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Comcast: Big Brother *and* Local Monopoly
Yesterday I got a letter in the mail from Comcast. I was surprised, because I’d just paid my most recent bill the day before. I opened the envelope and was created by the title of this letter, “Notice of Action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.”
Comcast says they got notice from HBO that they found my IP address downloading an episode of “The Wire.” That’s true. It’s just one of the many things I download from the Internet. I download computer applications, music albums, movies, TV shows – you name it, I download it to my computer.
Anyway, as you can see in the above picture of the letter, they got my IP address, name of the file, size of the fil, and even the exact Torrent I was downloading. That’s probably because HBO uploaded a dummy torrent of S01E01 of the Wire to catch “pirates” downloading.
Forgetting the fact that I cancelled that torrent because it was downloading too slow (and that I went on to find a better torrent with the entire first season), Comcast can, quite frankly, suck my balls. They’re the only ISP bowing down to the almighty studios and sending out letters to Internet users via IP address.
Believe me, it’s not my choice to use Comcast. Comcast is virulently anti-union, and they overcharge for Internet to boot (I’m paying $50/month for JUST internet). If I could use RCN, I would; but unfortunately, the only ISP able to serve my building is Comcast.
Going further, Copyright is dead. It is extremely unclear a.) what HBO/TimeWarner hopes to accomplish by uploading dummy torrents to the Pirate Bay, and then identifying those few people who download them, and then send letters to ISPs, and then have those ISPs contact those downloaders. What, do they think that will stop people from downloading their shows. OK. Have fun with that. But b.) what the fuck does Comcast care? There is so much “illegal” activity going on from people using their Internet that it’s impossible to describe. Why do they want to cut off customers who happen to download dummy torrents? I’m going to use the Internet anyway, I’m going to keep paying for their overcharged service, so they should really just save some paper and stop with their petty threats.
I said as much (in <140 characters) to Comcast's Twitter representative, Frank @comcastcares. He replies that he understands my sentiment, which is nice. It doesn’t change the fact that Comcast is enabling HBO’s futile quest to stop a tsunami with an umbrella.
May 8, 07:56 PM / Comment [12]
My TweetCloud
I put together my TweetCloud to show the frequency of words with which I tweet. Not too surprising overall: action verbs of coming or going, Dirt McGirt, and Obama. And also, a bunch of “really,” “pretty,” “new,” and “need.” Those stuck out to me. Need some new qualifiers, I guess. You can interact with the live cloud, too.
Oh, also: I protected my updates on Twitter because some folks inside the Department of Labor have been following my tweets from their Outlook 2007 RSS reader, and landing on my website and on work websites I run. They’re likely not happy with this, so now you’ll have to find some other way to stalk me, suckaz.
Plus One Me
Very cool new site from Clay Johnson (via Twitter). It’s called “Plus One Me,” and the tagline says it all:
You can rate your friends in three categories (social, mental, and physical), each with a number of different attributes with which you can “+1” your friends. Social attributes include leadership, romantic, and punctual; mental +1s feature honesty, innovation, and adventurous; make them blush with physical plusses like strength, beauty, and cuteness.
The list is growing, too. If your idea for an attribute is accepted, you get +1 creativity.
You can register on the site to collect +1s, but you can also send them anonymously to your friends via email – even if they aren’t registered on the site.
So go ahead, +1 me – I already gave myself one point for humility.
Tracking the Spitzer Scandal on Twitter
Also posted to TechPres
Shortly after 2:00pm today, the New York Times posted a front-page story announcing New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer was involved in an interstate prostitution ring. But if you wanted the absolute latest information, close your NYTimes.com browser window and head over to Twitter, where the news of Spitzer’s scandal spread so quickly it was difficult to keep up.
Using the third-party application Tweetscan, you can search for specific phrases and see only the tweets that include your search. In the half hour between 3 and 3:30 EST, there were more than 300 tweets that mentioned Spitzer.
It’s not just the news of the scandal that spread across Twitter; looking at the stream shows folks’ reactions to the news and inquiries about how the story will play out. Some folks are plain disappointed, others lament that he was caught in such a typical trap.
You can also get analyses of how the scandal plays out in the 2008 election. This tweet mentions that both Spitzer and his lieutenant governor are super-delegates supporting Hillary Clinton. Another criticizes the Times’ protrayal of the scandal that implies Spitzer was involved with running the ring, not just being a john.
As David All tweeted early after the scandal broke, the coverage of the Spitzer scandal shows that Twitter is indeed a utility, not just a play-thing. While it’s still a bit inaccessible to read specific topics from within Twitter itself, its open API allows for applications like TweetScan to fill in the gaps.
Hillary's Classy Tweets to Ohio and Rhode Island
Hillary brought some short & simple class to Twitter tonight – she thanked both Rhode Island and Ohio immediately after winning each state.
I thought this was very nice to see. Instead of just reporting out, she’s engaging. Is this finally the start of The Conversation we were told about last January?
State of the Union Overloads Twitter
First Macworld, now the State of the Union. Several times during tonight’s SOTU address Twitter’s servers were overloaded, preventing users of the popular micro-blogging service from sending or receiving tweets for several minutes at a time.
A scan of Twitter’s public timeline during the speech showed a number of tweets about Bush’s (hopefully) last address to Congress. Personally, I got a flurry of tweets commenting on the speech from the people I follow on Twitter.
Midway through, Twitter’s website failed to process new messages and friend requests for several minutes at a time. Overall, the service held up, but the outage spikes were certainly annoying.
Earlier this month at Apple’s annual Macworld event, Twitter’s servers failed during Steve Job’s keynote. TechCrunch wrote about the failure at the time:
Twitter will probably just shrug their shoulders as they usually do during outages, and ultimately we’ll all keep using it, but if there’s one messge I’d like to get through to Twitter: keep messing with Twitter users and eventually users might flock elsewhere…
In my book, this is strike two for Twitter. (Okay, maybe one and a half.) Potential competitors like Pownce should try to seize this opportunity to make a home for Twitter users who want a stable service for micro-blogging.
Jan 28, 09:31 PM / Comment [1]
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