A series of individual events may seem insignificant when viewed in isolation, but becomes highly significant when viewed together. Now that cable companies and telcos have consolidated their near monopoly status (again!), there are new attempts to “stratify” the internet.
The first report comes from Canada. Users there of the Shaw cable broadband service report that using Vonage has become difficult or impossible, and that Shaw is now attempting to charge an additional “quality of service” surchage of CDN $10.00/month for users who want Vonage service (which competes with a similar Shaw-provided Shaw Digital Phone). According to Shaw:

Quality of service issues do not apply to Shaw Digital Phone because Shaw Digital Phone operates on its own separate, managed network. Voice traffic distributed along this network is never shared with public Internet networks, so you can be confident Shaw Digital Phone will deliver the service reliability and performance you expect. As an added safeguard, Shaw Digital Phone includes its own QoS Enhancement feature.

Uhuh. However, it seems that plenty of people in the rest of the world have managed to have acceptable VoIP service using their standard broadband connections. We get 30-frame-per-second video for heaven’s sake. Furthermore, most calls are going to end up leaving the Shaw network anyway to be terminated at some other endpoint…putting the traffic on the internet regardless of the shaw “end-to-end separate managed network”. This sounds like a blatent attempt to dictate what users run on their broadband connection. More on this one at ipdemocracy.

The second example was a statement from Deutsche Telekom that internet content providers such as Google and Amazon should pay extra for super-fast internet access. This echoed similar statements made lately by BellSouth and AT&T.

Here’s what I don’t get: The entire success of the Internet has been predicated on equal access for everyone. That’s how startup companies like eBay and Amazon got going…and frankly that is how the Bell companies, who are merrily consolidating back into themselves, and the cable companies who are doing the same, managed to avoid bankruptcy. So why is this trend a good idea? What ever happened to the notion of a “common carrier” which separates the delivery medium from the content. As soon as my cable company starts providing me specialized content over my cable broadband connection, there is an inherent conflict of interest. And since most of the U.S. is already highly uncompetitive as far as broadband with one or at most two possible providers, we’re already paying monopolistic pricing, stuck with poor service, and living with blocked ports and bizarre useage restrictions.

Or as Doc Searles quotes Bob Frankston on the reemergence of the notion of net neutrality:

It’s simple.

The Internet has won. Why negotiate terms of surrender?

We mustn’t settle for negotiating “Net Neutrality”. We must demand the basic right to connect and not just an enumerated list of what we are allowed to do. It’s no different from having to negotiate free speech by listing what is allowed. Having to beg for permission to speak is offensive.

What we need is very simple: a recognition that Internet-style connectivity is our right as fundamental infrastructure just like the roads are. We can share them like the roads or power lines.

Back to my original idea…that taken separately these incidents may seem insignficant. But, look at the whole collapse of the 1996 telecom deregulation decision by the FCC. Remember CLECS? Competitive Local Exchange Carriers? They were squashed by the Bell operating companies.
If we’re not careful, the whole thing is going to happen again. And we’re going to end up with haves and have-nots, “tiered” services…120 channels and still nothing to watch.

This is a link to a Microsoft Knowledgebase article on how to open control panel applications from the command line. For example


control netconnections
control userpasswords
control admintools

start the respective application for setting network connections, user passwords and viewing the administrator tools folder.

More on command line tools from the LabMice website.

I just had what turned out to be a critical message from a new acquaintence get lost in my spam filter. There were at least three possible “triggers” that caused me to miss this eMail:

1. The return address has no identifier other than a single first name
2. The subject line was a single innocuous word that was virtually impossible to decode without opening the eMail
3. The eMail was an HTML eMail.

So, in my OutLook Inbox, (if it had gotten there)…the message would have looked like:

Ok, so the spam filter put this in the spam folder, and I looked at it… and debated whether to open it. Because, if you open up an eMail that is so-called “html” eMail, you can trigger further spam, or get a trojan or virus.
The good news is that I opened it, and it was from somebody I wanted to hear from. The bad news was the message was indeed an html message. Nice background stationary, lovely fonts…logo, and everything.

Suggestions:
Here are a couple suggestions from someone who gets a couple dozen eMails a day, and sometimes many more.

1. Send mail as plain text, no background, no stationary. In OutLook this means not Rich Text, and not HTML mail.
2. Be sure that your eMail is properly set up with complete first and last name, or company name in the sender’s name section of your eMail account properties. Send an eMail to yourself and see what it looks like, and if the eMail isn’t readily identifiable from the subject line, I guarantee that a lot of your eMail is going into the bit bucket, unread.
3. Use subject lines that mean something. Refer to a previous communication, or to a relevant topic within the body of your eMail.

Maybe something like:

With recent media scares about disk-eating viruses, security continues to be a pressing issue that appears to show only incremental improvement. My latest peeve:

Why are there still Windows applications written that require a local user account on a workstation that has administrator rights? I can cite three examples, at random:

1. The very popular Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing used to teach keyboarding skills. This application requires that the user account used to log into the computer be an admin account. This requires either that a separate student account be set up just to run this application…or that the student who is logged in can then create havoc on the workstation by downloading and installing all manner of spam/spyware/malware etc.

2. The Polycom PVX desktop videoconferencing software requires administrative rights for the user on the computer.

3. The AIM real-estate software from Stewart also requires admin rights.

The latter two applications are more likely to be found in a professional or corporate setting where you’d think that random html drive-bys would be less of a problem. Ahem.

We are all in this together. Dumb network administrators, dumb users, and dumb programmers. But you can’t blame the dumb administrators or the dumb users if the dumb programmers are too lazy to figure out how to allow their application to run with standard user credentials.

We have recommended Microsoft Antispyware
and I found a hidden gem under the covers, a startup manager. Using this screen, you can determine what processes and programs begin executing when you log into your user account. You can find this under the Tools|Advanced Tools|System Explorers menu selection.

This is a great way to clean up those egregious little update programs in the system tray. Quicktime, Logitech, Java updater, you name it. You’ll also find that your machine will usually start more quickly, and that you’ll have a little more memory for running the programs that you want to run.

For more on the topic, see the book Degunking Windows by Jeff Dunteman and Jolli Ballew.

I’ve had a very nice conversation with folks at Marratech, who make a web-based videoconferencing/whiteboard software client that runs on all platforms. In talking with them, I asked about how they did their audio echo canceling, and they suggested looking into the Phonix Duet speakerphone. Excerpts from review that appeared on the VoIPspeak site are posted below. Essentially, this is a device which provides echo cancellation and that allows you to avoid using a headset.

The Duet was designed from the ground up to work with voice over IP (VoIP) services such as Skype, Gizmo, and SoftPhones as well as Instant Message clients such as MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and Google Talk. With proprietary Acoustic Echo Cancellation, Noise Suppression, and equalizer algorithms built in, the Duet PCS offers remarkably clean sound.

The first question you might ask is “who needs a business class speakerphone that plugs into a USB port?”. I actually had to think about that for a minute until I stopped to think about my own usage habits. To start off with, a USB sound device is much more efficient than using a soundcard for VoIP applications. With a soundcard you are using the processing power of the computer for the analog to digital conversion when the strength of a soundcard is not in its input, but rather than in its output abilitty. With a USB audio device, the device converts the audio into digital signals before sending it to the computer. This results in much better sound quality and compression which can have a dramatic efect on VoIP conversations. As a USB audio device, the Duet PCS not only functions as a speakerphone but also has a stadnard headset jack available essientially turning a standard headset into a high quality sound platform. Since it registers as an audio device, it is not specific to VoIP or IM applications, the noise reduction and echo cancelation make this device an excellent choice for podcasters as the recording quality is so good.

A PDF data sheet is located on the Phoenix site.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy has published a 2006 Technology Guide with stories outlining some unusual and creative ways that NGOs are using technology. From the introduction:

• A New York organization that provides low-cost technology aid to nonprofit groups is achieving another social goal: It trains low-income people and minorities to offer the technology services, giving them new job skills and paid empolyment
• Unicef gets the word out about issues that affect children around the world by producing “podcasts”–radio broadcasts that can be downloaded free and listened to on portable audio devices.
• Organizations tha deal with unpopular or sensitive causes are attracting a growing number of volunteers by using the Internet. In many cases, the groups are able to find people with far more expertise than the volunteers they were able to recruit in the past.

The Chron is subscription based.

This book is available as a free .PDF download.
From the web page description:

The massive popularity of wireless networking has caused equipment costs to continually plummet, while equipment capabilities continue to increase. By applying this technology in areas that are badly in need of critical communications infrastructure, more people can be brought online than ever before, in less time, for very little cost. We hope to not only convince you that this is possible, but also show how we have made such networks work, and to give you the information and tools you need to start a network project in your local community.

Welecome to Tech for Non-Profits, the unplugged version of Microdesign Consulting. We feel that non-profit corporations and NGOs deserve the same advantages that technology can bring to for-profit business. To that end, we’ve dedicated ourselves to finding cost-effective ways to bring the benefits of wide-area networks, computer databases, IP videoconferencing and Voice over IP to our clients and friends. Check out our (mostly) annotated VoIP resource guide.

eWeek this week has a review of screencam tools. And in the same issue, a review of Asterisk.