Author Archives: TGxPatriot

Internet watchdogs TekSyndicate broke news on Saturday of a new accusation posted to the Comcast Corporate Blog on by Senior Vice President Jennifer Khoury.  The post accused Netflix of double dipping, and throttling their own bandwidth to be able to accuse Comcast.  According to Comcast’s logic, Netflix would then be “forced” to pay Comcast for higher bandwidth, turn off the throttling, and then stick all the blame on Comcast.  As they say in their post: “Netflix’s decision to reroute its Internet traffic was all about improving Netflix’s business model.”  They go on to defend their position saying, “Comcast has a multiplicity of other agreements just like the one Netflix approached us to negotiate….”

The article went over recent news posted by the group about Comcast’s confirmed throttling of Netflix’s bandwidth by the company (including a insider source that emailed them with information about the throttling).  Making Comcast’s accusations much less likely.  The Huffington Post also confirmed, adding that this is just the latest in the war of words between these two.

This all comes on the heels of a recent FCC announcement that has basically reversed their earlier attempts to fight the cable companies on net neutrality.  According to the Huffington Post, “then the battle between Netflix and Comcast is set up to only grow more contentious”.

Reuters, famed hard news aggregation group much like the Associated Press, reported a surprisingly interesting story last Thursday.  Vladamir Putin, Russian President and ex-KGB director took several direct questions during a call-in news program in Russia, one of which being a pre-recorded question from Edward Snowden, prominent NSA leaker, and currently in refuge in Russia facing espionage charges.

According to Reuters, Snowden’s question was a fairly simple one:

“Does Russia intercept, store or analyze, in any way, the communications of millions of individuals?  And do you believe that simply increasing the effectiveness of intelligence or law enforcement investigations can justify placing societies, rather than subjects, under surveillance?”

Reuter’s reports: “Putin said Russia regulates communications as part of criminal investigations, but ‘on a massive scale, on an uncontrolled scale we certainly do not allow this and I hope we will never allow it.'”  And further that, not only does Russia’s laws not allow such an action but that “…we have neither the technical means nor the money at the United States has…”.  An expected response, but one that seems very unlikely coming from a state that was known for surveillance and terrorizing it’s citizenry during the Cold War.

Of course the political puditry in the US was quick to respond.  CNBC reporters were quick to debate and bring up that this question was very likely set up to make Russia look very good in comparison to the US.  And that in addition they were told in Sochi that the Russian authorities could look at any content on your phone at any time.

Very protecting of it’s citizen’s privacy indeed.

Recently BGR reported that the United States is now on the official “Enemies of the Internet” list by watchdog group Reporters Without Borders.  This annual report generally details countries that inhibit the freedoms of it’s citizens from posting or viewing content on the internet the country deems undesirable.  The report named several alphabet agencies of both the US and the UK like the NSA and GCHQ as major reasons why a variety of new changes have been made to a list that regularly calls out countries like China and it’s great firewall.

The report specifically mentioned that we should not consider the United States government as a whole responsible for the listing, but the practices of many of it’s intelligence agencies.  Practices that massively collect data are new targets of the report, along with specifics such as the NSA’s Quantum Insert program and exposing the numerous times and people hacked for information by the NSA and GCHQ.

For the more visual learner WhoIsHostingThis.com created two infographics for BGR that include a detailed map of the world’s internet censorship and a related graphic about the 6 companies that secretly run the internet.  Check both of these out for some interesting information.