Net Neutrality: No Caps on Internet Bandwidth!

ISP's have been warning us for a long time that the bandwidth on the Internet is exhausting. The doom's day when we will not be able to use the Internet is pretty close. They have attributed this problem to a variety of reasons: a small group of users consuming significantly more bandwidth than others, some applications like bit-torrent consuming the entire bandwidth, some websites like youtube consuming the bandwidth, etc. Solutions with respect to each of these problems were proposed respectively: capping user bandwidth and penalizing for any extra bandwidth, use protocol shapers that slow down (read discriminate) certain protocols, or charge the website owner like youtube for reaching the customer.

Cory Doctrow in his guardian article argues that all of these mechanisms are designed to prohibit people from using the Internet. I have been always against middle boxes like Packeteer that restrict bandwidth usage based on protocol because such discrimination is arbitrary and can be used to used to target and extort any application they want. Similarly, charging websites for reaching their customers is totally flawed as this can again be extortionist. And as Cory points out that it can also be used to curb public protests and free speech. In his words:


"by allowing ISPs to silently block access to sites that displease them, we invite all the ills that accompany censorship – Telus, a Canadian telcom that blocked access to a site established by its striking workers where they were airing their grievances."


I used to think that the solution in which ISP's fix the total data transfered over a month, is fair. This solution was not discriminatory to any particular website or application. However, I did not realize that such policy can significantly hinder the free usage of Internet. As Cory says:


But the real problem of per-usage billing is that no one – not even the most experienced internet user – can determine in advance how much bandwidth they're about to consume before they consume it. Before you clicked on this article, you had no way of knowing how many bytes your computer would consume before clicking on it. And now that you've clicked on it, chances are that you still don't know how many bytes you've consumed. Imagine if a restaurant billed you by the number of air-molecules you displaced during your meal, or if your phone-bills varied on the total number of syllables you uttered at 2dB or higher.


Actually in India, people who exceed the bandwidth cap are penalized significantly. So capping bandwidth usage with penalties is either going to scare off people from using the bandwidth or too conservative to try any new website or application on the Internet.

If we do not want any restrictions and ISP's keep claiming of the clogging routers, what is the solution. If ISP's keep adding more bandwidth, we probably don't need to talk about it. But if they keep insisting, what is the type of plan that I may agree to. The only thing that I may agree to is a price model which is incentive based for using more bandwidth. So it can be at a fixed cost till say 10GB a month and then they can charge me at a reduced rate for next 10GB. Such graduated rate will give more incentive for people to try new stuff on Internet. After all we want more people to freely use the Internet without worrying about the details that they do not understand.

Press Release: Indian Kanoon - Making Law Accessible To Common People

Please spread the press release for Indian Kanoonfar and wide

http://indiankanoon.org/static/press_release.txt

Ubuntu - Upgrade to Jaunty Jackalope

I recently upgraded Ubuntu on my Dell Inspiron 13 laptop from the Ibex Intrepid (8.10) to Jaunty Jackalope (9.04). "upgrade -d" was very slow on 23rd April, the release date for Jaunty. So I downloaded the Jaunty image using bit torrent. Once I had enough number of peers the average speed was topping 10MBPS. Looks like I was behind a 100Mbps switch.

Jaunty brings in Gnome 2.26 and a number of new features to the desktop. A common notification system for all applications is one of the very useful features. Desktop is much more slick and the new compiz and xorg are super fast. Compositing windows and the 3-D desktop effects are very useful for quickly turning to the window of interest. My music player rhythmbox used to hang while downloading multiple podcast feeds. This bug has been fixed in the jaunty. Jaunty brings in very fast boot-up with the boot time averaging to just 7 seconds on my laptop. And off course all devices on the laptop including webcam, bluetooth, wireless card and sound card were automatically identified and correct drivers were loaded.

Two things that did not work out of box were the intel GM965 graphics cards and the in-built microphone. The new Xorg (an open source implementation of X window system) has been a significantly changed from the previous release. Compiz when used with the new Xorg has freezes on Intel GM965 cards. As a result ubuntu blacklisted many intel graphics cards and will not turn up compiz. So you can use the metacity package that only supports 2-d graphics, which also had some performance regression with respect to the previous release. So overall people with Intel graphics card that wanted 3-d acceleration were left in cold. This has been kind of surprising and disappointing considering that Intel has been very nice with the support of their graphics cards on Linux. That has been one of the reasons that I exclusively buy Intel hardware.

Fixing the graphics bug was definitely not easy. As you can see the bug report on Ubuntu launchpad it has been very difficult to figure out where the bug is. Figuring out whether Xorg needs fixing or the driver has got even more complicated by the possibility of multiple bugs. The new UXA support has been added in Xorg to fix possibly one of the problems and I used it according to the instructions provided here. Then I turned off the blacklist and started compiz. Since then compiz has been working great with excellent performance and no freezes.

The support for in-built microphone in snd-hda-intel driver has been hard because of the large number of laptops that have different forms of the sound cards. Currently many people have reported this problem on the alsa website and hopefully support for my microphone will be added soon.

I wish there was better support for my graphics card and the in-built microphone. But overall Jaunty brings a great desktop for the usage of normal users.