In their typical juvenile fashion, the 4chan boards launched an attack against Verizon Wireless customers over the weekend and 4chan’s owners are playing victim with no mention of their own responsibility.  The 4chan board servers were sending a flood of messages to Verizon Wireless customers which could effectively degrade or even block their Internet connectivity.  Rather than acknowledge their own faults, 4chan’s only response was to complain that their boards are being blocked “intentionally” by Verizon and that their users should call Verizon support lines.
Some in the blogosphere are complaining about Verizon …

George S. Ford presents a study of the effects of broadband Internet use on “discouragement” within the labor market. Discouragement is the official term used to describe an individual who is out of work and desires to have a job, but has given up their search based on beliefs that their job prospects are unfavorable.

With 16.5% of the nation “underemployed” and economists gloomily doubting next-generation job creation, Washington is considering a number of strategies, including the President’s “jobs bill.” “Jobs,” President Obama insisted in his state of the union address, “must be our number one focus in 2010.”
But as Washington concentrates on employment, it also is considering a possibly job-killing set of new regulations on the communications sector. Known as “Net Neutrality,” these proposed new rules could, in their extreme form, prohibit many technologies and business plans used today on the Internet, not to …

Digital Society Q&A Podcast
Episode #4
Length: 26min 16sec
Topic: Thoughts on Apple’s iPad

DigitalWrong.org claims that whenever piracy is tracked to a particular home, then it was obviously the neighbor’s kid that did it by breaking into the home’s wireless network. Digital Wrong claims that these home wireless networks are impossible to secure, but that is blatantly wrong.

Despite being a Boxee user and fan of the service, (I have been a user of both the Alpha and Beta clients for over a year) I have to call out Ronen for trying to be too clever by half. The fact is, Zucker has the more honest argument on this point. Boxee doesn’t, in fact, act just like a browser.

Pew Research has produced two new reports on statistical findings surrounding the use of social media amongst the age groups of teens 12-17 and for adults 18 and older.

Geoff Daily wrote something I think is worth highlighting. Noting (A) Christopher Yoo’s point about the benefits of smart networks (multicast, mobility, security, cloud computing, interactive video, adaptability) and the preference or letting innovation happen before presuming it must be regulated, and (B) the points made by the Open Internet Coalition’s Markham Erickson, who “supports the notion that networks being able to offer prioritized service may potentially be a net positive, but he cautions that” it could tilt investment to managed services, rather than “open bandwidth”.

A group of game developers want the FCC to ban premium QoS services from ISPs, so they employ the usual scare tactics that ISPs will block websites without these hard line regulations. But their real motive is to stop their competitors from competing with better services.

John W. Mayo and Scott Wallsten examine secondary spectrum trading to improve wireless markets. The paper takes a look at the secondary spectrum markets regulation and evolution up to this point, and additionally catalog the secondary markets while examining their operations and resell practices.