An open letter to Telkom

This should really have been sent as an e-mail to Telkom, but Telkom play “hard to get” with their subscribers (or “customers” as they like to call them in these days of neoliberalism) and the e-mail address they give on their web site is invalid.

It is also an instance of the kind of occasion in which e-mail is a better form of communication than a voice phone call — see Millennials hate phone calls — and they have a point, so in what follows I shall try to point out why that is so, and some other more general observations which I would not normally include in an e-mail to Telkom, but which the people at Telkom probably ought to know.

Telkom provide us with a fixed line voice phone service, which also includes ADSL for linking to the Internet, and Telkom is also our ISP, so we use their services for e-mail, the Web and other Internet services. We recently signed a new contract with Telkom for a higher-speed connection by fibre-optic cable when the physical infrastructure becomes available (they are still digging trenches for the cables in our neighbourhood).

On Tuesday 3rd September I could not access my e-mail. I reported this to Telkom by e-mail to support@telkomsa.net, and included a copy of the error message I received when I tried to download e-mail:

02:00:52.125: >> +OK
<< 0015 PASS XXXXXXXX
02:00:55.203: >>
-ERR login failed

The aim of this was to give them specific information to help them to detect and fix the problem.

There was no response from Telkom, and I repeated the fault report the following day. I tested and found that outgoing e-mail was working, it was just incoming pop3 mail I could not get.

The next day, the entire ADSL system stopped working. Not only could I not download e-mail, I couldn’t conntect to the web, or send e-mail.

At that point, I used Telkom’s SMS reporting system to report the fault, which is not specific, and only allows vague specification of the fault. I indicated that the voice service was working, but ADSL was not.

On 7 September I got an SMS from Telkom saying fault Ref 2991487 has been restored.

I tested it, and it had not been restored, so I reported it to them again.

7 Sep 2019 06:28 AM — received another SMS from Telkom giving new reference 2992412.

On 11 September there was still no Internet service.

On 12 September a technician arrived, sent by Telkom.

Before he had even looked at any equpment, he asked how old our contract was, and then said that the problem was our ADSL modem, because the contract was more than two years old. After your contract is 2 years old, he siad, you must get a new modem.

He then connected his modem, and it didn’t work either. It looked considerably older than ours, so why didn’t he have a new one, I wondered.

He then phoned someone, and asked them to reset the ADSL password. After that, he entered the new password in his modem, and it connected to ADSL. He then tried to fiddle with my e-mail program, but was obviusly totally unfamiliar with it, and got frustrated, took his modem and left. I asked him to stay long enough to see if our modem would work with the new password, but he would not. Fortunately I had written it down, or he would have just taken it off with his modem.

When he had gone, I entered the new password in our modem, and it worked, in spite of the contract being more than two years old.

But e-mail still did not work.

Eventually, two days later, I managed to phone through to a human being at Telkom after several attempts at pushing numbers on an SMS to try to let them know that the technician they had sent had failed to fix the problem.

The human reset my e-mail password, and then I was able to download my e-mail, but all e-mail between 3rd September and 11th September had been lost.

The next thing was that we were billed for an unnecessary call-out for the incompetent technician who had come and failed to fix the problem. We went to the nearest Telkom office with the bill to query it. But all they did was press a button so that someone would call on a cell phone.

Eventually, after waiting half a day for a call that never came we tried again an managed after several attempts to get through to a human being. And I tried to explain all that is written above, which the person at the other end was trying to type out as I spoke, and I wondered what sort of garbled version was getting written there.

Meanwhile, if Telkom had responded to my first e-mail, which had a detailed description of the problem, they could have reset my e-mail password within 10 minutes, without, on their own initiative, not at my request,unnecessarily sending an incompetent and rude technican, and then wanting to charge for an unnecessary call out.

Everyone’s time was wasted because they wanted to use voice calls or button-pushing instead of e-mail, and they are too incompetent even to put their own e-mail address correctly on their web site.

Telkom try to encourage people to use the debit order system, but when they add contestable items like “unnecessary call outs” to the bill one can hardly trust them enough for that. And when they threaten their subscribers with dire action for unpaid bills that the subscribers have not yet received, no wonder people are looking for other service providers than Telkom.

Mailing lists (& newsgroups) versus Facebook Groups

The news that Yahoo! were to close their YahooGroups service (Yahoo! to close mailing lists? | Notes from underground) has provoked a frantic search for alternatives, one of the most popular being Groups.io, which I believe was set up a few years ago when Yahoo! imported a new whizz-kid manager who totally misunderstood the medium, and messed the site up so as to make it unusable.Yahoo made a half-hearted attempt to repair the damage, but now seems to have given up entirely.

YahooGroups and GoogleGroups were the largest public mailing list servers on the Internet, and with YahooGroups closing some have suggested migrating to GoogleGroups, but many more have suggested using Facebook Groups instead. I think that is a very bad idea, and will try to explain that here, rather than having to retype the explanation every time anyone makes such a suggestion. Marshall McLuhan once wrote a book called Understanding Media, and though he never envisaged these media, it is still important to understand these media and what they are good for and, even more important, what they are not good for.

Facebook Groups versus Mailing lists

People who are relatively new to the Internet may not realise what mailing lists are, so I’ll try to explain that first.

A mailing list is run by a list server (sometimes called “listserv” for short). It works by e-mail. You send an e-mail to the list server, and the list server sends it on to all the people who have subscribed to that list. You can reply either to the list, or to the original sender. Off-topic replies are best sent privately, on-topic replies are best sent to the list, then all members of the list will see the replies, as they will show up in their e-mail inbox, to be read or deleted or saved as desired,

The main purpose of a mailing list is discussion. You can see what someone says, and respond to particular points, and others can respond to what you say.

Facebook Groups are not really suited for discussion. I know that people have tried to use them that way, but they are a very poor substitute for mailing lists. Facebook Groups are best suited for announcements and ephemera. Announce a book release, an article, or a blog post in a Facebook group for people who might be interested in knowing about it. Announce an event and publicise things — a church service, a lecture, an art exhibition, a play.  They are OK for news items.

What Facebook Groups  are not good for is discussion.

Why not?

First of all, Facebook has an algorithm that limits what you see. It will show you only certain posts from certain groups and people. If people respond to it, it shows you only certain comments. It may notify you that “So and so commented on a post that you are following in X group”, but it doesn’t tell you the topic of the post. And if you do click on that, half the time you don’t see any comments from so and so, and you have to hunt up and down the page until you see a tiny faint line saying something like “5 more comments”. You click on that, but it has no comments from so and so. You go back and hunt up and down and eventually you find another faint little line somewhere on the page saying “See more comments”. In the midst of all that activity, Facebook of course is busy showing you ads and other stuff to distract you and in the end you forget whose comment you were looking for and what topic it was on.

And then, assuming that Facebook does show you the post, you don’t have time to read it now, and you think you’ll come back to it later. O fatal, fatal error! Because when you try to come back to it later, you’ll never find it again, and spend an hour searching for it, and in the mean time see lots of ads earning lots of lovely lolly for Facebook, and see other interesting things to click on. It’s like looking up words in a dictionary — you spot another interesting word, and look at that, and see an interesting word in its definition and look that up and then forget what word you were looking for when you started. Or, perhaps a more apt analogy, Facebook is like a taxi driver at an airport, who takes the newly arrived tourist on the longest possible route to his destination, pointing out all the scenic attractions, which happen to be not hills and lakes and forests, but billboards, hoardings and tourist trap shops.

So what happens with a mailing list? A message appears in my inbox. If I don’t have time to read it now, as soon as I close my inbox, my mail reader program (which computer nerds like to call a “client”, would that I could bill it!) sorts it into a folder with all other saved messages from that mailing list. I can go back to it in an hour’s time and read and reply to it. Of I can go tomorrow, or next week or next month or next year. If someone asks a question on a mailing list, and I find the answer in three months time, I can go back and give them the answer. Try doing that on Facebook and you’ll spend the next three months looking for it, wasting bandwidth and of course increasing their ad revenue. It usually takes about 30 seconds to find the message on my computer and it uses no Internet bandwidth.

So no, Facebook Groups are no substitute for mailing lists. They were designed to serve a different purpose, and they are good for that. Use the right tool for the job. You can open  tin of peaches with a scewdriver and a rock if you don’t have a tin opener, but if a tin opener is available, why not use it?

A few years ago there was a newsgroup called rec.arts.books (a newsgroup is a little like a mailing list, but not quite — it works on linked news servers rather than a single mailing list server). It had interesting book discussions and reviews. Then someone had a bright idea — let’s move it to a Facebook Group where we can post pretty pictures. So they did, and about half of them moved to the Facebook Group, which they called, appropriately enough, The Prancing Half-Wits. It died, mainly for the reasons described above. Only about 20% of the people would see each post, specially chosen by Facebook’s algorithms, and even fewer saw the comments. And rec.arts.books limps along, because most of the creative and interesting people left for Facebook.

 

Yahoo! to close mailing lists?

I just saw this announcement today which, if true, will mean that thousands of mailing lists will be cut off with very little notice.There are lists that deal with various academic subjects and have been used for research. Some universities run listservers of their own and may be able to take some over, but that is almost impossible at such short notice.

There are others, like genealogy groups, which have a lot of family history information that was searchable on the Web, but that too will be gone.

Yahoo is shutting down its Groups website and deleting all content:

Yahoo (owned by Engadget’s parent company Verizon) is phasing out one its longest-standing features. The internet pioneer is closing the Yahoo Groups website in a two-phase process that will effectively see it disappear. You’ll lose the ability to post new content on October 21st, and Yahoo will delete all “previously posted” material on December 14th. Users can still connect to their groups through email, but the site will effectively be vacant. All groups will be made private and require an administrator’s approval.

If you’re at all interested in preserving your history on the site, you’ll want to download your data either directly from posts or through Yahoo’s Privacy Dashboard.

It should be borne in mind that Yahoo! got into the mailing list business when it took over something called E-Groups, which ran public mail servers.

If they were concerned about their customers they would give them enough notice and time to possibly arrange for alternative mail servers. As Yahoo! took over E-groups, so other servers could possibly take over some of the lists hosted by Yahoo!. But if they leave an impossibly short time, that will not work.

If they close it down with such short notice I will certainly be removing my Yahoo! Id, and will have nothing more to do with any of their services in future.Actually Yahoo! has hardly any services left. The mailing lists were one of the last.

Yahoo! developed a reputation for taking over flourishing web services, and wrecking and killing them off. The list is a long one — Geocities, Webring, MyBlogLog, and E-groups.. And now it seems that Yahoo! itself has been taken over by another company, which is shutting them down.

A few years ago there was a group that tried to  set up an alternative when some bright spark arrived and tried to change the way YahooGroups worked and almost wrecked it. I think it was called groups.io — you can find more about it here. If you know of any others, please tell about them in the comments.

I suggest that while you still have the opportunity you will not the e-mail addresses and other contact information of people on mailing lists that you would like to stay in touch with while you still have the chance.

I’ve been involved with about 50 mailing lists that deal with a great variety of topics, including:

• Missiology
• New Religious Movements
• Books and Literature
• Genealogy and family history groups (including several dealing with Single family name)

I suppose we can put it down to entropy on the Internet — if there is anything useful there, it will die.

 

Your 25 friends on Facebook

Many Facebook users are concerned that Facebook only shows them posts from about 25 of their friends. And Facebook will probably only show their posts to about 25 (or fewer) of their freinds unless a lot of those friends “like” them, or react to them in some other way.

One thing that is a bit concerning about this is that Facebook is always nagging me to add new friends by showing “People you may know” prominently — but if I add them, which of my friends will drop off the radar?

Some people have thought the solution is to post things like this:

Fixed my blocked posts …….. I wondered where everybody had been!

This is good to know: It’s ridiculous to have so many friends and only 25 are allowed to see my post.
I ignored this post earlier, because I didn’t think it worked. But…. it WORKS!! I have a whole new news feed. I’m seeing posts from people I haven’t seen in years.

Here’s how to bypass the system FB now has in place that limits posts on your news feed:

Their new algorithm chooses the same few people – about 25 – who will read your posts. Therefore, Hold your finger down anywhere in this post and “copy” will pop up. Click “copy”. Then go your page, start a new post and put your finger anywhere in the blank field. “Paste” will pop up and click paste.

This will bypass the system… I thought I’ll try it and hey presto!

The problem it describes is real, but the proposed solution is not. Copying and pasting text like that will do nothing to change Facebook’s algorithms.

Some have claimed that the “25 Facebook friends” meme is a hoax, but it isn’t. The exact number of 25 may not be accurate, but there is certainly some such limit, and it doesn’t even seem to be affected by “likes” or other reactions.

How do I know this?

Well a couple of years ago Facebook forced me to have two accounts[1]. When I opened the second account I linked to some of my friends so I could still keep in touch with them while my main account was blocked. One of those friends is Koos van der Riet, who is a friend on both accounts. But Facebook never ever shows me his posts on my main account, no matter how many times I “like” them. It always shows me his posts on my secondary account, even though I deliberately refrain from “liking” them or reacting to them in any way. But to see his posts on my main account I have to type his name in the search bar and search for his account, otherwise Facebook never shows me his posts.

This problem will not be solved by copying and pasting a bit of text. It can only be solved by Facebook improving their algorithm. One way of doing that would be to rate every person you link to as a friend, say on a scale of 1 to 10, to show how much you wanted to see their posts.  The algorithm could then add their value for you to your value to them to show how much value to give to posts. It could also introduce a classification of kids of posts, family news, general news, news commentary, to let one indicate which kinds of posts one was most interested in from which people. Such a scheme would take a bit of work and research to develop, but would make it more useful to its users.

---

Notes

[1] Why I was forced to have two accounts. Facebook blocked my main account on my main computer, and semanded that I download and run some software before it would allow me to see it. I could still, however, see it on my laptop. So I opened a new account. Later I discovered I could still access my main account on my main computer using a different browser. So I use two browsers, one for each account.

Telkom Internet scam warning

To those who use Telkom Internet, a got a somewhat different phishing scam e-mail today, which could easily lead people to be unaware that they had been scammed. This was the e-mail:

telkomsa.net Notification

Hello User,

We have stopped processing incoming emails

Due to your refusal to update your account and as a result, we are forced to lock your account and all your services will be suspended.

Use the link below to update your account.

 

 

 

NOTE: This email will be closed if ignored.

 

Kind regards,

 

Supported by telkomsa.net

 

If you clicked on the link, this is what you would see:

With a space to enter your log in details.

You might think that this was a Telkom Internet login, but the actual address was:

http://informatique-securite.website/screenconnect/Bin/telkomsa/telkomsa/Login.htm

I you filled it in, you would be taken to the actual Telkom site, and perhaps, if you entered yourt actual log-in details, it would actually log in to Telkom, and you wouldn’t be any the wiser, except that the phishermen would now have your name and password.

As I usually do in such cases, I filled it in with a bogus name and password (and I advise you to do the same if you ever find yourself on such a site.

My e-mail reader and anti-virus program usually warn me about bogus bank statement phishing attempts, but it didn’t warn me about this one, so be careful.

 

The Moaning Meme and the Freelance Cynic

About 12 years ago I posted about The moaning meme | Notes from underground:

The Freelance Cynic complains that most memes that circulate in the blogosphere are about things that people like — your favourite book, movie, or whatever. But if you overheard conversations on the bus or in public places, they are usually complaining — about the weather, politics, other people’s habits and so on. One of the major aids to social bonding is moaning, grumbling and so on.

Someone seems to have looked at it recently, so I went to have a look at what I had written, and in the original blog post there was a link to the Freelance Cynic’s blog at FreelanceCynic.com, but when I tried to go there the blog had gone, and I was informed that the domain was for sale at $695. I assume that is US dollars, and that is R9728.47 at the current rate of exchange.Now there’s something to moan about.

Did the FreelanceCynic die and bequeath their domain name to whoever is selling it now? Or did they simply abandon their blog and drop the domain name? How much of that $695 will the actual Freelance Cynic get?

Another thing to moan about, if you feel like moaning: Communications:

Meraki Research would like to find out more about the way you communicate in this digital age. The survey will take less than 8 minutes to complete and we have kept it interesting. All answers will be kept anonymous.

If you are in South Africa and see this in February/March 2019, please follow the link and fill in the survey. After that it probably won’t work. Basically what it is about is how you prefer your spam. If you are like me, you will answer “Never” to how you prefer your SMS spam, and so participating in the survey may help to get the message through to SMS spammers.

So here’s my moaning meme for this Week. I’m not tagging anybody in it, anyone can take part.

And, for what it’s worth, I find SMS (“Text”) spam the most annoying.

E-mail spam can usually be removed by filters, though that is becoming more difficult now as more and more people seem to be trying to make their legitimate mail look as much like spam as possible by using HTML and especially “lazy HTML” that tries to incorporate something from a remote site into the body of a message. My e-mail reader automatically tosses those into the “Junk or Suspicious Mail” queue, and is set not to display anything on remote sites.

Newsgroup spamming can also be annoying, most of it these days seems to come via GoogleGroups, and no matter how much you report it to Google, they do little to stop it.

But SMS spam is the most annoying of the lot, because it is immediate. If you are travelling, and expecting an important message about an event you are going to, and you have to pull of the road to read it (like taking the next freeway exit), and then discover it is just some stupid ad, it really is annoying.

In defence of Facebook

I’ve often been critical of Facebook in the past, and since the recent Cambridge Analytica affair many people have been deleting their Facebook accounts and challenging others to do so.

Some speak of Facebook addiction, and suggest that failure to delete your Facebook account may be a sign of addiction. But that makes about as much sense as saying that if you don’t get rid of all your telephones, you must have a telephone addiction.

For all its faults, Facebook has its uses and I use it, like a telephone and other media of communication, to communicate with people that I want to communicate with. Sometimes one has to devise workarounds for the obstacles that Facebook puts in the way of communication, often in the name of utterly bogus “privacy” concerns, but in spite of this, I think the advantages of using Facebook outweigh the disadvantages.  As one of the critics acknowledges Facebook: is it time we all deleted our accounts?:

In many ways, being able to distance yourself from Facebook these days is a privilege. As Safiya Noble, an assistant professor of information studies at the University of Southern California and the author of Algorithms of Oppression, notes: “For many people, Facebook is an important gateway to the internet. In fact, it is the only version of the internet that some know, and it plays a central role in communicating, creating community and participating in society online.”

Even if you’ve got multiple ways to communicate and participate in society online, there is not really a good replacement for Facebook. There’s no one portal that reminds you of your friends’ birthdays, connects you to relatives across the world and stores photos from 10 years ago. Deleting Facebook inevitably means missing out on certain things and having to make more of an effort to connect with people in other ways.

Deleting your Facebook account is like locking the garage after the car has been stolen. You data is already out there, and deleting your Facebook account won’t recall it.

I mentioned Facebook’s totally bogus concern for privacy. For example, it keeps warning me about “Who can see this post?” when I make posts public. But it does not warn me when I don’t make them public. I posted something recently for friends only, and Facebook failed to warn me that the next five posts were also marked for friends only.

If there is something I don’t want people to see, I don’t put it on Facebook. If I put it on Facebook, I think it’s OK for people to see it. If I make it “friends only” it’s not because I don’t want people to see it, but because I think people might find it boring. I’ve no doubt that many people out there do find stuff I post boring, and one of my biggest gripes with Facebook is that its algorithm seems to show people things that will bore them, and not show them things that will interest them. For example “Top Stories”, which has recently become the default, is what Facebook thinks are the top stories, not what I think are the top stories.

But the other day I saw a very ominous invitation from Facebook with no privacy warning. I can’t remember the exact wording, but it was something to the effect of “Tell people something about yourself that they don’t know?” According to my bullshit detectors, that has BIG DATA written all over it, rather than the “Who can see this?” nonsense.

Most third-party apps, quizzes and games, especially the ones that say stupid stuff like “Which of your friends will spring you from jail?” serve no other purpose than to get access to your data and that of your Facebook friends. They do warn you that the app or quiz or whatever will give access to your friends list, but true addicts won’t care about that.

 

 

Early Social Media

It was 30 years ago this month that I first encountered online social media.

I borrowed a modem from a friend and used it to access Beltel, which was run by Telkom. The modem was a Saron (perhaps made in Saron in the Western Cape, perhaps not). It is so far lost in the mists of history that a Google search produced no information. A few months later I bought one. There were two gadgets we wanted back then — a modem and a microwave oven. We could not afford both, so we got the microwave oven. But then someone who had upgraded their modem to a faster one advertised a Saron modem second hand, and so I bought it.

Ceefax screen display from the UK. The Beltel display was similar.

Beltel was accessed by a 300/75 baud modem. It would download data at 300 baud, and upload it at 75 baud. “Baud” for those who don’t know, was roughly equivalent to bits per second. The Beltel system was similar to the Prestel and Ceefax system in the UK, and lasted until 1999, when it closed because the software was not Y2K compatible.

The Beltel system produced a 40 character screen display.

One of the features of Beltel was Comnet, which was like a bulletin board, with sections for discussing various topics. It worked a lot like Facebook, except that it had very crude graphics, it was much slower, and because it used 40 characters across the screen, it was easier to read.

There was also a more sophisticated version of Comnet called “The Network” for which one had to pay extra.

Most of the discussion was about computers. The main exception was a couple of right-wing white racists Adrian and Karen Maritz, who used it for racist propaganda. The were supported by someone using the pseudonym “Computer Advisory”, whom I suspect was Henry Martin, who later also posted racist propaganda under his own name. Most of the other users were white middle-class computer geeks, who whatever they may have thought about people of other races, reacted against the very crude racism of the propagandists.

A few years later Adrian Maritz and Henry Martin booby trapped a computer, which they sent to Durban, where it blew up and killed some poor innocent computer tech who was trying to compare it. They were arrested, and made it on to the news when they had a hunger strike in prison. An investigative journalist, Jacques Paauw, followed up the story, and 30 years later he’s still around, still digging up the dirt on politicians and the like. Henry Martin and Adrian Marits scarpered overseas to the UK. Perhaps they are still involved in right-wing politics over there.

Through Beltel I discovered BBSs — Bulletin Board Systems. These could be set up by anyone with a computer, a modem and a telephone line, and could both transmit and receive data at 300 Baud, and quite soon 1200 Baud. Then Baud as a measurement became obsolete, and new modems could transmit and receive at 2400 bits per second, which could not be measured in Baud. But even at 300 Baud, seeing characters appear on my screen and realising that they were coming from another computer 150 km away was an amazing thing. Now I’m typing this and it’s being saved on a computer on the other side of the world and I think nothing of it.

One of the first BBSs I used was Capital ComTech, run by Geoff Dellow from Centurion, which was only a local call away. I visited him one day, and also met the notorious Adrian and Karen Maritz, who were visiting at the same time. Most BBSs were run by computer geeks, and the main thing most of them wanted to talk about was computers. They would make their systems available to those who wanted to talk about other things, but regarded those as irrelevant fluff, and not the really important stuff. That seemed weird to me — like people only wanting to use telephones to talk about telephones (well, since the introduction of cell phones I think many people do want to use telephones to talk about telephones, but back in the 1980s it did seem to be ridiculous). Nevertheless, most BBSs had about 10-20 sections, called “conferences”, for discussing various aspects of computers, and perhaps one or two for non-computer stuff, which most sysops (BBS system operators) regarded as an unnecessary luxury, needed only to keep off-topic stuff out of the computer conferences.

So I wonder how many people are around who remember those early days of social media, who participated in ComNet and The Network on Beltel. Somewhere on my hard disk I’ve still got some conversations saved from those days.

How US Net Neutrality affects the rest of us

Those of us outside the US may have observed their debates on net neutrality, and wondered whether it would affect us.

Even if it is something confined purely to the US, however, the loss of net neutrality there will affect people all over the world. But when people speak of the loss of net neutrality, there are many ways in which it has already been lost, or rather, it is an ideal that has never been fully realised.

This article helps to explain what it means for people in the US — Someone Finally Illustrated What The Loss Of Net Neutrality Really Looks Like, And You Won’t Like It:

Net neutrality has become a volatile, high-profile news story, and with good reason: Americans are in danger of losing it. But what is net neutrality, and why is it important? Why are some lawmakers fighting so hard to make it a thing of the past?

The answer is complex, rooted in technological progress, a changing economic landscape, and a society and culture that is seeing greater class divisions than at any other time in our history. Some in our government are determined to make the internet a profit-driven product, and while this may sound understandable in a capitalist society, the dangers are very real.

Aptly illustrated by this picture:

If you live in South Africa, say, and you post some family photos on Facebook, the loss of net neutrality in the US might mean that your cousin in the US may not be able to see them, because their ISP has decided to charge more for access to Facebook.

Of course even with net neutrality your cousin in the US might not have been able to see your photos, because Facebook’s algorithm already decides who gets to see what you post, and who doesn’t get to see it.

Think of another example. An academic researcher in South Africa posts a research query in a blog, trying to verify some fact, or get reactions to a conjecture or hypothesis. With net neutrality, anyone with a web connection can see the blog and respond to the post. But without net neutrality, an ISP can decide to make that particular blogging platform only accessible to some of its subscribers who pay extra for it.

Even without legal protection of “net neutrality”, there have been all kinds of attempts to corral users into a closed system. Facebook’s Messaging app is an example. Get people to use that, and people have to join Facebook to communicate with you. Others may have attempted the same thing, but it might have backfired on them. In an earlier post, The decline and decline of tumblr | Notes from underground, I noted that tumblr had gradually reduced the functionality of their site to make it a closed world. Perhaps they did this in the hope that they, like Facebook, might be able to lock users in to their site, though the actual effect was to remove the incentive for many people to visit their site at all. To lock people in successfully, you have to be big like Facebook, not small like tumblr.

We had something similar in South Africa. A few years ago people who used MWeb as their ISP found it difficult to access certain web sites, because MWeb was trying to lock them in and steer them towards its own offerings. I don’t know if they still do that, but there was quite an outcry at the time.

Something similar was seen back in the 1990s, when dial-up BBSs were popular. Telkom, whose phone lines were being used for it, wanted to charge more for data calls to BBSs than for voice calls, but the counter argument was that Telkom was a “common carrier” — their job was to provide the connections, for which they could charge, but the content of the calls was none of their business. The “common carrier” principle is the same principle as net neutrality — an ISP charges you for the internet connection and the band width you use, but the content of your connection is none of their business.

The “common carrier” principle provided a great deal of freedom, because anyone could set up a BBS, and so BBSs were a great enhancement to free speech. It was one of the factors that helped to topple a lot of dictatorial regimes in the annus mirabilis of 1989. It was how news of the Tianamnen Square massacre in China reached the rest of the world; pro-democracy activists used a BBS conference called ASIAN_LINK to communicate with each other and the rest of the world.

So the loss of New Neutrality takes the USA another step further away from the “free world” that it once claimed to be the leader of.

 

 

 

The proliferation of unreadable e-mail

I’m getting more and more unreadable e-mails.

About a month ago I noted that WordPress’s response forms, which used to be a useful feature, are now unreadable and unusable.

More and more people seem to be sending e-mails with little more than long URLs that take up several lines of text, and make the actual message, if any, very hard to read, and have to be copied and pasted into a web browser because they haven’t bothered to enclose them in angle brackets. Don’t they know that Tiny URL is free? — please use it.

http://tinyurl.com/create.php

And then more and more people, especially church organisations and banks and the like, are sending HTML-only messages that are not only very hard to read, but also contain Lazy HTML, which prompts my mail reader to display the following warning:

What’s more, these messages are usually sent from a no-reply e-mail address, so you can’t even ask for clarification.

Whenever that warning pops up, I usually delete the message unread.

If they really wanted me to read the message, they would not have:

1. Disguised it to make it look like spam or malware
2. Deliberately made it hard to read
3. Made it “no-reply” so you can’t ask for clarification

So if you are sending e-mails, please remember some courtesy rules:

• No Lazy HTML
• No HTML-only messages
• No long URLS

To which I might add “No Comic Sans”, except that if you feel an irresistible compulsion to use HTML in e-mails, Comic Sans is a lot more readable than some of the squitty and faint fonts that some commercial firms feel compelled to use.