Month: February 2015

This Is How the FCC Will Ensure Net Neutrality ⇥ wired.com

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, in a guest article for Wired (really):

I am proposing that the FCC use its Title II authority to implement and enforce open internet protections.

Using this authority, I am submitting to my colleagues the strongest open internet protections ever proposed by the FCC. These enforceable, bright-line rules will ban paid prioritization, and the blocking and throttling of lawful content and services. I propose to fully apply—for the first time ever—those bright-line rules to mobile broadband. My proposal assures the rights of internet users to go where they want, when they want, and the rights of innovators to introduce new products without asking anyone’s permission.

All of this can be accomplished while encouraging investment in broadband networks. To preserve incentives for broadband operators to invest in their networks, my proposal will modernize Title II, tailoring it for the 21st century, in order to provide returns necessary to construct competitive networks. For example, there will be no rate regulation, no tariffs, no last-mile unbundling.

Overall, this is fantastic news. The FCC will be classifying both terrestrial and mobile internet providers as utility providers, requiring them to follow the same general principles as your phone company. This is really, really good news: a full 180° turn from what Wheeler was originally proposing, which I coherently summarized thusly:

Fuck.

So this is generally good. My only worry is that Wheeler’s proposal exempts ISPs from rate regulation. Let me tell you a story along those lines.

A few years ago, pretty much all Canadian cellphone carriers offered three year contracts as standard. The Canadian government body responsible for overseeing the wireless industry here — the CRTC — wisely decided that this was ridiculous. They couldn’t directly legislate a two-year cap on contracts, so they said that all new contracts could not have any cancellation fees after 24 months. Clever, right?

But the wireless carriers here were already ahead of them. Each and every one of the three big players here — Telus, Rogers, and Bell — cut all their contracts to two years, but increased monthly rates by about 50% across the board to compensate. My plan at the time was about $60 per month; it would have been just shy of $90 per month if I chose to re-sign with Telus. (I didn’t, obviously.) The carriers ensured that the cost of a contract was the same, but you were paying more any way you look at it. Nobody actually has a cellphone for just two years, do they?

I worry that something similar will happen in the US with ISPs. There’s no doubt in my mind that they will seize this chance to jack up their rates. Maybe there’s some cynicism leaking out of me — I really don’t like that — but ISPs are generally loathsome, and this decision won’t change that.

ARM’s A72 Chip Design Makes Big Efficiency Strides ⇥ recode.net

Ina Fried, Recode:

ARM, the British company whose chip designs are at the core of nearly all mobile phone processors, on Tuesday showed off a new processor core it says can deliver three times as much performance as its current designs.

Perhaps more importantly, ARM says the new A72 — due out in phones by next year — can use 75 percent less power while offering the same performance as today’s chips. That means phones that are thinner and more powerful don’t need fans, ARM says.

Some of the power and performance gains come from changes to ARM’s chip design, while others bank on the fact that the new chip is expected to be manufactured in plants using a thinner 16-nanometer generation of transistors.

This is really good news, but not necessarily because the phones don’t need fans.1 This isn’t likely to be in the 2015 iPhone, but it lends credence to Ming-Chi Kuo’s speculation that the A10 in the 2016 iPhone models will use a 16nm process. It’s not like that generation of iPhone won’t get thinner, either, but this development means that a thinner phone won’t necessarily come at the expense of battery life. If these performance improvements are as significant as ARM claims, the 2016 iPhones could be really thin, really powerful, and have way longer battery life, too.

  1. Was this a serious consideration at any point? ↥︎

Google Is Developing an Uber Competitor ⇥ bloomberg.com

Today must be a day of battles between entities, neither of which are to my liking. Brad Stone, Bloomberg:

Google is preparing to offer its own ride-hailing service, most likely in conjunction with its long-in-development driverless car project. Drummond has informed Uber’s board of this possibility, according to a person close to the Uber board, and Uber executives have seen screenshots of what appears to be a Google ride-sharing app that is currently being used by Google employees. This person, who requested not to be named because the talks are private, said the Uber board is now weighing whether to ask Drummond to resign his position as an Uber board member.

Drummond, here, is David Drummond, Google’s senior vice president of corporate development who also happens to sit on Uber’s board. Google has also invested in Uber through their Ventures arm.

I don’t like Uber very much. While the idea of calling taxis on a smartphone and linking them to your credit card for automatic payments is appealing, I find the company itself to be appalling — especially the practice of surge pricing — and I think the focus on “black cars” is exclusionary. However, they are still a startup, and it looks like they’re about to be screwed over by one of the largest companies in the world.

Also, recall that then-CEO of Google Eric Schmidt was on Apple’s board when they were working on the iPhone. It’s like they create their own conflicts of interest.

Update: According to the WSJ, the app that the Uber board saw was an internal ride-sharing app for Google employees.

The Emperor Has No Clothes ⇥ yahoo.com

David Pogue reviews the Pono Player for Yahoo:

The company says it has 2 million songs for sale, but 90 percent of it is in 44.1kHz format — no better than what’s on a CD. The remaining 10 percent, the good stuff, the remastered high-resolution songs, is hard to find.

[…]

At 96kHz (which is still not 192), there’s one album each from John Mayer, Kid Rock, Harry Connick Jr., David Bowie, Sting, Carole King, and Blake Shelton. Out of Tony Bennett’s 68 live and studio albums, only two are available at 96kHz.

The Pono store is almost completely devoid of high-res classical music, which is baffling — wouldn’t classical fans cherish high audio quality as much as rock fans?

If anything, classical music — with its much greater dynamic range — would be the most beneficial from higher-resolution audio formats. This whole thing feels like some kind of sham. Take this part of Pogue’s review:

You may remember that 14 of my test subjects said they didn’t hear enough difference to justify buying a Pono. The 15th guy, however, said, “I would and I did!”

That is, he was already the owner of a Pono.

I pointed out to him that in my test, even he had preferred the sound of the iPhone. His reply: The Pono may not actually sound better, but it delivers more emotion.

Re-read that sentence, but mentally change the subject from the Pono Player and sound quality to putting a drop of honey in your water every day for supposed health benefits. It feels as dishonest as any sort of homeopathic health claim.

Update: Sam Machkovech reviewed it for Ars Technica (via Michael Tsai):

Want to use studio-quality headphones with your new audio player? They better come with a 3.5mm adapter, because Pono doesn’t support any larger jacks. If you happen to own a pair of headphones with two “balanced XLR connectors,” you can plug them both in for supposedly improved sound.

I don’t get this decision at all. Isn’t this supposed to be for “audiophiles”?

We took the Pono Player on the go for an entire day, which proved to be a bit of a logistical nightmare. This isn’t just a bad device to put in a pocket—the triangular shape feels noticeable and obnoxious in your pants pocket—but it’s also lousy in a messenger bag. The creators elected not to include a hardware “hold” button of any sort. As a result, the volume and multi-function buttons got pressed on a regular basis during our testing—meaning this thing reached its maximum, incredibly high volume level so quickly that we had to rip earbuds out.

Gross.

Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Pay to Get Around AdBlock ⇥ ft.com

Robert Cookson, Financial Times:

Eyeo makes money by operating a “whitelist” of certain ads that are not blocked. It says sites can join this “acceptable ads” programme only if they meet criteria such as being “transparent with us about being an ad” and “do not disrupt or distort the page content we’re trying to read”.

While the whitelisting process is free for small websites and blogs, Eyeo charges a fee to large companies in order “to make the initiative sustainable”. Eyeo declined to say how much it charges.

One digital media company, which asked not to be named, said Eyeo had asked for a fee equivalent to 30 per cent of the additional ad revenues that it would make from being unblocked.

I sort of get this. I mean, I have an ad spot on Pixel Envy and, while it isn’t quit-my-day-job money, it does pay for the bills for this site. Thank you to those of you who keep AdBlock off.

But this sort of feels like a protection racket between kinds of companies I hate. Here’s a company that released a product which blocks a lot of advertising on the web, because there’s an awful lot of obnoxious stuff out there. It’s also nice because Google and Amazon, among many others, like to collect oodles of information about you across the web. So blocking all of that nonsense is, in some way, justified.

But there are publishers who depend on ad revenue for survival. That’s the way it’s always been; nothing comes entirely for free. So AdBlock has started to allow some of the less intrusive ads through, in exchange for a fee. Which just feels gross.

This whole debacle could be avoided if web ads were unobtrusive and obeyed Do Not Track flags, or some other one-click way for users to tell ad exchanges that they don’t want to have their personal information harvested and profiled. Of course, that makes web ads no more effective than print ads, but nobody’s clicking on them anyway.