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Breaking news this morning on the issue of net neutrality comes from Canada. Wired reports on Rogers, a Canadian ISP, who succeeded in inserting a message of their own on a Google page. The message tells the user that they are approaching the limit of their available bandwidth for the month.
The Wired article said,
A screen shot posted to the web over the weekend seems to show that Canada's largest provider of high-speed internet access is exploring a controversial data substitution technique that lets it add its own content to the webpages customers visit.
Expect this development to become Exhibit A in the case for net neutrality legislation.
At Mashable Kristen NIcole commented on Rogers putting their content on a Google page, saying
Further, it begs the question: who owns the website? Google, or Rogers? What’s next–Rogers advertising? Part of net neutrality is the delivery of information as it’s meant to be; not imposed upon by the company that’s providing access to that information. It’s a big deal when an ISP provider feels the need to modify the content, and it’s a situation that will really push the limits of the current discussions going on around net neutrality.
Watching this story play out should be interesting, since net neutrality is a hot issue in the U.S. as well as Canada.
What's happening elsewhere in the technology blogosphere?
Rants of a Feminst Engineer is a new addition to the BlogHer technology blogroll. It lists itself as "a blog about negotiating the boundaries between engineering and women's studies as a new assistant professor." Feminist Engineer is pretty excited about something called Scientiae Carnival, which is a monthly celebration (aka blog posts) in story about women in science, engineering, technology and math. If that description fits you, it might be a great place to swap stories and build community.
Mary Clare Hunt at In Women We Trust wrote Is the tail wagging the dog, or have WE become the dog? She observed
The power shift is happening, to people first and then it will settle in on women's ideals. Last month, during his talk at the Clinton Initiative, Al Gore stated that the government needed to come up with a "Marshall-type Plan" to lead the masses into becoming sustainable. After his trip to Bali, he's beginning to give credit where credit is due - with the new leaders of the free world - US. That's US, as in you-and-me-and-them-and-their's on the other side of the world, not the U.S.
She goes on to quote Al Gore and then says,
Who do we have to thank for this? George Bush and the Internet - George for creating a vacuum of leadership and the Internet for giving the frustrated (left within that vacuum) a place to self organize. As the adage goes, if you want anything done, do-it-yourself. Never thought I'd say this, but thanks George, because of you the public now knows for sure that it can inspire, teach and lead itself very nicely and in an orderly fashion.
She doesn't stop with the inspirational information, however. She provides a link to a very cool vehicle called Aptera that is on the way to our streets and garages.
Oh, my dear, my dear—you thought the iPhone was cool. You thought the Wii was cool. I can sense the early adopters drooling on their keyboards right now over this gorgeous hunk of cool: the Aptera.
A Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace was held at Yale University last week. Rebecca Tushnet at 43(B)log was a panelist at one session of the symposium.
Rebecca blogged all four sessions. She did a fine job of capturing the essence of the very interesting discussions about reputation. Here's a quote from her post about Panel III.
Ashish Goel: He focuses on protecting social networks against anti-social behavior like spam, badmouthing, quid pro quo reviews, ballot stuffing by sockpuppets, and spurious comments to increase ranking on social sites like Yahoo! Answers. Anonymity and automation increase the scope of the problem. Given the large number of content generators, small merchants, and first-time transactions, reputation is a critical problem. It is computationally intractable to detect collusion via back-scratching, link farms, etc.
Then why do search engines work so well? Because their heuristics are not in the public domain. He found that ranking reversals (where a better result appears after a worse result) create
