em_te's Techdirt Profile

em_te

About em_te

em_te's Comments comment rss

  • Sep 05, 2020 @ 04:18am

    Re: Human beings are really good at figuring out the algorithm.

    Each card had an NFL trivia question and if you scratched off the right answer it'd be good for a free big mac.
    But the answer was always in the same location on every card.
    An equivalent situation to the news article would be if you were allowed to scratch off all squares to expose both the right and wrong answers and since the right answer was "visible" you would win the big mac.

  • Feb 27, 2020 @ 08:12am

    The last mile network

    Telecoms don't want to give up control of DNS lookups to companies like CloudFlare because of the lucrative business of CDNs (Content Delivery Network).

    The DNS lookup determines which CDN the browser uses to download the file. This allows the DNS lookup to choose a CDN in a physical location that is closer to the user to improve speeds. CloudFlare is a CDN provider and many Telecoms are also CDN providers.

    While CDNs are free to the end user, they cost the telecom money when a user tries to load data found an "out of network" CDN because then the telecom will have to pay the network where the CDN is located for usage of their network. It is in the telecom's best interest to serve content from a CDN already on their network and they can generate more money by getting other people to download from their CDN too.

    Large telecoms already have carrier exchange agreements in place because counting all the bytes that they each exchange would be too much work. But telecoms can strong-arm smaller companies like CloudFlare to pay more. If CloudFlare is able to control the DNS, they have leverage against the telecoms and can divert traffic to networks that offer lower rates and CloudFlare can pay less.