Sorry for the intermittence, I promise it won’t happen super often. Sympathy all around, school and work can suck the life out of writing. Bejeweled 2 and Peggle too. Dastardly things the lot of them.
While busy leveling to 88 (6,218,550 points!) in Bejeweled 2, the issue of both internet privacy and per gigabyte fees ran through my mind. Specifically the Time Warner Cable leaked memo claiming “hard bandwidth” caps in Texas. Purely academic at first, this idea will cause all manner of headache for everyone in this post-Apple TV age.
The idea behind TWCs plan is simple: make it like a cell phone contract. The customer pays a set price for a speed and max download per month. Just like with cellphone minutes, go over that cap and you’re going to be charged a potentially heinous amount in overages. Believe it or not, that’s okay. Were my Internet Service Provider (EagleComm.net, a rural KS ISP) to go to the cellphone model I’d just buck up and pay top dollar. With good reason too.
At the moment I download 33 podcasts a month, 5 of which are weekly video episodes at about 200 megabytes a piece. Simple math tells you that’s 5 gigabytes of video and 7.2 gigabytes per month for regular audio podcasts. This doesn’t include any random Apple videos I may rent, general internet surfing, patches, demos, videos. My greatest fear isn’t to pay 100 dollars a month for (theoretically unfettered internet), but to pay $100 as overages on top of my $60 bill. That isn’t too much to ask for.
To hope for unhindered “traffic shaping”-less internet as a consequence of this plan should be abandoned immediately. Thinking any corporation or profit-seeking company is going to merely charge their customers what they pay (plus a tiny service charge) for access to the backbone is sorely mistaken. My ability to download is going to be hindered terribly, even when on the highest tier service. The reason is simple, more customers at a time equals more money. Money is definitely a desirable outcome for a company. Record breaking profitability even more so.
Then there’s another more pressing issue for privacy. It may surprise you, the gentle reader, to know I have an intolerance for both stupidity and eavesdroppers. Samwise Gamgee not withstanding, they rather infuriate me. So when that whole AT&T giving all their information to the CIA, including all data across their backbone, I was rather miffed. Yes, miffed seems appropriate. However, I being in the middle of fucking nowhere wasn’t too concerned about it. It did make me yearn for GnuPG to once again be compatible with my mail client. However I remembered a simple factoid about Hays, KS. We have one fiber optic backbone. A quick traceroute to my favorite sites reveals that why yes I am going across AT&T to get anywhere. So much for privacy.
Courtesy prevents me from using The Onion Router, the aforementioned bandwidth would be absolutely unfair to hoist upon someone else’s internet charge. I have no idea what I’m going to do, but I certainly wish more people used some form of encryption, for their sake as much as mine.
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