Techdirt. Stories filed under "proxies" Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us Techdirt. Stories filed under "proxies"http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Thu, 28 Feb 2013 07:38:51 PST Comcast: We Won't Terminate Your Account Under Six Strikes; We'll Just Block Every Single Website Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130227/14231422143/comcast-we-wont-terminate-your-account-under-six-strikes-well-just-block-every-single-website.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130227/14231422143/comcast-we-wont-terminate-your-account-under-six-strikes-well-just-block-every-single-website.shtml leaked over the past few months, but there had been nothing coming out of Comcast. AT&T planned to block "frequently visited websites" after the fourth strike. Verizon planned to throttle speeds so low that it would drive users crazy. It looks like Comcast is doing something similar to Time Warner, which means that after four accusations (not convictions, not proof of guilt, just accusations), anyone using the account of someone who hits that strike will have all of their browsing hijacked and sent to a landing page that they cannot get around. Oddly, for reasons that don't make much sense, the page that TorrentFreak links to on Comcast's site disappeared. If I go to it, I get a 404 not found. But if I do a search on the keyword "mitigation," it still shows up in the index. Then I click, and the page is still gone. Either way, while it's technically true that they're not "cutting off" people, they are clearly cutting them off from the wider web.
"If a consumer fails to respond to several Copyright Alerts, Comcast will place a persistent alert in any web browser under that account until the account holder contacts Comcast's Customer Security Assurance professionals to discuss and help resolve the matter,"
No information is given on what it means to "resolve the matter." It's hardly a surprise that Comcast would choose the most extreme option, considering that it owns NBC Universal, whose execs supposedly drove much of the discussion around the CAS system. In the meantime, are we still supposed to believe, as per the cheery video that the Center for Copyright Information put out, that this is all for the benefit of ISP users?

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]]> well,-there's-that http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20130227/14231422143 Mon, 29 Oct 2012 13:43:16 PDT CNN Counts Patents, Mistakes Them For Inventiveness Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20121024/18211120814/cnn-counts-patents-mistakes-them-inventiveness.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20121024/18211120814/cnn-counts-patents-mistakes-them-inventiveness.shtml not a proxy for innovation. In fact, they're not even clearly correlated. There is no link between the amount of innovation and the number of patents received. The only thing that patents seem to spur is... more patents. But... because patents are often falsely associated with innovation and because they're easy to count, it's a very easy way for the lazy press (and politicians) to assume that they're showing how innovative a certain geographic region might be. We've actually called CNN out on this lazy trope before, but it hasn't stopped them from coming right back and posting a silly article about the "most inventive states" based entirely on patent counts.

Unfortunately, this only serves to reinforce the bogus narrative that patents are a reasonable proxy for innovation, and ignores the true nature of innovation. It's no surprise that lazy journalists would do this kind of thing, but it is a reminder that we really need much better metrics for measuring innovation.

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]]> just-saying http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20121024/18211120814 Thu, 7 May 2009 06:17:31 PDT Hulu Continues Its War On Users Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090506/1650154773.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090506/1650154773.shtml survive in the longterm, given its awkward position between consumers who want to watch content, and content providers who want to put massive limits on how people can access content. This got plenty of attention in the ridiculous (and totally unnecessary) fight to block Boxee. In that case, even Hulu admits that it would like to allow Boxee (which is nothing more than a different type of browser), but that its content providers won't allow it (despite the fact that anyone who uses Boxee can simply open up another browser and watch the same content).

One of the biggest complaints with Hulu is that its content is limited only to people in the US, so those trying to access it from elsewhere get a message saying "too bad." Of course, there have been rather simple workarounds, using proxy servers to access the content. A couple months ago, when I was in the UK, I wanted to watch something on Hulu, but was blocked because of the location. Luckily, I just logged into my VPN, and Hulu let me through. Yet, today that might not work. Apparently Hulu has started blocking various anonymous proxies, saying that to watch Hulu, you need to log out of the proxy/VPN and "prove" that you're really in the states. Beyond being ridiculous, this can be a security risk. Many of us use VPNs for security reasons.

Again, my guess is that this is due to pressure coming from Hulu content providers, rather than Hulu itself. It makes little to no sense for the company to waste time and resources blocking people from viewing their content. However, it's that ongoing split, whereby Hulu has to waste time and resources making its service worse that may eventually spell doom for the company. Those who are blocked are likely to just go elsewhere -- such as BitTorrent -- to find the content they want, and thus the content providers won't get any ad revenue, whereas on Hulu they do share in the ad revenue. It's difficult to see how it makes any sense. Sure, some might point out that there are "rights" questions involved -- since the content providers may not have licenses to display the content outside the US, but given the basic geographic restrictions the site has set up, you'd think that Hulu had passed a sufficient bar that no court would accuse the company or the content provider of willfully violating any license agreements.

There's a pretty simple maxim that Hulu may be unable to follow: if you have to spend time and money making your product worse, you're going to have a hard time surviving. I recognize that Hulu has been something of a success to date, but it's hard to keep that up when you keep screwing over your users.

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