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You may have seen the MoveOn petition for Congress to preserve network neutrality. The major broadband internet providers — Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T (SBC) — have been lobbying Congress for something. What have they been lobbying for? Abolish "network neutrality"? Write a law so they can do something legal that they already do?

There's a good chance you get your home broadband internet connection through a cable line (especially if your provider is Comcast, Cox, Time Warner, RCN, or Adelphia). You may also get cable TV through the same wire into your house. The cable TV is quite possibly digital. It is sent over the same wire into your home but frequency-decoded by your cable box. Comcast pushes regular internet bits through one frequency and special "cable TV" bits through another. Are the big evil companies asking for something different?

I think it's quite just for Comcast to sell two kinds of service on its network in this case. Are they, Verizon, and AT&T asking for a power they don't already have? What are their motives? What are the specific implications? The debate on "network neutrality" is woefully underinformed on any of these points.

I don't think any of these companies are trying to be nice. They are huge corporations that earn slimming margins providing a commodity service. I have no doubt that they would love to work out some deal with the government that guarantees them a comfy profit margin. But are they doing that here?

If you have any clue, let me know. This whole debate is utterly confusing.

[Thanks to my coworker Todd Underwood for giving me the digital cable TV example.]

Intimacy is being seen and known as the person you truly are.
— Amy Bloom

At a discussion led by David Weinberger a few months ago, I realized that I find social software appealing because, like many structures and conventions in offline discourse, it fosters development of a certain honest closeness between people. The word to describe this is intimacy, and one of my favorite things about online discussion is the diversity of ways that intimacy arises.

In meatspace, intimacy comes from family relations, friendship, working relationships, and romance. The patterns that establish intimacy are characterized by repeated interaction with increasing ability to reveal oneself without inhibition. In our most intimate relationships, we tend to be generous, forgiving, attentive, and considerate. We are rewarded for these efforts by partners who weild significant emotional and intellectual leverage over our selves, yet exercise this leverage with care that ensures help, not hurt.

By these definitions, a blog is obviously an intimacy engine. I openly share my opinions, values, joys, sorrows, etc.; and you respond with specific criticism, forgive my occassional idiocy or inconsideration, and share in my happiness and my pain. Some bloggers and blog readers have become friends and colleagues, but all take part in a process of intimacy development at a novel, wonderful pace and scale.

The Mozilla Update site has lots and lots of extensions for Mozilla browsers. Here are my picks:

• Autocopy - automatically copy any selected text to clipboard
• Tabbrowser Preferences - tweak tab settings (includes putting an X on each tab label, not just on the right)
• AdBlock
• ForecastFox - weather forecasts in your toolbar
• DictionarySearch - get definitions via context menu
• Web Developer Toolbar - highly recommended if you develop websites
• ConQuery - query web services from the context menu; good for fiddling around with server-side scripts
• GooglePreview - adds thumbnails of result webpages to Google and Yahoo search results
• Javascript Debugger - aka Venkman
• Nuke Anything - probably superceded by AdBlock, but more straightforward. And perhaps you like advertisements…
• EditCSS - modify stylesheets, live
• AutoForm - automatically fills data into forms, such as your name and email address.

Potentially interesting:

• ieview - preview a page or link in MSIE
• SmoothWheel - smooth scrolling when using mouse wheel
• QuickNote - make annotations on web pages

I've tried a bunch of these and they work as advertised. It's great that Mozilla's extension system makes it possible for so many people to improve the product.

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Access your gigabyte of GMail storage as if it were a drive in Windows.

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I noticed this interesting idea while browsing around on Google's site:

[A business goal is] Using millions of computers to solve important problems requiring substantial CPU resources, such as cancer and disease research. For example, we have recently begun small-scale tests with the Folding at Home project at Stanford University with a few thousand selected Google Toolbar users, in preparation for a much larger scale system that would enable our millions of Google Toolbar users to opt-in to contributing their CPU cycles to solving important problems.

A company like Google investing its substantial brand recognition and technical know-how to enable world-wide grid computing would be an interesting adventure indeed. That would be a good way to grow beyond search but advance further in their other, behind-the-scenes competency: running lots of computers together. Possibilities boggle the mind.

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Soon ubiquitous wireless networks will span the earth, and the internet will finally finish prying world culture from the cold, dead hands of the information intermediaries.

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NYT Magazine is running an article by Clive Thompson that starts out by reporting on a study. The study finds that people lie less on the internet in spite of its image as a realm of dangerous strangers. I had a funny thought as I read this paragraph:

On the Internet, though, your words often come back to haunt you. The digital age is tough on its liars, as a seemingly endless parade of executives are learning to their chagrin. … This isn't a problem for only corporate barons. We all read the headlines; we know that in cyberspace our words never die, because machines don't forget. ''It's a cut-and-paste culture,'' as Hancock [the study's author] put it (though he told me that on the phone, so who knows? There's only a 63 percent chance he really meant it).

The parenthetical remark that ends this paragraph is a joke. (I mean that literally; it is a funny phrase intended to evoke levity.) It includes a playfully ironic jab at the author. My thought was: why didn't he put a smiley face there?

Oh yeah. This isn't a blog post (although the author writes a blog), it's an article in the friggin New York Times.

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Easily cache large media files for free at bandwidth hotspots around the internet! Wow!

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Hilarious! This guy writes great stuff!

Rex: r u on earth?

Hl4vot: no, still on mars.

Rex: whoah. No lag on the line.

Hl4vot:

Rex: shit - you guys got that portal working?

Hl4vot: yeah - pretty cool eh. All the earth content we want, none of the nasty time delays.

Rex: heh

Hl4vot: it was really screwing up our Tivos.

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Ignore those idiots who say the internet is going straight to hell. It in fact never left hell! It was all just hype!