Michael Tabolsky : Activity

What is inside the Telecoms Package?

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 12:32:26 GMT

Excuse my skepticism, but whenever there is a “market regulation” law popping out in a parliament, I always start from finding who benefits from it. And usually there is always an industry or corporation behind it which is lobbying for the new law. I don’t think it has to do something with global conspiracy but rather an obvious and logical thing.

Anyway, what is there in Telecoms Package? who is going to benefit?

Officially, there are two industries benefiting from it, the Entertainment industry that pushes the so called “3-strikes”or in plain words, for the ISP could disconnect you from Internet after you have been “caught” ~~downloading~~ accessing copyrighted materials. Think this, you go to youtube to see some funny stuff, find a link to some video, click on it and watch. That’s a copyrighted video someone has copied from TV and uploaded to youtube. You can get the first strike. Do that again and again. Boom, you are outlaw and can’t read e-mail. And don’t think this example is far from reality, youtube is constantly removing content uploaded by users AFTER they receive copyright notifications from owners. Obviously it is more complicated with peer-to-peer networks where downloading “unintentionally” is more complicated but trust my words, still possible.

The other party here are telcos. These are struggling to survive now with bandwidth demand from end-users and low prices trends on the market. Just to let you know, that peer-to-peer traffic together with on-line videos makes more than a half of total data passing through a public ISP pipes. And it’s growing. Someone always has to pay for traffic, it never comes “Gratis”. Think this, your home ADSL connection in Italy that brings you about ~10Mbps/512Kbps of speed can theoretically bring you 3,240,000 MByte of data within a month. This number, 3TB, is like having 130 Blueray (HDTV movies) discs downloaded. It’s a lot. Now, check this, Amazon Elastic Cloud services calculator estimates this traffic as $1,134.000 ( AFAIK doubles the price oh a typical Tier1) if you transfer it within one month. How much did you pay for your ADSL? 30 Euros? Obviously nobody uses their home ADSL to download hundreds of HDTV movies. But rest assured, with current trends:

it is closer than you may think and your ISP will not have the margin he has today.

The above is only a part of problems ISPs experience, if you are interested in more practical examples then look at Mobile Internet providers who are more sensitive to these problems and already sell “Packages” to access specific resources on Internet.

Not to mention VoIP that literally steals money from telcos.

So what a telco gets from Telecoms Package?

A legal possibility to sell you access to Internet content. Specific Content of specific type. Then they can control better the pricing and business models. Great.

Now then, what we, consumers, users, clients, citizens will get in return? I’ll tell you that, but first, why I am telling that?

I was there in Israel when broadband came in, in fact, I was in “beta testers” group of Israeli Bezeq ADSL service.And I was working for an ISP, and I was asked to block traffic, to minimize the international bandwidth utilization by users. A lot of tricks to pay less to providers and get more from customers. Proxy servers, firewalls, taps, capacity limiters … All kind of stuff. Nothing really worked. It worked for sometime but not enough for the business to be affected.

A few month ago, Italy joined child pornography war and that also fails…

You see, you can’t fight it, whenever some approach pops out, almost instantly people find a work around.

So ok, says telco, then I will not look for how to block, I will block all and will go up opening what I want clients to use. It ain’t going to work too.

If you feel fine with accessing only web pages and say it is all you need. After all, your Internet may be Google or Facebook and myspace…. Great. But will you want to chat sometimes? google talk is not going to work for you. Will you want to watch some videos on-line? like news? it’s not going to work ALWAYS. And you what? it is really disturbing when you know there is something there you can’t get when you know you should…

So what you get is hours spent on the phone with their support to redefine what is included in the package…. I am a voice from inside and I know how the implementation of marketing department ideas goes.

Now then, connect all of this to the Internet censorship talks, when politicians say that “Internet is like a big newspaper distributed through pipes” and it has to be controlled, licensed and approved. And you’ll see, that this kind of “collaboration” between lawmakers and corporations gives some people the power to control what you see. Literally.

I do feel frustrated and impressed and lost… This is something that should not happen. Ever.

Telecoms package

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 09:30:20 GMT

Hiding behind anti cybercrime actions, privacy issues, telecom services market blahblah.

If network neutrality term doesn’t ring anything to you, think this Europeans:

Do you really want to see something like this:

on the shelf of your favorite supermarcet.

Please do not allow the Internet Filtering, it is your freedom, your knowledge, your access to the information independently from corporation views or governament control. Don’t let them convert it into what they’ve done to television and press.

Please act on it now, nag your Meps via email, spread it in facebook, twitter it all over the net. Don’t let it happen. It is a real treat.

http://www.blackouteurope.eu/

http://www.laquadrature.net/en/tag/themes/telecom-package

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=73537262931&ref=ts

http://gfdsa.gfdsa.org/2009/04/25/telecoms-package/

Milan IN: youtube channel

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 09:31:12 GMT

youtube.milanin.com

watch, rate, subscribe, comment.

Stay tuned!

dejavu

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 21:17:58 GMT

2008:
Mr. von Tetzchner said that Opera’s engineers have developed a version of Opera Mini that can run on an Apple iPhone, but Apple won’t let the company release it because it competes with Apple’s own Safari browser.

back to 1998?

Crunched? Get yourself a LinkedIn profile!

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:41:56 GMT

In recent days, the business sent me a very excited press release claimig that 28 million people - or "professionals" - have now signed up. And where are they coming from? You've guessed it, the finance industry.

Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC's technology correspondent believes that chances are good for LinkedIn to grow the same rate as markets fall and financial institutions collapse.

here

Desktop Linux?

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 19:52:44 GMT

What’s wrong with it?

… here’s what MSI’s US sales director Andy Tung told our friend Joanna at Laptop when she asked about high return rates:
We have done a lot of studies on the return rates and haven’t really talked about it much until now. Our internal research has shown that the return of netbooks is higher than regular notebooks, but the main cause of that is Linux. People would love to pay $299 or $399 but they don’t know what they get until they open the box. They start playing around with Linux and start realizing that it’s not what they are used to. They don’t want to spend time to learn it so they bring it back to the store. The return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks than Windows XP netbooks. ….

via Gizmodo

just as I am always saying, don’t try to turn it into Pindows, don’t try to turn it into OS Y, don’t try to lie to your clients that this is the same but for no money. It is not! every company, even this one, should clearly get this idea, they sell a totally different software and principles.

What the companies should focus at (absolutely IMHO) is how to attract the new markets. My mother in law is using GNU/Linux/KDE3 for about two months. It just works for her because she doesn’t look for Start button to Stop computer. That’s the way. Trying to sell a netbook with Linux to someone who doesn’t know what the heck it is but knows how to format disks in Windows is a terrible mistake. He returns it as soon as he finds out that the “Desktop” is not where computer is but actually Computer is where the Desktop sits. Discovering such a thing is like discovering that there is no Santa but the latest is easily accepted thanks to a child’s ability to absorbe new facts and ambiential changes. So focus on two groups, people with no previous experience and adopters, children and youth.

I don’t hope my message will reach distributors but I do hope I am right so the conclusions I make will also be made by GNU/Linux sellers.

asterisk with skype

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 22:53:21 GMT

Big news, really big this time. The company that leads the proprietary VoIP is opening the ~~doors~~ gates for the standards. Predictably you have to pay for entrance. Ironically, they do it with the company leading the open VoIP, Digium:

GLENDALE, Ariz. (AstriCon 2008)—September 25, 2008—Digium®,
creator and primary developer of Asterisk®, the leading open source
telephony platform, and Skype™, the leading global Internet
communications company, today announced the beta version of Skype For
Asterisk, which will allow the integration of Skype functionality into
Digium’s Asterisk software and enable customers to make, receive and
transfer Skype calls from within their Asterisk phone systems.

Good? Has to be good somehow. Not impressed. We’ll see.

Canonical in numbers

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 21:45:08 GMT

A really nice page that shows in numbers who Canonical ( the company behind Ubuntu Linux driven by Mark Richard Shuttleworth, for the rest of us ) really is. Or at least it is my last argument in hating the pathetic distribution that sucks life essence from GNU/Linux.

I’ve been always saying Ubuntu is a pure damage to the free software movement, it is worse than microdoft, novell, oracle and whatever you can bring up from googling linux. The most terrible thing ever.

100 patches to kernel in 5 years. Now, who this company is? exploiter. Period.

That is a normal tactics to catch the train in commercial world. Good job Mark. Great Business Canonical. Community? sure, scared newbies who don’t know what’s the difference between Linux and Ubuntu desperately looking for My computers icons or whatever they had on their Redmond powered boxes. PR? Popularization? give me a break. Ubuntu looks like shit, (does not) works like shit and you know what was the conclusion I’ve got to with a couple of my friends? That Canonical is either a microdoft or aple spread that is targeted to destroy Linux as desktop platform. I still hope that was a result of logics lacking facts, but it seems so true….

Please, support the contributors, support the ones who creates and not resells, not exploiters. Remove that stinky ubuntu and install something from the top of the list.

Thank you for reading.

Am I scared by google?

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:12:01 GMT

I am. Spooky. How deep the rabbit hole is? How much of your own life can be traded for the commodity of web X.0 ?
First this Chrome thing with nr. 11 statement that owns all of the data comes in and out of browser. They say it was a mistake and will be corrected. Now this name tagging in picassa…..
Until now google only owned you in text web and now they will own you on photos too. I know many people who are trying to not show their real faces associated with their real names. But I do have their photos in my picassa albums. I am a kind person so I will not tag their names. Am I an unique character? Or will someone tag their names? How long will it take then until google will find and will tag all their photos on the net?

Are you sure about what photos of you are out there that you’d prefer to keep anonymous? I am pretty sure there are some I’d like to remove before my q=michael%20tabolsky in google picks them up.

Having all this global community and friending all the world is fine for me, but sometimes .. sometimes I think I’d better off to the old anonymous web where I could just say “I am gfdsa” and nobody could know what’s behind it.

Bottom line, I’m seriously thinking to move away from google, It will be a costly operation that will force me to pay more to hosters, but I just don’t trust this provider of free beer.

Firefox 3 release today?

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:54:51 GMT

Oh yes. They’ve told us June 17th. What do we get at 16:00 CET? You can bet we still have 2.0.14 as the only option. Why? Is there delay in the delivery? Some critical bug in software? Are their servers out of space for the new files?

Nope. Did you note the 24h time notation? Ok, so the thing is that Firefox is released at June 17th at 10pm. PDT !!!

Now you could say that it is okay, mozilla foundation is US based and can schedule the dates in their local time. Actually no, you can’t say that. It is a delivery of product. World wide delivery. Check this page’s map and tell me if there is a difference in the number of US and “rest of us” number of Mozilla Foundation customers. You bet there is. But who cares?

Pathetic USA self-centristic behaivour.

digital signage

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:26:46 GMT

digital signage a-la castorama

Moz_ffx_openStandards

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 21:47:20 GMT

Please, don't hurt the web Use open standards

hmmm

Mon, 29 May 2006 16:08:59 GMT

hmmm

calendar

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 12:41:06 GMT

My calendar

Kozulka

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 16:48:40 GMT

A kozulka running through the field