What’s really going on? Was Hurricane Sandy a dry run for something coming up…?
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North America Avg. Response Time: 364 Avg. Packet Loss: 32 % Total Routers: 37 Network up: 51 % |
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| This graph shows the North AmericaTraffic Index for the past 24 hours: |  Source: Internet Traffic Report |
Matt Ryan
Infowars.com
March 22, 2011
AT&T’s pending acquisition of T-Mobile USA has the tech world buzzing with various pros and cons of what this merging would mean for the consumer. Among the pros are the possibility of having a single mobile standard (4G LTE) and a market where phones aren’t restricted to a single carrier. The cons include having less choice between carriers and rate plans, millions of customers suddenly being subject to a more restricted terms of service, and the loss of what T-Mobile customers considered to be a much better overall customer experience.
What’s more troubling, are recent announcements by AT&T to begin capping the monthly usage and impose overage fees on their DSL and U-Verse customers. These customers were originally given a promise of unlimited usage by AT&T only to find an essential mode of communication is now restricted. In a sense, AT&T is forcing their customers to buy in to their cable and phone service to defer the bandwidth used by their online competitors, Skype, Hulu, Netflix, and others.
BIG BROTHER KNOWS BEST: Telecoms giant AT&T working towards an eventual digital monopoly. IMAGE: Infowars.com
If you’ve spent time searching for an apartment in the U.S. over the past few years, you may have noticed complexes are beginning to sign contracts with service providers like AT&T, Time Warner, Comcast, and others that forbid their tenants from switching to any other provider than the one they’re under contract with. This deal is offered to landlords in exchange for either what amounts to a kickback or a mock coupon giving their tenants a small discount on service costs. In a sense, you’re subject to your carrier’s restrictive terms and conditions as long as you’re under lease. With some of these contracts, tenants are forced as part of the lease to purchase and maintain a cable and/or Internet service with the carrier. For many in small towns and rural communities where WiMax and other options are impossible, this means you are all but forced to use a carrier’s service, especially when a certain complex is all you can afford.
As we’ve covered here in the past, all signs point to an eventual collapse of the Internet as we know it today. With phone, cable, and web services provided by only a handful select single corporations, more and more Americans are essentially at the mercy of an elite few. AT&T has been in hot water before with privacy advocates, in particular their sharing of private information with the NSA. (Hepting v. AT&T)
This trend to restrict services is even more concerning when coupled with Google and other search engines moves to limit search ranking for news aggregates and other sites they deem to be a “content farm”. This determination is based on the “quality” of a site’s content as determined by the search engine…
By Nathan Diebenow
RAW STORY
December 14, 2010
Author: If Americans want a truly free network, ‘we’ve got to build it from scratch’
Secrets outlet WikiLeaks’ continuing struggle to remain online in the face of corporate and government censorship is a striking example of something few truly realize: that the Internet is not and never has been democratically controlled, a media studies professor commented to Raw Story.
“[T]he stuff that goes on on the Internet does not go on because the authorties can’t stop it,” Douglas Rushkoff, author of Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age and Life, Inc.: How Corporatism Conquered the World and How to Take it Back”, said. “It goes on because the authorities are choosing what to stop and what not to stop.”
Rushkoff told Raw Story that the authorities have the ability to quash cyber dissent due to the Internet’s original design, as a top-down, authoritarian device with a centralized indexing system.
Essentially, all one needs to halt a rogue site is to delete its address from the domain name system registry.
“This is not rocket science,” said Rushkoff, who also teaches media studies at The New School University in Manhattan.
For example, the Dutch teenager arrested Thursday for helping to organize a denial of service attack on an ‘Operation Payback’ online chatroom: “They just took him off. He had his own server, and they just go, ‘Oh, nip this one!'” Rushkoff said.
This is why, he noted in a recent CNN editorial, the actual threat to PayPal, Visa, MasterCard and Amazon last week were “vastly overstated” in most media.
The best I.T. talent may soon gobble the red pill and test their skills down the rabbit hole.
“The forces of bottom-up anarchy have reached a similar impasse, and the authorities of the Internet have once again demonstrated their ability to fend off any genuine peer-to-peer activity,” he explained. “This is a tightly controlled network, and you know, that’s why I think the Chinese do have it right in that they understand, ‘Oh, we can control this thing. We just censor the fuck out of it… ”
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By Patrick Henningsen
21st Century Wire
Oct 12, 2010
The ongoing global battle between internet users and mega-media corporations saw a rare victory for the free internet community in Ireland this week. Leading Irish internet service provider UPC won a Dublin High Court legal battle against the major record companies over online music file sharing and ISP customer privacy.
The world’s corporate music industry has been keen to institute draconian measures against ISP users in Ireland, which would be administered by traffic-monitoring equipment that would scan, flag and record all content that is shared and downloaded by all ISP customer account holders in that country.
From Napster to Limewire: ultimately it's a case of the people's privacy vs the music industry.
Slashdot reports: “The High Court in Dublin ruled today that there was no precedent in Irish law to force ISPs to identify and disconnect people accused of illegally downloading copyrighted files. The court case was spurred by objections to the recording industry’s three-strikes system from Irish internet provider UPC. Earlier this year, Eircom, one of Ireland’s other large ISPs, gave in and implemented the system, as we discussed previously. This resulted in many of the more ‘technical’ users leaving that ISP in droves. Nice to see an ISP willing to take a stand.”
Alex Jones’ Infowars
21st Century Wire 