Kyle Brady: A Blog

Take a look at these screenshots.

Screen 1:  downloading a torrent for tonight’s Scrubs.  The source doesn’t matter, since there are both legal and illegal sources for this kind of content.  Download speed, via test, is 661Kbps, and the torrent is at a crawl.  Web pages and uploading things via SSH to a server take forever.

Screen 2:  all torrents now paused.  Download speed, via test is 2.2Mbps.  Everything is fast and quick.

This has been happening over the last week, maybe week and a half.  Never a problem before, but if I have a torrent active, even a simple thing like using SSH via command line becomes difficult and very “laggy”.

What the hell?  I left Comcast because they sucked at life (bad customer service, traffic shaping, lies, etc.), and now AT&T is starting to do something that’s highly decried as a “major no-no” in the public eye?

Great.  Thanks, assholes.

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Edit: just for the record, I’m on “AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet Pro”.  It’s a DSL dryloop plan.

Update (4/24/08 1AM PST): I called AT&T, got forwarded to a nonsense number, and then called back.  There was no record of me calling, no trouble tickets.  Because that’s not suspicious.

Update (4/24/08 1:40AM PST): “Call back tomorrow when our Line Department is open, it’s probably an issue with your line.”  Got a ticket number this time, but the SOB Manager wouldn’t give me his full name (”Chris” was definitely not part of it, that’s for sure) or a direct number to that department.  We’ll see what happens in a few hours.

Update (4/30/08 2:00PM PST): I sent off a few emails to different departments at AT&T, linking to this with a “this is bullshit, fix it or I’m leaving your service immediately” message.  In every case, I either got “this isn’t our department’s problem” or “we have determined this not to be an issue” in response.  I haven’t called back yet, because I wanted to see what would happen… the results?  My bandwidth is not being capped as much as before, since I now get about 60% of the promised speed if a torrent is involved.

This obviously didn’t just happen on it’s own, but I find it interesting nonetheless.  However, it’s not completely fixed yet, so I’m not giving up on this issue… I wonder what department fixed this, and why they did if it wasn’t “an issue” or their “problem”…

Update (9/23/08 7:30pm PST): I stopped downloading things for the last two months or so, in the hope that whatever they’ve flagged my account with disappears.  It didn’t.

I’m still dealing with bandwidth caps when torrents are connected, and getting the run-around from anyone who bothers to talk with me about it from on high.  And yet, they claim to be “down” with P2P.

I’m calling “shenanigans” on this one.

posted on April 24th, 2008 at 11:31 pm by Kyle - Comments

Tags: AT&T, Bandwidth, Deceit, Lies, Torrents, Traffic Shaping

Wired recently covered “Hancock”, a new programming language developed by AT&T used to spy on telephone customers and “graph” the results. Alot of people are up in arms over this, decrying the end of privacy… but I, at least, think they’re misguided, if not totally wrong.

“Language”?

I think that the use of the word “language” here is not the write way to describe Hancock. If you look at the code sample provided on Wired’s post, it should look familiar. It appears to be a very close cousin of C, with some procedural and syntax changes. At what point does a language change from and “adaptation of” to a new language? The obvious point in C vs. C++ is OOP… Should this be called a “security oriented C adaptation”? Or “C, using different libraries”?

In this case, however, it would appear that “different libraries” is an understatement, and “new language” is an overstatement.

This is completely unrelated.

Uses

AT&T developed this language with security monitoring and “community of interest” goals in mind, but when you read about how it works, and the end results… does anything else come to mind?

This language has huge potential. Looking for groupings of habits, traits, and connections between items (in this case, “people”) is a programmatical way to describe what Hancock does. Now imagine what search engines do. Or Facebook with their “social graph”. Or statistics’ processing.

If Hancock were to become more widely used, complicated things like searching for data and returning the most relevant results would become very easy… and, in the case of Google, perfect an already near-perfect system.

Maturation

Hancock is more than just an added library or two to a pre-existing language (kind of like C++), or a modification of one (Ruby)…. I believe it is a “maturation” of the language. As I mentioned before, it has many similarities to C, but makes some things much quicker, more efficient, and simpler than C. C++ was supposed to do that for C, but the end result was a more complicated language.

Iteration and data sorting is a huge part of any “real” language (LOLCODE does not count). Take another look at the sample provided by Wired, and then meditate on the code.

i can has SHUT YOUR MOUTH

Evil? Maybe.

Yes, maybe Hancock is currently being used for “evil” deeds like sorting through very private data to find “terrorists” for the American government. But take a step back from your emotions…

Elvis made “devil music” in his time… what’s he considered now? I’m pretty sure he can’t compete with Slayer…

posted on October 31st, 2007 at 8:21 pm by Kyle - Comments

Tags: AT&T, C, Code, Hancock, Programming, Spying