Category: posts

ChatGPT Helps me Open a 27+ Year Old Newton Backup File!

Yes, as a lifelong nerd I of course had an Apple Newton back in 1994 when I was a senior in high school. Check out this photo I took of my Powerbook and Newton together likely in 1994 or 1995:

The Newton had a companion app for backing up and synchronizing called the “Newton Connection Kit” or NCK. Apple being Apple this was an optional software package that did not come bundled with the device.

One of the neat things about the Newton Connection Kit software was that it allowed data from most of the core Newton applications (calendar, notes, contacts, etc) to be edited on the host Mac or PC. It stored everything in a single file that I have preserved all of these years.

Every so often I boot up Basilisk II on my modern Mac and tool around with some of the old Mac apps I enjoyed as a kid. (This process, by the way, is a heck of a lot easier now with the awesome Infinite Mac website that’ll load things up in a web browser with zero configuration).

During one of these tinkering sessions I stumbled across the file and remembered how the NCK used to work. So I headed over to the Macintosh Repository and found a working copy of NCK, installed it, and then discovered that my old backup file wouldn’t open.

This was due to the file losing its Mac file type and creator information. Unlike the PC that uses a file extension (like .DOC for a Word document) the classic Macs stored the originating application inside the file itself. Oftentimes transferring the file from a Mac to a PC like I must have done years ago stripped the Newton backup file of this information. Because of this the NCK software couldn’t see or open the backup.

I searched extensively over the last couple of weeks looking for the four letter code needed to get this file open to no avail. So I asked ChatGPT 4:

Its answer of “pkgb” was unfortunately not the right one. It was close though – pkgb is the file type for Newton’s equivalent of apps that the NCK software would also install back in the day. Many times people would email these apps to each other and found the NCK software didn’t know what to do with them.

So then I asked ChatGPT a followup question: “On an old Mac how might I look up what file type an application is looking for?”

Its step-by-step response led me to the right answer.

After following ChatGPT’s instructions using the Mac’s old “Resedit” utility I was able to quickly drill down into the 1994 application and get my answer. The correct file type for NCK backup files is “DCKb.”

I added that file type to my backup file, double clicked and BOOM! Suddenly everything that was on my Newton that day in 1995 was once again available to me.

To be honest there wasn’t much that was all that interesting. But there were some nostalgic calendar entries like the date of my high school graduation:

The rest of it had a bunch of random notes from high school and college classes but also a few fun things like this drawing a friend of mine made on the Newton on October 28, 1994:

What’s amazing about ChatGPT is its ability to sift through all the garbage you might get in a search result and guide you to the right place. It doesn’t always get things right as we saw here, but generally it will point you in the right direction.

If you’re curious about the Newton I made a video about this classic PDA platform a few years back when the iPad gained handwriting recognition functionality. It’s amazing how far ahead of its time it was.

Quick Thought on the SpaceX Starship Launch

I’m sure SpaceX would have preferred the rocket survived longer but it did get through a critical phase of flight.

My armchair analyst’s opinion is that they will be looking closely at the pad at lift off and how to better protect these densely packed engines from shockwaves before the hold down clamps are released.

It looked like something popped right at lift off which may have damaged other engines & systems.

SpaceX’s approach is rapid iterative development and low cost hardware. There’s probably a half dozen more of these either built or in the process of being built. A few weeks to refurb the pad and you’ll see another one out there ready to try again.

They even celebrated their many failures attempting to get their Falcon rockets to land in this video:

You can bet their next launch will get a little bit further.

Google Bard vs. Chat GPT-4

I got access to Google’s new Bard AI Chatbot this evening. I thought it might be fun to see how both Bard and Chat GPT-4 interpret a transcript of my latest video about Verizon’s 5G Home Internet. The transcript was extracted from YouTube’s automatic captioning and converted into a blob of text.

I asked each AI to “Summarize this transcript into a blog post in a journalistic style” and provided no additional guidance.

First let’s take a look at Google Bard spit out:

Title: Verizon 5G Home Internet Review: A Good Option for Many

Verizon 5G Home Internet is a good option for many people who are looking for a fast, reliable, and affordable internet connection. It is especially a good option for people who live in rural areas where other internet options are limited.

In this review, I will discuss the pros and cons of Verizon 5G Home Internet, as well as my personal experience using it.

Pros

  • Fast speeds: Verizon 5G Home Internet is capable of speeds of up to 1 Gbps, which is much faster than most other internet options.
  • Reliable connection: Verizon 5G Home Internet is a reliable connection, and I have not experienced any outages or slowdowns in the time that I have been using it.
  • Affordable price: Verizon 5G Home Internet is an affordable option, especially when compared to other internet options like cable and fiber.
  • No contracts: Verizon 5G Home Internet does not require a contract, so you can cancel at any time if you are not satisfied with the service.

Cons

  • Coverage area: Verizon 5G Home Internet is not available in all areas.
  • Speeds may vary: The speeds of Verizon 5G Home Internet may vary depending on your location and the number of devices that are connected to the network.
  • Data cap: Verizon 5G Home Internet has a data cap of 500 GB per month.

Personal experience

I have been using Verizon 5G Home Internet for about a month now, and I am very happy with it. The speeds are fast and reliable, and the price is affordable. I have not experienced any outages or slowdowns in the time that I have been using it.

Overall, I would recommend Verizon 5G Home Internet to anyone who is looking for a fast, reliable, and affordable internet connection.

Overall Bard’s summary is weak and got a lot wrong. Verizon does not advertise speeds for its service so I don’t know where it got the 1 gigabit speed from (I certainly didn’t mention that in my review). It also wrongly said there’s a 500 GB data cap (Verizon does not have a cap on their home service). Later when I had it correct the record it apologized but then spit out the wrong info again.

It also completely made up the “personal experience” section. I never said I used the service for a month. I specifically said I tried it out at a friend’s place who didn’t live far from me. Bard also completely missed my key criticism of the Verizon service related to its poor ping rates.

In another experiment I gave Bard a link to another YouTube video I posted recently about an outdoor TV antenna and it came back with a summary about opening a 7-Eleven franchise in the Philippines!

I think it needs some work..

So let’s see how Chat GPT-4 did with the transcript:

Title: Verizon’s 5G Home Internet: A Casual User’s Delight

In Connecticut, Verizon’s 5G home internet service is making a splash, offering a viable alternative to traditional broadband services. Priced competitively at $25 a month for existing Verizon Wireless customers, the 5G Home service provides fast and reliable internet for casual users. However, it may not be the best choice for heavy gamers or streamers.

The service comes with a Gateway device that connects to the Verizon tower and provides Wi-Fi service to the home. It supports Wi-Fi 6 and includes two Ethernet ports for hardwiring devices. For the best performance, users are advised to place the Gateway near a window with a clear line of sight to the cell tower.

In ideal conditions, users can expect download speeds of around 300 Mbps and upload speeds of 15-16 Mbps, which is great for video streaming, web browsing, and email. However, the service has some drawbacks, particularly when it comes to latency in online gaming and streaming services like Hulu Live.

The ping rate varies considerably due to Verizon prioritizing mobile users over home internet customers, which is not ideal for multiplayer gaming or streaming that requires an instantaneous response. For now, there is no data cap or penalties for heavy data usage on the plan, but the router does feature a cellular traffic query page, hinting at possible future restrictions.

In summary, Verizon’s 5G home internet service is a fantastic choice for casual users looking for fast, reliable internet at a reasonable price. However, gamers and streamers may want to explore other options for a more consistent and low-latency experience.

Wow.. Chat GPT-4 is light years better than Google’s system for this task. It effectively encapsulated all of the key points of the video and didn’t make anything up.

You’ll note that it mentions Verizon prioritizing packets – that was something I said in the video that some viewers think is not true. I based that observation on the ping rate variability I noticed during my testing. So if that is incorrect it’s on me and not the robot.

And Google has a long way to go here.. I’m shocked by how much stuff Bard is just making up. Just a few minutes ago it told me that Google developed the competing GPT-3 language model!

This just goes to show how companies that were once the disruptors can be disrupted themselves.

Meta / Facebook Has Just Given Up..

Facebook has long had a huge bot and spam problem. It’s a haven for scammers of all types and Meta seems unable to do much of anything about it. On my Facebook page I frequently get spammers and scammers trying to lure my viewers into their schemes. Take this most recent one for example spamming my group with an illegal IPTV service:

While I remove comments like this when I can it’s hard to keep up with them all – especially as Facebook brings in exactly $0 in revenue to my overall operation. I also report the comments but more often than not Facebook takes no action. Facebook said the post above did not “go against any of our community standards” and took no action against this user spamming pages and groups.

While this illegal IPTV service will likely not result in my account getting hacked , the next set of comments I reported surely will. What do you think happened when I reported a set of comments directing users to a fake account recovery service?

You guessed it : nothing. I will give credit to Facebook though – at least they tell you they’re doing nothing versus the black hole that is YouTube’s spam reporting feature.

The other day Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta’s plans to offer a paid verification tier to make their users pay for something Meta should have been doing all along to protect their users. This is an effort to crack down on account impersonations that also plague the service.

I have no doubt this will be a successful product offering because it’s essentially a protection racket. Individuals and businesses who depend on Meta’s services to reach people will have no choice but to pay in order to protect their accounts and followers. Meta will have even less incentive now to rid the platform of fake accounts and spammers.

High Altitude Balloons Have Little Regulation

Small balloons (similar to what have been shot down recently) have few regulations regarding their use. In fact there are more rules on drones than there are on balloons carrying less than four pounds of payload!

While some balloons are designed to pop when they reach a certain altitude, others can float for months, even years at a time. Take for example the amateur radio W5KUB balloons.

The W5KUB-112 balloon has floated around the world 10 times in less than a year aloft! It is currently in the Pacific Ocean south of Alaska and will be re-entering US airspace shortly. Its altimeter reports its position at 47,734 feet – slightly above commercial air traffic but not by much.

This balloon would almost certainly now be on NORAD’s target list given that similar small objects were shot down by US jets at similar altitudes. And while W5KUB is operating these balloons in accordance with US law, they don’t have to register the balloon with authorities so NORAD would likely not know this is a benign payload.

There are likely hundreds of balloons like this floating around the globe carried by the wind. Their payloads could be dead but the balloons themselves may very well still be floating. Adversaries can take advantage of this information gap by floating small payload balloons that look like all of the other stuff floating around in the wind.

Electronics don’t have to be large to be useful spying tools. A small radio like the ones on W5KUB’s balloons could be equipped to dump data to passing satellites via VHF or UHF bands and smaller messages can be sent over the HF bands without a satellite at all.

W5KUB’s high frequency WSPR radio. Source: W5KUB

A few months ago I demonstrated sending data packets up to the space station using a small 7 watt radio.

W5KUB’s small payload transmits APRS positioning packets on VHF frequencies and weak WSPR signals on HF. Those WSPR signals can be picked up even when the balloon is in the middle of the ocean.

Clearly up until now NORAD was looking for planes and missiles. For its part the FAA doesn’t seem to care much about small payload balloons and hasn’t been tracking their movements.

What’s next? I expect to see the FAA clamp down on domestic balloon activity similar to what they did with drones. Further there may be some discussion with other governments to develop some standards around registration and tracking for balloons that have the capability to float beyond borders.

How Are YouTube Shorts Doing for Me So Far?

Not great. I earned 26 cents on 5,000 YouTube Shorts views since monetization began – a $0.05 CPM. This is WAY below the typical YouTube CPM (cost per thousand views) on long-form content both for ad & Premium viewers.

My Shorts did pick up 83 new subscribers since I started posting shorts so there is some value there, but certainly not on the monetization side of things.

New Shorts don’t take much time to create but I don’t think there’s any value in spending time repurposing older longer-form content as Shorts. The same number of views from long form videos generated significantly higher CPMs even in saturated content verticals like gaming.

Razer Specs on New Edge Handheld Incorrect

We saw the new Razer Edge at CES earlier this month. You can see it in Dispatch 3 at the 7:57 mark. Like the Logitech G Cloud Android gaming handheld we looked at recently they are gearing this towards game streaming, however the Snapdragon processor inside has some decent horsepower according to its specs.

But it looks like Razer messed up in communicating those specs to users. Today I received an email updating me on the status of my pre-order – apparently Wi-Fi versions of the Edge have 6 GB of RAM whereas their 5G version has 8. Initially Razer said both versions had 8GB of RAM:

Is this a big deal? Probably not.. I don’t think there’s any Android game that requires more than 6GB of RAM but this might limit some of the multitasking possible on the unit if a demanding game or app is running in the background.

My Wi-Fi version should arrive sometime in the next two weeks so we’ll find out for sure. Stay tuned! I’ll likely do a livestream when it arrives.

2023 Off to a Great Start!

Just a quick note to thank you all for a great start to 2023. After a pretty lousy December our CES coverage kicked off a nice boost to channel viewership and growth this month. I’ve also prioritized a few reviews and topics based on what I’m seeing subscribers are showing more interest in.

Thank you as always for your support!

Retroarch & Emulators on Retail Xbox Consoles Including Series S & Series X

Xbox consoles, even some of the older ones, make great emulation devices. In the past getting emulators onto a game console would require circumventing DRM controls but lately things have become a bit easier.

My project this weekend was getting Retroarch installed on my Xbox Series X. The good news is that the process was so easy I spent more time playing than configuring!

This process initially required setting the console into developer mode but this new method allows any retail console to work without modification or mode switching. I found this guide at MakeTechEasier.com to be pretty helpful. If you’re somebody who needs a little more of a visual step-by-step ETA Prime has a great tutorial that you can find here.

The Xbox Series consoles have pretty powerful CPUs that can handle emulation of nearly every supported core that Retroarch offers. That includes even more complex consoles like the Playstation 2 and Gamecube/Wii. You can even load the games up on a USB flash drive which is detailed in the tutorials linked above.

The MiSTer is still my go-to retro device but for certain things like more recent game consoles and Sega Super Scaler arcade titles Retroarch on the Xbox is a great combination. It was awesome playing Afterburner 2 on my 65″ OLED with its awesome soundtrack pumping through my home theater audio. And although I will probably re-map some of the controls the general experience I found to be excellent insofar as compatibility, gameplay and performance are concerned.

If you’re curious about Retroarch and why it’s so popular, check out this interview I did with a member of the Retroarch team a few years back. They do some amazing work making emulation less complex for the masses!

CES Trip Day 2 Update!

I just posted my second live update from CES here in Las Vegas!

Last night we attended a pre-show event called CES Unveiled. This has never been a great event in past years but this year it was filled with a lot of stuff I found interesting. So if everything cooperates here we’ll have our first dispatch video posted this evening! Stay tuned for that.

I am heading over to Lenovo’s CES suite in a little bit to get a look at some of the products they have planned for the coming year which will be part of Dispatch 2.

This evening my favorite CES event, Pepcom, will be taking place at the Mirage Hotel. There are close to 200 companies there so we should have enough to finish up our second dispatch video this evening.

Yesterday I had to go out and buy some things I forgot to pack with me – specifically a battery charger for my on-camera light and my Apple Watch charging cable! Generally I’m a much better packer but we just got back from a family vacation less than 24 hours before I had to leave for Vegas.

Thankfully there’s a photo store in Vegas called B&C Camera (not to be confused with B&H) that had what I needed at a close-to-market price. It looks like this place caters to photo and video professionals who forget to pack things as they had a good selection of gear.

Tomorrow is going to be a non-stop crazy day. We are going to hit the show floor first thing and stay out there until they close. That will be followed by the last showcase event called Showstoppers that should have a good number of exhibitors. We fly home Friday afternoon. My hope is to try and get Dispatch 2 up before we leave. Wish me luck !

Merry Christmas!

Just a quick note to wish you a Merry Christmas to those celebrating. I want to thank you all for another great year – my 10th as a content creator! Your viewership and engagement make it all happen.

Here’s to 2023! Look for my annual retro review tonight!

Update on LastPass and Their Poor Communications

I updated yesterday’s blog post on LastPass to indicate that some users got an email about their catastrophic breach. But I did not. I got one email in August when this first broke and that was it. And yes, I checked spam and trash. Nothing since August.

The email that reached some but not all users made no mention of their vaults being in the hands of the threat actor. They expected users to click through to their blog post and read a few paragraphs in to get the bad news.

So ultimately the only people notified were those paying attention. Their crisis PR team is running the show now, not good. LastPass’ corporate interest will now be the priority vs their customers’ security.

Each customer’s risk level depends on their password length and complexity. Lastpass is passing the buck by essentially telling customers it’s their fault if their stolen vault is compromised. Not a good look from a company whose one job was to protect password data and didn’t do it.

I wonder if work from home led to this breach. It sounds like the threat actor’s code possession was enough to convince the social engineering target to turn over the keys to the kingdom. Clearly LastPass lacked human to human authentication protocols and learned nothing from their prior breaches.

I have deleted my Lastpass account and switched to Bitwarden for now. Ultimately all of these services are a juicy target for hackers given the value of the stored data. So next I’ll be experimenting with ways I can create something under my direct control.

LastPass Password Vaults Stolen by Hackers

LastPass is a popular password manager that was heralded for their security model when it was a small startup. The allure was convenience coupled with security. Unique, random passwords were easily generated for every website a user visited and could seamlessly sync across devices. The password “vaults” that stored the passwords used an encryption model that made it impossible for LastPass or anyone else to access the contents.

Back in August LastPass notified users of a security breach that impacted their development environment but they did not believe any user data was compromised. But yesterday they quietly updated their blog post on the incident and indicated that this was a catastrophic breach. The bad news was buried several paragraphs into the narrative:

“The threat actor was also able to copy a backup of customer vault data from the encrypted storage container which is stored in a proprietary binary format that contains both unencrypted data, such as website URLs, as well as fully-encrypted sensitive fields such as website usernames and passwords, secure notes, and form-filled data.”

LastPass tried to soften the blow by touting how secure their model is but having what appears to be the entirety of their customer’s data in the hands of a threat actor is not a good thing.

No doubt heavily resourced governments will want to get their hands on these vaults to look for vulnerabilities. It also appears from the notice that email addresses and websites associated with these vaults were not encrypted, making it easy to identify its owner along with the service credentials stored in the vault. And because the master password for most users is something easily remembered it’s not out of the realm of possibility that many vaults could be unlocked with off-the-shelf GPUs in a matter of days.

But worse is that this data is now out there floating around. Even if the security model is secure today, that doesn’t mean it will be secure tomorrow. Encrypted data from the 90’s can now very easily be cracked even on a relatively cheap laptop. Patient threat actors will have a treasure trove of data to look at as the steady increase in computing power will reduce the time it will take to crack open these vaults.

In the short term the biggest threat for most users will be phishing attacks. This is because the websites stored in the vault were not encrypted so a threat actor will know that the user has an account at a financial institution for example. If you are or were a LastPass user you should be vigilant about clicking on links for services you visit frequently.

What infuriates me is that they haven’t pushed out any notice to their customers beyond this quiet update of their blog yesterday. Their press department is not responding to inquiries either.

UPDATE: A few folks who follow my Facebook page received an email from Lastpass yesterday but I did not. But those who did get a communication didn’t receive much other than an ask to visit the blog. they should have disclosed a lot more here:

As for me I spent last night changing passwords and transitioning over to BitWarden. Lastpass has lost my trust – not only because of this hack but also because of how poorly they are communicating to users.

Downloading Shareware Games in the Early 90’s

I stumbled across a game I used to play in 1992 as a teenager called “Night Raid” the other day. You can find it on the Internet Archive and play it right in your browser!

Night Raid was a take on an old Apple II game called “Sabotage.” The premise of both games is that you’re a lone anti-aircraft gunner fighting off wave up after wave of paratroopers trying to take you out. You earn points with each aircraft and paratrooper hit and lose a point every time the gun is fired.

I hadn’t given the game much thought over the years (I even forgot its name) but the other day something about it popped in my head that sent me down a Google rabbit hole. A few minutes of searching brought me to the Internet Archive and I immediately was back in the 90’s playing a cool shareware game in my browser! I’ve since added it to the DosBox-X instance I run on my Macbook Air.

One of the fun parts about Night Raid was the heavy promotion of the Software Creations Bulletin Board System (BBS) that hosted its download files. During the Intermission scenes a little airplane flies overhead with the phone number for the BBS and the end screen of the game also encourages people to dial in and experience the board’s 50 lines and 6 gigabytes of storage space!

Software Creations was located in Massachusetts and was one of the larger BBS systems at the time. When a hot new shareware game came out you’d hear about it on FidoNet message boards on your local BBS but you’d have to dial out long distance to pick up the files at Software Creations. This was also where I picked up Doom in 1993 right when it was released to the public.

As you can imagine I racked up some major phone bills dialing into that BBS. Night Raid’s zip file came in at around half a megabyte which took roughly 33 minutes to download on the 2400 baud modem I used at the time.

When Doom came out the following year it was a whopping 2 megabytes and took over two hours to download. Unfortunately for me there wasn’t an active shareware gaming user base in my local calling area beyond my buddies and me so long distance was the only way to get at the latest goods.

When I finally had the cash to buy a 14,400 baud modem that same Doom download could be done in 20 minutes. With long distance rates running about 10-15 cents per minute that faster modem offered a huge return on investment!

BBS systems are still out there but are mostly available on the Internet these days via telnet. I did a video on the topic a few years ago if you’d like to get a feel for what it was like on one of those systems.

The whole scene died out pretty quickly once dialup Internet service became available in the mid 90’s. But it’s great to see so many people working to keep not only BBS’ing alive but also some of the networks that connected them together like FidoNet.

The Software Creations BBS was acquired by the “Total Entertainment Network” in 1995 right as BBS’ing gave way to web surfing. Apparently TEN cut their losses as the BBS’ing collapsed and shut the system down only a year or so after the acquisition according to Apogee Software’s Joe Siegler in a 2002 message board post:

It was even more of a surprise to us – as we had our files there. They essentially closed down overnight – we had no warning that it was going to happen.

It would be super cool if one of the Sysops (short for System Operator) had a backup of the BBS somewhere. How awesome would it be to have a time capsule like this accessible via Telnet to experience what the PC gaming scene was like back then.

Zapier to Mastodon Solution

I mentioned the other day that I spun up a small docker container to pass an RSS feed from my link blog to my Mastodon account.

I’ve now been able to retire it thanks to a helpful post I found at lukas.io that walks through setting up a Zapier webhooks action for posting to a Mastodon instance.

This makes use of a premium Zapier feature so you’ll need to have a paid subscription in order for this to work. Zapier is something that saves me a ton of time so I’m happy to pay for it but other solutions might work better for those with a little more coding prowess.

If you’re interested in how this stuff works check out my video called “owning your content” that shows how I have adopted Indieweb principles for my written content.

The Week Ahead

It’s crazy how fast the end of the year is approaching! I’ll be taking a little time off just after Christmas to recharge ahead of CES but will hopefully get a bunch of stuff queued up! I lost a day and a half this week due to a minor bout of what was likely COVID (my second or third go-around) but I’m feeling much better today. Definitely not as bad as my experience with it last year! 

I’m focusing a lot these days on adopting “indieweb” principles for my content. I’ve talked a little bit about this before but I’ve added some new things to the mix that I’ll likely talk about later this week or early next.

Additionally I’m going to do a short piece providing some context on the Twitter controversy surrounding aircraft ADS-B data and how it all works. I figure if people are going to argue about Twitter bans they should at least know what the argument is about :). This won’t be another hot-take about Twitter (there’s plenty of those) but rather just looking at the basis of the dispute, how private aircraft data is collected, and how anyone can do it for about 30 bucks, no radar system required. 

I covered a lot this week, including my top tech products of the year, a tutorial on off-site Synology backups, a nice game controller for smartphones and an awesome powerbank with an AC outlet! Take a look below! 

It’s Time Connecticut Ratepayers Got A Seat At The Regulatory Table

This is an op-ed I wrote for CTNewsjunkie.com about my longstanding issues with my utility companies here in Connecticut. The following idea came as a direct result of my most recent experience after a telephone pole caught fire at the end of my road. I’m hoping our legislature makes this change in their coming session:

I’ve long been a critic of my local utility monopolies because they’ve put their profits ahead of serving customers and taxpayers. Over the last couple of decades as regulations eased, utilities reduced staff and deferred maintenance resulting in several week-long outages and reliability issues across Connecticut.

Meanwhile, electricity monopoly Eversource enjoys billion-dollar net profit margins, money that comes from consumers who have little choice but to pay whatever rates they decide to charge irrespective of the quality of service being offered. Their corporate culture was on full display at a 2020 hearing when former Eversource CEO Jim Judge ranked shareholders as his top priority above customers and ratepayers.

Progress is being made, however. Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA), which allowed these reductions in service quality for many years, is finally starting to turn the page and hold utilities accountable. Additionally the recently enacted “Take Back our Grid Act” is another set of accountability measures that can begin to roll back decades of customer neglect.

But PURA’s staffing levels haven’t increased despite these new tools, making it difficult for the authority to document examples of local deficiencies that could lead to enforcement action. But there is an existing mechanism that can help provide PURA those “eyes and ears” on the ground: local Cable Television Advisory Councils.

Decades ago when legislators grew tired of dealing with constituent complaints about cable television service, they created this local council structure that meets regularly with cable television company officials to work out problems before issues rise to regulatory action. Members are appointed by local municipalities and boards of education.

The councils still exist today but their regulatory authority is limited only to cable television and not any of the other utilities that benefit and profit from poles and wiring conduits running on public and private right-of-ways.

It’s time to modernize this advisory council structure and extend its advisory authority to any utility that makes use of poles and conduits in a community. Irrespective of whether the service is regulated, the use of public rights of way to deliver services is a regulated activity.

Extending this oversight authority will cost the state nothing beyond what it’s already doing to support these councils and will help PURA exercise the new regulatory powers granted to them in recent legislation. But, more importantly, this will provide an opportunity for utilities to build productive relationships with local customers and hopefully prevent regulatory action from taking place at all.

While utilities could choose not to attend these local council meetings it would most certainly be in their interest to be there and listen to customers and officials about local concerns. And if a resolution is not possible locally, the council could, through PURA, initiate regulatory dockets for enforcement such as they have with the cable companies for decades.

I have no doubt the utilities will oppose any additional oversight of their businesses. But they no longer have the trust of the public and it’s time to create a process to re-establish relationships and refocus their efforts on those who matter: us.