Broadband Politics

Now that Michael Phelps has won 17 dozen gold medals with chocolate chips and the world has been made safe for democracy for another Olympiad, we can turn to more trivial matters such as the technology policies of our presidential candidates. Friday McCain (the old white guy) released a tech policy statement that was very short and sweet. From this we can determine that his tech adviser is Mike Powell, a man who loves his TiVo and uses few words. Powell’s Four Freedoms to consume Internets are in McCain’s statement somewhere.

Predictably, supporters of Obama (the black John Edwards) rose up en masse and lambasted the McCain plan as insufficiently detailed and otherwise lacking in emotion. Obama’s tech policy fairly oozes romance, so they have a point.

At first cut, the contrast between the two policy statements is fairly severe. Obama’s is longer, more detailed, more hands-on, and more meddlesome, teeming with programs to support this, protect that, and maximize this other thing (such as girl and minority science degrees,) while McCain’s is more focused on cutting costs to business and getting the regulators out of the way. But if you read a little closer, you see that Obama’s statement is simply a mess of equivocation: he’s going to crack down on piracy, but loosen the rules that prevent the appropriation of IP (by Google, presumably) and that sort of thing.

Obama’s people claim McCain’s tech policy is like a Republican energy policy, all about profits instead of people. But I would submit that Obama’s is like farm policy, all about increasing the profits of a few large corporations without actually feeding anyone. It’s clear why the Obamatites want to attack McCain: god forbid anyone reads Obama’s policy statement, you might hurt yourself.

[this space to be modified]

Filed under: Net Neutrality, Politics | 1 Comment »

Another day, another deception from the People’s Republic of China’s Olympics. Remember the cute assemblage of children in colorful ethnic dress carrying the flag in the Opening Ceremony? They weren’t what they appeared to be:

Media reports said the children were from the Galaxy Children’s Art Troupe, which involves young actors and actresses mainly from the dominant Han ethnic group which makes up about 92 per cent of China’s 1.3 billion population.

But the programme for the four-hour ceremony had said the children were from different ethnic groups.

“56 children from 56 Chinese ethnic groups cluster around the Chinese national flag, representing the 56 ethnic groups,” read the media guide for the opening ceremony.

The fill-ins came as China struggles to keep conflicts with its ethnic groups out of the spotlight during the Olympics.

So we had fake singing, fake fireworks, fake ethnic harmony, fake passports, fake fans bussed in to fill empty seats, fake promises of free speech violated by visa denials and arrested journalists.

The Olympics were supposed to be the coming-out party for The New China. Indeed they are, and we’ve learned that the New China is just like the Old China, only shinier.

Don’t take my word for it. ask any of the 900 soldiers working the controls under the stadium who had to wear diapers because they weren’t allowed to leave their posts for 7 hours.

And for more perspective. see Ruth Coniff of The Progressive on The Totalitarian Olympics:

I would be a lot more excited about the summer Olympics if the host country weren’t fielding teams of athletes who are essentially forced laborers. Talk about taking the fun out of sports.

Yang Wenjun, a gold medalist in flatwater canoeing, told The New York Times recently that he longs to quit, but can’t. The Chinese government refused to let him retire after he won his gold medal in 2004, threatening to cut off the income he and his poor, rice-farming parents live on. Yang’s situation is typical.

The system of government-run Chinese sports schools takes children as young as 6 years old from their parents and trains them in their chosen sports, forgoing regular education. Stars are pushed to compete through injury, denied rest and medical care, and put through a grueling training regimen.

In the case of gymnastics, children are taken from their families at age three.

Filed under: Fascism, Olympics | No Comments »

So our best gymnasts are now Nastia Liukin and Sasha Artemev, offspring of highly-decorated Soviet gymnast dads and moms.

It’s funny how things work out. Twenty years ago, during the height of the Cold War, Valeri Liukin and Vladimir Artemev were slugging it out for the Marxist-Leninist system, and now their children are defeating its remnants on the world stage. Maybe Nastia’s and Sasha’s kids will be libertarian surfers.

Filed under: Olympics | 16 Comments »

What if you threw a spectacle and nobody came? That’s China’s Olympic dilemma:

Two weeks after announcing they had sold every one of the record 6.8 million tickets offered for the Games, Olympics officials expressed dismay at the large numbers of empty seats at nearly every event and the lack of pedestrian traffic throughout the park, the 2,800-acre centerpiece of the competition.

U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps won his third gold medal Tuesday in an arena with at least 500 no-shows, and there was a smattering of empty seats Wednesday morning as he captured his fourth gold in the 200 butterfly. The U.S. softball team played in a stadium only about 30 percent full on Tuesday, while the day before, 10 of 18 venues did not reach 80 percent capacity, officials said. Meantime, crowds of tourists and fans have been thin in the extravagantly landscaped Olympic Park, which holds 10 venues including National Stadium.

To remedy the problem, officials are busing in teams of state-trained “cheer squads” identifiable by their bright yellow T-shirts to help fill the empty seats and improve the atmosphere. They are also encouraging residents to apply for access to the heavily secured park.

Surely the capitalist media is making this up.

One event that was heavily attended was yesterday’s Beach Volleyball match between Russia and Georgia. No tanks were involved, due in part to the fact that the Georgian team consists of two Brazilians hired for the Games. That’s the Olympic spirit!

Anyhow, for bonus coverage, see Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary on the 1936 Olympic Opening Ceremony, the source of the modern model:

Extra bonus link! See the latest on the Michael Phelps drowning incident.

Filed under: Sports | No Comments »

Not content to slip under-aged girls onto their gymnastic team, Chinese officials also engaged in some sleight of hand in the Opening Ceremony. We’re not talking about the Clone Army that performed all the synchronized drumming, but the little girl who sang the cute song. It was lip-synched fakery:

One little girl had the looks. The other had the voice.

So in a last-minute move demanded by one of China’s highest officials, the two were put together for the Olympic opening ceremony, with one lip-synching “Ode to the Motherland” over the other’s singing.

The real singer, 7-year-old Yang Peiyi, with her chubby face and crooked baby teeth, wasn’t good looking enough for the ceremony, its chief music director told state-owned Beijing Radio.

So the pigtailed Lin Miaoke, a veteran of television ads, mouthed the words with a pixie smile for a stadium of 91,000 and a worldwide TV audience. “I felt so beautiful in my red dress,” the tiny 9-year-old told the China Daily newspaper.

The Guardian has this justification::

“This is in the national interest. It is the image of our national music, national culture. Especially the entrance of our national flag; this is an extremely important, extremely serious matter,” Chen Qigang, the event’s general music designer, explained to a Beijing radio station.

As if that wasn’t enough, the TV feed included CGI-enhanced fireworks:

Officials have already admitted that the pictures of giant firework footprints which marched across Beijing towards the stadium on Friday night were prerecorded, digitally enhanced and inserted into footage beamed across the world.

This is life in an authoritarian country, where the sky is whatever color the Central Committee says it is. But when that country is part of a world that doesn’t embrace its conformist values, these desperate attempts to make itself appear more perfect than it really is simply backfire.

Filed under: Fascism, Sports | 10 Comments »

Downloading Olympics programming in HD from NBC involves using a private P2P network, some DRM, and a little bit of luck. After a few mishaps, I’m finally subscribed for some automatic Olympic programming updates.

I had to use Explorer to do this, as Firefox 3 isn’t supported by the DRM plugin NBC uses, and neither is any form of Linux or any version of Windows older than XP SP2. But that’s OK as my current home setup runs Ubuntu in a virtual machine alongside Windows Vista. So we have no more dual-booting or any of that nonsense. The ease with which we can switch operating systems these days is sick.

Filed under: Sports | 3 Comments »

The first thing to annoy me about the Beijing Olympics is China’s evident cheating in girls’ gymnasitcs, where they’ve flouted the minimum age standard by making false passports for a couple of children. If Chinese gymnasts He Kexin and Jiang Yuyuan are 15 1/2 years old, I’ll buy them each a Cadillac. Seeing them in Hi-Def makes me doubt these little tykes are a day over 14, actually. But nobody can make any sort of official protest until the games are over and they’re safely out of the country, for fear of judging reprisals or worse.

One thing that’s not in doubt is China’s history of cheating by lying about the ages of their female gymnasts:

Yang Yun of China won individual and team bronze medals at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and later said in an interview on state-run television that she had been 14 at the time of those Games. A Hunan Province sports administration report also said later that she had been 14 when she competed in Sydney.

Bela Karolyi, who coached Retton of the United States and Nadia Comaneci of Romania to their Olympic gold-medal triumphs, said the problem of under-age gymnasts had been around for years. Age is an easy thing to alter in an authoritarian country, he said, because the government has such strict control of official paperwork.

It’s sad that the government of China abuses these poor children. And desperate, because they’re not fooling anybody.

These Olympics were supposed to be China’s bid to show itself to the world in a favorable light, but so far we have an all-robot opening ceremony, a murdered tourist, a bizarre recruitment program that pumps professional athletes into junk sports like air rifle, girls’ weight-lifting and synchronized diving, and blatant cheating in the marquee events. China comes of as a deranged lunatic, obsessed with winning and lacking in both grace and the capacity for self-analysis; a Bridezilla.

In short, China is looking at a public relations nightmare. But that might be good in the long run, if it prompts some serious self-analysis.

Filed under: Fascism, Sports, Weird | 16 Comments »

Valleywag’s outstanding reporting on the BitTorrent collapse continues with a detailed account of the tussle:

BitTorrent has denied our report that the company laid off 12 out of 55 employees. That may be true: While our source told us 12 employees were on the layoff list, we’ve learned that, at the last minute, the jobs of two sales engineers, an HR manager, and an office manager were spared. Another tipster — “you can guess as to whether I’m an insider or not” — says that the BitTorrent layoffs aren’t the fault of new CEO Doug Walker, who came to the those-crazy-kids file-sharing startup to add some enterprise-software gravitas. Instead, the elimination of BitTorrent’s sales and marketing departments amounts to a coup by cofounders Bram Cohen and Ashwin Navin, pictured here to Walker’s right and left, who are giving up on the notion of marketing BitTorrent’s file-sharing technology to businesses and hardware makers, and instead pinning their hopes on becoming an “Internet peace corps.”

One part that I can confirm is the lack of enthusiasm for DNA on the part of the tech people. I’ve asked them why anybody should care about DNA and I got was silence.

How long until we hear about the equally vexing woes at Vuze? They won their battle with Comcast before the FCC, at the expense of their corporate viability. Peer-to-peer needs to be domesticated, but the FCC has forbidden that. The only other choice is extermination, and metered pricing will take care of that quite efficiently.

Sad.

Previous entry here.

Technorati Tags: net neutrality, FCC, P2P, business

Filed under: FCC, Net Neutrality, Overregulation, Peer-to-Peer | No Comments »

Jeff Jarvis is an intelligent man with a sentimental populist side. He’s writing a book praising Google, and sharing his thoughts as he goes along. Today’s entry goes off the deep end with this dismissal of intelligence:

The curmudgeons also argue that this level playing field is flooded with crap: a loss of taste and discrimination. I’ll argue just the opposite: Only the playing field is flat and to stand out one must now do so on merit - as defined by the public rather than the priests - which will be rewarded with links and attention. This is our link economy, our culture of links. It is a meritocracy, only now there are many definitions of merit and each must be earned.

Pardon me, but don’t we all know better than that?

Most people are stupid, and the Googlenet hasn’t changed that. The wisdom of crowds isn’t wise, it tends to the lowest common denominator. You don’t get popularity in the Googlenet by saying things that are intelligent or insightful, you do by showing naked women in various states of compromise and by inflaming the emotions in other equally manipulative ways. So this commentary simply ignores these truths of human nature. The link economy isn’t about “merit;” people link indiscriminately to things that made them laugh, get sexually aroused, pissed off, or confused.

If you want a culture that rewards excellence, you aren’t going to get it by ranking pages by the number of morons who saw fit to link to them, you rank them by the number of intelligent people who found them valuable. And that evidence shows up in the real world, not on the Googlenet.

Filed under: Culture, Google, New Age crazy | 1 Comment »

NBC is streaming the Olympics over the Internet, in multiple resolutions, in what amounts to a massive test of the ability of the Internet fabric to handle load. Nothing on this scale has been done before, although BCC did stream the last Olympics inside the UK using Multicast. So we’re going to learn just how realistic net neutrality really is:

This will be the biggest test today of Internet viewers’ appetite for streaming video of live sporting events – and of the Internet’s ability to handle that.

If the Internet service providers networks start getting maxed out, you can probably expect some “rate shaping” or other bandwidth management techniques to come into play, Eksten notes. After all, you still have to get the e-mail through for non-sports fans.

Which means not just technologists like Eksten but network neutrality proponents should spend a lot of time looking at logs and statistical reports from the service providers, after this is all over to see how the streaming affected the Internet’s fabric of networks.

Stay tuned, if you can.

Technorati Tags: net neutrality, Internet, TV, Olympics

Filed under: Current Affairs, Internet, Net Neutrality, TV | 5 Comments »