Opinion
Should ISP’s be copyright enforcers?
Feb 5th
A few months ago I started this blog entry and then left it sit because I was so angry about what the potential outcome could mean to the ISP industry. Today I read this article on Wired that give me some hope that the world isn’t about to end for ISPs so I decided to revisit this entry and see if it still makes sense. Let’s see…
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We live in a society that has mostly agreed on what is right and what is wrong. We have coined the term, Common Values in order to build communities where we can agree on what is acceptable behaviour. To enforce our safe communal living, we turned these common values into laws. As a society, we have set up governments to enforce the laws (common values) and protect us from those who would harm us.
As members of society, I think we’re all in agreement that theft is a bad thing. No matter what country you are from, it’s pretty much a given that stealing is frowned upon. It’s a pretty common value, maybe even sacrosanct.
Request For Comments
Feb 4th
One of the many terms you’ll hear thrown around an internet service provider is Request For Comments, aka, RFC: “This isn’t per the RFC!” or “We follow the RFC!” or “Read the <expletive deleted> RFC!” So what is an RFC, and why do you want to know what it says.
RFCs are, in a nutshell, the description of how a program, or procedure should work. The history of RFC is long and boring, but basically, they’ve been around since the ARPANET Project began, as written or typed memo that were literally Requests for Comments, open ended questions that someone wanted to solicit answers to. As ARPANET grew, RFCs became the standard way to record procedure, and a way for people to implement the fundamental technologies that make up the Internet as it stands today. Today, RFCs are managed by the Internet Engineering Task Force.
“It Worked Yesterday!”
Nov 6th
The three most dreaded words a support technician can hear are “It Worked Yesterday.”
That phrase has a hidden implication trailing after it “…so what did you do?”
Well, usually, we didn’t do anything. People can accept that a car, or a furnace, or a TV can break someday out of the blue. We all know that those are machines, and we have some idea of how they work, and that they do break. The problem is, not a lot of people realize that computers are machines too. Sure, If you ask someone if a computer is a machine, they’ll say yes. However, if you show them the inside of a computer tower, they’ll usually shake their head and say “Is that it?”
