A deep dive into digital marketing

Your bits are better then mine

Posted by Chris under Broadband, Comcast, Security, Technology, Uncategorized

Yesterday CNET reported on the latests over the the FCC 3-2 ruling on Friday to “declare that Comcast’s throttling of BitTorrent traffic last year was unlawful, marking the first time that any U.S. broadband provider has ever been found to violate Net neutrality rules”

Big news right except that there were not fines, penalties or even a slap on the wrist, and Comcast’s comment from a company spokeswomen: “We believe that our network management choices were reasonable, wholly consistent with industry practices,” isn’t really one of apology.

Remember this is the same Comcast that denied in August 2007 that it was filtering BitTorrent traffic. But when experts showed a few months later that Comcast really was throttling BitTorrent after all, and the company was forced to concede to the FCC that it blocks only “excessive” traffic.

Now I’m a Comcast subscriber. I’ve been using their highspeed broadband for almost 10 years and their broadband and TV for over four. It’s fast, reliable and for the most part like the electricity in my house, it just works. Clearly their are network bandwidth issues, some of which along with some solutions are pointed out in the recent MIT Technology Journal. As a side note I’d suggest you add this magazine or the website to your regular reading.

The FCC needs to get it’s act together to work with ISP’s and create solutions to packet/data management as the problem is going to get worse before it gets better.

a hot topic in congress and the senate

Posted by Chris under Technology, Twitter, privacy

This week two hot topics out in Washington, Privacy and Twitter. Well not really twitter but using “new” channels such as Twitter and Qik to communicate with constituents.

I’d suggest you first take a read to Aaron Brazell’s techsailor, in which he as excellent coverage, links, and consolidation on the issue. First I think it’s great that members of congress are taking advantage of tools to better communicate with their constituents and secondly since it’s using blogs, twitter, qik that’s even better.

On Privacy, the senate is taking a look at behavioral targeting and tracking. Or as Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D said, he was concerned that behavioral targeting is like someone following you around from store to store, taking notes on what you do. He said he was especially concerned that a web search for medical terms such as “dementia” and “post-nasal drip,” followed by a search for information on a California trip, followed by a search for a rock group, could create a behavioral profile that could follow him for years.

Hey Senator Dorgan, ever bought a book from Amazon as a gift (and not classified it as a gift), and all of a sudden you’re getting recommendations for books that you really don’t want. But seriously it is a smart issue to look at, I’m just a bit concerned about the understanding of the people looking at it. But AdAge has a short article on the hearing and the washington post has more.

YouTube Security?

Posted by Chris under Security, YouTube

Way too many clicks this morning to, check if this real or an ingenious art project (I even looked at MySpace TOS, well not that thoroughly). But here it is:
Has someone pimped you on MySpace and created a fake account of you, how’s a goth girl to prove she’s the real deal. Well according to these posts, track backed to death but I’ll start with ValleyWag, in order to prove ownership of a MySpace account, the company asks users to film themselves reading their account number to the camera. Brad Troemel assembled a number of these clips into Proof, a mesmerizing look into MySpace’s user base.

True or not it’s a strange reflection of either Brad or our times since the images he pulled from the larger collection seem to have a certain genre of heavy mascara, early Avril, emo/goth/punk chick-a-do’s. That and it feels like an idea concocted by some admins, as in: dude let’s have chicks video themselves to prove they’re who they are. Yeah it’s for their own security right.

Ohh, still on topic, my wandering search was paid off, in that Brad Troemel has some pretty interesting other photography on his site

Google, where is your certificate?

Posted by Chris under Google, Security

Writing my post the other day I did a search (on google) for google accounts. First result was

Google Accounts