[ SECRET POST #4002 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4002 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.



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02.
[Christian Bale in Little Women]


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03.
[The Crown (Vanessa Kirby as Princess Margaret)]


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04.
[Mindhunter]


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05.
[Pokemon anime]


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06.
[Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (Ser Gregor "The Mountain" Clegane on GOT)]


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07.
[TV Tropes]












Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 28 secrets from Secret Submission Post #573.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Net Neutrality question

[(Anonymous)]

This may sound stupid, but how exactly do companies theoretically divide up the internet? Yeah, I know, there could be entertainment packages like Netflix/Hulu, shopping like Ebay/Amazon, social media like Facebook/Twitter, etc, but what about the rest of it? There are literally thousands of new websites every day, so how would those work? Or would they just not be 'important' enough to matter?

Re: Net Neutrality question

[(Anonymous)]

They'll probably be speed packages instead of website packages.

Re: Net Neutrality question

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, it's more likely to be who companies are in bed with, and what websites are part of their portfolio.

My take is they actually won't care about tiny sites, but the moment they hit it big, they could be theoretically be handed what amounts to a blackmail letter (pay the ISP or we'll slow down access to your site). Which will stifle newcomers who can't afford the demanded fees.

Example: If Verizon wanted to slow access to the Fox News website to a crawl unless Fox News pays an exhorbitant sum, they could.

For an actual, not theoretical example, I got a slight, fortunately not long-lasting taste of it before Net Neutrality came along. NBC was having a fight with Time Warner over contract negotiations, so they blocked those with Time Warner service (this was a cable package fight, NOT an internet one, and it bled over) from watching shows on the website. All you'd get was a notice that amounted to: "We don't want you stinky Time Warner people accessing our online videos, so suck it".

Re: Net Neutrality question

[(Anonymous)]

I don’t necessarily know that ISPs will divide the internet into shopping sites, social sites, and so on. It’s more like Verizon and Comcast and Time Warner and whatever other ISPs will prioritize sites and services that either they or their parent companies own, or that other companies have paid them to speed up traffic to.

Everything else might load slowly or not at all, so what sites load easily would depend on what ISP you went with. Independently owned or small sites might well be screwed because they may have to pay every ISP out there or be stuck in molasses-slow nothing-loads land forever, but if they’re small or independently run they probably can’t afford to pay up.

And to top it all off, it’s now legal for ISPs to censor content that criticizes them (like a site organizing pro-net neutrality rallies), or content that might hurt their bottom line (such as a list of senators and congresscritters who took money from telecomm companies in exchange for gutting net neutrality), or that they just disagree with (say, a site arguing that internet access should be universally available to everybody) so that people never even see it.

Re: Net Neutrality question

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Most small mom-and-pop sites are going to be on a shared hosting service, so if Comcast has a fit with Wordpress.com, Bluehost, GoDaddy, or Amazon Web Services, they can figure out an appropriate IP range to throttle. But they probably won't bother that much with low-bandwidth and low-use sites. They're going to go after competitor's streaming which is the majority of data going through their network.

The other way they can do it is through packet filtering. Internet content is split into packets, which are tagged with metadata necessary to determine where they need to go and how the computer should read them. Even encrypted packets have some degree of metadata, so an ISP can search for the appropriate metadata patterns and block it. (ISPs already do this routinely to block malicious attacks.) Or they can sell that metadata on to advertising. What's more worrisome is content injection. Your ISP can intercept HTML traffic (only over http), perform some basic edits, and insert whatever they want.

Re: Net Neutrality question

[(Anonymous)]

I'm concerned about things like government/public and also news websites with important information - could I still browse the public library catalog from home? Check if schools are closed or open after a blizzard? Is there a tornado warning going on? Where do I go when I arrive at the courthouse for jury duty? Can I download tax forms and instructions? What do I need to do to renew my driver's license, where are the DMV centers located, and when are they open? What roads are closed because of construction?

Sure, there are alternate options for these things, but if it's something like calling a phone number, how do I know what number to call? What if I miss the TV news report and they aren't cycling back to it?

There's a hell of a lot of basic life things where the internet is necessary, assumed, or just really, really helpful.