Month: September 2016

Dude – Who brought the ‘script’s to the party?

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party

This week, some of our early adopters got together for a party in virtual reality. One amazing thing is how High Fidelity mixes artist-created animations with sensor-driven head-and-hand motion. This is done automatically, without the user having to switch between modes. Notice the fellow in the skipper’s cap walking. His body, and particularly his legs, are being driven by an artist-created animation, which in turn is being automatically selected and paced to match either his real body’s physical translation, or game-controller-like inputs. Meanwhile, his head and arms are being driven by the relative position and rotation of his HMD and the controller sticks in his hands(*).

So, dancing is allowed.

But the system is also open to realtime customization by the the participants. Some of the folks at the party spontaneously created drinks and hats and such during the party and brought them in-world for everyone to use. A speaker in the virtual room was held by a tiny fairy that lip-sync’d to the music. One person brought a script that altered gravity, allowing people to dance on the ceiling.

dancing

*: Alas, if the user is physically seated at a desk, they tend to hold their hand controllers out in front of them. You can see that with the purple-haired avatar.

FCC Tells You About Your Phone Transition — Y’all Might Want To Pay Attention.

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I’ve been writing about the “shut down of the phone system” (and the shift to a new one) since 2012. The FCC adopted a final set of rules to govern how this process will work last July. Because this is a big deal, and because the telecoms are likely to try to move ahead on this quickly, the FCC is having an educational event on Monday, September 26. You can find the agenda here.

 

For communities, this may seem a long way off. But I feel I really need to evangelize to people here the difference between a process that is done right and a royal unholy screw up that brings down critical communication services. This is not something ILECs can just do by themselves without working with the community — even where they want to just roll in and get the work done. Doing this right, and without triggering a massive local dust-up and push-back a la Fire Island, is going to take serious coordinated effort and consultation between the phone companies and the local communities.

 

Yes, astoundingly, this is one of those times when everyone (at least at the beginning), has incentive to come to the table and at least try to work together. No, it’s not going to be all happy dances and unicorns and rainbows. Companies still want to avoid spending money, local residents like their current system that they understand just fine, and local governments are going to be wondering how the heck they pay for replacement equipment and services. But the FCC has put together a reasonable framework to push parties to resolve these issues with enough oversight to keep any player that participates in good faith from getting squashed or stalled indefinitely.

 

So, all you folks who might want to get in on this — show up. You can either be there in person or watch the livestream. Monday, September 26, between 1-2 p.m. For the agenda, click here.

 

Stay tuned . . .

Cleveland and the Return Of Broadband Redlining.

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I am the last person to deny anyone a good snarky gloat. So while I don’t agree entirely with AT&T’s policy blog post taking a jab at reports of Google Fiber stumbling in deployment, I don’t deny they’re entitled to a good snarky blog post. (Google, I point out, denies any disappointment or plans to slow down.) “Broadband investment is not for the feint hearted,”

 

But the irony faeries love to make sport. The following week National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) had a blog post of their own. Using the publicly available data from the FCC’s Form 477 Report, NDIA showed that in Cleveland’s poorest neighborhoods (which are also predominantly African American), AT&T does not offer wireline broadband better than 1.5 mbps DSL – about the same speed and quality since they first deployed DSL in the neighborhood. This contrasts with AT&T’s announcement last month that it will now make its gigabit broadband service available in downtown Cleveland and certain other neighborhoods.

 

Put more clearly, if you live in the right neighborhood in Cleveland, AT&T will offer you broadband access literally 1,000 times faster than what is available in other neighborhoods in Cleveland. Unsurprisingly for anyone familiar with the history of redlining, the neighborhoods with crappy broadband availability are primarily poor and primarily African American. Mind you, I don’t think AT&T is deliberately trying to be racist about this. They are participating in the HUD program to bring broadband to low-income housing, for example.

 

There are two important, but rather different issues here — one immediate to AT&T, one much more broadly with regard to policy. NDIA created the maps to demonstrate that a significant number of people who qualify for the $5 broadband for those on SNAP support that AT&T committed to provide as a condition of its acquisition of DIRECTV can’t get it because the advertised broadband in their neighborhood is soooo crappy that they fall outside the merger condition (the merger requires AT&T to make it available in areas where they advertise availability of 3 mbps). Based on this article from CNN Money, it looks like AT&T is doing the smart thing and voluntarily offering the discount to those on SNAP who don’t have access to even 3 mbps AT&T DSL.

 

The more important issue is the return of redlining on a massive scale. Thanks to improvements the FCC has made over the years in the annual mandatory broadband provider reporting form (Form 477), we can now construct maps like this for neighborhoods all over the country, and not just from AT&T. As I argued repeatedly when telcos, cable cos and Silicon Valley joined forces to enact “franchise reform” deregulation in 2005-07 that eliminated pre-existing anti-redlining requirements – profit maximizing firms are gonna act to maximize profit. They are not going to spend money upgrading facilities if they don’t consider it a good investment.

 

Again, I want to make clear that there is nothing intrinsically bad or good about AT&T. Getting mad at companies for behaving in highly predictable ways based on market incentives is like getting mad at cats for eating birds in your backyard. And while I have no doubt we will see the usual deflections that range from “but Google-“ to “mobile gives these neighborhoods what they need” (although has anyone done any actual, systemic surveys of whether we have sufficient towers and backhaul in these neighborhoods to provide speed and quality comparable to VDSL or cable?) to “just wait for 5G,” the digital inequality continues. I humbly suggest that, after 10 years of waiting and blaming others, perhaps we need a new policy approach.

 

More below . . .

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Feeding Content

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Our latest High Fidelity Beta release builds on June’s proof of concept, which suggested three visitable places above the address bar. Now we’re extending that with a snapshot feed. This should assist people in finding new and exciting content, and seeing what’s going on across public domains.
Just The Basics:

I. There is now a snapshot button in the toolbar: It works in HMD, and removes all HUD UI elements from the fixed aspect-ratio picture. If you are logged in to a shareable place, you also get an option to share the snapshot to a public feed. (Try doing View->Mirror and taking a selfie!)

snapshot-review

II. The “Go To” address bar now offers a scrollable set of suggestions that can be places or snapshots: The two buttons to the right of the address bar switch between the two sets, and typing filters them. Clicking on a place takes you to that named place, but clicking on a snapshot opens another window with more info. You can then visit the place that snapshot was taken by clicking on the picture, explore the other snapshots taken by that person or in that place, or share the picture to Facebook if you choose. If your friends follow your share to the picture on the Web, they can click on the picture to jump to the same place – if they have Interface installed.

feed

(None of this has anything to with our old Alpha Forums picture feed, which isn’t public or scalable, nor are there changes to the old control-s behavior.)
Where We’re Headed:

There’s a lot more we can do with this, but we wanted to release what we have now and find out what’s important to you.

  1. We’re also thinking about other activity and media you might like to share and see in the feed, such as joining a group or downloading from marketplace.
  2. How might we use the “wisdom of crowds” to score and order the suggestions, based on real activity that people find useful?
  3. The community is quite small right now, and often your real world or social media friends do not have HMDs yet. So for now there there’s just one shared public feed of snapshots. As we grow, we’ll be looking at scaling our infrastructure, and with it, more personalized sharing options.

As we move forward:

  • We don’t want to require a login to use High Fidelity or to enjoy the suggestions made by the feed. We do require a login to share, and we’d like to offer personalized feeds in the future based on your (optional) login.
  • We don’t want to require connecting your High Fidelity account to any social media, but we do want to allow you to do so.
  • We don’t want to share anything without you telling us that it is ok to do so.

Can Obama Stop The Stalling On Clinton Appointees. Or: “It’s Raining Progressives, Hallelujah!”

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As we end 2016, we have an unusually large number of vacancies in both the executive branch and the judiciary.  As anyone not living under a rock knows, that’s no accident. Getting Obama appointments approved by the Senate was always a hard slog, and became virtually impossible after the Republicans took over the Senate in 2015.  This doesn’t merely impact the waning days of the Obama Administration. If Clinton wins the White House, it means that the Administration will start with a large number of important holes. Even if the Democrats also retake the Senate, it will take months to bring the Executive branch up to functioning, never mind the judiciary. If Clinton wins and Republicans keep the Senate, we are looking at continuing gridlock and dysfunction until at least 2018 and possibly beyond.

 

In my own little neck of the policy woods, this plays out over the confirmation of Federal Communications Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel (D). Rosenworcel’s term expired in 2015. Under 47 U.S.C. 154(c), Rosenworcel can serve until the end of this session of Congress. That ends no later than Noon, January 3, 2017, according to the 20th Amendment (whether it ends before that, when Congress adjourns its legislative session but remains in pro forma session is something we’ll debate later). Assuming Rosenworcel does not get a reconfirmation vote (although I remind everyone that Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein was in a similar situation in 2004 and he got confirmed in a lame duck session), that would drop the Commission down to 2-2 until such time as the President (whoever he or she will be) manages to get a replacement nominated and confirmed by the Senate. Given the current Commission, this would make it extremely difficult to get anything done — potentially for months following the election. It would also force Chairman Tom Wheeler to remain on the Commission (whether he wants to or not) for some time.

 

From the Republican perspective, however, this has advantages. If Clinton wins, it means that the FCC is stuck in neutral for weeks, possibly months. Since Republicans generally do not like Wheeler’s policies, that’s just fine. By contrast, if Trump wins, Republicans will have an immediate majority if Wheeler follows the usual custom and steps down at Noon January 20. So even though Republicans promised to confirm Rosenworcel back in 2014 when the Ds allowed Commissioner Mike O’Reilly (R) to get his reconfirmation vote, they have plenty of reasons to break their promise and hold Rosenworcel up anyway. Not that Senate Republicans have anything against Rosenworcel, mind you. It’s just (dysfunctional) business.

 

Again, it’s important to remind everyone who obsesses about communications that this is not unique to Rosenworcel. From Merrick Garland (remember him?) on down, we have tons of vacancies just sitting there without even the virtue of a bad excuse beyond “well, we’d rather the government not function if someone on the other side is running it.” While I keep hoping this will change, I don’t expect either political party to have a change of heart around this following the next election.

 

Fortunately, I have a plan so cunning you can stick a tail on it and call it a weasel.  On the plus side, if I can get the President to go along with it, it will not only keep things working between January 3, Noon, and January 20, Noon. It will also give the Republicans incredible incentive to move Clinton’s nominations as quickly as possible. On the downside, it’s not entirely clear this is Constitutional. I think it is, based on the scanty available case law (mostly Nat’l Labor Relations Bd v. Canning). But, as with test cases generally, I can’t guarantee it. Still, like the idea of preventing a U.S. default on its debt with a trillion dollar platinum coin, it can’t hurt to think about it.

 

For the details of what I call “Operation Midnight At Noon” (throwback to the Midnight Judges), see below . . .

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