Network neutrality is the philosophy that all things related to the network of the internet be neutral, i.e. unregulated. In a completely neutral network, there would be no regulations on what can connect to that network and what data can be transferred across that network. This is the environment in which the Internet has grown in and thrived upon, and thus the environment that most Internet purists strive to maintain.

However, the issue with this idea of neutrality is the Internet is now a vessel of capitalism. Capitalism revolves around the creation and protection of wealth. Therefore, it has become in the best interests of many players in this industry to begin to protect their wealth. An example of where this protection of this wealth clashes against net neutrality is the Comcast and BitTorrent issues. As you may recall, Comcast began capping the rates at which their subscribers could use BitTorrent transfers. In Comcast’s defense, it was a matter of protecting their services for all their subscribers. The bandwidth required to support BitTorrent had never existed previously, and was a strain Comcast was not ready to support. On the net neutral end of things, what gave Comcast the right to dictate what John Q. Public could or could not do on the Internet?

Like many political documents, Google and Verizon attempt to avoid clearly defining their stance on net neutrality. It doesn’t appear that Google and Verizon intentionally sought any policies to hinder net neutrality, but by omitting language to specifically foster net neutrality, they opened the flood gates of opposition. For example, a specific clause of “Network Management” was introduced, encouraging the right of an ISP to “engage in reasonable network management.” This clause was skillfully crafted in such a manner to ride the fence of net neutrality. If this was a legal language that existed when Comcast decided to control BitTorrent usage, the outcome of that situation would not have been any more clearly defined than it was without this kind of guideline.

Google’s position shown in this document, is somewhat of an identity crisis. Google’s lifeline is this free and open Internet. However, Google must work with the other big players in the net to create a framework in which Google’s capital interests can be protected. It will be interesting to continue to follow how and what legal entities get involved. One thing is for certain: despite any goodwill shown by any of the parties involved, network neutrality is at risk.

See also:

http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/08/joint-policy-proposal-for-open-internet.html

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/facts-about-our-network-neutrality.html

Chrome OS is currently intended for use on netbook-like devices, which are small and portable. Everything you do, when using Chrome OS, is through the browser (the same Chrome browser Google offers now). There are some resulting benefits from this approach, namely speed in doing anything online, but the tradeoff is simplicity. You can’t run Photoshop or Quickbooks or any other “installed” application on Chrome OS.

Here is one critical review of Chrome OS and one positive review.

And here is a blurb that explains one of the benefits of using a Web operating system like Chrome OS:

…the overhead of managing multiple PCs is too high for a home user. Paraphrased, his statement was that if you have five conventional PCs, it’s a pain to keep them all up-to-date and their data synced. The reason, I would add, is that five conventional PCs each presume that they’re either alone in the universe, or that they “connect” to this thing called a “server.” But five Chrome OS portables are five caches for the same cloud-based user and application data, and as such they resemble five netbooks only in their form factor.

And finally, a video:

Comments

In order to prevent SQL injections, “it’s a good practice to add a layer between a form on the front end and the database in the back end. In PHP, the PDO extension is often used to work with parameters (sometimes called placeholders or bind variables) instead of embedding user input in the statement. Another really easy technique is character escaping, where all the dangerous characters that can have a direct effect on the database structure are escaped. For instance, every occurrence of a single quote ['] in a parameter must be replaced by two single quotes ["] to form a valid SQL string literal.”

For preventing cross-site scripting (XSS), Google recommends the following measures:

• Stripping the input that can be inserted in a form (for example, see the strip tags function in PHP);
• Using data encoding to avoid direct injection of potentially malicious characters (for example, see the htmlspecialchars function in PHP);
• Creating a layer between data input and the back end to avoid direct injection of code in the application.

Tune into the post for more information!

Comments