Sprint Throttled Skype Without Telling Anyone... And Nobody Seems To Care Much

from the slippery-slope dept

Last month we pointed to research out of Northeastern University that showed U.S. wireless video performance was thoroughly mediocre thanks in large part to arbitrary carrier throttling. The study, spearheaded by researcher David Choffnes, found that this carrier throttling usually had absolutely nothing to do with congestion. Instead, much of it was driven by carriers trying to impose arbitrary limits on your connection, then charge you more money to avoid it. For example, Verizon now throttles all video on its "unlimited" wireless data connections to 480p (around 1.5 Mbps), unless you pay Verizon for a more expensive plan.

Choffnes is tracking ISP network management by using crowdsourced data from his Wehe app. More recently Choffnes released an updated report that continues to show that carriers arbitrarily throttle video and select apps. But his report and data also found that Sprint (and its prepaid subsidiary Boost Mobile) routinely throttles Skype performance on its networks... without telling consumers about it. The throttling was discovered in 34 percent of 1,968 full tests run between January 18 and October 15 of this year, note the researchers:

"We found a significant number of instances of Sprint throttling our Skype tests. This is interesting because Skype’s telephony service can be construed as directly competing with the telephony service provided by Sprint...We asked Sprint to comment on our findings. Their reply was: "Sprint does not single out Skype or any individual content provider in this way." Our test results indicate otherwise, particularly for video content providers where we were able to confirm targeted throttling of Wehe tests."

On its surface, Sprint throttling Skype a third of a the time isn't the end of the world. But as is often the case with net neutrality, it's the precedent that matters. Sprint has already tinkered with throttling video, music, and games unless users were willing to pay more money, something nobody in the Obama administration so much as blinked at -- even with net neutrality rules intact.

Now, post-repeal, Sprint is throttling a service that could be directly construed as competing with Sprint's own offerings, something Choffnes told me should be raising alarm bells for anybody interested in keeping the internet competitive and relatively neutral:

"In a neutral network, all of these services can compete on a level playing field to offer a product that attracts the most users,” he said. “When an Internet provider targets a service for throttling, the playing field can tilt in favor of one service over another."

“This is particularly problematic if the Internet provider's service is favored, because they can use this advantage to drive users away from competing products and to ones belong to the Internet provider,” Choffnes added. “And because the competition is limited by the Internet service they are given, in some cases there may nothing they can do to regain equal footing."

Sprint, for its part, justly flatly denied to me and other reporters that this was even happening, though Choffnes stands by his data. Here's the point where an objective regulator would come in, investigate the issue, and then punish companies if necessary. Of course in the Ajit Pai era that's simply not going to happen. Under the FCC's 2015 rules, ISPs had to be transparent about what they were doing so users knew what kind of connection they were buying. With those rules now dead, the FCC has effectively made transparency a largely voluntary affair that ISPs can ignore at their leisure.

That's where Choffnes comes in. He's trying to at least hold ISPs accountable by using crowdsourced data to clarify what ISPs are up to. But with the news of Sprint throttling Skype coming and going without a single comment from anybody in a position to actually do anything about it, it's not clear if knowing alone is going to be enough.

Again, Sprint throttling Skype for a third of its users certainly isn't the end of the world. But it remains a precedent you should be worried about. ISPs are desperately trying to be on their best behavior right now ahead of next February's net neutrality lawsuits against the FCC. They don't want to add any fuel to the fire (well, aside from that Verizon throttling California firefighters for no reason thing). But should the FCC and ISPs win their court battle, you're going to see a lot more "creative" efforts to impose costly new barriers to access, and less and less transparency with the end user about what's happening.

Filed Under: competition, fcc, net neutrality, throttling, voice
Companies: skype, sprint

'See Something, Say Something' But For Immigrants Continues To Collect Little But Petty Complaints From Petty Americans

from the 'dangerous-people-out-there,'-I-said,-pointing-towards-the-US dept

The president's new "see something, say something" program isn't about national security, even if he'll claim it is. It's about gathering whatever bits of evidence he can use to shore up his repeated claims about "dangerous" immigrants. The narrative doesn't work without it. Unfortunately, despite the money and manpower being thrown at it, the lack of "bad hombre" data continues to undermine this administration's assertions.

Last year kicked off with a bunch of ICE sweeps. Done in hopes of rustling up enough undocumented hardened criminals, it was a robust failure. Communications obtained from ICE show it inflated the number of "egregious" cases by cannibalizing reports from other jurisdictions, if not travelling back in time to include violators seized during 2016 raids. Even the inflated numbers were underwhelming.

The next step was the VOICE hotline -- a place where citizens could report suspicious individuals they suspected were undocumented and known criminals/immigrants. Calls are fielded 12 hours a day, supported by $1 million in annual funding taken directly from "any and all resources that are currently used to advocate on behalf of illegal aliens."

Data leaked by ICE showed this plan wasn't working either. A majority of the calls received reported aliens of extraterrestrial origin when not showering staffers with obscenities. The more "legitimate" complaints weren't all that legitimate. Many of the calls discussing illegal immigrants were nothing more than estranged spouses, angry parents, and other such upstanding Americans attempting to use ICE as an on-call vigilante force to remove people they didn't like from their lives.

VOICE is still in operation and has finally delivered its first report. As Vera Bergegruen reports for Buzzfeed, there's no success story to be found in its pages.

Since April of last year, six operators sitting at a call center in Laguna Niguel, California, have fielded an astonishing range of calls for 12 hours a day.

One caller asked to make a reservation at a Trump hotel. Another called to report that “a ‘coyote’ stole his cat.” Then there was the one who “requested to report Melania Trump, who is stealing caller’s taxpayer funds.” Another complained that “illegal aliens are going into her yard and taking food from her garden.”

Dozens of callers reported space aliens, some going into the details of what dates they were abducted by UFOs — all dutifully logged by the operators. Hundreds called to denounce ex-spouses, neighbors, and business rivals whom they suspected of being in the country illegally.

A much smaller number called to request information about the immigration status or the custody status of alleged criminals who are undocumented immigrants — the original purpose of the toll-free hotline.

It's more of the same stuff (inadvertently) reported by ICE when it moved an unredacted spreadsheet of call center info to an unprotected space on its document server. And it's more of the same petty misuse of government resources -- both by people trying to deputize ICE to fix their personal problems and prank callers seeking to derail the office's limited usefulness.

What can't be found anywhere in this report [PDF] is a justification for its ongoing existence. $1 million a year was supposed to buy the administration a whole lot of anti-immigrant narrative. Even in terms of this disingenuous effort, it has failed. But it goes beyond that. Even if you cede the argument that hardline immigration enforcement is necessary for the health and the security of this nation, the lack of actionable info makes it a waste of time and money.

[T]he office's first "quarterly report," released just over a week ago, 15 months after the office was officially launched and covering April through September of last year, provides no information on how many of the more than 4,000 calls it received involved crimes by undocumented immigrants. Nor does it say much about the “effects of victimization by criminal aliens” who, in the words of the memo that announced its establishment, "routinely victimize Americans and other legal residents.”

More than half the calls have nothing to do with immigrants, immigration enforcement, or reports of illegal activity. Sure, lots of this can be chalked up to prank callers, but many of these calls are also of the "I saw a Mexican in my neighborhood" variety. It's a vehicle for petty vindictiveness, which adds nothing to the understanding of the supposed immigration "problem," nor aids in the apprehension of actual dangerous criminals.

The report data shows 972 calls reporting crimes, but the underlying data shows many of these calls were reporting nothing more than perceived illegality related to citizenship.

[M]ore than one in five users used it as a tip line to report people they suspected of being in the country illegally — which the office is not supposed to handle, and has to refer to ICE’s tip line. Call logs show that the bulk of their allegations — marriage fraud, faking signatures, employing undocumented workers — was a far cry from the violent crimes the president cites when he talks about “criminal aliens.”

The decision to give ICE its own "see something, say something" hotline makes no sense. The DHS's hotline -- tied to its multiple "Fusion Center" boondoggles -- has resulted in little more than an expanding collection of non-actionable anecdotes from citizens who treat these call centers as a hotline for the redress of personal grievances where they can turn in neighbors, in-laws, their kids' friends, the sketchy-looking guy at the mall, etc. for simply existing. The fuel being thrown on the rhetorical fire by this administration has still failed to coalesce into a data-driven narrative about dangerous immigrants, but it's not for a lack of trying.

Filed Under: ice, immigrants, reporting, voice

ICE Demands Journalists 'Return' Snitch Hotline Data It Left Exposed For Three Days After Being Notified

from the people-are-awful,-and-ICE-is-no-better dept

Daniel Rivero and Brendan O'Connor of Splinter recently acquired documents pertaining to ICE's snitch program -- a "see something, say something" but for suspected undocumented aliens. What's contained in these documents is nasty, petty abuse of a crime victim hotline by Americans who don't mind turning the government into their own personal army.

This is part of new program started by the Trump Administration -- one presumably meant to pump up numbers for its weekly "Two Minutes Hate" reports, which document the criminal acts of people roaming the county without the proper papers.

Splinter didn't find much evidence backing up the administration's fervent belief that "undocumented" equals "hardened criminal." What it did find was Americans using the VOICE tip line to engage in a low-level variant on SWATting: sending ICE to round up people they just don't like.

In April, the Trump Administration launched what it called the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) hotline, with a stated mission to “provide proactive, timely, adequate, and professional services to victims of crimes committed by removable aliens.” But internal logs of calls to VOICE obtained by Splinter show that hundreds of Americans seized on the hotline to lodge secret accusations against acquaintances, neighbors, or even their own family members, often to advance petty personal grievances.

[...]

Together, the logs are a grim running diary of a country where people eagerly report their fellow residents to the authorities, or seek to bring the power of the immigration police to bear on family disputes.

One man called to report his stepson, who he didn't like parking near his house. Another caller reported some in-laws. One claimed his ex-wife was undocumented. This is the sort of "intelligence" being gathered by the VOICE program. Unbelievably, those reports may be some of the better ones.

In the first two weeks of the program, from April 26 to May 10, the logs show that the call center handled 1,940 calls from across the country. Most were pranks, or in the bureaucratic words of the record keepers, “concerned citizens,” who unleashed streams of profanity or talked about green aliens until the operator hung up.

ICE should have expected this. While the tip line was supposed to be used to find assistance for victims of criminal acts by undocumented immigrants, it became a clearinghouse for BS complaints from "tipsters" hoping to have the government solve their personal problems.

But there's more to this story than the low-grade ugliness of certain Americans. ICE somehow managed to expose a whole lot of personal data while compiling the spreadsheets it turned over to Splinter. The information left out in the open contained details about callers and who those callers were reporting.

[A]fter conducting Google searches for some data in that spreadsheet, including local police report numbers provided by callers, we were able to find a second spreadsheet, covering April to mid-August, hosted on the ICE web site. That spreadsheet appears to have been partially redacted to prepare it for release under the FOIA, but two columns containing intimate personal details—names, cell phone numbers, alleged crimes, addresses, and Social Security numbers—of both callers and the alleged undocumented immigrants they were calling about remained completely unredacted and publicly available. In several cases, the details would make it possible for people to figure out who informed on them.

Why ICE moved a work-in-progress document into a publicly-accessible space is something ICE has yet to explain. The agency has refused to directly respond to queries about the exposed spreadsheet. Nor was it particularly interested in ensuring this personal data remained out of the public's hands. Splinter gave ICE three days' notice before publishing, but the document wasn't removed until several hours after the Splinter article went live.

ICE's official response has been overkill. It took its entire FOIA document library offline on October 4th. As of October 9th, it is still down. Ridiculously, ICE is now demanding Splinter "return" the partially-redacted spreadsheet the agency left exposed online.

On Wednesday, an ICE lawyer sent a letter to Jonathan Schwartz, the chief legal and corporate affairs officer of Splinter’s parent company Univision, demanding that we destroy or return the spreadsheet. The letter, which was sent to Schwartz via UPS as well as emailed to the two Splinter reporters who wrote the story, is the first official acknowledgement that ICE had accidentally published private and potentially dangerous information on its web site for anyone to download. ICE had previously declined to confirm or deny the breach.

I'm sure it's boilerplate, but the wording used suggests ICE wants Splinter to box up all the bits and send them back to ICE HQ. Even stupider, the letter warns Splinter of the consequences of exposing this information, as if it wasn't ICE that exposed the document in the first place.

Please note that any further use or disclosure of the information contained in these records could impede or interfere with law enforcement activities and violate the privacy rights and interests of the people whose information is contained in the records. Further, should you perpetuate the use of disclosure of any of this information, you may endanger the persons to whom the information pertains.

This sounds like ICE is hoping to blame Splinter for any fallout from the exposed data. But this is ICE's fault entirely. As is noted (again) in the follow-up post, Splinter informed ICE of the exposed data three days before publication. The spreadsheet wasn't removed until almost 8 hours after Splinter's post went live. The data has now been accessed by any number of people who won't be affected by ICE's very belated attempt to stuff Pandora's personal data back in the box.

And that brings us to one more salient point: if you're going to hand over personal info to the government, be aware it's repeatedly shown it can't be trusted to keep citizens' data protected. People who thought they were going to get away with turning in exes, stepkids, and in-laws now need to be worried about retaliation from those they snitched on. Others using the line for more legitimate reasons are in no better shape -- victims of crime exposed by the agency they turned to for help.

Filed Under: dhs, exposed data, hotline, ice, return data, voice

Al Jazeera Gives A 'Voice To The Voiceless' By Killing News Comments

from the enjoy-your-new-muzzle dept

We've noted time and time again how numerous websites have been killing news comments because they're too lazy and too cheap to cultivate an on-site community, and/or don't like having story errors pointed out in quite such a transparent, conspicuous location. Of course editors and publishers can never admit this is their real motivation, instead offering a rotating crop of disingenuous prattle about how they're muzzling their readers and shoving them over to Facebook because they're just so very into building relationships and are breathlessly-dedicated to improving conversation.

This week Al Jazeera joined the hottest trend in media, penning a missive over at Medium about how they're banning public news comments as part of their quest to... wait for it... give a voice to the voiceless:

The mission of Al Jazeera is to give a voice to the voiceless, and healthy discussion is an active part of this. When we first opened up comments on our website, we hoped that it would serve as a forum for thoughtful and intelligent debate that would allow our global audience to engage with each other. However, the comments section was hijacked by users hiding behind pseudonyms spewing vitriol, bigotry, racism and sectarianism. The possibility of having any form of debate was virtually non-existent.

Except that's simply not true. Numerous websites, including this one, have shown repeatedly it's possible to discuss complicated, divisive subjects without the metaphorical house burning down. Yes, it's true that when you don't moderate, show up, or give much of a damn about your comment system, it's quick to devolve into a cesspool of trolls and nincompoops. But the reality is that websites can't monetize quality discourse during budget meetings, so it's easier to just outsource all conversation to the homogeneous blather zone of Facebook, where listening to what your own customers are saying becomes somebody else's problem:

`Over time, we found social media to be the preferred platform for our audience to debate the issues that matter the most to them. We encourage our audience to continue to interact with us this way. We realise that this move will come as a disappointment to the members of our audience who did try and engage in thoughtful debate on our site. However, we will be working hard over the coming months to figure out how best to bring back debate to aljazeera.com. To continue the debate on social media, please share your thoughts with us on our Facebook page and get in touch via Twitter.

Again, does anything really give a "voice to the voiceless," foster quality conversation, or cultivate relationships quite like muzzling your customers, then shoving them toward a massive social media site where their thoughts, insights and contributions will get lost in a tsunami of prattle? It's clear that countless publishers really love the idea of reverting back to the era of "letters to the editor," when public feedback to your reporting could be carefully censored and repackaged as a genuine dialogue with your readership. But this line of thinking is a disservice to the quickly-evolving conversation the news has become.

I keep waiting for a news website to ban comments then candidly admit it was because they just didn't give much of a damn. Until then, the best we'll get are missives about how the best way to bring a voice to the voiceless is apparently with a good, swift kick in the ass.

Filed Under: comments, community, voice
Companies: al jazeera

New Tools Allow Voice Patterns To Be Cloned To Produce Realistic But Fake Sounds Of Anyone Saying Anything

from the shopped-images-are-so-yesterday dept

Fake images, often produced using sophisticated software like Photoshop or the GIMP, were around long before so-called "fake news" became an issue. They are part and parcel of the Internet's fast-moving creative culture, and a trap for anyone that passes on striking images without checking their provenance or plausibility. Until now, this kind of artful manipulation has been limited to the visual sphere. But a new generation of tools will soon allow entire voice patterns to be cloned from relatively small samples with increasing fidelity such that it can be hard to spot they are fake. For example, in November last year, the Verge wrote about Adobe's Project VoCo:

"When recording voiceovers, dialog, and narration, people would often like to change or insert a word or a few words due to either a mistake they made or simply because they would like to change part of the narrative," reads an official Adobe statement. "We have developed a technology called Project VoCo in which you can simply type in the word or words that you would like to change or insert into the voiceover. The algorithm does the rest and makes it sound like the original speaker said those words."

Since then, things have moved on apace. Last week, the Economist wrote about the French company CandyVoice:

Utter 160 or so French or English phrases into a phone app developed by CandyVoice, a new Parisian company, and the app's software will reassemble tiny slices of those sounds to enunciate, in a plausible simulacrum of your own dulcet tones, whatever typed words it is subsequently fed. In effect, the app has cloned your voice.

The Montreal company Lyrebird has a page full of fascinating demos of its own voice cloning technology, which requires even less in the way of samples:

Lyrebird will offer an API to copy the voice of anyone. It will need as little as one minute of audio recording of a speaker to compute a unique key defining her/his voice. This key will then allow to generate anything from its corresponding voice. The API will be robust enough to learn from noisy recordings. The following sample illustrates this feature, the samples are not cherry-picked.

Please note that those are artificial voices and they do not convey the opinions of Donald Trump, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

As Techdirt readers will have spotted, this technical development raises big ethical questions, articulated here by Lyrebird:

Voice recordings are currently considered as strong pieces of evidence in our societies and in particular in jurisdictions of many countries. Our technology questions the validity of such evidence as it allows to easily manipulate audio recordings. This could potentially have dangerous consequences such as misleading diplomats, fraud and more generally any other problem caused by stealing the identity of someone else.

The Economist quantifies the problem. According to its article, voice-biometrics software similar to the kind deployed by many banks to block unauthorized access to accounts was fooled 80% of the time in tests using the new technology. Humans didn't do much better, only spotting that a voice had been cloned 50% of the time. And remember, these figures are for today's technologies. As algorithms improve, and Moore's Law kicks in, it's not unreasonable to think that it will become almost impossible to tell by ear whether the voice you hear is the real thing, or a version generated using the latest cloning technology.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: cloning voice, voice, voice patterns

DailyDirt: Computers To Talk For Us

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Computers help people communicate all the time, but they can be really helpful for people who have no voice at all (eg. Stephen Hawking). Synthetic speech technologies are getting better -- with better algorithms to generate more human-like speech and cloud-based systems that allow processor-intensive software to run on handheld devices. Here are just a few examples of some computer-created voices.

• Most people usually think of synthetic speech software sounding like a HAL9000 or Gene Roddenberry's wife, so there's been a notable dearth of synthetic kid's voices. Until now. Meet Harry and Rosie -- a couple text-to-speech voices that sound like British children. [url]
• The Blizzard Challenge is an annual competition for taking a limited speech database and building a synthetic voice from it in order to learn more about how algorithms can be improved for speech synthesis. Someday, these results will actually make some Mission Impossible tricks seem plausible. [url]
• A new smartphone app can translate spoken words in real time from Japanese to English (or Mandarin or Korean) and vice versa. This app doesn't do much for grammar, but it can get across some meaning even though it's not perfect. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: asr, blizzard challenge, speech synthesis, stephen hawking, text-to-speech, translation, voice

Patents Threaten To Silence A Little Girl, Literally

from the profit-motives dept

Slashdot points us to a sad story from blogger Dana Nieder, providing yet more evidence of how patent monopolies can hold back innovation and do very real damage to people's lives in the process—and how people are interested in progress, not patents. As Dana says in her post, she understandably doesn't give a damn about legal details when something as important as her daughter's ability to communicate is at stake:

My daughter, Maya, will turn four in May and she can’t speak. The only word that she can consistently say with 100% clarity is “done”—which, while helpful, isn’t really enough to functionally communicate. When Maya was two and a half we introduced her to the iPad, and we’ve danced with AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) ever since. We experimented with a few communication apps, but nothing was a perfect fit. After an extensive search for the perfect app, we found it: Speak for Yourself. Simple and brilliant, we saw that it had the potential to serve Maya into adulthood, but was also simple enough for her to start using immediately.

And she liked it. And it worked. And I started to have little flashes of the future, in which she could rapidly tap out phrases and ideas and tell me more and more of the secret thoughts that fill her head—the ones that I’m hungry to hear and she’s dying to share but her uncooperative mouth just can’t get out.

My kid is learning how to “talk.” It’s breathtaking.

But now Speak for Yourself in under fire, and from a surprising (to an AAC outsider) or not-so-surprising (to an AAC insider) source. They’re being sued by Semantic Compaction Systems and Prentke Romich Company, big names in the AAC world. SCS and PRC allege that Speak for Yourself is infringing on their patents. I’m going to be honest: I don’t know about patents and infringement, and I’m not going to get into debates about the legal merits of the case, because that’s a conversation in which I would quickly drown.

Dana explains that her defense of the app isn't arbitrary. Before discovering Speak For Yourself, she explored dedicated speech devices from the big AAC companies, including Prentke Romich. None of their options were suited to her daughter, and they all carried hefty price tags—as in $7,000+ hefty. She began asking around to see if PRC or any of the other big companies were planning on releasing an iPad app, and learned that although many customers were clamoring for one, the companies had no intention of meeting their demands. They didn't want an affordable option out there reducing sales of their expensive systems.

Whenever the incumbents of any industry are ignoring the demands of their customers, you can bet that someone else is paying attention. In this case, it was speech-language pathologists Heidi LoStracco and Renee Collender, the pair behind Speak For Yourself. The app's website explains how it came about:

Mrs. LoStracco and Mrs. Collender began to see a shift in the field when the iPad was released. Mrs. Collender says, "Districts and parents were buying an iPad with an 'AAC' app on it and saying, 'Make this work.' We would try to reprogram the applications with the language that the children needed, but it took forever and it was never really 'right.'" Heidi and Renee say that it got to the point that someone was asking them about iPad applications for AAC every day, and they decided that they needed a better answer. Heidi says, "We would tell them, there's not really an effective AAC app out there yet, but when there, is, we'll be the first to tell you about it.” Then we started thinking that we could create something that followed motor learning principles and gave individuals access to the language they needed to communicate effectively, and that's when we designed Speak for Yourself." Renee says, "We've always believed that communication is a basic human right, and the only AAC pre-requisite skill that a nonverbal person needs is a pulse."

Dana points out that PRC's mission statement begins "We Believe Everyone Deserves A Voice" and that their refusal to create an affordable iPad app, and now their attempts to crush a competitor who did, clearly runs counter to that mission. For her, that's basically where the discussion ends: a company is trying to take away the only thing that has been able to give her daughter a voice, and she couldn't care less whether or not they have the legal right to do so.

It's hard not to sympathize with her position, even though the lawsuit and the patent in question, #5,920,303, both appear to be solid. As Dana's story gains traction, we can only hope that it will increase social pressure on PRC and possibly shame them into allowing Speak For Yourself to survive by offering them an affordable license, or at least releasing their own iPad app at a similar price point—but as we've seen with pharmaceutical companies, the holders of life-saving and life-changing patents often don't seem too bothered about withholding them no matter what it does to their public image.

Ultimately, this is more evidence that in today's world of rapid innovation, tech monopolies are increasingly untenable. Big companies that have dominated niche markets for years—and have long since paid off their R&D costs by charging monopoly rates—are being disrupted by nimbler competitors. As we've seen with media and software piracy, this happens whether or not the competitors are "legitimate" under intellectual property law. Can there be any doubt that, if Speak For Yourself is shut down and the app eliminated, Dana will seek out a way to keep it running on her daughter's iPad? Since her story is running on Slashdot, she's already received comments with advice on how to do so, and suggestions that she contact Speak For Yourself and convince them to release their source code on github. At the moment, it looks like she just plans on turning off all connectivity on the iPad so that it will no longer sync and the app will remain even if it is removed from the iTunes store. Can anyone blame her? The simple fact is that markets always eventually find a way to meet demands—and if companies (especially those in industries that seriously affect people's lives) use their intellectual property to block powerful market forces, that control will eventually be wrested from them, one way or another.

Filed Under: augmentative and alternative communication, communications, ipad, patents, speak for yourself, voice
Companies: prentke romich company, semantic compaction systems

Chicago Tribune Columnist: Hey You People Online With Opinions... Get Off My Lawn!

from the that-bad,-huh? dept

Reader Cannen alerts us to yet another column by yet another old school newspaper guy whining about the fact that "the people" now have the ability to have their voices heard. What's funny is that his own column seems to contradict his statements.

Don't get me wrong. I am also an outraged narcissist, but I had to work six-hour shifts in Bakersfield, Calif., to earn my stripes as a communicator. Nowadays, having a Twitter page qualifies a person to give commentary on CNN. I am not interested in the take of @stinky on the Fort Hood shootings or any other current events. I am watching CNN because I expect them to gather the news, not act as a clearinghouse for any bonehead with a computer, a cable modem and a half-baked opinion.

Ah yes, so because today it's easier for people to have a voice, it's bad. Yes, and you used to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow and television was called radio and had no pictures. But the world improves and progress comes along and gives more people a voice and that's bad how exactly?

With the advent of Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging and texting, now almost any fool can set up his or her broadcast hub. Then the likes of CNN, Fox News, Oprah and even the Tribune play right into their hands, giving them instant access to the rest of the world. I beseech the online editors at this paper to turn off the "comments" after each article. If people have opinions about something that they've just read, let them write a letter to the editor.

Yes, but "any fool" doesn't get quite the attention as, say, a fool who blasts the fact that people have a voice in a major national newspaper, right? Who cares that anyone can say what they want. Most people don't see those complaints. You call it a "broadcast hub" but most people's Twitter accounts don't have very many followers. That's not the issue at all. The actual complaint seems to be that CNN and Fox and others have elevated a few of these folks (a tiny percentage of the overall population using these tools), and you don't like it because.... what, exactly? Because they compete with you in being a public "fool"?

Most of my career has been spent in radio, where call-in comments are somewhat encouraged. The main difference is that we can hang up on people.

Ok, let me get this straight. Before you were complaining that CNN and Fox were putting these people on their shows, but then you say at least on radio you could "hang up on people." Do you not sense the contradiction? CNN and Fox can just as easily "hang up" on these people too. So what's the difference?

Basically, it sounds like the guy is pissed off that he's no longer the only person with an opinion getting heard. But, of course, he's missing the point in blaming the new technology. Yes, lots of people have a voice, but most still don't get heard very far. The folks who are getting on TV or are making their voices heard are because they're saying something that resonates, whether it's stupid or not. And, no, maybe they didn't have to practice being a public moron in some small town first, but is that really a necessity?

Filed Under: opinions, people, social media, voice

Recognizing That Voice Is Just Data (Or How Google Voice Could Be Disruptive)

from the voice-is-data-too dept

Karl Bode, over at Broadband Reports, wrote up a great article a little while back about why Google Voice was more disruptive than anyone (especially the telcos) were willing to give it credit for being. The key underlying point: voice is just a form of data. Once you realize that, you realize that no one needs to be tied to any telco's own dialing system. Your mobile phone service provider really could just be a dumb pipe.

For years, I've always felt that the calls for "triple play" or "quadruple play" was incredibly misleading. All of the different "plays" (voice, video, data) were actually all just data. And when things are all just data, and its on an open network, then anyone can provide the services on top of that data. The telcos recognize this, somewhat -- which is why they've tried to block out others from offering certain telco services (it's why Google Voice was blocked on the iPhone), but it could be really game changing. Imagine if you could just buy a mobile phone that had no calling plan at all -- but it was all in the software? You could even use different dialers (with different numbers?) depending on what made the most sense or was cheapest.

The telcos hate thinking of themselves as dumb pipes, but there's something to be said for focusing on the pipes and making them as strong as possible, while letting everyone else innovate at the service level, and just selling good data plans. The more others innovate, the more valuable those data connections become.

Filed Under: data, disruptive, google voice, voice

Congressional Reps Rewrite AT&T's Google Voice Complaint, And Send It To The FCC

from the at-least-try-to-be-creative dept

A few weeks back, we noted how AT&T was trying to claim that Google violated the very net neutrality rules the search giant is pushing for by blocking calls on Google Voice to various free conference service lines. However, as we explained at the time, the issues are totally different. However, from AT&T's standpoint, they get to try to kill two birds with one stone. First, AT&T would love to kill the regulatory arbitrage situation that allows small rural telcos to charge incoming call providers ridiculous connection fees. So, complaining about Google Voice draws more attention to that issue. Separately, it gets net neutrality questions moved away from AT&T and onto Google, which AT&T generally dislikes.

Still, it's hard not to be even more cynical when a bunch of politicians suddenly pick up interest in this issue, and ask the FCC to investigate Google using language that appears quite similar to the letter AT&T sent to the FCC. As Broadband Reports notes in that last link, it sure looks like AT&T got a bunch of friendly politicians to suddenly express outrage over something most of them didn't understand -- and they just had to rewrite the letter AT&T had already used. It's as if these companies and politicians don't even care how blatant it is that the lobbyists actually set the agenda.

Filed Under: arbitrage, congress, google voice, lobbying, voice
Companies: at&t, google