FortySouth

Google has partnered with Open Technology Institute, PlanetLab Consortium and other academic researchers to release tools designed for measuring the performance of your internet connection, developed under the Measurement Lab.

• Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT) – measures your broadband speeds and identifies common network problems
• Glasnost – tests if your ISP is throttling or blocking BitTorrent traffic
• Network Path and Application Diagnosis (NPAD) – diagnoses some of the common problems effecting the last network mile and end-users’ systems
• DiffProbe (coming soon) – tests to see if your ISP is prioritizing or degrading certain traffic (traffic shaping)
• NANO (coming soon) – attempts to detect whether an ISP is degrading the performance of a certain subset of users, applications, or destinations

In the US, Comcast has in the past run into problems with the FCC for content discrimination, particularly of P2P streams. Cox is also not coy about it traffic shaping policies.

These tools are essential to helping you figure out if you are getting the internet service from your provider that you paid for.

Be the change you want to see in the world – Mahatma Gandhi

Congratulations, President Obama!

Leaders in business and government should definitely take a cue from this.

From Hulu:

[snip]

This note, however, is not about the fact that episodes of ”It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” were taken down. Rather, this note is to communicate to our users that we screwed up royally with regards to _how_ we handled this specific content removal and to apologize for our lack of strong execution. We gave effectively no notice to our users that these ”Sunny” episodes would be coming off the service. We handled this in precisely the opposite way that we should have. We believe that our users deserve the decency of a reasonable warning before content is taken down from the Hulu service. Please accept our apologies.

[snip]

Given the very reasonable user feedback that we have received on this topic (we read every twitter, email and post), we have just re-posted all of the episodes that we had previously removed.

[snip]

The team at Hulu is doing our best to make lemonade out of lemons on this one, but it’s not easy given how poorly we executed here. Please know that we will do our best to learn from this mistake such that the Hulu user experience benefits in other ways down the road.

Sometimes that’s just the best response.