TriNetre - Archive for June 25, 2004
(no longer updated)
"I told my wife, unless it is absolutely necessary and unless you are going to a site like our banking site, stay off the Internet right now,"
Brent Houlahan CTO, NetSec
Well, if you insist on using Internet Explorer, you might as well make that a permanent "stay off".
William Fisher, a professor at Harvard Law School looks back at the ways in which the invention of VCRs, radio and webcast (and the varied response to these technologies) shaped the profit margin of copyright holders.
(...) happiest ending - both for the public and for the copyright owners - was the one in which the owners were denied any share in the revenues earned by the developers of the new technology but instead had to develop a new business model to take advantage of it (VCR's). The next best outcome occurred when the copyright owners first allowed the new technology to take root and then worked out an arrangement in which they obtained modest license fees (radio). The least satisfactory outcome occurred when copyright owners demanded fees that were so high they hurt the growth of the new technology (Webcasting).
He then gives RIAA an advise:
History suggests that the record industry, and society at large, would be better off in the long run if it approached this new challenge with more open minds.
The part I am confused about is when he says:
To its credit, the industry has started to participate in paid music download services like iTunes, but a better solution would be to institute a monthly licensing fee paid by Internet users.
"monthly licensing fee paid by Internet users" - what does that mean? How is it supposed to work? William Fisher doesn't elaborate. Is he proposing that instead of paying for each song (as is done in iTunes now), I pay a monthly subscription charge for membership to iTunes and get to download some number of songs? So I get charged even if I do not download a single song for the whole month?
While I would love to rush out and say I do not like that idea, I am reminded of how Cable TV subscriptions work and how I am readily paying a monthly charge irrespective of whether I am actually watching the programs or not.
Interesting news via BBC - Indian railways to offer net access.
Indian Railways is to offer internet access to passengers from 30 June, according to the Times of India.
..
A kiosk with two computers will be set up on luxury coaches while "hotspots" will allow passengers with wireless-equipped devices to connect to the web.
..
The service will initially be free with eventual charges expected to be similar to the fees at RailTel's station kiosks.
Great. now I can have 'Briyani-mutta(egg)' while I surf... hrrr, add a samosa to that please.
TCP Vegas - a congestion avoidance protocol proposed by Lawrence Brakmo and Larry Peterson from University of Arizona (quiet different from the default TCP NewReno), has been added into the Linux kernel starting v2.6.6-rc3. A lot of work was initially done by Neal Cardwell for the 2.2 and 2.3 kernel and later added to 2.6.6 by David S. Miller.
This is a very interesting development for me because my Masters work was on addressing some of the limitations of TCP Vegas which resulted in my proposal of an 'adaptive' version of TCP Vegas, which we call TCP Vegas-A (IPCCC 2003, PDF file). Later on Sumit Gahlawat, a student at National University of Singapore (where I did my MSc.) had refined Vegas-A a bit and implemented it as TCP Vegas-EA for the 2.2.10 kernel. Now, maybe we can implement Vegas-A or Vegas-EA in the 2.6.6/2.6.7 kernel and play with it.
