Verizon FiOS claimed public utility status to get government perks

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The FCC classifies broadband (such as FiOS) as an information service under Title I of the Communications Act, resulting in less strict rules than the ones applied to common carrier services (such as the traditional phone system) under Title II. But since both services are delivered over the same wire, Verizon FiOS is able to reap the benefits of utility regulation without the downsides.

via Report: Verizon FiOS claimed public utility status to get government perks | Ars Technica.

“The companies’ affiliates have acted together and have taken control of the customer-funded wires and networks, which are Title II, in multiple ways that allow the company to control both the end-user connection—speed, access, and use of the Internet—as well as the competitor side of attaching to the wire and delivering services to the end users,” Kushnick wrote in an e-mail. “We will be asking for the FCC to open the networks to all forms of competition because customers paid for it and they are Title II, and because the affiliate companies have created a bottleneck that controls the wires and blocks competitors.”

Crushing Blow for Copyright Trolls: Appeals Court Halts AF Holdings’ Extortion Scheme

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This same coalition has fought for years in courts around the country to explain how the trolls were abusing the legal process to extort settlements from unsuspecting John Does.  While several district courts have agreed, this is the first time a federal appeals court has weighed in.

via Crushing Blow for Copyright Trolls: Appeals Court Halts AF Holdings’ Extortion Scheme | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“Once a troll gets the names it’s looking for, then it already has what it needs to put its shakedown scheme in motion,” EFF Staff Attorney Mitch Stoltz said.

The threat facing online comments

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Thus, according to the ECtHR, a news website should anticipate types of stories that might attract defamatory or insulting comments and be prepared to remove them promptly – or even before the comment has been reported, which might mean websites will be forced to pre-moderate any comment it publishes. One only has to look at the type and volume of comment posted below the line on websites from the FT’s to the Daily Mail’s to see the implications of this ruling. And, as any moderator will tell you, controversial comments can appear in the unlikeliest of places.

via The threat facing online comments – FT.com.

Be a kernel hacker

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In this tutorial, we’ll develop a simple kernel module that creates a /dev/reverse device. A string written to this device is read back with the word order reversed (“Hello World” becomes “World Hello”). It is a popular programmer interview puzzle, and you are likely to get some bonus points when you show the ability to implement it at the kernel level as well. A word of warning before we start: a bug in your module may lead to a system crash and (unlikely, but possible) data loss.

via Be a kernel hacker | Linux Voice.

RStudio – About

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RStudio provides open source and enterprise-ready professional software for the R statistical computing environment. We started RStudio because we were excited and inspired by R. RStudio products, including RStudio IDE and the web application framework RStudio Shiny, simplify R application creation and web deployment for data scientists and data analysts.

via RStudio – About.

Speeding Up Grep Log Queries with GNU Parallel

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Enter GNU Parallel, a shell tool designed for executing tasks in parallel using one or more computers. For my purposes I just ran in on a single system, but wanted to take advantage of multiple cores.

Having enough memory on my system, I loaded the entire massive file into memory and pipe it to GNU Parallel along with another file consisting of thousands of different strings I want to search for in the “PATTERNFILE”:

cat BIGFILE | parallel –pipe grep -f PATTERNFILE

via Speeding Up Grep Log Queries with GNU Parallel – The State of Security.

On MetaFilter Being Penalized By Google

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The truth is more likely that it’s less to do with his site and more to do with Google seeing a pattern of what it considers to be unnatural linking by the publishers it is contacting. As Haughey guesses, it’s more likely that MetaFilter is “collateral damage,” with the damage being the annoying link removal requests rather than any real distrust of the site. That’s especially since its ranking drop seems to well predate these requests.

But it is worrisome, especially when Haughey writes about how much care apparently goes into trying to ensure all links are relevant:

via On MetaFilter Being Penalized By Google: An Explainer.

Earn respect. That’s your best defense if things go south with Google. It’s also your best offense for doing well in Google

“What is post-PC”?

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The market is changing. PCs are lasting longer, and people are finding acceptable utility in replacing casual-use, low-end PCs with smartphones and tablets.

Again, it’s about the total compute time across all of society. The PC is just becoming a smaller chunk of a larger whole, the majority of which will be post-PC devices.

via “What is post-PC”? — The Post-PC FAQ | The Platform.