MetaFilter, back in January, published a post detailing several gaffes caused by hitting “reply-to-all” instead of “reply.”

Standard IT geek watercooler fare.

One comment, however, was particularly noteworthy. An e-mail from a secretary in the U.K., wished to notify those on her floor that there were “Free bananas in the kitchen!!!”. However, she accidentally sent it, not to her entire floor, but to everyone in the multinational corporation she was employed at.

Automated “Out-Of-Office” messages, sent to “reply all” started clogging up the system – in addition to the manually entered “please unsubscribe me from this list,” various angry threats, etc. These automated out of office messages themselves prompted other automated out-of-office messages.

This was bad enough but… well, I’ll just let you read the whole story.

For Exchange administrators, there is luckily a way to disable the “reply all” button in Outlook. The option still exists but requires more mouse clicks.

It just goes to show you that not all performance problems are caused by misconfigured servers, worms, secret FTP sites, etc… sometimes it’s just a combination of human ignorance and exponential growth that brings down your network – or at least your e-mail system.

This is especially important when you’re worried about VoIP, Video IP, virtualization… er… other words that start with “V”… Oh! The Conficker Worm. That starts with a Double V. I know it’s called a “double U” but it really looks more like a double V to me… Point is, you can worry a lot about all these new technologies on the network, but basic, simple data apps like e-mail still need careful care and planning.

Though to be fair, Gmail’s new “unsend” feature will help.

Network World recently published an article, “U.S. isn’t falling behind in broadband,” in its news section of its LANs & WANs page. The article is written by James Lakely of the Heartland Institute, a conservative public policy think tank based in Chicago.

In it, Lakely argues that spending on improving the nation’s telecommunication infrastructure – specifically the spending in

Obama’s stimulus package – isn’t necessary because, contrary to popular belief, America is not falling behind in broadband.

Lakely attacks the methodology used in the OECD’s [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] broadband penetration numbers, and in this he has a point. The U.S. ranked 15^th in the world in “broadband penetration” measured by a per capita rate of people who subscribe to broadband services. I too have a problem with using that measurement; broadband subscription rates are not the same as broadband availability rates, and other countries’ cultures might place more emphasis on the value of being online.

My mother still refuses to use the Internet for anything other than basic e-mail, and even then it’s pulling teeth.

Lakely, however, criticizes the OECD study due to the old argument that the countries with better broadband have higher population densities. That is the only argument he brings forward which speaks to his thesis rather than tangential information.

And it’s faulty logic – while the U.S. population density (31/km²) compares unfavorably to France’s (113/km²), the population of certain states, like, for example, California, comes closer to France. If the population density theory is true, California’s broadband should rival France, and the technology in New York City should rival that of Tokyo or Seoul. Or perhaps most telling, Finland, at #3 on the list, has a population density of only 16/km².

As for that tangential information, he points out that the United States has the most consumers of high-speed Internet when talking raw numbers. (We also have a population eight times that of South Korea, six times that of France, and twice that of Japan – in fact, the only countries that have more people are China and India.)

He also mentions new technologies, such as Verizon’s FIOS:

A new study by consulting firm RVA Market Research pegs the annual growth rate of "fiber to the home" networks — the latest, fastest and most competitive broadband technology — at 76% on this side of the pond.

Of course, since we’re just now getting the fiber-optic connections that our counterparts in Japan have had for months or years, our growth rate is bound to be higher.

And finally, Lakely offers this tidbit of “information”:

If worry-warts want to get their hard drives heated up over comparisons between the United States and other countries, they can try this one on for size: A survey released this month by the German broadband association Bitkom found 84% of respondents there between the ages of 19 and 29 would rather ditch their spouses than their broadband connections.

Now that's a troubling study. "Catching up" with the rest of the world isn't always such a good idea.

Is Lakely seriously arguing that America’s broadband stagnation leads to healthier marriages? Even so, Lakely’s got his facts wrong: Germany has a divorce rate of 2.3 per 1000 population, the United States has a divorce rate of 3.6 per 1,000 population.

Of course, all of this is completely irrelevant to the real issue – that is, that we shouldn’t be concerned so much with broadband adoption at this point but at broadband performance. We are moving beyond streaming video applications to live video applications – cloud computing has come to gaming, for crying out loud – and this gives technological advantage to those countries who can leverage the technologies behind virtualization and cloud computing because they’ve laid groundwork with infrastructure.

In short, we need not worry about what percentage of Americans have broadband speeds, but rather, how good and how fast is the broadband when they get it? South Korea has an average speed of 15Mbps compared to 3.9Mbps in the U.S. Japan’s fastest broadband service is 150Mbps – for $60 a month.

What irks me about the Heartland Institute making these claims in Network World is not that it’s in any way a reasoned critique of the Obama stimulus infrastructure spending. In other words, this is not an argument that “the free market can solve the problem better than government intervention can.” This is an argument that “there is no problem.”

That’s frustrating to me because recognizing a problem is the first step to dealing with it. Even free market solutions mean that someone has to be aware that there is a problem in order to capitalize on fixing it.

The Heartland Institute has been involved in other, similar campaigns where they argue that problems that are publically perceived as problems are not, in fact, problems at all. Before 2005, the Heartland Institute had a number of funding organizations which may have resulted in a conflict of interest, as of 2005, the Heartland Institute insists on secrecy for funding sources.

We’re trying a little something new – and well, if you’re going to try something new, try something new on a Friday.

Network Performance Daily, as you know, is the company blog of NetQoS. We try to be informative, but while our marketing material implies that all we ever do is worry about network performance, we also take the time out to be human beings.

So we came up with this idea: “Profiles in Performance” to try to give you some insight into the people behind the technology. We start with Carol Schiraldi. Wicked programmer, yes, but also gifted fine art photographer. We hope you’ll enjoy it.

In May, 1998, Stephen Glass, who then worked at The New Republic, wrote an article called called “Hack Heaven,” about a 15-year old hacker named Ian Restil.  According to that story, Ian Restil used a computer at his high school library to hack into software firm “Jukt Micronics.”  Jukt decided it would be cheaper to hire Restil to tell them how he did it rather than have their in-house engineers determine how he did.  Glass claimed that stories like Restil’s were “common” and that “Computer Insider,” a newsletter for hackers, estimated that 900 hackers were hired.

It was a compelling story, and one which resonated with the 1998 audience of The New Republic – the idea of hacker protection rackets.  Except, none of it was true.  Restil was fiction.  Jukt Micronics was fiction.  Computer Insider was fiction.  There was no “Center for Interstate Online Investigations,” no radio advertisement against hacker protection in Nevada, no “Uniform Computer Security Act,” no “National Assembly of Hackers.” Even Jukt Micronics Web site was a (pathetic) fake one set up by Glass on members.aol.com.    This was revealed by Adam Penenberg, then working at Forbes Digital, (a milestone for internet journalism – as an online news site took down the star reporter of one of the most storied print magazine publications.) 

I mention this story, because that story bears a bit of a resemblance to this one, published by the Associated Press on Mar. 25th: “Teen Hacker turns corporate cyber-crime consultant.”

WELLINGTON, New Zealand - A New Zealand teenager who helped a crime gang hack into more than 1 million computers worldwide and skim millions of dollars from bank accounts has a new job as a security consultant for a telecom company….

[Owen] Walker pleaded guilty last July — when he was 18 — to a raft of charges connected to his work for an international network that the FBI estimated infiltrated 1.3 million computers and skimmed bank accounts or damaged computer systems to the tune of more than $20 million.

The charges against Walker… were dismissed and he was released without a criminal record after paying a fine and forfeiting cash paid by the criminal group for his expertise.

But after contacting Telstra Clear, the telecom company in question, spokesman Chris Mirams explained that the story was “fairly accurate with the following exceptions”:

“Owen Walker was contracted to be one of three speakers for us at two seminars delivered to customers and prospective customers last October and November. Those audiences included IT, security and senior management. We also used his image for a targeted advertising campaign for our specialist security unit, DMZ Global.”

“He has not presented any seminars to TelstraClear staff, used any computer equipment or had access to our network. He was contracted for those duties only, a period of around two months, and was not, and is not, a fulltime employee…”

“Prior to contracting Owen the company consulted the Police case officer, who was positive in his feedback, and read both the Judge and probation service reports filed with the court. He was, you might remember, not convicted and the Police later publicly stated the outcome was fair.”

The unnamed AP reporter is not the next Stephen Glass, and the main problem with the story seems to be one of semantics and implication rather than facts: “new job” implies full time employment, but does not explicitly state it, and makes it sound like Walker absconded or destroyed $20M. In fact, he was the “ringleader” only so far as he designed the software used in the attack – in short, a botnet author.  In fact, his share of the damage to UPenn’s computer system came to a reasonably low $9526 according to the judge in the case who asked him to pay restitution.

“Black Hat” hackers have gone “White Hat” before – Kevin Mitnick now operates a security consulting company – and similarly to Walker, produced a keynote presentation on computer security called “Art of Deception”, and Kevin Poulsen now writes “Threat Level” and identified 744 registered sexual offenders with MySpace profiles. 

What is different is, perhaps, the methodology – Mitnick and Poulsen, not to romanticize their crimes – operated at a time when hacking was, essentially, a game, and operated primarily alone for the challenge of it – “disorganized crime,” if you will.  On the other hand, Walker used botnets, an attack that only the broadband era would make feasible.  To strain a metaphor, Mitnick and Poulsen targeted individual companies and corporations; while botnets target the general public – the difference between cat burglary and mugging.  Well, mugging a whole bunch of people.

Additionally, the strain that botnets can put on both public Internet and private enterprise networks has placed emphasis on computer security and computer networking working hand in hand – in the field of network behavior analysis.  So… it’s… like mugging a whole bunch of people and making them late for work – okay, the metaphor is falling apart. 

But back to the point at hand – in order to protect the general public from computer-security related problems, like botnets, what we need is level-headed, non-sensational reporting from the mass media (and it doesn’t get any more mass media than the Associated Press.)  Botnets thrive on technical ignorance and misinformation; and it is the role of the press to fight both ignorance and misinformation. 

I just think that the press should be doing a better job here.

This is the penultimate punch line in today’s “Penny-Arcade” Webcomic. It is in reference to a company called “OnLive” which promises to use virtualization and cloud computing to provide broadband, server-side gaming in the browser. The server renders the entire game, then sends back 60 images per second to a browser window. This means, theoretically, that older hardware can “play” complex games.

The big concern, of course, is latency - how many milliseconds does it take from the time you press the button until the button press is registered on the game server, and how many milliseconds does it take for the computer to display the results? In a video interview, OnLive’s CEO, Steve Perlman, handwaved those concerns away:

“If we had a significant amount of lag, it would be unusable. So we had to develop a new technology that would allow the game to run – a lot of the game to run – in the server center. And then really to send tiny pieces of the game down through your DSL and cable modem connection, very very rapidly, with no lag… your computer screen or your TV screen updates so fast that perceptually, it’s as if the game is running right there.”

The video game industry is particularly noteworthy for hype. For example, the Phantom console promised direct game downloads in 2004 – that turned out, of course, to be a scam. And let’s face it – there’s no such thing as “no lag” unless you’re planning to roll out TCP over Quantum Entanglement.

But there’s no doubt that the idea that OnLive proposes is feasible. That is, there’s very little difference between this technology and Cisco Telepresence, only, of course, instead of displaying an image of the opposite partner in the conversation, the image displayed is a computer-simulated hallucination that was pre-rendered and flattened from three dimensions to two. There really is no technical difference between the two.

Yes, it could be done.

But the question is, of course, will something that should work in theory work when it is field tested on the much less predictable conditions of the larger Internet (rather than on corporate LANs or WANs). Ultimately, OnLive relies entirely on network performance to remain feasible, at a time when many broadband providers are purposefully degrading Internet access in one way or another to prevent overcongestion.

The marketing department wanted me to plug Network Rockstar Challenge again.  I thought it might be a bit too soon, but then again, it’s also a little early in our rock career for us to go “unplugged.”

Yes, I do deserve to be shot for making that pun, but you have to find me first.

So, we figured, what’s a good way to rock this mother (an industry-wide technical term) out? We decided to compile a list of our top five geek rockstars.  We’d make it more, but then we’d have to put it on multiple pages, and “Top Xs” on multiple pages are pretty lame.

The criteria for the list is simple: Does the work draw from, or add to, technical culture.  Does it use technology in new ways – either to create music, or as the subject of music.  More importantly: Do they rock?

#5 – The Protomen

The Protomen are champions of finding a story in the most unlikely of places and running with it.  From the barebones of the story of the only NES “Megaman” series, the Protomen have created a dystopian rock-opera about an oppressive society akin to “1984” or “Children of Men.”

What’s surprising – other than the fact that they’ve taken this large project to completion (and beyond, in the case of the upcoming prequel) – is that it’s way better than any rock opera based on a video game has a right to be. 

#4 – MC Frontalot

The coiner of the term “nerdcore hip hop” – MC Frontalot is in our list to represent an entire genre of music blending the beats of the streets with the raps of the (server) racks.  One of the first to gain mainstream (well, in the geek mainstream) acceptance when he played at the 2004 Penny Arcade Expo, he’s the principal subject of the documentary on Nerdcore, “Nerdcore Rising.”

The interesting thing about nerdcore as a genre is the idea of separating content from context; one of the defining themes of information in today’s society – if not the defining theme of Web 2.0.  Nerdcore is essentially a musical exploration of that subject – in short, rapping (the context) about stuff you don’t normally rap about (the content.)

#3 – Devo

In addition to the “new wave” geek look that the band sported, it’s easy to forget that Devo is, at it’s very core, “smart rock” – the entirety of the band’s reason for existing being the exploration of the concept of hostility to intelligence – a “de-evolution,” from which the band gets its name.  They also supported the satirical “Church of the Subgenius,” whose in-jokes made their way to various geek circles. 

But more than that, Devo was on the forefront of video technology.  They were not only known for being one of the first bands out there sending music videos to MTV, but they were recording their very first stage appearance at Kent State University – back in 1973 when the technology for video recording was neither cheap nor easy to use. 

#2 – Dr. Brian Howard May, Ph.D.

Brian May is the Chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University in Liverpool, and co-authored “Mgl Emission in the Night Sky Spectrum” and “An Investigation of the Motion of Zodiacal Dust Particles (Part I)” based on observations at the Teide Observatory, and completed a Ph.D. thesis in astrophysics, entitled “A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud,” from the Imperial College London departments of Physics and Mathmatics. 

He was also the lead guitarist of “Queen.”

#1 – Stevie Wonder

According to Popular Science, Stevie Wonder’s been at the forefront of technology, using third-party accessibility software on both PCs and Macs to use high tech audio editing tools.  Though why should this surprise anyone – the guy got the nickname “Stevie Wonder” because he learned to play the piano, harmonica, and bass blind and signed up with Motown Records at the age of 11. 

But he also presents the “Vision Free Awards” which rewards companies and organizations that make products that the blind can use, championing accessible technology.

Network World linked to a survey conducted by the Internet Society [ISOC].  In it, ISOC claims [PDF] that there are “no concrete business drivers for IPv6” but, paradoxically, customer demand for IPv6 is on the rise. 

Ignoring for a second that “satisfying customer demand” has generally been a good business driver in general, it seems that IPv6 has been, like Duke Nukem Forever, “just around the corner” for quite some time now.  In fact, IPv6 was a Standards Track Protocol back in December 1998, and Duke Nukem Forever has been in development since 1997, which makes interesting betting between friends and technically inclined mobsters over which will happen first: IPv6 mainstream adoption or Duke Nukem Forever releasing.

The survey states in its abstract that:

“While respondents who had begun IPv6 deployment reported gaps in support for IPv6 among tools and applications, they found the process of deploying IPv6 relatively straightforward.”

This is very different from the experiences of the tech guys and gals on Slashdot, whose anecdotes sound a little something like this:

Numbski: “I *tried* to build up a new fiber network in downtown St. Louis using IPv6. I couldn't get the address space!

It's insane - I could get 3x/24 blocks (non-sequential) assigned to my ASN, but in order to get an IPv6 allotment, I had to show proof that I *already* had utilized a full /24 of IPv6 addresses (which is NOT 256. It's 256*256*256!) They said to get it from my upstream provider - they said they don't do that, get it from ARIN. I go back to ARIN, ARIN says "They're full of it, get it from your upstream provider."

Even more insane? IPv6 allotments are FREE! I had to pay per year for an IPv4 allotment, but the free stuff? Pfft...we have it, we'll never run out of it within your lifetime, but you can't have it.”

Slashdot user “Mellon” counters with the idea that providers are probably simply used to the IPv4 way of doing things, which includes fragmentation, huge routing tables, etc., all of which are different from the way things are done in IPv6.

There’s also another thing to consider, and this might make a compelling case for IPv6 – that is, virtualization makes it very easy to create (and to destroy) development platforms in a very, very short amount of time.  With all those machines being moved around, in other words, it’s nice to have a “set it and forget it” IPv6 block that’s large enough to not need to worry about fragmentation.

Finally, the most compelling business case?  It’s simple really.  It’s IPv6.  It’s two more than IPv4.  So if you liked IPv4, IPv6 is IPv4 plus two more!  Seriously, how can you say no to an extra two? 

For those trying to understand the credit crisis as it deals with sub-prime mortgages, there’s a handy video online called “The Crisis of Credit” and explains in simple, easy to understand terms exactly what the heck happened to the sub-prime mortgage market. The problem is that the sub-prime mortgage crisis was only the trigger to the much larger derivatives crisis.

One thing that is clear is that this problem was caused, in part, by a lack of oversight. We all have different opinions on how much, if any, the government should regulate Wall Street. However, when I talk about oversight, I mean that the government didn’t bother collecting the data that they needed to make informed decisions about whether or not regulation was needed, how much, and what type, and as the Daily Show has revealed, the business media didn’t bother collecting the data that they needed to inform individual investors about whether or not particular companies were doing well, or were about to fail.

And just like networking, the simple truth is that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Forget any ideological ideas you may have about the role of government in business. Even if you believe that the market works best in completely lasses-faire, you can still keep an eye on the market without choosing to interfere in the market.

But back to the crisis at hand – part of the problem wasn’t just that no one was keeping an eye on the situation, but also, that the measurements we did have were just plain wrong. The main reason everyone invested in the top tier of the sub-prime mortgaged based CDOs is because they were rated by the rating agencies as an AAA investment – the same amount of “risk” as treasury bills, the safest investment there is.

But if the insurance companies had the ability to pay off on the insured mortgages, none of us would be in this mess. Instead, here’s what happened – insurers were selling “Naked” credit default swaps. Here’s how Rolling Stone put it:

In a "naked" CDS, neither party actually holds the underlying loan. In other words, Bank B not only sells CDS protection to Bank A for its mortgage on the Pope — it turns around and sells protection to Bank C for the very same mortgage. This could go on ad nauseam: You could have Banks D through Z also betting on Bank A's mortgage. Unlike traditional insurance, Cassano was offering investors an opportunity to bet that someone else's house would burn down…

What this meant is that the insurance companies had to pay off multiple times the value of the original investment if that investment failed.

If this sounds vaguely familiar to you, it’s essentially the same exact plan that Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom hatched in Mel Brooks’ “The Producers.”

I thought about drawing an analogy here to oversubscribing (or overleveraging?) your lines, betting that everyone in the company won’t need to use tons of bandwidth all at once… but when a line gets oversubscribed, the network merely gets congested. Apparently, when overleveraging credit default swaps, the economy blows up.

Of course, if all of this crisis talk is confusing – full of big numbers, strange acronyms, and misunderstood, misapplied concepts – well, there’s a case to be made that Wall Street’s Leo Blooms and Max Bialystocks conduct business in a language that is impossible for outsiders to understand and interpret. (A sort of thieves’ cant, if you will.) Not only has this made it harder for the average person to understand the crisis, it’s made it harder for the media to cover the crisis, and it’s made it harder for anyone not already well versed in Wall Street – in other words, the people who got us into this mess – to sort through all the gibberish in order to get us out of this mess.

I wish that we could claim moral superiority in our own tech world, but I don’t think we can.  Too often, silos persist in IT where protective individuals try to keep their own jobs secure by being the only person who can understand and interpret the data.  It’s the same kind of thing, and I’d say it’s “just as bad,” except that while it may be counter-productive, it hasn’t yet blown up an entire civilization’s economy.

Yet.

In the meantime, here’s some handy links from Amazon:

· Blazer PT-4000 Pencil Butane Torch.

· Speeday Series 60” Pitchfork

And for the kids:

· Angry Mob Playset

A few links for today following up on various stories we’ve written about.

Googlekiwi

PC World New Zealand has reported that NZ’s controversial “Section 92a” – which would cut people off from the Internet after three accusations of copyright infringement just got a submission from Google, which explains that “more than half (57%) of the takedown notices it has received under the U.S. Digital Millenium Copyright Act 1998 were sent by businesses targeting competitors and over 1/3^rd (37%) were not valid copyright claims.”

As such, Google says "Section 92A puts users’ procedural and fundamental rights at risk, by threatening to terminate users’ internet access based on mere allegations and reverse the burden of proof onto a user to establish there was no infringement."
It goes on to say, "Section 92A undermines the incredible social and economic benefits of the open and universally accessible internet, by providing for a remedy of account termination or disconnection that is disproportionate to the harm of copyright infringement online."

Now, I’ve met with a number of people, including Deputy Prime Minister Bill English, in New Zealand politics. Suffice to say, I think that NZ’s government can do dumb things but rapidly course corrects when they find out new information. Google’s statistics not only illustrate that not only will 92a result in false accusations, but that false accusations are actually the majority.

Which gives me a bit of a pause – if Google has the kind of data that would be useful to determining proper Internet governmental policies… maybe those statistics should be shared with the world. Problem is, Google’s a for-profit business, and that releasing that information would put Google at a competitive disadvantage. Hmm… something to think about.

Kinky Brisbane Dentistry

Australia’s Internet Filtering plans are back in the news after the secret list of websites to be “banned” under a proposed mandatory Internet filtering scheme surfaced on Wikileaks.

The Age, one of Melbourne’s largest papers, wrote about some of the sites on the list. This was the lede:

The Australian communications regulator's top-secret blacklist of banned websites has been leaked on to the web and paints a harrowing picture of Australia's forthcoming internet censorship regime.

Journalists, especially major metro newspaper journalists, are often loathe to use strong adjectives or make value judgments in non-editorial stories. That Asher Moses used the description “harrowing,” says quite a lot.

But about half of the sites on the list are not related to child porn and include a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.

I had no idea that Brisbane dentistry was so kinky.

Also on the list – and this isn’t a joke – 4chan.

Compounding bad judgment with great stubbornness, the Australian Communications and Media Authority actually went so far as to threaten a $11,000 (AUD) fine per day to Australian Broadband News Site Whirlpool for linking to one of the anti-abortion sites listed in the blacklist, demanding that the link be taken down. Think that’s bad? It gets worse.

On January 5, an internet user in Melbourne, known online as Foad, lodged a complaint with ACMA about "offensive content" on an anti-abortion web page, not the entire website.
The man did not want his real name published for fear of reprisals. He said his motive was to test the system and show that web pages not showing material connected with sexual abuse of children could end up on the blacklist.
The web page concerned is the same as the link stated in ACMA's notice to Bulletproof.
Around two weeks after the complainant contacted the regulator, he received a reply from ACMA informing him it was "satisfied that the internet content is hosted outside Australia, and the content is prohibited or potential prohibited content''.

So, a protestor added an innocuous site to ACMA to see if the system could be abused. Not only could it be abused but that same innocuous site, used as an example of an innocuous site unfairly marked “illegal” by ACMA was then threatening a site linking to the site as an example of a site unfairly marked…

…oh dear, I seem to have gone all cross-eyed.

Cisco officially goes Flip over Pure Digital

The rumored purchase of Pure Digital by Cisco went through today for $590 million in stock. While Ashlee Vance of the New York Times couldn’t make sense of the deal, we listed some reasons Cisco was willing to pay for the Flip Mino maker in a blog post last week.

And finally, some shoutouts

Anue Systems has been recently linking to different monitoring resources in their blog, “The Network View” – and mentioned us in one of their posts. We wanted to give them a shout-out back in response. Our customers have told us that Anue Systems’ port aggregation products have transformed what was previously a tedious and painful command line process into a streamlined and simple experience.

We also wanted to say hello to the NCIX.com forums, who have been jamming out on the Network Rockstar Challenge game. Hey guys!

Oh, did you know that there’s this basketball something-or-other going on?

Let’s skip to the point. Tomorrow, the NCAA March Madness games start up. For the past few years, the tech media and the NOC teams have been worried about the impact that the games, streamed live over the Internet – and the networks buckled under the streaming recreational traffic.

This year will be the first year in which those streamed games will be Internet broadcast in High Definition.

But to be brutally honest, I don’t think that March Madness will make as big an impact as it did in earlier years – and this has to do with changes in networking philosophies as well as a broader cultural shift.

Six years ago, the first March Madness on Demand hit an Internet completely unused to the idea of streaming video as mainstream. Sure, I remember attempts to sell WWF (now WWE) events via the Internet to college students unable to order them via pay-per-view as far back as 1998, but neither the infrastructure nor the expectation was there; even if we had H.264 encoding back during those halcyon days, we didn’t have the processing power on our client machines to decode it.

But compared to only a couple of years ago, we’re simply used to the idea that you can get video on your computer. There isn’t an HDTV sold in the U.S. that can’t take a computer input via a $30 HDMI cable. When we’ve got nothing better to do, we’re just as likely to YouTube surf than channel surf – and YouTube has videos in 720p – the better to match the 720p videos we’re making with $150 cameras. CBS doesn’t just show March Madness – there’s full episodes of Survivor, The Price Is Right, the Caruso Show (a.k.a. CSI:Miami) – the only show I couldn’t find a full episode of was “Game Show In My Head,” and that’s probably because no one wants to watch “Game Show In My Head.”

ABC, Fox, and NBC also have shows online, not just including Hulu. Great worldly events such as, say, the presidential Inauguration – are also online. And when we think of video on the Internet, we’re not just thinking about entertainment – we’re thinking about medical and enterprise applications made possible by technologies such as Cisco Telepresence. If your network is able to handle all of that – if you’re monitoring and managing your network so that all the other recreational network traffic doesn’t kill it, then March Madness simply isn’t the specter that it once was.

Technologically, our Internet infrastructure is faster, our ability to manage the network is better, and television? Television’s dying. “TV shows” are in name only, and they are “Internet Video Shows.”

So I wouldn’t worry too much about March Madness this year. What damage it could cause was because of its anomalous nature. Now it’s just part of the status quo. If you’re worried about the impact of March Madness, at best, this is a wakeup call. At worst, you’re lagging behind your competitors.