zbisch

(I tried to be vague to avoid spoilers but now fear my post makes no sense)

One of my favorite things about the twists though is that I feel like they actually lay a lot of groundwork and foreshadow them very well. For example, I think the twist before the main "first season twist" that you mention was foreshadowed beautifully at the beginning of the episode. By the end of the pre-opening credits scenes, I knew something was up.

Similar story this season. There were so many scenes that felt weird to me (things weren't "matching") that I knew something was up. And as soon as that twist was revealed, they had laid the background/groundwork for it so well enough in season 1 that I immediately knew why it was that way.

Edit: My point was that I've heard some people complain about the twist in season 1 being predictable, but I don't think a "twist" being unpredictable is always a good thing, sometimes it's shitty writing. Almost every time I'm surprised by something in Mr. Robot, I had suspected something was up and thought, "I should have seen that coming". It's almost like watching a really good magic show: I know how a lot of tricks are done, I know they're going to try to trick me, and I'm still surprised when they pull it off.

I took a look at the slides/paper and you are completely correct (I thought the same thing).

The plot is essentially saying that if you compare the "average household" to the households of Netflix and Hulu subscribers, customers in the latter are about 2.5-3 times more likely to be "cable cutters". This is what what I would call "Netflix and Hulu killing cable."

The whole premise of their article is flawed on a misreading of a figure. The study they cite contradicts their claims.

Here are their slides: http://www.experian.com/assets/marketing-services/brochures/...

Residential networks are actually part of my current research, and, although I don't know the full details of every technology, I am familiar with the basics of how DSL and DOCSIS networks work.

Yes, there is a cost (in terms of performance and congestion) over these links, but this not really relevant in the discussion when talking about the cost of where the traffic is originating. Whether the traffic originates in Comcast's data center in Seattle, from a CDN in Level3's network, or over their peering links with Tata, the cost of it traversing the last-mile is irrelevant. In any of these cases, traffic will still be crossing this link. And yes, this is a significant cost in terms of deploying the last-mile network, but as I said, it has nothing to do with the cost of getting of getting the packets to the DOCSIS network.

What we're saying is that if Comcast is carrying traffic from Seattle to a user in their network, they do not have to pay a transit provider to carry this traffic. If it is from Level 3, Level 3 would actually be paying them to carry that traffic to Comcast subscriber. If the traffic were coming from Comcast's peering link with Tata, Comcast would have to pay Tata (their transit provider) for the traffic.

Yes, the cost of the last-mile network is real and important, however, in this discussion it doesn't really relate, since you would be traversing the DOCSIS network in all cases.

Yeah I can't believe this works for them. So I assume Comcast pays Tata, right? I was under the impression at some point that was their primary provider (paid transit). They keep these links so congested [1], that in order to actually provide reasonable service to Comcast users, a content provider needs to pay to peer with them (or pay someone else to) in order to give reasonable performance. I guess if you have enough users and enough of a demand to reach them faster, you can charge others. I take this to mean that Comcast should be paying me to subscribe to their Internet service! (or at least to watch Netflix on their network)

[1] http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg15911.html

Edit: Although it is not my exact area of research, a colleague of mine has done some interesting work that discusses the costs of P2P traffic for some of these ISPs that is somewhat related: http://torrentfreak.com/large-isps-profit-fom-bittorrent-tra...

Ah, very good point. The last thing I read on the Level3/Comcast spat story lead me to believe Comcast was paying Level3 for the peering. I apologize. However, this line lead me to believe the author had a misunderstanding of the costs of traffic:

"...they almost certainly traverse fewer fiber route-miles and physical router ports (Comcast’s two primary costs of delivery)."

That is, unless the author meant Comcast's primary costs within their network, which is not what I read it as. Without providing reference to the cost of the peering, the comparing the _geographic_ distance of traffic seemed irrelevant. Even in this case, the reason that it is more expensive for Comcast to send traffic is not that is coming from Seattle, but because they are losing money on having Level3 pay them.

Edit: I also need to read more on this as I'm curious why Level3 is paying Comcast since Comcast is (as far as I know) not acting as a transit network. But I suppose this is what happens when you violate valley-free routing.

Edit2: Also, just wanted to add, the fact that Comcast controls the peering links is why this is so sketchy. By raising the costs of peering links, they could make it way more expensive for the competitors to send their users traffic, forcing the competitors to raise their prices, allowing Comcast to be the only content provider to have reasonable prices. While the part about the bandwidth to them not counting towards your cap is sketchy, the practice of charging you less, a lower flat rate, or not at all for traffic that stays within the network is reasonable. Where it is sketchy is when that difference is leveraged to make the service cheaper. If the service is more expensive, it's the fact they are charging competitors more that is sketchy. So... in general, providing content and the network is all around sketchy.

I'm sorry to sound very negative on the author, but I don't know how you could have the knowledge to write this article, but not have the knowledge to understand the basics of costs on the Internet.

A few points that are horribly wrong FTA (reasoning explained below):

"In order to use as few network resources as possible—both to keep costs low and quality high—these providers typically attempt to get as “close” as possible to end users, often forging agreements in which they directly connect to provider networks."

The "close"-ness that they are talking about here is not geographic closeness but network closeness. And this isn't just in terms of the distance traveled geographically, but the cost to send that traffic across some other network. That is, it is more expensive for Netflix to send traffic from their provider to (for example) AT&T to Sprint to Comcast to you, than it is to have Level3 send traffic from Level3 to Comcast to you. In fact, because of the peering agreement between Level3 and Comcast, Comcast has to pay Level3 to send them traffic (or so I believe).

The cost is not how many links it has to traverse, but the cost of the peering agreement that that network has with where it is sending the traffic.

"The only appreciable differences between the Xfinity streaming service for Xbox and e.g., Netflix, are that the source of content is within the Comcast’s “internal” CDN instead of on a third-party CDN, and that Comcast requires you to be using their own Internet service. (This is much more likely related to their agreements with content owners rather than any technical reason.) "

This is wrong. The reason is entirely financial. It is cheaper for Comcast to send traffic only within their network. If I traveled to China, it would cost Comcast much more to send the traffic to China and almost nothing to send the traffic to my computer which is Comcast's network.

"As you’ll see, the cap-exempt content is likely even more expensive for Comcast to deliver than the third party content!"

"All of these third-party streams almost certainly originate from third party providers in the Bay Area, all via direct connections to Comcast. Even though they count against my bandwidth cap, they almost certainly traverse fewer fiber route-miles and physical router ports (Comcast’s two primary costs of delivery) than the stream which originated in Seattle(!) and does not count against my cap."

Completely wrong.. Even though it is a further distance away, sending traffic from Seattle to somewhere in California is almost no cost to Comcast, so long as it stays within their network. With retrieving content from Level3 (such as Netflix movies), it has to _pay_ Level3 to send them traffic that its users want.

Again, sorry to bash on the author so much, but the author was misinformed concerning cost. Also, DSCP is kind of meaningless when traveling between networks (any network router can overwrite them and change their priority).

I believe there is a similar story used in statistics courses (based on a true story) of a possible case of gender discrimination. The university (or universities) basically appeared to be discriminating against females (maybe lower overall acceptance or higher scores). Further analysis shoed that females were applying to more competitive majors. I wouldn't be too surprised if something similar was going on here.

Yeah, that sounds very awesome and like exactly what I want. Is this using the MLB streaming service?

I really wish I could do the same thing with hockey games. I just really despise the idea of either paying a chunk of money and not being guaranteed of watching every game, or paying way more for a bunch of stuff I don't want to get almost every game.

Out of curiosity, what sorts of options do you have in Europe?

I don't mean to sound critical but why do you think networks get sports right? I actually feel like this is one of the worst offenders. Say I want to watch every Chicago Blackhawks game this season (or any other hockey team). Well, then I need to sign up for Versus. In order to get that I need to sign up for a Cable/satellite service. But I don't want all the channels, I watch what I want on broadcast or rent/stream. I just want to be able to watch a game when I have the time. I don't like watching normal shows TV on cable (can't stand commercials), so I rent DVDs or stream it on Netflix. Now there really aren't any options for me to just get sports, without paying way extra for a bunch of crap I don't want.

I can sign up for NHL Center Ice (Internet streaming), but then I don't really get to watch every game online, most are subject to blackouts, playoff games are spotty, Stanley Cup games are nonexistent. And since I don't have cable, I miss local games because it's subject to black out in my team's region.

Maybe it's better with other sports, but I really wish there was an easier way to select a team I want to follow or pay to watch games as I watch them, and only pay for that. The only station that I thought got things right was Telemundo during the world cup, even though I don't know any more spanish than "no hablo espanol". I watched all the games there since I didn't want to sign up for cable to get ESPN for two months.

Basically I'd just like a way to pay for season passes (and actually get all the games) or get a decent sports channel without paying for a bunch I don't want.

Edit: Sorry if this seemed nonsensical, my frustration with finding an easy way to watch certain sports has gone on for a couple years now.

I think that's also a very reasonable point of view. However, at the same time, I its also reasonable to say that there is a group that could include people we would consider non-hackers that use this type of application (e.g., those with any sensitive/private information on their computers). Maybe they wouldn't use the exact same application, but something to track their laptop may be of use. Then again, maybe those people can afford a system with a built in tracking devise that can't easily be removed (requires more than just wiping the system). Meanwhile, hackers are left to add a "hack" to their computer that can do the same thing.

Honestly, I see your point, and both sides. I've just met a few people that have a similar service installed onto their phones, and I certainly would not call them hackers. Similarly, if someone told me they had this installed on their computer, I wouldn't think, "Oh, cool! S/he's a hacker!" On the other hand, if I saw someone starting "Learn Python the Hard Way" I _would_ think, "Oh shit, s/he's becoming a hacker!". Anyway, I don't really care too much. You do make a good point though. In general, a hacker might be more likely to aggressively try to track you down :)

The reason that people are annoyed is because the title of the article is misleading. Yes, this guy may be a "hacker" in the sense of the word that we all like to use (he's a programmer).

The issue is that the article is titled "Why you don't steal from a hacker". This is not actually an appropriate name for the article, because it's not the writer's status as a hacker that leads to the final result. It is the writer's position as an application user that leads to the final result. In that sense, this article be should called, "Why you don't steal from someone that knows how to use an application to track their stolen laptop". Hence, by replacing the the "application user" with "hacker" you are diluting the meaning of hacker that everyone here loves to use. I'm not trying to be critical, just explaining why people are stating this and that they are attempting to express a consistent stance. You may associate this type of activity with a hacker, but understandably, it is not what you'd come up with when you attempted to define a hacker.

I believe I had even read somewhere in an interview that the reason Netflix had "Net" in it was because of their long term plans to move towards streaming, not because users selected movies on a website. In other words, it sounded like the founders had originally planned to focus on a streaming service.

I'm actually doing some research on this topic right now in grad school. I think there is definitely a lot more that can be done in this area; we're looking at things like time-of-day congestion, traffic management policy, actual application performance, and reliability. I think, as you said, there is a lot more to this than just bandwidth measurements. For example, last November a bunch of DNS servers went down in Comcast's networks that essentially meant no Internet for the majority of people that don't know how to configure public DNS.

We're working to eventually get a much finer grain survey of performance (e.g. a neighborhood), by piggy backing on network-intensive applications (currently BitTorrent). In addition to throughput, we're looking at things such as packet loss, latency (the last-mile in particular), time-of-day effects, as well as using traceroutes for underlying forward-path analysis.

My point is, if anyone has any ideas for other applications (something like Netflix would be great) to leverage, metrics to include, or advice, I'd be happy to hear them. :)

I think most people don't realize that a lot of what IPv6 fixes means you don't need to deal with the IP address directly so often.

Also, any program that converts an IP address to an integer (or goes the other way) would require a new look-up table. Which I guess wouldn't be that bad but it seems unnecessary to me.

It's a neat hack, but I think it's creates almost as much trouble as it solves. Especially since reading off an unabbreviated address would require 16 words (yes, it is easier, but not drastically so). Do people really want to read off "dem bag:bip nog:kep lip:bep nig:bot dad:kip dug:bap him:hod fum"? It's also very difficult to audibly differentiate between some of these words (e.g. "mom", "nom" or "mug" "nug"). The only use I see for this is reading off an IP address, so I think that would need to be fixed. It's also not easy to memorize (I, personally, don't think I could memorize a nonsensical 16-word sequence). It'd take me less time to get DNS working. I think a 128 bit number is rather "unfriendly" no matter how you dress it up.

Your point reminds me of Colbert's speech at Northwestern this year. Towards the end (the more serious part) he says something along the lines that, you don't really "win" at life. I'd say more, but Colbert says it better: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6tiaooiIo0

You're spot on. When I first saw Google Wallet, I thought, "haven't Japanese cellphones been doing this for a while?" Also, I have an electronic dictionary, a DS with a dictionary game, and a phone with a dictionary. I still prefer to use my electronic dictionary when possible. The reason is simply that it is by far the best. It has the most extensive dictionary (including many computer terms), more (quantity and quality) useful examples, it also has better features for jumping across dictionaries and makes it really easy to quickly look up other words in definitions, and finally, it has much better written Kanji recognition than the DS and phone. I imagine if a phone dictionary worked this well, people would use it. It's not like I carry it everywhere with me, but like flocial says, when I'm seriously studying Japanese, I prefer to have my dictionary.