AOL web troubles.. New AOL speedup seems to be a slowdown

Fri Jan 30 00:44:44 UTC 2004

At 07:37 PM 1/29/2004, Stephen Sprunk wrote:

>Thus spake "Kevin Loch" <kloch at gurunet.net>
> > Nicole wrote:
> > >  In the past few days our AOL users have been reporting serious problems
> >
> > Several Brickshelf users have complained about the new "blurry images"
> > problem using AOL.  I have not heard any reports of broken images or
> > upload problems yet.
>
>In the past, some ISPs have used a quality-reduction algorithm on images to
>"speed up" dialup users' experience; I assume that's what AOL has adopted.

Gotta use their lingo... your stuff's been optimized!

I have been thinking about whether the use of lossy compression methods 
would constitute tampering with copyrighted material. After all, if a site 
was carefully designed to provide optimized images of fine art, and AOL or 
other ISPs mess with the quality, the value of the site content would be 
decreased, and the site could lose business due to users thinking the 
quality of the images is bad.

>This reminds me of an old saying, "you can make any computation go faster if
>you don't care if it gives the right answer."

Heh.