From Jon Crowcroft…
Recently I noticed from some friends that their Facebook pages had inaccurate birthday dates — this turns out to be deliberate on their part (a mechanism to mitigate identity theft).
Later: Tony Hirst has had the excellent idea of emulating the Queen, who has two birthdays — one real and one official. He proposes that we all have web birthdays.
The FT’s John Gapper has been following up on the Eliot Spitzer story.
The Emperors Club VIP was clearly at the top end of prostitution enterprises. It operated across borders – in Paris and London as well as in US cities – and it was very expensive. Clients had to pay between $1,000 and $5,500 per hour for its services.
Like other service businesses, it had a loyalty club for the most elite clients who paid even more than $5,500 per hour, known as the Icon Club. It allowed some clients to “buy out” their favourite prostitutes, permitting the men direct access to the women without going through the Emperors Club.
The 47-page complaint shows the Emperors Club also faced many operating challenges. The federal wiretaps of conversations show the organisers facing problems such as having too few prostitutes for the demand from clients in one city and having to hassle clients to pay their bills.
One problem was to get the prostitutes to get correct imprints of the clients’ American Express cards. The complaint states that one of the organisers asked another:
“To ask the prostitutes to fax the imprints, or if that did not work, to scan them and email the imprints and then send the originals in the event of a dispute with the clients about the charge, or if American Express inquired.”
Wonder how many corporate wives will now look askance at their husband’s Amex accounts?
Bill Thompson in lyrical mode…
I didn’t see the crowd start to get restless and heckle Zuckerberg about the deeply-unpopular Beacon advertising system, or get a chance to grab the microphone and ask questions when Lacy threw the conversation open to the floor.
And yet I was there in another way, listening to and even interacting with some of my friends in the audience, picking up on the vibe in the room and even tuning in later as Sarah Lacy loudly defended herself.
I was there because I was plugged into Twitter, the instant messaging service that lets users send short text messages to anyone who cares to tune in, online or on their mobile phone.
As I sat at my desk a constant stream of ‘tweets’, as they are called, was being supplied by many of the people in the room and I was able to reply directly and feel that I too was participating…
Net neutrality — which, in crude terms, is the principle that the Internet ought to treat every packet equally and not privilege some at the expense of others — is one of those interesting cases where righteousness may be the enemy of rationality. At the root of it is a visceral belief that the end-to-end architecture of the Net is something very precious (and the key to understanding why the network has sparked such a tidal wave of innovation); those of us who share that belief tend to be paranoid about the lobbying of large corporations who would like to violate the principle for what we see as narrow commercial ends.
But the truth is that net neutrality is a very complicated issue — as real experts like Jon Crowcroft often point out. It may be, for example, that righteous adherence to neutrality may blind us to the fact that, in some circumstances, it may not yield optimal results. Which is why I was interested to read this thoughtful piece in MIT’s Technology Review this morning.
At the end of February, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) held a public hearing at Harvard University, investigating claims that the cable giant Comcast had been stifling traffic sent over its network using the popular peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol BitTorrent. Comcast argued that it acted only during periods of severe network congestion, slowing bandwidth-hogging traffic sent by computers that probably didn’t have anyone sitting at them, anyway. But critics countered that Comcast had violated the Internet’s prevailing principle of “Net neutrality,” the idea that network operators should treat all the data packets that travel over their networks the same way.
So far, the FCC has been reluctant to adopt hard and fast rules mandating Net neutrality; at the same time, it has shown itself willing to punish clear violations of the principle. But however it rules in this case, there are some Internet experts who feel that Net neutrality is an idea that may have outlived its usefulness…
The article goes on to cite the views of Mung Chiang, a Princeton computer scientist, who specialises in nonlinear optimization of communication systems. He argues that,
in the name of Net neutrality, network operators and content distributors maintain a mutual ignorance that makes the Internet less efficient. Measures that one group takes to speed data transfers, he explains, may unintentionally impede measures taken by the other. In a peer-to-peer network, “the properties based on which peers are selected are influenced to a large degree by how the network does its traffic management,” Chiang says. But the peer selection process “will have impact in turn on the traffic management.” The result, he says, can be a feedback loop in which one counterproductive procedure spawns another.
Programs using BitTorrent, for instance, download files from a number of different peers at once. But if a particular peer isn’t sending data quickly enough, Chiang says, the others might drop it in favor of one that’s more reliable. Activity patterns among BitTorrent users can thus change very quickly. Network operators, too, try to maximize efficiency; if they notice a bandwidth bottleneck, they route around it. But according to Chiang, they operate on a much different timescale. A bottleneck caused by BitTorrent file transfers may have moved elsewhere by the time the network operator responds to it. Traffic could end up being rerouted around a vanished bottleneck and down a newly congested pipe.