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[George Ou | 19 Mar 2010 | 5 Comments | ]
Analysis of Viacom and Google evidence on YouTube piracy

Google and YouTube argue that they are innocent in the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom because they are protected under the DMCA Safe Harbor provisions. But Safe Harbor only protects websites that have no knowledge of infringement yet YouTube founders clearly knew of and almost entirely depended on pirated content. One YouTube co-founder even uploaded stolen content himself.

Broadband & Wireless, News »

[George Ou | 18 Mar 2010 | No Comment | ]
How big of a problem is ‘vampire power’ consumption?

AT&T has announced an interesting “ZERO Draw” phone charger that draws no power when not charging a phone.

Broadband & Wireless, CurrentHeader, Government & Policy, Network Management »

[George Ou | 17 Mar 2010 | 5 Comments | ]
Free Press wants the FCC to mandate a dumb Internet

Free Press wants the FCC to mandate a dumb Internet because they claim that network prioritization technology makes networks unfair and inefficient. But the engineering shows that prioritized networks are actually more fair and more efficient.

Broadband & Wireless, CurrentHeader, Government & Policy »

[George Ou | 16 Mar 2010 | One Comment | ]
White space backhauls – A penny wise and a pound foolish

When government gives away super valuable 700 MHz mobile spectrum, it gets wasted on wireless backhaul which could have used 5 GHz. While 700 MHz might save a little money on backhaul costs, it saves a lot more money on access and mobile networks. Commercial operators that paid billions of dollars for 700 MHz spectrum would never waste valuable spectrum like this.

Broadband & Wireless, FCC Reform, Government & Policy, Network Management »

[George Ou | 12 Mar 2010 | No Comment | ]
FCC should consider passive network monitoring

The FCC is asking for a good way for consumers to monitor broadband performance and they have put out a public Request For Quotation (RFQ).  Well I’m going to suggest a more granular and complete method of network monitoring that doesn’t generate unnecessary traffic on the network, and one that does not require any third party tools to collect the information.  The current methods of installing Java and/or other tools and using small active measurement samples is inferior.
Every modern Operating System (OS) has built in …

News, Technology »

[George Ou | 12 Mar 2010 | One Comment | ]
YouTube HTML5 versus Flash – Round 2

Earlier last month, I found that YouTube’s HTML5 beta wasn’t even worthy of being beta. Three weeks after that, Jan Ozer ran some CPU performance tests between YouTube Flash and HTML5 on Mac OS X and Safari and found that CPU performance was better on HTML5.

Broadband & Wireless, CurrentHeader »

[George Ou | 11 Mar 2010 | 2 Comments | ]
Burlington muni-fiber sticks tax payers with massive debt

Burlington Vermont’s experiment in municipal fiber was once thought to be shining example of why muni-fiber broadband was such a great idea. Those dreams have now turned into a $50 million nightmare for the tax payers of Burlington Vermont the majority of whom don’t use the service.

Broadband & Wireless, CurrentHeader, Government & Policy »

[George Ou | 11 Mar 2010 | 11 Comments | ]
Why municipal fiber hasn’t succeeded

Municipal fiber is seen by many as the holy-grail of broadband utopia, but like utopia it hasn’t had much success in the real world. This paper examines the challenges of implementing community owned fiber and why tax payers are getting stuck with a huge debt.

Security, Technology »

[George Ou | 10 Mar 2010 | One Comment | ]
Software liability is nonstarter

I generally admire the work coming from the SANS Institute, but Alan Paller’s call for software liability (via Deb Shinder) for security vulnerabilities just doesn’t make sense.  That’s because software security is like a bank vault which are rated by the time and effort required to break, but none are rated unbreakable.
While SANS is right to point out the sloppiness of the software industry, calling for software liability is irresponsible.  Even the most secure software in the world can be hacked if there was a sufficient reward.
I can understand holding …

Broadband & Wireless, CurrentHeader »

[George Ou | 9 Mar 2010 | 5 Comments | ]
Throwing bandwidth at applications is never the answer

Conventional wisdom says that more innovation for applications on the Internet must involve much more bandwidth. But once we understand the economics of video on the Internet, we quickly begin to understand why applications will never be high bandwidth.