Wired has the story You Don’t Want Super-High-Speed Internet, Says Time Warner Cable.

Time Warner Cable chief technology officer Irene Esteves says you don’t really want the gigabit speeds offered by Google Fiber and other high speed providers.
.
.
.
Esteves did say that if demand and applications pick up, the company would be interested in offering faster connections to communities, The Verge reported. But by then, it may be too late for the incumbents.

Communities across the country are sick of waiting for the big telcos or Google to bring them faster speeds and are taking matters into their own hands. Lafeyette, Louisiana and Chattanooga, Tennessee are the most famous examples. Both have built gigabit speed municipal networks that provide access. Meanwhile, cities like Seattle and Chicago are contracting with Gigabit Squared to turn unused fiber optic infrastructure into consumer internet connections.

Thirty years ago, I returned to Bolton, MA after having spent a year in Oakland, CA.  I called the phone company to complain about the slow internet speed in the sticks of Massachusetts compared to what I had experienced in California.  They came to visit me at work to explain the difficulties they experienced upgrading the computer service.  Only people who worked in the high tech industry were willing to pay for better service.  I told them then that if they didn’t get their act together, the able companies would eat their lunch.

In 2006, I moved to Sturbridge, MA from a dozen or so years stay near Portland, OR.  Verizon could not provide DSL to my house like it provided to my house in Oregon.  So I cut the Verizon wire, and went with Charter Cable for my TV, internet, and telephone connection.

Verizon is now trying to sell me FiOS, but it is too little, too late.  And besides, my house is not in the area to which they can provide FiOS service.

In a twist on history repeating itself, I may eventually be able to get a municipal service and bypass both the phone company and the cable company.  In high tech, if you snooze, you lose.

Private enterprise is supposed to be more efficient than government according to some pundits.  Can you think of a more efficient way to deliver a package than is the apparent route of this delivery that I am expecting today?

Travel History

Yes, I know, it must have something to do with region boundaries and which location is able to make local deliveries within its region that includes my house.

Of course there is the 9 hour trip from Willington to Auburn to consider. I could have used a bicycle to get it to Auburn faster. That’s 35 miles which Google says should have taken 39 minutes. I could have driven to Willington to pick up the package a day earlier and saved two tolls on the Mass Pike.

The Washington Post has the piece Sotomayor, Kagan ready for battles by Dana Milbank. A few excerpts might give you the gist of the article.

The acerbic Scalia, the court’s longest-serving justice, got his latest comeuppance Wednesday morning, as he tried to make the absurd argument that Congress’s renewal of the Voting Rights Act in 2006 by votes of 98 to 0 in the Senate and 390 to 33 in the House did not mean that Congress actually supported the act. Scalia, assuming powers of clairvoyance, argued that the lawmakers were secretly afraid to vote against this “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

Kagan wasn’t about to let him get away with that. In a breach of decorum, she interrupted his questioning of counsel to argue with him directly. “Well, that sounds like a good argument to me, Justice Scalia,” she said. “It was clear to 98 senators, including every senator from a covered state, who decided that there was a continuing need for this piece of legislation.”
.
.
.
Sotomayor allowed the lawyer for the Alabama county seeking to overturn the law to get just four sentences into his argument before interrupting him. “Assuming I accept your premise — and there’s some question about that — that some portions of the South have changed, your county pretty much hasn’t,” she charged. “Why would we vote in favor of a county whose record is the epitome of what caused the passage of this law to start with?”

Apparently these women Justices and Senators like Elizabeth Warren just don’t know how to show the proper deference to the bullies of the world.  That’s why I voted for Warren and am glad that Obama appointed these two Justices.

We had a successful presentation of the petition at the Mass DEP regional office in Worcester today. You can view the following image gallery without the frame

That is a rhetorical question I have been asking myself.  Rejecting austerity, as the Italian voters appear to have done, is to reject an economy killing program.  Should be good, right?  Well, of course not.  As the Yahoo! Daily Ticker explains in the article Why Italy’s Election Has Caused Global Markets to Crater:

The ECB says it will buy government’s debt, provided that said government engages in various reforms that the ECB wants to see.

There’s only one catch. Voters hate austerity. And voters hate when their own politicians are taking their cues from an institution like the European Central Bank, rather than domestic needs.

And that’s the phenomenon that came home to roost last night.

The political parties seen as continuing along the existing ECB-preferred path did badly. The rebellion voters (Silvio Berlusconi and populist Beppe Grillo) did much better than expected.

And this has the potential to undermine all of the progress made in Europe over the past several months.

So the real problem is that The European Central Bank will only do what it ought to do, inject liquidity into the sovereign debt market, if the countries receiving the injection will do what they ought not do, go on an austerity program.

Just as in the US, there’s a big thirst among elites for structural reforms to reduce long-term deficits.

Well, that’s not the real reason elites want structural reform.  Applying Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive Behavior, the real explanation could be that the elites want the markets to tank to create a buying opportunity for them.  That way they can buy up whatever assets they don’t already own at fire sale prices.  What else are corporations sitting on several trillion dollars of liquid assets waiting for?

Here is an email that Sharon received:

Sharon–

Remember the job growth chart that helped President Obama win the 2012 election?

It tells a story of an economy built from the middle class out — and you’re a part of that!

But all that progress — all those blue lines and all those jobs — will go out the window if House Republicans let the brutal sequester cuts take effect on March 1st.

If you’ve got the President’s back, click here to tell Republicans it’s time to act now.

President Obama is working around the clock to stop the cuts — but Boehner and Cantor refuse to even come to the table.

It’s going to take the muscle of our grassroots movement to back up the President and force Republicans to act. Join the DCCC, Democratic Governors, and proud Democrats all across the country calling out Boehner and Cantor before the sequester deadline:

http://dccc.org/Stop-The-Sequester

Thanks,

Brandon

Brandon English

DCCC Digital Director

 

Paid for by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee | 430 South Capitol Street SE, Washington, DC 20003 (202) 863-1500 | www.dccc.org | Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

The IEEE online magazine Computing Now has the interesting article Is Everything We Know about Password Stealing Wrong?

The money mule’s role is to turn a traceable, reversible transaction into an untraceable, irreversible one.  Using a stolen password, the thief transfers money (traceably and reversibly) to the mule’s account using, for example, online bill pay. On receipt, the mule sends this money (untraceably and irreversibly), minus a “commission,” to the thief. By using, for instance, Western Union for this transfer, the mule has made it irreversible and untraceable. By authorizing the withdrawal with a signature, the mule gives up any ability to repudiate. The mule has thus given up any consumer legal protections that he or she might have enjoyed. The mule accepts a bad transfer and initiates a good one.

Consider a fraudulent transfer of $9,000 from a compromised account. Using online bill pay, the thief sends $9,000 from the victim’s account to the mule. The mule sends $8,100 to the thief and keeps a $900 commission. Once fraud is discovered, the victim is reimbursed, and reversal is attempted from the mule account. Thus, before discovery, the victim, mule, and thief have gains of –$9,000, $900, and $8,100, respectively. After discovery and reimbursement, they have $0, –$8,100, and $8,100, respectively.

The moral of the story is that you are less in danger from having your password stolen at an ATM than you are of being talked into becoming a mule. Still, you’ll avoid hassle if not loss of money if you protect your password from theft.

As Kermit might say, “It is not easy being a mule.” Maybe it’s Eddie Murphy that would make that remark.

The full title of this piece from NBC News is Will our universe end in a ‘big slurp’? Higgs-like particle suggests it might.

If the “Higgs-like particle” discovered last year is really the long-sought Higgs boson, the bad news is that its mass suggests the universe will end in a fast-spreading bubble of doom. The good news? It’ll probably be tens of billions of years before that particular doomsday arrives.

I don’t know who thought up the name “big slurp”, but I think that person deserves a medal of some sort.

The New York Times has the story Prosecutors, Shifting Strategy, Build New Wall Street Cases.

Criticized for letting Wall Street off the hook after the financial crisis, the Justice Department is building a new model for prosecuting big banks.

In a recent round of actions that shook the financial industry, the government pushed for guilty pleas, rather than just the usual fines and reforms. Prosecutors now aim to apply the approach broadly to financial fraud cases, according to officials involved in the investigations.

Lawyers for several big banks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they were already adjusting their defenses and urging banks to fire employees suspected of wrongdoing in the hope of appeasing authorities.

Is this a new corporate idea, firing employees who break the law in the process of carrying out their official duties?  In my 40 odd years in the corporate world, I always thought that such firing was already corporate policy.  That was probably only true of people at my low level.

Perhaps Elizabeth Warren was only one of the voices criticizing the Justice Department, but her voice brought a lot of attention to the issue. See Elizabeth Warren Embarrasses Hapless Bank Regulators At First Hearing.

If the Justice Department’s worry is that such prosecutions will put the companies out of business, they could also include nationalization of the company as part of the punishment.  This would put the government in charge of an orderly winding down of the failing company.  If the Justice Department has no qualms about hounding individuals until they commit suicide, how about just making corporate executives pee in their pants.