Past Sins

Sam Varghese wrote an article about Matthew Garrett’s LCA talk “The Linux community: what is it and how to be a part of it” [1]. In page 2 Sam quotes Martin Krafft as asking about how Matthew’s behavior had changed between 2004 and the present, Sam cites some references for Matthew’s actions in 2005 to demonstrate. I think that this raises the issue of how far back it is reasonable to go in search of evidence of past behavior, something that I think is far more important than the specific details of what Matthew said on mailing lists many years ago and whether he now regrets such email.

If someone did something that you consider to be wrong yesterday and did the same thing five years ago you might consider it to be evidence of a pattern of behavior. If someone’s statements today don’t match their actions yesterday then you should consider it to be evidence of hypocrisy. But if someone did something five years ago which doesn’t match their current statements then in many situations it seems more reasonable to consider it as evidence that they have changed their mind.

Then of course there is the significance of what was done. Flaming some people excessively on some mailing lists is something that can be easily forgiven – and forgotten if Google doesn’t keep bringing it up. But as a counter-example I don’t think that Hans Reiser will be welcome in any part of the Linux community when he gets out of jail.

For the development of the Linux community (and society in general) I think it’s best to not tie people to their past minor mistakes. While it is nice when someone apologises for their past actions, the practical benefits of someone just quietly improving their behavior are almost identical. A particular corner case in this regard is the actions of young people, anyone who was born after about 1980 will have had great access to electronic media for their entire life and will have left a trail. Most people do a variety of silly things when they were young, the older members of the Linux community were fortunate enough not to have electronic records remaining where Google could find them.

Back to Matthew, I think that if he is to be criticised about such things then evidence that is much more recent than 2005 needs to be used.

Cultural Differences

Sam quotes Matthew as claiming that “the Linux community was largely a Western, English-speaking one, those who participated in it necessarily had to adapt to the norms of this group“.

I don’t believe that there is a single Linux community. There are a number of different communities that are formed around free software, which have significant amounts of overlap. I don’t believe that there’s any reason why a Chinese or Indian Linux mailing list should conform to the same standards as those of an American list. But there will be a trend towards meme propagation through people who are associated with the Linux communities in multiple countries – every time you meet Linux people in another country you are helping to reduce the cultural differences in the Linux community.

Someone from China or India who joins a LUG in Australia will have to adapt to some of the norms of Australian behavior – in the same way as an Australian who migrates to China or India would have to adapt to some local norms.

On page 4 of the discussion Matthew disagrees with Sam’s interpretation [2], maybe Matthew’s opinions on this matter are closer to mine than the way Sam describes them.

Is Division Inherently Bad?

I believe that the word “divisive” is overused. The only way to avoid division is to have everyone agree with the majority, but sometimes the minority will be right. Note that I am using the word “minority” to refer to any group of people who happen to disagree with the majority, among other things that includes people who vote for a political party that isn’t one of the two biggest ones. An entirely separate issue is that of the treatment of “minority groups“, one of the most divisive events in history was the US civil war – it’s good that slavery is outlawed but unfortunate that a war was required to gain that result.

On page 4 of the discussion Matthew says to Sam “Your writing is influenced by members of the Linux community, and in turn it influences the Linux community. The tone of it is entirely relevant to the behavioural standards of the community” [2]. If a community can be easily divided then the real problem probably isn’t the person who triggered a particular division. Also there is the issue that even if you could get a general agreement that certain issues shouldn’t be discussed in certain ways then with the wide range of cultural attitudes and ages of participants you have to expect someone to raise the issue you don’t want raised. Of course it’s impossible to objectively determine whether a division is productive or not, so it doesn’t seem at all viable to have any expectations regarding outsiders not being divisive. Sometimes you just have to deal with the fact that the Internet contains people who disagree with you.

It seems to me that the most divisive issues we face involve people who mostly agree on contentious issues. If someone entirely disagrees with you then it’s easy to ignore them (if you even have a conversation with them), but if they are someone that you communicate with and they are almost “right” in your opinion then there’s the potential for a big argument.

Probably the best way to minimise division in the community is to have the first people who get involved in a dispute take a Rogerian approach [3]. Failing that a good approach is to respond by writing an essay. When an issue is made popular by services such as Twitter that give little explanation then everyone rushes to the barricades.

It seems to me that the unreliability of some blogging platforms is part of the cause of the problem in this regard. I’ve just given up on writing comments on Blogger, I’m not going to write a good comment only to have it eaten by blogger. There are lots of blogs that have problems which discourage the population from writing anything other than a one-sentence response.

The Good that can come from Disputes

On page 5 of the discussion there is a comment from Anirudh – the Indian student who was criticised by Sam (which ended up inspiring part of Matthew’s talk and leading to more disputes) [4]. Here is the start:

I am the person who wrote the ill thought-out post that drew criticism eight months ago. There has been some discussion about that, so I wish to say something.

I am very grateful to Sam Varghese. I say this with utmost sincerity.

Read the rest, it’s educational. I’m sure that there are others who have had similar learning experiences but who don’t want to write about them. I’m sure that there have been many disputes which would appear to the casual observer to have resulted in no good at all, but which would actually have resulted in people learning things and amending their behavior.

The issue of Age

Car rental companies generally don’t do business with men who are less than 25 years old. Life insurance policies don’t offer reasonable rates to males between the ages of about 16 and 25. This is because the insurance companies have good statistical data on the results of the typical actions of people at various ages and know that young men tend to be at a high risk of earning a Darwin Award. The same combination of hormones and life experience that makes a young man a danger on the road will also tend to make him get involved in flame-wars on the net.

If we could figure out how to influence teenagers into being less anti-social then it would be a great achievement. The current young people will become older and more sensible soon enough but will be replaced by a larger number of young people who will do the same things. As things stand I don’t expect the next cohort of young people to learn from Anirudh.

• [1] http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/open-sauce/36850
• [2] http://discuss.itwire.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=18319&start=28
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogerian_argument
• [4] http://discuss.itwire.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=18319&start=28

Martin Krafft advocates a model of Internet access where advertisers pay for the Internet connection [1]. The first problem with this idea is the base cost of providing net access – which in most cases is wires to the premises. Every service that involves a cable to someone’s house (Cable TV, Cable/DSL net access, or phone service) has a base minimum monthly fee associated with the expense of installing and maintaining the cable and whatever hardware is at the other end of the cable. For DSL and basic phone service the pair of wires ends at an exchange and takes a share of the DSLAM or a telephone exchange. It seems that the minimum monthly cost for any wire that goes to the house in Australia is about $20. So if an advertiser makes $0.20 per click (which I believe to be higher than the average price for Google Adsense clicks) then the user would have to be clicking on adverts more than 3 times a day. This might be viable if an ISP runs a proxy that inserts adverts into all content (which technically shouldn’t be that difficult). But modifying content in-transit to introduce adverts is something that the net-discrimination crowd can only dream about.

3G net access has the lowest per-user costs. Based on current data costs it seems possible for an ISP to run a 3G service with bills for users as low as $15 per annum if they don’t transfer much data. Recouping $15 might be easy but it’s also a small enough amount of money that most users won’t mind paying it. What we really need is to have more competition in the 3G ISP business. When I investigated this issue last month I found that there are few 3G Internet providers in Australia and the cheapest is Dodo at $139 per annum with a 15G limit [2]. With a bit more competition I’m sure that someone would offer a really cheap plan for 1G or 2G of data access in a year.

Martin complains about users paying twice as “users pay to access the network (which is like paying a taxi to get to the market), so that they can visit sites where advertisers make money showing ads to the visitor”. But if the advertisers were to pay then there would be a lot of inefficiency in determining how much each advertiser should pay which would result in extra expenses – and therefore providing the service would cost more. I don’t think that paying for a taxi to get to the market is a bad thing, personally I prefer to save money and use a bus or tram. I think that the best analogy for this is comparing using your own choice of a bus, tram, taxi, etc to get to the market or having the market operator provide taxis for everyone and then make everything really expensive to cover the significant costs of doing so.

Finally there is the issue of video transfer which uses up a lot of bandwidth. According to both industry rumor and traceroute there is a significant mirror of youtube content in Australia. This means that youtube downloads will be cheap local transfers not expensive international transfers. I expect that most multi-national CDNs have nodes in Australia. So for Australia at least video transfer would not be as expensive as many people expect.

I think that to a large extent the concept of having content providers pay to host the content has been tried and found to fail. The Internet model of “you pay for your net access, I pay for mine, and then we transfer data between our computers without limit” has killed off all the closed services. Not only do I think that net-discrimination is a bad idea, I think that it would also turn out to be bad for business.

• [1] http://madduck.net/blog/2010.02.20:charge-advertisers-for-the-last-mile/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/15/cheap-net-access-australia/

I previously wrote about how the National Broadband Network (NBN) seems more suited to porn delivery than regular Internet use [1]. It doesn’t seem to be of much use really. In a particularly insightful comment John Hughes suggested that the real purpose would be TV delivery.

The ABC is currently delivering 640*360 resolution MPEG4 files via iView for it’s TV content. To use iView on Linux you need Jeremy Visser’s Python-iView program [2] in conjunction with Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton’s rtmp program [3]. Note that to get this working on Debian/Lenny you need to install the python-simplejson package as well. On any version of Debian you need to install the python-beautifulsoup package.

For the current ABC service it requires 251652 of data for a 3167.6 second Torchwood episode, that averages to 79.4KB/s of data. In contrast a video of Dan Gilbert from TED.com at high quality was in 640*480 resolution and required 301652KB of data for 1276.5 seconds which averaged out to 236.3KB/s. My ADSL2+ connection is theoretically capable of something over 1MB/s and occasionally gets such speeds for unusual download situations (such as downloading multiple large files at the same time). But generally I can’t rely can’t rely on sustained transfer rates of more than about 200KB/s. So I could watch streaming TED talks at reasonable quality, but for the best results I have to download them and watch them from disk. Assuming the same ratio of compressed data to raw pixels used for HDTV as used for TED talks a 1920*1080 HDTV resolution MPEG4 with the same quality as a TED talk would take 1600KB/s. It is possible to vary the compression level and possibly the usage of a TV stream would permit better compression than the usage of a TED talk for the number of pixels. But it seems reasonable to assume that something like 1600KB/s is needed for best HDTV, that is more than the vast majority of ADSL2+ installations can be relied on to sustain. But 100Mb/s would allow at least two 1920*1080 HDTV transmissions to be viewed at the same time, and maybe three or four – as few homes have only one TV this should be of great interest.

Now the question is how much people would pay for this. Currently there are two main pay TV companies in Australia, Foxtel which charges $916 for a 12 month plan [4] and Optus who’s web site is so awful that I gave up before discovering what they cost (I will assume that they are competitive with Foxtel). Now I think it’s reasonable to assume that $916 is at the high end of what potential customers are prepared to pay, as they are competing with free to air TV, DVD sales, Youtube, and downloads of pirate content. The current bank interest rate on term deposits from the Commonwealth bank is 6.3%, the interest rate on raising the finance would have to be greater than that – let’s assume 7%. So the $5000 per household will require an interest payment of $350 per annum. If a household signs up to pay TV services at a cost of $1200 per annum that might be enough money to pay slightly more than $350 to the NBN plus make a profit for the pay TV company. So if every household in Australia signed up for pay TV over the NBN it should be profitable. But that seems unlikely.

The majority of the Australian population (IE the majority of the city population) is used to paying not much more than $240 per annum for a basic phone service and not much more than $360 per annum for a basic broadband Internet service. A bundled deal of $1600 per annum for phone, Internet and pay TV should allow the pay TV company and the NBN to be barely profitable if everyone accepts the deal (unless of course interest rates rise). If half the population aren’t interested then the bundled deal would have to cost $2000 to have the potential for being profitable. If three quarters of the population aren’t interested then it would have to cost $2300 or more!

The Australian Bureau of Statistics documents that in 2008 the median household disposable income in capital cities was $593 per week [5]. So it seems that the idea of the NBN being profitable is based on plan to have more than three weeks of household disposable income per year being spent on Internet/phone/TV services.

But fortunately for the pay TV companies and the content companies there is no requirement for the NBN to be profitable, it’s being paid by tax money so if it loses money then we can just pay more tax! It’s the ideal “public private partnership”, the citizens take all the risk and the corporations reap all the profits!

James Purser describes how Stephen Conroy gave the TV networks something between $250,000,000 and $500,000,000 a year for the next two years [6]. It was claimed that this huge gift would be conditional on the production of more Australian content but they ended up not putting any conditions on it. In a strange coincidence Stephen Conroy did this a month after having a meeting with Kerry Stokes (head of Channel 7). Based on this I don’t believe that there was ever a serious plan to make the NBN profitable. I think that the plan was just to take our tax money and spend it on things that benefit friendly corporations. Really it’s better for us if the government just hands out $500,000,000 at a time instead of spending $43,000,000,000 on a project that has the same aim of giving a few hundred million to cronies.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/02/16/national-broadband-porn-network/
• [2] http://jeremy.visser.name/2009/08/30/python-iview/
• [3] http://lkcl.net/rtmp/
• [4] http://www.foxtel.com.au/
• [5] http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/ABS%40.nsf/0/C5B82D434B4BB5F0CA2573D20010E735?opendocument
• [6] http://jamespurser.com.au/blog/Two_Ministers_and_a_Shadow

For some time the film industry has been running an anti-piracy campaign with slogans such as “you wouldn’t steal a car” [1] in an attempt to draw a false analogy between downloading a movie and stealing a significant and valuable object – the modern equivalent to being a “horse thief“. One of the many ways that such poor analogies break down is the fact that downloading a movie is not a crime, it’s copyright infringement.

The best analogy that I can think of for non-commercial copyright infringement is the practice of short-changing. I expect that almost everyone has at some time received less change than they deserved when buying something at a shop, the cashier aims to collect $1 or $2 from each customer and can easily double the amount of money that they take home at the end of the day. When a customer complains they just pretend to have made a mistake and although short-changing is a crime (unlike copyright infringement) it almost never results in police action. The practice is tolerated to such a degree that some people know the shops where they are likely to be short-changed, they count their change more carefully and demand the full amount – but don’t bother complaining to the manager!

The film industry also tries to portray itself as representing struggling artists who deserve the money, it’s described as a moral issue – good people pay for movies while bad people download movies and steal cars. But then there’s the case of Roman Polanski who is a well known movie director and child rapist [2]. I expect that most store employees would gladly palm some of the change if Roman Polanski was a customer – that is of course if they weren’t too busy arranging a lynch mob.

So instead of “you wouldn’t steal a car” a more reasonable statement would be “you would short-change a pedophile if you weren’t organising a lynch mob“. Please note that murdering a criminal as part of a lynch mob is a crime (unlike making an unauthorised copy of a DVD), so I encourage people not to perform lynchings.

Many important people in the movie industry have different ideas, the Wall Street Journal has an article about the petition to free Roman Polanski which demonstrates the difference between Hollywood attitudes and those of the rest of the world [3]. For them, violent crime is no big deal if the criminal is famous and the victim isn’t – but anything which affects their own wealth is regarded as a serious issue.

Indiewire has a copy of the petition to free Roman and a list of the names of 100 people who signed it [4] (I heard that the latest count was nearer 150 but couldn’t find a reference). I believe that the matter of morals is not whether someone who rapes children deserves jail time (that issue is really clear) but whether it is morally acceptable to give money to such a criminal – or their supporters. I suggest that the list of signatories to the pro-rape petition be black-listed, any movie that involves any of them should not be paid for – either don’t see the movie or download it without paying at your own whim. If anyone knows of a web site that is being regularly updated with a list of all past and current projects involving people who signed the petition for Roman then please let me know – it would be good to have a list of movies that I will never pay for.

Anyone who feels morally obliged to pay something for a movie and who has a great desire to watch a movie made by Roman Polanski or his supporters could download it and then make a donation to a charity equivalent to the purchase price – rumor has it that women’s refuges are always short of funds.

As an aside I find Wikipedia a good reference for movies that I don’t plan to see, I read the plot summary on the wiki page and then have no curiosity about what happens in the movie – if that isn’t adequate I ask friends for spoilers or do a Google search on the movie name and “spoilers“.

• [1] http://www.bl0g.co.uk/20091217/you-wouldnt-steal-a-car/
• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Polanski
• [3] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574448033489885784.html
• [4] http://www.indiewire.com/article/over_100_in_film_community_sign_polanski_petition/P0/

Currently we have a new “National Broadband Network” under construction in Australia [1]. It is going to cost $43,000,000,000 which is $5,000 per household. It is designed to deliver 100Mb/s speeds to most homes – that is the homes that can currently get more than 8Mb/s through ADSL2+ or cable connections.

The question is, what can we do with 100Mb/s that we can’t do with 8Mb/s? It seems that ADSL2+ works pretty well for VOIP, video-conferencing, online games, and transferring CD/DVD images (with a little patience). It seems to me that the only benefit in having download speeds faster than 8Mb/s is for downloading high resolution images and video files in a small amount of time – and porn surfing seems likely to be the only reason for someone being so impatient to get high resolution images!

Now there are some potential technical benefits to this, FTTH will allow synchronous upload and download speeds and being able to transmit data at 100Mb/s will be a significant benefit. If the data transfer quota was reasonable then I could run my blog, my web site (including my Debian package repositories), and some other new projects from a server in my own home. Currently Internet access in Australia sucks – mostly because of the cost of international bandwidth [2]. Also while Telstra was run by the awful Sol Trujillo it was trying to gain a monopoly on domestic services via it’s Fiber To The Node (FTTN) scheme, it seems that one of the biggest benefits of the NBN is to prevent Telstra gaining such a monopoly – but as they are going to pay the NBN CEO a $2,000,000 salary [3] it seems that some of the same mistakes are being made. In any case $43,000,000,000 is a lot of money to pay to break a monopoly, there are much cheaper ways of doing this.

Now if the money was to be spent intelligently on Internet access the first area would have to be submarine cables, if the capacity of the connections between Australia and the rest of the world could be significantly increased then it would change the way the Internet is used. I have a US-based colleague who transfers more data from his mobile phone than I do through my home ADSL connection – and he pays about the same amount of money as me! I think that most serious Internet users would rather have an ADSL2+ connection that is cheaper and has a larger bandwidth quota than a FTTN connection with a high transfer rate but a small quota of data that can be transferred – from what I’ve read about the NBN it doesn’t sound like a service I would want to sign up for. Then there is the issue of servers, currently for most uses Australia is not a viable location for a server due to bandwidth costs. This decreases the job opportunities for Australian system administrators and decreases the Australian IT skills base.

The next area that needs attention is wireless net access. The first issue that should be addressed is the minimum cost, the cheapest net access in Australia is via 3G because it avoids all the costs of wiring [4]. It would be good if instead of paying about $150 per annum for 3G net access there were some options for cheaper plans, maybe $60 per annum for 6G of data. In many ways the current Australian lifestyle requires Internet access, and many aspects of interaction with government organisations requires net access, so it seems that the government should make it a priority to provide cheap net access to the entire population. A 3G net access plan of $60 per annum plus a subsidised purchase plan for cheap PCs (maybe taking a Netbook from $350 to $250) should significantly decrease the number of people who can’t use the Internet.

3G access (both Internet and telephony) also needs to be available in more areas. Currently Telstra has the widest coverage of any mobile phone company, but it uses a non-standard frequency which limits the availability of suitable phones and it doesn’t compete on price [5]. So rural users have to pay through the nose for Telstra mobile telephony and they get a limited choice of phones. It would be really good if we had a NBN for 3G phones that covered the areas surrounding most rural population centers to compete with Telstra. If rural users could pay $60 per annum for 3G Internet access and a reasonable rate for mobile phone access (maybe a combined phone/data plan similar to those offered by Three and Virgin) then it would significantly improve the rural access to services that urban residents take for granted.

The NBN plan does include providing wireless and satellite net access to the 10% of the population who will be out of range of FTTH. But I am concerned that it will provide a bare minimum of service and not an integrated voice/data service that permits using the newest features of phone OSs such as Android. In the past I’ve had some commercial experience with satellite Internet access and I have not been impressed with it, the response times were very poor and fully interactive services were almost unusable. The government should aim to provide support for interactive services that facilitate business operations (including video-conferencing and remote server access via ssh, VNC, etc) to as much of the population as possible. I expect that a significant portion of the Internet using applications on smart-phones such as those running the Android OS will require fast response times, so even if a satellite version of an Android phone is ever produced it still wouldn’t be as useful as the current phones.

Finally the government should offer free wireless net access in all major urban areas for the purpose of accessing government services, Australian content, and Australian mirrors of foreign content. This would be a convenience feature for most people and would also be good for emergency access – I shouldn’t have been denied access to government services when the PSU for my ADSL modem died in the heat last week, I should have been able to take a laptop to the nearest government Wifi access point!

In conclusion I think that the government should spend money on lowering the cost of Internet and mobile telephony access for everyone and granting greater access to government services. I am not aware of any evidence to suggest that the current NBN plan will do anything to achieve such aims. But it should be really good for accessing porn sites that use a CDN with an Australian presence.

Update: John Hughes pointed out in an insightful comment that 100Mb/s can be used for watching TV. So this could be a ploy to try and convert Internet access into better TVs paid for by our tax money!

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/18/why-internet-access-in-australia-sucks/
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2009/08/19/ceo-pay/
• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/15/cheap-net-access-australia/
• [5] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/02/01/choosing-australian-mobile-telco/