[LINK] Infoworld discovers HDMI downsides, only two years late

[Richard Chirgwin]

Saliya Wimalaratne wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 06:24:14PM +1000, Richard Chirgwin wrote:
>   
>> There's nothing like "news to me" syndrome:
>> http://weblog.infoworld.com/yager/archives/2008/06/ahead_of_the_cu_7.html
>>     
>
> No offence to Tom, but his assumption (and it can only be that) that
> P2P traffic is somehow outweighed by "VOIP, streaming news, advertising 
> and entertainment, photo galleries, remote PC access, Usenet repositories, 
> denial of service attacks, and spam" is just plain wrong.
>   
But to be fair, he didn't say exactly that. Quote:
> We should take as a warning sign of descent down the slippery slope 
> toward the loss of Internet freedoms Internet providers' arbitrary 
> blocking and throttling of BitTorrent traffic. The rationale points to 
> the bandwidth wasted by BitTorrent. That doesn't ring true. There are 
> other flavors of traffic such as VOIP, streaming news, advertising and 
> entertainment, photo galleries, remote PC access, Usenet repositories, 
> denial of service attacks, and spam that consume beastly amounts of 
> bandwidth, but somehow none of these warrants detection and control at 
> the provider's end of the pipe. It makes one wonder, what's so special 
> about BitTorrent that it cries out to be controlled in such a radical 
> manner?
He didn't say that these outweigh BT, but that they are big bandwidth 
consumers that providers aren't threatening to throttle ...
> Providers take a special interest in P2P traffic simply because it changes
> their business model due to the way it changes resource consumption. A
> service provider can make an educated guess about P2P usage _without_
> analysing traffic (i.e. just from byte counters over time).
>
> Not because they're interested in DRM. 
>   
No argument there.
> FWIW; if I bought a device (display, or STB) that was incompatible with
> my existing hardware because of HDCP I'd be saying it wasn't fit-for-purpose
> and demanding a refund. 
>   
Here, the question is whether your demand would be met. I personally 
think there's a case for bringing the industry's cartel-like behaviour 
to the attention of the ACCC, but is there a complaint that would stand up?

But of course, I remain a digital TV sceptic. The digital move was at 
least partly driven by the realisation that digital could carry DRM with 
it (from the industry's point of view, not the government's).

RC
> Regards,
>
> Saliya
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