management
P2P responsible for 19 percent of global mobile data traffic
P2P is responsible for 19 percent of the traffic on global mobile data networks, according to a new report from network management vendor Allot Communications that my colleague Stacey Higginbotham is covering in depth over at Gigaom.com . Just for comparison’s sake: YouTube is causing 10 percent of the traffic on those networks, and actually 32 percent of all HTTP-based streaming traffic. Does that mean that the blame game for congested 3G networks will finally shift from P2P to, well, everyone else?
Continue reading »Nirvana Bassist: I Agree with Bono, Need to Fight P2P
Says “content needs to be worth something if anybody is going to care about it,” and that “free content will ultimately resemble, well, free content.” Last I week I mentioned how U2 frontman Bono had amazingly cited our fight against child pornography and China’s success in suppressing online dissent as examples that filtering content, specifically copyrighted material, is possible. Added to his rant was a criticism of ISPs whom he says have gotten rich from P2P, that they’re “swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business.” UK ISP Talk Talk, that country’s largest broadband provider, later responded by calling Bono “seriously misguided.” It countered that not only does P2P “ incur some marginal cost due to the extra bandwidth required ,” but that it’s quite amazing that a comparison would be made between the “ need to protect minors from the evils of child pornography with the need to protect copyright owners.” Now Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, who readily admits that he’s “not up to speed on having ISPs regulate copyrighted material,” has written an article in the alternative newspaper Seattle Weekly defending Bono’s stance on illegal file-sharing. “Content needs to be worth something if anybody is going to care about it,” he writes.
Continue reading »Comcast to Pay $16 million for BitTorrent Throttling
Comcast, the ISP that gained a bad rap when last year it was accused a number of times of interfering with the traffic of p2p users and pledged good behavior in January 2009, settled its class-action lawsuit yesterday. The company agreed to pay $16 million (minus $3 million in fees) damage compensation to those customers who had their bandwidth throttled. Comcast’s statement came shortly after: “We are pleased to have reached a settlement in these consolidated class action lawsuits.
Continue reading »Computerized medicine: good for quality, but not costs
Electronic medical records and the general digitization of medical data and practices are promoted as a way to slow the rapidly inflating costs in the US healthcare system. The push for expanded medical IT has come from the top, with President Obama extolling its virtues and his administration making funding for EMR deployments part of its stimulus package. But many have pointed out that simply throwing computers at a problem isn’t a solution unless the software and practices are also in place to allow the medical community to leverage the technology efficiently.
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