Getting IPv6 working for World IPv6 Day

World IPv6 Day is tomorrow, June 8 — which also happens to be my birthday. I took it as a personal challenge to see if I could get IPv6 working at home, and to report back on how difficult it was. The answer: Extraordinarily difficult and beyond the reach of the average consumer.

Neglecting the fact that no major ISP (aside from Comcast, perhaps) provides native IPv6 service to the home, one is forced to use a tunnel broker, like SiXXS or Hurricane Electric. These organizations will let you establish an IPv6 tunnel between two IPv4 endpoints (i.e. their server and your router), and they will also assign and route you an IPv6 /64 subnet. The rest — getting all the moving parts up and running — is up to you. Continue reading →

Why I’m Leaving IT for Journalism

After ten years in IT, I’m changing careers. In the fall, my wife and I are moving to New York City, where I will be starting an M.A. program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

I wouldn’t be taking this step if I didn’t believe that the future of journalism is bright. I realize that my optimism flies in the face of popular opinion, particularly amongst those who bemoan the increasingly desperate state of the newspaper industry. The coming decades will bring a different type of journalism than exists today, but the fundamentals of news won’t change. World events will still happen. People still want to know what is happening in their communities. And finally, they will still want quality and accuracy, because they’ve been used to it for so long. The big questions for media organizations, large and small, are how to fulfill these demands without going bankrupt, or paying journalists below-subsistence wages. Continue reading →

Kimberly-Clark tells journalists: It’s not Kleenex, it’s Kleenex ® Brand Tissue

The advertisement on the back cover of this month’s issue of the Columbia Journalism Review struck me as astonishing. Here it is:

Kleenex (R) Brand Tissue Ad in Columbia Journalism Review

Remember, CJR is a magazine targeted at journalists and journalism educators. So let me get this straight. Kimberly-Clark has spent a substantial sum of money to place an ad exhorting journalists to help protect their brand by ensuring Kleenex is only referred to as "Kleenex ® Brand Tissue?" Does this strike anyone else as insane? Or is this to be seen as a shot across the bow — hacks, here’s your fair warning, and if you don’t refer to Kleenex (excuse me, Kleenex ® Brand Tissue) by its proper moniker, you risk being sued?

I’d be interested in knowing if this ad made others uneasy.

pictures of autocrats lecturing the people

There seems to be one common element to the Arab Spring: all the autocrats seem to take to the airwaves to lecture their people. Have a look:

Ben-Ali

Mubarak

???????



I’m sure this condescending and patrician attitude reflects their view towards their own people: that they’re too infantile or fragile to understand geopolitical issues. You can imagine Muammar al-Qaddafi thinking, as he wags his finger on state television, wouldn’t it be better for everyone involved if they just went back to their homes and schools and left the “governing” to the people who really understand power?

Could Usage-Based Billing work?

In my last post, I talked about why Internet usage-based-billing (UBB) is detrimental to both content producers and consumers. But my friend Davison raised an excellent question: could UBB work if the price was right?

After some deliberation, I would have to say yes, with some caveats. The argument in favour of UBB is about fairness: those who use more bandwidth should have to pay for it. Most rational people would agree that this method of billing has its merits. After all, that’s how we’re billed for electricity and gas; why shouldn’t it be the same for bandwidth? And don’t corporations pay for bandwidth this way already? Continue reading →

A content producer’s take on Usage-Based Billing

The Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission recently issued a decision on usage-based billing and I’d like to comment from the perspective of a large-scale, Internet video supplier. (Insert the usual disclaimer about my opinions not representing my employer’s.)

As many readers know, I work for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in digital media operations. It’s extremely important for our customers — the Canadian taxpayer — to have cheap, unmetered bandwidth, so that they can watch our programming online. “Online” means not only the content that users can stream directly from our website using the CBC player, but also the content we send to our channel partners: iTunes, NetFlix, YouTube, and so on.

The adoption of usage-based billing across the board will drastically affect our ability to reach consumers over the Internet. It doesn’t take very long to go through 25 gigabytes of streaming data in a month. For Bell and other incumbent carriers to characterize anyone who uses over 25 GB/mo as a “bandwidth hog” grossly misstates the available capacity on the Internet today. Otherwise, why should it be possible for a commercial entity to purchase unlimited bandwidth ADSL service from Bell using essentially the same technology as home DSL, but without being metered?

I could continue, but let me instead quote some folks who have said it better than I could: Netflix. Here’s an interesting excerpt from Netflix’s investor relations website; specifically, their Q4 Letter To Shareholders (PDF). Obviously, I’m not speaking for CBC when I say this, but I think the comments here fairly represent the challenges that we, as an “Internet video supplier”, face under a usage-based billing regime.

Delivering Internet video in scale creates costs for both Netflix and for ISPs. We think the cost sharing between Internet video suppliers and ISPs should be that we have to haul the bits to the various regional front-doors that the ISPs operate, and that they then carry the bits the last mile to the consumer who has requested them, with each side paying its own costs. This open, regional, no-charges, interchange model is something for which we are advocating. Today, some ISPs charge us, or our CDN partners, to let in the bits their customers have requested from us, and we think this is inappropriate. As long as we pay for getting the bits to the regional interchanges of the ISP’s choosing, we don’t think they should be able to use their exclusive control of their residential customers to force us to pay them to let in the data their customers’ desire. Their customers already pay them to deliver the bits on their network, and requiring us to pay even though we deliver the bits to their network is an inappropriate reflection of their last mile exclusive control of their residential customers. Conversely, this open, regional, no-charges model should disallow content providers like Netflix and ESPN3 from shutting off certain ISPs unless those ISPs pay the content provider. Hopefully, we can get broad voluntary agreement on this open, regional, no-charges, interchange model. Some ISPs already operate by this open, regional, no-charges, interchange model, but without any commitment to maintain it going forward.

and

An independent negative issue for Netflix and other Internet video providers would be a move by wired ISPs to shift consumers to pay-per-gigabyte models instead of the current unlimited-up-to-a-large-cap approach. We hope this doesn’t happen, and will do what we can to promote the unlimited-up-to-a-large-cap model. Wired ISPs have large fixed costs of building and maintaining their last mile network of residential cable and fiber. The ISPs’ costs, however, to deliver a marginal gigabyte, which is about an hour of viewing, from one of our regional interchange points over their last mile wired network to the consumer is less than a penny, and falling, so there is no reason that pay-per-gigabyte is economically necessary. Moreover, at $1 per gigabyte over wired networks, it would be grossly overpriced.

I’ll close by giving you a sense of how outrageous a $1/GB charge is.

CBC pays pennies per gigabyte to our CDN to deliver content to the ISP’s front door. Some portion of that is the CDN’s profit, and yet they are still able to meet the marginal cost obligations of expanding their network. In fact, by using a CDN, we are paying a premium to the actual cost of the delivery of the bits, for the benefit of leveraging the CDN’s robust infrastructure, ability to scale, and many points of presence.

From an network engineering perspective, there really is no difference between a CDN and an ISP; in fact, the CDN transfers far more data per year across a far more complex worldwide data network. If our CDN can do it for such a low cost, why can’t Bell? I can only arrive at the same conclusion as Netflix: that Bell and other incumbent “last mile” providers are using their monopolistic ownership of those connections to justify outlandish charges to the customer.

CBC.ca Operations Group is hiring!

My team at the CBC is hiring for two vacancies: System Administrator and Senior System Administrator.

Our group does day-to-day server and application management of the CBC.CA infrastructure, which runs almost entirely on Linux (so RHCT-level experience is needed for the former job, and RHCE for the latter). Equivalent experience, especially in the media industry, is welcome. Above all, since we’re a communications company, excellent communication skills and a pleasant demeanor are essential.

To apply, click on the links above. The postings close on Friday, November 26.

do voters not understand magnitudes?

Toronto’s municipal election will be held on October 25th this year. With sixteen days left in the campaign, I’m astonished that Rob Ford is the mayoral candidate leading the pack. For those of you not living in Toronto, Ford’s controversial record as a councillor stands on its own.

Ford, and many other candidates that run on a platform of cost reduction, rely on the fact that voters often can’t visualize the difference between $1M and $1B. Without a sense that these two figures are three orders of magnitude apart, it’s easy to think that halving the number of Councillors (which will save $2.25M per year) will have a significant impact on Toronto’s debt load (somewhere in the $3B range).

A while ago, while looking into the "quantitative easing" that the US Federal Reserve is engaged in, I came across the following excellent visualization of the difference between $1M, $1B and $1T dollars. Have a look.

The Globe and Mail’s $1.7 Billion Folly

Much ink, digital or otherwise, has already been spilled about The Globe and Mail’s recent redesign. The end product mirrors a great deal of what the San Francisco Chronicle did last year with its redesign; a long-term contract with Transcontinental, a set of new digital printing presses that would permit glossier stock, a smaller form factor, and colour on every page. The end product is definitely beautiful. But that’s like complimenting your neighbour on his fine new team of horses when the Ford Model T is already revolutionizing transportation.
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