Benton RSS Feed

An article appeared earlier this week at GigaOm, in which the authors “blame Verizon” for failing to accommodate the growing volume of traffic coming from Cogent Communications, another bandwidth provider. Unfortunately, GigaOm didn’t have the full story.

The authors accurately describe settlement-free peering as “essentially an arrangement between two bandwidth providers where they send and receive traffic from each other for free.” It goes on to say: “the logic is that the data sent from one network to another is reciprocated.” What the article doesn’t say, however, is that Cogent is not compliant with one of the basic and long-standing requirements for most settlement-free peering arrangements: that traffic between the providers be roughly in balance. When the traffic loads are not symmetric, the provider with the heavier load typically pays the other for transit. This isn’t a story about Netflix, or about Verizon “letting” anybody’s traffic deteriorate. This is a fairly boring story about a bandwidth provider that is unhappy that they are out of balance and will have to make alternative arrangements for capacity enhancements, just like any other interconnecting ISP.

Though being a parent has never been easy, the Internet hasn't made the job any easier. Just how seriously are parents taking their role of monitoring their children's online behavior?

A new study from the Digital Future Project finds a divide in parental approaches to Internet supervision. Seventy percent of parents say they monitor their child's online activity while on Facebook and other social media sites, and 46% have password access to their children's accounts. In contrast, 30% of parents don't chaperone online interactions because they trust their kids, don't want to show a lack of trust, don't know how to use social media sites or don't have time to. The findings come from the Digital Future Project, a long-term study of views and behavior of Internet users, conducted by the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future and led by director Jeffrey Cole.

When Max Kelly, the chief security officer for Facebook, left the social media company in 2010, he did not go to Google, Twitter or a similar Silicon Valley concern. Instead the man who was responsible for protecting the personal information of Facebook’s more than one billion users from outside attacks went to work for another giant institution that manages and analyzes large pools of data: the National Security Agency. Kelly’s move to the spy agency, which has not previously been reported, underscores the increasingly deep connections between Silicon Valley and the agency and the degree to which they are now in the same business. Both hunt for ways to collect, analyze and exploit large pools of data about millions of Americans. The only difference is that the NSA does it for intelligence, and Silicon Valley does it to make money. The disclosure of the spy agency’s program called Prism, which is said to collect the e-mails and other Web activity of foreigners using major Internet companies like Google, Yahoo and Facebook, has prompted the companies to deny that the agency has direct access to their computers, even as they acknowledge complying with secret NSA court orders for specific data. Yet technology experts and former intelligence officials say the convergence between Silicon Valley and the NSA and the rise of data mining — both as an industry and as a crucial intelligence tool — have created a more complex reality.

The announcement that Coursera, which offers free college classes online, had signed agreements with state universities enrolling more than a million students made it plain that such courses, virtually unheard-of two years ago, are now part of the higher education mainstream. But along the way, a rancorous debate has emerged over whether such courses will lead to better learning, lower costs and higher graduation rates — or to the dismantling of public universities, downgraded or eliminated faculty jobs, and a second-class education for most students.