The Federal Communications Commission (FCC)net neutrality rulings of 2015 are under attack from – surprise, surprise! – Ajit Pai, the former attorney for Verizon and new FCC chairman. Mr. Pai calls the rollback of Title II regulations “Restoring Internet Freedom”. It’s clear Mr. Pai has read and understood his Orwell. Part of the niceties involved in rolling back the Internet Service Provider (ISP) common carrier regulations of Title II that Mr. Pai and his Republican allies in Congress and the White House want to have happen are invitations for public comment on the FCC website. It turns out, however, that when the FCC isn’t complaining about John Oliver inciting his viewers to inundate the FCC website with comments in support of Title II, they are ignoring the questionable origin of comments against Title II from citizens whose identity may have been hijacked by the very companies they pay for monthly internet service, companies like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T.
Astroturfing is nothing new in politics, but to ignore the obvious signs of astroturfing in a letter writing or email campaign to government regulators or congresspeople signifies a set agenda that is not to be swayed by emails or letters of varying opinions. The fix is in, in other words. It’s clear from FCC Chairman Pai’s previous public comments what his opinion is on Title II and net neutrality, and now that the FCC board has a Republican majority, his opinion is likely to become policy. It is hypocrisy then for the FCC to invite public comment and ignore for whatever reason the comments it’s board doesn’t want to hear, even though they are genuine, while accepting the clearly astroturfed comments originating from industry insiders.
Ajit V. Pai, new Chairman of the FCC.
Lewis Black in a concert in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, after the 2008 financial meltdown, comments on capitalism, greed, and how the United States government handled the crisis. In the end, there were no repercussions to the wealthy for the damage they inflicted on the working and middle class people who pay their way year after year. Warning: foul language.
Chairman Pai has remarked that in the 90 day public comment process, the FCC will not ” rely on hyberbolic statements about the end of the internet as we know it, and 140-character argle-bargle, but rather on the data.” Presumably the FCC chairman will then be ignoring the considerable amount of 140 character argle-bargle generated by his boss, the Argle-Bargler-in-Chief. Would that it were so. The reality is that the new FCC Chairman and the new President and the new Republican Congress appear to be in perfect agreement on rolling back Title II common carrier regulations for ISPs, and there’s little that ordinary citizens can do to stop them. Try John Oliver’s solution or the one from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and good luck to you, but in the future pay attention at the ballot box once every two to four years, and every day remember not to buy into the “fruit from your tree” delusion.
― Techly
In trying to specifically target their advertisements and therefore get a higher return per ad, companies like to know as much as possible about the consumer, and lately some of them have resorted to using ultrasonic beacons embedded in their ads. Say you are at your desktop computer reading a news story from the online version of your local newspaper, and nearby on your desk is your smartphone, which is on but currently idle, or so you would assume. Unknown to you, one of the ads on the webpage you are looking at emits an ultrasonic beacon lasting about 5 seconds through your computer’s speakers. Most likely also unknown to you (because like most people you probably don’t bother to read all the permissions you grant an application when you install it), one or more of the applications on your smartphone pick up that ultrasonic beacon through the phone’s microphone and, through various commercial agreements also done without your knowledge, relays the packet of information encapsulated in the beacon, along with information contributed from the smartphone application, back to the advertiser on the webpage as well as to anyone else who has an interest in information about you.
The more advertisers know about you, the better, as far as they are concerned. The problem here is how sneaky they are being about collecting information. It is even possible for advertisers to embed ultrasonic beacons in television advertisements, though so far there is no proof any of them have done that. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which regulates deceptive advertising practices, nonetheless recently warned 12 smartphone application developers about deceptively implying they were not monitoring users’ television viewing habits when in fact they were capable of doing so. Researchers recently discovered that as many as 234 Android applications are capable of using beacon technology. Unfortunately, it appears the FTC is reluctant to force the developers to divulge this capability to Android smartphone users. There is even less information available from Apple application developers.
The Statue of Liberty, also known as a beacon of freedom, on Liberty Island in New York Harbor; photo by William Warby.
This cross-device tracking, as it is known, is as invasive and sneaky as it gets, yet there seems to be little political will to either outlaw it or regulate it. A warning letter? That’s all? In the 1950s and 60s there was a public outcry about subliminal messages in print and television advertising. While the effectiveness of subliminal advertising has always been dubious, people were nevertheless upset they were being manipulated in such a sneaky, underhanded way. Because of the public outcry, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was moved to state it would revoke the license of any broadcaster who used subliminal messages in programming or advertising, and the FTC stated that it would prosecute advertisers under Sections 5 and 12 of the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, which governs deceptive practices.
Given the remarkable similarity of ultrasonic beacons in electronic devices to subliminal messaging, in practice if not in usage, it’s difficult to understand why the FCC and FTC have not come down harder on the commercial use of this technology. The practice is the same because both seek to take advantage of consumers without their knowledge, and certainly not with their explicit approval; the usage is different because subliminal advertisers cast a wide net to boost sales, while companies employing beacons gather information about users in order to more specifically target them, like fish in a barrel. Until federal regulators take stronger action against the use of ultrasonic beacons, people upset by the practice will apparently have to rely on the more acute hearing of their dogs to alert them.
― Techly
His Master’s Voice, an 1898 painting by English artist Francis Barraud (1856-1924) of his brother’s dog, Nipper. The Victor Talking Machine Company began using the painting in 1900, and in 1929 the painting became the symbol of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), aka RCA Victor.
“When you take the UNCF model that, what a waste it is to lose one’s mind, or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.”
― Vice President Dan Quayle, speaking at a luncheon for the United Negro College Fund on May 9, 1989, mangling the Fund’s slogan “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”
Is the internet making us dumber? stupider? how about less bright? Listicles like this one could be one reason why we might not be that smart anymore. Maybe they’ve helped make us smarter than we used to be. Did listicles ever exist outside the internet, meaning a long, long time ago? Maybe in magazines, most of which were not meant for serious people, the way newspapers were, way back when.
Mel Brooks shows us an alternative past involving lists and tablets in his 1981 movie History of the World – Part 1.
Anyway, enough history. Here we go ―
Before the internet, you needed to know and remember stuff, because you couldn’t just look it up online at the drop of a hat. You maybe could find out from a book, if you knew where to find one.
Because you can look up practically anything now on the internet, some people think it’s making us smarter, especially about what our favorite celebrities have been up to lately.
Without the internet, we couldn’t check on what our friends had for dinner and all the cool places they’ve been out to eat, unless we called them, which we don’t want to bother with, just text. Everything would have to be texts, which is probably okay.
Spending lots of time playing computer games is good because it trains you for a good job with the military remotely piloting drones to drop bombs on terrorists over in their country from an undisclosed location somewhere else, and that’s really smart because otherwise they’d be over here blowing themselves up.
Knowing a lot of internet and computer stuff is also a smart way to get a job with the National Security Agency (NSA) looking into everybody’s business.
There’s no need to develop social skills when there are social media networks like Facebook and Twitter around.
The internet is also good for getting things off your chest by commenting online, and you don’t have to worry about being nice about it, because on the internet no one knows who you are, unless they’re with the NSA.
It used to be that before the internet you could be bored a lot. Now with smartphones and tablets that you always have with you, you don’t ever have to be bored and think about stuff, because you can do other things online, like Facebook or Twitter again.
According to Hebb’s Law, which you can look up online, when your brain spends a lot of time doing something, it gets smarter doing that thing. Even though the brain is mostly fat, it’s like a muscle that way.
Your brain is wired just like the internet. Well, actually, since your brain was here first, especially if you were born a generation or more ago, the internet is wired like your brain. Not that any central authority planned it that way, it just happened. If you’re an old person, that’s probably why you might not understand everything about the internet, because you have to think about it, instead of being wired up ready to go from early on.
Mike Judge shows us a possible future in his 2006 movie Idiocracy. Okay, it might be more than just a possible future and might be closer to now than is comfortable. Warning: foul language.
Okay, that pretty much wraps it up. It was fun. Now you know the internet isn’t necessarily making us any dumber, just different, but don’t think about it too hard or your brain’ll seize up and crash like you drank something really cold really fast. You can’t email Microsoft tech support about that.
― Techly
There are Easter eggs for baskets and Easter eggs for computers, and for fun both types are hidden, the former only for the spring holiday, and the latter at any time of year.
Easter eggs in the Czech Republic; photo by Karakal.
Still Life with Robin’s Nest, an 1863 oil painting by Fidelia Bridges (1834-1923).
Oddly enough, the computer type of Easter egg is a little closer to nature in that, like the Robin’s nest of eggs concealed among the branches of trees, it is more subtle than the often highly decorated traditional Easter egg.
Have fun with both, and have a Happy Easter!
― Techly
[simple_tooltip content=”We’re not Easter eggs!”]
[/simple_tooltip] American Robin eggs in nest; photo by Laslovarga.
Last week the United States Congress voted to repeal new Federal Communications Commission rules which would have required that internet service providers (ISPs) notify their customers of the data they collect on them for their own commercial purposes unrelated to providing the service, and that customers had to specifically opt-in to the practice. The FCC voted 3 to 2 in favor of the new rules in October 2016, and they would have gone into effect on March 2 of this year had the FCC not stayed it on March 1 under new chairman Ajit Pai. Outgoing FCC chairman Tom Wheeler pushed for the new rules in order to spell out consumer privacy protections in relationship to ISPs, something which he and two of the other commissioners felt was inadequately addressed in Section 222 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
The Telecommunications Act goes back to 1934, when the original law went into effect creating the FCC and granting it the authority to regulate telecommunications companies as common carriers, which is to say the same as utilities. Section 222 of that law pertained to how the carriers could use their customers’ personal information, and it required them to keep the information confidential except as required by law or by consent of the customer. Congress has amended the Act periodically to reflect changes in technology, with the last major revision in 1996.
Common carrier or not is the logical puzzle in question. Substitute “Section 222” for Catch-22 to relish the flavor of the ISP regulatory mess.
Since the advent of widespread consumer internet service in the 1990s, there has been a regulatory battle over whether ISPs should be considered common carriers, and thus subject to oversight by the FCC under the Telecommunications Act. Since some providers, such as AT&T and Verizon, were also telephone companies, they were already partially subject to FCC oversight. It wasn’t until early 2015 with the FCC’s Open Internet Rules that all ISPs were brought under the same set of regulations as common carriers and bound by the consumer privacy protections of Section 222.
Previously the only regulatory oversight of some ISPs on behalf of consumer privacy came from the Federal Trade Commission, and it was limited to holding the companies accountable to the terms of their own privacy policies. The FTC does not regulate consumer privacy regarding the actions of common carriers. It does regulate consumer privacy regarding the actions of so-called edge providers that offer services by voluntary subscription, like Facebook, and of websites in general, but again only by holding them to their own privacy policies, as invasive as they may be. Since the implementation of the FCC’s Open Internet Rules in 2015, all ISPs must adhere to the more restrictive regulations applied to common carriers.
The 1970 film adaptation of Joseph Heller’s brilliant Catch-22 lays out a problem in logic. It does not attempt to explicate it, because that would be impossible and probably unhealthy.
Still, Chairman Wheeler and others felt that the language of Section 222 did not go far enough in spelling out consumer privacy protection in the internet age. Originally written in 1934 when the capacity of a common carrier to sweep up vast amounts of customer data was not even a pipe dream, and inadequately addressed in the major 1996 revision of the law, Section 222 did not explicitly deny ISPs the ability to sell customer data because the ISPs could interpret “with the approval of the customer” in Section (c)(1) to mean they could consider customers opted-in unless they stated otherwise. Being passive and silent rather than active and vocal has always been considered assent or approval, especially by sneaky people with an agenda, and it is a prevalent practice on the internet. That is a trick of the interactive internet age that no one foresaw in 1934, and apparently not even in 1996. In 2002, Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota introduced a bill which would have changed “the approval of the customer” to “the affirmative written consent of the customer.” The bill went nowhere.
Without legislation from Congress to clarify things in the new regulatory environment, Chairman Wheeler felt obliged to take up the slack by adopting Broadband Consumer Privacy Rules in October 2106. As already noted, the vote was 3 to 2. The 3 ayes came from Chairman Wheeler and the two other Democrats on the Commission board. The 2 nays came from the Republicans on the board, including Ajit Pai, now the new Chairman. When the new Republican Congress and President came to Washington, Chairman Pai stayed the new Privacy Rules before they could take effect, and Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona introduced a bill to repeal the Rules and also prevent the FCC from making similar rules in the future.
That’s an android in the center, but it could just as well be you, an internet service customer, caught between government regulators and telecommunications providers.
The rest is history. We are returning to the regulatory environment of the past year and a half after the FCC ruled all ISPs were common carriers, but before it adopted new Privacy Rules to clarify the difference between “approval” and “consent” of customers. Now ISPs, though they are common carriers, have a gray area to navigate in Section 222 of the Telecommunications Act, and their claim that they will still be regulated by the FTC is disingenuous at best, considering the FTC does not regulate common carriers. It should be understandable now why ISPs lobbied to repeal the new Privacy Rules. Citing their own privacy policies in which they claim they never have and never will sell customer data, and which had been enforced by the FTC (they glide over the part about FTC regulation no longer applying to them as common carriers), they claimed the FCC was unnecessarily complicating the regulatory environment. They say they shouldn’t be held to stricter privacy standards than companies like Google and Facebook, thereby putting them at a competitive disadvantage. Except for the part about competitive disadvantage not being applicable to monopolistic utilities that are regulated in the public interest, that’s a fair point. Instead of raising the privacy bar for everyone, however, they and their mostly Republican allies in Congress and in the new FCC prefer to lower the bar, serving corporate interests instead of consumers. Trust us, they say. Uh-huh.
― Techly
So when they continued asking him, he lifted himself up and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him be the first to cast a stone at her.
― John 8:7 (Jubilee Bible 2000)
In any discussion of government surveillance, such as has been revealed by the recent WikiLeaks “Vault 7” release of CIA documents, there are some folks who are apt to pipe up with “Let the government spy on me – I have nothing to hide.” By that they presumably mean for their listeners to understand they are not terrorists, criminals, or perverts, and to drive home their utter lack of impure intentions they will often add a feebly humorous aside about how government agents would fall asleep from the boredom of eavesdropping on them. How reassuring to learn that government flouting of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution is okay because there are some among us who are without sin! Whether these folks realize it or not, their smug pronouncement comes out of them because in their lives the presumption of innocence has always been a given, and therefore government agents would have no interest in their good citizen behavior. It doesn’t seem to occur to them there are others in our culture who, through no fault of their own, are presumed guilty, and there are still others who are just as law abiding as the “nothing to hide” crowd, but may be concerned about hackers and thieves accessing their data, or simply want to be left alone and feel that their affairs are their own and should not be the concern of the government. We can use locks on our doors not only to keep out criminals after all, but nosy neighbors and government snoops as well.
Jesus and the Adulteress; drawing by Rembrandt.
The digital age has changed the game somewhat by introducing new channels of communication and cheap storage for vast quantities of information. The Fourth and Fifth Amendments are no less valid, however, in stating that citizens should be secure in their “effects”; that government officials need warrants; that citizens cannot be compelled to testify against themselves; and that government shall follow due process of law in proceedings against any citizen. Naturally the Founding Fathers did not foresee the age of computers, smartphones, and the internet. They didn’t need to foresee those things, because in looking back on thousands of years of ancient Roman and Greek law and English common law, they were able to extract valid principles which were applicable to the general human condition whatever the particulars of any one era might be. Since their time, we have moved from postal mail and personal messenger to phone calls and telegrams, and now to blog posts and email. Government snooping amounts to the same thing whatever the means of communication, and it is protection from the ends that the Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution.
That much should be obvious, yet the erosion of the Bill of Rights continues bit by bit, often with the excuse that technology has wrought different contingencies in our modern era. There are no different contingencies – what has changed is that the state of emergency appears now to be permanent because it suits the agenda of powerful interests in the military-industrial complex. In the past, the United States government trampled rights for various reasons which seemed sensible to many at the time, from the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, to the Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920, to the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II. Always the advocates of such policies invoked a state of emergency to justify the abuse of state power, but eventually calmer heads and changing circumstances would prevail and the balance would be corrected.
A segment of Eisenhower’s January 17, 1961 farewell address, with commentary.
As long as there are enablers of government snooping who complacently and self-righteously announce to everyone within earshot that they “have nothing to hide,” dislodging the powerful interests invested in the current status quo and restoring a constitutionally correct balance between citizens and government will be a protracted struggle. Those who value the privacy of their communications enough to take measures to protect it, such as by using the Tor internet browser or encrypting their emails, are thereby presumed guilty of possible anti-state, criminal, or sexually deviant enterprises by government snoops and their sanctimonious “nothing to hide” enablers because the very action of taking privacy measures draws scrutiny from those groups and is something they deem an admission of being up to no good. It is as if the Fourth and Fifth Amendments have been turned upside down, and objecting to having snoops looking in the windows of your house and walking in through the front door any time they please is fussy obstructionism, definitely unpatriotic, and possibly prosecutable. The “nothing to hide” folks are unconcerned over these developments, secure as they are in the comforting knowledge of their own innocence, though they may want to keep in a corner of their uncluttered minds the notion that the perception of innocence by those in power can shift capriciously, and so they are well advised to note this paraphrased bit from a poem by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller: They came for the Privacy Advocates, and I did not speak out – Because I had nothing to hide.
― Techly
Few things are more frustrating than dealing with poor or indifferent customer service. Calling a company’s customer service number – if you can track it down – usually involves navigating a phone tree of options that may or may not result in discussing your problem with a human being, and then only after waiting on hold. When you do get to talk to a person, that person may be based at a call center in India, and while they are almost always polite and professional people honestly trying to do a good job, there can be language and cultural barriers getting in the way of resolving your problem. Some companies have reacted to customers’ frustrations by touting that their customer service representatives are based in the United States, and to avoid long hold times they offer to call customers back.
Email is a somewhat better route for dealing with a company’s bureaucracy if you don’t mind delays of a day or two in getting a response. If you have follow up questions, the back and forth can stretch to a week or more and can feel like dancing with an elephant. Even though you might think there is an advantage to having your questions and their answers in writing, it has come to be more of a stumbling block than it used to be as reading comprehension deteriorates in the population. Consider how many times you have written an email to a company’s technical support only to find out after the usual one or two day delay in getting a response that they obviously misunderstood your question. They read the first sentence, and whatever followed made their eyes glaze over, because after years of exposure to television and the internet, they no longer have the attention span to comprehend anything longer than a snippet or a sound bite.
MÁV train reservations call center in Hungary; photo by MÁV Zrt.
Of the three major technological ways of interacting with customer service, that leaves chat, and it turns out to be the most satisfactory in many ways for both customers and companies. Unlike a phone call, chat leaves a customer freer to do other things while waiting for a representative to come online or even while the chat is taking place. Unlike email, chat response times from companies are far quicker, and in many cases quicker than phone call response times. And like a phone call or face to face interaction, chat allows for immediate clarifications of misunderstandings. There is back and forth between the customer and the representative as in a phone call, and at the end the customer can print a transcript. Companies prefer chat, too, because it is cheaper to run than a call center on account of the flexibility the representatives have in handling multiple customers at once, and because the experience leaves customers more satisfied than dilatory email responses.
Hotel owner Basil Fawlty, portrayed by John Cleese, was not one for tact or subtlety.
But what about older folks, who are often not as technologically savvy as the rest of the population, or what about people who simply don’t want to hassle with computers? These people prefer to contact customer service the old-fashioned way, either in person or by phone. They experience even more frustration than the rest of us because companies have mostly moved away from those older methods as being too costly, and even seem to actively discourage their use by making the experience unpleasant and time wasting. That can lead to serious consequences for the elderly especially, as their frustration with modern customer service options leads them to take foolish risks, like trying by themselves to dislodge a fallen branch from the power line service drop to their house after a storm rather than calling the power company to have them remove it, a service power companies perform for free because the hazard is serious and people should not be discouraged by a fee from having the problem resolved safely.
The 120 volt insulated line connecting to a house or apartment building can be every bit as dangerous as the higher voltage lines going from one utility pole to the next, and you have only to make one mistake with it and you’ll never make another. For safety reasons like this, it is vital that companies who deal in dangerous products like electricity and home generators and space heaters not hide their old school customer service contact points as some modern companies have done. We can gripe as much as we like about the cable company’s lousy customer service, but their product can’t kill us if we mess with it (physically, that is; mentally – that’s open to question). A power line is another matter entirely, even when the birds seem to tell us it’s okay.
― Techly
Three magpies (Pica pica) gathering in the tree tops, United Kingdom; photo by Flickr user Peter Trimming. In a nursery rhyme featuring magpies, three together signifies a human girl will be born. That may be, but for purposes of this post it is important to note that birds can perch safely on a power line because they come into contact with it at only one point, and therefore do not provide a path to ground. An exception can be found in the case of large birds such as raptors, whose extensive wing span can bring them into contact with two lines at once, or with a line and another point, electrocuting them.
“It seems odd that every day we hear about a new smartphone app that lets you do something innovative, yet these modern-day mobile miracles don’t enable a key function offered by a 1982 Sony Walkman.” ― Ajit Pai, the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, in a speech he gave at a North American Broadcaster’s Association symposium on February 16, 2017.
If you have a smartphone, you might not be aware it has a chip in it that allows it to receive FM radio broadcasts. The phone manufacturers include the chip as a matter of course for all phones worldwide, and then coordinate with the carriers about activating it or not. In the United States, only about 44% of smartphones have activated FM radio chips, according to Mr. Pai. There are smartphone applications available that take advantage of the FM radio chip in the phone, and downloading and trying to use one of those applications is a way of determining if your carrier has activated the chip. Most likely, though, if you don’t see an application for “FM radio” already installed on the phone, then the chip is not activated.
Ajit Pai at an FCC workshop on May 5, 2014.
Since the chip is already in the phone,why would the carriers not want it activated for their customers? Activation costs them nothing, after all. The carriers are suspiciously silent on this issue, which allows the rest of us, their paying customers, to speculate on their motivations and judge them harshly. Cellular phone companies are in the business of selling internet access along with phone service. Even though their phone contains a chip capable of receiving FM radio, most smartphone users can only access FM radio stations through an application such as TuneIn, which uses the internet to tap into a station’s streaming service, if it offers one. That sells data for the carriers. If your phone could access FM radio directly, your carrier would get nothing.
“We are controlling transmission.”
Besides saving data when accessing FM radio without using the internet, smartphone owners can expect longer battery life because their phone is not constantly using its transmitter to talk to the nearest cell tower the way it does when streaming media. The screen and the transmitter of a smartphone are the two biggest battery drains. Ownership of the phone brings up another issue – if it’s your phone, and it has the capability of receiving FM radio, your carrier should not be able to prevent you from using that feature. It appears the motivations of the carriers come down to greed and arrogance. Shocking!
To be fair, not all carriers disallow FM radio service and some of them disallow it only on some of their phones. No one understands why, because the carriers, who are in the communications business, are not talking. Some carriers don’t even bother to acknowledge there are public safety benefits to their customers of having access to FM radio outside of internet or cellular service during and immediately after a natural disaster, when those two services might be out of commission. The best course of action for smartphone users is to bring pressure to bear on their carriers, who up until now have been relying on the ignorance of their customers to get away with their policy. When you bought your phone, did your carrier advise you that it contained an FM radio chip? Most likely not, because then they would have had to explain why they wouldn’t let you use it. Take back control and make them explain themselves to you here and now. ― Techly
An early transistor pocket radio by Motorola. The first Motorola brand automobile radio was produced in 1930. Motorola began the commercial production of transistors at a new $1.5 million facility in Phoenix in 1955. This advertisement is from the May 23, 1960 issue of Life magazine (page 13). The 1960 price of $24.95 translates to a little over $200 in 2017.
Nomophobia is a term coined in 2010 by the United Kingdom Post Office, which commissioned research into the anxieties of mobile phone users. It stands for no-mobile-phone phobia, or the fear of not having access to a phone or phone service.
On February 3, 2017, New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton, responding in part to the antics of Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Antonio Brown, who streamed a post-game speech by his head coach, Mike Tomlin, on Facebook Live from his smartphone, vowed to “scramble” social media sites in the Saints’ locker room in the future. It was unclear what Payton meant exactly by “scramble,” but perhaps he was referring to using a filter on the locker room wi-fi service. Players could still access social media sites using the signal from their cellular service, however, making the overall effectiveness of Payton’s ban doubtful. A cell phone signal jammer would be an option if it were legal.
Payton’s proposed ban was his response to players’ increasing inattention as well, since they itched to check their phones for distractions instead of devoting their full attention to the business at hand in locker room meetings. These are men in their twenties and thirties, some of them making millions of dollars a year, and they cannot be relied upon to disregard their smartphones for more than forty minutes at a time while their head coach conducts a meeting. But then, considering the behavior some players exhibit during games, perhaps it should come as no surprise they are selfish and immature in other areas of their lives. We would more usefully order our priorities to not give the players and the game as much attention as we do.
No cell phones sign at a church in the Canary Islands. The message in English reads “Sacred Place – Silence Please”. Iglesia de San Ginés in Arrecife, Lanzarote, Canary Islands; photo by Frank Vincentz.
Whether it is a compulsion or an addiction that many people have to constantly check their smartphone for text messages, emails, or social media posts, is something they need to examine for themselves. The rest of us just wish they would stop checking, checking, and checking again, because it is costing us time and frustration, and in some cases our lives. Besides the everyday annoyances caused by compulsive smartphone users disrupting the enjoyment of theater-goers and patrons at restaurants and shops, there is the now nearly constant problem of being held up at a traffic light by the driver in front being too engrossed in their smartphone to realize the light has turned green. Such drivers build up road rage in others, and that’s minor considering the dangers they pose once they get their car moving.
A majority of drivers sensibly acknowledge that texting and driving is dangerous and are in favor of state laws prohibiting it, yet many of them continue to do it. You can see these drivers everywhere on the roads, bobbing their heads up and down like mechanical dipping birds as they look up and down from the smartphone they hold down just out of view of others – as if they’re fooling anyone – to the road and back again. The danger comes not only while they are looking down, but also for the first few seconds after they look up, because in that time their minds are elsewhere.
The Green Eggs and Ham Cafe at the Seuss Landing attraction of the Universal Islands of Adventure theme park in Orlando, Florida; photo by Panoramio user BihnX.
Since some people can’t seem to stop themselves from texting and driving, and since enforcement is lax, it appears the only thing that will get at least some of them to stop is the kind of social disapproval that has built up around smoking in public over the past twenty years. It’s incredible now to recall that up until twenty or thirty years ago smoking in most public places was not only acceptable, it was the norm. People smoked in theaters, restaurants, and on planes and trains. Like enjoying green eggs and ham, people had a cigarette pretty much anywhere they liked. Speaking of green eggs and ham, now there’s an excellent idea: shut off that phone, smart or otherwise, and enjoy an attentive meal with friends or family, put the phone to sleep in the glove compartment while you drive to the theater, and then leave it in the car when you go in to relax and enjoy the show. Your dinner companions, the drivers you share the road with, and your fellow patrons at the theater will appreciate it, and it won’t kill you.
― Techly
It’s fair to say subscribers to cable and satellite television services dislike their providers in large numbers due to high prices and poor customer service. With the option of internet streaming television service becoming more popular every year, cable and satellite subscribers are increasingly resorting to getting their television service the newest way and dropping the old service, though ironically they can sometimes still be tied to the cable company because it provides their internet service. For some people, particularly those with a low bandwidth limit on their internet service, the oldest way of getting television service can be the best, which is to say receiving broadcast television with an antenna.
Family watching television, 1958; photo by Evert F. Baumgardner. What, no rabbit ears? They must have had a rooftop antenna.
There is no such thing as an HDTV (High Definition Television) antenna except in the minds of marketers and confused consumers. An antenna is an antenna is an antenna. Standard definition and high definition digital signals are merely the format of the content that TV stations broadcast, not the method. The method is the same as it was when the format content was analog, and that is electromagnetic frequencies in the MegaHertz (MHz) band of the spectrum, in Very High Frequency (VHF) or Ultra High Frequency (UHF). Any antenna can pick up analog and digital signals as long as it is optimally configured to pull in those frequencies. That is known as the antenna’s “gain.”
It is the tuner in the television set that needs the capability of properly displaying the digital signal. That is why older analog television sets needed a digital converter box when the the digital television transition occurred in 2009. No one needed to go out and buy a different antenna then, but that didn’t stop unscrupulous or ignorant salespeople from selling plenty of “HDTV” antennas to confused consumers.
Because many of the new antennas being marketed as “HDTV” have a mod, futuristic profile, looking much different than the old rabbit ears indoor antennas and the old coat hanger outdoor antennas, consumers can come to believe they are not like those antennas, and marketers are happy to let them believe that. In truth, much of the new antenna designs are due to making them omnidirectional or UHF-only, both of which are not necessarily improvements over the old designs.
VHF TV antenna, 1963; photo by Edward Finkel. VHF-only antennas were used when few UHF stations were on air.
Omnidirectional antennas pick up signals over 360 degrees, but that also means they pick up a lot of interference and are weaker at picking up a strong signal from one direction. The old design, a large coat hanger antenna on the rooftop is still best at picking up a distant signal from one direction and tuning out interference from other directions. The UHF-only design allows an antenna to have a low profile because of the characteristics of the UHF signal, but at the obvious cost of not being able to pick up VHF signals. Manufacturers did this in the belief that after the digital transition there would be far fewer TV stations broadcasting over VHF because the digital signal is more efficient over UHF, and because they felt consumers would prefer the smaller profile.
Consumers prefer small profile antennas for some settings in particular, such as apartments and in neighborhoods with a homeowners association, where landlords and homeowners association boards would like to have them believe they are not allowed to put up a high gain antenna outdoors. Section 207 of The Telecommunications Act of 1996 says landlords and association boards cannot get away with blanket prohibitions. This is especially worth noting because clear reception of a digital signal requires a higher gain antenna than is necessary for receiving an analog signal. A preamplifier on the antenna can help, but because a preamplifier increases signal noise as well, it is best used for boosting the signal as it travels down a long cable run to the television set, rather than as a stopgap to make up for low gain from the antenna. A strong over-the-air signal is worth the trouble it can require, however, since the resulting television picture is much sharper than an equivalent cable or satellite derived picture. In order to carry hundreds of channels, cable and satellite companies need to compress their signal data, losing definition. Broadcast signals are not compressed.
Modern UHF-only TV antenna; photo by Flickr user shaorang, from Puerto de Santa Maria, Cadiz, España. UHF elements in front are backed by corner reflector elements.
Whatever you do when you cut the cable or satellite TV cord, think twice before falling for the “HDTV” antenna ads currently airing. Like all con games, they rely heavily on the greed of the mark in believing he or she can get something for nothing. To that end, the TV huckster does not say directly that the mark can get all the same channels cable and satellite services provide, but through clever wording he allows the unsophisticated mark to infer that and jump to conclusions. The wreckage can be found in online forums. Tempting as it can be to jeer at these consumers for getting what they deserved, they are more deserving sympathy in the recognition that it has taken only one generation to pass for them to forget or never realize there once was a way to watch television without paying for it. These people often are purchasing the product because they are too poor to continue paying high cable and satellite bills. The marks more deserving contempt are some of the better educated high rollers who, ignoring reality, willed themselves to believe Bernie Madoff really was getting them something for nothing. They might have been better off cutting out the middle man and investing directly in the booming market for “HDTV” antennas.
― Techly
