Peer to peer download services are still popular with music-loving kids, it seems. The second annual survey of young people's music consumption by pressure group UK Music found that three-fifths of the 1,808 18-24 year olds who took part said they used p2p services, and four-fifths of those did so at least once a week. This is almost the same as last year's result, and would seem to indicate that the efforts by the music industry to offer a range of licensed alternatives to Limewire and other p2p services have failed to have any real impact. more
Our world finds itself at a critical juncture. Both trillions of dollars and the future of human communications including fundamental access to it are at stake. For telecom operators and media outlets there is not a migratory way from where we are to the future. There is a clear consumer shift underway that runs in the opposite direction to that of telecom and media incumbents; emergent social practice is increasingly clashing with the very structure and desires of incumbent players... It was for these reasons that one of the six keynote speakers invited to Spring 2009 Emerging Communications Conference (eComm) in San Francisco was Richard Whitt, Google's Washington Telecom and Media Counsel. His keynote was entitled, Tinkering without Tampering: Wrestling with Convergence and Communications Policy... more
Apple's Wordwide Developers Conference may have just ended, but already, the conference release of Mac's OS X 10.6 — a beta build previewed for developers — has been leaked onto torrent sites. It borders on irony: for years, Mac lovers have touted the superior security of the Mac operating system over Windows, but earlier this year, it was torrent sites — the very sites where OS X 10.6 is now being freely copied — that caused more than 25,000 Mac users to fall victim to the iServices Trojan. Some Macs never learn. more
Annual global IP traffic will pass two-thirds of a zettabyte in four years according the Cisco's Visual Networking Index report. The economic downturn has only slightly tempered traffic growth and the global IP traffic is expected to quintuple from 2008 to 2013. Cisco predicts IP traffic to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40%. more
In response to customer feedback, Time Warner Cable has discontinued its trials of tiered Internet service. [Corporate Announcement here.] It was quite a stuff-storm, but to TWC's credit, they put their finger up, felt the howling gale, and changed course right away. This is in marked contrast to their larger competitor, Comcast... more
Without rehashing the mainstream headlines, it's clearly on the table now that eBay has given up trying to create synergies with Skype, so the focus now is on making the best of things as distinct entities. The preferred route for eBay would be to keep Skype and recoup their investment via an IPO sometime next year. That would certainly bring an end to things with both parties leaving on a high note. Of course this hinges heavily on the state of capital markets... more
April 1st was the start of a new anti-piracy law in Sweden where, according to traffic data, an immediate and significant drop (over 30%) occurred in the nation's overall Internet traffic. Reported today by Royal Pingdom: "The combined traffic passing through Sweden's Internet Exchange Points usually peaks around 160 Gbit/s, but on Wednesday it peaked at around 110 Gbit/s. That's a huge drop in traffic, and is presumably a direct result of less file sharing taking place. ... Another interesting observation is that there was more traffic than usual during the last days before the law took effect. Were people hoarding films and music? On Tuesday (the day before the law went live) traffic peaked at nearly 200 GBit/s, roughly 25% above normal levels." more
I don't want to get into the entire Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) vs Eircom and IRMA vs ISPs debacle. The only reason I'm even writing this is because I'm getting a bit tired of all the "quotes" of "quotes" and other unclear and misleading things that people have been saying about ISPs over the last few weeks. more
ipoque, a European deep packet inspection hardware provider has published an Internet study for 2008/2009 providing an overview of the Internet's current state based on analyzing 1.3 petabytes of Internet traffic -- "the amount of data equal to 300,000 DVDs" -- in eight regions of the world (Northern Africa, Southern Africa, South America, Middle East, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Southwestern Europe, Germany). The study includes the use of about 100 of the most popular Internet protocols including P2P, VoIP, media streaming, instant messaging. more
David Akin pointed me to this article in the Ottawa Citizen which describes CRTC initiatives aimed at getting the cablecos to pay into a fund that would support, "the creation of high-quality, high-cost, scripted Canadian broadcasting content in the new media." In it, Ken Engelhart, senior vice-president of regulatory [affairs?] for Rogers Corp. is quoted saying... more
Announced today, Google Inc. along with the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, PlanetLab Consortium, and academic researchers are launching a new initiative called Measurement Lab, or M-Lab. According to Google's announcement, M-Lab is an open, distributed server platform for researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools. "The goal of M-Lab is to advance network research and empower the public with useful information about their broadband connections. By enhancing Internet transparency, M-Lab helps sustain a healthy, innovative Internet." more
Some of the largest ISPs in US, including phone and cable companies, plan on updating their networks over the next two months with a new technology that promises to accelerate P2P distribution. According to reports, recent trials have demonstrated 59% increase in download delivery speeds on average -- and up to 150% for the fastest class of users. more
The following is most of the generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) strings applied for in the 2000 and 2003 applications. Some are two, and even one character ASCII strings. Some have since been approved, or disapproved (which of course means nothing in the 2008 round). It is a universe of 180 strings. Enjoy. more
In follow up to August 1st ruling against Comcast, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in a 67 page order released today has given Comcast 30 days "to disclose the details of their unreasonable network management practices, submit a compliance plan describing how it intends to stop these unreasonable management practices by the end of the year, and disclose to both the Commission and the public the details of the network management practices that it intends to deploy following termination of its current practices." more
North American p2p went from 370 petabytes in 2006 to only 416 petabytes in 2007 according to Cisco's figures. Since U.S. users increased 16% in the same period, that's a drop in p2p per user and a significant drop in p2p as a percentage of all traffic. There's a major margin of error in these figures, so I'm calling it "flat." That's very different from pre 2007 experience, when p2p grew rapidly. It severely contradicts what many in Washington D.C. are saying... more
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