take your interval

Last month, I wrote about Comcast and its practice of secretly limiting peer to peer internet protocols while telling its customers they were paying for unlimited access to the internet. My concern then was an article in the New York Times that reported the government’s intention of taking control of the internet due to this secrecy on the part of big ISPs. I made this plea to Comcast:

Just be honest with your customer. If you can’t handle the bandwidth demanded by your consumers, say so. Whether you use pricing to regulate demand or control the supply, just be up front with your customers. That way, we can avoid governmental toll booths on the information superhighway.

Clearly, Comcast listened to me.* How else can we explain this week’s press release from Comcast and P2P giant BitTorrent?

Comcast Corporation and BitTorrent, Inc. announced today that they will undertake a collaborative effort with one another and with the broader Internet and ISP community to more effectively address issues associated with rich media content and network capacity management…

Comcast announced that it will migrate by year-end 2008 to a capacity management technique that is protocol agnostic…

“Additionally, we plan to more than double the upstream capacity of our residential Internet service in several key markets by year end 2008…”

Comcast has acknowledged their inability to meet current demand and have unveiled their plan to change that. It includes working with other ISPs and the P2P companies that are causing the ‘problem.’ Now the government has no reason to get involved. You’re welcome*.

*My ego isn’t quite that big, yet.

It seems the arms dealer branch of the defense department made another oops involving nuclear technology. At least this time, it didn’t involve completed warheads.

The New York Times is reporting a slight distribution error in the arms dealer branch of the defense department. Turns out, when Taiwan asked for batteries, they got fuses for nuclear warheads instead, an error that went undetected for a year and a half.

The fuses have now been returned, and an investigation and confirmation of inventory will be launched, likely similar to the investigation launched after last year’s ‘inexcusable’ mistake that resulted in armed nuclear warheads flying full across the US from North to South. It would be nice if this earlier investigation revealed the fuse fiasco, but I’m afraid Taiwan’s integrity is our savior here. They discovered and reported the error to the US.

While mistakenly shipping highly specialized nuclear missile fuses won’t likely bring about a nuclear driven ‘terrorist’ attack, there’s no reason to think that any given nuclear missile part isn’t capable of being similarly mislabeled and shipped to any of our arms clients (and we have many), since we were unable to detect this or last year’s nuclear errors before they took place.

I wonder if the attorney general would be surprised yet again at the scope and location of this threat?

Finally, one has to ask, if Russia or China made a similar shipping error to one of its arms recipients, how understanding would the US be? Let’s hope China, who isn’t exactly friendly with Taiwan and has been financing our deficit for years, is feeling generous.