USA Tech News

Google's TV chief has admitted the internet is crap for TV. Speaking to the Cable Europe Congress in Amsterdam, Vincent Dureau told attendees:

"The web infrastructure, and even Google's [infrastructure]...doesn't scale. It's not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect."

Dureau, is head of TV technology at the ad giant. He candidly admitted that his own YouTube video service was part of the problem.

Engineers point to two different problems with today's Internet. The bandwidth is too low, but more acutely, latency and "jitter" mean the quality of the viewing experience is severely compromised. If an email program, or even one of Google's YouTube's Flash-based movies is forced to wait for a second, no one notices. But if a movie keeps hiccuping, no one will use the service again.

A bill introduced in the U.S. Senate lays the groundwork for a national database of illegal images that Internet service providers would use to automatically flag and report suspicious content to police. The proposal made by Sen. John McCain also would require ISPs and perhaps some Web sites to alert the government of any illegal images of real or "cartoon" minors. Failure to do so would be punished by criminal penalties including fines of up to $300,000.

The Arizona Republican claims that his proposal will aid in investigations of child pornographers. It will "enhance the current system for Internet service providers to report online child pornography on their systems, making the failure to report child pornography a federal crime," a statement from his office said....

Canada appears to give in to telecoms lobby groups and give up on network neutrality.

Apparently the Canadian press has dug up information that the Tory government is not going to introduce network neutrality.

Frankly, as a Canadian, I am disgusted.

Any company opposing network neutrality is doing nothing but trying to impose taxes on data traffic they do not own, and trying to make sure that 'small voices' do not get heard equally. I am sure the RIAA would love net neutrality going down in flames as it would allow them to get ISPs to tax 'mp3' file transfers (it could be done - stateful packet inspection of data streams; all the governments would have to do is outlaw encrypted streams or mandate encryption they and the ISPs have keys to, which would make encryption useless)...

We don’t wanna say we told you so, but, ya know, we did. On Monday, Microsoft filed a mystery application with the FCC for an enigmatic wireless device that could be used to talk over the Internet. Sounds like a VoiP device, right?

Not really. The device is described as being used for “consumer broadband access and networking,” which doesn’t sound like vanilla VoIP to me. Microsoft goes on to say that the device would use OFDM as its communications protocol, not WiFi or Bluetooth. Well, why not? The standard OFDM (orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing) is a modulation scheme that is used widely in upcoming 4G standards of the future. But with wireless access gaining momentum, and the all-around arms race for bandwidth, 4G starts to make sense, in a crazy, crazy kind of way...