Tubes

He’s also spewing a bunch of hooey about email delivery times, which are virtually never the fault of the “tubes”, but almost always the fault of one endpoint or the other. My emails usually arrive in 15 seconds.

We tend to take for granted that e-mail arrives in a few seconds. But it is often forgotten that the SMTP protocol which delivers mail is best-effort and non-guaranteed. It works fantastically well most of the time and there are various safeguards to ensure e-mail is not lost. Also, e-mail used to be a lot slower in the early years of the Internet, without the fast connections we have now.

E-Mail can indeed be kept waiting in various queues and take longer to arrive. When your mailserver is unavailable for whatever reason, SMTP puts the message in queue and tries again later to deliver the message. Often an exponential backoff system is used where a message will first be retried in 5 minutes getting exponentially higher as the message fails to deliver.

I occasionally get emails days late.

The Senator’s language is quite charming, but I’m confused about his argument. Isn’t he saying that he thinks commercial entities shouldn’t be able to dump huge amounts of stuff on our mom’n’pop internet and so clog up the, ah, tubes?

If he’s worried about that, why is he opposed to any form of net regulation?

What’s somewhat ironic about this is that the canonical books on TCP/IP internetworking are known as “the Stevens books”: their author was “W. Richard Stevens. Shame Ted’s staff didn’t know that. 

obit

Melinda is on the right track — it has more to do with his familiarity with a set of discursive codes and markers than the technical applicability of the metaphor.

He’s doing things that “tech-savvy” people wouldn’t do in conversation, which shows he’s outside of that discursive community. It would be like judging an Emo band by how “emotional” they are, or a Hip Hop act by how “hip” they are.

Of course, most of us inside that community don’t know that much more than he does about how the internet works, but we know how to sound convincing enough about it not to embarrass ourselves.

Even if SMTP gets hung up, me2i81 has it right – it’s got to be the fault of the endpoints, in queues on either end, not on TCP traffic. There’s simply no way that the message could take days to deliver because of delays in transit. I.e., this has nothing to do with the bandwidth/net-neutrality debate.

Father Ted misunderstands the character of the internet. His speech is littered with peculiar distortions of both the mechanical and cultural characteristics of internet use. As Michael (above) points out, email handling is not the same thing as bandwidth limits, even if one affects the other. Stevens might be forgiven for glossing that difference. But his thinking about various ‘nets – one for the DoD, one for the family, one for video customers, and so on, profoundly misplaces these networks.

His understanding is so confused that he makes statements that appear self-contradictory:

Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it’s not using what consumers use every day.

It’s not using the messaging service that is essential to small businesses, to our operation of families.

If the commercial net is not what consumers use every day, then what is? And if it isn’t using the very same network as small business and families, what is it using?

Stevens is laughable when he uses phrases like ‘sent an internet’, but he is risble when he miscomprehends broader workings so badly.

Ted stevens is a joke here in alaska with anyone not sucking the GOP koolaid. His rants, red faced and foot stomping, are comedy routines that engender much ballyhooing. What a rube. He makes little sense in his coherent times and during his rube speeches he becomes apoplectic and unintelligable.
Somehow this maniac has got his name on the Anchorage International airport. Too bad his death wasn’t required to do that.

I wouldn’t now Ted from Fred but the truck example shows he does now his networks.

The famous Tanenbaum quote on this subject is “Never underestimate the bandwith of a stationwagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.”

I can download only a few DVD’s a day through my ADSL “tube”. The postman on the other hand wouldn’t notice if he had to throw an extra package of a dozen DVD’s in his truck. He would still deliver all my mail on time. A reliabilty Ted apparently doesn’t get from his email provider.

And if you’re charitable to the guy, even his argument is slightly coherent. If you want your email delivered pronto, you have the industry deliver services that does that. Apparently he thinks that his email didn’t get delivered instantly because of p2p, spam and other high bandwith (or “commercial”) internet use, and not because of incompetence of his provider. That’s where he gets it wrong. But since 99% of the industry uses this excuse for not delivering email on time, why blame him?

And to appeal to the sensitivities of his American audience he adds that email is essential to “our operation of families”. What more do you want from your favourite politico?

C’mon, give him a break: he’s probably using mosquito.net for his home ISP. How reliable, really, can mosquitos be?

Stevens has a lot of power, is rarely reticent in expressing disdain for those with whom he disagrees, and revels in supporting special interests of the moneyed kind.

Or: he displays a staggering ignorance over the very stuff he will help fashion legislation regulating.

This sycophant doesn’t actually know anything except how to please his corporate masters so he can get reelected. He sounds just like the old guy who lived across the street and used to shake his rake at squirrels. Which was okay, because that crazy old codger wasn’t crafting life-changing legislation.

The sad part about all this is that the forces seeking a multi-tiered internet don’t seem to understand that they’d be starting the first internet-world-war — in which they would be massively outgunned. A virtual militia of geeks would instantly dream up a thousand ways to bypass the tiering system, and then there would be the inevitable stupid/misguided legislation to outlaw those methods, etc etc.

Every time these clowns in Congress try to pass pro-corporate legislation like this, it becomes clearer that the citizen is not represented in our federal legislative body any longer.

#25- when you’re talking about technical issues that only a small percentage of the population can actually understand, its pretty much inevitable that the lobby with the most financial backing will win. Its not that the government doesn’t represent the political will of its citizens, its just that on an issue like this, there is no political will and so the lobbies win out. Its pretty hard to imagine a democratic government functioning any other way. Its exteremely frustrating- but do you have any solutions?

In the corporate world, email is held up by sender ad receiver side spam/virus scanning and the complexities of routing/processing between internal email systems.

Rea,
I had the same idea. “Tubes” is just a strange word to use, but if you are a clueless monkey it might come to mind when trying to remember the word “pipe”.

In Soviet Russia the internet tiers you!

Seriously, how clueless do you have to be to say that somebody sent an internet? It’s probably not a mistake that even your average idiot would make.

What Cm said. Here we have an internal email system and an SMPT gateway. Sometimes the gateway is down or clogged and then the ‘internet sent to my staff’ can be delayed for hours – or days, perhaps – while the internal email system is working just fine.