The New York Times has launched a very interesting blog called Baghdad Bureau, Iraq from the Inside, written by current and former NYT reporters. The paper has 7 to 10 Western reporters, photographers and videographers who work with a large staff of Iraqi reporters in the city and throughout Iraq.
The blog features first-hand accounts of what's happening inside Baghdad, including videos and podcasts made by the reporters. It's not your usual fare. This item by former newsroom manager Ali Adeeb opens with this sentence:
"Hurry up, Mom, we don’t want to be late," I called my mother after I heard the sound of an I.E.D., an improvised explosive device, blowing up.
Let's just say that most Western blogs rarely feature first-hand items about a family fleeing the devastation of war. Let's also hope that the Air Force sees fit to keep this blog off its list of banned blogs.
Wired's Danger Room reports that the Air Force is cutting off personnel access to many blogs, including those with the word "blog" in its web address. The Air Force Network Operations Center under the service's new "Cyber Command" is using software to block access to all blogs that are not "primary, official-use sources."
Not only is this new policy "utterly stupid" according to an anonymous Air Force official cited by Danger Room, but it could also be potentially dangerous. A lot of blogs, such as the banned Counterterrorism Blog, can be great sources of intelligence for tracking insurgents and other potential foes.
One former Air Force officer who writes a now-banned blog called In From the Cold using the pseudonym Nathan Hale told Danger Room
If knowledge and information are power -- and no one disputes that -- then why not trust your people and empower them to explore all sides of issues affecting the service, air power and national security?
AT&T Group President John Stankey said today that a 150-home test of cable modem service in one market found that cable modem download throughput rates averaged 300 kbps to 400 kbps, far below the 6 to 8 mbps advertised by the cable companies. Speaking at Merrill Lynch's Communications Forum (webcast here), Stankey presented the results of the test, which took place in one unnamed market.
In that market, AT&T recruited over 150 different residential homes, which then purchased cable modem services. AT&T put probes on the network to track for several months the cable operator's (or maybe multiple operators') high-speed Internet performance.
Even though peak speeds averaged around 3 Mbps during periods of low congestion, still far below the 6 to 8 Mbps speeds, average speeds hovered around 300 kbps to 400 kbps.
Stankey's point in raising these test results is to argue that "it's not just good enough to talk about access speeds" at the local level. "The local access speed is not indicative of what the end-to-end performance is."
Rather, "the way you manage performance is by having a complete set of skills that you manage across the network," Stankey said. As it so happens, AT&T has a national fiber-based backbone that feeds its own DSL connections. "The IP backbone gives us tremendous capability to manage the service."
Stankey's test raises more questions than it answers. How is it possible that the advertised throughputs are so much dramatically higher than the average speeds delivered? Would AT&T's own DSL service produce the same kind of results? How does this square with conflicting information obtained from users themselves?
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:22 PM | Print | Comments (3)
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