Updated on February 27, 2010 at 10:20 AM: Tim Karr has demanded a retraction with claims that he fact checked his piece.  Upon further review of his claims, and having offered Tim $1,000 for proof of my “deep ties” to Arts & Labs, I have decided to change the title of the post to indicate he was “98% Fact Free”. He did, after all, spell my name correctly.
Updated on February 26, 2010 at 6:46 PM: I had suspected this, but did not know it at the time of the original …

In the category of onerous regulation, it appears that the Israeli Knesset has approved a new law that would mandate email portability despite the fact that email was never designed to be portable.  This is similar to a failed attempt in the United States when a freelance writer Gail Mortenson petitioned the FCC for an immediate rule making.
Individual email addresses (e.g., someperson@somedomain.com) were never designed to be portable.  The “somedomain.com” portion is portable but only if the entire domain is moved, but the “someperson” portion must reside where ever somedomain.com resides. …

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.

The rhetoric from the opponents of TV Everywhere has gotten downright bazaar.  Melvin Ammori and Free Press have decided to go on an all out assault on the TV Everywhere.  TV Everywhere is a new Internet Video on Demand service that Cable companies (and maybe other Multichannel Video Program Distributors) are looking to GIVE AWAY AT NO EXTRA CHARGE to their existing TV subscribers, and groups like Free Press are fuming over this and they want government to investigate these companies for “collusion” and put a stop to this.
What I …

Tim Conneally of Betanews reports that Verizon responded to the FCC that it would still lose money even with the increased Early Termination Fee (ETF).  If a customer were to bail out of the contract at 12 months and paid a prorated $230, Verizon would still lose $460.

The “Global Information Industry Center” at the University of San Diego has produced their 2009 report on how much information Americans consume and they’ve quantified to to be  1.3 trillion hours and 3.6 zettabytes (3,000,000,000 terabytes) or 34 GB per person per day on average.
The study provides some useful data on hourly usage, but the definition of “information” as defined in bytes is a bit more shaky as it is based on some arbitrary made up assumptions about compression level of gaming where there is no compression being used.  And …

Mayor Gavin Newsom has announced his intentions to support a new regulation in the city of San Francisco that would require all cell phone retailers to post radiation levels next to each cell phone at a price . While the specifics of the regulation hasn’t been announced, it’s possible that the city will require maximum Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) levels to be posted which will be a very misleading and unnecessary form of fear mongering.

We’ve had our turn knocking down the Berkman broadband study and even responded to Yochai Benkler’s response, but Mark Goldberg has done a great job of summarizing the latest brutal critiques.

Free Press wants the FCC to ban any form of Internet discrimination even if engineers argue that some types of discrimination are good and necessary to make all application work well. To make their point, Free Press got two non engineers to write an engineering paper gets all the facts wrong.

David Farber is considered to be the “grandfather of the Internet”, and he gives some valuable insights in the following two video clips as to how the Internet actually works as opposed to common misconception.