Carl Hutzler’s Blog

“It’s like Deja Vu all over again.” - Y.B.

There has been a lot of talk lately from the cable broadband providers (Comast, TW Cable, etc) that they are looking to implement bandwidth caps on their cable internet customers. Some will begin capping your download to 5GB a month in the fall, which is a VERY small amount of data when you consider your download pipe is around 10Mbps! That means you would hit the cap in about a half a day if you were downloading at the max speed. So much for unlimited internet for $50/month.

The cable companies have been saying caps are needed because of a very small percentage of people using 80% of the bandwidth. And we have been led to believe these evil people are also breaking the law as it is mostly P2P traffic (bit torrent, etc) and music/video steeling.

But me thinks the caps are for a little different reason….

Basically, if you look at what the major TV networks are doing lately, you start to realize that you can watch shows online more conveniently than ever. If you have a computer hooked up to a TV, you can simply visit abc.com or nbc.com, etc and stream the show you want to watch. And even smaller cable only stations are doing streaming shows too. And it’s free (ad supported).

And you can also stream and download movies from iTunes, Netflix, and many others. And there are more and more set-top boxes available now to allow you to stream or download movies and watch them.

Well, as you might guess, our Cable companies don’t like this and are scared we might actually ditch their Cable TV service and just subscribe to their internet service….which of course we will. So what do they do to preempt becoming a dumb pipe provider? Implement bandwidth caps to make the whole thing useless.

Yet more companies in the long list of companies that have tried to stop technology from moving forward instead of seeing the trend and adapting. Cell phone companies will be next. No one wants voice connections. They want data so they can do voice, video and data how they want.

Now, if Cable operators instead embraced the coming age of IPTV, they might be able to become more efficient at providing massive amounts of bandwidth, while charging more for it, and being more profitable. But the issue, I suspect, is that they have so much invested in the old system which is highly profitable. So even though they have other revenue streams (VOIP and Internet data), they want to keep everything. Sounds like a company I used to work for.

As a follow-up to my last post on IndieKazoo.com, another neat web application I learned about today is called CircaVie.

CircaVie allows you to create your own timeline/scrapbook type of thing on the web by linking and uploading a few pictures. Its very simple and yet a neat way to share what is going on in your life with others.

I like it because it is all photographs, movies, and multimedia as opposed to my blog which is mostly text. Yes, blogs can have images and movies, etc, but this timeline thing is meant for multi-media. Its also more the way people want to view stuff about your life or your family….in a timeline.

Congratulations to David McVicar whose great idea this was. But not only was it a great idea, he made sure it happened by following his dream. And congrats to the UUSS team…it was either that or storing it in FLICKR I guess ;-)

Check out mine…it took me about 20 minutes to create:

John Snow (developer extraordinaire at AOL) updated the Top Coder extension I wrote about back in Sept ‘06 which allows people with AOL mailboxes to use the special AOL mail features in Thunderbird. This is a cool extension as it brings UNSEND, STATUS and REPORT SPAM to Thunderbird users.

Anyway, as John just reported in the comments of the original post, he is having trouble getting the extension out of the “sandbox” area of Mozilla.Org. If you would like to have this extension see the light of day, please help by leaving a comment in the sandbox area. You will need to create an account on mozilla.org in order to do this. Here are the steps:

1. Visit http://addons.mozilla.org/ and REGISTER an account. Confirm the account (click on the link in the email you will receive)

2. Login with your new account and go to your account preferences and ENABLE SANDBOX access.

3. Visit https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4860 and leave a comment.

Thanks for your help, Carl (and John ;-)

The extension that Top Coder put together for us is updated. I also included some information on why TB seems to work differently when it is talking to AOL servers vs any other IMAP/POP server. There is a reason!

Check the original post to get the info.

…amazing to see these things are also underlying a lot of Yahoo’s problems:

Techcrunch.com link

I have met Brad Garlinghouse several times in my antispam/email work and he is a good guy…someone you would want to work for. Maybe he is making a power move, but I think this is a weird way to do it. Instead, I think he is frustrated and just being very honest about what is wrong over there, perhaps in a last ditch effort to change the organization (before he joins Google :-).

I see many of the same things wrong with AOL. Not everything is identical, but boy do the similarities outweigh the differences. How would you change AOL if you were in charge?

Alan Keister (AOL’s Director of AIM Development) showed me AIM Buddy Feed today. Basically, it is an RSS feed “aggregator”.

Read more

Last year, Margot Koschier and I taped some interviews in AOL’s Reston operations facility for an upcoming film, Spam: The Documentary. The film was produced by Scott Dobson and directed by David Manning for Canada’s CBC station (similar to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the US)

Anyway, looks like it airs on both Tuesday October 17 and Saturday October 21 at 10pm ET/PT on CBC Newsworld. Set your TIVO!!

We heard from the director that they got some great footage when they literally ran after some well known spammers and tried to interview them in Las Vegas. Should be fun.

PS: If anyone does actually TIVO it, I would love to see the show. I just can’t wait until it comes to the States on Court TV sometime in the future :-)