Net Neutrality

More than anything else, I voted for Barack Obama because of his support for Net Neutrality. I wanted Healthcare reform too, but Net Neutrality was the big issue for me, and I’d have simply stayed home on election day, had he not openly supported that issue. The FCC, as a result of Obama’s new appointments, is now trying to implement Net Neutrality regulations. It’s no surprise that there are many on the political right now getting up on their soap box to bash Net Neutrality.

During his campaign for president, I criticized John McCain for his computer illiteracy. It’s really too bad that the anti-Net Neutrality advocates (they would call themselves “free market” advocates, but that would be ignoring markets that exist almost exclusively within the Internet, like Google and Facebook) are being represented by someone like John McCain. Even though I think the anti-reform advocates are wrong, I also think some have worthwhile points to make, and deserve to be heard. Unfortunately, it seems the people standing on the tallest soap box in opposition, are the people who clearly don’t have the slightest clue what they’re talking about.

There’s an argument to be made that the FCC shouldn’t be allowed to make up regulations on their own, and then implement them without congressional approval. Even members of the EFF are making that argument. I think it’s a valid point, and I would prefer to see binding legislation on this issue, rather than just FCC regulations that could easily be repealed at any time when the next administration comes in. However, this isn’t an argument against Net Neutrality; just against the FCC doing things unilaterally.

The few worthwhile arguments against Net Neutrality itself almost all revolve around the idea that the infrastructure was built by private companies, and thus those companies should be able to do what they like with that infrastructure. It’s a good ideological argument, but it ignores the issue of private monopoly, and the government subsidies taxpayers gave to those private companies to help them build that infrastructure. But even though that argument is flawed, it’s still immeasurably better than the “new fairness doctrine” malarkey coming out of some people. Net Neutrality is about forbidding the regulation of speech on the Internet (particularly by ISPs), which is the exact opposite of what the fairness doctrine was all about.

I believe the United States has been the most innovative country in terms of Internet start ups. Without Net Neutrality, companies like DIGG.com, mint.com, and people just looking to make a little money with their blog through advertising, simply wouldn’t have anything like the opportunities they have had in the past. Most of the websites we go to regularly wouldn’t have been viable businesses if we allowed the ISPs to run the Internet the way many of those same companies run cable television.  We need to ensure America’s continued dominance in this space, and I don’t think we’ll be able to do that without Net Neutrality.

CFW, PSN, And DRM

Sony has recently blocked PSP users using the 5.50 GEN custom firmware from accessing the Playstation Store. This affects me, because I recently updated my firmware from GEN-B to GEN-D, which has resulted in all my PSN games no longer being recognized as legitimate, because I can’t log on to the PSN and re-authenticate my system.

I used to really like buying PSX games from the Playstation Store. Why buy a PSP game for $20 and have it locked to just the PSP, when I can buy a PS1 game for $10, and play it on both my PSP and PS3. The Playstation One section of the Playstation Store was a place for great deals, in my opinion, and I spent a lot of money there. For that reason, I’m rather disappointed that I can no longer play any of the PSN versions of those games on the PSP.

However, this would have been a much bigger problem had I not already owned most of those games in other forms. A few hours of experimentation, and I was able to rip a lot of those games from the UMDs and PS1 discs I already had. I bought those games from the Playstation Store for convenience. I didn’t know how to rip games before, but now that I do, I have more games on my PSP’s flash drive than I ever did when I could buy them from the PSN.

John Gilmore has said that the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. The same principle behind that statement can be applied to tech geeks and DRM. So long as DRM doesn’t get in my way, I have no problem with it. But if it tries to stop me from doing what I want to do with my own property, I’m going to find a way around it.

Sony has every right to block people who use custom firmware from accessing the PSN. In fact, I think ensuring security on their systems is probably a very good idea (better late than never). But for people like me, the cat is too far out of the bag at this point; I can’t go back to the official firmware anymore. They need to offer more applications and retro games on the store, so people aren’t tempted by the homebrew apps in the first place. Emulators and e-book readers are the gateway to CFW, and if people find out how to rip games themselves (which isn’t all that hard), they won’t have any need for the PSN anymore.

Put Squaresoft Up On PSN

Before Square Enix, there was Squaresoft, and the way I see it, with the notable exception of Final Fantasy X and the first Kingdom Hearts, all of Squaresoft’s best games came out on the original PlayStation at some point. Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, Xenogears, Parasite Eve, nearly all the Final Fantasy games up to FF9…among others. Seems to me that the fastest way to make PlayStation an RPG powerhouse again would be as simple as putting all the old PS1 Squaresoft games up on PSN. Forget about Xbox 360’s Infinite Undiscovery; Sony has nearly all of Final Fantasy at its fingertips just begging to be ripped and put up for digital download.

For a system that had so many great Squaresoft games, it’s criminal that that legacy is only being represented by Final Fantasy VII on the Playstation Network. I’m still very happy that FF7 is there, but I want more.

Mandriva 2009 Spring and Windows 7 RC

I’ve been toying around with both the Windows 7 RC and Mandiva 2009 Spring and I’ve come to one unavoidable conclusion: as long as the OS and applications are stable, my user experience doesn’t change much between different operating systems. Firefox runs on any OS I’m inclined to install on my computer, and that’s the application I spend the vast majority of my time in.

I miss comix on Windows (comical just isn’t as good), and I really miss the program repositories and updates I get in any decent Linux distro, but otherwise Windows 7 is pretty good. I like the Windows 7 dock a lot better than even the OSX dock, and I’m already wishing Linux had an equivalent. Windows 7 is also notably snappier than Vista, and as with all modern Windows versions, the video drivers put the Linux video drivers to shame. The OS is also rock solid; I never needed to restart as a result of a bug. All things considered, this is probably the best operating system Microsoft has put out since Windows 2000.

I also liked Mandriva 2009 Spring a lot. I installed it because I wanted to try out a more recent build of KDE 4 on an OS that was designed for it. I think KDE 4 is finally ready for prime time. They still need to fix the clock so you can change the default settings from military time to am/pm time with a right click menu (it shocks me that they haven’t done this yet), but it’s a lot more stable than it used to be, and I get fewer graphical bugs than I did before (though I’ve also started using a different video card, so that might be part of it too). Madriva itself seems to be a nice OS. Overall the experience didn’t seem as stable to me as Ubuntu, but that could just be that I’m no longer accustom to the quirks of the Red Hat derived branch of Linux distros the way I used to be. I recall rebooting more than I would with Ubuntu (and certainly more than I did with Windows 7), but I honestly can’t recall any one reason that occurred more than once.

Frankly, if it weren’t for the fact that Windows has a giant “infect me” sign painted on it’s butt, I think Windows 7 would be a phenomenal OS (generally better than Mandriva, at least). I could get over the lack of program repositories and an inferior comic book reader without much trouble. The problem is that without trusted repositories, it’s hard to trust the programs you’re forced to surf the web to get knowing that you do have that “infect me” sign painted all over your OS. It’s ironic that the OS that most needs a trusted program repository built into the OS is one of the few that doesn’t have one.

Vi (Vim) and Eclipse

It’s been a while since I posted last, and a lot of stuff has happened. The most important thing that’s happened, though, is that I’m back at collage, and starting on a computer science degree.

The school I’m going to teaches Java as it’s introductory programming language, and uses Eclipse as the IDE for the class. I don’t have anything negative to say about Eclipse. It’s a great open source IDE if you don’t mind long load times and code completion pop-up windows. However, the teacher I have expresses frustration about said pop-ups all the time. I wonder if listening to him complain is as annoying to me as the various quirks of Eclipse are to him? Last class I decided to ask him what he preferred to code Java in. It turns out that he does pretty much all his programming in Vi (or Vim).

Assuming my instructor was a bit of a masochist, but also realizing that there was going to be future classes at my school that required the use of Vim, I decided to give coding in that command line editor a try. I spent an entire night working on the third CS project for the class in Vim, and only used Eclipse if I got stuck. As it turned out, I didn’t need to use Eclipse much at all. It took some time to get used to the lack of automatic code completion (which lead to a lot of errors early on), but after a short time, I stopped copying little bits of code over to Eclipse for debugging, because everything seemed to work fine in Vim. I must say that, for a command line utility, Vim is really useful.

But, I was still right about my teacher being a bit of a masochist. The project had us writing five separate class files, two or three of which we would need to edit simultaneously to get the program to run properly. That’s not something I enjoyed dealing with in Vim. It wasn’t too hard, but I really missed my GUI file tabs. Even gedit has GUI file tabs for multiple documents. Vim might be a better editor for programming languages that are less likely to require you to edit multiple files simultaneously, but Java doesn’t seem like a good fit.

My basic conclusion is that, if all you have is the command line, Vim is great (don’t talk to me about emacs; I haven’t coded anything interesting in emacs yet), but if you’re coding in Java and have a desktop GUI of any kind running, there are probably better options available, and if you like IDEs with lots of bells and whistles, Eclipse seems great.

Installing HP LaserJet P1006 on Ubuntu 8.10

My mother got me a laser printer for Christmas. I hate Inkjet printers, because I consider them little more than a money sink if used on a regular basis (those ink cartages are insanely overpriced). They’re good cheap color printers, but I’ve never needed to print in color; it’s a nice feature, but it’s unnecessary for me. Unfortunately, my old HP Laserjet 4L has finally gotten flaky (after many years of reliable service), so it was time I got a new printer anyway. Knowing all this, my mother got me the HP Laserjet P1006 for Christmas, and I love it so far. It prints out D&D character sheets a lot faster than the 4L did. The only problem I’ve had with it was the instillation.

The instillation took a lot longer than I expected. The P1006 is basically the only inexpensive laser printer that was being sold at any of the stores I had browsed through, so I figured it was common enough that Ubuntu would recognise and set it up automatically. And technically, it did set it up automatically. It just set it up wrong. I would tell it to print something, then after a minute, it would tell me that the print job was done, even though nothing had actually been printed.

This seems like a pretty common problem with this printer. After Googling the problem, I found basically two solutions. Only one of those solutions actually worked for me, though. The first one sent me to hplip, where you can update the hplip drivers, and have them automatically set up the printer that way. That seems to have worked for some people, but it didn’t work for me.

The solution that worked for me was found in the bug report for this exact problem. The solution was to install the foo2xqx drivers manually. The instructions on http://foo2xqx.rkkda.com/ were very easy to follow, but I needed to open System>Administration>Printing and delete all the redundant entries that resulted from all my previous failed attempts to get the printer set up.

So, if you’re trying to set up an HP LaserJet P1006 on Ubuntu 8.10, here’s what worked for me:

Make sure all redundant entries are deleted from System>Administration>Printing

Go to http://foo2xqx.rkkda.com/ and follow the directions in the section that says “Download and Install”.

Go back to System>Administration>Printing and tell it to add the new printer.

There might be two drivers listed as “HP Laserjet P1006 Foomatic/foo2xqx [en]”. If so, make sure you chose the one that is not “(recommended)” (don’t know why, but that’s what worked for me).

I Hate The Grub Boot Loader

Last night, I tried to edit the menu.lst file so that the new grub boot loader that came with my new instillation of Debian could boot up my old Ubuntu instillation too. Things didn’t turn out very well.

Debian doesn’t come with a gui to edit the grub boot loader, and the only up to date one I found online (kgrubeditor) didn’t have a Debian package for it. There was an Ubuntu .deb package, but it wouldn’t work with Debian. Which means that the tool to fix my problem would only run in the OS that I needed the tool to get to.

This left me with a boot loader that would only boot Debian or Windows. The problem is that I haven’t really done anything with my Windows partition in over a year, and I was rapidly loosing patience with Debian because of the problems with grub. By 5am I’d decided to just give up, and reinstall Linux Mint over the Debian instillation. I knew that Mint was set up so that it’s grub boot loader would see an Ubuntu instillation, and more importantly, it was an OS that didn’t need me to fiddle with it to get it to run compiz and play flash video online. So, that’s what I did.

But, to top this all off, my Ubuntu instillation got corrupted somehow during this series of events, so I still can’t boot up into it.

I’m just going to use Linux Mint to back up the home folder on my Ubuntu partition, and start again from scratch. I’ve been toying around with a lot of distros lately, and I’m looking to get into some harder stuff than Ubuntu, Mint, and Mandriva. I just want the boot loader to be able to boot my other distros. With all the hassle I went through last night, I’m sick of seeing “kernel panic” pop up and lock my computer during boot up. I don’t mind experimenting, but when the computer won’t even boot right, I loose my patience.

In the future, if I suspect a new boot loader won’t recognize one of my distros, I won’t install it in the Master Boot Record, and just install it locally to that partition instead. That way, I can just chain the boot loaders by pointing the old one at the new one, instead of trying to figure out how to manually get grub to boot an OS it doesn’t already see.

P.S. The new version of Ubuntu is out (8.10), and it works great with my Macbook. It even installs the right wifi drivers automatically after instillation.

Flash 10 on Linux

I’ve said before that I’ve had problems with Flash in Linux. I’ve had problems with bad frame rates in full screen mode, and even a lot of frame tearing while running GNOME. Flash 10 has fixed the problem entirely.

Apparently, it was a compatibility problem with flash and my video card. Flash 9 just didn’t seem to like my Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 (yes, my desktop is old). Flash 10, though, seems perfectly happy with it, so now I get proper hardware acceleration in online flash videos like I do with all my other videos.

It’s so typical that within days of Sony finally including Flash 9 on the PS3’s web browser, Adobe would come out with Flash 10 for Linux.

Hulu on PS3

The 2.50 update to the Playstation 3 firmware finally adds flash 9 support to the webbrowser.  That means you can start watching hulu on your HDTV without hooking up a PC to it.  There are a few bugs with it, though.  There seems to be some frame dropping issues, but the the biggest problem is that the full screen functionality doesn’t seem to work.  However, you have a limited zoom built into the PS3 browser that helps a little on that front.

I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.  I’m off to watch the new episode of Heroes.

Is Biden Bad for Internet Freedom?

Gizmodo posted some of Joe Biden’s history as it relates to internet freedom issues. It got a lot of attention on Digg, so I think it’s worth addressing.

First, let me say up front that I like Joe Biden as a person and politician. In hindsight, I don’t think I’d have voted for him if he ran for president (as opposed to VP), but I’d have cheered him on from the side lines, because whenever I’ve seen him on c-span, he’s come off as more genuine than most others.

That being said, let’s go over the issues raised by Gizmodo one by one:

He asked Congress to spend $1 billion to monitor peer-to-peer activity. (In fairness, much of this is to prevent child pornography, but the tactic is apparently a little blunt.)

Gizmodo is a little biased in it’s presentation here, given that it wasn’t “much” of the money going to fight child porn, it was ALL of it. What’s more, peer-to-peer file sharing isn’t exactly a private activity. With most forms of P2P, anyone with an internet connection can scan what’s available, and collect IP addresses of those providing content. Frankly, if you think you’ve got a “reasonable expectation of privacy” while using Bittorrent or Limewire, then you don’t understand P2P.

What’s more, the government already monitors p2p for kiddy porn. This isn’t a slippery slope legal issue, because the government already does it, and thus the legal issues are already there to be dealt with one way or another.

Two Biden bills have been explicitly anti-encryption, because you know, encryption makes it hard for the FBI to read people’s e-mails.

This one is bad. I don’t know the history of the bills they are referring to, so I can’t verify the language of them. However, this position stinks of Big Brother trying to do an end-run around the courts. “If we can’t spy on those with a reasonable expectation of privacy, then we’ll make having that expectation illegal.” I hope such legislation wouldn’t stand up in the courts.

This one would scare me a lot more, though, if Gizmodo hadn’t demonstrated a clear bias with the presentation of the first issue. I should probably do more research for myself.

He has expressed support for internet taxes and internet filtering in schools and libraries.

This is actually three different issues. I’m opposed to internet taxes on principle, but I don’t do enough spending online to care all that much. I paid over $100 on sales tax when I got my Macbook. I won’t pretend that’s a good thing, but it stung enough for me to feel a little bitter toward those who circumvent state sales tax by purchasing goods online. I’m still opposed to the idea of an online sales tax; just not as much as I might be otherwise. (Side note: It sort of annoys me that the internet is biased against those who choose not to use credit or debit cards.)

As far as internet filtering in Schools: That’s a state issue. All the grade schools I went to filtered the internet, and it was never more than an annoyance. I don’t see it as a problem.

Filtering the internet in libraries: I’m oppose to it. Libraries were designed as free resources for information. However, with that in mind, they also tend to be very public places, so there’s a question about the legality of the government monitoring internet access in libraries.

The RIAA seems to be one of his best buddies: Biden sponsored a bill that would restrict recording of songs from satellite and net radio, and another one that would make it a felony to “trick” a computer into playing back unauthorized songs or running bootlegged videogames. That latter one died when Verizon, Microsoft, Apple, eBay and Yahoo all argued against it.

He took a bad position, and got shot down. The system worked. Let us celebrate that, and hope Biden learned his lesson.

Biden was one of just four senators invited to attend a celebration of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act hosted by the MPAA’s Jack Valenti and the RIAA’s Hillary Rosen, two of American file-sharer’s most wanted.

He has connections to companies that are working hard to protect their investments. Again, this would worry me a little if he was actually running for president. But, he’s not. What’s more, being opposed to piracy isn’t a bad thing. He’s just ill informed about how best to deal with it.

When he was asked in 2006 about proposing net-neutrality laws, he said there was no need, since any bit-filtering violations would provoke such a huge public ruckus they’d have to hold congressional hearings anyway—and they’d be standing-room only. (Wonder if Biden reads Gizmodo.) [Cnet]

A lot of people are misinterpreting this statement. He’s not opposed to Net Neutrality legislation. He simply thinks it’s redundant, because there are already FCC regulations in place. Admittedly, I don’t agree with him. I think we do need stronger Net Neutrality legislation. However, this isn’t half as bad as McCain’s outright vocal opposition to Net Neutrality.

Overall, I don’t like Biden’s tech record. But, I’m not voting for him. It’s widely stated that no one votes for the vice president. I think that’s a good thing. No doubt there are a lot of republicans who are likely to do so this year (Sarah Palin is getting a lot of positive attention), but anyone who votes for the vice president is likely to be very disappointed when the person actually running for president gets the job.  The Vice President isn’t the one with sign/veto power.

Obama’s and McCain’s positions on tech issues are the ones that matter, and Obama’s position is the one I like.