Sanders Media

Greetings from Montauk, NY. My southern accent is definitely getting me some curious looks.

I finally caved. I can’t take my slow DSL uploads anymore (downloads aren’t that much better). Fortunately, I don’t have to change ISP’s.

For those that don’t know, U-verse is a product offered by AT&T. It provides telephone, television and internet service to it’s customers. The beauty of this is the use of Fiber Optics. I will be jumping from 1.5 mbps to 6.0 mbps. While cable can do that already, I’m not in love with our cable provider, Comcast. I know some have beefs with AT&T, but I’ve chosen the lesser of the evils.

For me, the most exciting thing about U-verse is the way the DVR will be used. We’ll have one DVR in the house. However, every other TV in the house will be able to access that DVR. This will allow my family to watch recordings on any TV in the house.

AT&T hasn’t rolled out service everywhere, but when they do, it might be worth your while to try it.

I know many of you like to share photos in your personal life, but it can also be helpful in your business. There are several sites that host photos for your friends or clients to see. Photobucket, Flickr, SmugMug and Google’s Picasa are just a few. Most are free for a basic membership, with the option to pay for an upgrade. Since I use Flickr, I’ll discuss them.

Flickr is one of the most popular photo sharing sites, and has a bustling user community. You can view and comment on any public photo, giving it the feel of a social network. They’ve even added video sharing capabilities. This becomes a great marketing opportunity by enabling you to publish photos of your work, your company or any other relevant subject.

You may have tried sending photos via email, and found it to be very tedious. With most digital cameras today shooting at least 5 megapixels, the file size of a photo can be large. Many email services and internet service providers (ISP) don’t allow you to send email with attachments above a couple of megabytes. A much easier way is to upload the images to your Flickr account, and email the link to your Photostream.

Try Flickr. I think you’ll like what they can do. Best of all, it’s free!

I usually try to keep this space free of hot button topics. Here I like to discuss things that help you understand how the web works in a practical way. However, the more the web expands into our lives, the more these issues come to the forefront. I’ll touch on a couple.

One such hot button topic that has been bantered about is internet filtering. Certain sections of the US government, as well as a large portion of the telecommunications industry, want the ability to force an ISP (Internet Service Provider) to divulge our internet habits. They say this can help them root out terrorists, stop child pornography and stop sharing of copyrighted materials.

These seem like noble ideals, and they are in their simplest form. My fear, however, is there will be a compromise of our privacy. The right to privacy is a very American one, and a right we must defend rigorously. I fear the temptation to use this information in ways we can’t comprehend and wouldn’t approve of will be too great. I cannot condone large organizations (governments, corporations, etc.) with seemingly endless resources being able to spy on me.

Another big issue recently in the news is internet throttling. Internet throttling is the practice of slowing down the connection speeds of users taking up a lot of bandwidth. An example would be people who upload large amounts of video to the web.

The ISP’s call this practice reasonable network maintenance. They claim these users are slowing down connections for everyone else and are overloading the network. Whether or not this is true is up for debate. Comcast just received a stinging rebuke from the FCC for throttling users without their knowledge. Instead of stopping internet throttling altogether, they are now just being upfront about it.

This is a Pandora’s Box. Once we allow some content to be blocked or inhibited, where do we draw the line? Deregulation has put the power in fewer and fewer hands. The FCC rebuke aside, there has been very little in the form of accountability. The telecommunications industry is a very powerful lobby, and has large resources available to petition our government. We need checks and balances to make sure our rights and freedoms are observed.

Wherever you stand in the political realm, these are issues that have and will continue to affect you. I encourage you to contact your US and state representatives. Ask them where they stand on these issues, and if they plan to protect your privacy.