Comcast Appeals FCC Throttling Order

Submitted by MacRonin on September 5, 2008 - 1:15am.

Comcast Appeals FCC Throttling Order - Via Threat Level:

Comcast on Thursday appealed the Federal Communication Commission's order that it stop its controversial practice of throttling file sharing traffic.

On Aug. 1, FCC commissioners concluded on a 3-2 vote that Comcast monitored the content of its customers' internet connections and selectively blocked peer-to-peer connections using the BitTorrent protocol. The commission found that Comcast violated so-called rules of net neutrality.

David Cohen, a Comcast vice president, said Comcast would comply with the order, even though Comcast maintains it never throttled traffic. Still, Cohen said the Philadelphia-based internet service provider was appealing (.pdf) to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit because the commission went too far.

"We filed this appeal in order to protect our legal rights and to challenge the basis on which the commission found that Comcast violated federal policy in the absence of pre-existing legally enforceable standards or rules," he said in a statement. "We continue to recognize that the Commission has jurisdiction over Internet service providers and may regulate them in appropriate circumstances and in accordance with appropriate procedures. However, we are compelled to appeal because we strongly believe that, in this particular case, the Commission's action was legally inappropriate and its findings were not justified by the record."

The commission's ruling was the first time the FCC waded into the net neutrality waters.

"Let's suppose they win. The commission would not have the authority to deal with them," said Art Brodsky, a spokesman for Public Knowledge, one of the groups whose complaints about Comcast stirred the FCC to action. "This is about setting ground rules for enforcement."

Cohen said Comcast was moving toward a "protocol-agnostic network congestion" platform by year's end. It also has capped monthly usage at 250 GB for residential users.

Illustration M3Li55@/Flickr

See Also:


(Read Original Article - Via Threat Level.)


Bookmark/Search this post with:

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

hi

Submitted by Anonymous on September 5, 2008 - 11:15am.

http://tech-arun.blogspot.com

i like your site

could you please say me what module you used for this captcha.
i am using D5.

i tried many captchas but not getting this one.

reCAPTCHA ?

Submitted by MacRonin on September 5, 2008 - 12:45pm.

I have a few SPAM blockers installed here. I am using a layered approach. So even if it gets by one, a latter one may stop it. So ou wil have to be more specific what you are seeing. The most interesting one I have is reCAPTCHA, but it has a link right on it about how to get more info.


Digitizing Books One Word at a Time

reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
Example of OCR errors

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.