nets

FCC urged to stop Comcast Internet blocking

Members of the SavetheInternet.com Coalition and Internet scholars from Harvard, Yale and Stanford law schools filed a petition and complaint with the Federal Communications Commission Thursday in response to claims that Comcast is blocking some kinds of peer-to-peer traffic.

The complaint comes after the Associated Press discovered, based on its own testing, that content was blocked on several Comcast broadband connections using the peer-to-peer filing sharing network BitTorrent. Other Comcast users have also complained that their BitTorrent content has been blocked.

In their petition, the groups claim that Comcast is violating the FCC's Internet Policy Statement, which essentially … Read more

Episode 593: Resist Melissa's siren song

Obama pledges Net neutrality laws if elected president

If elected president, Barack Obama plans to prioritize, well, barring broadband providers like AT&T and Comcast from prioritizing Internet content.

Affixing his signature to federal Net neutrality rules would be high on the list during his first year in the Oval Office, the junior senator from Illinois said during an interactive forum Monday afternoon with the popular contender put on by MTV and MySpace at Coe College in Iowa.

Net neutrality, of course, is the idea that broadband operators shouldn't be allowed to block or degrade Internet content and services--or charge content providers an extra fee for … Read more

Net neutrality becomes issue in presidential race

Net Neutrality could soon get top billing in the upcoming 2008 U.S. presidential race.

Or at least, that's what the folks at MoveOn.org are hoping. A question about the issue will be asked of Senator Barack Obama on Monday during an MTV dialogue in Iowa. The event will be streamed live on the Internet at 1:30 p.m. EST and air on MTV at 7:00 p.m. EST.

MTV agreed to ask Obama the top-rated question submitted by a voter in the online video contest 10Questions.com. And the top-rated question is from a MoveOn … Read more

Blog vs blog: the Sun/NetApp saga

Ashlee Vance of The Register has a great piece on the ongoing patent feud between Sun and NetApp over Sun's/NetApp's ZFS technology. In this war of words, Sun's Schwartz gets to take the moral high ground:

The simple reality that [NetApp founder Dave] Hitz needs to face here is that Schwartz, who is very talented in the art of rhetoric (sometimes to a fault), has more persuasive material to work with in the court of public opinion. No matter how hard it tries, NetApp comes off as a seller of high-priced storage gear doing everything it can to keep selling high-priced gear in the face of a disruptive technology....… Read more

From driving to file-sharing, the Brits do it backwards

Ever since Napster found its way into every college dorm room in 1999, the defenders of intellectual property have been perplexed at how to best deal with peer-to-peer file transfer. Last week's news that Comcast's servers were interfering with BitTorrent traffic may have come as a surprise to some, but given that few companies have been willing to acknowledge the legal uses for P2P, it shouldn't be too much of a shock.

What strikes me is the fact that in the United Kingdom, it is actually the ISPs who are opposed to banning file-sharing and the lawmakers who have been pushing it. According to Broadband Reports, a representative from the service providers union suggested that, "ISPs are no more able to inspect and filter every single packet passing across their network than the Post Office is able to open every envelope." While this argument seems somewhat weak given Comcast's ability to infiltrate BitTorrent, it is true that file-sharers will always be one step ahead of the regulators, and I support their commitment toward an open internet.

Senators want probe of Comcast's BitTorrent 'discrimination'

Comcast's reportedly aggressive filtering of BitTorrent and other file-sharing traffic is drawing calls for a U.S. Senate hearing--and a renewed push for Net neutrality laws.

Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) on Friday sent a letter asking Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) to convene a hearing as soon as possible to investigate "the topic of service discrimination by phone and cable companies."

The request isn't new: Dorgan and Snowe both made a similar plea after reports that Verizon Wireless had initially refused to carry a reproductive rights group's text messages.

The senators … Read more

Sun countersuit: NetApp violates 12 patents

A month ago, Network Appliance sued Sun Microsystems, alleging the server and software company's ZFS file system infringes seven NetApp patents. Sun on Thursday fired back with a suit that claims NetApp violates 12 of Sun's.

Sun's suit also argues that NetApp's patents are invalid and that it doesn't infringe them anyway. And it requests an injunction prohibiting the company from selling any products that infringe Sun's patents.

Patent suits are often expensive and acrimonious proceedings, and they're particularly unpleasant when fought among Silicon Valley rivals who often share mutual customers and sometimes … Read more

NetApp founder brushes off Sun threat

A day after Sun Microsystems Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz said his company will sue to have Network Appliances' file-server products removed from the market, NetApp's founder Dave Hitz brushed off the threat and took issue with Schwartz's open-source reasoning.

"This sounds like Sun's broad threats when they sued Azul, but in the end, Sun didn't put Azul out of business or even stop them from shipping products. I'm quite confident that two years from now--or however long it takes this suit to reach court--NetApp will be doing just fine," Hitz said in a blog posting … Read more

Sun to countersue NetApp over ZFS, indemnify and protect Apple's Leopard

Stephen Shankland reports that Sun plans to countersue NetApp over ZFS, but that Apple's Leopard won't get caught in the crossfire:

"Apple is including ZFS in their upcoming Leopard OS X release. This is happening without any payment to Sun," [Sun CEO Jonathan] Schwartz said. "Under the license, we've waived all rights to sue them for any of the patents or copyright associated with ZFS. We've let Apple know we will use our patent portfolio to protect them and the Mac ZFS community from NetApp--with or without a commercial relationship to Sun." … Read more