mudadosk.com

Federal regulators are planning to meet on Friday and declare that Comcast violated Net neutrality principles when throttling BitTorrent traffic on its network. This would become the U.S. government’s first Net neutrality-related ruling.

For its part, Comcast has been adamant that it would be unlawful for the FCC to hand down a cease-and-desist order related to BitTorrent. Its filings with the agency read like legal briefs, and amount to an unsubtle promise to file a lawsuit if the FCC proceeds. One, for instance, warns the FCC that any ruling “clearly would be subject to close and skeptical judicial review.”

Friday’s ruling may also end up as a cautionary tale for AT&T and Verizon, which as recently as last month seemed to be egging on the FCC to take action against their cable industry rival. But the same activists that have targeted Comcast before the FCC no doubt realize that AT&T’s terms of service limit “peer-to-peer applications”; Verizon Wireless flatly prohibits them; Verizon’s Fios service blocks incoming port 80. Another term for those network management practices is “Net neutrality violations.”

Lacking authority
Lack of legal authority hasn’t stopped the FCC before. In 2005, a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., ruled the agency did not have the authority to draft its so-called broadcast flag rule. Last week, a federal appeals court in Pennsylvania ruled the FCC’s sanctions against CBS, which publishes CNET News, in the Janet Jackson Wardrobe Malfunction Incident amounted to an “arbitrary and capricious change of policy.”

For Comcast, there are some risks to a court challenge. For now, at least, the vagueness of the FCC’s Net neutrality principles can be useful to both sides: broadband providers and Free Press can point to them as supporting their respective positions. If a court declares them to be unlawful, the ruling could invite more specific regulations or explicit legislation from Congress.

Coming clean
In March, Comcast announced a kind of detente with BitTorrent, saying it would move toward a “capacity management technique that is protocol agnostic.” Before the announcement, Comcast had responded to network congestion caused by BitTorrent users by sending forged TCP reset packets, which disrupted transfers and prevented some users from uploading files.

But she offered what amounts to a strong hint that a lawsuit is in the works: “Does that legal standard set precedent for the future about other legal decisions? If you let a statement saying they have ancillary authority potentially go unchallenged, does that have further implications?” (Comcast has hired Helgi Walker, a partner at the law firm of Wiley Rein and a former associate counsel to President Bush on FCC matters, to represent it before the commission.)

“Should Comcast finally be held accountable for its illegal practices, it will be the direct result of historic public involvement in this precedent-setting debate,” said Marvin Ammori, general counsel of Free Press, which is funded in part by George Soros’ Open Society Institute. “We look forward to seeing the order, and commend the FCC for conducting such a thorough investigation on behalf of Internet users everywhere.”

(Ironically, some of the same interest groups that sued the FCC over its claim to possess unfettered authority–even in the absence of congressional authorization–to enforce broadcast flag rules are now backing its theories of unfettered authority to police Net neutrality violations. Public Knowledge, for instance, claimed the FCC’s use of so-called ancillary authority was “arbitrary and capricious” and “unlawful.” Now it loves the idea.)

Comcast spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice on Monday declined to say whether her employer would sue, saying the text of any order has not been released and it’s not clear what authority the FCC would invoke.

But even if Comcast was being less than forthcoming, it doesn’t mean the FCC has the power to fine it or issue a cease-and-desist order. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in another FCC case that “an agency literally has no power to act… unless and until Congress confers power upon it.” And that doesn’t seem to have happened here.

Not helping Comcast’s credibility was its poker-faced denial in August 2007 of initial allegations that it was filtering BitTorrent traffic. A few months later, though, it turned out that Comcast really was throttling BitTorrent after all, and the company was forced to concede to the FCC that it blocks only “excessive” traffic. That also handed competitors like AT&T a perfect opening to say that they don’t throttle peer-to-peer traffic at all.

It’s true that the FCC adopted a set of principles in August 2005 saying “consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice.” But the principles also permit providers’ “reasonable network management” and, confusingly, the FCC admitted on the day of their adoption that the guidelines “are not enforceable.”

Friday’s scheduled vote at the FCC stems from a request submitted in November by Free Press and its political allies, including some Yale, Harvard, and Stanford University law school faculty. They claim the FCC has the authority–under existing law–to “impose additional regulations” declaring Comcast’s throttling to be illegal.

There’s just one problem with the Federal Communications Commission’s plans: They may not be quite, well, legal. In other words, the FCC may not actually have the authority to make its ruling stick.

If FCC enforcement against Comcast is illegal, why would Chairman Martin call Friday’s meeting? Only he knows for certain, but one explanation is that if the FCC is embarrassed when slapped down by a federal appeals court two years hence, Martin will have long since departed to a lucrative partnership at a law firm or private equity firm. (This is a customary exit path for FCC chairmen: Newton Minow went to Sidley Austin; William Kennard went to the Carlyle Group; James Quello went to Wiley Rein, named for ex-chairman Richard Wiley, where equity partners made an average of $4.4 million in 2006.)

In 2006, Congress rejected five different bills, backed by groups including Google, Amazon.com, Free Press, and Public Knowledge, that would have handed the FCC the power to police Net neutrality violations. Even though the Democrats have enjoyed a majority on Capitol Hill since last year, their leadership has shown zero interest in resuscitating those proposals.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, a Republican and occasionally the swing vote at the commission, is reported to be in favor of ruling against Comcast. It’s no stretch to say the FCC’s two Democrats, Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, will join him. That leaves the remaining two Republican commissioners dissenting; commissioner Robert McDowell wrote an op-ed article published in the Washington Post on Monday that the Internet would “die of clogged arteries if network owners had to seek government permission before serving their customers by managing surges of information flow.”

A theory had wafted through the danceosphere that techies would hijack the online voting process and project their lovable, but not entirely ego-free, hero to the sinuous summit.

He even stretched credulity far beyond the four inches that he apparently shed from his waist with the constant jiggling, by praising the voting system.

Yes, despite the best efforts of every possible method of social networking, Steve Wozniak was eliminated, ejected, rejected and thrown into the tango trash by the cruelty that is the voting process of “Dancing with the Stars.”

The fact that he was sent home suggests three possibilities.

But if he calls you offering dancing lessons, perhaps it’s best to take a rain check. Or, at the very least, claim a pulled hamstring, sore knee, ear infection, slipped disc, putrid patella, intestinal inflammation or just good old-fashioned gout.

This despite the fact that the Twitter group supporting Woz numbered more than 103,000, which ought to have translated into a minimum of 2 million votes. (Woz admitted to his Facebook Support Group that he voted for himself: “I even voted and texted from my 2 cell phones last night, and this morning voted online from about 7 of my own email accounts.”)

In cubicles all around Silicon Valley, geeks will be weeping Wednesday.

"All I feel is the pain of what might have been."

I think all three may have been to blame. (Although one has to be particularly suspicious about a voting system that claims to know when you have reached the limit of your allocated number of votes, but doesn’t reveal the actual numbers)

Or three, the chaps behind the
Conficker virus interfered with Woz’s inexorable rise to dancing’s highest peak, fearing that his survival, and the uncontrolled excitement it would undoubtedly engender, would interfere with their attempt to dominate the online world April 1.

(Credit: CC Eric Rhoads)

One, the producers, deeply depressed at having their integrity besmirched by Woz’s accusations of vote fixing made sure that he would go no further (making one of the less sexy humans on the planet perform the Argentine tango was not exactly an act of altruism).

Woz endeared himself to some and, frankly, enervated some others. But at least he showed character. Something the tech world’s image has singularly and painfully lacked.

Now we can only worry about his future. Will he become a regular on “Entertainment Tonight”? Will he occasionally step in for Drew Carey on “The Price is Right”? Or will he suddenly appear on “The Biggest Loser”?

His professional partner, the infinitely sensual, flame-breathing Karina Smirnoff, did well to hide her displeasure as the ax fell gently upon her neck. At least she had avoided risk of injury in forthcoming weeks.

Woz seems to have found himself in the middle of a perfect storm that might have blown Fred Astaire’s umbrella clean out of his hands and into the arms of a passing lady of the night.

While Woz, as he stood for his final interview (together with the also-eliminated former Playboy model, Holly Madison), praised the show.

Two, techies were so embarrassed by Woz’s honest but heartily incompetent efforts at passing himself off as a super trouper that they performed the online equivalent of euthanasia. They pulled the plug on their Macs and condemned him to the dance of a thousand fails.

Weiner was executive vice president of Yahoo’s network division, overseeing many of the Internet company’s most important products.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

According to a memo from Yahoo President Susan Decker, reported on TechCrunch, “On an interim basis, Jeff’s team will report to me as we consider how to best move the organization forward.”

“Weiner will advise the leadership teams of existing Accel and Greylock consumer technology portfolio companies, and will also work closely with the firm’s partners to evaluate new investment opportunities,” the firms said.

Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo's network division

Jeff Weiner, a top Yahoo executive who announced his departure from the company last week, is indeed joining two venture capital firms.

Accel Partnerse and Greylock Partners both announced Monday that Weiner is joining as “executive in residence.”

How will we benefit from the Large Hadron Collider? Practical results might be a ways off, but they’ll be coming, and they’ll be shared equally among all the countries that have participated.

In Sunday night’s season premiere of the CBS news program 60 Minutes, Steve Kroft talked to a number of the scientists involved–one reckoned that half of all U.S. particle physicists are there–and ventured underground for a closer look at the one-of-a-kind machinery built by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. (CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.)

Meet the Americans working on the Large Hadron Collider: Steve Kroft talks to three scientists, one from MIT, one from the University of Chicago, and one from the University of Michigan.

Build an $8 billion machine that forms a 17-mile circle 300 feet underground and that may reveal secrets from the origins of the universe, and you’re bound to provoke curiosity.

See inside the Large Hadron Collider: Get the lowdown on the machinery in the underground facility and the kinds of questions it might help answer, such as “What is the origin of mass?”

Below are some clips from the 60 Minutes story:

The machine in question is the Large Hadron Collider, the goal of which is to reproduce the conditions from just fractions of a second after the Big Bang. It’ll do so by slamming together subatomic particles at about the speed of light, with scientists poised for a glimpse at the results.

How the Large Hadron Collider works: Animation shows the scope of the facility and how the subatomic particles will zip along at the speed of light before colliding with each other.

It was just a matter of time. Silicon Valley, which has remained largely impervious to the increasingly global economic downturn, is starting to feel the strain, according to The New York Times. It’s not that housing prices are in freefall (they’re not) or that people are being laid off en masse (they’re not), but rather that the exit opportunities have largely dried up. According to the Times:

With those options increasingly off the table, investors must spend money and time nurturing–or altogether salvaging–existing companies rather than building new ones.

commentary

Open-source investments are at an all-time high, but let’s not kid ourselves. Open-source companies may be better suited to thrive in a down market, but their stockholders still want exits.

Regardless, I can’t help but feel that much as I like winning, I’d prefer that all software companies were doing well right now, both in their businesses and in their exits. The software industry will be a drag if all we can eke out is a few exits per year.

There was also a sharp falloff in the acquisition of start-up companies by bigger corporations…There were only 56 acquisitions in the first three months of the year, down from 83 in the fourth quarter.

Perhaps this just means that open-source companies will need to take longer to grow their businesses. Perhaps it means that we’ll see a few crack $100 million without being acquired.

During the first three months of the year, only five companies backed by venture capital investors went public on Wall Street…That is down from 31 in the fourth quarter of last year, and is roughly the same level as at the nadir of the dot-com bust.

I guess Oracle has already acquired everybody.

It’s taken a little bit longer than expected, but Microsoft has its first customer ready to put Surface computers into public use.

Microsoft has said it is aiming to have the consumer version on shelves by 2011, as much as two years earlier than its initial plan.

“We’re looking at more of a managed rollout of the SDK at this point,” he said, adding that he would not characterize the software kit as being broadly available. “That’s where we want to get to. I don’t want to say this is a closed or managed system over time.”

“We’re in business now,” said Pete Thompson, the general manager of Microsoft’s surface computing unit.

Thompson said that the company has started offering a development kit for some software makers and partners, but that for the time being the kit will only be available to select developers.

An example of the Surface computer set-up that AT&T plans to use in its retail stores.

As for those early buyers, Thompson said that Microsoft does have other unnanounced customers for the Surface, though he declined to name names. (One name we’ve heard mentioned is Disney, though Thompson would not comment on that.) He did say that we would start to see activity through partners in some additional areas, such as government, health care, and education.

The company will use several counter-height units inside its cellular retail stores. The company is beginning with five stores on April 17: two in New York, one in San Francisco, one in San Antonio, and one in Atlanta. Each store will have a few of the Surface machines where customers can compare the features of different phones as well as check out service plans and view coverage maps. Currently AT&T uses laptops in the store to offer such features.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

At last year’s partner conference, Microsoft talked about having a software development kit available by April.

Perhaps most interestingly, the first one out of the gate is not one of the company’s earliest partners. Instead, it is cellular carrier AT&T that is ready to make use of the touch-screen computers.

And, although Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said he wants the consumer version of Surface speeded up, Thompson said he also wants to make sure that the company doesn’t disappoint its earliest customers, who are all large businesses.

“You can just walk into most lobbies,” Thompson said, adding that the company has about 15 to 20 buildings with the machines so far. “We’re putting in three to five a week.”

Microsoft had talked about such a retail use for Surface, but in its demonstrations had featured AT&T rival T-Mobile. Thompson said that T-Mobile remains a partner, but he had no update as to when that carrier will be ready to use Surface in its stores.

Although AT&T will be the first place the public can go to regularly see the Surface, Microsoft has permanently installed the machines in one other place: its own campus.

“We are trying to do the right thing and accelerate where we can,” Thompson said, but added, “I am very much focused on making this initial commercial plan a success without getting distracted.”

Panasonic has been tapped to pinch-hit for Pioneer.

The news comes a month after reports surfaced that Pioneer was pulling out of the plasma business. When Pioneer confirmed it would be finding someone who could make the panels more inexpensively than it could, there was a sense of dismay and disappointment among fans of its Kuro technology. Pioneer plasma TVs are generally regarded by experts–including CNET Reviews’ David Katzmaier–as having the blackest black levels of any TV on the market.

The two television makers said Wednesday they had come to an agreement in which Panasonic will produce the panels for Pioneer’s plasma televisions.

(Credit:
Pioneer)

In a joint statement, the two companies said they will build a new type of panel that integrates Pioneer’s Kuro technology and Panasonic’s NeoPDP, which it currently uses in its Viera TVs. Panasonic will have the panels sporting the new, combined technology ready for Pioneer by the second half of 2009.

Panasonic is the largest producer of plasma TVs, so the panels should be more affordable for Pioneer, which is trying to cut costs. Neither has said how much the panels will cost.

And at first blush, the theory makes a lot of sense. Apple acquired P.A. Semi earlier this year to put CEO Don Dobberpuhl and his team of designers to work on developing new chips for the iPhone and iPod Touch, which currently use chips manufactured by Samsung, Marvell, and NXP based on the ARM core. Dobberpuhl has a long history with the ARM architecture as leader of the StrongARM processor design team eventually acquired by Intel.

Ties between ARM and Apple go back to the early 1990s, when ARM was actually created out of a partnership between Apple and Acorn, ARM’s forerunner. ARM got the design win for the ill-fated Newton back in those days, but it made a strong comeback at Apple, inside the
iPod line in the early part of this decade.

The company is thought to have very few architectural licensees. Although they are believed to include companies like Qualcomm, Marvell, Texas Instruments, Freescale, and Samsung, an ARM representative did not immediately respond to a request for the full list of architectural licensees.

ARM’s architectural license gives holders the freedom to tinker with the ARM architecture and processor cores, whereas most of its customers sign licenses for specific core designs to incorporate into their chips.

Note the common ground between those companies: they’re all chipmakers. No other major handset vendor–with the exception of Samsung–has taken a similar degree of interest in designing processors, which makes Apple a likely candidate for the new architectural license, given its plans for the P.A. Semi designers.

ARM Chief Executive Warren East revealed on an earnings conference call on Wednesday that “a leading handset OEM,” or original equipment manufacturer, has signed an architectural license with the company, forming ARM’s most far-reaching license for its processor cores.

A new architectural licensee revealed by mobile-chip designer ARM might just be an old friend.

East declined to elaborate on ARM’s new partner, but EETimes’ Peter Clarke could think of only one smartphone maker who would be that interested in shaping and controlling the direction of the silicon inside its phones: Apple.

The fun browser add-on PicLens has incorporated YouTube and Amazon.com into the short but hopefully soon-to-grow list of supported Web sites. Compatible with
Firefox on Windows and Mac, Internet Explorer, and Safari, PicLens recreates your surfing experience with a futuristic graphical display.

As Rafe talked about in February, PicLens highlights the image content of a site and allows you to whip back and forth using mouse gestures instead of conventional static browsing. If you’re familiar with how it works with an image site like Flickr, the YouTube interface is identical. The PicLens plug-in will install a grid button on your Toolbar, which you click to activate the PicLens full-screen interface. Click a thumbnail to start playing a video, while the search box lives in the upper right of your screen. As video starts playing, standard YouTube controls appear at the bottom of the video. One potential drawback is that if the quality of the video is low, then the not-quite-full-screen playback will probably appear pixelated.

On Amazon, the experience is slightly different. The main Amazon.com page doesn’t support the PicLens button, but if you click on the button anyway it will open up the PicLens UI. From there, change the Web site search to Amazon, type in your search term, and images of whatever item you searched for will zoom past. The Amazon interface responded slower than other, more heavily-image based Web sites like Picasa.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

PicLens currently supports YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, MySpace, Fotobucket, deviantART, Google Images, Yahoo Images, and about a half-dozen others. The slideshow mode makes PicLens more accessible for users who are worried about the vertiginous effects of the add-on. There’s also a plug-in for WordPress users to add the feature to their site, and instructions for any webmaster to add PicLens support to their self-hosted pages.

PicLens now supports searches on YouTube and Amazon.com.

The site was also allegedly burning through cash because of server demands, and it needed a revenue stream–but that would’ve put it on even shakier legal ground.

The Muxtape format has gained serious hipster cred from the site’s initial burst of popularity, but there’s a problem: bands already have MySpace profiles, as well as iLike concert listings, and they can upload their music to Imeem.

(Credit:
Muxtape)

Muxtape founder Justin Ouelette says the bureaucracy of the music industry was just too much for him to deal with. That’s why he took down the playlist creation Web site, which became a hipster craze earlier this year, after spreading largely via word of mouth. It’ll be relaunching soon, he says, but strictly as a service for independent bands to share their own music.

He spelled out his vision: “The new Muxtape will allow bands to upload their own music and offer an embeddable player that works anywhere on the web, in addition to the original Muxtape format. Bands will be able to assemble an attractive profile with simple modules that enable optional functionality such as a calendar, photos, comments, downloads and sales, or anything else they need.”

The idea of a cleaner, more unified site for bands is attractive; the idea of competing with News Corp., which just launched the MySpace Music service for its social site, is less so. It echoes of what happened with Napster founder Shawn Fanning when he tried to legitimize the service–it lost steam as a subscription music service and was finally sold to Best Buy earlier this month for $121 million.

Ouelette’s indie spirit is admirable, but the fate of his restructured venture doesn’t look good.

“I walked away from the licensing deals,” Ouelette wrote in a transparent, albeit navel-gazing letter on Muxtape’s home page. He’d hired a lawyer and tried negotiating, with varied reactions from the major labels.

Soon, Ouelette said, Muxtape will return as “an extremely powerful platform with unheard-of simplicity for artists to thrive on the Internet.”

Ouelette, a former employee of InterActiveCorp’s Vimeo, created Muxtape this spring. Legal questions were instantly raised–though downloads were not permitted, Muxtape had not negotiated with record labels. A minor riff of scandal also came into view when gossip blog Valleywag deduced that Vimeo founder Jakob Lodwick, who had departed the company months ago, had funded Muxtape, creating a potential conflict of interest because Ouelette had quit his job at IAC to run the start-up.

The Muxtape logo.

In August, the Recording Industry Association of America finally complained to Ouelette’s host, Amazon Web Services, and Muxtape was shut down. Frustrated with negotiations that were going to take months, he decided to give up.

“They had become too complex for a site founded on simplicity, too restrictive and hostile to continue to innovate the way I wanted to. They’d already taken so much attention away from development that I started to question my own motivations. I didn’t get into this to build a big company as fast as I could, no matter what the cost; I got into this to make something simple and beautiful for people who love music.”