Ryan I Am

Time for a quick rant.

At my last job, I used Spiceworks to monitor my network. At one point, I figured out that they collect data about my network and send it home to their servers, so that advertisers can hit me better. No worries, I thought. I read their TOS and found that the data is supposedly anonymized. That was enough to satisfy me at the time.

Now, I happen to work for a company that sells a product that Spiceworks customers might use, and we discussed advertising with them last year. At the time, we elected not to buy, but they encouraged us to be active on the forums and participate in the community.

So, I did just that. While not the most frequent poster, I got two ‘Best Answers’ and racked up enough points to move up a couple of their levels. You know, typical forum participation thing.

Naturally, I subscribe to the firewall and networking forums, where my company’s product fits in. And a few people asked for advice, and I chimed in with a recommendation to check out our product. Note that I was logged in as myself. I didn’t create fake accounts to astroturf. I’m not in sales, I’m not in marketing, and I don’t get a commission. I didn’t paste in copy from a brochure. I wrote a response tailored to each individual, from sysadmin to sysadmin, addressing their exact question. I have a few years of experience in IT, and I don’t like marketing BS. My responses were completely appropriate.

Next thing I know, I start getting PMs from Spiceworks people. They’re censoring my posts. Why? Because advertisers are supposed to pay. This seems kind of silly to me, because I think I’m providing pretty relevant information. So I check out their ToS:

“You may not post or transmit any advertising, promotional materials or any other solicitation of other users or Members to use or buy products, goods or services except in those areas (e.g., a classified bulletin board) that are designated for such purpose.”

I didn’t do any of the above, of course. I just answered a dude’s question. The number of general posts I wrote is much higher than the number of posts I wrote containing any information about my employer, so I would also argue I contributed quite a bit to the community, without being spammy.

Now, if they want to have a rule that says an employee may not say a word about his company’s products, then fine. Put that rule in the ToS (ironically, Spiceworks themselves would then be in violation of that rule), and tell your salespeople to stop telling potential custoemrs to be active in the forums. But their policy as it stands now is quite hypocritcal.

Oh, and one last thing. One of their employees took it upon himself to email my PMs to my boss. I actually already printed out everything, and we had discussed it at length, and my boss agreed with me, but that’s beside the point. Internet etiquette states that a “private message” is private, and is not disclosed to anyone else without your consent.

So, to wrap it up:

• Spiceworks sends network data to advertisers, which may or may not be anonymized and may or may not be secure.
• Spiceworks censors forum posts.
• Spiceworks forwards PMs to other people.

If you use Spiceworks, consider switching to something else. For me?

Not on pink donuts. Those things are nasty. But is there anyone who understands more about nuclear energy than this man?

In the distinguished expert’s own words:

Well you know boys, a nuclear reactor is a lot like women. You just have to read the manual and press the right button.

And… we are especially thankful for nuclear power, the cleanest, safest energy source there is. Except for solar, which is just a pipe dream.

The tragedy in Japan has recently renewed interest in the safety of California’s two aging nuclear power plants, both of which are located on the coast. And rightly so—with the surprise discovery in 2008 of the Shoreline Fault that sits .6 miles offshore from Diablo Canyon, the revelation that a critical cooling system was unknowingly offline for 18 months, repeated citations at San Onofre for safety violations such as failed emergency generators, the lack of storage space for spent fuel rods, and  the design similarities between the California plants and Fukushima Daiichi, concern is certainly merited.

But of even greater concern is that our media has brainwashed us into thinking that the risks of nuclear power outweigh its advantages, and that those risks can’t be even further diminished. Never mind that coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste, or that “particle pollution from power plants is estimated to kill approximately 13,000 people a year,” or that the Kingston coal ash spill was one of the U.S.’s most catastrophic enviromental disasters (the volume of toxic slurry released was over 100 times the volume of the Exxon Valdez spill). Yet thanks to the public’s fear of nuclear energy, ground hasn’t been broken for a new nuclear reactor in the United States since 1974, allowing our consumption of coal, and production of toxic ash slurry, to steadily increase.

Meanwhile, reactor design and passive safety engineering have steadily improved. China recently announced its thorium reactor project, and pebble bed technology has been in development for decades. To Wired Magazine’s credit, it reported on pebble bed technology in China in 2004 and on thorium reactor technology in 2009, and has consistently championed safe nuclear power that “employ[s] passive safety technologies, such as gravity-fed emergency cooling rather than pumps.” Yet I can’t think of, or find via Google search, any other major media outlet that has even bothered to touch the subject, much less champion the cause.

The problem isn’t nuclear energy itself. The problem is a public lack of awareness of the pros and cons of various energy production technologies, and the media’s lack of  interest in educating itself and the public in order to move the debate forward. Perhaps stories on safe nuclear power don’t sell magazines or garner clicks, but as long as we ignore the issue, we’re allowing dirty coal plants to pollute our environment with arsenic, mercury, and lead.

We can do better.

The Economist, a magazine I greatly respect when it sticks to issues it knows about, such as, say, economics, writes a giant fail of an article on Net Neutrality, apparently unknowingly contradicting itself in adjacent paragraphs. In a nutshell, the editorial claims:

1. Land-based ISPs should be able to fast-track. It only makes economic sense that an company should be able to charge more for a specific type of content.
2. Usage-based pricing is the norm, and wireless ISPs should be able to stick to this.
3. None of this would be an issue if there were more competition.

Well, I wear contacts, but I’m not blind. For anyone who knows anything about the internet, those three statements directly contradict each other.

First of all, the worry isn’t about an ISP fast-tracking a specific type of content, it’s about an ISP prioritizing its own services and deprioritizing delivery of a competitor’s service. Imagine if the Post Office, wonderful entity that it is, decided to start randomly throwing away mail from senders that didn’t pay it a kickback. You either have to pay into their circle, or live with the fact that you won’t receive half your mail. Nice system. Fortunately or unfortunately, snail mail has becoming increasingly marginalized, while a stable internet connection has become more and more vital.

Ironically, the easy solution to this problem is in point #2, that the Economist also advocates: Usage-based pricing. If you pay for 5Mbps of bandwidth, you get 5Mbps of bandwidth. If you pay for 10, you get 10. This is how pricing has been up to now, and it makes sense. As the Economist would recognize, this type of market will foster the greatest amount of competition within the industry, among both old and new business entities.

The Economist then goes on to brilliantly observe that the market lacks competition. Obviously, we wouldn’t be having this argument if there was more competition. We’ve essentially got a duopoly on our hands, yet the Economist seems to think that all we need to do is “demand it.” From who, is a little more unclear. Should I go petition my local Better Business Bureau in the hopes that some enterprising young whippersnapper will take up my idea and roll out a multi-billion dollar network, so he can compete against even larger corporate behemoths? I’m all for competition, and I think there are regulations that could and should be put into place to allow for a better resale environment for existing networks, but without government subsidies, the only financially feasible new ISP can work in the wireless space. Oh yeah, I guess the Economist forgot about Clearwire.

But until Clearwire WiMax is able to cover more area, we don’t have said competition. I live 45 minutes outside of Los Angeles and am not holding my breath. At this rate, they’ll continue rolling out over the next decade, and that still only adds one highly-leveraged competitor to the market, let alone the two or three necessary for real competition.

So, until we have another competitor or two, how about we go with the Economist’s second recommendation: Put the duopolies and startups on a level playing field, and require usage-based pricing? May the best ISP win.

The problem is, the ISPs are uncomfortable in their own skin. They don’t want to be a utility company, they want to be content providers, or at least syndicators. Instead of being an internet gateway, they want to be a content gateway. Instead of optimizing their network and running a lean, efficient, business that competes on the value of its product, they want to be a digital middleman where none is necessary. I buy electronics from Newegg and content from Netflix. I don’t need Southern California Edison tellling me I can only buy their electronics if I want to use their electricity any more than I need Comcast telling me I can only buy their content if I want to use their pipe. Not a lot of utility in that.

But the devil is in the detail. What happens for instance if some people want to pay for their data to go faster, or if others hog all the bandwidth?

It’s simple, Economist. You already answered it yourself. Usage-based pricing. Internet 101. Now stop hogging my bandwidth.