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Posts Tagged ‘Isp’

feature: How Amsterdam was wired for open access fiber

The city of Amsterdam has been involved for several years in building Citynet, a partnership between the city and two private investors to wire 40,000 Amsterdam buildings with fiber. And it’s not just fiber, it’s open access fiber—any ISP can sign up to use the infrastructure and deliver ultra-fast Internet access.

In 2008, the European Union ruled that the city’s involvement in the project was in fact legal, and that it was not improperly interfering in the market.

We asked Herman Wagter, CEO of the company that built Citynet fiber project, to talk about how he got the job done, and to explain the challenges of rolling out fiber in a densely crowded European city.

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Week in tech: Google could be your new ISP

Google made the biggest splash during the past week, announcing that it is planning a 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home trial. The first phase will serve 50,000 to 500,000 people and will be run as an open access network. Responses to Google’s plan have mostly been enthusiastic.

We’ve all heard the phrase “ahead of their time” to describe famous inventors. Ars celebrates the hapless geniuses who were too far ahead of their time, but still helped to build the communications world we live in today.

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Verizon Blocks 4chan

According to 4chan’s Twitter account and status update blog, they have been “explicitly blocked” by the Verizon wireless network.

If you’re unfamiliar with 4chan and why an ISP/wireless company would block it, read more about it on Wikipedia. The high-traffic image board of mostly anonymous users was created by Christopher Poole in 2003 and has been the subject of a fair amount of negative media and legal attention over the past six years. But why would Verizon choose to block the site now? Does this put Verizon on par with foreign ISPs that block torrent sites and social networks? Or is there more to the story?

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Poole wrote this afternoon, “Over the past 72 hours, we’ve been receiving reports from Verizon Wireless customers having difficulty accessing the image boards. After investigating, we found that Verizon is dropping traffic… only on port 80 (HTTP). No other subdomain/IP/port is affected, which leads us to believe this block is intentional.”

However, a couple hours ago, Poole posted, “After an hour and a half on the phone, we’ve received confirmation from Verizon’s Network Repair Bureau (NRB) that we are ‘explicitly blocked.’”

In the past, we’ve held a generally negative view of ISP censorship and traffic-shaping, regardless of site content. It’ll be interesting to see how this battle shapes up, as Poole is calling for 4chan users to file complaints with Verizon’s Network Repair Bureau.

We are contacting Poole and Verizon to figure out specifically why the site is being blocked and will update this post as more information becomes available.

While we’ve personally confirmed that the image boards are not accessible from the Verizon wireless network, we’re not certain that Verizon as an ISP is blocking the site or whether they plan to in the near future. Again, a move of this magnitude would have to have some pretty compelling justifications, and we can’t wait to find out Verizon’s reasons.

This incident calls to mind AT&T’s temporary blocking of the site in July 2009. Eventually, AT&T said the block was due to a DDoS originating from 4chan IP addresses, to which Poole responded, “We’re glad to see this short-lived debacle has prompted renewed interest and debate over net neutrality and Internet censorship – two very important issues that don’t get nearly enough attention – so perhaps this was all just a blessing in disguise.”

UPDATE: A Verizon NRB rep said their center has been deluged with phone calls but was unable to relate the specific reason the site has been blocked. We are continuing to call other Verizon numbers at this time, but we’ve been alerted that Verizon has not yet set up any process for dealing with media calls on this issue as no other media outlets have yet contacted them.

UPDATE: Multiple Verizon FIOS/DSL customers have let us know that the boards are still accessible from other devices not on the Verizon wireless network. However, we’re confused as to why Verizon wireless would block a website and still allow access on other parts of its network.

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Swedes start buying music; are anti-P2P laws working?

Is Sweden, the only country to have sent a member of the Pirate Party to the European Parliament, finally giving up its swashbuckling ways?

When Sweden’s IPRED anti-piracy law went into effect earlier this year, Internet traffic across the country plummeted overnight—a sign that P2P users, fearing exposure at last, were abandoning their existing copyright infringement tools. The Pirate Bay defendants were found guilty by a Swedish court earlier this year, and the site’s ISP are now under assault by the music and movie industries.

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EMI manages to compete with free after all

As digital downloads have disaggregated the album and restored the single to prominence, “unit sales” at the Big Four major labels have increased even as revenues have dropped. But new data out from EMI shows that labels can do more than just resign themselves to hugely decreased revenues as they sell bazillions of teen-pop singles on iTunes; it is possible to increase total revenues, even in recorded music.

EMI has been in trouble for years. The smallest of the majors, it was acquired by private equity firm Terra Firma in 2007 and has since bled hundreds of millions of pounds in net losses. Revenues have declined steadily for years.

But EMI has just released some results from fiscal year 2009 showing that revenue is up 7.4 percent over 2008—and that’s without “graduated response” coming into effect (except in South Korea), ISP filtering, or the anti-infringement measures. Might it be possible to compete with free after all?

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Yes Men punk US Chamber of Commerce on climate change, sued

In late October, a troupe of comedic pranksters called the Yes Men took on the United States Chamber of Commerce over its stance on climate change via a parody that was hard to distinguish from the real deal: a fake press conference, press releases, and a modified version of the Chamber’s own website, hosted at a similar address. The Chamber responded by getting the Yes Men’s ISP to pull the site, which drew the Electronic Frontier Foundation into the fight. Now, it looks like all these parties may be meeting in court, as the Chamber has filed a suit alleging that the parody crossed the line into fraud. We say “may” because the Chamber appears to be having a difficult time serving the pranksters.

The events started in April, when the Chamber triggered a series of events that could easily be considered self-parody. Its leadership filed a petition with the EPA, asking that the evidence for climate change be subjected to public hearings. After that petition was widely ignored, they upped the ante, calling for a modern equivalent of the Scopes Monkey Trial, which questioned the science behind evolution.

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Turn Your Windows 7 Computer Into a WiFi Router In 5 Minutes, Free & No Hardware

Connectify.me is a new service we just found out about. They’ve sussed out how to make any Windows 7 computer into a WiFi hotspot. Since we just installed Windows 7 on a spare laptop, we figured it was about time to make Windows do something cool, so we installed the app.

We were quite literally up and running with other devices connected in five minutes. In fact, this post is being published right now on a Connectify.me-powered connection. Windows 7 users have got to try this app. You never know when you’ll get to save the day by letting other users share your Internet connection.

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Speaking of which, use cases we can think of right now run the gamut between Sticking It To The Man and Violating My ISP’s TOS; nevertheless, it’s an interesting, fun little hack that should’ve been done long ago.

Installation is simple. Go to the website, click the big, shiny button, run the .exe file, follow the prompt. You’ll then see a Connectify logo in the notification tray. It’s party time! Choose a name, set up a password, and click the big, shiny button. Congratulations. You’re now a software-based wireless router. It took about five very obvious clicks and was truly so easy a caveman could do it.

This is almost as much fun as that MiFi we played with a while ago. The main difference is that the MiFi creates an Internet connection for 3-5 users using cellular networks, and Connectify allows multiple users to piggyback off a single connection. Oh, and the MiFi and similar devices cost a bit – or a lot – to buy and maintain, but Connectify is free to install and run.

Connectify runs on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 r2. Why no other Windows OSes, you ask? “Connectify depends on improvements made in Windows 7 to operate,” reads the site’s FAQ. “Frankly, Windows 7 is such a big improvement that we suggest you’re better off upgrading than waiting for us to get all this working on an older version of Windows.”

Three cheers for Windows for getting their act together on the OS front, and many thanks to Connectify for bringing us all n-for-the-price-of-1 WiFi!

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Not-so-anonymous speech: how to get yourself unmasked online

You’re anonymous when you post comments online—except when you’re not. Though many Internet users still believe that their identities are as hidden as they choose to make them, online anonymity is not always guaranteed and, in fact, there’s no way to stay truly anonymous. There is always a company somewhere that has information that can be traced back to you, whether it’s Google or your ISP, and judges have shown themselves willing to issue subpoenas to unmask anonymous posters.

But what determines whether or not you will be unmasked? Unfortunately, it’s hard to say—there is no black-and-white line to be crossed. There is a gray area, however, that you could find yourself in if you do the wrong things.

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