Net neutrality is the principle that Internet access should be treated as a utility, like electricity and water supply.

On a ‘neutral’ Internet, your service provider sells you a level of service for access to the Internet but does not alter your service based on what you might use that access for. Your fees, connection speed and quality does not change whether you're using a Mac or a PC, whether you're accessing YouTube or YouPorn.

Following the electicity analogy, you pay your power company for a supply of electricity, but they do not care whether you use it to power a hair dryer, television or a kettle. On a non-neutral electrical grid, your power company would be able to tell you that your water would take twice as long to boil unless you used a Kambrook brand kettle.

Proponents of net neutrality say that it opens up the Internet to innovation. If YouTube had needed to strike individual deals with major Internet providers, putting money in the pockets of each to guarantee its videos were delivered without interruption, there would probably be no YouTube. Critics say that it is an unwarranted interference in the major Internet providers right to do business as they see fit, and that major backbones such as the big US Telcos have the right to charge extra for companies like YouTube who consume significant amounts of their bandwidth.

We don't have net neutrality in Australia: ISPs often offer “sweeteners” in the form of exempting certain sites such as the iTunes store from your monthly bandwidth cap. This is a bad thing (i.e. anyone who might want to compete with iTunes must strike a similar sweetheart deal with ISPs) but because we're a small market where most consumers have several internet providers to choose from, its not as big a deal as it happening in the USA.

Why is this announcement a big deal?

Up until now, the net neutrality fight in the USA has seen the major telecommunications companies who control the major Internet backbones and also monopolise large areas of consumer Internet access in the United States on one side. Opposite them has been the Internet industry represented largely by its 800lb gorilla, Google. In the middle has been the Federal Communications Commission which, because neither side has been able to reach agreement, has been forced to take a role in regulating the industry.

Through this deal the two biggest antagonists in the fight are now working together to write a joint policy proposal on net neutrality. It is very likely that their agreement will be the new status quo for the enforcement of net neutrality in the USA. More, the provision specifically takes the FCC out of the role of regulator, and turns them into a simple ombudsman, overseeing the rules the industry sets for itself.

What does the announcement entail?

In broad strokes, Google and Verizon agree that net neutrality is a good thing. They ask that the FCC be allowed to enforce that everyone with an Internet connection should be provided equal and fair access to all of the services that the Internet provides, except in the case of:

• access to illegal content
• “additional, differentiated online services” offered by the providers themselves
• wireless and mobile services

Why should you be worried about the exceptions?

Illegal Content

Internet censorship is a thorny issue, the solution to which sadly does not fit into the margin of a blog post. Why on earth would Verizon want to explicitly take on the role of Internet Cop? Who would want the thankless task of deciding what is or isn't legal and regulating service as a result? Why not leave that job to the courts, policemen and lawyers?

The short answer: BitTorrent.

File-sharing, most of it illegal, consumes a not insignificant chunk of the Internet's available bandwidth. Verizon has led the charge in throttling its users use of BitTorrent, the most popular file-sharing protocol. ISPs make money from the disparity between the bandwidth they sell to consumers and the amount the consumers actually use, so throttling back the largest user of that bandwidth in the name of protecting copyright makes good business sense.

So the proviso that neutrality only extends to “legal content” is short-hand for “We will continue to assume that BitTorrent is illegal traffic and throttle it accordingly. Oh, and fuck you Pirate Bay”.

BitTorrent is also the only way for people without access to the big, expensive content distribution networks to distribute large amounts of data without crippling bandwidth costs. Independent film-makers and musicians are using BitTorrent today to bypass traditional distribution systems and get their work in front of viewers and listeners. This sort of collateral damage is irrelevant to the ISP.

Differentiated Services

On one hand, the idea that some services may be sufficiently “differentiated”, a word only defined in terms of itself and a grab bag of unrelated and increasingly ill-defined examples, to be exempt from neutrality provisions is a loophole wide enough to run a truck through. In a world where more and more data is sent using Internet protocols, the boundary of the Internet itself is less and less well-defined. How does one say what lies on the other side of that line?

Some commenters have gone as far as suggesting the provision is a forerunner to the backbone providers simply stopping adding capacity to the Internet itself in favour of an alternative, closed network that they can control.

Wireless Exemption

The statement justifies the exemption of mobile services from neutrality provisions ‘because the mobile marketplace is more competitive and changing rapidly’.

This makes no sense. The wired Internet was not hampered in its competition or rate of change by the assumption of net neutrality. On the contrary, the low barrier to entry of the open Internet was what made most of the giants we know today–the Amazons, eBays and even the Googles—possible.

Of all the provisions in the Verizon/Google statement, this is the most blatant land-grab by two companies that are currently close partners in providing mobile services. It is the telephone company saying ‘We will not lose control of the mobile networks in the same way we lost control of our wired networks. We will not give up our position as the keepers of the gates and constructors of the toll roads.‘ and it is Google saying ‘Thankyou for selling a lot of Android handsets. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’

Particularly: Wizball, Marble Madness, Commando and the much less well-known “Dragons Den” which came on a cartridge with the computer itself and was, for quite a while, the only game we owned that we hadn't typed in ourselves from a book.

I also learned that my earliest memories of home-computer sampled sound were the result of a bug in the C64’s sound chip being exploited by clever programmers:

Due to imperfect manufacturing technologies of the time and poor separation between the analog and digital parts of the chip, the 6581's output (before the amplifier stage) was always slightly biased from the zero level. By adjusting the amplifier's gain through the main 4-bit volume register, this bias could be modulated as PCM, resulting in a "virtual" fourth channel allowing 4-bit digital sample playback. The glitch was known and used from an early point on, first by Electronic Speech Systems to produce sampled speech in games such as Impossible Mission (1983, Epyx) and Ghostbusters (1984, Activision). – MOS Technology SID, Wikipedia

So there’s your totally useless information for Monday.

There was some very interesting technology in Wave and some really compelling ideas on how to facilitate rich real-time online conversation. There were also some usability issues, but those are the sorts of things that can be, and were being sorted out. The big hurdle was always convincing people that using Wave was a better idea than sending an email, pinging someone on IM, writing a note on Facebook or any of the thousand other ways people communicate over the Internet these days.

As a writer of collaboration software, the “How do I get people to use it?” question comes up a lot. To get people to use your application you need to give them a compelling reason to visit the site: not just once to see what it’s like, but every day to check what's new. For social software you need to get over the Catch-22 hurdle: you need content to bring people to the site, and you need to bring people to the site to generate content.

You need a circuit-breaker: a path from the old way of doing things to the new.

Wave was supposed to be an email killer, but there was never any migration path. Google Talk and Buzz both benefit from a presence in the GMail UI: I wouldn't even know Buzz existed if it wasn't reminding me from my Inbox. Integrating Wave with GMail seemed to me like the logical next step, allowing GMail/Talk users to enhance conversations amongst themselves while somehow keeping non-Waved participants in the loop.

Sticking Wave in a quiet corner and not letting it play with the other children just seemed like a bit of a waste.

So yes, cards on the table, I'm an Apple fanboy and you can clearly dismiss anything I might have to say about the iPad as the deluded ravings thereof.

Another point of view would be to say that if you look at the string of wildly successful products Apple has produced since the original iMac, the way they turned from resigned “When are they going to die?” to breathless “What are they going to do next?” in the course of a decade, anyone who doesn’t at least have a grudging appreciation of the company and its products deserves to have their judgement questioned.

Edit: I originally promised further reviews here, but pretty much everything I wanted to say about the iPad has already been said by others, if not better than I planned to then at least close enough that I can't be bothered making the effort. Management apologises for the inconvenience.

If you think the balance of trees will be better than it has in the past 5 years then your diluted.

One side-effect of the rise of the Internet has been the birth of a post-literate generation.

In my un-networked youth, writing was something you did for teachers and families. You wrote school projects, stories and essays. You wrote postcards, thank-you notes for presents and the occasional paragraph at the end of a letter. When you did so you made as sure as you could that you got all the words right because an adult was watching, and would usually correct you if you got it wrong.

With the popularity of text-messaging, email, blogging, Internet message-boards, everyone has become a voracious correspondent all at once. The recipients of the messages are peers, not superiors. The feedback loop is broken and anyone who objects is a grammar nazi. When in doubt, it is far more efficient to transliterate what you would say out loud and hope the letters line up than it would be to check if it is correct or not.

Of course we rail against it and hope that by the time people enter serious study or the workforce they are able to write in a way that doesn't embarrass. On the other hand spelling, like pronunciation, has always undergone seismic shifts despite the efforts of purists and dictionary-worshippers to capture the language and encase it in amber.

In short, it might be time to end my almost two-decades-long battle against the confusion of ‘lose’ and ‘loose’.

There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they’re guardians of language. They’re no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind. – Stephen Fry

The tweet was deleted about 40 minutes after it was posted, which was even more silly than posting it in the first place. If you screw up in public, you recover in public. Don't just try to pretend it didn’t happen.

ORLY?

As both the owner of what is almost certainly the world’s largest general purpose computing cluster, and our self-nominated bastion against evil, I really hope someone at Google is keeping an eye on this.

Two hours after I wrote it, my blog post is in the index and showing up in search results. That’s just a little uncanny. It’s not even as if I update my blog that often any more.

I've touched on this before.

Say you're arguing with someone and there is a flaw in their reasoning, but you also know that their argument could be reformulated to avoid that flaw. If you attack their argument as is, you'll either win a hollow victory with an argument that you know is faulty or you'll just prolong the debate as your opponent makes the obvious adjustment. It's the kind of thing you do when you're more interested in scoring cheap debating points than actually advancing the sum total of human understanding.

Not that there isn't a time and place for scoring cheap debating points.

Beyond straight argument, the principle of charity can provide a nice set of assumptions that help streamline interactions with other human beings.

1. Assume intelligence. The person you are talking to has a brain, and knows how to use it.
2. Assume honesty. The person you are talking to honestly believes what they are saying.
3. Assume diligence. The person you are talking to, when given a task, will approach it with rigour and attempt to complete it to the best of their ability.

You could be wrong on any of these, that's why they're called assumptions. Ultimately, however, you're better off assuming the best and then adjusting your behaviour if you are proven wrong than you are starting off believing people are stupid, dishonest and lazy.

A very simple example. Someone else is working on a problem, and I think of a very simple solution. Do I walk over and ask “Did you think of X?”

If I do, I've just violated assumptions 1 and 3. If I could think of a simple solution, then someone else who is both intelligent and already diligently working on the problem is likely to have already thought of that answer and discarded it for some reason. Chances are I'm not even the first outsider to have suggested it.

If I rephrase the question as “So why didn’t you go with X?”, I’ve gone from assuming ignorance on their part to assuming I'm the one missing something. If X turns out to be something they didn’t think of after all, it’s a surprise for us both, and I sound a lot less condescending.

Now all I have to do is remember this sort of thing in practice.

Vegemite is very much an acquired taste; strong and salty. Those of us who love it tend to have either been indoctrinated as children or convinced by friends or family to work through the initial ‘what the hell is THAT?’ reaction.

After some research you come up with a new product that you believe is friendlier to the unfamiliar palate. You hope that this product will bring you new customers, and maybe even act as a gateway to lure people to try the original flavour. So how do you get people to notice?

Some publicity is a given. Any update on a product that is in some ways synonymous with Australia will make it into the nightly news bulletin and the daily paper. If you grease the right palms you might even get a longer segment on a week-night current affairs show. But you're ambitious. Can you make your product launch occupy not one tiny corner of one news cycle, but a whole week of headlines? What about a month of them?

Well, this week we found out.

1. Hold a competition to name your new product. That will get you on the news on release day, then a few mentions throughout the competition.
2. When the competition ends, choose the worst name possible
3. For extra points, pick a name that will be annoy people on the Internet, because ‘people on Twitter are upset’ is a flavour-of-the-month story
4. For extra extra points, play on nationalistic outrage by announcing your new name for that most Australian of products during the Australian Rules Football grand final
5. Once you've wrung as much attention as you can out of the “naming debacle”, apologise profusely for your “mistake” and announce a new competition to pick the real name from a pool of obvious candidates.
6. Finally, announce the new name

‘iSnack 2.0’ was so obviously a name for the week, not a name for the ages. What I find most amusing is that the current generation of consumers are, at least if you ask them, so much more cynical of marketing ploys. We're more clued in to how the media works and the Internet has taught us to mistrust authority and question everything we read.

Yeah, right. Someone in Kraft marketing is on track for a pretty big bonus this year.