Open letter to CEO asks why AT&T left DSL areas with shoddy Internet access.

A man who has been an AT&T customer since 1960 has a message for CEO John Stankey about the company's failure to upgrade DSL areas to modern Internet service. Aaron Epstein, 90, is so frustrated by his 3Mbps Internet plan that he took out a Wall Street Journal ad in today's print edition in order to post an open letter to Stankey.

"Dear Mr. Stankey: AT&T prides itself as a leader in electronic communications. Unfortunately, for the people who live in N. Hollywood, CA 91607, AT&T is now a major disappointment," Epstein wrote in the letter.

Epstein paid $1,100 to run the ad for one day in the Manhattan and Dallas editions of today's Journal, he told Ars in a phone interview. (Correction: Epstein told us later that he paid $10,000 for the ad, not $1,100.) He chose the Manhattan edition to reach investors who might want to pressure AT&T into upgrading its network and Dallas because that's where AT&T is headquartered, he said.

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When 90-year-old Aaron Epstein bought a Wall Street Journal print ad to complain about his slow AT&T Internet service, the impact was immediate. Reporters like me called him and wrote articles, talk of his plight went viral on the Internet, his ad made an appearance on Stephen Colbert's Late Show, TV networks interviewed him for nightly news broadcasts, and AT&T executives sprang into action to minimize the public-relations damage.

"I had to start a telephone company to get [high-speed] Internet access."

We'd heard of SwissDisk here at rsync.net, but they rarely showed up on our radar screen. We were reminded of their existence a few days ago when their entire infrastructure failed. It's unclear how much data, if any, was eventually lost ... but my reading of their announcement makes me think "a lot".

I'm commenting on this because I believe their failure was due to an unnecessarily complex infrastructure. Of course, this requires a lot of conjecture on my part about an organization I know little about ... but I'm pretty comfortable making some guesses.

It's en vogue these days to build filesystems across a SAN and build an application layer on top of that SAN platform that deals with data as "objects" in a database, or something resembling a database. All kinds of advantages are then presented by this infrastructure, from survivability and fault tolerance to speed and latency. And cost. That is, when you look out to the great green future and the billions of transactions you handle every day from your millions of customers are all realized, the per unit cost is strikingly low.

It is my contention that, in the context of offsite storage, these models are too complex, and present risks that the end user is incapable of evaluating. I can say this with some certainty, since we have seen that the model presented risks that even the people running it were incapable of evaluating.

This is indeed an indictment of "cloud storage", which may seem odd coming from the proprietor of what seems to be "cloud storage". It makes sense, however, when you consider the very broad range of infrastructure that can be used to deliver "online backup". When you don't have stars in your eyes, and aren't preparing for your IPO filing and the "hockey sticking" of your business model, you can do sensible things like keep regular files on UFS2 filesystems on standalone FreeBSD systems.

This is, of course, laughable in the "real world". You couldn't possibly support thousands and thousands of customers around the globe, for nearly a decade, using such an infrastructure. Certainly not without regular interruption and failure.

Except when you can, I guess:

uptime

12:48PM up 350 days, 21:34, 2 users, load averages: 0.14, 0.14, 0.16

(a live storage system, with about a thousand users, that I picked at random)

uptime

2:02PM up 922 days, 18:38, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

(another system on the same network)

Further, the consensus might be that rsync.net is not providing "cloud storage". Good. We're not. I would be very happy if the colloquial definition of "cloud storage" did indeed imply very "sophisticated" and "modern" infrastructures, like Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud Files and so on. Complex, sprawling webs of fault tolerance and survivability that no team of ten people could possibly understand - and certainly not their customers.

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Last week Verizon launched its own option across the US, and its prospect is more compelling because it's much more widely available. Verizon's rural home LTE is truly unlimited, with speeds averaging 25Mbps, the carrier said. It costs $40/month for people with Verizon Wireless service, and $60/month for people without. You need to buy a $240 router. //

What's best, Verizon gave a list of ZIP codes where rural home LTE is available.

Verizon first launched the service in July.

Verizon (Engadget’s parent company) is expanding the availability of its LTE Home internet service to more rural areas across the US. After launching in July in select markets, it’s now available in “parts” of 189 markets across 48 states.

Current Verizon wireless subscribers can get the service for $40 a month — as long as they’re on a cellular plan that costs more than $30 per month. For those who don’t have an existing plan with the carrier, the service costs $60 per month with paperless billing and autopay.

According to a non-peer-reviewed paper, Humphreys and Peter Iannucci of the Radionavigation Laboratory state they have determined the Starlink satellites operating in low Earth orbit could provide an 'unjammable' alternative to Global Navigation Services, GPS. "Anticipation is building for commercial broadband Internet services provided by mega-constellations of satellites in low Earth orbit. Such services’ global reach, low latency, and wide bandwith situate them to revolutionize broadband communications. This paper seeks to establish a less-obvious assertion: In addition to broadband service, these constellations could revolutionize satellite-based positioning, navigation, and timing," the paper reads. "Their space vehicles are far nearer and more numerous than those of traditional global navigation satellite systems in medium Earth orbit or geostationary orbit, and their communications transponders have both exceedingly high gain and access to a vast allocation of spectrum."

The paper describes in great technical detail, a system that utilizes the Starlink satellites working alongside traditional GPS signals to deliver precise location signals more accurate and faster than current GPS. Read the research paper published by the University of Texas at Austin: Fused Low Earth Orbit Global Navigation Satellite Systems

I wrote this article to introduce the Internet to a non-technical audience. In order to get everyone on board, I first explain basic concepts, such as communication protocols, network topologies, and signal routing. The section about Internet layers becomes increasingly technical and peaks with a deep dive into DNSSEC. If the beginning is too elementary for you, then just skip ahead to more interesting sections.

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A network of giant internet-enabled balloons from Google's sister firm Loon is to provide internet access to remote areas of Kenya.

The project was announced two years ago but final sign-off from the Kenyan government has only just been given.

It is now being fast-tracked to help improve communications during the coronavirus pandemic.

The balloons' 4G internet service has been tested with 35,000 customers and will initially cover a region spanning 50,000 sq km (31,000 sq miles).

Eventually 35 solar-powered balloons will be in constant motion in the stratosphere above eastern Africa. They are launched in the US and make their way to Kenya using wind currents.

One field test of the service showed download speeds of 18.9Mbps (megabits per second) and upload speeds of 4.7Mbps.

Loon began as one of Google's so-called ''moonshot projects" in 2011.

In 2018, it teamed up with Telkom Kenya to provide a commercial service.

SpaceX can apply in low-latency tier, but FCC says it faces “substantial challenge.” //

The Federal Communications Commission said it has "serious doubts" that SpaceX and other low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite providers will be able to deliver latencies of less than 100ms.

As we reported yesterday, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai backed off a plan that would have completely prevented SpaceX and other LEO companies from applying for rural-broadband funding as low-latency providers. But the FCC's full order was released today and suggests that SpaceX will have a tough time convincing the commission that its service will deliver latencies below the FCC standard of 100ms.

• This Painting Is Made of Pure Web Code- Video interview with Vice Daily News, 09/14/2018
• Artist creates digital paintings using only HTML and CSS - Boing Boing, 05/02/2018
• Stunning ‘Paintings’ Developed Entirely With HTML & CSS Left The Internet In Awe
• Design Taxi, 05/03/2018This Web Developer Makes Stunning Digital Art Entirely From HTML Code - Paper Mag, 05/22/2018

The debate about whether social media companies should have protection from liability misses a larger question about their role in American society. //

But I don’t need to be an expert in liability law to know this: social media are corrosive to our civic life, and social media companies like Twitter are largely unaccountable for their actions in that regard. Without question, Twitter and Facebook and YouTube have harmed democratic life in America, eroded our civic values, and exacerbated divisions and distrust between citizens. If they all disappeared tomorrow, the country would be better off.

Consider for a moment the disconnect between what social media promised us and what we actually got. The big idea was that making everyone more connected virtually would bring us closer together in reality, that a digital commons would increase empathy and build real community. //

The future is uncertain, but the present state of affairs is not. Let’s admit what we all know: Twitter and the other tech giants are a cancer on our body politick. We owe them nothing, certainly not special protection from liability. Let them figure out how to operate like the traditional publishers they have decided to be—and if they can’t, let them die.

SSG Site Pros

• Developer-Focused: Hand-coding websites is a pain in the Lance Bass. It's fun to be artisanal for a second, but once you get into dozens (hundreds, thousands) of pages, it becomes frustrating and confusing. On the dynamic side, manipulating WordPress and Squarespace to do all you know is possible can be frustrating (I know that the folks who work on these teams work very hard to improve dev experience as it's a weak spot in most dynamic site generators).
• Separation of Concerns: SSG sites maintain the separation of visual presentation and content. You can continue to write new content as Markdown files without manually applying styling to it as you would with a hand-coded static site.
• Reusable: Global changes to templates (e.g., blog post template) and components (e.g., navigation) are made by editing one file instead of many.
• Metadata: One of the most powerful aspects of SSGs is that it surfaces the metadata: the title of the page, published date, site taxonomy, hero image, etc, can be defined and changed without touching the templates themselves, reinforcing the separation of concerns. Metadata is surfaced in something called front matter, which allows the content maintainer to add and customised data to the literal front of their file. (I'll talk more about this and show examples when we dive into Eleventy's structure in part II.)
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• Economic: Most SSGs are free to set up.
• Asset Management: On static sites, asset management is largely manual; you might run individual photos and CSS files through some processes. On dynamic sites, image handling is automated and quite dialed in by way of plug-ins and platform-wide support. Most SSGs include some sort of process for assets, including compiling, transpiling, minifying, and bundling assets. SSGs provide build processes for anything from photo management (serving appropriately sized images) to CSS minification (rewriting your CSS into what the browser needs to read rather than what's optimal for developers to read).
• Build Customisation: Most SSGs allow you to manipulate how the build process happens. So, if you want to see the site refresh live as you make edits, that's usually possible. If you want to check for specific linting processes, that's possible too.

SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk has shared more details about when in 2020 we can expect the company’s Starlink low-latency, high-bandwidth satellite internet service to actually be available to customers. He said on Twitter that a private beta for Starlink would begin in around three months…

Netflix and YouTube have announced that they would be reducing their quality of streaming in Europe to lessen the strain on the continent's internet capabilities during the coronavirus pandemic.

The inimitable tale teller Mark Twain said:

“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

I long ago paraphrased his assertion – into the headline you now see before you.

Only because the Left lives by it. //

Europe has the massive-government, uber-stupid Network Neutrality imposed upon their networks.

And Europe generally is inclined to add more regulation to…everything. Including the Internet.

The sclerotic additive of government – is why Europe is now en masse watching video 1990s-style.

Our relative minimization of sclerotic government – is why the US is still streaming in style.

We had Barack Obama-imposed Net Neutrality for about a year.

The Donald Trump Administration rid us of it.

As always, the Left’s response was understated.

The Internet Is Dying. Repealing Net Neutrality Hastens That Death

Two-plus years later – in the midst of the global shutdown – it is our Internet that is kicking keister and taking names.