fedward, tumbling

goes on, and the heat goes on
~ Sunday, August 14 ~
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Twitter has jumped the gun on its move to ubiquitous link-wrapping with its t.co service.  They said they’d start on the 15th, with links longer than 20 characters, and they started on or before the 12th, with links longer shorter than 20 characters (that’s 19 above).  I’m not happy about this change.  In making it they’ve broken any sort of link parsing in any third party client that doesn’t auto-expand links, which means that any client that would, say, display images inline or filter out pesky 4sq.com links automatically can’t do that anymore, because everything is now t.co.

And there doesn’t really seem to be any point to it except as a grab to obsolete any other URL shortening service in favor of its own.  Twitter doesn’t have an end game here.

They like to talk about how they’re fighting spam, and they’re announcing the change to link wrapping as “a means to protect users from malicious sites and scams.”  Except they admit that they’re not actually resolving shortened URLs, they’re just rewrapping them.  Once they figure out — IF they figure out — that a link is bad then they might send you to a warning page instead of just redirecting you, but it appears they’re not actually trying to do anything with those links.

And they’re not doing anything about spam either.  That user is clearly violating the policy, but since there’s no effective automation of spam blocking, the only way the user gets flagged and disabled is if the recipients of that spam, like me, push the button.  And there’s increasingly less incentive to do that.

Fix it, Twitter.  If you’re going to force this on us, then do three things:

  1. Live up to your word.  If you say you’re going to implement a change on a certain date, don’t do it early.  And don’t wrap URLs that are already short enough.  All you’re doing is filling up your namespace, with no other apparent gain to anybody, including yourselves.
  2. Resolve all URLs, either through the longurl.org API (I’m sure you could probably buy the service outright instead of licensing it) or by rolling your own equivalent to it.  Display the fully-resolved URL on twitter.com and make it available in the API so any client can see it without doing extra work.  Your current half-assed solution is useless.
  3. Show some evidence you’re actually attempting to deal with the spam problem by filtering URLs before they even get posted, as opposed to after the fact.  A user like “holahanhzsp6” sending out the same URL in mention-spam should be easy to spot algorithmically. Hell, offer me a job and I’ll write the regexes for you.
Tags: twitter spam longurl.org URL shortening url wrapping url expansion short urls urls internet
~ Tuesday, April 6 ~
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Title for my paper

tbridge:

“Network Neutrality: Threat or Menace?” 

What do you think?

I would avoid using the term “Network Neutrality” except to deconstruct it, since it has become laden with half-truths and propaganda.  And I’d be tempted to use a Simpsons reference, something like “Argle-Bargle or Fooferaw?” instead of “Threat or Menace?”  If you insist on using the two words “Network” and “Neutrality” together like that, though, I’d probably do something like, “Everything You Know About Network Neutrality Is Wrong (and so is everything you didn’t know and were afraid to ask).”

Things worth remembering when talking about network neutrality, on one side:

  1. The ISPs would like nothing more than to double-dip, charging twice or more for the same transmission of data.  The end user is already paying what should be a fair price for their own usage; the content provider has paid to get the content delivered to the ISP in the first place. Arguments about how the content providers are using the ISP’s networks “for free” are disingenuous.
  2. Claims about “bandwidth shaping” and “protocol limiting” can be used to mask business decisions and/or force users to use preferred or premium services the ISP makes extra profit on.

And on the other side:

  1. Content providers talk out of both sides of their mouths. They desire not to have their usage capped or surcharged, because they have their own contracts with other ISPs and networks to protect. Hulu benefits from unrestricted, unmetered access, but it also has made arrangements with presumably every network to protect everybody’s profits.  It’s also theoretically possible that a Hulu-like site could be pushing more content through its own peers than they were expecting when they signed the contracts, but that’s not the end ISP’s problem.
  2. While there are substantial legal uses of BitTorrent and the like (downloaded a Linux distro lately?), it is undeniable that heavy users of these protocols are a drain on network resources, and acting as if piracy isn’t really all that big a problem weakens the validity of one’s arguments.

I don’t think anybody can talk intelligently about network neutrality unless they understand how peering and transit work, and very few people even know what those things are, much less how they work.  The people who could actually have a reasonable discussion on the merits could fit into a large conference room.   FWIW, my own exposure to peering and transit was both tertiary to my actual job and so long ago that I’d have to study up just to be able to follow along.

Tags: network neutrality network internet ISP content free
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