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Does technology lead us invariably to an uncertain future?  Or just more of the same?  How about cable?
You can sing along with this page - just a simple substitution - just substitute "lawyers" for "clowns" and do a Judy Collins imitation!

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MILITARY USES OR GOVERNMENT INVASION OF PRIVACY



Apple's Jobs unveils 'intimate' $499 iPad tablet
YAHOO
By JESSICA MINTZ and RACHEL METZ, AP Technology Writers
January 27, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO – Apple Inc. will sell the newly unveiled tablet-style iPad starting at $499, a price tag far below the $1,000 that some analysts were expecting.

The iPad, which is larger in size but similar in design to Apple's popular iPhone, was billed by CEO Steve Jobs on Wednesday as "so much more intimate than a laptop and so much more capable than a smart phone."

Jobs, 54, a pancreatic cancer survivor who got a liver transplant during a 5 1/2-month medical leave last year, looked thin as he introduced the highly anticipated gadget, though he seemed to have more energy than he did at Apple's last event in September.

The iPad has a 9.7-inch touch screen, is a half-inch thick, weighs 1.5 pounds and comes with 16, 32 or 64 gigabytes of flash memory storage. It comes with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity built in. Jobs said the device has a battery that lasts 10 hours and can sit for a month on standby without needing a charge.

The basic iPad models will cost $499, $599 and $699, depending on the storage size, when it comes out worldwide in March.

Apple will also sell a version with data plans from AT&T Inc. in the U.S.: $14.99 per month for 250 megabytes of data, or $29.99 for unlimited usage. Neither will require a long-term service contract.

Those 3G iPad models will cost more — $629, $729 and $829, depending on the amount of memory — and will be out in April. International cellular data details have not yet been announced.

Apple had kept its "latest creation" tightly under wraps until Wednesday's unveiling, though many analysts had correctly speculated that it would be a one-piece tablet computer with a big touch screen, larger than an iPhone but smaller than a laptop.

Raven Zachary, a contributing analyst with mobile researchers The 451 Group, considered the iPad a laptop replacement, especially because Apple is also selling a dock with a built-in keyboard.

But Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey said he doesn't believe the iPad added enough for consumers to justify buying yet another gadget, or to call this a new category of devices. In an e-mail, he criticized its lack of social features such as ways to share photos and home video and recommend books.

Sitting on stage in a cozy leather chair, Jobs demonstrated how the iPad is used for surfing the Web with Apple's Safari browser. The CEO typed an e-mail using an on-screen keyboard and flipped through photo albums by flicking his finger across the screen. He also showed off a new electronic book store and a book-reading interface that emulates the look of a paper book, putting the iPad in competition with Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle and other e-book readers.

Like iPods and the iPhone, the iPad can sync with Apple's Macintosh and Microsoft's Windows computers. Jobs said the iPad will also be better for playing games and watching video than either a laptop or a smart phone. Software coming with the iPad includes a calendar, maps, a video player and iPod software for playing music. All seem to have been slightly redesigned to take advantage of the iPad's bigger screen.

Tablet computers have existed for a decade, with little success. Jobs acknowledged Apple will have to work to convince consumers who already have smart phones and laptops that they need this gadget.

"In order to really create a new category of devices, those devices are going to have to be far better at doing some key tasks," Jobs said. "We think we've got the goods. We think we've done it."

Applications designed for the iPhone can run on the iPad. Apple is also releasing updated tools for software developers to help them build iPhone and iPad programs.

"We think it's going to be a whole 'nother gold rush for developers as they build applications for the iPad," said Scott Forstall, an iPhone software executive.

A new newspaper reader program from The New York Times and a game from Electronic Arts Inc. were also demonstrated during the event. The audience, which included many journalists and bloggers, clapped and even gave Jobs a standing ovation.

Shares in Apple rose $2.04, or 1 percent, to close Wednesday at $207.98. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company's shares have more than doubled over the past year, partly on anticipation of the tablet computer. Shares in Amazon rose $3.27, or 2.7 percent, to $122.75.

The Times to Charge for Frequent Access to Its Web Site
NYTIMES
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
January 21, 2010

The New York Times announced Wednesday that it intended to charge frequent readers for access to its Web site, a step being debated across the industry that nearly every major newspaper has so far feared to take.

Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper’s print edition will receive full access to the site.

But executives of The New York Times Company said they could not yet answer fundamental questions about the plan, like how much it would cost or what the limit would be on free reading. They stressed that the amount of free access could change with time, in response to economic conditions and reader demand.

“This announcement allows us to begin the thought process that’s going to answer so many of the questions that we all care about,” Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the company chairman and publisher of the newspaper, said in an interview. “We can’t get this halfway right or three-quarters of the way right. We have to get this really, really right.”

Any changes are sure to be closely watched by publishers and other purveyors of online content who scoffed at the notion of online charging until advertising began to plummet in 2007, battering visions of Internet businesses supported solely by ads. Few general-interest publications charge now, but many newspapers and magazines are studying whether to make the switch.

Still, publishers fear that income from digital subscriptions would not compensate for the resulting loss of audience and advertising revenue.

NYTimes.com is by far the most popular newspaper site in the country, with more than 17 million readers a month in the United States, according to Nielsen Online, and analysts say it is easily the leader in advertising revenue, as well. That may make it better positioned than other general-interest papers to charge — and also gives The Times more to lose if the move backfires.

The Times Company has been studying the matter for almost a year, searching for common ground between pro- and anti-pay camps — a debate mirrored in dozens of media-watching blogs — and the system will not go into effect until January 2011. Executives said they were not bothered by the prospect of absorbing barbs for moving cautiously.

“There’s no prize for getting it quick,” said Janet L. Robinson, the company’s president and chief executive. “There’s more of a prize for getting it right.”

This would not be the first time the company has attempted an online pay model. In the 1990s it charged overseas readers, and from 2005 to 2007 the newspaper’s TimesSelect service charged for access to editorials and columns. TimesSelect attracted about 210,000 subscribers who paid $49.95 a year but it was scrapped to take advantage of the boom in online advertising.

Company executives said the current decision was not a reaction to the ad recession but a long-term strategy to develop new revenue.

“This is a bet, to a certain degree, on where we think the Web is going,” Mr. Sulzberger said. “This is not going to be something that is going to change the financial dynamics overnight.”

Two specialized papers charge already: The Wall Street Journal, which makes certain articles accessible only to subscribers, and The Financial Times, which allows non-paying readers to see up to 10 articles a month, a system close to what is planned by The Times.

Most readers who go to the Times site, as with other news sites, are incidental visitors, arriving no more than once in a while through searches and links, and many of them would be unaffected by the new system. A much smaller number of committed readers account for the bulk of the site visits and page views, and the essential question is how many of them will pay to continue that habit.

Executives said the computerized subscription service must work smoothly and communicate seamlessly with the computer systems that handle the database of print subscribers. The Times will not use one of the pay systems being marketed by other companies, like Journalism Online, led by Steven Brill, or the News Corporation, instead choosing to create the system essentially from scratch.

“There’s a lot of technical work that we need to do over the next year to get this right,” said Martin A. Nisenholtz, the company’s senior vice president for digital operations. “And I think if you were to benchmark this against other, similar implementations, you would find that a year is not excessive.”

Bill Keller, the executive editor, embraced the plan.

“It underscores the value of what we do — trustworthy, aggressively reported professional journalism, which is an increasingly rare and precious thing,” Mr. Keller said. “And it gives us a second way to sustain that hard, expensive work, in addition to our healthy advertising revenue.

Company executives would not release estimates of how many subscribers and how much revenue an online system would attract, how many visitors the site might lose because of it, or how much ad revenue would decline.

The Times Company looked at several approaches, including a straightforward pay wall similar to The Journal’s; various “metered” systems, including the one they chose; a “membership” format similar to the one used in public broadcasting, with rewards for supporters but little or no limit on access to the site; and a hybrid among those options.

The approach the company took is “the one that after much research and study we determined has the most upside in both” subscriptions and advertising, Mr. Nisenholtz said. “We’re trying to maximize revenue. We’re not saying we want to put this revenue stream above that revenue stream. The goal is to maximize both revenue streams in combination.”


Companies Fight Endless War Against Computer Attacks
NYTIMES
By STEVE LOHR
January 18, 2010

The recent computer attacks on the mighty Google left every corporate network in the world looking a little less safe.

Google’s confrontation with China — over government censorship in general and specific attacks on its systems — is an exceptional case, of course, extending to human rights and international politics as well as high-tech spying. But the intrusion into Google’s computers and related attacks from within China on some 30 other companies point to the rising sophistication of such assaults and the vulnerability of even the best defenses, security experts say.

“The Google case shines a bright light on what can be done in terms of spying and getting into corporate networks,” said Edward M. Stroz, a former high-tech crime agent with the F.B.I. who now heads a computer security investigation firm in New York.

Computer security is an ever-escalating competition between so-called black-hat attackers and white-hat defenders. One of the attackers’ main tools is malicious software, known as malware, which has steadily evolved in recent years. Malware was once mainly viruses and worms, digital pests that gummed up and sometimes damaged personal computers and networks.

Malware today, however, is likely to be more subtle and selective, nesting inside corporate networks. And it can be a tool for industrial espionage, transmitting digital copies of trade secrets, customer lists, future plans and contracts.

Corporations and government agencies spend billions of dollars a year on specialized security software to detect and combat malware. Still, the black hats seem to be gaining the upper hand.

In a survey of 443 companies and government agencies published last month, the Computer Security Institute found that 64 percent reported malware infections, up from 50 percent the previous year. The financial loss from security breaches was $234,000 on average for each organization.

“Malware is a huge problem, and becoming a bigger one,” said Robert Richardson, director of the institute, a research and training organization. “And now the game is much more about getting a foothold in the network, for spying.”

Security experts say employee awareness and training are a crucial defense. Often, malware infections are a result of high-tech twists on old-fashioned cons. One scam, for example, involves small U.S.B. flash drives, left in a company parking lot, adorned with the company logo. Curious employees pick them up, put them in their computers and open what looks like an innocuous document. In fact, once run, it is software that collects passwords and other confidential information on a user’s computer and sends it to the attackers. More advanced malware can allow an outsider to completely take over the PC and, from there, explore a company’s network.

With this approach, the hackers do not need to break through a company’s network defenses because a worker has unknowingly invited them inside.

Another approach, one used in the Google attacks, is a variation on so-called phishing schemes, in which an e-mail message purporting to be from the recipient’s bank or another institution tricks the person into giving up passwords. Scammers send such messages to thousands of people in hopes of ensnaring a few. But with so-called spear-phishing, the bogus e-mail is sent to a specific person and appears to come from a friend or colleague inside that person’s company, making it far more believable. Again, an attached file, once opened, unleashes the spy software.

Other techniques for going inside companies involve exploiting weaknesses in Web-site or network-routing software, using those openings as gateways for malware.

To combat leaks of confidential information, network security software looks for anomalies in network traffic — large files and rapid rates of data transmission, especially coming from corporate locations where confidential information is housed.

“Fighting computer crime is a balance of technology and behavioral science, understanding the human dimension of the threat,” said Mr. Stroz, the former F.B.I. agent and security investigator. “There is no law in the books that will ever throw a computer in prison.”

As cellphones become more powerful, they offer new terrain for malware to exploit in new ways. Recently, security experts have started seeing malware that surreptitiously switches on a cellphone’s microphone and camera. “It turns a smartphone into a surveillance device,” said Mark D. Rasch, a computer security consultant in Bethesda, Md., who formerly prosecuted computer crime for the Justice Department.

Hacked cellphones, Mr. Rasch said, can also provide vital corporate intelligence because they can disclose their location. The whereabouts of a cellphone belonging to an investment banker who is representing a company in merger talks, he said, could provide telling clues to rival bidders, for example.

Security experts say the ideal approach is to carefully identify a corporation’s most valuable intellectual property and data, and place it on a separate computer network not linked to the Internet, leaving a so-called air gap.

“Sometimes the cheapest and best security solution is to lock the door and don’t connect,” said James P. Litchko, a former government security official who is a manager at Cyber Security Professionals, a consulting firm.

Some companies go further, building “Faraday cages” to house their most critical computers and data. These cages typically have a metal grid structure built into the walls, so no electromagnetic or cellphone transmissions can come in or out. Defense contractors, aerospace companies and some automakers have built Faraday cages, named for the 19th-century English scientist Michael Faraday, who designed them to shield electrical devices from lightning and other shocks.

But in the Internet era, isolationism is often an impractical approach for many companies. Sharing information and knowledge with industry partners and customers is seen as the path to greater flexibility and efficiency. Work is routinely done by far-flung project teams. Mobile professionals want vital company data to be accessible wherever they are.

Most of that collaboration and communication is done over the Internet, increasing the risk of outside attacks. And the ubiquity of Internet access inside companies has its own risks. In a case of alleged industrial theft that became public recently, a software engineer at Goldman Sachs was accused last year of stealing proprietary software used in high-speed trading, just before he left for another firm. The engineer, who pleaded not guilty, had uploaded the software to a server computer in Germany, prosecutors say.

The complexity of software code from different suppliers, as it intermingles in corporate networks and across the Internet, also opens the door to security weaknesses that malware writers exploit. One quip among computer security experts is: “The sum of the parts is a hole.”

But, security experts say, the problem goes well beyond different kinds of software not playing well together. The software products themselves, they say, are riddled with vulnerabilities — thousands of such flaws are detected each year across the industry. Several weaknesses, it seems, including one in the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser, were exploited in the recent attacks on Google that were aimed at Chinese dissidents.

The long-term answer, some experts assert, lies in setting the software business on a path to becoming a mature industry, with standards, defined responsibilities and liability for security gaps, guided by forceful self-regulation or by the government.

Just as the government eventually stepped in to mandate seat belts in cars and safety standards for aircraft, says James A. Lewis, a computer security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the time has come for software.

Mr. Lewis, who advised the Obama administration about online security last spring, recalled that he served on a White House advisory group on secure public networks in 1996. At the time, he recommended a hands-off approach, assuming that market incentives for the participants would deliver Internet security.

Today, Mr. Lewis says he was mistaken. “It’s a classic market failure — the market hasn’t delivered security,” he said. “Our economy has become so dependent on this fabulous technology — the Internet — but it’s not safe. And that’s an issue we’ll have to wrestle with.”

B'way broadband brawl center stage
New York Post
By BILL SANDERSON
Last Updated: 10:59 AM, January 16, 2010
Posted: 2:44 AM, January 16, 2010

There's new drama on Broadway over the federal government's decision to reallocate radio frequencies used by stage crews and performers.

Verizon and AT&T are taking over radio frequencies allotted to wireless microphones used in theaters, churches, sports arenas and stadiums, among other places.

On Broadway, the wireless systems are used by stage crews to communicate scenery moves and by performers to amplify voices.

Theaters have until June 12 to switch to new frequencies. On some big shows, the changeover could end up costing $100,000, the Broadway League says.

Long-running shows like "Wicked" will have the hardest time, since their producers bought equipment before the FCC contemplated changing the airwave rules.

Broadway producers were unhappy with the change, but say that in return for giving up their frequencies the FCC may impose new protections on their new systems.

Verizon and AT&T won a government auction in 2008 to use the theaters' frequencies for high-speed Internet services.

Also yesterday, Verizon and AT&T announced they'll cut prices for voice cellphone services.

Verizon moved first, slashing the cost of an unlimited voice plan by $30, to $69.99 before taxes. AT&T quickly matched it.

Nationwide: Computers Increase Students' Temptation To Cheat
Hartford Courant
By JESSE LEAVENWORTH
October 30, 2009

The link between teenagers' computer abilities and an increase in academic cheating is evident across the nation.

From Manchester to Newport Beach, Calif., high school students have been accused of tapping into school computer systems to change grades, erase absences and lift exams before they're given.

Two Manchester High School students — both boys, ages 15 and 17 — are suspected of altering online grade books and attendance records, officials said this week. No charges have been filed, but police are investigating.

Asked Thursday if the boys had confessed, police spokesman Lt. Chris Davis would say only that they "have been cooperative."

There's nothing new about cheating, said Lt. James Wardwell, a computer forensics expert with the New Britain Police Department, "and the computer is just another tool to help someone accomplish a bad deed."

What is new is that cheating in America's high schools has become "rampant, and it's getting worse," according to a 2008 nationwide survey by the Josephson Institute, the California-based nonprofit organization that runs the Character Counts! youth ethics program in schools in Connecticut and throughout the country.

The survey of 30,000 high school students found that 64 percent said they had cheated on a test during the past year, up from 60 percent in 2006. The survey did not address school computer hacking, but 36 percent of respondents said they had used the Internet to plagiarize an assignment, an increase from 33 percent in 2006.

Some students have been lured into cyber-cheating by the apparent cloak that computers and personal communication devices provide, Michael Josephson, president of the ethics institute, said. Armed with stolen information, kids can enter school record systems from their bedrooms, or they can photograph copies of tests with their cellphones and send them to others who have to take the same test.

"Technology has made it easier to cheat" and is driving the upward trend in cheating, Josephson said.

But most of the increase, he said, is due to a passive indifference and cynicism among both schools staff and parents.

"It's a mistake to focus on the tools," Josephson said. "If they had the moral fiber, they wouldn't do it no matter how easy it was."

Newspaper reports from throughout the country show that the methods students use to crack school computer programs range from simply watching a school staff member entering a password — the method used in Manchester, according to police — to sneaking spyware onto school computers. "Key-logger" programs, for instance, record all strokes on a computer keyboard and send a record to another computer.

In some cases, cyber-cheating students have lifted user names and passwords from hard copy lists left in school offices. Some school staff members use their own names, or slightly altered variations, as passwords, enabling a student to enter a grading or attendance site after a few guesses.

That was the case in Naples, Fla., recently, where police say a 16-year-old boy slipped into school district computers by guessing an employee's password. The boy was then able to change the grades of five or six students, according to Florida news reports.

Students often share stolen passwords with friends, expanding illicit record changes and the resultant costs to taxpayers in lost staff time and security upgrades. In Sugar Land, Texas, last year, four high school students were suspected of changing the grades of at least 60 students, according to the Houston Chronicle. Investigators estimated the cost to the school district at about $190,000.

Manchester school officials have been close-mouthed about the alleged cheating at the high school and have not commented about the students' possible punishment. Davis said police must analyze the three computers they seized from the boys before any charges are filed.

Just as a burglar leaves tracks in the mud, computer crime leaves trails, Wardwell said. In most cases of school cyber-cheating, police have seized computers to track that digital path.

Sometimes, however, evidence literally pops up.

In Eau Claire, Wis., last year, a high school student altered grade and attendance records for himself and two friends, according to the St. Paul Pioneer Press. School officials were tipped to the activity when a box twice appeared on a teacher's computer screen indicating that she was logging out while she was entering grades. The teacher also noticed in her log-in history that she had logged in at times when she wasn't using her computer, according to the newspaper report.

Alert teachers and school staff also have noticed discrepancies between online and hard copy records, and sometimes their memories of students' grades and absences didn't match the online record.

Classmates also reveal the schemes. Manchester police said another student told officials about the alleged record changes.

Of course, there's always simple deduction.

A Kentucky high school student's scheme unraveled in 2007 when school officials found tests and quizzes from seven teachers had been copied from the school system. Those seven teachers had only one student in common, according to The Courier-Journal newspaper in Louisville.

Copyright © 2009, The Hartford Courant

I BBC
Cable
Icann oversees the structure of the net

Page last updated at 15:07 GMT, Wednesday, 30 September 2009 16:07 UK

US relaxes grip on the internet
By Jonathan Fildes, Technology reporter, BBC News

The US government has relaxed its control over how the internet is run.

It has signed a four-page "affirmation of commitments" with the net regulator Icann, giving the body autonomy for the first time.

Previous agreements gave the US close oversight of Icann - drawing criticism from other countries and groups.

The new agreement comes into effect on 1 October, exactly 40 years since the first two computers were connected on the prototype of the net.

"It's a beautifully historic day," Rod Beckstrom, Icann's head, told BBC News.

The European Commission, which has long been critical of Icann's alliance with the US government, welcomed the new deal.

"Internet users worldwide can now anticipate that Icann's decisions...will be more independent and more accountable, taking into account everyone's interests," said Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for information society and media.

'Global system'

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) is a not-for-profit private sector corporation - set up by the US government - to oversee critical parts of the internet, such as the top-level domain (TLD) name system. Top level domains include .com and .uk.

Since its inception in 1998, it has periodically signed accords - known collectively as the Joint Project Agreement (JPA) - with the US Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

we endorse this Affirmation and applaud the maturing of Icann's role in the provision of internet stability
Eric Schmidt
CEO, Google

These papers meant that the US government was responsible for reviewing the work of the body.

These have now been abandoned in favour of the new "affirmation of commitments", a brief document which turns the review process over to the global "internet community".

"Under the JPA, Icann staff would conduct reviews and hand them over to the US government," explained Mr Beckstrom.

"Now we submit those reviews to the world and post them publically for all to comment."

In addition, independent review panels - including representatives of foreign governments - would specifically oversee Icann's work in three specific areas: security, competition and accountability.

The US will retain a permanent seat on the accountability panel.

Mr Beckstrom said the decision to break away from the US government in all other areas had been made "over the last year and a half".

"Stakeholders told us that the JPA should not be renewed and that it wasn't appropriate for it to be renewed," he told BBC News.

"It is also recognition by the US government that the internet is a global system."

The internet began as a research project by the US military, known as Arpanet.

On 1 October 1969, the second computer was connected to the network, said Mr Beckstrom. Ever since, the US has played close attention to the workings and growth of the net.

"Today's announcement bolsters the long-term viability of the internet as a force for innovation, economic growth, and freedom of expression," said US Assistant Secretary for communications and information Lawrence Strickling.

"This framework puts the public interest front and centre."

Businesses have also welcomed the change of direction by the US.

"Google and its users depend every day on a vibrant and expanding internet; we endorse this affirmation and applaud the maturing of Icann's role in the provision of internet stability," said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.

However, the new agreement does not totally sever the links between the US government and Icann entirely.

In addition, Icann also has a separate agreement with the US - to run the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) - that expires in 2011.

The IANA oversees the net's addressing system.



$100M-plus broadband map runs into cost questions
By PETER SVENSSON and JOELLE TESSLER, AP Technology Writers Peter Svensson And Joelle Tessler, Ap Technology Writers
Sat Sep 12, 12:37 pm ET

WASHINGTON – The national stimulus package passed by Congress in February may have been too enthusiastic about spending money on one particular project: figuring out where broadband Internet access is available and how fast it is.

The $787 billion stimulus bill championed by the Obama administration set aside up to $350 million to create a national broadband map that could guide policies aimed at expanding high-speed Internet access. That $350 million tag struck some people in the telecommunications industry as excessive, compared with existing, smaller efforts. The map won't even be done in time to help decide where to spend much of the $7.2 billion in stimulus money earmarked for broadband programs.

Now it appears the final cost won't be as high as $350 million — though just how much it will be is unclear.

To ensure the mapping money is used "in a fiscally prudent manner," the National Telecommunications and Information Administration signaled Wednesday it would initially spend more than $100 million, and then reassess the program.

The agency, which is part of the Commerce Department, said it has received requests for $107 million in funding for projects that would map broadband in individual states over the first two years. The states want another $26 million for various purposes over five years, including steps to encourage broadband demand. On top of that, the NTIA will have to spend more money to collate the statewide maps into a national one.

But while the map should run much less than the $350 million cap set by Congress, the total still looks like it will be far higher than estimates based on the costs of smaller mapping programs in individual states.

In North Carolina, for instance, state broadband authority e-NC spends at most $275,000 per year on maintaining a map of broadband availability in the state, detailed enough to list individual addresses, according to executive director Jane Smith Patterson.

Rory Altman, director at telecommunications consulting firm Altman Vilandrie & Co., which has helped clients map broadband availability in some areas, said $350 million was a "ridiculous" amount of money to spend on a national broadband map.

Even $100 million might be high. The firm could create a national broadband map for $3.5 million, and "would gladly do it for $35 million," Altman said.

Dave Burstein, editor of the DSL Prime broadband industry newsletter, believes a reasonable cost for the map would be less than $30 million.

The map should reveal what most individuals already know: whether their homes can get broadband, and how fast it is. Officially, the goal for the map is to help shape broadband policy and determine where best to invest government funds. It may also help consumers shopping for Internet service.

However, the map won't be ready in time to influence the first round of broadband grants and loans funded by the stimulus package. That money will start going out this fall. And the map likely won't be finished before February's scheduled release of a national broadband plan being developed by the Federal Communications Commission, which is also mandated by the stimulus bill.

About two-thirds of U.S. homes already have broadband. It's available to many more, perhaps 90 percent of homes, but the figure is uncertain because of the lack of authoritative nationwide studies. The cable industry alone says it covers 92 percent of U.S. households.

When the Pew Internet and American Life Project surveyed people who didn't have broadband in 2007 and 2008, it found that most of them aren't interested in it, find the Internet too hard to use, or don't have computers. Lack of available broadband was the third most common reason.

Still, there is concern that the U.S. is falling behind other countries in the reach and speed of its Internet connections, and that this might hinder economic growth. Advocates of expanding broadband also worry that some rural areas might never get high-speed Internet because service providers don't see a payoff in extending their lines there.

Identifying those areas will be a major thrust of the mapping project. The maps will show broadband availability, type (phone or cable, for example) and speeds for each small cluster of homes, roughly equivalent to a city block in urban areas.

Each state's grant for mapping will go to either a nonprofit or a government agency. Internet service providers have already committed to handing over data about where they have broadband coverage, so the main job will be to collect and translate that information into a map.

Mark Seifert, who is overseeing the broadband grant and mapping programs at the NTIA, offers several reasons why the federal government may spend proportionally more on mapping than some states. For one thing, he said, most efforts that have been done in states have focused on so-called "last-mile" connections that link homes and businesses with the broader infrastructure of the Internet. The NTIA also wants extensive data on that behind-the-scenes Internet infrastructure.

What's more, since much of the mapping data will come from phone and cable companies, the NTIA wants the information to be independently verified — which could involve knocking on doors to confirm where broadband is and is not available and conducting other on-the-ground checks.

"You can spend less money on a map ... but you get what you pay for," he said. "Data costs money."

Although the map will not be done in time to guide this round of broadband funding in the stimulus package, it could prove useful for later broadband deployment programs. And it could help set priorities in the years ahead for huge federal programs such as the Universal Service Fund and the Rural Utilities Service, which spend billions of dollars annually to subsidize telecom services.

In addition to the NTIA's mapping project, there's a parallel push at the FCC to gather more detailed data on broadband subscribers. Both efforts are designed to aid the Obama administration's goal of "data-driven decision making" in setting telecom policy, said Colin Crowell, a senior counselor to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.

"There is a voracious appetite for all kinds of broadband data," said Crowell, who helped write the broadband mapping legislation as a staffer on a House subcommittee overseeing telecommunications. "Policymakers have been wringing their hands for several years that we don't have accurate data on broadband deployment and adoption."






How does this relate to ACORN, if at all...for example, some people get off easy?
Legal Battle Plays Out: Online Attitude vs. Rules of the Bar
NYTIMES
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
September 13, 2009

Sean Conway was steamed at a Fort Lauderdale judge, so he did what millions of angry people do these days: he blogged about her, saying she was an “Evil, Unfair Witch.”

But Mr. Conway is a lawyer. And unlike millions of other online hotheads, he found himself hauled up before the Florida bar, which in April issued a reprimand and a fine for his intemperate blog post.  Mr. Conway is hardly the only lawyer to have taken to online social media like Facebook, Twitter and blogs, but as officers of the court they face special risks. Their freedom to gripe is limited by codes of conduct.

“When you become an officer of the court, you lose the full ability to criticize the court,” said Michael Downey, who teaches legal ethics at the Washington University law school.

And with thousands of blogs and so many lawyers online, legal ethics experts say that collisions between the freewheeling ways of the Internet and the tight boundaries of legal discourse are inevitable — whether they result in damaged careers or simply raise eyebrows.  Stephen Gillers, an expert on legal ethics at New York University Law School, sees many more missteps in the future, as young people who grew up with Facebook and other social media enter a profession governed by centuries of legal tradition.

“Twenty-somethings have a much-reduced sense of personal privacy,” Professor Gillers said. Younger lawyers are, predictably, more comfortable with the media than their older colleagues, according to a recent survey for LexisNexis, the legal database company: 86 percent of lawyers ages 25 to 35 are members of social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace, as opposed to 66 percent of those over 46. For those just out of law school, “this stuff is like air to them,” said Michael Mintz, who manages an online community for lawyers, Martindale-Hubbell Connected.

In Mr. Conway’s case, the post that got him in trouble questioned the motives and competence of Judge Cheryl Aleman, and appeared on a rowdy blog created by a criminal defense lawyers’ group in Broward County. The judge regularly gave defense lawyers just one week to prepare for trials, when most judges give a month or more. To Mr. Conway, the move was intended to pressure the lawyers to ask for a delay in the trials, thus waiving their right under Florida law to have a felony trial heard within 175 days, pushing those cases to the back of the line.

“All I had left were my words,” Mr. Conway said, adding that he decided to use the strongest ones he had.

Mr. Conway initially consented to a reprimand from the bar last year, but the State Supreme Court, which reviews such cases, demanded briefs on First Amendment issues. The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida argued that Mr. Conway’s statements were protected speech that raised issues of legitimate public concern. Ultimately the court affirmed the disciplinary agreement and Mr. Conway paid $1,200.

That penalty is light compared with the price paid by Kristine A. Peshek, a lawyer in Illinois who lost her job as an assistant public defender after 19 years of service over blog postings and who now faces disciplinary hearings as well.  According to the complaint by officials of the state’s legal disciplinary body, Ms. Peshek wrote posts to her blog in 2007 and 2008 that referred to one jurist as “Judge Clueless” and thinly veiled the identities of clients and confidential details of a case, including statements like, “This stupid kid is taking the rap for his drug-dealing dirtbag of an older brother because ‘he’s no snitch.’ ”

Another client testified that she was drug free and received a light sentence with just five days’ jail time, and then complained to Ms. Peshek that she was using methadone and could not go five days without it. Ms. Peshek wrote that her reaction was, “Huh? You want to go back and tell the judge that you lied to him, you lied to the presentence investigator, you lied to me?”

The complaint, first noted by the Legal Profession Blog, said that not only did Ms. Peshek seem to reveal confidential information about a case, but that her actions might also constitute “assisting a criminal or fraudulent act.”

Ms. Peshek declined to comment, citing the pending inquiry “for which I am currently seeking representation.”

Frank R. Wilson, a lawyer in San Diego, caused a criminal conviction to be set aside and sent back to a lower court because of his blog postings as a juror. According to a decision published recently in the California Law Journal and picked up by the Legal Profession Blog, Mr. Wilson, while serving on a jury in 2006, posted details of the case on his blog. Any juror who blogs about the details of a trial risks trouble and even civil contempt charges. But lawyers like Mr. Wilson also face professional penalties that can threaten their livelihood.

Mr. Wilson received a 45-day suspension, paid $14,000 in legal fees and lost his job. He said that warnings not to discuss the case did not ban blogging; the bar disagreed. Mr. Wilson also had not disclosed during jury selection that he was a lawyer. In an interview, Mr. Wilson said he had not been working as a lawyer at the time and had only been asked his occupation.

Judges, too, can get into trouble online. Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in California, was investigated for off-color humor that was accessible on his family’s Web server, though not intended to be public. He was cleared of wrongdoing, but a three-judge panel admonished him for not safeguarding the site, which they said was “judicially imprudent.”

Of course, some lawyers’ online problems are the same as everyone else’s, like getting caught in a fib. Judge Susan Criss of the Texas District Court in Galveston recalled in an interview a young lawyer who requested a trial delay because of a death in the family. The judge granted the delay, but checked the lawyer’s Facebook page.

“There was a funeral, but there wasn’t a lot of grief expressed online,” Judge Criss said. “All week long, as the week is going by, I can see that this lawyer is posting about partying. One night drinking wine, another night drinking mojitos, another day motorbiking.” At the end of the delay, the lawyer sought a second one; this time the judge declined, and disclosed her online research to a senior partner of the lawyer’s firm.

Judge Criss, who first told the story at a panel during an American Bar Association conference, said that the lawyer has since removed her from her friends list.

For his part, Mr. Conway noted that the judge he criticized was reprimanded last year by the Florida Supreme Court, which affirmed a state panel’s criticism of what it called an “arrogant, discourteous and impatient” manner with lawyers in another case. (Judge Aleman did not return calls seeking comment.) Mr. Conway said his practice was “probably enhanced by the experience” of going public.

But the State Supreme Court ultimately concluded that his online “personal attack” was “not uttered in an effort to expose a valid problem” with the judicial system. And so, the court concluded, the statements “fail as protected free speech under the First Amendment.”

ALERT:  Danger to the Internet
ACORN fires 2 in DC after video footage
Washington Times
ASSOCIATED PRESS
 Saturday, September 12, 2009

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The advocacy group ACORN said Friday it fired two more employees over hidden camera videos that show the group's workers giving financial advice to women posing as prostitutes.  The latest firings, in the Washington office, come a day after two other ACORN workers in Baltimore were fired over hidden camera footage.  Fox News Channel aired parts of the latest video and posted it online Friday. It shows a man and woman at the group's Washington office, asking for help in buying a house for her prostitution business.

Fox News said the video was provided by conservative activist James O'Keefe, who appears in both videos.

The workers tell the woman not to list prostitution as her profession on housing loans. Instead, they suggest she create a false business name and tell banks that she's a consultant for her own company.  The couple tells the workers they plan to bring several girls from Central America to work in the house. Another option the workers suggest is that the man could buy the house and act as a landlord unaware of what's happening in the home.

Because of his political ambitions, the workers tell the supposed law student and potential office-seeker to avoid the house. They say the couple must be low-key about the business, or people could "call Fox."

On Thursday, two other ACORN workers in Baltimore were fired after a they were recorded in a similar incident. O'Keefe, the filmmaker, has told FOX he posed as a pimp in the first video and that he was shocked by the ACORN employees' helpfulness.  In Maryland, Delegate Anthony J. O'Donnell, House Minority Leader on Friday called for an investigation into ACORN by the state's attorney general, Baltimore's state's attorney, and the U.S. Attorney's Office for Maryland.

In a statement, ACORN's President of Housing Alton Bennett and Executive Director Mike Shea, said they were "appalled and angry" to see the latest video. They said there were no loan documents completed, no bank loans arranged and no new business established. They said the two workers were fired and an internal review of practices will be done.

But Bennett and Shea said the video was "slanted to misinform the public about ACORN Housing." The video fails to mention that the same people who made the tape went to at least five other ACORN Housing offices where they were either turned away or where employees responded by calling police, they said.

"It is part of a long-term plan to smear ACORN Housing for political reasons and provide entertainment in the process," Bennett and Shea said. "But that does not excuse the behavior of the employees."

ACORN officials are asking Fox News to disclose its relationship with O'Keefe. An attorney for the group sent a letter to Fox News on Friday saying the filming and broadcast of the conversations violate secret recording laws. The letter demands that the network stop broadcasting the videos on air and the Internet in advance of litigation.

ACORN -- which stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now -- advocates for poor people. It conducted a massive voter registration effort last year and became a target of conservatives when some employees were accused of submitting false registration forms with names such as "Mickey Mouse." ACORN has said only a handful of employees submitted false registration forms and did so in a bid to boost their pay.

On its Web site, Fox News reported that the first videotape was made public Thursday on a political blog, BigGovernment.com.

Op-Ed Columnist
Stung by the Perfect Sting
By MAUREEN DOWD
NYTIMES
August 26, 2009

WASHINGTON

If I read all the vile stuff about me on the Internet, I’d never come to work. I’d scamper off and live my dream of being a cocktail waitress in a militia bar in Wyoming.

If you’re written about in a nasty way, it looms much larger for you than for anyone else. Gossip goes in one ear and out the other unless you’re the subject. Then, nobody’s skin is thick enough.

“The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered,” says Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic. “The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.”

Those are my people, I protested, but I knew what he meant. That’s why I was interested in the Case of the Blond Model and the Malicious Blogger.

Sooner or later, this sort of suit will end up before the Supreme Court.

It began eight months ago when Liskula Cohen, a 37-year-old model and Australian Vogue cover girl, was surprised to find herself winning a “Skankiest in NYC” award from an anonymous blogger. The online tormentor put up noxious commentary on Google’s blogger.com, calling Cohen a “skank,” a “ho” and an “old hag” who “may have been hot 10 years ago.”

Cohen says she’s “a lover, not a fighter.” But the model had stood up for herself before. In 2007, at a New York club, she tried to stop a man named Samir Dervisevic who wanted to drink from the vodka bottle on her table. He hit her in the face with the bottle and gouged a hole “the size of a quarter,” as she put it, requiring plastic surgery.

This time, she punched the virtual bully in the face, filing a defamation suit to force Google to give up the blogger’s e-mail. And she won.

“The words ‘skank,’ ‘skanky’ and ‘ho’ carry a negative implication of sexual promiscuity,” wrote Justice Joan Madden of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, rejecting the Anonymous Blogger’s assertion that blogs are a modern soapbox designed for opinions, rants and invective.

The judge cited a Virginia court decision that the Internet’s “virtually unlimited, inexpensive and almost immediate means of communication” with the masses means “the dangers of its misuse cannot be ignored. The protection of the right to communicate anonymously must be balanced against the need to assure that those persons who choose to abuse the opportunities presented by this medium can be made to answer for such transgressions.”

Cyberbullies, she wrote, cannot hide “behind an illusory shield of purported First Amendment rights.”

Once she had the e-mail address, Cohen discovered whence the smears: a cafe society acquaintance named Rosemary Port, a pretty 29-year-old Fashion Institute of Technology student.

Cohen called and forgave Port, but did not get an apology. She had her lawyer, Steve Wagner, drop her defamation suit. But now Port says she’ll file a $15 million suit against Google for giving her up.

Port contends that if Cohen hadn’t sued, hardly anyone would have seen the blog. (If a skank falls in the forest and no one hears it ... ?)

But Cohen says the Internet is different than water-cooler gossip. “It’s there for the whole world to see,” she told me. “What happened to integrity? Why go out of your way solely to upset somebody else? Why can’t we all just be nice?”

She said she may become an activist, and has been e-mailing with Tina Meier, mother of Megan Meier, the 13-year-old who killed herself after getting cyberbullied by the mother of a classmate who pretended to be a teen suitor named “Josh.”

“If that woman had started a MySpace page as herself, that little girl would still be in her mother’s arms,” Cohen said.

The Internet was supposed to be the prolix paradise where there would be no more gatekeepers and everyone would finally have their say. We would express ourselves freely at any level, high or low, with no inhibitions.

Yet in this infinite realm of truth-telling, many want to hide. Who are these people prepared to tell you what they think, but not who they are? What is the mentality that lets them get in our face while wearing a mask? Shredding somebody’s character before the entire world and not being held accountable seems like the perfect sting.

Pseudonyms have a noble history. Revolutionaries in France, founding fathers and Soviet dissidents used them. The great poet Fernando Pessoa used heteronyms to write in different styles and even to review the work composed under his other names.

As Hugo Black wrote in 1960, “It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes.”

But on the Internet, it’s often less about being constructive and more about being cowardly.


ORWELL LIVES!  ("Big Brother is watching you" department)

Editorial: The Government and the Web
NYTIMES
August 25, 2009

The Obama administration is considering new rules to make it easier for government Web sites to use “cookies” and other technology to track visitors. There are valid reasons for using such tools, but the government has to build in robust privacy protections.

The Clinton administration adopted a rule severely limiting tracking on federal Web sites. Tracking could be done only if officials could prove a compelling need and the agency head had personally authorized it.

Tracking technology can help improve the quality of Web sites by monitoring how many people are visiting and how they use the site, and by personalizing the experience. For example, the Parks Service could offer information based on where a user lives.

Browser makers have made it easier for users to remove cookies or even reject them wholesale. But tracking technology can still present a real privacy risk, especially for the uninitiated. If users give personal information on one government Web site, the government could track visits to its other Web sites, like one offering information on drug addiction or H.I.V./AIDS. It could do this with cookies, or by keeping track of users’ IP addresses, which may be tied to specific individuals.

In recent years, the government has monitored some Americans’ library use and illegally eavesdropped on telephone calls and e-mail. Privacy groups are concerned that the new rules could pave the way for third parties to collect large amounts of data through government sites — for example, if an agency site posted a YouTube video carrying its own cookies.

The Office of Management and Budget is developing the new rules. Officials say they recognize that people must be told that their use of Web sites is being tracked — and be given a chance to opt out. More is needed. The government should commit to displaying such notices prominently on all Web pages — and to making it easy for users to choose not to be tracked.

It must promise that tracking data will be used only for the purpose it was collected for: if someone orders a pamphlet on living with cancer, it should not end up in a general database. Information should be purged regularly and as quickly as possible. These rules must apply to third parties that operate on government sites.

The Obama administration is working to better harness the power of the Internet to deliver government services. That is good. But it needs to be mindful that people should be able to get help and be assured that their privacy is being vigilantly protected.

Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man
NYTIMES
By JOHN MARKOFF
July 26, 2009

A robot that can open doors and find electrical outlets to recharge itself. Computer viruses that no one can stop. Predator drones, which, though still controlled remotely by humans, come close to a machine that can kill autonomously.

Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.

Their concern is that further advances could create profound social disruptions and even have dangerous consequences.

As examples, the scientists pointed to a number of technologies as diverse as experimental medical systems that interact with patients to simulate empathy, and computer worms and viruses that defy extermination and could thus be said to have reached a “cockroach” stage of machine intelligence.

While the computer scientists agreed that we are a long way from Hal, the computer that took over the spaceship in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” they said there was legitimate concern that technological progress would transform the work force by destroying a widening range of jobs, as well as force humans to learn to live with machines that increasingly copy human behaviors.

The researchers — leading computer scientists, artificial intelligence researchers and roboticists who met at the Asilomar Conference Grounds on Monterey Bay in California — generally discounted the possibility of highly centralized superintelligences and the idea that intelligence might spring spontaneously from the Internet. But they agreed that robots that can kill autonomously are either already here or will be soon.

They focused particular attention on the specter that criminals could exploit artificial intelligence systems as soon as they were developed. What could a criminal do with a speech synthesis system that could masquerade as a human being? What happens if artificial intelligence technology is used to mine personal information from smart phones?

The researchers also discussed possible threats to human jobs, like self-driving cars, software-based personal assistants and service robots in the home. Just last month, a service robot developed by Willow Garage in Silicon Valley proved it could navigate the real world.

A report from the conference, which took place in private on Feb. 25, is to be issued later this year. Some attendees discussed the meeting for the first time with other scientists this month and in interviews.

The conference was organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and in choosing Asilomar for the discussions, the group purposefully evoked a landmark event in the history of science. In 1975, the world’s leading biologists also met at Asilomar to discuss the new ability to reshape life by swapping genetic material among organisms. Concerned about possible biohazards and ethical questions, scientists had halted certain experiments. The conference led to guidelines for recombinant DNA research, enabling experimentation to continue.

The meeting on the future of artificial intelligence was organized by Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who is now president of the association.

Dr. Horvitz said he believed computer scientists must respond to the notions of superintelligent machines and artificial intelligence systems run amok.

The idea of an “intelligence explosion” in which smart machines would design even more intelligent machines was proposed by the mathematician I. J. Good in 1965. Later, in lectures and science fiction novels, the computer scientist Vernor Vinge popularized the notion of a moment when humans will create smarter-than-human machines, causing such rapid change that the “human era will be ended.” He called this shift the Singularity.

This vision, embraced in movies and literature, is seen as plausible and unnerving by some scientists like William Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Other technologists, notably Raymond Kurzweil, have extolled the coming of ultrasmart machines, saying they will offer huge advances in life extension and wealth creation.

“Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years,” Dr. Horvitz said. “Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture.”

The Kurzweil version of technological utopia has captured imaginations in Silicon Valley. This summer an organization called the Singularity University began offering courses to prepare a “cadre” to shape the advances and help society cope with the ramifications.

“My sense was that sooner or later we would have to make some sort of statement or assessment, given the rising voice of the technorati and people very concerned about the rise of intelligent machines,” Dr. Horvitz said.

The A.A.A.I. report will try to assess the possibility of “the loss of human control of computer-based intelligences.” It will also grapple, Dr. Horvitz said, with socioeconomic, legal and ethical issues, as well as probable changes in human-computer relationships. How would it be, for example, to relate to a machine that is as intelligent as your spouse?

Dr. Horvitz said the panel was looking for ways to guide research so that technology improved society rather than moved it toward a technological catastrophe. Some research might, for instance, be conducted in a high-security laboratory.

The meeting on artificial intelligence could be pivotal to the future of the field. Paul Berg, who was the organizer of the 1975 Asilomar meeting and received a Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1980, said it was important for scientific communities to engage the public before alarm and opposition becomes unshakable.

“If you wait too long and the sides become entrenched like with G.M.O.,” he said, referring to genetically modified foods, “then it is very difficult. It’s too complex, and people talk right past each other.”

Tom Mitchell, a professor of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, said the February meeting had changed his thinking. “I went in very optimistic about the future of A.I. and thinking that Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil were far off in their predictions,” he said. But, he added, “The meeting made me want to be more outspoken about these issues and in particularly be outspoken about the vast amounts of data collected about our personal lives.”

Despite his concerns, Dr. Horvitz said he was hopeful that artificial intelligence research would benefit humans, and perhaps even compensate for human failings. He recently demonstrated a voice-based system that he designed to ask patients about their symptoms and to respond with empathy. When a mother said her child was having diarrhea, the face on the screen said, “Oh no, sorry to hear that.”

A physician told him afterward that it was wonderful that the system responded to human emotion. “That’s a great idea,” Dr. Horvitz said he was told. “I have no time for that.”

Op-Ed Contributor - we note the interrelationship between "cloud" computing and another concern...
Lost in the Cloud
NYTIMES
By JONATHAN ZITTRAIN
July 20, 2009

Cambridge, Mass.

EARLIER this month Google announced a new operating system called Chrome. It’s meant to transform personal computers and handheld devices into single-purpose windows to the Web. This is part of a larger trend: Chrome moves us further away from running code and storing our information on our own PCs toward doing everything online — also known as in “the cloud” — using whatever device is at hand.

Many people consider this development to be as sensible and inevitable as the move from answering machines to voicemail. With your stuff in the cloud, it’s not a catastrophe to lose your laptop, any more than losing your glasses would permanently destroy your vision. In addition, as more and more of our information is gathered from and shared with others — through Facebook, MySpace or Twitter — having it all online can make a lot of sense.

The cloud, however, comes with real dangers.

Some are in plain view. If you entrust your data to others, they can let you down or outright betray you. For example, if your favorite music is rented or authorized from an online subscription service rather than freely in your custody as a compact disc or an MP3 file on your hard drive, you can lose your music if you fall behind on your payments — or if the vendor goes bankrupt or loses interest in the service. Last week Amazon apparently conveyed a publisher’s change-of-heart to owners of its Kindle e-book reader: some purchasers of Orwell’s “1984” found it removed from their devices, with nothing to show for their purchase other than a refund. (Orwell would be amused.)

Worse, data stored online has less privacy protection both in practice and under the law. A hacker recently guessed the password to the personal e-mail account of a Twitter employee, and was thus able to extract the employee’s Google password. That in turn compromised a trove of Twitter’s corporate documents stored too conveniently in the cloud. Before, the bad guys usually needed to get their hands on people’s computers to see their secrets; in today’s cloud all you need is a password.

Thanks in part to the Patriot Act, the federal government has been able to demand some details of your online activities from service providers — and not to tell you about it. There have been thousands of such requests lodged since the law was passed, and the F.B.I.’s own audits have shown that there can be plenty of overreach — perhaps wholly inadvertent — in requests like these.

The cloud can be even more dangerous abroad, as it makes it much easier for authoritarian regimes to spy on their citizens. The Chinese government has used the Chinese version of Skype instant messaging software to monitor text conversations and block undesirable words and phrases. It and other authoritarian regimes routinely monitor all Internet traffic — which, except for e-commerce and banking transactions, is rarely encrypted against prying eyes.

With a little effort and political will, we could solve these problems. Companies could be required under fair practices law to allow your data to be released back to you with just a click so that you can erase your digital footprints or simply take your business (and data) elsewhere. They could also be held to the promises they make about content sold through the cloud: If they sell you an e-book, they can’t take it back or make it less functional later. To increase security, companies that keep their data in the cloud could adopt safer Internet communications and password practices, including the use of biometrics like fingerprints to validate identity.

And some governments can be persuaded — or perhaps required by their independent judiciaries — to treat data entrusted to the cloud with the same level of privacy protection as data held personally. The Supreme Court declared in 1961 that a police search of a rented house for a whiskey still was a violation of the Fourth Amendment privacy rights of the tenant, even though the landlord had given permission for the search. Information stored in the cloud deserves similar safeguards.

But the most difficult challenge — both to grasp and to solve — of the cloud is its effect on our freedom to innovate. The crucial legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you — and the vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy. Microsoft might want you to run Word and Internet Explorer, but those had better be good products or you’ll switch with a few mouse clicks to OpenOffice orFirefox.

Promoting competition is only the tip of the iceberg — there are also the thousands of applications so novel that they don’t yet compete with anything. These tend to be produced by tinkerers and hackers. Instant messaging, peer-to-peer file sharing and the Web itself all exist thanks to people out in left field, often writing for fun rather than money, who are able to tempt the rest of us to try out what they’ve done.

This freedom is at risk in the cloud, where the vendor of a platform has much more control over whether and how to let others write new software. Facebook allows outsiders to add functionality to the site but reserves the right to change that policy at any time, to charge a fee for applications, or to de-emphasize or eliminate apps that court controversy or that they simply don’t like. The iPhone’s outside apps act much more as if they’re in the cloud than on your phone: Apple can decide who gets to write code for your phone and which of those offerings will be allowed to run. The company has used this power in ways that Bill Gates never dreamed of when he was the king of Windows: Apple is reported to have censored e-book apps that contain controversial content, eliminated games with political overtones, and blocked uses for the phone that compete with the company’s products.

The market is churning through these issues. Amazon is offering a generic cloud-computing infrastructure so anyone can set up new software on a new Web site without gatekeeping by the likes of Facebook. Google’s Android platform is being used in a new generation of mobile phones with fewer restrictions on outside code. But the dynamics here are complicated. When we vest our activities and identities in one place in the cloud, it takes a lot of dissatisfaction for us to move. And many software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple.

If the market settles into a handful of gated cloud communities whose proprietors control the availability of new code, the time may come to ensure that their platforms do not discriminate. Such a demand could take many forms, from an outright regulatory requirement to a more subtle set of incentives — tax breaks or liability relief — that nudge companies to maintain the kind of openness that earlier allowed them a level playing field on which they could lure users from competing, mighty incumbents.

We’ve only just begun to measure this problem, even as we fly directly into the cloud. That’s not a reason to turn around. But we must make sure the cloud does not hinder the creation of revolutionary software that, like the Web itself, can seem esoteric at first but utterly necessary later.

Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard, is the author of “The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It.”

U.S. Justice Department Eyeing Telecom Probe: Report
NYTIMES
By REUTERS
Filed at 3:20 p.m. ET
July 6, 2009

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department has begun looking at big telecom companies to try to determine if they have abused their market power, the Wall Street Journal reported in its online edition on Monday.

The journal, which cited people familiar with the matter, said the Antitrust Division's review was in its very early stages and was not a formal probe of any specific company.

The country's biggest operators are AT&T Inc <T.N> and Verizon <Communications <VZ.N>.

Lawmakers have recently raised questions about whether large wireless carriers were hurting smaller rivals by entering exclusive agreements with the makers of popular phones. Deals like AT&T's multiyear agreement with Apple Inc <AAPL.O> for exclusive rights to sell the iPhone in the U.S. are at the center of some lawmakers' concerns.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel referred questions on any probe to the Department of Justice. But he defended the practice of exclusive agreements between carriers and phone makers, saying they spurred competition and helped companies collaborate on new features.

Verizon Wireless spokesman Jeffrey Nelson said that his company, which is the biggest U.S. mobile service, had had no notice from the Justice Department about any probe into handset exclusivity. Verizon Wireless is a venture of Verizon Communications <VZ.N> and Vodafone Group Plc <VOD.L>.

John Taylor, a spokesman for Sprint Nextel <S.N>, the No. 3 U.S. mobile service which has an exclusive agreement to sell Palm Inc's <PALM.O> high-profile Pre phone, declined comment on the reported probe.

He also defended exclusive handset agreements as pro-competitive. "We think that without these exclusivity arrangements carriers are less likely to risk the investment necessary to develop and promote devices like these," he said.

The new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, plans to review the deals.  According to a copy of the written responses to questions from Senator John Kerry obtained by Reuters in mid-June, Genachowski said he would "promote competition and consumer choice."

Lawmakers have also raised questions about the pricing of text messages.

Plugging In $40 Computers
NYTIMES
By Saul Hansell
May 21, 2009, 7:45 am

What would you do with a $40 Linux computer the size of a three-prong plug adapter?

Marvell Technology Group is counting on an army of computer engineers and hackers to answer that question. It has created a “plug computer.” It’s a tiny plastic box that you plug into an electric outlet. There’s no display. But there is an Ethernet jack to connect to a home network and a USB socket for attaching a hard drive, camera or other device. Inside is a 1.2 gigahertz Marvell chip, called an application processor, running a version of the Linux operating system.

All this can be yours for $99 today and probably for under $40 in two years.

“There’s not much in there,” said Sehat Sutardja, Marvell’s chief executive and co-founder, just a few chips and the sort of power supply used to charge a cellphone battery. Because this computer uses chips designed for cellphones, it uses far less power than chips designed for regular computers.

In its 13 years of existence, Marvell Technology Group has become a major player in semiconductors, with annual sales of more than $2 billion a year. It makes more than half of the microprocessors that control hard disk drives and is also a supplier of chips that go into cellphones.

Mr. Sutardja envisions an explosion of innovation about to hit home users because of the combination of open-source software and very powerful chips that are becoming available at very low costs.

The first plausible use for the plub computer is to attach one of these gizmos to a USB hard drive. Voila, you’ve got a network server. CloudEngines, a startup, has in fact built a $99 plug computer called Pogoplug, that will let you share the files on your hard drive, not only in your home but also anywhere on the Internet.

“This creates a smart data center for the home,” Mr. Sutardja said.

Another application might be to connect a security camera to the Internet, adding enough intelligence to help analyze images to distinguish between a stray dog and a cat burglar.

Scientific American asked some “alpha geeks” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory what they might do with a plug computer. One researcher imagined a system to automatically turn on and off appliances as people moved around the house. Another described a “life filter” that might weed out boring e-mails before sending them on to his computer.

Ultimately, these computers may well be used in more mainstream devices, especially for home entertainment.

“We wanted to seed the thinking of people in the market place with what you can do with our processors,” Mr. Sutardja said. “Eventually you won’t see the plug. We want this device to be in your TV, your stereo system, your DVD player.”

The Marvell chips are based on designs by ARM Holdings, which have emerged as the leading rival to Intel’s x86 chip architecture. ARM dominates the cellphone market because of its chips’ low power usage. ARM licenses its designs to Marvell and many other chipmakers. A year ago, Warren East, the chief executive of ARM, predicted what would happen when the price of ARM’s processors fell from the $10 range to 50 cents. At that level, every light switch may well be an Internet connected computer, he said.

The plug computer idea is clearly a step in that direction. And it is part of an even broader array of chips designed initially for phones that will add features to many other devices.

Mr. Sutardja talked about the sort of digital photo frame you can now buy for about $50. Add $2 in chips, and it can display high definition movies, he said. Another $2 adds a camera. And less than a dollar adds several microphones.

“You now have the sort of video conferencing that corporations buy for much more money,” he said.

Not surprisingly, in Mr. Sutardja’s view, it is the sort of brain that Marvell makes that will be in the center of all this.

“The uses of an application processor are endless,” he said. “It is up to smart people to imagine what it can do.”

Frontier to Buy Rural Verizon Lines for $5.3B
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:31 a.m. ET
May 13, 2009

NEW YORK (AP) -- Verizon Communications Inc. said Wednesday it reached a deal to sell scattered phone service areas outside its main Northeastern and Californian territories for $5.3 billion in stock.  The buyer is Frontier Communications Corp., based in Stamford, Conn. The company focuses on serving small towns and rural areas and will triple in size with the deal.

The deal continues Verizon's strategy of focusing on its core areas, where it is upgrading its phone lines to fiber optics, enabling it offer TV service and faster Internet access. It sold off its phone lines in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont for $2.3 billion last year to Fairpoint Communications Inc.  The agreement would give Frontier 4.8 million phone lines to residential and small business customers and 1 million broadband connections. Frontier currently has 2.3 million customers.

The sale includes all of Verizon's phone lines in Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin as well as some assets in border areas of California.  Verizon shareholders will receive one share of Frontier stock for approximately every 4.2 shares of Verizon stock, depending on the price of Frontier shares at closing, which is expected within a year.

Frontier shares were up 39 cents, or 5.2 percent, at $7.96 in premarket trading Wednesday. Verizon shares gained 9 cents to $30.49.  Verizon is also extracting $3.3 billion from the units before selling them off, by having them pay cash to the parent company and letting them assume debt.  Frontier will issue so much stock to Verizon shareholders that they will end up owning 68 percent of the company.

''This is a truly transformational transaction for Frontier,'' Maggie Wilderotter, Frontier's chief executive, said in a statement. ''With more than 7 million access lines in 27 states, we will be the largest provider of voice, broadband and video services focused on rural to smaller city markets in the United States.''

Frontier also said it is cutting its annual dividend to 75 cents from $1, freeing cash to invest in the acquired areas, including for broadband buildouts. The cut takes its dividend yield to 9.9 percent.

Analyst Christopher King at Stifel Nicolaus noted that buyers of Verizon phone lines have fared badly in the past -- Fairpoint is struggling with its debt load, and the buyer of Verizon's Hawaiian business is in bankruptcy. But Frontier will actually reduce its debt load relative to its earnings through the transaction, King said.  The roughly 11,000 workers that support the local landlines will move to Frontier with union contracts intact, Verizon said.

Verizon lines in Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas and Virginia and most of California are not affected by the deal.

FORMER LEADER INFO

Oklahoma, Utah Lead Going Cell-Only; Calif, NY Lag
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:21 p.m. ET
March 11, 2009

Trendy California isn't a trendsetter when it comes to relying on cell phones. And while the 1987 movie ''Wall Street'' helped introduce the then-brick-sized mobile phone to popular culture, New York and other Northeast states lag in dropping landlines. Surprisingly, Oklahoma and Utah lead in going wireless, according to federal estimates released Wednesday.

At least 26 percent of households are now cell-only in Oklahoma and Utah, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated. That rate was at least 20 percent in nine other states -- Nebraska, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, New Mexico, Texas, South Carolina and Tennessee -- and the District of Columbia.

The study is sure to be watched closely by telecommunications companies trying to understand state and local markets better, and by government, academic and commercial survey researchers using telephone polling to monitor health trends, politics and much more.

The CDC, blending its own 2007 survey data with Census updates, found the prevalence of cell-only households varies widely by state -- sometimes within regions and even between neighboring states. This is tied to differences by state in demographics known to predict wireless-only ownership, especially being young and renting rather than owning a home.

States with the fewest cell-only households: Vermont (5 percent) and Connecticut, Delaware and South Dakota (6 percent each). South Dakota was near the bottom even though next-door Nebraska was near the top. Also below 10 percent: Rhode Island, New Jersey, Hawaii, California (9 percent), Montana, Massachusetts and Missouri.

In New York -- where Michael Douglas as corporate raider Gordon Gekko roamed lower Manhattan barking orders on a huge early cell phone in ''Wall Street'' -- 11 percent of households were cell only.

The study also estimated how many adults only have cell phones. Those estimates mostly came within a point or two of the household numbers.

The study's lead author, Stephen Blumberg, senior scientist at the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, noted the data are from 2007 and all signs indicate people keep substituting cell phones for landlines at a steady pace.

''We would expect that today in 2009 the prevalence rates in every state have increased, perhaps by 5 percentage points or more. What we don't know is whether the rate of growth is the same in every state,'' Blumberg said in an interview.

By asking about telephone usage in its monthly in-person health surveys, Blumberg's agency is the only source for data on prevalence of cell-phone-only households. It estimates more than one in six American homes -- 17.5 percent -- had only wireless phones as of a year ago.

The health survey doesn't have enough interviews to produce reliable state-level estimates in most states, so Blumberg's team looked to the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey, with large state samples. The researchers compared CPS data on demographic groups known to be associated with cell phone usage and adjusted the CDC state estimates to conform.

U.S. telephone surveys, especially on the state level, typically sample only landline phones. There's growing evidence from the 2008 election that excluding cell phones could hurt poll accuracy, at least a little. Blumberg noted that in health surveys omitting cell-only respondents could, among other things, underestimate the number of smokers and binge drinkers -- and, paradoxically, those who exercise regularly.

China will limit Internet access during the Olympic games 
DAY
By Andrew Jacobs    
Published on 7/31/2008 

Beijing - The International Olympic Committee failed to press China to allow fully unfettered access to the Internet for the thousands of journalists arriving here to cover the Olympics, despite promising repeatedly that the foreign news media could “report freely” during the games, Olympics officials acknowledged Wednesday.

Since the Olympic Village press center opened Friday, reporters have been unable to access scores of Web pages - among them those that discuss Tibetan issues, Taiwanese independence, the violent crackdown of the protests in Tiananmen Square and the Web sites of Amnesty International, the BBC, Radio Free Asia and several Hong Kong newspapers.

The restrictions, which closely resemble the blocks that China places on the Internet for its own citizens, undermine sweeping claims by Jacques Rogge, the IOC president, that China had agreed to provide free Web access for foreign news media during the games.

But a high-ranking IOC official said Wednesday that the committee was aware that China would continue to censor Web sites carrying content that Chinese propaganda authorities deemed harmful to national security and social stability. The committee acquiesced to China's demands to maintain such controls, said the official, who declined to be identified.

In its negotiations with the Chinese over Internet controls, the official said, the IOC insisted only that China provide unfettered access to sites containing information useful to sports reporters covering athletic competitions, not to sites that the Chinese and the Olympic committee negotiators determined had little relevance to sports.

The official said he now believed that the Chinese defined their national security needs more broadly than the Olympic committee had anticipated, denying reporters access to some information that they might need to cover the events and the host country fully.

This week, foreign news media in China were unable directly to access an Amnesty International report that detailed what it called a deterioration in China's human rights record in the prelude to the games.

Chinese officials initially suggested that any troubles journalists were having with Internet access probably stemmed from the sites themselves, not any steps that China had taken to filter Web content. But Sun Weide, the chief spokesman for the Beijing Olympic organizing committee, acknowledged Wednesday that journalists would not have uncensored Internet use during the Games.

”It has been our policy to provide the media with convenient and sufficient access to the Internet,” said Sun. “I believe our policy will not affect reporters' coverage of the Olympic games.”  


Demand for Data Puts Engineers in Spotlight
NYTIMES
By STEVE LOHR
Published: June 17, 2008

In Silicon Valley, the stars have long been charismatic marketing visionaries and cool-nerd software wizards. By contrast, mechanical engineers who design and run computer data centers were traditionally regarded as little more than blue-collar workers in the high-tech world.  For years, they toiled in relative obscurity in the engine rooms of the digital economy, amid the racks of servers and storage devices that power everything from online videos to corporate e-mail systems. Their mission was to keep the computing power plants humming, while scant thought was given to rising costs and energy consumption.

Today, data center experts are no longer taken for granted. The torrid growth in data centers to keep pace with the demands of Internet-era computing, their immense need for electricity and their inefficient use of that energy pose environmental, energy and economic challenges, experts say.  That means people with the skills to design, build and run a data center that does not endanger the power grid are suddenly in demand. Their status is growing, as are their salaries — climbing more than 20 percent in the last two years into six figures for experienced engineers.

“The data center energy problem is growing fast, and it has an economic importance that far outweighs the electricity use,” said Jonathan G. Koomey, a consulting professor of environmental engineering at Stanford. “So that explains why these data center people, who haven’t gotten a lot of glory in their careers, are in the spotlight now.”

At one time, “we were seen as sheet metal jockeys,” said Chandrakant Patel, a mechanical engineer at Hewlett-Packard Labs who has worked in Silicon Valley for 25 years. “But now we have a chance to change the world for the better, using engineering and basic science.”

There is no letup in the demand for data center computing. Digital Realty Trust, a data center landlord with more than 70 facilities, says that customer demand for new space is running 50 percent ahead of its capacity to build and equip data centers for the next two years. “We’re building the railroads of the future, and we can’t keep up,” said Chris J. Crosby, a senior vice president at Digital Realty.

For every new center, new data center administrators need to be hired. “It takes us eight months to find a guy to run a data center,” said Mr. Crosby.

Indeed, some data managers with only a degree from a two-year college can command a $100,000 salary. Trade and professional conferences for data center experts, unheard of years ago, are now commonplace. Five-figure signing bonuses, retention bonuses and generous stock grants have become ingredients in the compensation packages of data center experts today.

Paul Marcoux knows the feeling of being wanted. Cisco Systems, giant Silicon Valley maker of equipment used in data centers, recently held a nationwide search for a vice president for “green engineering.” It needed someone who could manage the traditional information technology functions as well as increasingly important mechanical and electrical systems.

Last November, Cisco found Mr. Marcoux, an electrical engineer with an M.B.A. working at American Power Conversion, a manufacturer of power supplies and air-conditioners for data centers. Mr. Marcoux, 57, worked on the design and construction of about 100 data centers in his 30-year career.

“To really make progress, we have to bridge the analog and the digital worlds,” said Mr. Marcoux.

At Cisco, Mr. Marcoux is applying his experience to improving the company’s data centers and its products, so that its computers increasingly can communicate with the coolers and power generators. “Our products need to talk to the power supplies and air-conditioners instead of being standalone boxes,” he explained.

Cisco is just one of the many companies — and the Energy Department’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory — working on the challenge of making data centers operate more like seamless machines, using sensors and software, for example, so the computers can direct air-conditioners and fans where and what level of cooling is needed.

Mr. Patel is overseeing H.P.’s programs in energy-efficient data centers and technology. The research includes advanced projects like trying to replace copper wiring in server computers with laser beams. But like other experts in the field, Mr. Patel says that data centers can be made 30 percent to 50 percent more efficient by applying current technology.

The pace of the data center buildup is the result of the surging use of server computers, which in the United States rose to 11.8 million in 2007, from 2.6 million a decade earlier, according to IDC, a research firm. Worldwide, the 10-year pattern is similar, with the server population increasing more than fourfold to 30.3 million by 2007.

“For years and years, the attitude was just buy it, install it and don’t worry about it,” said Vernon Turner, an analyst for IDC. “That led to all sorts of inefficiencies. Now, we’re paying for that behavior.”

The problem is that most computers in data centers run at 15 percent or less of capacity on average, loafing the rest of the time, though consuming electricity all the while. (In the old days, when they housed a few large computers, data centers were far more efficient. Mainframe computers run at 80 percent of capacity or more.)

The computers also generate a lot of heat, so much so that half of the energy consumed by a typical data center is for enormous air-conditioners, fans and other industrial equipment used mainly to cool the high-tech facilities.

The nation’s data centers doubled their energy consumption in the five years to 2006, exceeding the electricity used by the country’s color televisions, according to the latest government estimates.

The availability of electricity, not just its cost, presents a threat to the continued expansion of data center computing that can hamper companies across the economy, as they increasingly rely on information technology.

Based on current trends, by 2011 data center energy consumption will nearly double again, requiring the equivalent of 25 power plants. The world’s data centers, according to recent study from McKinsey & Company, could well surpass the airline industry as a greenhouse gas polluter by 2020.

Because the task ahead, analysts say, is not just building new data centers, but also overhauling the old ones, the managers who know how to cut energy consumption are at a premium. Most of the 6,600 data centers in America, analysts say, will be replaced or retrofitted with new equipment over the next several years.

They apparently have little choice. Analysts point to surveys that show 30 percent of American corporations are deferring new technology initiatives because of data center limitations.

Mechanical and electrical engineers with experience in data center design, air-flow modeling and power systems management are in demand. “If you have those skills, there are jobs waiting,” says Phil Calabrese, a mechanical engineer and director of I.B.M.’s real estate engineering and construction unit.

No company has longer experience in the care and feeding of data centers than I.B.M., and analysts say improving data center efficiency will involve applying some mainframe-style management disciplines.

To exploit the opportunity, I.B.M., which built its business on mainframes and still sells them, last fall introduced a green data center services unit. The new group signed $300 million in contracts in the fourth quarter of last year, and the business is growing rapidly this year, the company says.

Now that costs and energy consumption are priorities, the data center gurus are getting a hearing and new respect.

“After 25 years, we’re finally elevating mechanical engineering and adding a lot of electrical engineering, computer science and applied physics,” said Mr. Patel of Hewlett-Packard. “I wish I were 20 years younger.”

Vast Spy System Loots Computers in 103 Countries
NYTIMES
By JOHN MARKOFF
March 29, 2009

TORONTO — A vast electronic spying operation has infiltrated computers and has stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama, Canadian researchers have concluded.

In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved.

The researchers, who are based at the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto, had been asked by the office of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader whom China regularly denounces, to examine its computers for signs of malicious software, or malware.

Their sleuthing opened a window into a broader operation that, in less than two years, has infiltrated at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including many belonging to embassies, foreign ministries and other government offices, as well as the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York.

The researchers, who have a record of detecting computer espionage, said they believed that in addition to the spying on the Dalai Lama, the system, which they called GhostNet, was focused on the governments of South Asian and Southeast Asian countries.

Intelligence analysts say many governments, including those of China, Russia and the United States, and other parties use sophisticated computer programs to covertly gather information.

The newly reported spying operation is by far the largest to come to light in terms of countries affected.

This is also believed to be the first time researchers have been able to expose the workings of a computer system used in an intrusion of this magnitude.

Still going strong, the operation continues to invade and monitor more than a dozen new computers a week, the researchers said in their report, “Tracking ‘GhostNet’: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network.” They said they had found no evidence that United States government offices had been infiltrated, although a NATO computer was monitored by the spies for half a day and computers of the Indian Embassy in Washington were infiltrated.

The malware is remarkable both for its sweep — in computer jargon, it has not been merely “phishing” for random consumers’ information, but “whaling” for particular important targets — and for its Big Brother-style capacities. It can, for example, turn on the camera and audio-recording functions of an infected computer, enabling monitors to see and hear what goes on in a room. The investigators say they do not know if this facet has been employed.

The researchers were able to monitor the commands given to infected computers and to see the names of documents retrieved by the spies, but in most cases the contents of the stolen files have not been determined. Working with the Tibetans, however, the researchers found that specific correspondence had been stolen and that the intruders had gained control of the electronic mail server computers of the Dalai Lama’s organization.

The electronic spy game has had at least some real-world impact, they said. For example, they said, after an e-mail invitation was sent by the Dalai Lama’s office to a foreign diplomat, the Chinese government made a call to the diplomat discouraging a visit. And a woman working for a group making Internet contacts between Tibetan exiles and Chinese citizens was stopped by Chinese intelligence officers on her way back to Tibet, shown transcripts of her online conversations and warned to stop her political activities.

The Toronto researchers said they had notified international law enforcement agencies of the spying operation, which in their view exposed basic shortcomings in the legal structure of cyberspace. The F.B.I. declined to comment on the operation.

Although the Canadian researchers said that most of the computers behind the spying were in China, they cautioned against concluding that China’s government was involved. The spying could be a nonstate, for-profit operation, for example, or one run by private citizens in China known as “patriotic hackers.”

“We’re a bit more careful about it, knowing the nuance of what happens in the subterranean realms,” said Ronald J. Deibert, a member of the research group and an associate professor of political science at Munk. “This could well be the C.I.A. or the Russians. It’s a murky realm that we’re lifting the lid on.”

A spokesman for the Chinese Consulate in New York dismissed the idea that China was involved. “These are old stories and they are nonsense,” the spokesman, Wenqi Gao, said. “The Chinese government is opposed to and strictly forbids any cybercrime.”

The Toronto researchers, who allowed a reporter for The New York Times to review the spies’ digital tracks, are publishing their findings in Information Warfare Monitor, an online publication associated with the Munk Center.

At the same time, two computer researchers at Cambridge University in Britain who worked on the part of the investigation related to the Tibetans, are releasing an independent report. They do fault China, and they warned that other hackers could adopt the tactics used in the malware operation.

“What Chinese spooks did in 2008, Russian crooks will do in 2010 and even low-budget criminals from less developed countries will follow in due course,” the Cambridge researchers, Shishir Nagaraja and Ross Anderson, wrote in their report, “The Snooping Dragon: Social Malware Surveillance of the Tibetan Movement.”

In any case, it was suspicions of Chinese interference that led to the discovery of the spy operation. Last summer, the office of the Dalai Lama invited two specialists to India to audit computers used by the Dalai Lama’s organization. The specialists, Greg Walton, the editor of Information Warfare Monitor, and Mr. Nagaraja, a network security expert, found that the computers had indeed been infected and that intruders had stolen files from personal computers serving several Tibetan exile groups.

Back in Toronto, Mr. Walton shared data with colleagues at the Munk Center’s computer lab.

One of them was Nart Villeneuve, 34, a graduate student and self-taught “white hat” hacker with dazzling technical skills. Last year, Mr. Villeneuve linked the Chinese version of the Skype communications service to a Chinese government operation that was systematically eavesdropping on users’ instant-messaging sessions.

Early this month, Mr. Villeneuve noticed an odd string of 22 characters embedded in files created by the malicious software and searched for it with Google. It led him to a group of computers on Hainan Island, off China, and to a Web site that would prove to be critically important.

In a puzzling security lapse, the Web page that Mr. Villeneuve found was not protected by a password, while much of the rest of the system uses encryption.

Mr. Villeneuve and his colleagues figured out how the operation worked by commanding it to infect a system in their computer lab in Toronto. On March 12, the spies took their own bait. Mr. Villeneuve watched a brief series of commands flicker on his computer screen as someone — presumably in China — rummaged through the files. Finding nothing of interest, the intruder soon disappeared.

Through trial and error, the researchers learned to use the system’s Chinese-language “dashboard” — a control panel reachable with a standard Web browser — by which one could manipulate the more than 1,200 computers worldwide that had by then been infected.

Infection happens two ways. In one method, a user’s clicking on a document attached to an e-mail message lets the system covertly install software deep in the target operating system. Alternatively, a user clicks on a Web link in an e-mail message and is taken directly to a “poisoned” Web site.

The researchers said they avoided breaking any laws during three weeks of monitoring and extensively experimenting with the system’s unprotected software control panel. They provided, among other information, a log of compromised computers dating to May 22, 2007.

They found that three of the four control servers were in different provinces in China — Hainan, Guangdong and Sichuan — while the fourth was discovered to be at a Web-hosting company based in Southern California.

Beyond that, said Rafal A. Rohozinski, one of the investigators, “attribution is difficult because there is no agreed upon international legal framework for being able to pursue investigations down to their logical conclusion, which is highly local.”

Lawmakers say computers were hacked from China 
DAY
By PETE YOST and LARA JAKES JORDAN    
Published on 6/12/2008  
 
Washington - Multiple congressional computers have been hacked by people working from inside China, lawmakers said Wednesday, suggesting the Chinese were seeking lists of dissidents.

Two congressmen, both longtime critics of Beijing's record on human rights, said the compromised computers contained information about political dissidents from around the world. One of the lawmakers said he'd been discouraged from disclosing the computer attacks by other U.S. officials.  Virginia Rep. Frank Wolf said four of his computers were compromised, beginning in 2006. New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith, a senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said two of his computers were attacked, in December 2006 and March 2007.

Wolf said that following one of the attacks, a car with license plates belonging to Chinese officials went to the home of a dissident in Fairfax County, Va., outside Washington and photographed it.  During the same time period, The House International Relations Committee - now known as the House Foreign Affairs Committee - was targeted at least once by someone working inside China, said committee spokeswoman Lynne Weil.

Wednesday's disclosures came as U.S. authorities continued to investigate whether Chinese officials secretly copied the contents of a government laptop computer during a visit to China by Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez and used the information to try to hack into Commerce Department computers. The Pentagon last month acknowledged at a closed House Intelligence committee meeting that its vast computer network is scanned or attacked by outsiders more than 300 million times each day.

Wolf said the FBI had told him that computers of other House members and at least one House committee had been accessed by sources working from inside China. The Virginia Republican suggested that Senate computers could have been attacked as well.  He said the hacking of computers in his Capitol Hill office began in August 2006, that he had known about it for a long time and that he had been discouraged from disclosing it by people in the U.S. government he refused to identify.

”The problem has been that no one wants to talk about this issue,” he said. “Every time I've started to do something I've been told 'You can't do this.' A lot of people have made it very, very difficult.”

The FBI and the White House declined to comment.  The Bush administration has been increasingly reluctant publicly to discuss or acknowledge cyber attacks, especially ones traced to China.

In the Senate, the office of Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who chairs the Senate's subcommittee on humanitarian issues, asked the sergeant at arms to investigate whether Senate computers have been compromised.

Wolf said the first computer hacked in his office belonged to the staffer who works on human rights cases and that others included the machines of Wolf's chief of staff and legislative director.

”They knew which ones to get,” said Dan Scandling, who currently is on leave of absence from his job as Wolf's chief of staff. “It was a very sophisticated operation,” he said. “The FBI verified that it had been done.”

Smith said the attacks on his office computers were “very much an orchestrated effort.”

He said that after the first intrusion in December 2006, “that was the last time” his office put the names of dissidents on its computers.

In Beijing, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs had no immediate comment on the allegations by Wolf and Smith.  Last week, China denied the accusations regarding Gutierrez's laptop and the alleged effort to hack Commerce Department computers.  Wolf said he was introducing a House resolution that would help ensure protection for all House computers and information systems.

It calls for the chief administrative officer and sergeant at arms of the House, in consultation with the FBI, to alert members and their staffs to the danger of electronic attacks. Wolf also wants lawmakers to be fully briefed on ways to safeguard official records from electronic security breaches.

”My own suspicion is I was targeted by China because of my long history of speaking out about China's abysmal human rights record,” Wolf said in a draft of remarks he prepared to give on the House floor.

He said Congress should hold hearings, specifically the House Intelligence Committee, Armed Services Committee and Government Operations Committee. Speaking generally in May 2006, Wolf called Chinese spying efforts “frightening” and said it was no secret that the United States is a principal target of Chinese intelligence services.

Wolf thinks that President Bush should stay away from the Olympics because of China's human rights record.  He also has been outspoken on the subject of violence in the Darfur region of Sudan, where China has major oil interests.  Smith has introduced the Global Online Freedom Act which would prohibit U.S. Internet companies from cooperating with countries such as China that restrict information about human rights and democracy on the Internet.

Wolf and Smith both traveled to Beijing 17 years ago seeking the release of 77 people imprisoned or under house arrest because of their religious activities.

Recording Industry Getting Tougher On State's Students For Illegal Downloads; Settle Now Or Face A Federal Lawsuit, Lawyers Tell The Accused In Form Letter 
DAY
Published on 2/15/2008 

Free downloads have never cost so much.

Since last August, 84 University of Connecticut students, along with many others from Yale, Fairfield University, and Trinity College, have received letters from attorneys representing several major record companies threatening heavy fines and legal action against the students, who have allegedly downloaded music illegally using the school's Internet server.

The letters state, “You have been infringing copyrights owned by the Record Companies.”

The correspondence, obtained this week by The Day and addressed Jan. 9 from the Denver-based law firm Holme, Roberts and Owen, goes on to say that the students had 20 days “to settle the claims for a significantly reduced amount.”

If the accused students do not settle, the record companies promise to file a federal lawsuit, according to the letter, and the students would face much stiffer penalties compared to what the companies' settlement offers.

A spokesman for the law firm said it doesn't comment on the letters.

One Canterbury man, who is the father of a UConn sophomore, said his daughter received a presettlement letter. The man asked not to be identified because he fears retaliation from the record companies. When he called the settlement hotline, the law firm asked for $3,000 compensation for the 350 songs his daughter had downloaded.

“It's totally ridiculous — it's extortion,” he said. “They're kind of bullying you.”

The man said his daughter did not pay the fine and now faces $262,000 in penalties from the record companies.

The record companies represented by the law firm are the heavyweights of the industry — EMI Recorded Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, as well as all of their subsidiaries.

Since last February, the Recording Industry Association of America has been waging an aggressive campaign against illegal downloads, especially cracking down on colleges and universities, because there are disproportionately higher incidences of illegal file sharing on college campuses. More than 2,350 students have settled with the RIAA since the stepped-up campaign began, according to the association.

The recording industry does not know the names of the students yet, just the specific IP addresses of their computers; however, the companies can compel the university to reveal the names by issuing a subpoena.

“We're familiar with these kinds of claims, and we have no direct authority to intervene,” Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said earlier this week.

According to Blumenthal and an online database for federal court cases, the university has not yet been served with a subpoena.

Blumenthal said he has been contacted by a relatively small number of people seeking help, and his office has “successfully moderated or reduced such penalties in the past by appealing to the companies' sense of fairness and common sense.”

University officials said that instances of illegal downloading on campus has drastically decreased over the past years, but combating it is still a challenge.

“It's a constantly moving target,” said Michael Kerntke, chief information officer at UConn.

Kerntke said the college has software to prevent the type of person-to-person file sharing that has led to legal challenges, but students who are determined to download files illegally will find a way to do so.

“The RIAA is obviously trying to enforce royalty payments in some way, shape or form,” Kerntke said. As a way to help students avoid the temptation of illicit file sharing, the university points students to a site that allows free, legal downloads, www.ruckus.com.

In a Feb. 6 post on the university's Web site, Dean of Students Lee Williams warned about the consequences of illegal file sharing.

“When the RIAA contacts the University, and produces a legal subpoena, we are obliged to give them information about students' identification and online activity,” Williams wrote in her post. “All we can (and will) do on your behalf is notify you that the RIAA is after you. At that point, you'll have to either pay this fine, or hire a lawyer to fight this.”

The experience of people who have fought that legal battle has not been good. Just this week Oklahoma State University revealed the names of 11 students accused of illegal downloads. The students and the school were unsuccessful in trying to quash the RIAA subpoena.

“The bottom line is: illegal downloading is ... illegal. And it will cost you a bundle,” Williams said in her message.  


The Amazon "Kindel" (seen above)

Sony to Launch a Wireless e-Reader
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:42 p.m. ETAugust 25, 2009

NEW YORK (AP) -- Sony Corp. plans to offer an e-book reader with the ability to wirelessly download books, injecting more competition in a small but fast-growing market by adopting a key feature of the rival Kindle from Amazon.com.

Sony's $399 Reader Daily Edition will go on sale by December, Sony executives said Tuesday at an event at the New York Public Library. The device has a 7-inch touch screen and will be able to get books, daily newspapers and other reading material over AT&T Inc.'s cellular network.

Sony has sold e-book reading devices with ''electronic ink'' displays in the United States since 2006, but has seen most of the attention stolen by Amazon.com Inc., which launched the Kindle with similar e-ink technology a year later. The latest version of the Kindle -- which is not controlled by touching the screen -- costs $299 and uses Sprint Nextel Corp.'s wireless network for downloads.

On Tuesday, Sony also began selling a ''Pocket Edition'' e-book reader with a 5-inch screen, for $199, and a larger $299 touch-screen model. Neither has wireless capability, so both have to be connected to a computer to acquire books.

Though Sony is following in Amazon's footsteps by adding wireless capability, its e-book strategy differs in crucial respects.

The only copy-protected books the Kindle can display are from Amazon's store, and the only devices the store supports are the Kindle, the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

Sony, on the other hand, has committed to an open e-book standard, meaning its Readers can show copy-protected books from a variety of stores, and the books can be moved to and read on a variety of devices, including cell phones.

Sony also announced Tuesday that the Readers will be able to load e-books ''loaned'' from local libraries. A library card will provide access to free books that expire after 21 days.

The library connection ''would seem to be something Amazon would never embrace, so that could be a key differentiator,'' said Richard Doherty, director of research firm The Envisioneering Group.

The alliance with AT&T helps the Dallas-based carrier further expand the use of its wireless network beyond cell phones. Like other carriers, AT&T is looking for new avenues of growth now that almost every adult has a cell phone. In July, it announced that it would provide the connection to another upcoming e-book reader from Plastic Logic Ltd., which will use the e-book store of Barnes & Noble Inc.

Reader owners won't be charged a subscription fee for wireless access, said Steve Haber, head of Sony's U.S. reading division.

Instead, the bookseller will likely have to pay AT&T for the wireless access, out of money it charges for the books, similar to the way Amazon pays Sprint. Sony's multi-store strategy makes that challenging. The Daily Edition will initially have wireless access only to Sony's e-book store, Haber said.

Sony said the names of the newspapers that will be available on the device will be announced later. The Kindle already offers 46 newspapers, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

Sony's U.S. shares rose 43 cents, or 1.6 percent, to $27.01 in midday trading, while Seattle-based Amazon gained 30 cents to $84.80.


7 May 2009
By Michael Fitzpatrick
BBC News

Kindle DX
The Kindle DX is designed for newspapers and periodicals - but is only black and white

The rise and rise of e-readers
Amazon's launch of its first dedicated e-reader for newspapers and magazines points to a future when digital and analogue publishing begins to merge.

Nearly double the size of the book giant's existing e-reader, Amazon's wireless Kindle DX has adopted a tabloid-like format for ease of reading newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times and the Washington Post which have announced they will launch pilots editions on Kindle DX this summer.

Although others, most notably the Japanese and the Dutch, have trials underway that publish tabloid-size digital editions for other handheld e-reader devices, Amazon with its mighty marketing clout represents the first mainstream commercial stab at the market.

Increased graphics resolution and the larger size of the tablet-like, the $489 Kindle DX is also a departure from previous e-readers on the market, although Japan's Fujitsu has a similar sized colour reader on the market for twice the price.

"Cookbooks, computer books, and textbooks - anything highly formatted -shine on the Kindle DX," claims Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO underlining the new Kindle's purported better handling of detail and graphics.

Amazon already has a hit on its hands with the Kindle 2. The same heft as a paperback, weighing about eight ounces, such e-ink readers are basically handheld screens on which you can read words page by page reasonably comfortably.

Amazon says it has already sold more than 500,000 of its $359 Kindle e-readers, which buyers use mostly as a portable library downloading print media via a wireless connection.

The new Kindle DX, like other popular e-readers such as the Sony reader, employs "e-ink" technology that far enhances the reading of digitized print.

Sony Reader
Sony has a rival e-reader on the market

As there is no backlight and no glare, the effect is not unlike reading a page in a regular book. Publications are bought online making paid subscriptions, along the lines of paid for music on iTunes, a possibility.

Such benefits have not been lost on newspaper editors who are desperate to find alternatives to today's failing business models of newspaper publishing.

Alan Rusbridger, the editor of UK newspaper The Guardian, for one, has predicted there might be an "iPod moment" for the industry with the coming of a handheld device on which reading a newspaper will become commonplace.

However excited some in the ailing newspaper and magazine industry are over the new Kindle, there are still severe shortcomings, not least that content offerings still come only in black and white.

Vastly superior to reading off a computer monitor or conventional mobile phone screen Amazon's e-readers and their ilk are products of electronic-ink technology that creates clear, easy-to-read text even in sunlight.

With electronic ink, charged particles migrate under the influence of an electric field. Depending on the field applied, either the white or the black particles move to the front of the screen to make up the image.

The technology used in most e-readers are adaptations of this form of "ePaper" and "e-ink" that create bubbles of e-ink by pushing ink-like particles around under its light-grey plastic skin.

As a leader in the field of e-paper development Japanese researchers at Fujitsu Frontech have attempted to sidestep the mono-chromatic drawbacks by creating colour e-ink and went to market last month with a full colour e-reader.

Dubbed Flepia, the three-quarters of a pound device displays 260,000 colours - good enough to display magazine-like graphics, is slightly smaller than a sheet of A4 and just over a centimetre thick.

Flepia
Fuji sells a colour e-reader - but it is expensive

Colour for such e-ink technology does not come cheap, however, and Flepia retails at $1,000 in Japan.

Looking at the Flepia, the future of e-ink digital e-readers, says Tokyo-based new media journalist Nobuyuki Hayashi, has a long way to go, not least on price.

"Flepia has a too slow refresh rate (1.8 seconds), users have to use a stylus to turn pages and its user interface is no-frill, no-fun and non-intuitive. In my opinion this does not look like a serious consumer device," he says.

"An easier-to-use device from outside of the country such as Kindle (or the iPhone), will probably eliminate this somewhat alien product."

Whatever the outcome of both Fujitsu's and Amazon's new formats the rivals have entered an increasingly crowded marketplace for the e- reader.

Sony and a Dutch firm iRex have both experimented with newspaper subscriptions on their paperback sized e-readers.

Kindle 2
The Kindle DX has a 9.7 inche screen and can display Adobe Acrobat files

Since Christmas, iRex has offered over 800 newspapers from 81 countries on its new monochrome but high- resolution iRex Digital Reader 1000 series.

While French telecoms provider Orange has just finished an e-reader trial in partnership with five French newspapers, including Le Monde and Les Echos, and will be looking to start a proper commercial service by the end of the year.

But despite having success with using an e-reader with its e-reading clients, Orange is undecided which platform is best suited to delivering daily print media subscriptions "as the market is moving too fast to tell".

With smartphones and net books falling in price, such all in one devices - suitable for anything from book reading to watching TV - might prove a more convenient platform for publishing and even present better business models for publishers as Japan has found.

"Expect a slow beginning and a period of rapid evolution before e-reader's become ubiquitous, " says Japanese media consultant David Kilburn.

"They will also need to compete successfully with what people can already do using their mobile phones."

Already "keitai culture", the pervasiveness of mobile phone usage, as generated by Japan's early embracing of mobiles is making its impact felt in other activities such as newsgathering and newspaper reading.

The popularity of Amazon's Kindle and the Sony e-book reader suggests there is a market that has been poorly exploited so far by smartphones in the west while Japan is racing ahead with manga by e-mail and paid for newspaper subscriptions by phone.

Ryo Shimizu CEO of applications developer UEI in Tokyo says the phone as book, magazine or sketchpad is already something that has taken off in Japan.

"The killer application in Japan is CGM, such as novels or comics, which can be read by mobile phones. Here, mobiles are already a true alternative to paper."

Looking at Japan's reach for the handier keitais, going bigger isn't always going to be better, even for Amazon.




Click above for on-line "Brave New World" - the original.  After many years the "Revisited" came out...from Wikipedia:

Brave New World Revisited (Harper & Row, 1958, 1965), written by Huxley almost thirty years after Brave New World, was a non-fiction work in which Huxley considered whether the world had moved towards or away from his vision of the future from the 1930s. He believed when he wrote the original novel that it was a reasonable guess as to where the world might go in the future but in Brave New World Revisited he concluded that the world was becoming much more like Brave New World much faster than he thought...

Rell seeks to safeguard citizenry's private information from online search sites
Manchester Journal Inquirer
By: Harlan Levy
12/25/2007

Complaints about online directory assistance sites that reveal extensive personal data have prompted Gov. M. Jodi Rell to start developing a legislative package to help

In a news release, Rell said Monday that she's received complaints about online search engines that list not only names, addresses, and telephone numbers but also people's ages, places of work, and other personal information.
 
Rell said she plans to propose restrictions that would likely be in the form of an "opt-out" registry that's an electronic version of the state and federal "Do Not Call" list, which blocks telemarketing calls to citizens whose phone numbers are on the list.

"Anyone who goes to WhitePages.com or 411.com will find personal information published that many people may want protected," Rell said. "This is a safety and security issue, particularly for our elderly citizens who too often are targeted by scam artists and other opportunists."

A third site, veromi.net, provides the names of possible relatives and roommates, as well as a person's name, address, age, and other information.

The opt-out registry Rell outlined would establish a centralized, one-time process for Connecticut residents to remove some or all of their private information from Internet search sites, credit card solicitations, direct mail lists, and other records.

"There have long been Web sites that, for a modest fee, specialize in taking bits and pieces from each of these sources and assembling a surprisingly complete profile of an individual, including Social Security number, address history, employer and even the make and model of their car," Rell said in the release.

"Now some sites are adding even more personal information to search results ... I am concerned this 'personal information creep' will put more and more individual privacy at risk."

Rell said she understands that these sites are breaking no law by gathering and disseminating this information.

Nevertheless, she said, an opt-out registry "will in no way jeopardize my commitment to transparency in government," because "I believe there are reasonable protections we can explore without compromising the Freedom of Information Act and the principles of open government."

One impediment is that the First Amendment of the Constitution prohibits the restraint of free speech. That means that the directory-assistance Web sites cannot be forced to remove any data that is public. And one's name, spouse's name, address (unless unpublished), age, and workplace are probably all available to the public, whether they can be easily found or not.

If it's public, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said, "there are no constitutional problems that I would foresee. The government cannot censor what's in the public realm."

What the government can censor, Blumenthal said, is a party tracking and selling the private information that comes from an individual's Internet dealings and purchases without the individual's knowledge.

Three weeks ago Blumenthal proposed a "Do Not Track" list similar to a Canadian program that would prohibit such conduct by telemarketers and others who use, buy, or sell such information that they surreptitiously obtain without consent. Blumenthal wants next year's legislature to enact the measure.

"The basic concept is to prevent collecting information without the consumer's consent," Blumenthal said.
"If the consumer objects to collecting the information and says, 'Do not track me when I travel the Internet,' that wish should be respected, and this law would compel marketers to protect that right under consumer privacy."

That protection would come from state law and not under the right to privacy under the Fourth Amendment, Blumenthal added.

"The Fourth Amendment right is against the government invading my privacy and telling me what to do," he said.
Privacy laws being scrutinized

Rell noted that many states are examining their privacy laws, security measures, and the kinds of information they collect, manage, and distribute in light of identity theft, fraud, and other computer crimes.

The state has endured several recent incidents of misplaced computers with vast amounts of unprotected personal data. Protective reactions followed soon thereafter.

In October, Rell announced that the Department of Information Technology had selected a new encryption tool for use by state agencies for laptop computers and other mobile computing and storage devices.

On Sept. 10, Rell announced a new mobile computing and storage device security policy requiring agencies to adhere to new restrictions and accountability measures, including mandatory risk assessments and written authorization from the agency head for any instance in which restricted or confidential data must reside on a mobile device for business reasons.

Any data residing on a mobile device under these controlled circumstances must be encrypted, the amount of data and length of time it may reside on the mobile device must be limited, and protections from unauthorized access and disclosure are required.

Rell also directed all agencies to assess and purge sensitive data currently on laptop computers and portable storage devices if there was no compelling business need for the information to be so stored.

"Privacy concerns are constantly evolving," Rell said. "We must not only keep up with them but do our best to stay ahead of the curve."

Rell said she will ask state agencies to review private information about residents that the state collects, manages, and distributes.

"While bearing in mind such traditional functions such as tax collection, media and freedom-of-Information requests and law enforcement, I want to ensure that the security of private information within state government is protected," Rell said.

Recent new laws in other states sharply curtail the business use and release of Social Security numbers and specify that businesses may not retain information from the "magnetic stripe" on the back of credit and debit cards for longer than 48 hours.



Major Internet hubs see lesser influence
By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer
October 7, 2007

NEW YORK - The recent rush by major Internet portals to buy advertising companies and extend their sales networks is a sign that the business of being a one-stop shop for information and entertainment isn't what it used to be.  Gone are the days of emphasizing ways to attract and keep visitors — the way television networks long have operated — by creating destinations with anything people might need for work, leisure or companionship.

Instead, those companies are now more aggressively trying to follow Web surfers elsewhere — and bring lucrative advertising to them.

As people increasingly turn to blogs, social-networking sites and other sources of user-generated media, Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL have spent more than $10 billion collectively this year to acquire companies and technologies that help extend their online advertising networks.  So instead of relying solely on being portals for consumers, the major companies are creating one-stop shops for advertisers, who are increasingly wanting to buy ads centrally and place them where the eyeballs are. The networks take care of feeding the ads to smaller sites.

"We're not interested in building yesterday's portal," said Ron Grant, AOL's president and chief operating officer. "Consumers are finding what they are looking for is coming from more and more fragmented places. We need a way for advertisers to take advantage of that fragmentation."

That shift is important for the major Internet businesses to grab a substantial share of the marketing dollars expected to flow at the expense of television and print.  For consumers, the development means greater freedom and a further erosion of artificial walls designed to keep visitors from leaving sites.  According to comScore Media Metrix, the U.S. audience for the four major Internet brands grew over the past year. But the total time spent at Yahoo and AOL dropped about 10 percent, while Microsoft's MSN-Windows Live services saw an 8 percent decline.

In other words, these sites are attracting more people but are keeping them for shorter durations as users find what they need elsewhere.  Google was the exception, with a 57 percent jump in total time spent, but even the company recognizes that "no individual property will have all those products and services" a user might want, said Tim Armstrong, Google's head of North American ad sales.

"The Internet is basically being built and scaling (faster) than any one property on the Internet is," Armstrong said. "Companies in the Internet space are changing their business models to have models which are consumer driven, not property driven."

That's not to say the major Internet destinations are ceding their own properties.  In a few cases, the large companies have bought wildly popular sites. Google spent about $1.76 billion last November to absorb the leading video-sharing site, YouTube. It also owns the blogging service Blogger, while Yahoo has the photo-sharing site Flickr.  They are also innovating. AOL revamped its video search site in August, while Yahoo retooled its core search engine this month to try to make it more engaging and lure back those who had defected to Google.

"Everyone still wants to be your home page. They are always going to battle for that," said Nick Nyhan, chief executive of market research firm Dynamic Logic. "But they have to think beyond that. Consumers aren't going to just take your stuff."

Google, Yahoo and AOL still make most of their ad money from sites they own and operate (Microsoft did not break down figures in its regulatory filings). Google and Yahoo even reported relative growth there in the second quarter.  Ad networks set the stage for the future and help the large Internet companies ensure they will have enough inventory to sell in the years ahead.  Ford Motor Co. can, for instance, come to Google and buy ads that run not only there but also at The New York Times' Web site and thousands of others within Google's AdSense network. Ford wouldn't have to deal with all those sites individually; third-party sites wouldn't have to expand their sales team.

Meanwhile, Google gets a cut of ad revenues — without spending a dime developing those specialty sites.  Although this concept isn't new, what is changing is the scale.  In agreeing to acquire DoubleClick Inc. for $3.1 billion, Google is looking for better ways to deliver multimedia display ads to supplement the small, text-based ads the company already does well.  The still-pending acquisition also extends Google's reach beyond AdSense to all the outside sites for which DoubleClick now distributes advertising.

Likewise, in buying Tacoda Inc., AOL not only gets Tacoda's technology for targeting ads, but also extends its reach to NBC Universal, Scripps Networks and the Times (sites can join multiple ad networks). AOL also has a network through its 2004 acquisition of Advertising.com and separately bought companies this year serving international markets and wireless devices.

Yahoo, meanwhile, paid about $650 million for the 80 percent of Right Media Inc. it did not already own and agreed to buy BlueLithium Inc. for $300 million. Microsoft bought aQuantive Inc. for $6 billion.

"It's not that networks are going to supplant these mass-market sites, but they will have less influence as networks have more," said David Hallerman, a senior analyst at the research group eMarketer, which projects U.S. online advertising spending at $44 billion in 2011, more than double the $17 billion last year.

The shift didn't happen overnight. Many factors are involved, including online hangouts like Facebook and News Corp.'s MySpace commanding more of a user's time over the past few years. Web sites big and small are making features available, through tools called widgets, for viewing directly at those sites.  Of course, the major brands would still prefer visitors going to them directly, as they wouldn't have to share ad revenues with another site.

But as audiences disperse, advertisers have become reluctant to concentrate their spending at a traditional portal.

Besides standardization, efficiency and diversity, advertisers get better targeting with networks. Say you are trying to reach Seattle natives with a propensity to fly to the remote Arctic island of Svalbard. On a portal you might find 10. On a network 100 times larger, you'd find 1,000 without changing your campaign.

There are drawbacks, though.

U.S. and European regulators are reviewing Google's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick. Critics complain Google would have too much control over online advertising and personal information collected on users. 
And despite the efficiencies, consolidation could hamper flexibility, said Jason Turner, vice president for interactive at advertising agency Ignited.

"When there were four television networks, you were beholden to those four, (who could say), `Here are the rules. This is what it's going to cost and if you don't like it you're not going to get on TV,'" Turner said.

Nonetheless, ad networks are here to stay.

"Advertisers are going to need to start to use the Internet the way people always use the Internet, spreading out in hot pursuit of the things they need and want," said Jarvis Coffin, chief executive of Burst Media Corp., an independent ad network. "It's much easier to fish where the fish are."

Intel Unveils New Classmate PCs
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: April 3, 2008
Filed at 10:50 a.m. ET

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Intel Corp. unveiled new features for its line of low-cost laptops for schools Wednesday, adding bigger screens and more data storage capacity as the chip maker ratchets up its rivalry with the One Laptop per Child organization, which sells a competing machine.

Intel's new Classmate PCs -- slated to go on sale in April for between $300 and $500 -- reflect the company's growing efforts to sell computers equipped with its own chips to schools in developing countries, a battleground for technology companies because of the millions of people there just coming online.

But the target market has expanded to include kids in the U.S. as potential users of cheaper, stripped-down machines.

Classmate PCs also are part of Intel's push to generate interest in a new class of mobile devices the company is calling ''netbooks,'' which are smaller and have fewer functions than standard laptops but also use far less power and are easier to carry around.

Other tweaks to the Classmate that Intel announced Wednesday from its developer forum in Shanghai include the availability of both 7-inch and 9-inch screens, a 30 gigabyte hard disk drive and an integrated Web camera.

At the developer forum, Intel executives also rolled out five new processors under the ''Atom'' brand name. The chips are designed for pocket-size Internet devices. The chips come in speeds up to 1.86 gigahertz while using less than 3 watts of power.

Intel said its Classmate PCs will eventually use Atom processors.

Classmates are based on Intel's design and include its processors, but they are built by other manufacturers and sold under a variety of brand names. The first generation went on sale in March 2007 with the 7-inch screen and fewer functions. Intel said it has sold ''tens of thousands'' of the machines but declined to provide more specific data.

Intel and OLPC have feuded furiously over their competing products.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based nonprofit OLPC says it has sold hundreds of thousands of its $188 machines.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff's low-cost XO laptop includes a microprocessor from Advanced Micro Devices Inc., the world's No. 2 microprocessor maker behind Intel.

A short-lived truce between Intel and OLPC ended earlier this year when Intel suddenly pulled out from OLPC's board of directors.

Intel claimed it couldn't continue cooperating with OLPC when founder Nicholas Negroponte demanded Intel stop selling Classmates overseas. Negroponte said the dispute stemmed from Intel sales reps disparaging OLPC products while pushing Intel's own machines.

WORLD-WIDE INTERNET CONNECTIVITY



Op-Ed Columnist
The Land of ‘No Service’
NYTIMES
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
August 16, 2009

Chief’s Island, Botswana

If you travel long enough and far enough — like by jet to Johannesburg, by prop plane to northern Botswana and then by bush plane deep into the Okavango Delta — you can still find it. It is that special place that on medieval maps would have been shaded black and labeled: “Here there be Dragons!” But in the postmodern age, it is the place where my BlackBerry, my wireless laptop and even my satellite phone all gave me the same message: “No Service.”

Yes, Dorothy, somewhere over the rainbow, there is still a “Land of No Service” — where the only “webs” are made by spiders, where the only “net” is the one wrapped around your bed to keep out mosquitoes, where the only “ring tones” at dawn are the scream of African fish eagles and the bark of baboons, where the only GPS belongs to the lioness instinctively measuring the distance between herself and the antelope she hopes will be her next meal, and where “connectivity” refers only to the intricate food chain linking predators and prey that sustains this remarkable ecosystem.

I confess, I arrived with enough devices to stay just a teensy-weensy connected to e-mail. I wasn’t looking for the Land of No Service. But the Okavango Delta’s managers and the Wilderness Trust — a South African conservation organization that runs safaris to support its nature restoration work — take the wilderness seriously. The staff at our camp on the northwestern tip of Chief’s Island, the largest island in the delta, did have a radio, but otherwise the only sounds you heard were from Mother Nature’s symphony orchestra and the only landscapes, sunsets and color combinations were painted by the hand of God.

So, like it or not, coming here forces you to think about the blessings and curses of “connectivity.” “No Service” is something travelers from the developed world now pay for in order to escape modernity, with its ball and chain of e-mail. For much of Africa, though, “No Service” is a curse — because without more connectivity, its people can’t escape poverty. Can there be a balance between the two?

For the normally overconnected tourist, the first thing you notice in the Land of No Service is how quickly your hearing, smell and eyesight improve in an act of instant Darwinian evolution. It is amazing how well you can hear when you don’t have an iPod in your ears or how far you can see when you’re not squinting at a computer screen. In the wild, the difference between hearing and seeing with acuity is the difference between survival and extinction for the animals and the difference between a rewarding experience and a missed opportunity for photographers and guides.

It was our guide spotting a half-eaten antelope lodged high in a tree that drew our attention to its predator, a leopard, calmly licking her paws nearby and then yawning from her midday meal. The cat’s stomach was heaving up and down, still digesting her prey. The leopard had suffocated the antelope — you could still see the marks on its neck — and then dragged it up the tree, holding it in her jaws, and placed the kill perfectly in the V between two branches. And there the antelope dangled, head on one side, dainty legs on the other, with half her midsection eaten away. The rest would be tomorrow’s leopard lunch, stored high above where the hyenas could not get it.

But while maintaining “No Service” in the wild is essential for Africa’s ecotourism industry, the rest of the continent desperately needs more connectivity. Eric Cantor, who runs Grameen Foundation’s Application Laboratory in Uganda, explains what a huge difference cellphones and Internet access can make to people in Africa:

“A banana farmer previously limited to waiting for a buyer truck to pass his farm to sell the week’s harvest can now use a mobile-phone marketplace to publicize the availability of his stock or to search for buyers who might be in the market or have truck transport available to a larger market,” said Cantor. “They can also compare going prices to gain more power in a negotiation. Teenagers too shy to ask parents about causes and symptoms of sexually transmitted diseases can research them privately and improve their own health outcomes. A farmer with no money who needs a remedy for the pest attacking her primary crop can find one that uses locally available materials, when they need it.”

Botswana, about the size of Texas, luckily has enough diamonds to be able to turn 40 percent of its land into nature preserves. Its urban connectivity with the global diamond exchanges enables it to maintain “No Service” in its wilderness. Zimbabwe, by contrast, has become virtually a country of “No Service” after decades of dictatorship by Robert Mugabe, and, as a result, both its people and wildlife are endangered species.

The more African countries where “No Service” can be a choice, not a fate — an offering for the eco-tourist to enjoy, not a condition for the entrepreneur to overcome — the more hope that this continent will be able to enhance its natural wonders and its people at the same time.
Bringing the Internet to Remote African Villages
NYTIMES
By CHRIS NICHOLSON
February 2, 2009

ENTASOPIA, Kenya — The road from Nairobi winds 100 miles to this town deep in Masai country. The asphalt gives way to sand and dust, until finally it is just a dirt track climbing over broken hills and plunging back to desert flats. The going is slow.

The outpost, with about 4,000 inhabitants, is at the end of that road and beyond the reach of power lines. It has no bank, no post office, few cars and little infrastructure. Newspapers arrive in a bundle every three or four weeks. At night, most people light kerosene lamps and candles in their houses or fires in their huts and go to bed early, except for the farmers guarding crops against elephants and buffalo.

Entasopia is the last place on earth that a traveler would expect to find an Internet connection. Yet it was here, in November, that three young engineers from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, with financial backing from Google, installed a small satellite dish powered by a solar panel, to hook up a handful of computers in the community center to the rest of the world.

In recent years the mobile phone has emerged as the main modern communications link for rural areas of Africa. From 2002 to 2007, the number of Kenyans using cellphones grew almost tenfold to reach about a third of the population, many of whom did not have land lines, according to the International Telecommunication Union.

But many of the phones were simple models made more for talking than Web browsing, and wireless data networks are slow, with sporadic coverage.

Satellite connections are faster and more stable, which is why they are attracting interest from the likes of Google, as a way to provide Internet connections to the estimated 95 percent of Africans who, according to the telecommunications union, have no access.

Although providing Internet access is outside the normal business realm of Google, with this project it is looking at how obstacles might be overcome in Kenya and other parts of Africa.

The dish at Entasopia was intended to operate for months with little maintenance under harsh conditions. This station, along with two others in villages almost as remote, is part of a larger push by Google into small, marginal communities, providing them with new tools to access information, work with distant colleagues, and communicate with friends and family.

Google paid for the final design of the stations and is covering the monthly fees for satellite bandwidth. The company has also invested in O3b, a start-up that hopes to deploy a constellation of satellites over Africa by the end of next year.

“Building infrastructure is not necessarily Google’s objective, but if you look at all the areas that Google has gone into, in many cases it has been to fill a gap,” said Joseph Mucheru, who heads Google’s East Africa office. “The market should see the opportunity.”

Just how much opportunity there is remains unclear. Google is uncertain whether such satellite stations can pay for themselves in rural areas, given the cost of equipment and bandwidth. Communities may well benefit from the connection, but they do not all have the means to afford it.

Bandwidth fees for stations like the one in Entasopia could cost as much as $700 a month, though slower ones cost less, said Wayan Vota, a senior director at Inveneo, a nonprofit that works to disseminate Internet technology throughout Africa and the developing world. As these connections are introduced more widely, which is O3b’s goal, the price could fall, Mr. Vota said.

When Internet connections arrive in small towns like Entasopia, they put new tools into the hands of people hungry to use them, and for some there, that has had wide repercussions.

James Mathu has worked for the Kenyan agriculture ministry in Entasopia for five years, advising farmers on the environment, crop husbandry and soil conservation. The stable Internet link allows him to send information to district headquarters in Kajiado, instead of spending days traveling there and back to deliver monthly reports, which are too lengthy for him to send via cellphone.

“It is a five-day affair,” he said, estimating that the Internet saved him 12,000 shillings a year, or $152, in a country where the gross domestic product per person is $1,700.

Julius Kasifu, 40, is using the Internet to try to help others. His family runs a farm, but because his legs were crippled by polio as a child, he was limited in the farm work he could do.

In Masai society, he said, disabilities like his were seen as bad omens. Traditionally, disabled newborns were abandoned and their mothers were put through a ritual cleansing to banish the evil spirits that were said to have caused the disability, while the place where the birth took place was burned. Even now, such children are often kept hidden away in the family manyatta, a wattle-and-daub hut.

Mr. Kasifu is leading a campaign to raise awareness and to build a shelter, called Tuko, for such children. With the Internet connection, he has been able to upload a short video about their plight.

“The mothers come to me and say: ‘Have you got a place to take our children?’ ” he said. “It hurts, but what can I do? Out of that hurt came this project.”

But there are significant limits to how many Kenyans the Internet can reach. Even if it is available free, not everyone can take full advantage of it, one obstacle being computer literacy.

Teddy Chenya, who for the past eight months has helped staff the community center for the Arid Lands Information Network, the Kenyan nongovernmental organization running the satellite ground stations, said that younger people were more likely to visit him than older ones, because they had time to spend and were willing to sit down, three to a computer, and learn by trial and error.

“Most people looking for information, they need help,” he said. “They still don’t know where to look or what a Web address is. I played for them streaming video, and they said: ‘Is it a radio? Is it a TV?’ ”

Another obstacle is literacy itself: many of the adults in Entasopia, especially women, cannot read.

Nthenya Mule, East Africa manager for Acumen Funds, a nonprofit organization, directs investments in regional businesses that have a social-development aspect. Ms. Mule said there were many challenges facing poor, rural communities, and progress was often held back by larger problems like lack of infrastructure, health care or loan availability, rather than the scarcity of Internet access.

“Is VSAT what’s most important?” she asked, referring to very small aperture terminal, the satellite technology being used in the project.

Still, Ms. Mule said, “there are so many issues, sometimes you just begin acting where you can.”
MIT Spinoff's Little Green Laptop A Hit In Remote Peruvian Village 
DAY
By Frank Bajak, AP Technology Writer    
Published on 12/25/2007 

Arahuay, Peru — Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago.

These offspring of peasant families whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the $188 laptops — people who can ill afford pencil and paper much less books — can't get enough of their “XO” laptops. 
At breakfast, they're already powering up the combination library/videocam/audio recorder/music maker/drawing kits. At night, they're dozing off in front of them — if they've managed to keep older siblings from waylaying the coveted machines.

“It's really the kind of conditions that we designed for,” Walter Bender, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff, said of this agrarian backwater up a precarious dirt road.

Founded in 2005 by former MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte, the One Laptop program has retreated from early boasts that developing-world governments would snap up millions of the pint-sized laptops at $100 each.  In a backhanded tribute, One Laptop now faces homegrown competitors everywhere from Brazil to India — and a full-court press from Intel Corp.'s more power-hungry Classmate.

But no competitor approaches the XO in innovation. It is hard drive-free, runs on the Linux operating system and stretches wireless networks with “mesh” technology that lets each computer in a village relay data to the others.  Mass production began last month and Negroponte, brother of U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, says he expects at least 1.5 million machines to be sold by next November. Even that would be far less than Negroponte originally envisioned. The higher-than-initially-advertised price and a lack of the Windows operating system, still being tested for the XO, have dissuaded many potential government buyers.

Peru made the single biggest order to date — more than 272,000 machines — in its quest to turn around a primary education system that the World Economic Forum recently ranked last among 131 countries surveyed. Uruguay was the No. 2 buyers of the laptops, inking a contract for 100,000.

Negroponte said 150,000 more laptops will get shipped to countries including Rwanda, Mongolia, Haiti, and Afghanistan in early 2008 through “Give One, Get One,” a U.S.-based promotion ending Dec. 31 in which you buy a pair of laptops for $399 and donate one or both.  The children of Arahuay prove One Laptop's transformative conceit: that you can revolutionize education and democratize the Internet by giving a simple, durable, power-stingy but feature-packed laptop to the worlds' poorest kids.

“Some tell me that they don't want to be like their parents, working in the fields,” first-grade teacher Erica Velasco says of her pupils. She had just sent them to the Internet to seek out photos of invertebrates — animals without backbones.

Antony, 12, wants to become an accountant.

Alex, 7, aspires to be a lawyer.

Kevin, 11, wants to play trumpet.

Saida, 10, is already a promising videographer, judging from her artful recording of the town's recent Fiesta de la Virgen.

“What they work with most is the (built-in) camera. They love to record,” says Maria Antonieta Mendoza, an Education Ministry psychologist studying the Arahuay pilot to devise strategies for the big rollout when the new school year begins in March.

Before the laptops, the only cameras the kids at Santiago Apostol school saw in this population-800 hamlet arrived with tourists who visit for festivals or to see local Inca ruins.  Arahuay's lone industry is agriculture. Surrounding fields yield avocados, mangoes, potatoes, corn, alfalfa and cherimoya.  Many adults share only weekends with their children, spending the workweek in fields many hours' walk from town and relying on charities to help keep their families nourished.

When they finish school, young people tend to abandon the village.  Peru's head of educational technology, Oscar Becerra, is betting the One Laptop program can reverse this rural exodus to the squalor of Lima's shantytowns four hours away.  It's the best answer yet to “a global crisis of education” in which curricula have no relevance, he said. “If we make education pertinent, something the student enjoys, then it won't matter if the classroom's walls are straw or the students are sitting on fruit boxes.”

Indeed, Arahuay's elementary school population rose by 10 when families learned the laptop pilot was coming, said Guillermo Lazo, the school's director.  The XOs that Peru is buying will be distributed to pupils in 9,000 elementary schools from the Pacific to the Amazon basin where a single teacher serves all grades, Becerra said.  Although Peru boasts thousands of rural satellite downlinks that provide Internet access, only about 4,000 of the schools getting XOs will be connected, said Becerra.

Negroponte says One Laptop is committed to helping Peru overcome that hurdle. Without Internet access, he believes, the program is incomplete.

Teachers will get 21/2 days of training on the laptops, Becerra said. Each machine will initially be loaded with about 100 copyright-free books. Where applicable, texts in native languages will be included, he added. The machines will also have a chat function that will let kids make faraway friends over the Internet.

Critics of the rollout have two key concerns.  The first is the ability of teachers — poorly trained and equipped to begin with — to cope with profoundly disruptive technology.  Eduardo Villanueva, a communications professor at Lima's Catholic University, fears “a general disruption of the educational system that will manifest itself in the students overwhelming the teachers.”

To counter that fear, Becerra said the government is offering $150 grants to qualifying teachers toward the purchase of conventional laptops, for which it is also arranging low-interest loans.

The second big concern is maintenance.  For every 100 units it will distribute to students, Peru is buying one extra for parts. But there is no tech support program. Students and teachers will have to do it.

“What you want is for the kids to do the repairs,” said Negroponte, who believes such tinkering is itself a valuable lesson. “I think the kids can repair 95 percent of the laptops.”

Tech support is nevertheless a serious issue in many countries, Negroponte acknowledged in a phone interview.  One Laptop is currently bidding on a contract with Brazil's government that Negroponte says demanded unrealistically onerous support requirements.  The XO machines are water resistant, rugged and designed to last five years. They have no fan so they won't suck up dust, are built to withstand drops from a meter and a half and can absorb power spikes typical of places with irregular electricity.

Mendoza, the psychologist, is overjoyed that the program stipulates that kids get ownership of the laptops.  Take Kevin, the aspiring trumpet player.  Sitting in his dirt-floor kitchen as his mother cooks lunch, he draws a soccer field on his XO, then erases it. Kevin plays a song by “Caliente,” his favorite combo, that he recorded off Arahuay's single TV channel. He shows a reporter photos he took of him with his 3-year-old brother.  A bare light bulb hangs by a wire from the ceiling. A hen bobs around the floor. There are no books in this two-room house. Kevin's parents didn't get past the sixth grade.

Indeed, the laptop project also has adults in its sights.

Parents in Arahuay are asking Mendoza, the visiting psychologist, what the Internet can do for them.

Among them is Charito Arrendondo, 39, who sheds brief tears of joy when a reporter asks what the laptop belonging to ruddy-cheeked Miluska — the youngest of her six children — has meant to her. Miluska's father, it turns out, abandoned the family when she was 1.

“We never imagined having a computer,” said Arrendondo, a cook.

Is she afraid to use the laptop, as is typical of many Arahuay parents, about half of whom are illiterate?

“No, I like it. Sometimes when I'm alone and the kids are not around I turn it on and poke around.”

Arrendondo likes to play checkers on the laptop.

“It's also got chess, which I sort of know,” she said, pausing briefly.

“I'm going to learn.”  
I-BBC; Last Updated: Wednesday, 12 December 2007, 15:04 GMT
A child's view of the $100 laptop
What will a child in the UK make of a laptop designed to help children in the developing world? Rory Cellan-Jones brought an XO home to find out.

The XO laptop
The laptop was designed to be robust and easy to use

In late November I returned from Nigeria with a sample of the XO laptop.

The computer, made by the One Laptop per Child charity, is a robust little machine designed to entertain and educate children while allowing them to learn by themselves.

I knew there was only one person who could review it for me.

The Nine Year-old's View

Enter Rufus Cellan-Jones. He is nine, has far more experience of games consoles than computers, and has strong views on most matters.

"Looks fun," was his only comment when I handed over the small, green and white laptop, explaining that he was the only child in Britain to have one.

But very quickly he was up and running.

All I did was give him the security code for our home wireless network so he could take the XO online. The rest he figured out for himself, as he explains:

Lots of fun

"I just seemed to work it out. It was rather easy. I didn't even need help." Surprise, surprise, his first discovery was a game. "I found Block Party. It's like Tetris. I'm now up to Level 7."

I thought my young games fanatic might stick there but he moved on. "Then I discovered paint. You can use pencils, change the texture, use different sizes of brush."

Even better, there was an animation programme called Etoys.

"That's my favourite.You make things. You can see tutorials and demos. Then you can make a new project. I've made a crazy UFO which you can move."

But Rufus says it isn't just about play.

"I use the calculator - that can be rather useful for sums. You can even browse onto the internet. You can watch and learn stuff. You can write things and it can also remind you which is extremely useful."

What, I asked, does a nine year old need to remind himself about? "Christmas stuff," he said, with an air of mystery.

Social networking

But the real surprise came one evening, when Rufus asked me to explain what his friends were telling him on the laptop.

I thought those imaginary childhood friends from years back must have returned.

But I went and had a look - and it was true - he appeared to be chatting online.

So how had he managed that?

"You go on "neighbourhood", then you go to the chat thing.

You go on Nigeria and you chat to them."

But why, if he was online with the children at the Nigerian school I had visited, were they sending messages in Spanish?

I decided he must be linking up with one of the South American schools taking part in the OLPC project but we still aren't sure quite how that is happening.

Still, Rufus is widening his social circle. " I have three friends. It's nice to talk to them. They don't speak much English but I can understand them." The conversation is not exactly sparkling, but Rufus has learned to say "Hola".

Not a toy

So Rufus is using his laptop to write, paint, make music, explore the internet, and talk to children from other countries.

Because it looks rather like a simple plastic toy, I had thought it might suffer the same fate as the radio-controlled dinosaur or the roller-skates he got last Christmas - enjoyed for a day or two, then ignored.

Instead, it seems to provide enduring fascination.

I had returned from Nigeria not entirely convinced that the XO laptop was quite as wonderful an educational tool as its creators claimed.

I felt that a lot of effort would be needed by hard-pressed teachers before it became more than just a distracting toy for the children to mess around with in class.

But Rufus has changed my mind.

With no help from his Dad, he has learned far more about computers than he knew a couple of weeks ago, and the XO appears to be a more creative tool than the games consoles which occupy rather too much of his time.

The One Laptop Per Child project is struggling to convince developing countries providing computers for children is as important as giving them basic facilities like water or electricity.

Unusually, Rufus does not have an opinion about that controversy, but he does have a verdict on the laptop. "It's great," he says.

Laptop Project Says Each Sale To U.S. Buyer Will Donate One To Developing-Country User 
DAY
By Brian Bergstein, AP Technology Writer    
Published on 9/24/2007 
   
Cambridge, Mass. — The project that hopes to supply developing-world schoolchildren with $188 laptops will sell the rugged little computers to U.S. residents and Canadians for $400 each, with the profit going toward a machine for a poor country.

The One Laptop Per Child project expects that its “Give One, Get One” promotion will result in a pool of thousands of donated laptops that will stimulate demand in countries hesitant to join the program. It will be offered for only two weeks in November.

Originally conceived as the “$100 laptop,” the funky green-and-white low-power “XO” computers now cost $188. The laptops' manufacturer, Quanta Computer Inc., is beginning mass production next month, but with far fewer than the 3 million orders One Laptop Per Child director Nicholas Negroponte had said he was waiting for.

Negroponte said the availability of donated laptops would not be the sole condition for many countries weighing whether to place multimillion-dollar orders. But “it just triggers it,” he said. “It makes it all happen faster.”

By opening sales to people in the U.S. and Canada at http://www.xogiving.com, “Give One, Get One” will delight computing aficionados, because the XO is unlike any other laptop.

It has a homegrown user interface designed for children, boasts built-in wireless networking, uses very little power and can be recharged by hand with a pulley or a crank. Its display has separate indoor and outdoor settings so it can be read in full sunlight, something even expensive laptops lack.

The machines use the Linux open-source system and don't run Windows; Negroponte expects that to be possible soon, but Microsoft Corp. insists it can't guarantee that, given the machine's idiosyncratic specs.

The catch is that “Give One, Get One” will run only from Nov. 12 to Nov. 26. Negroponte said the limited availability is partly necessary so the nonprofit doesn't run afoul of tax laws, but mainly designed to create scarcity-induced excitement.

“We need that burst,” he said.

Just the first 25,000 buyers will be promised delivery of their XOs by the Christmas season. Everyone else will be on a pace reminiscent of the old Sears Roebuck catalog, with the computer probably arriving in January.

Then again, most buyers figure to be motivated more by the “Give One” aspect than the “Get One” part. Negroponte said that dynamic is beginning to pervade the program, with several poor countries finding that richer governments are willing to act as sponsors.

For example, Italy is buying all 50,000 XOs that Ethiopia will get in the program's first wave. Now Negroponte is trying to encourage similar arrangements with governments in Europe and Asia, with Pakistan and Afghanistan among the possible recipients. Megabillionaire Carlos Slim is expected to purchase 25,000 XOs and lend them to Mexican children.

Thailand, Uruguay, Nigeria, Brazil, Libya and Rwanda are among the countries that could be in the first wave of laptop customers, though specifics have not been announced.

Given all the innovations in the XO and the discussions it has inspired about computers in education, One Laptop Per Child — a spinoff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — can claim significant achievements. However, Negroponte hoped to be further along by now.

In September 2005, he was saying that 5 million to 15 million machines might be in production in 2006, with perhaps 100 million out by now. In April 2006 he foresaw 5 million to 10 million XOs dotting the landscape in 2007.

Now 250,000 to 300,000 are due to be made by the end of this year. Negroponte expects that to ramp up to 1 million a month next year, though he still lacks signed orders for that many.

One reason things may have gone slower than predicted is One Laptop Per Child's impending emergence awoke commercial vendors to the promise of a low-cost international educational market. Now governments considering buying XOs for their youngsters have multiple options in the $200 range — including more-conventional computers that can run Windows. Negroponte acknowledges the absence of Windows led Russia to say no.

One of the laptop program's unabashed admirers is Miguel Brechner, who runs a government-funded technology group in Uruguay. Brechner has been overseeing a test of 200 XOs in a Uruguayan village and believes the laptops have stimulated collaboration and raised expectations for children. He expects to buy many more XOs as Uruguay soon begins to outfit all 400,000 of its primary schoolchildren with laptops.

“I'm absolutely a believer that this will change the country,” Brechner said.

But not all of those computers will be XOs. To hedge its bets, Uruguay probably will buy other inexpensive laptops as well, including Intel Corp.'s Classmate PCs. Brechner argues that Windows is a better option for older kids who are closer to entering the computing work force.

“We will see (what happens) in the field and change whatever is necessary,” Brechner said. “We will make some mistakes. We don't know who to copy on this.”

Wireless is beefed up in downtown
By FRANK MacEACHERN, fmaceachern@thestamfordtimes.com
September 6, 2007

STAMFORD —Three small parks in the city's downtown are more than just places to relax on a warm day, they're also areas where people can connect to the Internet via free Wi-Fi service.

City officials hope it's just the start of a "wireless corridor" running from the downtown to the transportation center, said Michael Pensiero, Stamford's director of technology management services.

"Our entire plan is to have a wireless service from Ferguson Library to the transportation center, to create a wireless corridor," said Pensiero.

The service enables people who have a laptop to work in an area where they can't plug in to a wall socket in order to access the Internet. Instead they're able to sit in an area, such as a park, and connect to the Internet wirelessly.

The project is funded by a $15,000 federal grant which was used to purchase the radio equipment and for service fees, said Pensiero. Approval for the grant came last fall and the city received the money approximately two months later.

Last year the city offered the service at Columbus Park. This summer the city added Latham Park on Bedford Street and Veterans Park on Atlantic Street near Stamford Town Center.

The city is working with the state to have the service extended to the transportation center so commuters would be able to use it while waiting for a train, said Pensiero.

To access the Internet users have to type the 13-digit access code on Connecticut library cards. Out-of-state residents have to obtain a library card from Ferguson Library if they wish to connect to the Internet.

There haven't been many users yet, said Pensiero, but he hoped more will take advantage of it once they get to know about the service.

Once users know about free Wi-Fi service they're eager to use it, said Alice Knapp, director of public services at the Ferguson Library.

The library began offering the service three years ago at its main branch and then expanded it this year to the Harry Bennett and the Weed & Hollander Memorial branches in Turn of River and Springdale areas respectively. She estimated about 12-13,000 users have signed on to use the Wi-Fi service.

For people who bring their laptop to the library to work on a project or assignment the Wi-Fi service is another convenience for them. They can work and also access reference material at the same time as others are doing so, said Knapp.

Internet speed at the Wi-Fi sites is very good, said Pensiero, although he cautioned it's affected by how many users are online.

Municipal Wi-Fi faces financial hurdles
By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Business Writer
Fri Aug 31, 2:54 AM ET

SAN FRANCISCO - A year ago, it seemed like just about every major U.S. city was drawing up ambitious plans to build wireless Internet networks so more people, both rich and poor, could have online access wherever they wanted. Now, economics is blurring the Utopian vision as city leaders and the companies proposing to build the Wi-Fi networks haggle over whether the projects make financial sense.

The problem came into sharper focus this week as once-ballyhooed projects in San Francisco and Chicago unraveled while another high-profile deal in Houston neared a breaking point.

"Cities and companies are rethinking the models that they are adopting," said Esme Vos, founder of MuniWireless.com, a Web site that tracks trends in the industry. "It's all about economics and risk-sharing now."

MuniWireless estimates Wi-Fi networks have either already been built or are under consideration in 455 cities and counties across the United States, up from 122 two years ago.

The second thoughts about municipal Wi-Fi revolve around questions about whether the networks will generate enough revenue to justify the multimillion-dollar investments to build and maintain them.

EarthLink Inc., an Internet service provider that had been one of the chief evangelists in the crusade to blanket cities with Wi-Fi, has decided it can no longer afford to foot the bill by itself as the Atlanta-based company tries to bounce back from $46 million in losses during the first half of this year.

"We will not devote any new capital to the old municipal Wi-Fi model that has us taking all the risks," Rolla Huff, EarthLink's chief executive, told analysts during a Wednesday conference call. "In my judgment, that model is simply unworkable."

Later Wednesday, Huff informed San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom that EarthLink was rescinding a proposal to cover the estimated $14 million to $17 million cost of building the city's Wi-Fi network.

Had the San Francisco system been built, EarthLink planned to charge about $20 per month for Wi-Fi access that would have been three to four times faster than a free service subsidized by ads sold by Google Inc. San Francisco still hopes to find other vendors willing to build a Wi-Fi network in its city, an effort that Google said it will continue to support.

"Google is committed to promoting alternative platforms for people to access the Web no matter where they are, and we encourage others to think creatively about how to address access issues in their own communities," Google spokesman Andrew Pederson said.

Last year, Google completed a free Wi-Fi network in its home town of Mountain View that the company says attracts about 15,000 users per month.

EarthLink had doubts about whether it could sign up enough San Francisco subscribers to recover its costs there, based on its experience so far in other cities, including Philadelphia and New Orleans, where it has already completed or is still building Wi-Fi networks.

Houston was counting on EarthLink to invest about $50 million to build a Wi-Fi network there, but those high hopes are now fading. The city this week notified EarthLink that it will fine the company $5 million for missing its contractual deadlines. The payment will give EarthLink more time to consider whether it wants to abandon the Houston project or find other partners willing to help defray the costs.

Chicago canceled its $18.5 million Wi-Fi project after concluding it would require the city to spend too much money to help finance it.

Financial worries also have jeopardized a $20 million Wi-Fi network in Milwaukee. The project remains in its testing phase, but the vendor, Midwest Fiber Networks, has publicly expressed concerns about whether the network will attract enough customers to recoup the investment.

Vos and other industry observers believe the dreams about wireless Internet access in big cities can still be realized if the some of the financial burden is shifted from the private sector.

"What is happening right now is a black eye (for Wi-Fi), but I don't think it's a death blow," said Godfrey Chua, who follows wireless networking issues for the research firm IDC. "We just need to work on new business models."

Some cities already have agreed to help finance Wi-Fi by sharing some of the upfront costs and guaranteeing subscriptions. Minneapolis, for instance, has agreed to become the "anchor tenant" on its Wi-Fi network — a commitment that will cost the city $1.25 million annually.

Houston had also agreed to pay EarthLink $500,000 annually to give the city's workers Wi-Fi access during the first five years of its contract, but that still might not be enough to keep EarthLink on board.

DPUC Issues Certificate For U-Verse; Decision Clears The Way For AT&T's New Phone-Line Television Offering 
By Anthony Cronin, Day Business Editor    
Published on 11/2/2007         

AT&T and union officials on Thursday welcomed state regulators' approval of the communications company's new U-verse offering, which provides television services over its phone network.

The state Department of Public Utility Control issued a “certificate of video franchise,” making AT&T the first competitor to offer television services under a new state law designed to increase competition with the cable industry.

New London is one of the introductory markets for the new U-verse television service. AT&T, whose statewide headquarters is in New Haven, launched the service last December in a handful of towns and cities. Since then, it has expanded to 42 municipalities and serves more than 150,000 customers. Company officials said AT&T would continue to expand the service to more towns and cities across Connecticut.

In addition, downtown New London is home to a service center for the new U-verse service that employs about 100.

Ramona Carlow, president of AT&T's Connecticut operations, said her company is pleased with the DPUC decision, saying that Connecticut consumers “have long desired more choice in the video marketplace.”

The U-verse service comes into a residence via the telephone network. Once inside the home, equipment essentially “splits” the television signal off from the voice or data signals, providing cable-like service to individual television sets in a home.

Earlier this week, AT&T won an important court victory when a Hartford Superior Court judge backed the communications company in its battle to convince state regulators to let it sell the service without being considered a regulated cable provider.

The DPUC had ruled this past month that AT&T needed a cable-television license for its new service. AT&T objected, along with its union workers and many of its customers. AT&T officials said they have invested more than $300 million in the new service and disputed that it is a cable-like service.

William F. Henderson III, president of the Communications Workers of America Local 1298, said the DPUC decision on Thursday offers welcome relief to his union, which had forecast the loss of at least 1,300 jobs across the state if the new television offering were halted.

The CWA workers include various technicians and service personnel who are working to install the new service and broaden the U-verse network to more municipalities across the state. “I'm happy that they (DPUC) moved so quickly because jobs were at stake and the economy in the state of Connecticut would suffer” if jobs were lost from the initial DPUC ruling in October, Henderson said.

U-verse basic service starts at $44 a month, but the price increases depending on the level of service, such as adding television offerings or Internet-related packages.
AT & T Wins In Court; TV Service To Continue
By MARK PETERS | Courant Staff Writer
November 1, 2007

A Hartford Superior Court judge ruled Wednesday that AT&T can resume signing up customers for its TV service, possibly ending the battle over how to regulate the company's alternative to cable television.

Judge Robert McWeeny overturned a ruling by the state Department of Public Utility Control that required AT&T to follow the same rules as cable companies. McWeeny ruled that AT&T should instead be regulated under a new state law designed to promote TV services that compete with cable companies, something the state hopes will lead to lower rates and improved service.

"The legislature has made a policy determination to encourage competition in the area of cable services by reducing the regulatory burden on providers… The DPUC and [state Office of Consumer Counsel] are created by the legislature to facilitate and implement their policy determinations, not to frustrate them," the judge wrote.

As a result of the recent DPUC decision, AT&T threatened to lay off hundreds of workers, call off hundreds of millions of dollars in construction and shut down the TV service for its 7,000 existing customers.

AT&T now plans to continue expanding its TV service known as U-verse, which is available in parts of 42 towns and cities in Connecticut. The company uses an Internet-like technology to deliver ESPN, HBO and other TV programming over telephone lines.

As part of the new state law, AT&T will have to receive a new kind of license from the DPUC as a competitive video provider. The company said it won't start signing up new customers until it gets the license.

"Connecticut consumers will have a chance for video choice at last. We are proud and pleased today to have gotten clarity from [the court]," Seth Bloom, an AT&T spokesman, said in a statement.

It wasn't clear Thursday whether the state might appeal the ruling. Neither officials at the DPUC nor the Office of Consumer Counsel, which represents TV service customers, could be reached for comment.

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal had argued that U-verse should be treated the same as cable TV companies and abide by the same rules. But he softened his position in recent days, and said Thursday he doesn't believe McWeeny's ruling should be appealed. He may seek legislative changes to ensure competition for TV service is fair.

"We may differ on legal issues, but we share the goal of providing cable consumers with this new service so they, hopefully, have the benefits of lower prices and better service. Continued legal combat ill-serves that common objective," Blumenthal said in a statement.

The battle over AT&T's U-verse service had focused on whether the phone giant should be compelled to get a franchise license for the whole state and provide service to anyone who wanted it, statewide. Cable companies like Comcast and Cox Communications currently have that requirement for their franchise areas, which encompass several municipalities and not the whole state.

The consumer counsel and Blumenthal had argued that if AT&T wasn't required to serve everyone, then only certain areas of the state would benefit from competition. The company could then pick and choose the most lucrative areas, leaving others particularly the poor or those in rural areas with no competitive choice.

AT&T argued that to offer the service to everyone would be burdensome as it entered a market where cable companies have had a decades-old monopoly. If the state wanted competition, the company maintained, it would have to drop the so-called universal service requirement.

The General Assembly did just that in a law passed earlier this year that prevents AT&T from discriminating against low-income areas, but doesn't require the company to offer U-verse to all customers. The law also set up a lighter regulatory system that still included customer service requirements and public access TV funding.

However, that law came into question after a federal court ruled that AT&T was a cable company in a lawsuit brought by the consumer counsel and cable industry. The federal ruling resulted in the DPUC ruling on Oct. 15 that AT&T didn't qualify under the new state law and had to stop signing up customers until it received a cable franchise license.

AT&T balked and appealed the ruling to state court, leading to Wednesday's ruling.

AT&T building U-verse
CT POST
By PAM DAWKINS
Article Last Updated: 08/23/2007 10:35:33 PM EDT

While a federal district court and state regulators contemplate rulings about the nature of AT&T's U-verse television service, the company continues building up the infrastructure and customer base.

AT&T plans to spend about $336 million on infrastructure improvements in the state as part of its three-year plan to roll out U-verse nationally.

It started the service in Connecticut in parts of nine towns in December; today it is available in parts of 35 cities and towns, including Bridgeport, Danbury, Derby, Fairfield, Milford, New Haven, Stratford, Trumbull, Westport and West Haven. The company won't disclose specific numbers, but says it has thousands of subscribers here already. Its marketing efforts include a doublewide trailer with two living rooms, where customers can check out the service. That trailer is at the Best Buy parking lot in Danbury for another month.

"The main driver behind U-verse is the empowerment of the Web U-verse is about bringing that Web empowerment to your TV," Chris Traggio, AT&T's vice president for consumer operations, said Thursday during a media tour of the video hub office.

For security and competitive reasons, AT&T has asked the hub's location be identified only as being in New Haven County, around the center of the state. The hub has no identifying signage.

This is where AT&T acquires Connecticut and New York City channels — sent digitally through fiber optics — and merges them with national content, said Rob Frey,
the facility manager.

Inside, gray and black bookcase-like shapes line rows, holding black boxes sporting a variety of wires and lights; bundles of yellow fiber-optic cable are everywhere. Everything has a redundancy, Frey said, so service isn't interrupted. This includes the power supply; huge batteries fill in for a secondary backup generation if the primary generator, which is on site, fails.

The local signal moves down an aisle of machinery, which processes it into an Internet Protocol stream. Technicians can also change the color or volume in a program. The process is mirrored on the other side of the room for national programming.

Both sets move via fiber optics to neighborhood nodes but once there, the content moves to individual sites via the copper wire that also carries phone service, said Chad Townes, AT&T's vice president and general manager for Connecticut. That need to move through sites with fiber optics is why it's not available in the whole state at once, he said. "Every day, we're adding more fiber."

Part of the installation — the company has 100 technicians now with more going through six-week training courses continuously — includes rewiring the house if the wires are too old.

U-verse is billed as competition to cable television, but Attorney General Richard Blumenthal maintains the service is cable television, and so AT&T should be regulated like a cable company, which includes requesting a franchise from the state Department of Public Utility Control.

One worry, Blumenthal has said, is that AT&T will "cherry pick" its demographic, bringing U-verse to wealthier communities and leaving poorer areas behind. Also, unless held to franchise rules, the company won't offer public access television; AT&T, however, has promised to do this.

In June 2006, the DPUC ruled AT&T's Internet Protocol Television is not subject to cable franchising requirements; Blumenthal sued in U.S. District Court for a ruling that it is. In July 2007, the court overturned the DPUC's decision. Now, AT&T has moved for a reconsideration while Blumenthal has filed an emergency request with the DPUC to force AT&T to apply for a franchise.

Blumenthal puts AT&T's chances of a reconsideration at "virtually zero," calling it a "futile attempt" at delaying the inevitable.

"Whatever the rules for cable franchises they should apply to IPTV," he said Thursday. "It's the law," and what the federal courts have decided.

"We're waiting until court action is finalized," because it would be imprudent to take action until then, DPUC spokeswoman Beryl Lyons said Thursday. The DPUC's cable regulating authority is minimal and includes ensuring cable companies meet public, education and government access requirements.

"Cable competition has been permitted since 1984," Lyons said, but "the investment is enormous. The risk was very great," so no one wanted to start up service. AT&T, however, already has a fiber-optic infrastructure.

In its most recent session, the state Legislature passed, and Gov. M. Jodi Rell signed, a bill to prompt competition wherever possible. In part, Lyons said, as of Oct. 1, the bill narrows the DPUC's jurisdiction once competition — when there's at least one non-cable company customer in an existing franchise — is established. The DPUC, however, remains the franchising authority and continues to oversee access channels and customer service.

Townes declined to comment Thursday about the court case, but said, "There's a huge difference between the two technologies." Cable, he said, is a one-way broadcast of content; U-verse is two-way communication.

The cable box, he said, brings in a signal with all the offerings. The U-verse set-top box tells the hub what programming to send. This frees up bandwidth for more channels and other offerings.

The company has four packages, which include high definition television channels. Prices for bundled U-verse and Internet service — customers can buy the television service alone but the highspeed Internet service is embedded in the signal — range from $59 to $129 a month, depending on Internet speed.

The basic package has more than 100 channels and comes with one receiver. Other packages come with three receivers, including one with a digital video recorder, which can record up to four channels at once. "We don't ever expect to replace the computer," Townes said, but U-verse will soon be capable of showing photos from the Web, stock quotes and movie times and even send messages to appear on the screen from an off-site computer. Today, users can program their DVR from an off-site computer or cell phone.Wallingford resident Leslie Spiars, an AT&T employee, has a projection television hooked up to U-verse, as well as a 1988-era model in the basement. "We're kind of into technology," said Spiars; the company used her home setup as a demonstration for reporters Thursday. While AT&T is looking at U-verse as a way to bring new services to existing customers, it is also planning to take people away from the cable companies. According to Townes and other executives, their service is about 20 to 30 percent cheaper than comparable cable television prices.

But the cable companies, which are going after telephone customers through their new offerings, won't be giving up on television.Cablevision, for example, has about 1.4 million residential phone service customers; it also offers customers a chance to bundle telecommunications services.

"Cablevision is successful in a competitive market because customers love and value our television, Internet and phone products. Our digital cable service features real interactivity, local news and information through News 12 Connecticut, and 40 high-definition programming services at no additional charge," the company said in a prepared statement. Blumenthal, meanwhile, said even if the court and DPUC rule against AT&T, he doesn't expect the company will pull its U-verse out of Connecticut, because there's "too much money and opportunity [here]."

AT&T Asks Court To Reconsider 'U-verse' Decision; Company's new interactive video service must abide by cable-TV rules, judge said 
DAY
By Patricia Daddona    
Published on 8/14/2007 

AT&T has asked the U.S. District Court in New Haven to reject a recent federal opinion that finds the same rules for cable programming apply to a new video product offered by the phone company.

At the same time, one of the plaintiffs in the case, the state's Office of Consumer Counsel, has asked Judge Janet Bond Arterton to halt AT&T's acceptance of its new “U-verse” interactive video technology until it obtains a cable franchise license and to direct the state Department of Public Utility Control to require the company to take that step immediately.

Last month, the judge ruled in a summary judgment in federal court that U-verse must be subjected to the same regulations as conventional cable. The opinion, if it becomes a final ruling, would require AT&T to get a cable franchise just like other cable providers.

Arterton's judgment has the effect of potentially shooting down a 2006 decision by the DPUC, which had said AT&T was not required to seek a cable franchise for its Internet protocol television service, since it was not the same as conventional cable, but rather relied on two-way interaction between the company and the subscriber.

Arterton said, however, that federal law pre-empts the state's interpretation. Although AT&T uses two-way delivery of services, AT&T still delivers prepackaged programming to all subscribers, so subscriber interaction “is the same as that involved in traditional” cable programming, she wrote.

In its request to be heard again, in writing and orally, AT&T argues that the judge erred factually and as a matter of law, in part by failing to take into account that the new video service is capable of providing — and “in time” will enable — features and functions that subscribers can use to customize the type of video content they receive.

The distinction makes AT&T's service “fundamentally” different than traditional cable service, the telecommunications giant argues.

AT&T describes U-verse as interaction over a corporate Internet network that enables a person's TV to communicate and work with other Internet-driven devices. For instance, a cell phone might be used to set the recording time for a digital video recorder, or a subscriber might display ball-game statistics without waiting for a program producer to do it.

The court also mistakenly decided, AT&T contends, that U-verse is not a two-way transmission and that “interactivity must be visible to the subscriber” to count as interactivity, an interpretation the company claims is nowhere to be found in legislative language or history governing cable franchises in Connecticut, or in the Federal Communication Commission's interpretations.

The cable company also provided the court with a “status report” on recent changes in Connecticut law regarding cable franchises. A new law intended to encourage competition among video service providers requires new providers like AT&T to get a certificate of video franchise authority, the company states, asserting that the law was written with specific regard for AT&T.

“Once (the judge) evaluates the information we submitted, we're eagerly anticipating her decision on that,” said Adam Cormier, a spokesman for AT&T.

But William Vallee Jr., lead attorney for the state's Office of Consumer Counsel, said the judge's opinion “is pure law” and correctly interprets what existing federal law means.

“There's nothing new here,” Vallee said of the motion for reconsideration. He also points out in a status report for the plaintiff that the state certificate does not become effective until Oct. 1. “Only a clear, unambiguous order from this Court can ensure ... compliance,” he wrote.

Last week, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal asked the DPUC to force AT&T to apply for a franchise license, but DPUC spokeswoman Beryl Lyons said no action could be taken until any appeal period on a final ruling expired. Lyons was not available for comment late Monday.

“AT&T's request for reconsideration is without basis in law or fact,” Blumenthal said, “a blatant delaying tactic to forestall state licensing and regulation of its Internet television service.”

Big Brother is watching us all
By Humphrey Hawksley, BBC News, Washington
15 September 2007

The US and UK governments are developing increasingly sophisticated gadgets to keep individuals under their surveillance. When it comes to technology, the US is determined to stay ahead of the game.

computer image capturing Humphrey Hawksley's height, tracking and gait DNA
Humphrey Hawksley's data is captured by a camera in one second

"Five nine, five ten," said the research student, pushing down a laptop button to seal the measurement. "That's your height."

"Spot on," I said.

"OK, we're freezing you now," interjected another student, studying his computer screen. "So we have height and tracking and your gait DNA".

"Gait DNA?" I interrupted, raising my head, so inadvertently my full face was caught on a video camera.

"Have we got that?" asked their teacher Professor Rama Challapa. "We rely on just 30 frames - about one second - to get a picture we can work with," he explained.

Tracking individuals

I was at Maryland University just outside Washington DC, where Professor Challapa and his team are inventing the next generation of citizen surveillance.

They had pushed back furniture in the conference room for me to walk back and forth and set up cameras to feed my individual data back to their laptops.

Gait DNA, for example, is creating an individual code for the way I walk. Their goal is to invent a system whereby a facial image can be matched to your gait, your height, your weight and other elements, so a computer will be able to identify instantly who you are.

Crowd of people at airport
How you walk could be used to identify you in a crowd
"As you walk through a crowd, we'll be able to track you," said Professor Challapa. "These are all things that don't need the cooperation of the individual."

Since 9/11, some of the best scientific minds in the defence industry have switched their concentration from tracking nuclear missiles to tracking individuals such as suicide bombers.

Surveillance society

My next stop was a Pentagon agency whose headquarters is a drab suburban building in Virginia. The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) had one specific mission - to ensure that when it comes to technology America is always ahead of the game.

Its track record is impressive. Back in the 70s, while we were working with typewriters and carbon paper, Darpa was developing the internet. In the 90s, while we pored over maps, Darpa invented satellite navigation that many of us now have in our cars.

"We ask the top people what keeps them awake at night," said its enthusiastic and forthright director Dr Tony Tether, "what problems they see long after they have left their posts."

"And what are they?" I asked.

He paused, hand on chin. "I'd prefer not to say. It's classified."

"All right then, can you say what you're actually working on now."

"Oh, language," he answered enthusiastically, clasping his fingers together. "Unless we're going to train every American citizen and soldier in 16 different languages we have to develop a technology that allows them to understand - whatever country they are in - what's going on around them.

"I hope in the future we'll be able to have conversations, if say you're speaking in French and I'm speaking in English, and it will be natural."

"And the computer will do the translation?"


Opinion polls, both in the US and Britain, say that about 75% of us want more, not less, surveillance

"Yep. All by computer," he said.

"And this idea about a total surveillance society," I asked. "Is that science fiction?"

"No, that's not science fiction. We're developing an unmanned airplane - a UAV - which may be able to stay up five years with cameras on it, constantly being cued to look here and there. This is done today to a limited amount in Baghdad. But it's the way to go."

CCTV cameras
In Britain we are monitored 24/7 by four million CCTV cameras

Smarter technology

Interestingly, we, the public, don't seem to mind. Opinion polls, both in the US and Britain, say that about 75% of us want more, not less, surveillance. Some American cities like New York and Chicago are thinking of taking a lead from Britain where our movements are monitored round the clock by four million CCTV cameras.

So far there is no gadget that can actually see inside our houses, but even that's about to change.

Ian Kitajima flew to Washington from his laboratories in Hawaii to show me sense-through-the-wall technology.

"Each individual has a characteristic profile," explained Ian, holding a green rectangular box that looked like a TV remote control.

Using radio waves, you point it a wall and it tells you if anyone is on the other side. His company, Oceanit, is due to test it with the Hawaiian National Guard in Iraq next year, and it turns out that the human body gives off such sensitive radio signals, that it can even pick up breathing and heart rates.

"First, you can tell whether someone is dead or alive on the battlefield," said Ian.

"But it will also show whether someone inside a house is looking to harm you, because if they are, their heart rate will be raised. And 10 years from now, the technology will be much smarter. We'll scan a person with one of these things and tell what they're actually thinking."

He glanced at me quizzically, noticing my apprehension.

"Yeah, I know," he said. "It sounds very Star Trekkish, but that's what's ahead."


Chips: High tech aids or tracking tools?
By TODD LEWAN, AP National Writer
Sun Jul 22, 6:23 AM ET

CityWatcher.com, a provider of surveillance equipment, attracted little notice itself — until a year ago, when two of its employees had glass-encapsulated microchips with miniature antennas embedded in their forearms.

The "chipping" of two workers with RFIDs — radio frequency identification tags as long as two grains of rice, as thick as a toothpick — was merely a way of restricting access to vaults that held sensitive data and images for police departments, a layer of security beyond key cards and clearance codes, the company said.

"To protect high-end secure data, you use more sophisticated techniques," Sean Darks, chief executive of the Cincinnati-based company, said. He compared chip implants to retina scans or fingerprinting. "There's a reader outside the door; you walk up to the reader, put your arm under it, and it opens the door."

Innocuous? Maybe.

But the news that Americans had, for the first time, been injected with electronic identifiers to perform their jobs fired up a debate over the proliferation of ever-more-precise tracking technologies and their ability to erode privacy in the digital age.

To some, the microchip was a wondrous invention — a high-tech helper that could increase security at nuclear plants and military bases, help authorities identify wandering Alzheimer's patients, allow consumers to buy their groceries, literally, with the wave of a chipped hand.

To others, the notion of tagging people was Orwellian, a departure from centuries of history and tradition in which people had the right to go and do as they pleased, without being tracked, unless they were harming someone else.

Chipping, these critics said, might start with Alzheimer's patients or Army Rangers, but would eventually be suggested for convicts, then parolees, then sex offenders, then illegal aliens — until one day, a majority of Americans, falling into one category or another, would find themselves electronically tagged.

The concept of making all things traceable isn't alien to Americans. Thirty years ago, the first electronic tags were fixed to the ears of cattle, to permit ranchers to track a herd's reproductive and eating habits. In the 1990s, millions of chips were implanted in livestock, fish, dogs, cats, even racehorses.

Microchips are now fixed to car windshields as toll-paying devices, on "contactless" payment cards (Chase's "Blink," or MasterCard's "PayPass"). They're embedded in Michelin tires, library books, passports, work uniforms, luggage, and, unbeknownst to many consumers, on a host of individual items, from Hewlett Packard printers to Sanyo TVs, at Wal-Mart and Best Buy.

But CityWatcher.com employees weren't appliances or pets: They were people made scannable.

"It was scary that a government contractor that specialized in putting surveillance cameras on city streets was the first to incorporate this technology in the workplace," says Liz McIntyre, co-author of "Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID."

Darks, the CityWatcher.com executive, dismissed his critics, noting that he and his employees had volunteered to be chip-injected. Any suggestion that a sinister, Big-Brother-like campaign was afoot, he said, was hogwash.

"You would think that we were going around putting chips in people by force," he told a reporter, "and that's not the case at all."

Yet, within days of the company's announcement, civil libertarians and Christian conservatives joined to excoriate the microchip's implantation in people.

RFID, they warned, would soon enable the government to "frisk" citizens electronically — an invisible, undetectable search performed by readers posted at "hotspots" along roadsides and in pedestrian areas. It might even be used to squeal on employees while they worked; time spent at the water cooler, in the bathroom, in a designated smoking area could one day be broadcast, recorded and compiled in off-limits, company databases.

"Ultimately," says Katherine Albrecht, a privacy advocate who specializes in consumer education and RFID technology, "the fear is that the government or your employer might someday say, 'Take a chip or starve.'"

Some Christian critics saw the implants as the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy that describes an age of evil in which humans are forced to take the "Mark of the Beast" on their bodies, to buy or sell anything.

Gary Wohlscheid, president of These Last Days Ministries, a Roman Catholic group in Lowell, Mich., put together a Web site that linked the implantable microchips to the apocalyptic prophecy in the book of Revelation.

"The Bible tells us that God's wrath will come to those who take the Mark of the Beast," he says. Those who refuse to accept the Satanic chip "will be saved," Wohlscheid offers in a comforting tone.

___

In post-9/11 America, electronic surveillance comes in myriad forms: in a gas station's video camera; in a cell phone tucked inside a teen's back pocket; in a radio tag attached to a supermarket shopping cart; in a Porsche automobile equipped with a LoJack anti-theft device.

"We're really on the verge of creating a surveillance society in America, where every movement, every action — some would even claim, our very thoughts — will be tracked, monitored, recorded and correlated," says Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Program at the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C.

RFID, in Steinhardt's opinion, "could play a pivotal role in creating that surveillance society."

In design, the tag is simple: A medical-grade glass capsule holds a silicon computer chip, a copper antenna and a "capacitor" that transmits data stored on the chip when prompted by an electromagnetic reader.

Implantations are quick, relatively simple procedures. After a local anesthetic is administered, a large-gauge hypodermic needle injects the chip under the skin on the back of the arm, midway between the elbow and the shoulder.

"It feels just like getting a vaccine — a bit of pressure, no specific pain," says John Halamka, an emergency physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
He got chipped two years ago, "so that if I was ever in an accident, and arrived unconscious or incoherent at an emergency ward, doctors could identify me and access my medical history quickly." (A chipped person's medical profile can be continuously updated, since the information is stored on a database accessed via the Internet.)

Halamka thinks of his microchip as another technology with practical value, like his BlackBerry. But it's also clear, he says, that there are consequences to having an implanted identifier.

"My friends have commented to me that I'm 'marked' for life, that I've lost my anonymity. And to be honest, I think they're right."

Indeed, as microchip proponents and detractors readily agree, Americans' mistrust of microchips and technologies like RFID runs deep. Many wonder:

Do the current chips have global positioning transceivers that would allow the government to pinpoint a person's exact location, 24-7? (No; the technology doesn't yet exist.)

But could a tech-savvy stalker rig scanners to video cameras and film somebody each time they entered or left the house? (Quite easily, though not cheaply. Currently, readers cost $300 and up.)

How about thieves? Could they make their own readers, aim them at unsuspecting individuals, and surreptitiously pluck people's IDs out of their arms? (Yes. There's even a name for it — "spoofing.")

What's the average lifespan of a microchip? (About 10-15 years.) What if you get tired of it before then — can it be easily, painlessly removed? (Short answer: No.)

Presently, Steinhardt and other privacy advocates view the tagging of identity documents — passports, drivers licenses and the like — as a more pressing threat to Americans' privacy than the chipping of people. Equipping hospitals, doctors' offices, police stations and government agencies with readers will be costly, training staff will take time, and, he says, "people are going to be too squeamish about having an RFID chip inserted into their arms, or wherever."

But that wasn't the case in March 2004, when the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona, Spain — a nightclub catering to the body-aware, under-25 crowd — began holding "Implant Nights."

In a white lab coat, with hypodermic in latex-gloved hand, a company chipper wandered through the throng of the clubbers and clubbettes, anesthetizing the arms of consenting party goers, then injecting them with microchips.

The payoff?

Injectees would thereafter be able to breeze past bouncers and entrance lines, magically open doors to VIP lounges, and pay for drinks without cash or credit cards. The ID number on the VIP chip was linked to the user's financial accounts and stored in the club's computers.

After being chipped himself, club owner Conrad K. Chase declared that chip implants were hardly a big deal to his patrons, since "almost everybody has piercings, tattoos or silicone."

VIP chipping soon spread to the Baja Beach Club in Rotterdam, Holland, the Bar Soba in Edinburgh, Scotland, and the Amika nightclub in Miami Beach, Fla.

That same year, Mexico's attorney general, Rafael Macedo, made an announcement that thrilled chip proponents and chilled privacy advocates: He and 18 members of his staff had been microchipped as a way to limit access to a sensitive records room, whose door unlocked when a "portal reader" scanned the chips.

But did this make Mexican security airtight?

Hardly, says Jonathan Westhues, an independent security researcher in Cambridge, Mass. He concocted an "emulator," a hand-held device that cloned the implantable microchip electronically. With a team of computer-security experts, he demonstrated — on television — how easy it was to snag data off a chip.

Explains Adam Stubblefield, a Johns Hopkins researcher who joined the team: "You pass within a foot of a chipped person, copy the chip's code, then with a push of the button, replay the same ID number to any reader. You essentially assume the person's identity."

The company that makes implantable microchips for humans, VeriChip Corp., of Delray Beach, Fla., concedes the point — even as it markets its radio tag and its portal scanner as imperatives for high-security buildings, such as nuclear power plants.

"To grab information from radio frequency products with a scanning device is not hard to do," Scott Silverman, the company's chief executive, says. However, "the chip itself only contains a unique, 16-digit identification number. The relevant information is stored on a database."

Even so, he insists, it's harder to clone a VeriChip than it would be to steal someone's key card and use it to enter secure areas.

VeriChip Corp., whose parent company has been selling radio tags for animals for more than a decade, has sold 7,000 microchips worldwide, of which about 2,000 have been implanted in humans. More than one-tenth of those have been in the U.S., generating "nominal revenues," the company acknowledged in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing in February.

Although in five years VeriChip Corp. has yet to turn a profit, it has been investing heavily — up to $2 million a quarter — to create new markets.

The company's present push: tagging of "high-risk" patients — diabetics and people with heart conditions or Alzheimer's disease.

In an emergency, hospital staff could wave a reader over a patient's arm, get an ID number, and then, via the Internet, enter a company database and pull up the person's identity and medical history.

To doctors, a "starter kit" — complete with 10 hypodermic syringes, 10 VeriChips and a reader — costs $1,400. To patients, a microchip implant means a $200, out-of-pocket expense to their physician. Presently, chip implants aren't covered by insurance companies, Medicare or Medicaid.

For almost two years, the company has been offering hospitals free scanners, but acceptance has been limited. According to the company's most recent SEC quarterly filing, 515 hospitals have pledged to take part in the VeriMed network, yet only 100 have actually been equipped and trained to use the system.

Some wonder why they should abandon noninvasive tags such as MedicAlert, a low-tech bracelet that warns paramedics if patients have serious allergies or a chronic medical condition.

"Having these things under your skin instead of in your back pocket — it's just not clear to me why it's worth the inconvenience," says Westhues.

Silverman responds that an implanted chip is "guaranteed to be with you. It's not a medical arm bracelet that you can take off if you don't like the way it looks..."

In fact, microchips can be removed from the body — but it's not like removing a splinter.

The capsules can migrate around the body or bury themselves deep in the arm. When that happens, a sensor X-ray and monitors are needed to locate the chip, and a plastic surgeon must cut away scar tissue that forms around the chip.

The relative permanence is a big reason why Marc Rotenberg, of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, is suspicious about the motives of the company, which charges an annual fee to keep clients' records.

The company charges $20 a year for customers to keep a "one-pager" on its database — a record of blood type, allergies, medications, driver's license data and living-will directives. For $80 a year, it will keep an individual's full medical history.
___

In recent times, there have been rumors on Wall Street, and elsewhere, of the potential uses for RFID in humans: the chipping of U.S. soldiers, of inmates, or of migrant workers, to name a few.

To date, none of this has happened.

But a large-scale chipping plan that was proposed illustrates the stakes, pro and con.

In mid-May, a protest outside the Alzheimer's Community Care Center in West Palm Beach, Fla., drew attention to a two-year study in which 200 Alzheimer's patients, along with their caregivers, were to receive chip implants. Parents, children and elderly people decried the plan, with signs and placards.

"Chipping People Is Wrong" and "People Are Not Pets," the signs read. And: "Stop VeriChip."

Ironically, the media attention sent VeriChip's stock soaring 27 percent in one day.

"VeriChip offers technology that is absolutely bursting with potential," wrote blogger Gary E. Sattler, of the AOL site Bloggingstocks, even as he recognized privacy concerns.

Albrecht, the RFID critic who organized the demonstration, raises similar concerns on her AntiChips.com Web site.

"Is it appropriate to use the most vulnerable members of society for invasive medical research? Should the company be allowed to implant microchips into people whose mental impairments mean they cannot give fully informed consent?"

Mary Barnes, the care center's chief executive, counters that both the patients and their legal guardians must consent to the implants before receiving them. And the chips, she says, could be invaluable in identifying lost patients — for instance, if a hurricane strikes Florida.

That, of course, assumes that the Internet would be accessible in a killer storm. VeriChip Corp. acknowledged in an SEC filing that its "database may not function properly" in such circumstances.

As the polemic heats up, legislators are increasingly being drawn into the fray. Two states, Wisconsin and North Dakota, recently passed laws prohibiting the forced implantation of microchips in humans. Others — Ohio, Oklahoma, Colorado and Florida — are studying similar legislation.

In May, Oklahoma legislators were debating a bill that would have authorized microchip implants in people imprisoned for violent crimes. Many felt it would be a good way to monitor felons once released from prison.

But other lawmakers raised concerns. Rep. John Wright worried, "Apparently, we're going to permanently put the mark on these people."

Rep. Ed Cannaday found the forced microchipping of inmates "invasive ... We are going down that slippery slope."

In the end, lawmakers sent the bill back to committee for more work.


Cameraphone-Internet catches another excess?

Lawyer Wants Video Suppressed in Texas Fight Case
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:11 p.m. ET
July 6, 2009

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas (AP) -- A lawyer for a man accused of organizing fights among developmentally disabled Texans for entertainment argued Monday that cell phone videos of the events should be suppressed.

The grainy cell phone videos showing the students forced to fight each other was expected to be the evidence centerpiece this week as four former employees at the Corpus Christi State School go on trial.

State District Judge Sandra Watts was hearing arguments Monday on a motion filed for defendant Timothy Dixon, who allegedly recorded the fights on a phone that was turned over to police. His attorney, Ira Miller, contends the phone was stolen and police should have obtained a search warrant before examining the videos.

Jury selection, expected to begin Monday morning, was delayed. Jurors were expected to be picked for the trial of Dixon, 30, D'Angelo Riley, 23, and Jesse Salazar, 25, all charged with multiple counts of causing bodily injury to a disabled person. In a separate courtroom, Stephanie Garza, 21, was to face a lesser charge of not intervening to stop the fights. Two other former employees are scheduled to go on trial later this year.

''These people did horrific things,'' said Jeff Garrison-Tate, of the advocacy group Community Now!, which has called for closing the state schools in favor of community-based services. ''But they were given silent permission for these heinous acts.''

District Attorney Carlos Valdez did not return calls for comment. Defense attorneys for the accused declined to comment.

Almost 20 videos dating back to 2007 were found on a cell phone turned in to police, showing staff at the Corpus Christi State School forcing residents into late-night bouts, even kicking them to egg them on. Eleven staff members were identified and six were charged.

Dixon is believed to have shot the videos, though other staff members can been seen pointing cell phone cameras toward the brawls. None of those charged still works at the facility.

The state has taken pains to close the issue. In May, the Legislature approved a $112 million settlement with the Justice Department for widespread mistreatment found at Texas' 13 residential facilities for the developmentally disabled. Gov. Rick Perry signed legislation last month aimed at improving oversight of the facilities that house nearly 5,000 people.

The settlement is ''a big step that will certainly bring improvements and changes to the system,'' said Laura Albrecht, a spokeswoman for the Department of Aging and Disability Services. She said the agency is making unannounced visits to the Corpus Christi facility and cameras are being installed.

The school's director remains in place, to the consternation of some who say that the incidents showed a disturbing lack of supervision.

Beth Mitchell, the managing lawyer for Advocacy Inc., a nonprofit with federal authority to monitor abuse and neglect at the facilities, asked what the administration's role in the alleged crimes was.

''They (those charged) were probably the ones instigating the fight clubs, but my concern is: How can you have it going on as long as it did without the administration knowing about it?'' she asked.
Camera phone maker mulls gadget's impact
By MAY WONG, AP Technology Writer
Sun May 20, 1:47 AM ET

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. - The chilling sounds of gunfire on the Virginia Tech campus; the hateful taunts from Saddam Hussein's execution; the racist tirade of comedian Michael Richards.   Those videos, all shot with cell phone cameras and seen by millions, are just a few recent examples of the power now at the fingertips of the masses. Even the man widely credited with inventing the camera phone in 1997 is awed by the cultural revolution he helped launch.

"It's had a massive impact because it's just so convenient," said Philippe Kahn, a tech industry maverick whose other pioneering efforts include the founding of software maker Borland, an early Microsoft Corp. antagonist.

"There's always a way to capture memories and share it," he said. "You go to a restaurant, and there's a birthday and suddenly everyone is getting their camera phones out. It's amazing."

If Kahn feels a bit like a proud father when he sees people holding up their cell phones to snap pictures, there's good reason: He jury-rigged the first camera phone while his wife was in labor with their daughter.

"We were going to have a baby and I wanted to share the pictures with family and friends," Kahn said, "and there was no easy way to do it."

So as he sat in a maternity ward, he wrote a crude program on his laptop and sent an assistant to a RadioShack store to get a soldering iron, capacitors and other supplies to wire his digital camera to his cell phone. When Sophie was born, he sent her photo over a cellular connection to acquaintances around the globe.  A decade later, 41 percent of American households own a camera phone "and you can hardly find a phone without a camera anymore," said Michael Cai, an industry analyst at Parks Associates.

Market researcher Gartner Inc. predicts that about 589 million cell phones will be sold with cameras in 2007, increasing to more than 1 billion worldwide by 2010.  Mix in the Internet's vast reach and the growth of the YouTube generation, and the ubiquitous gadget's influence only deepens and gets more complicated. So much so that the watchful eyes on all of us may no longer just be those of Big Brother.

"For the past decade, we've been under surveillance under these big black and white cameras on buildings and at 7-Eleven stores. But the candid camera is wielded by individuals now," said Fred Turner, an assistant professor of communications at Stanford University who specializes in digital media and culture.

The contraption Kahn assembled in a Santa Cruz labor-and-delivery room in 1997 has evolved into a pocket-friendly phenomenon that has empowered both citizen journalists and personal paparazzi.

It has prompted lawsuits — a student sued campus police at UCLA for alleged excessive force after officers were caught on cell-phone video using a stun gun during his arrest; and been a catalyst for change — a government inquiry into police practices ensued in Malaysia after a cell-phone video revealed a woman detainee being forced to do squats while naked.

On another scale, parents use cell-phone slideshows — not wallet photos — to show off pictures of their children, while adolescents document their rites of passage with cell phone cameras and instantly share the images.  One of the recipients of Kahn's seminal photo e-mail was veteran technology consultant Andy Seybold, who recalled being "blown away" by the picture.

"The fact that it got sent wirelessly on the networks those days — that was an amazing feat," Seybold said.

Kahn's makeshift photo-communications system formed the basis for a new company, LightSurf Technologies, which he later sold to VeriSign Inc. LightSurf built "PictureMail" software and worked with cell phone makers to integrate the wireless photo technology.  Sharp Corp. was the first to sell a commercial cell phone with a camera in Japan in 2000. Camera phones didn't debut in the U.S. until 2002, Kahn said.

Though Kahn's work revolved around transmitting only digital still photographs — video-related developments were created by others in the imaging and chip industries — his groundbreaking implementation of the instant-sharing via a cell phone planted a seed.

"He facilitated people putting cameras in a phone, and he proved that you can take a photo and send it to someone with a cell phone," Seybold said.

Kahn, 55, is well aware of how the camera phone has since been put to negative uses: sneaky shots up women's skirts, or the violent trend of "happy slapping" in Europe where youths provoke a fight or assault, capture the incident on camera and then spread the images on the Web or between mobile phones.  But he likes to focus on the technology's benefits. It's been a handy tool that has led to vindication for victims or validation for vigilantes.

As Kahn heard the smattering of stories in recent years about assailants scared off by a camera phone or criminals who were nabbed later because their faces or their license plates were captured on the gadget, he said, "I started feeling it was better than carrying a gun."

And though he found the camera-phone video of the former Iraqi dictator's execution disturbing, Kahn said the gadget helped "get the truth out." The unofficial footage surreptitiously taken by a guard was vastly different from the government-issued version and revealed a chaotic scene with angry exchanges depicting the ongoing problems between the nation's factions.

Kahn also thinks the evolution of the camera phone has only just begun.

He wouldn't discuss details of his newest startup, Fullpower Technologies Inc., which is in stealth mode working on the "convergence of life sciences and wireless," according to its Web site.  But, Kahn said, it will, among other things, "help make camera phones better."


Our question is this:  what will actions taken be after the last "twitter" is silenced?

Internet Most Popular Information Source: Poll
NYTIMES
By REUTERS
Filed at 1:04 p.m. ET
June 17, 2009

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Internet is by far the most popular source of information and the preferred choice for news ahead of television, newspapers and radio, according to a new poll in the United States.

But just a small fraction of U.S. adults considered social websites such as Facebook and MySpace as a good source of news and even fewer would opt for Twitter.

More than half of the people questioned in the Zogby Interactive survey said they would select the Internet if they had to choose only one source of news, followed by 21 percent for television and 10 percent for both newspapers and radio.

Only 10 percent described social websites as an important for news, and despite the media buzz about Twitter, only 4 percent would go to it for information.

The Internet was also selected as the most reliable source of news by nearly 40 percent of adults, compared to 17 percent who opted for television and 16 percent who selected newspapers and 13 percent for listened to the radio.

"The poll reinforces the idea that efforts by established newspapers, television and radio news outlets to push their consumers to their respective websites is working," Zogby said in a statement.

Almost half of 3,030 adults questioned in the online survey said national newspaper websites were important to them, followed by 43 percent who preferred television websites.

Blogs were less of a necessity than websites with only 28 percent of those polled saying blogs that shared their political viewpoint were important.

"That the websites of traditional news outlets are seen by a wide margin as more important than blog sites - most of which are repositories of opinion devoid of actual reportage - could be seen as an encouraging development for the media at large," Zogby added.

When asked to peer into the future, an overwhelming 82 percent said the Internet would be the main source of information in five years time, compared to 13 for television and 0.5 percent chose newspapers.

About 84 percent of American have access to the Internet, according to industry studies.

 Warning sounded on web's future
By Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent, BBC News
15 September 2008

Giant magnet at Cern, AFP/Getty
Some feared firing up the LHC would doom the Earth

The internet needs a way to help people separate rumour from real science, says the creator of the World Wide Web.

Talking to BBC News Sir Tim Berners-Lee said he was increasingly worried about the way the web has been used to spread disinformation.

Sir Tim spoke prior to the unveiling of a Foundation he has co-created that aims to make the web truly worldwide.

It will also look at ways to help people decide if sites are trustworthy and reliable sources of information.

Future proof

Sir Tim talked to the BBC in the week in which Cern, where he did his pioneering work on the web, turned on the Large Hadron Collider for the first time.

The use of the web to spread fears that flicking the switch on the LHC could create a Black Hole that could swallow up the Earth particularly concerned him, he said. In a similar vein was the spread of rumours that the MMR vaccine given to children in Britain was harmful.

Sir Tim told BBC News that there needed to be new systems that would give websites a label for trustworthiness once they had been proved reliable sources.

"On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable," he said. "A sort of conspiracy theory of sorts and which you can imagine spreading to thousands of people and being deeply damaging."

Sir Tim and colleagues at the World Wide Web consortium had looked at simple ways of branding websites - but concluded that a whole variety of different mechanisms was needed.
Tim Berners-Lee (AFP/Getty)
Sir Tim wants to help get the web to people who are cut off from it.

"I'm not a fan of giving a website a simple number like an IQ rating because like people they can vary in all kinds of different ways," he said. "So I'd be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways".

Sir Tim spoke to the BBC to publicise the launch of his World Wide Web Foundation which aims to improve the web's accessibility.

Alongside this role it will aim to make it easier for people to get online. Currently only 20% of the world's population have access to the web

"Has it been designed by the West for the West?" asked Sir Tim.

"Has it been designed for the executive and the teenager in the modern city with a smart phone in their pocket? If you are in a rural community do you need a different kind of web with different kinds of facilities?"

Creative medium

The Web Foundation will also explore ways to make the web more mobile-phone friendly. That would increase its use in Africa and other poor parts of the world where there are few computers but plenty of handsets.

The Foundation will also look at how the benefits of the web can be taken to those who cannot read or write.

"We're talking about the evolution of the web," he said. "Perhaps by using gestures or pointing. When something is such a creative medium as the web, the limits to it are our imagination".

The Foundation will also look at concerns that the web has become less democratic, and its use influenced too much by large corporations and vested interests.

"I think that question is very important and may be settled in the next few years," said Sir Tim.

"One of the things I always remain concerned about is that that medium remains neutral," he said.

"It's not just where I go to decide where to buy my shoes which is the commercial incentive - it's where I go to decide who I'm going to trust to vote," he said.

"It's where I go maybe to decide what sort of religion I'm going to belong to or not belong to; it's where I go to decide what is actual scientific truth - what I'm actually going to go along with and what is bunkum".




FCC set to test wide-range broadcast internet 
DAY
By Kim Hart    
Published on 7/25/2008 

Wasington - The nation's top technology companies have spent millions of dollars and nearly two years building devices, poring over laptops and working in federal labs trying to come up with a new way of providing high-speed Internet to bandwidth-hungry cities as well as hard-to-reach rural regions.

Last week, the companies moved from lab to field.

Engineers from the technology heavyweights, including Motorola and Philips, lugged their laptops, antennas and other equipment to parks, homes and high-rises around the Washington area, hoping to prove to the Federal Communications Commission that the unlicensed airwaves between television stations, known as white spaces, could provide a new form of mobile Internet service.

Using white spaces “will provide a way to provide broadband across long distances at much faster speeds than cellphone networks and WiFi,” said Jake Ward, spokesman for the Wireless Innovation Alliance, which includes Google, Microsoft, HP and Dell.

The group is trying to convince regulators that using the airwaves will provide broadband to rural schools, beam high-definition online video to low-income households and let consumers stream music while sitting in highway traffic.

First out of the gate was a team from Motorola. On a recent steamy day in the middle of Patapsco Valley State Park about 10 miles west of Baltimore, Dave Gurney, an engineer for the company, set up shop in a parking lot surrounded by dense forest.

A large black box the size of a suitcase hooked up to a laptop sat near the base of a tree-covered hill. An antenna perched on a tripod rested a few feet away. A group of engineers stared intently at the contraption, as if it were about to spring to life.

”It's done!” Gurney said. He held his breath as the men leaned in further and quickly jotted down a cryptic list of numbers. Then he ran the test again.

The stakes are high for this mysterious black box. Tech giants and Silicon Valley start-ups are betting that using white spaces could extend the Internet's reach. They also hope it will spark a new wave of portable devices.

But the idea faces big hurdles. Broadcasters use adjacent airwaves to beam TV shows to viewers, and they say the technology could interfere with over-the-air signals. Wireless microphone users, from pop stars to mega-church ministers, say using white spaces could blot out their sounds.

White-space backers say their devices will be able to detect and avoid frequencies being used by broadcasters and wireless mics. Critics say the devices are not reliable enough.

The FCC is trying to settle that debate. For more than a year, the agency has been testing prototypes with mixed results. An early prototype built by Microsoft failed to operate in the FCC's lab. Microsoft later determined the device was broken.

The FCC is now testing other prototypes built by Philips and Motorola as well as Silicon Valley start-up Adaptrum and Singapore-based Institute for Infocomm Research. The Motorola device connects to a database of TV stations operating within 200 kilometers and scans the airwaves nearly every second for other signals that may pop up unexpectedly, such as a wireless microphone.

If the device senses that it is within or close to a TV station's coverage area, it is supposed to avoid that station's frequency. It then ranks empty frequencies by their proximity to existing signals. If a new signal suddenly appears, the white-space device should automatically switch to another open channel.

”We're testing multiple times to make sure the results are consistent,” Gurney said.

But the results can be hard to decipher. At the first location, Motorola's device indicated that channel 51, for example, was open and available. At the second location, the device picked up a weak signal on the channel, suggesting that it was already in use.


Motorola's engineers say that means the signal changed slightly between locations, and the device would be able to avoid that channel as soon as it was detected. But Bruce Franca, vice president of policy and technology for the Association for Maximum Service Television, a broadcasting industry group, is skeptical.

”The results of every single test were different,” he said. “The device failed to recognize that certain channels are actually being occupied by TV signals. ... Clearly this is not ready for prime time.”

Shure, which makes microphones and other audio equipment used in Broadway shows and sports games, argues the tests have not proven that the prototypes can consistently detect TV signals, let alone wireless microphones that hop on frequencies without notice.

The FCC plans to test the white-space devices at an entertainment venue in the next few months. The National Football League has offered the Baltimore Ravens' stadium or the Washington Redskins' park as possible venues. And the Recording Academy, which puts on the Grammy Awards, has offered up the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago next month for testing.

”That's where the rubber will meet the road,” said Mark Brunner, senior director of brand management at Shure. 


A wajanbolic antenna (left), described in story below. Rube Goldberg  lives!  Above right is another example of "WIFRY" - narrowing signal for better quality and range (also can use a WOKTENNA) - instructions below:
Make 2.4GHz parabolic mesh dishes from cheap but sturdy Chinese cookware scoops & a USB WiFi adaptor! The largest so called "WIFRY" or "WOKTENNA" (12"= 300mm diam) shows 12-15dB gain (enough for a LOS range extension to 3-5km),costs ~US$5 & comes with a user friendly bamboo handle that suits WLAN fieldwork- if you can handle the curious stares! Neater boutique versions may better appeal indors.

Frying the wires, freeing the waves      
Grassroots organisations in Indonesia are building communication media from the most basic of utensils
By Edwin Jurriëns - jurriens-wajanbolic.jpg
Received via e-mail from Yale, 2-15-09

While Indonesia’s big cities are saturated with many types of media, media fare at the village level is often quite limited. In response, several grassroots organisations have begun building a more participatory communications infrastructure, relying on advances in technology to provide community television facilities and cheap wireless Internet. Like existing community radio, theatre and print media already scattered across the archipelago, these new media have emerged as an alternative to government and business-controlled Internet and television programming.

Out of the frying pan

In 2000, residents of Timbulharjo village in Bantul, Central Java formed the organisation Angkringan, named after the Javanese term for ‘food vendor’, to build a media infrastructure that would meet the information and communication needs of their community. Starting with an eight-page print bulletin of local news and entertainment, within half a year, Angkringan expanded into community radio broadcasts. During the parliamentary elections of 2004, the organisation used mobile screening facilities to air information about the elections. And in 2007, Angkringan began work on establishing a local Internet network, called AngkringanNet, for Timbulharjo.

AngkringanNet relies on the convergence of community radio broadcasting with wireless Internet technology. Using a community radio antenna, AngkringanNet transmits an Internet signal over the 2.4 MHz frequency, free of charge. The signal can then be accessed by anyone in Timbulharjo with a computer and a ‘wajanbolic’ antenna.

Using wajanbolic receivers, browsing the Internet and sending e-mail is as easy as frying an egg

The wajanbolic antenna is the key to the system: it is composed of an actual wajan, or frying pan, wrapped in aluminium foil and connected to a short tube. Once placed on a rooftop, tree or other elevated point, the linked WiFi USB stick can be connected to one or more personal computers. Users do not have to pay individual Internet connection fees, but can share the costs with other users, keeping the costs per household to only several thousand rupiah per month.

Angkringan’s wajanbolic antenna is based on alternative Internet technology pioneered by the Indonesian technology guru Onno W Purbo and students from Muhammadiyah University in Malang. Angkringan deliberately chose the wajan, a basic piece of cookware that can be found in almost every Indonesian kitchen, to put people with no prior exposure to modern communication technology at ease, and to make it clear that browsing the Internet or sending an e-mail was as easy as frying an egg. The choice can also be seen as a symbol of local resistance against business monopolies dominating the computer and Internet industries.

AngkringanNet provides Timbulharjo residents with Internet links to the outside world as well as an Intranet exclusively for the community. Villagers are encouraged to understand and creatively engage with the technology, and move beyond simply being end users. The AngkringanNet web site makes available various Open Source software programs for villagers to use. They can also contribute to the Village Database, which contains information on local governance, economy, health and other issues.

To date, 12 wajanbolic antennas have been installed in Timbulharjo. In various workshops, Angkringan has shared its ideas and experiences beyond their village with representatives of other Indonesian community media organisations. The Indonesian government, through the Department of Communications (Depkominfo), has also donated computer equipment and provided assistance in Internet training sessions. Angkringan plans to open its wireless service to locally produced community television broadcasts in the near future.

Members of Angkringan also helped establish the Association of Indonesian Community Television (Asosiasi Televisi Komunitas Indonesia, or ATVKI), an umbrella organisation of community television stations. Similar to Angkringan’s wajanbolic philosophy, ATVKI defines its community television as ‘from, by and for the people’. ATVKI members exchange technical information and give each other guidance on organisation and broadcast content.

Not coincidentally, ATVKI was founded in Grabag village in Central Java, home of Grabag TV, one of the few active community television stations in Indonesia. Grabag TV was founded in 2005 by Hartanto, a lecturer from the Jakarta Institute of the Arts and native of Grabag. At the time, Grabag residents could only receive the commercial television channel RCTI, relayed from Jakarta by antenna because of the village’s mountainous surroundings. Hartanto built a small studio, provided basic equipment, and organised training sessions on script-writing, filming and editing. Using the existing antenna, villagers began broadcasting programs written and produced by their fellow citizens.

Community TV should broadcast content ‘from, by and for the people’

Currently, Grabag TV has two-hour broadcasts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoon. Any villager with an idea for a program or a general interest in broadcasting is welcome to make a contribution. Farmers and traders go on air to talk about their professional problems, plans and strategies. Programs have featured students from primary and secondary schools discussing the positive and negative effects of television on education, part of Grabag TV’s efforts to raise the media literacy of Grabag’s citizens. The art and culture programs often contain popular Javanese dance and music performances. Grabag TV also organised live coverage of elections for the village head, thus providing a new mechanism for monitoring local political processes.
Costs and controversies

Grabag TV has been able to restrict its average operational costs to only Rp. 800,000 ($A109) per month. It covers these costs with voluntary donations from the viewers. In general, money is an important issue, but not a major obstacle to community initiatives like Grabag TV and AngkringanNet. Often such initiatives find more difficulties in generating innovative and educational media content, and ensuring community participation once the initial enthusiasm has worn off.

Community media also face regulatory and legal hurdles. In the 2003 negotiations over the allocation of broadcast frequencies by the government, community television was passed over while public, commercial and pay television channels were given official broadcast rights, possibly under pressure from the broadcasting industry. The process of receiving a community broadcasting license is also time-consuming and expensive. AKTVI continues to fight for official broadcast frequencies and the streamlining of broadcast licenses.

The work done by organisations like Angkringan and AKTVI illustrates the awareness of Indonesian media activists that the struggle for free and independent information and communication can start, but certainly will not stop, with a WiFi USB stick and a frying pan.  

Edwin Jurriëns (e.jurriens@adfa.edu.au) is a lecturer in Indonesian Language and Culture at The University of New South Wales, Canberra.
Global Dreams for a Wireless Web
NYTIMES
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: May 25, 2008

Menorca, Spain

SITTING on the porch at Finca Torrenova, his 800-acre retreat on this Mediterranean island, Martin Varsavsky ticks off the credentials of the group of Internet entrepreneurs finishing lunch at a nearby table.

“He has 40 million uniques, he has 50 million, and he has 8 million,” Mr. Varsavsky says, referring to the number of visitors to Web sites owned by his guests — many of whom are also business associates and have joined him for several days of brainstorming about the digital future.

These days, commercial victory on the Internet is all about scale, and Mr. Varsavsky, a 48-year-old from Argentina, can be forgiven for speaking longingly and in detail about his peers’ achievements. No stranger to success — he has had a tidy crop of new media and telecommunications hits since the 1990s — he is still struggling to bring his newest Internet venture to fruition.

Three years ago, aiming to create a global wireless network, he founded FON, a company based in Madrid that wants to unlock the potential power of the social Internet. FON’s gamble is that Internet users will share a portion of their wireless connection with strangers in exchange for access to wireless hotspots controlled by others.

The swaps, in theory, would allow “Foneros” to have ubiquitous, global wireless access while traveling for business or pleasure. But despite $55.2 million in backing from such corporate heavyweights as Google and BT, the former British Telecom, as well as newer enterprises like Skype and a handful of venture capital firms, FON and Mr. Varsavsky are still missing a crucial ingredient: scale.

At the moment, there are just 830,000 registered Foneros around the world, and only 340,000 active Wi-Fi hotspots run FON software. Because it’s built upon the concept of sharing Wi-Fi access, FON works well only if there are Foneros everywhere.

And as he struggles to expand the FON network, Mr. Varsavsky faces particular hurdles now that the Internet’s commercial side has reached a crossroads. Born a few decades ago as an anarchic, digital version of a barn-raising, the wireless Internet is now a battleground between two giant technology consortiums seeking to rein in the Web’s chaotic openness in favor of creating uniform, global access built upon wireless data networks.

The two camps, known as WiMax and L.T.E., for “long-term evolution,” are both top-down, highly structured approaches that will cost billions of dollars to build and may close a door on some of the architectural openness that led to the rapid growth of the Internet.

But their potential advantage is that closed standards can encourage the kind of growth that offers more access to mainstream consumers and business users, as occurred when Microsoft imposed a measure of conformity on software development.

For his part, Mr. Varsavsky hopes that FON can offer a middle ground — deploying the original, bottom-up strengths of the early Internet movement and at the same time wedding them to a more formal, corporate approach to expansion.

Although FON faces huge obstacles in realizing those ambitions, the company also has a growing number of devotees.

“The wireless Internet market today is fragmented and complex — it can be accessed through 3G operators, through WiMax, through private hotspots, through paid hotspots and through corporate networks,” said Michael Jackson, a partner at Mangrove Capital in London and a former FON board member. “In summary, it is a nightmare for a consumer. FON can and will change this.”

But others have their doubts.

“I know that the people at Google like this idea,” said John Saw, the chief technology officer at Clearwire, the WiMax start-up of Craig McCaw, which recently announced a $14.5 billion joint venture to build a nationwide WiMax network with Sprint, Google, Intel, Comcast and others. “But we’re skeptical.”

Undeterred, Mr. Varsavsky says that what he currently lacks in scale he can make up for in huge cost savings, particularly because FON avoids the expensive proposition of having to build a worldwide network of cellular towers and Wi-Fi nodes from scratch.

“Our army of Foneros is a much more efficient way of distributing a signal,” he says. “We believe WiMax operators will be happy to have some customers use their services for free and save billions in infrastructure deployment.”

MR. VARSAVSKY has worked overtime trying to line up more high-profile partners for FON. To that end, he traveled to Cupertino, Calif., last fall to meet with Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple.

During that 90-minute meeting, Mr. Varsavsky says, the two men discussed why a partnership might make sense.

Apple has sold millions of its Wi-Fi routers to residential customers, and its community of Wi-Fi users who share router access would be an ideal platform for FON. For his part, Mr. Jobs had developed an interest in Wi-Fi sharing because of the expanding number of iPhone users who are often frustrated by locked Wi-Fi access points.

But, Mr. Varsavsky says, from the moment that he and Mr. Jobs met, their discussion devolved into an argument. (Mr. Jobs did not respond to requests to comment on the meeting.)



At the outset, Mr. Varsavsky recalled, Mr. Jobs asked sharply, “Who needs your community?” and “Why should British Telecom bother to do a deal with you, and why shouldn’t people just leave their routers open for sharing?”

Mr. Varsavsky says he responded, “Why should you bother to do a deal with AT&T? Shouldn’t iPhones just be connected freely with any cellphone network?”

Mr. Varsavsky says he left the meeting with the uncomfortable feeling that Apple might end up as a competitor rather than as a partner. But it wasn’t only because of Mr. Jobs’s legendary stubbornness that the Apple meeting apparently went awry. Mr. Varsavsky’s own substantial ego also came into play — something he freely acknowledges when he talks about how he first got into business.

“My father died and my mother was saying, ‘Martin, get a job, get a job,’ ” he recalls. “And I would go to job interviews and they would say, ‘How do you see yourself in five years?’ And I would say, ‘Well, at least as your boss!’ ”

That attitude surfaced in other forums as well. In high school in Argentina during the 1970s, he says, he persuaded classmates to open their own office supply store to compete with a store across the street from their school. He also declared his interest in left-leaning politics, which he said attracted the attention of the Argentine military junta that was purging high schools of dissidents. In the “dirty war” of 1976-83, the government killed thousands it suspected of being leftists.

An officer told the school to expel him, Mr. Varsavsky says, and he left for Brazil. Around the same time, he believes, his cousin was kidnapped and killed by the military. The Varsavsky family fled to the United States, and Mr. Varsavsky earned his undergraduate degree in economics and philosophy at New York University in 1981. He later attended Columbia University, where he received graduate degrees in international affairs and business administration.

MR. VARSAVSKY says start-ups got into his blood during graduate school, when he made his first million in a real estate foray: renovating and reselling lofts in New York.

After moving to Spain in the 1990s, he had three big telecommunications and Internet successes. He says that a $200,000 investment he made to start a long-distance company, Viatel, in 1990 was worth about $240 million when he cashed in his stake in 1999; that the 5 million euros he used to start Jazztel in 1997 has given him a stake now worth about 150 million euros; and that the 38 million euros he used to start a Spanish Internet service provider, Ya.com, in 1999 had grown to about 149 million euros when he sold the company the next year.

Then, after this first round of success, Mr. Varsavsky was hit with a loss that he describes as a striking, gut-wrenching failure. His German start-up EinsteinNet, founded in 2000 as an effort to sell software over a private fiber optic network, collapsed in 2003, leaving him with a personal loss of $50 million.

“I used the most money of my own in a company where I lost it all, and I consider it my business black eye,” he recalls, saying that he also drew a valuable lesson from the misadventure: “I don’t invest on my own. If other people don’t want to back me, it’s a sanity check.”

TO that end, Mr. Varsavsky has become a tireless networker, traveling the world to participate in a continuous parade of technology conferences and cultivating a global retinue of friends and contacts. He has also been active on the philanthropic front, earning kudos from a onetime resident of the White House.

“Martin represents the future of entrepreneurial culture and is helping to transform the way people give,” former President Bill Clinton says. “He has found different ways to use his acute business sense and creativity to improve our world and the lives of others.”

This month, Mr. Varsavsky brought together more than 70 Internet business people and technologists from Europe, Asia, Latin America and the United States for a conclave on his Menorca farm. Some guests represented the more than 20 digital enterprises in which he has a stake; others were “friends of Martin,” a loose-knit group that comprises his informal business network around the world.

The four-day conclave featured several unscripted “tech talks” in which entrepreneurs described problems they faced building their businesses. Participants included Lukasz Wejchert, the chief executive of Onet, Poland’s dominant Internet portal.

Deals with companies like Onet will be crucial if Mr. Varsavsky is to make good on his goal of having a million FON customers on each of three continents by 2010. The two companies recently came close to a deal, Mr. Wejchert says, but Onet decided that it was still to early for it to become an Internet service provider in Poland because the regulatory environment worked against new entrants.


That major players like Onet are beginning to find FON a potentially profitable partner is promising, and Mr. Varsavsky’s formidable networking abilities with politicians and entrepreneurs are also a plus. Ultimately, however, FON’s success will hinge on its strategic soundness and operational prowess — not on Mr. Varsavsky’s skills at working the cocktail circuit.

He likes to refer to FON as a “revolution,” but so far his crusade has had difficulty gathering momentum because formal corporate alliances have been slow to jell.

In Mr. Varsavsky’s approach, FON’s business is subsidized by non-Foneros — passing Web surfers who buy time for access to the network — which he can then share with FON’s customers. The approach is different from that of Boingo, a Wi-Fi aggregator based in Los Angeles that charges users a monthly fee for using hotspots while they are traveling.

Yet both FON and Boingo have faced significant resistance from Internet service providers that carefully restrict access to their customers, leaving the idea of a seamless wireless Internet based on Wi-Fi technology an unfulfilled dream so far.

Mr. Varsavsky said he initially hoped that selling $30 Wi-Fi routers embedded with FON software would be all he needed to expand the ranks of Foneros around the globe. But this approach failed to gain traction fast enough, and he shifted gears. Now he is trying to steadily stack up distribution deals with I.S.P.’s.

While some I.S.P.’s have ignored his company, Mr. Varsavsky says FON has gained ground among I.S.P.’s that are looking for a way to attract new customers in competitive markets as well as to compete with high-speed wireless cellular networks.

FON now has a growing range of alliances, including ones with the BT Group, Neuf Cegetel in France, Livedoor (a Japanese I.S.P.), and Time Warner in the United States, as well as a recent agreement with the city of Geneva, which is distributing hundreds of FON routers to residents. Now strongest in Britain, France and Japan, FON has recently made progress with new agreements with two major Japanese retailers and a Taiwanese I.S.P. And Mr. Varsavsky said he is close to major agreements in India and Russia.

FON’s losses have shrunk from more than a million euros a month to less than 500,000, Mr. Varsavsky says. He also hasn’t given up his belief that a coming generation of wireless Internet technology will eventually give FON an even bigger boost.

The first generation of Wi-Fi technology was limited in range, making it impractical for Foneros to share their routers widely. But a new wireless technology, known as 802.16, which should be more widely available to consumers over the next two years, will offer far greater ranges.

This next generation of wireless communication, called WiMax by Intel and others, may allow him to complete his dream — in effect making it possible to weave together a wireless digital network in an urban area with nothing more than an army of Foneros willing to let their routers be used as micro cell towers.

“Why should anyone have to build their own towers?” he asks.

FON’s future, he argues, will revolve around universal access to the wireless Internet. In the meantime, he faces a big obstacle in one of the world’s most lucrative communications markets: the United States, where newer cellular networks with flat-rate pricing may prove a challenge because they will provide universal high-speed coverage.

In Europe, the Internet landscape looks more promising. The European Commission’s decision last summer to place a price cap on voice calls — to make cellphones more affordable for residents traveling within the European Union — didn’t include mobile data. Recent high-speed wireless networks introduced in Europe also use per-megabyte pricing, discouraging the streaming of large files like video.

That leaves a potentially big opportunity for a widely accessible sharing solution for travelers. Yet even in Europe, there are potential roadblocks, not the least of which has been a historically inhospitable atmosphere for entrepreneurial gambits.

“Europe has a larger market than the U.S.A., but it is culturally fragmented and risk-averse,” Mr. Varsavsky says. “But the differences are narrowing, and now there are European venture capitalists and a local entrepreneurial culture.”

Yet he remains undaunted when he discusses his unfinished revolution and FON’s prospects.

“FON,” he said, “is like a telephone company built by the people,” he said.
Vaunted WiMax's messy side: the spectrum grab
By John Letzing, MarketWatch
Last Update: 10:31 AM ET Sep 29, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- In its drive to roll out a new, cutting-edge wireless technology, Sprint Nextel Corp. has taken on Burke County Middle School and a cast of equally unlikely opponents in a nasty spat over the use of airwaves.

Sprint announced in July that they will team up to cover 100 million people with WiMax networks by 2008.  Sprint is placing a risky bet on the largely unproven technology to revive a wireless business that has lost ground to those of rivals Verizon and AT&T, analysts say. Upstart Clearwire, meanwhile, hopes WiMax can one day help the company become a major telecom player.
 
But laying the groundwork for WiMax has involved a messy endeavor to gather up access to necessary airwaves. Much of the spectrum is owned by non-profits and schools, such as those in Burke County, Ga. Many have held it for years, without assigning much value to it. Wrangling over rights to this spectrum has pitted Sprint against a number of the schools and non-profits, while underlining a rift with Clearwire, an important partner in dispatching WiMax in its early stages.
 
Decades ago, the Federal Communications Commission allocated to schools and non-profits much of the 2.5 gigahertz spectrum ideal for WiMax. Classified as "EBS," it can't be owned directly by businesses. The North American Catholic Educational Programming Foundation, for example, can use it to broadcast programming such as "Prayer Talk" and "Gift and Mystery."

Others, like the Burke County schools near Augusta, Ga., didn't even realize they had it until Sprint came calling. General counsel for Burke County Public Schools, James Hyder, said Sprint made an unexpected offer early last year to lease one of the schools' two spectrum licenses.

"We woke up one day and saw we had these," Hyder said. After a call to a former superintendent to clear up what it was exactly Sprint was after, the schools agreed, Hyder said.

Seeing dollar signs

The relationship took an odd turn late last year, however, when the Burke County schools applied to the FCC to renew a second, expired spectrum license. Around 40 other organizations, ranging from Heartland Community College to Connecticut Public Broadcasting, had also applied for the renewal of expired EBS licenses which, thanks largely to WiMax, have dramatically increased in value.

The FCC granted those requests in January, inviting a flood of hundreds of subsequent late renewal requests. Sprint has called the development a mushrooming threat to its network plans. It filed a petition for the commission to reconsider the late renewals in February.

"These former licensees seek to hijack ... valuable spectrum," Sprint said in its petition, adding that the FCC "should not be mislead into granting new authorizations."

Clearwire, meanwhile, has sided with the schools and non-profits. The FCC hasn't yet issued a decision on the matter.
 
The EBS spectrum in question was long seen as having little value beyond broadcasting TV signals in one direction. That's changed as companies like Sprint and Clearwire have announced plans to use it for beaming data and voice communication among computers and phones on WiMax networks, and as the FCC has issued rules making it easier to lease for commercial purposes.

"These educational groups who didn't really care ... whether they had these [licenses] or not are now seeing dollar signs," said Tim Sanders, an analyst with research firm Maravedis Inc.
Indeed, some groups have seen handsome windfalls, thanks to the spectrum's increased value. But the grab for airwaves has also resulted in a series of lawsuits and a surplus of acrimony.

Pandora's box

WiMax can blast radio signals far more broadly than WiFi, thus requiring less network equipment to cover large areas, and some believe it also has certain technical advantages over cellular phone technology.

But the FCC's decision to grant renewals of expired EBS licenses could mar Sprint's WiMax rollout by cutting holes in carefully-planned network coverage areas, the company says. Sprint would either have to negotiate new deals for the reinstated licenses, or see them fall to competitors.   A number of educational groups with EBS licenses have also joined Sprint in complaining about the renewals, which they say threaten to impinge on existing coverage areas.

"You think you have a three-bedroom house, and then all of a sudden someone comes and says, 'hey, half the house is mine'," said Sprint spokesman Scott Sloat. "This has opened a whole Pandora's box."
So far, at least 188 expired EBS license renewal applications have now been filed with the FCC, Sloat said.

In a filing with the FCC posted Friday, Sprint, Clearwire and a number of license holders put forth a proposed settlement, under which late-renewed licenses would have slightly altered coverage areas.
The impetus for the schools' and non-profits' late renewals, Maravedis' Sanders said, is often "someone approaching them and saying, 'we'll lease your spectrum if you can get your license back'."

"I can't speak to their motivation other than to say spectrum is a valuable asset, and people aware of that may see that as an opportunity for a land grab," Sloat said.

Hyder, the Burke County schools' general counsel, said the decision to renew their second spectrum license and seek a suitor was an easy one. "It's the difference between getting nothing today, and something tomorrow," Hyder said, adding that whatever the schools are offered to lease the spectrum "doesn't have to be too significant" for a deal to make sense.  
Faster Wi-Fi in works to transfer data
By GREG BLUESTEIN, Associated Press Writer
Sun Sep 2, 2:43 PM ET

ATLANTA - With a wave of his hand over a homemade receiver, Georgia Tech professor Joy Laskar shows how easily — and quickly — large data files could someday be transferred from a portable media player to a TV.
 
Poof! "You just moved a movie onto your device," Laskar says.

While Wi-Fi and Bluetooth have emerged as efficient ways to zap small amounts of data between gadgets, neither is well suited for quickly transferring high-definition video, large audio libraries and other massive files.

Laskar and other scientists at the Georgia Electronic Design Center have turned to extremely high radio frequencies to transfer huge data files over short distances.

The high frequencies — which use the 60 gigahertz band — have been a mostly untapped resource. Researchers say it could one day become the conventional wireless way to zap data over short distances.

Laskar hopes it could soon become a rival to other wireless technologies. Getting government permission to use the spectrum would not be a problem, since that radio band, much like the one used for Wi-Fi, is unlicensed. Because the range will likely be less than 33 feet, interference is less likely and transmissions could be more secure.

A similar short-range technology, known as ultra-wideband, is just now reaching the market after several years of wrangling between different companies and engineering bodies. It exploits another unlicensed band, reaching up to 10.3 GHz. Last month, Toshiba Corp. introduced laptops with built-in UWB chips that can communicate wirelessly with a docking station. Other possible uses include transmission of high-definition video.

But the maximum current speed of UWB is about 480 megabits per second, equivalent to a high-speed computer cable but possibly not be enough for all applications. Use of the 60 GHz band promises much higher speeds.

"There will be a constant pressure for speed and it will never cease," said M. Kursat Kimyacioglu, director of strategy and wireless business development at the semiconductor subsidiary of Philips Electronics NV. "We need much faster wireless data networking technologies to make much faster downloads and back-ups and higher resolution HD video streaming possible."

He said Philips is looking at using the technology to eliminate cable bundles, but much more research will be needed. The signals don't penetrate walls very well and are too easily disturbed by passing people and pets, Kimyacioglu said.

The research is far from over, Laskar said, but he hopes those challenges can be overcome in the next year or so. If so, the hardware for transferring files could be available by 2009, and new TV sets could be built with the chips the next year.

The center has already achieved wireless data-transfer rates of 15 gigabits per second from a span of 1 meter. That would mean a download time of less than five seconds for a DVD-quality copy of "The Matrix" or other Hollywood movies.

Specialized radios have been sending and receiving high-frequency signals for years, but they're big and can cost tens of thousands of dollars. The Georgia center's challenge has been to convert these devices into tiny chips that can be slipped directly into phones and computers. To be competitive with other technologies, Laskar's set his sights on a $5 chip, and so far his researchers have hammered together a few prototypes to show off the technology.

"We don't want to replace these guys," says Laskar, pointing at an HD receiver and TV set. "We want to complement them."

A cheap chip would launch a new round of competition for the technology, said Anh-Vu Pham, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California at Davis.

"The technology is there, it just requires a little more work," he said. "If the radio can be deployed, you'll have a lot of applications — from HDTV to flash drives — without using any type of cable. Once you solve that problem, you open up so many applications."

The technology could get a big boost if the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a top international association of electrical engineers, decides to create a standard for the spectrum. The group is weighing the decision now and could decide by next year.

"You're talking about moving gigabits in seconds, your whole iPod library, your whole video library," said Laskar. "This has the potential of becoming the de facto way of moving this information on and off the devices.

"With this type of technology, you can compete — and pretty much crush — the wired competition."

Cities struggle with wireless Internet
By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer
May 21, 2007

A $3 million plan to blanket Lompoc, Calif., with a wireless Internet system promised a quantum leap for economic development: The remote community hit hard by cutbacks at nearby Vandenberg Air Force Base would join the 21st century with cheap and plentiful high-speed access. Instead, nearly a year after its launch, Lompoc Net is limping along. The central California city of 42,000, surrounded by rolling hills, wineries and flower fields more than 17 miles from the nearest major highway, has only a few hundred subscribers.

That's far fewer than the 4,000 needed to start repaying loans from the city's utility coffers, potentially leaving smaller reserves to guard against electric rate increases.

And Lompoc isn't alone. Across the United States, many cities are finding their Wi-Fi projects costing more and drawing less interest than expected, leading to worries that a number will fail, resulting in millions of dollars in wasted tax dollars or grants when there had been roads to build and crime to fight.

More than $230 million was spent in the United States last year, and the industry Web site MuniWireless projects $460 million will be spent in 2007.  Without revenues they had counted on to offset that spending, elected officials might have to break promises or find money in already-tight budgets to subsidize the systems for the low-income families and city workers who depend on the access. Cities might end up running the systems if companies abandon networks they had built.

The worries come as big cities like Philadelphia and Portland, Ore., complete pilots and expand their much-hyped networks.

"They are the monorails of this decade: the wrong technology, totally overpromised and completely undelivered," said Anthony Townsend, research director at the Institute for the Future, a think tank.

Municipal Wi-Fi projects use the same technology behind wireless access in coffee shops, airports and home networks. Hundreds or thousands of antennas are installed atop street lamps and other fixtures. Laptops and other devices have Wi-Fi cards that relay data to the Internet through those antennas, using open, unregulated broadcast frequencies. In theory, one could check e-mail and surf the Web from anywhere.

About 175 U.S. cities or regions have citywide or partial systems, and a similar number plan them, according to Esme Vos, founder of MuniWireless.  Rhode Island has proposed a statewide network, while one in California would span dozens of Silicon Valley municipalities. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta also want one.
Because systems are just coming online, it's premature to say how many or which ones will fail under current operating plans, but the early signs are troubling.

"I will be surprised if the majority of these are successful and they do not prove to be drains on taxpayers' money," said Michael Balhoff, former telecom equity analyst with Legg Mason Inc. "The government is getting into hotly contested services."

Most communities, including Lompoc, paid for their projects. Elsewhere, private companies agreed to absorb costs for the chance to sell services or ads.  The vendors remain confident despite technical and other problems. Chuck Haas, MetroFi Inc.'s chief executive, said Wi-Fi networks are far cheaper to build than cable and DSL, which is broadband over phone lines.

Demand could grow once more cell phones can make Wi-Fi calls and as city workers improve productivity by reading electric meters remotely, for instance.  Balhoff, however, believes the successful projects are most likely to be in remote places that traditional service providers skip — and fewer and fewer of those areas exist. Cities, he said, should focus on incentives to draw providers.

In Lompoc's case, officials say construction was delayed about a year once they realized wireless antennas had to be packed more closely together. Then the city learned that its stucco homes have a wire mesh that blocks signals, making Internet service poor or nonexistent indoors without extra equipment.

But more importantly, just as Lompoc committed to the network, cable and telephone companies arrived with better equipment and service, undercutting the city's offerings.

"It seemed like we announced we were going to do this and that and the next day we got trucks from the providers doing this and that, when we've been asking for years and nothing ever happened," Lompoc Mayor Dick DeWees said.  D.A. Taylor, who runs a software business from her home, said Lompoc's Wi-Fi service lacks key features she gets through DSL.

"It's a really great idea, but they didn't spend a lot of time thinking who their target market was," Taylor said.

DeWees acknowledged that Lompoc might have to pull the plug if it cannot boost subscriptions, but he said the city still has an aggressive marketing push in store. Lompoc recently slashed prices by $9, to $16 a month, for the main household plan.  Just a few years ago, these municipal wireless projects seemed foolproof. 
Politicians got to tout Internet access for city workers and poorer households — many programs include giveaways for lower-income families. Some cities bear no upfront costs when a company pays for construction in exchange for rights to use fixtures like lamp poles.

Vendors like EarthLink Inc. saw a chance to offset declines in dial-up subscriptions. MetroFi, offering free service, got to join the burgeoning market for online advertising. Google Inc. also is jumping in for the ads, partnering with EarthLink in San Francisco, although the city's Board of Supervisors is resisting their joint proposal.  As projects get deployed, both sides are seeing chinks in their plans.

Many cities and vendors underestimated the number of wireless antennas needed. MobilePro Corp.'s Kite Networks wound up tripling the access points in Tempe, Ariz., adding roughly $1 million, or more than doubling the costs.

"The industry is really in its infancy, and what works on paper doesn't work that same way once you get into the real world," said Jerry Sullivan, Kite's chief executive.

Networks like St. Cloud, Fla., and Portland, meanwhile, shared Lompoc's difficulties penetrating building walls, requiring indoor users to buy signal boosters for as much as $150. And when it works, service can be slower than cable and DSL.

"There's an antenna literally at the curb of my house, but when I've tried to log on, it cuts in and out," said Landon Dirgo, who runs a computer repair shop in Lompoc.

One recent sunny afternoon in Portland, few could be found surfing the Internet from the city's downtown parks. Mari Borden, a student at Portland State, said she couldn't connect to MetroFi's free network from several locations, even though her computer could detect a signal (MetroFi officials say users might need stronger wireless cards to send back a signal).  The vendors insist they have been upfront with customers about limitations. But MetroFi's Adrian van Haaften said managing expectations can be challenging.

EarthLink said it has 2,000 customers in four markets — New Orleans; Milpitas and Anaheim, Calif.; and Philadelphia — paying $22 or less a month. MetroFi said it had 8,000 free users in Portland in April, averaging 10 hours online; the city says about 1,000 use the network on any given day.  Although both companies say their numbers are good given that their networks aren't fully built yet, they also are realigning expectations.

MetroFi will insist that future contracts commit cities to spend a specific amount for public safety and other municipal applications. EarthLink, which recently suspended new bids while it focuses on existing projects, said it would likely seek minimums, too.  Glenn Fleishman, editor of the Wi-Fi Networking News site, said vendors could no longer afford to treat projects as testbeds and loss leaders for winning publicity and new business.

Municipalities, meanwhile, are becoming more cautious. Applying lessons from other municipalities, Boston plans to raise money upfront from local groups and businesses and avoid tax dollars or a corporate partner.  Competition and expectations will only increase as DSL and cable modems get faster.  Users today are struggling with e-mail and the Web over some wireless systems, yet video and online games will require even more capacity.

"Most people if they are going to do serious work aren't looking to be sitting in a park," said Eric Rabe, a spokesman for DSL provider Verizon Communications Inc. "They want to be at a desk where they have their papers or business records."

Lompoc's backers, though, still claim success, "even if the whole network were to be written off tomorrow," said Mark McKibben, Lompoc's former wireless consultant.

"Prices dropped and quality of service went up," he said. "That's the way a lot of cities look at it. They don't look at business profits and losses. They see it as a driver for quality of life."




Technology Challenges Iran's Censors 
By New York Times News Service 
Published on 6/23/2009

Shortly after Neda Agha-Soltan bled her life out on the Tehran pavement, the man whose 40-second video of her death has ricocheted around the world made a somber calculation in what has become the cat-and-mouse game of evading Iran's censors. He knew that the government had been blocking Web sites like YouTube and Facebook. Trying to send the video there could have exposed him and his family.
Instead, he e-mailed the 2-megabyte video to a nearby friend, who quickly forwarded it to the Voice of America, the newspaper The Guardian in London and five online friends in Europe, with a message that read, “Please let the world know.” It was one of those friends, an Iranian expatriate living in the Netherlands, who posted it on Facebook, weeping as he did so, he recalled.

Copies of the video, as well as a shorter one shot by another witness, spread almost instantly to YouTube and were televised within hours by CNN. Despite a prolonged effort by Iran's government to keep a media lid on the violent events unfolding on the streets there, Agha-Soltan was transformed on the Web from a nameless victim into an icon of the Iranian protest movement.

At one time, authoritarian regimes could draw a shroud around the events in their countries by simply snipping the long-distance phone lines and restricting a few foreigners. But this is the new arena of censorship in the 21st century, a world where cell phone cameras, Twitter accounts and all the trappings of the World Wide Web have changed the ancient calculus of how much power governments actually have to sequester their nations from the eyes of the world and make it difficult for their own people to gather, dissent and rebel.

Iran's sometimes faltering attempts to come to grips with this new reality are providing a laboratory for what can and cannot be done in this new media age - and providing lessons to other governments, watching with calculated interest from afar, about what they may be able to get away with should their own citizens take to the streets.

One early lesson is that it is easier for Iranian authorities to limit images and information within their own country than it is to stop them from spreading rapidly to the outside world. While Iran has severely restricted Internet access, a loose worldwide network of sympathizers has risen up to help keep activists and spontaneous filmmakers connected.

The pervasiveness of the Web makes censorship “a much more complicated job,” said John Palfrey, a co-director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The Berkman Center estimates that about three dozen governments - as widely disparate as China, Cuba and Uzbekistan - extensively control their citizens' access to the Internet. Of those, Iran is one of the most aggressive. Palfrey said the trend during this decade has been toward more, not less, censorship. “It's almost impossible for the censor to win in an Internet world, but they're putting up a good fight,” he said.

Since the advent of the digital age, governments and rebels have dueled over attempts to censor communications. Text messaging was used to rally supporters in a popular political uprising in Ukraine in 2004 and to threaten activists in Belarus in 2006. When Myanmar sought to silence demonstrators in 2007, it switched off the country's Internet network for six weeks. Earlier this month, China blocked sites like YouTube to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

In Iran, the censorship has been more sophisticated, amounting to an extraordinary cyber-duel. It feels at times as if communications within the country are being strained through a sieve, as the government slows down Web access and uses the latest spying technology to pinpoint opponents. But at least in limited ways, users are still able to tweet and transmit video to one another and to a world of online spectators.

Because of the determination of those users, hundreds of amateur videos from Tehran and other cities have been uploaded to YouTube in recent days, providing television networks with hours of raw - but unverified - video from the protests.

The Internet has “certainly broken 30 years of state control over what is seen and is unseen, what is visible versus invisible,” said Navtej Dhillon, an analyst with the Brookings Institution.

But taking pictures is an increasingly dangerous act in Iran. The police in Tehran confronted citizens who were trying to film near a memorial to Agha-Soltan on Monday.

Threatening people who have cameras is only the latest in a series of steps by the authorities. On June 12, the day a disputed presidential election set off the protests, the government summarily shut down all text messaging in the country - the prime tool that government opponents had been using to keep in touch - making newfangled tools like Twitter and old-fashioned techniques like word-of-mouth more important for organizing.

In the days that followed, Iran has tightened the spigot without closing it entirely. Even before the election, the country was known to operate one of the world's most sophisticated Web filtering systems, with widespread blockades on specific Web sites. According to media reports in April, some of the monitoring technology was provided by Nokia Siemens Networks, a joint venture between Nokia, the Finnish cell phone maker, and Siemens, the German technology giant.

The day after the election, Iran's state-controlled telecommunications provider completely dropped off the Internet for more than an hour, according to Renesys, an Internet monitoring company. Access was partly restored the Monday after the election. YouTube said traffic to the site from within Iran was down about 90 percent last week, indicating that most - but not all - connections had been stopped or slowed. Facebook said traffic from Iran was down by more than half since the election.

Whether for political, social or financial reasons, Iran has been hesitant to shut off its sterilized Internet access entirely. Some have reasoned that a complete halt would hurt businesses.

Still, the off-and-on Web connections and government threats imposed a kind of self-censorship on some of the population, one that is also evident in other countries with authoritarian regimes, Palfrey said. Some Iranians have harnessed ways to bypass the system, relying in part on supporters around the world who are offering their computers as so-called proxy servers, which are digital safe-houses that can be used to make the Iranians' Internet connection anonymous so they can view blocked Web sites. Tor, a volunteer-run tool for masking Internet traffic that bounces Internet connections off three separate computers, said the traffic emanating from Iran over the course of the week increased tenfold.

Despite the crackdown, the videos and tweets indicate to many that broadly distributed Internet tools - and the spirit of young, tech-savvy people - cannot be completely repressed by an authoritarian government.

”You can't take the entire Internet and try to lock it in a little box in your country, as China continuously attempts to do,” said Richard Stiennon, founder of IT-Harvest, a Web security research firm. “There are just too many ways now to find paths around blockages. They would have to ban the Internet entirely, or build their own network.”

That may not be so far-fetched. Experts say China is in its own league for filtering. Ethan Zuckerman, a colleague of Palfrey's at the Berkman Center, said China has “baked in the censorship” for its citizens by building its own Web sites and tools. Recently it said it would require so-called Green Dam filtering software to be installed on all computers sold in the country, prompting a complaint from the U.S. government and likely kicking off yet another round of cat-and-mouse.

Brian Stelter reported from New York, and Brad Stone from San Francisco. Reported was contributed by Michael Slackman from Cairo, Steven Lee Myers from Baghdad, Noam Cohen from New York, and a New York Times employee from Tehran. 
3 Net Providers Will Block Sites With Child Sex
NYTIMES
By DANNY HAKIM
Published: June 10, 2008

ALBANY — Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable have agreed to block access to Internet bulletin boards and Web sites nationwide that disseminate child pornography.

The move is part of a groundbreaking agreement with the New York attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, that will be formally announced on Tuesday as a significant step by leading companies to curtail access to child pornography. Many in the industry have previously resisted similar efforts, saying they could not be responsible for content online, given the decentralized and largely unmonitored nature of the Internet.

The agreements will affect customers not just in New York but throughout the country. Verizon and Time Warner Cable are two of the nation’s five largest service providers, with roughly 16 million customers between them.

Negotiations are continuing with other service providers, Mr. Cuomo said.

The companies have agreed to shut down access to newsgroups that traffic in pornographic images of children on one of the oldest outposts of the Internet, known as Usenet. Usenet began nearly 30 years ago and was one of the earliest ways to swap information online, but as the World Wide Web blossomed, Usenet was largely supplanted by it, becoming a favored back alley for those who traffic in illicit material.

The providers will also cut off access to Web sites that traffic in child pornography.

While officials from the attorney general’s office said they hoped to make it extremely difficult to find or disseminate the material online, they acknowledged that they could not eliminate access entirely. Among the potential obstacles: some third-party companies sell paid subscriptions, allowing customers to access newsgroups privately, preventing even their Internet service providers from tracking their activity.

The agreements resulted from an eight-month investigation and sting operation in which undercover agents from Mr. Cuomo’s office, posing as subscribers, complained to Internet providers that they were allowing child pornography to proliferate online, despite customer service agreements that discouraged such activity. Verizon, for example, warns its users that they risk losing their service if they transmit or disseminate sexually exploitative images of children.

After the companies ignored the investigators’ complaints, the attorney general’s office surfaced, threatening charges of fraud and deceptive business practices. The companies agreed to cooperate and began weeks of negotiations.

By pursuing Internet service providers, Mr. Cuomo is trying to move beyond the traditional law enforcement strategy of targeting those who produce child pornography and their customers. That approach has had limited effectiveness, according to Mr. Cuomo’s office, in part because much of the demand in the United States has been fed by child pornography from abroad, especially Eastern Europe.

“You can’t help but look at this material and not be disturbed,” said Mr. Cuomo, who promised to take up the issue during his 2006 campaign. “These are 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds, assault victims, there are animals in the pictures,” he added. “To say ‘graphic’ and ‘egregious’ doesn’t capture it.”

“The I.S.P.s’ point had been, ‘We’re not responsible, these are individuals communicating with individuals, we’re not responsible,’ ” he said, referring to Internet service providers. “Our point was that at some point, you do bear responsibility.”

Representatives for the three companies either did not return calls or declined to comment before the official announcement of the agreements on Tuesday.

Internet service providers represent a relatively new front in the battle against child pornography, one spearheaded in large part by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Federal law requires service providers to report child pornography to the National Center, but it often takes customer complaints to trigger a report, and few visitors to illicit newsgroups could be expected to complain because many are pedophiles themselves.

Last year, a bill sponsored by Congressman Nick Lampson, a Texas Democrat, promised to take “the battle of child pornography to Internet service providers” by ratcheting up penalties for failing to report complaints of child pornography. The bill passed in the House, but has languished in the Senate.

“If we can encourage — and certainly a fine would be an encouragement — the I.S.P. to be in a position to give the information to law enforcement, we are encouraging them to be on the side of law enforcement rather than erring to make money for themselves,” Mr. Lampson said.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children collaborated on Mr. Lampson’s bill and with Mr. Cuomo’s office in its investigation and strategy.

“This is a major step forward in the fight against child pornography,” Ernie Allen, the president and chief executive officer of the center, said in a statement. “Attorney General Cuomo has developed a new and effective system that cuts online child porn off at the source, and stops it from spreading across the Internet.”

As part of the agreements, the three companies will also collectively pay $1.125 million to underwrite efforts by Mr. Cuomo’s office and the center for missing children to purge child pornography from the Internet.

One considerable tool that has been assembled as part of the investigation is a library of more than 11,000 pornographic images. Because the same images are often distributed around the Web or from newsgroup to newsgroup, once investigators catalog an image, they can use a digital identifier called a “hash value” to scan for it anywhere else — using it as a homing beacon of sorts to find other pornographic sites.

“It’s going to make a significant difference,” Mr. Cuomo said. “It’s like the issue of drugs. You can attack the users or the suppliers. This is turning off the faucet. Does it solve the problem? No. But is it a major step forward? Yes. And it’s ongoing.”

The most graphic material was typically found on newsgroups, the online bulletin boards that exist apart from the World Wide Web but can be reached through some Internet search engines. The newsgroups transmit copies of messages around the world, so an image posted to the server of a service provider in the Netherlands, for example, ends up on other servers in the United States and elsewhere.

The agreement is designed to bar access to Web sites that feature child pornography by requiring service providers to check against a registry of explicit sites maintained by the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Investigators said a few providers, including America Online, had taken significant steps on their own to address some of the problems their competitors were being forced to tackle.

Mr. Cuomo said his latest investigation was built on agreements he and other state attorneys general had reached with the social networking sites Facebook and MySpace to protect children from sexual predators.

“No one is saying you’re supposed to be the policemen on the Internet, but there has to be a paradigm where you cooperate with law enforcement, or if you have notice of a potentially criminal act, we deem you responsible to an extent,” he said. “This literally threatens our children, and there can be no higher priority than keeping our children safe.”
Study finds 25 countries block Web sites
By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer
Fri May 18, 12:46 AM ET

NEW YORK - At least 25 countries around the world block Web sites for political, social or other reasons as governments seek to assert authority over a network meant to be borderless, according to a study out Friday.

The actual number may be higher, but the OpenNet Initiative had the time and capabilities to study only 40 countries and the Palestinian territories. Even so, researchers said they found more censorship than they had initially expected, a sign that the Internet has matured to the point that governments are taking notice.

"This is very much the revenge of geography," said Rafal Rohozinski, a research fellow at the University of Cambridge in England.

China, Iran, Myanmar, Syria, Tunisia and Vietnam had the most extensive filters for political sites. Iran, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen had the strictest social-filtering practices, blocking pornography, gambling and gay and lesbian sites.

In some countries, censorship was narrow. South Korea, for instance, tends to block only information about its neighboring rival, North Korea.

Yet researchers found no filtering at all in Russia, Israel or the Palestinian territories despite political conflicts there.

Governments generally had no mechanism for citizens to complain about any erroneous blocking, with Saudi Arabia, Oman and the United Arab Emirates being among the exceptions.

The OpenNet Initiative, a collaboration between researchers at Cambridge, the University of Oxford, Harvard University and the University of Toronto, has previously published reports detailing censorship in specific countries. The latest study was its attempt to compare filtering worldwide.

The study did not attempt to chronicle the effectiveness of the efforts. Some technical approaches are better than others in blocking sites, but all can be bypassed with enough technical know-how to use "proxy" techniques or special software.

The organization said the regions chosen for review should not be considered comprehensive. It didn't include any countries in North America or Western Europe on grounds that filtering practices there have been better known than elsewhere. It also excluded North Korea and Cuba for fear of risks to collaborators it would need in those countries.

The group supplied software to volunteers in each of the countries tested. Web sites checked include those for gambling, pornography and human-rights abuses.

Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford, said filtering appeared to occur most widely in countries where Internet penetration is higher, possibly explaining the lack of any censorship efforts in Russia and Egypt.

Technology saves day for NH parents of Virginia Tech students
New Hampshire Union Leader Staff
By JOHN WHITSON
10am Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Technology can be a godsend in a crisis.  When Donna Sproul of Londonderry heard about the shootings at Virginia Tech, where her son Jonathan goes to school, she couldn't reach him by telephone.

"My brother-in-law, who lives in Blacksburg (Va.), called me in a panic because he couldn't get hold of him," said Sproul.  After her own initial attempts failed, she went online and there he was.

"Thank God for instant messaging," said Sproul.  Michael Neverman of Londonderry said cell phone circuits were busy when he tried to call his daughter, Erica, a Virginia Tech freshman, yesterday morning.  Neverman then sent a text-message, sat back, and nervously waited for a response.  An unidentified person is carried out of Norris Hall at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., yesterday. (AP)

►President Bush orders flags to half staff after Virginia Tech massacre; click here for MSNBC's coverage

"About 10 minutes later she text-messaged me back saying she was OK," said Neverman, breathing another sigh of relief as he told the story.  Jonathan Sproul, a freshman, said the campus went into lockdown - meaning students couldn't leave the buildings they were in - minutes after he returned to his dormitory after a 9 a.m. class.

"Right now they're actually opening up the dining halls and we're allowed to go to eat," said Jonathan shortly after 2 p.m.  Classes, he said, were cancelled yesterday and all day today.

Sproul said other students on campus from New Hampshire that he knows were safe. He said he spoke with Paul Ahern of Londonderry, and another Granite-Stater, Ashley Morgenstern of Derry, posted online messages saying she was OK.

The lockdown order came from campus police via e-mails, said Sproul. Once he and his roommate heard the news they turned on a TV. "We haven't taken our eyes off it," he said.  When they took time to look outside, Sproul said police officers were everywhere. "They were surrounding the dorm next to us, with guns drawn," he said.

The dormitory where the first shootings happened at about 7:15 a.m., explained Sproul, is two buildings and about 200 yards away from his.  The shootings have been the only topic of conversation throughout the lockdown, said Sproul, but people started to relax a little bit by afternoon. "Right now it's pretty calm," he said, "but no one knows what to think."

Erica Neverman was in a physics class when the campus went into lockdown. Her father said he was especially nervous because she is an engineering major.  The second round of shootings took place in an engineering class in Norris Hall. "That was the scary part," said Neverman.

"It's obviously frustrating when you're a long way away," he said. "You feel so helpless."

Yesterday was actually the second day of shootings this school year at Virginia Tech.  Sproul, who is studying civil engineering, said three people were shot on campus during the first day of school last fall.

"I think they're random incidents," he said. "I don't see a pattern. I don't have any thoughts of transferring."

His mother said she also finds no fault with the school itself.

"We've been going to Blacksburg forever," said Donna Sproul. "It has been my child's dream to go to this school. It is the most beautiful school you could ever imagine and the safest town you could ever imagine. For this to happen is unbelievable."

Michael Neverman said uncertainty in the minutes and hours when the shootings were first reported turned into a mixed blessing for his household.

"I think we've discovered how blessed we are," he said, "because there have been a gazillion e-mails and messages and calls asking about (Erica) and sending prayers for our family."

At Home or Away, It’s Still a DVR
NYTIMES
By Eric A. Taub
June 30, 2009, 2:43 pm

DVRs, or digital video recorders, first popularized by the TiVo brand, have become an essential part of the TV viewing experience in many U.S. homes.

But the hardware to allow consumers to record and pause video on a hard disk can be costly. Cablevision, the cable TV operator, came up with a different approach: Keep the show recordings on a central server and feed them to the viewer when they requested them. Customers could be charged less, and capacity would no longer be an issue.

This remote recording technology came under attack from the big four TV networks, among others, with the companies suing Cablevision claiming copyright infringement.

The case was decided against the networks and they appealed to the Supreme Court. Earlier this month, the U.S. Solicitor General recommended to the Court that they not hear the case; apparently it agreed. On Monday, the Supreme Court decided to let the lower court ruling stand, allowing Cablevision to go ahead and offer its off-site DVR.

The Consumer Electronics Association sung the praises of the decision, with its CEO, Gary Shapiro, stating that “From a common-sense standpoint, the Court’s decision was a slam-dunk. The Court has already ruled that consumers have the right to time-shift television shows.”

Apparently, a DVR is a DVR, whether you have it in your house or it’s located at some central location miles away.
High Court Won't Block Remote Storage DVR
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:21 a.m. ET
June 29, 2009

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Hollywood studios and television networks have lost a Supreme Court bid to block the use of a new digital video recorder system that could make it cheaper and easier for viewers to record shows and watch them when they want, without commercials.

The justices, in an order Monday, say they will not disturb a federal appeals court ruling that Cablevision Systems Corp.'s remote-storage DVR does not violate copyright laws.

For consumers, the action means that Cablevision and perhaps other cable system operators soon will be able to offer DVR service without need for a box in their homes. The remote storage unit exists on computer servers maintained by a cable provider.

Conn. says utility pole boxes need municipal OKs 
DAY
By STEPHEN SINGER, AP Business Writer 

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) -- Connecticut regulators issued a draft decision Friday that AT&T must get permission from municipalities before putting its large video equipment boxes on utility poles and other properties.

The state Department of Public Utility Control issued a preliminary ruling on a petition from Bridgeport, Danbury and Stamford. The cities asked regulators to investigate the safety and location of the telecommunications equipment.

The so-called VRAD cabinets, which house equipment for AT&T's video U-Verse services and broadband, are about five feet high by four feet wide. Fewer than 8,000 of AT&T's 800,000 utility poles in Connecticut will be used to mount the equipment, regulators said.

AT&T "should have acted in a more responsible manner" by providing notice to public officials and seeking informed consent from municipalities and neighboring property owners, the state agency said.

A final decision is expected Sept. 29.

Adam Cormier, a spokesman for AT&T in New Haven, would not comment specifically on regulators' criticism of the telecommunications company.

"It's a draft decision so we look forward to working with the department and all the parties to bring the docket to a final decision," he said.

Burt Rosenberg, assistant corporation counsel for Stamford, said the city challenged AT&T because officials demanded to be informed about where the equipment is placed. The boxes, which he said are about the size of small refrigerators, are one foot off the ground and present a hazard to pedestrians, bicyclists and others, Rosenberg said.

The cities said the boxes should be at least seven feet above the ground, he said. Lawyers for the municipalities cited the federal Americans with Disabilities Act as a basis for the complaint, arguing that blind pedestrians or people who use wheelchairs are particularly at risk.

Following the decision by the Department of Public Utility Control, AT&T will inform cities of the location of the VRAD equipment and municipal officials will meet with the telecommunications company to voice objections, Rosenberg said.

State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal praised regulators, but said he will ask that AT&T be ordered to seek retroactive permission from municipalities and property owners for video equipment boxes already installed. The draft decision requires the company to seek permission to install boxes if property owners or municipalities had objected, he said.
Blumenthal's TV Change 
DAY editorial
Published on 10/26/2007 

It is great that Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has seen the light and moderated his anti-competition position when it comes to new television service technologies, but he does not go far enough.

A new state law that took effect Oct. 1 appeared to settle the matter. It provided a format for new emerging technologies — such as AT&T's U-verse and Verizon's FiOS — to compete with cable-TV franchises. The consumer-friendly legislation would let competition determine prices and drive service.

But when AT&T applied for a certificate to offer U-verse service under the new law, Mr. Blumenthal and the Office of Consumer Counsel opposed it. Citing a federal court decision, they argued these new technologies should be regulated under the old monopolistic cable-TV regulations, including forcing them to commit to providing service to entire franchise areas.

Unfortunately, the state Department of Public Utility Control bought their argument and, ignoring the new law, told AT&T it had to apply for a cable-TV franchise. AT&T argued the old regulatory model made no sense in this new age of communication. If necessary, AT&T said it would take the $336 million it planned to invest in a Connecticut U-verse system to other states that welcomed competition. Such a move would also mean the loss of thousands of jobs.

Consumers have reacted with outrage. They want TV service options. Apparently Mr. Blumenthal realized he was on the wrong side of this issue. In a letter to AT&T Tuesday, he said he would be happy to support a stay of the DPUC decision while the courts decide whether to apply the old law or new law to U-verse.

While the change of heart may help Mr. Blumenthal politically (he may run for governor in 2010), a stay wouldn't do much for AT&T or consumers. The company is not likely to sign up new customers and build out its system when an adverse court ruling could force it to unplug them.

The better course of action would be for the DPUC to reverse its decision and let the new law take effect immediately. Meanwhile, a hearing is set for today at which AT&T will ask state Superior Court Judge Robert F. McWeeny to force the DPUC to abide by the new competition-friendly law. The legislature's intent to encourage competition is clear. The Day urges Judge McWeeny to act swiftly and order that the law be implemented.
Phone TV Conflict Blurry; Officials Try To Defend Choice By Denying it
By MARK PETERS | Courant Staff Writer
October 21, 2007

TV viewers might find it difficult to choose a side in the fight over cable competition in Connecticut.  Should they choose the side of government officials who say they are representing consumers by encouraging TV-service competition as long as everyone in the state can benefit?

That position effectively eliminated a choice between AT&T's new U-verse service and cable TV for as many as 150,000 consumers last week in areas where U-verse was going to become available. Regulators told AT&T it had to stop expanding U-verse and apply for a franchise.  Or should consumers take AT&T's side? Starting 10 months ago, the telephone giant began giving some consumers a competitive option to the decades-old monopoly of local cable TV franchises. U-verse delivers television programming over telephone lines.

But AT&T is beholden first and foremost to shareholders, which is part of the reason the company doesn't want to be required to offer TV service to every home in its franchise area.

The legal, technical and business arguments about the new service can be perplexing for consumers. The confusion was evident last Thursday as union workers for AT&T rallied in downtown Hartford to support their employer's position in the battle. A few commuters waiting nearby for their evening bus were trying to figure out what the protesters were shouting about.

"I thought the phone company only had Internet, and obviously, phone service," said Sharon Griffin-Joseph, watching for both the rally and her bus.

But inside the telecommunications industry, the fight is fierce over how new types of TV service should be regulated.

The issue in Connecticut revolves primarily around what's known as a universal service requirement. That regulation would require AT&T to provide TV service to all customers in its franchise area, which could be the whole state.

For years, the state has been divided into cable franchise areas, and each cable company is required to offer service throughout its franchise area.  AT&T has said that if it is forced to adhere to the universal service requirement, it will drop its more than 7,000 U-verse customers in the state and proceed with the service elsewhere.  Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, government regulators and cable companies say universal service must be a requirement, or all consumers won't get the lower rates and other benefits expected to come with more competition.

At stake is an additional option for consumers who have endured years of rising rates for cable TV and the only other available choice, satellite TV.  The Federal Communications Commission, in a study of prices for TV service, found that cable rates rose nationally by 93 percent between 1995 and 2005. In areas where effective competition exists, prices charged by cable companies were 17 percent lower, the same study found.

For now, unless they have the benefit of clairvoyance, Connecticut consumers will simply have to decide which side offers the most persuasive argument about what might happen in the future.  In the most recent skirmish last week, AT&T lost a crucial battle before the state Department of Public Utility Control. The DPUC ruled Monday that AT&T had to stop signing up new U-verse customers until it followed the same franchise rules as cable companies, including the universal service requirement.

Thomas W. Hazlett, a professor of law and economics at George Mason University and former chief economist of the FCC, said the DPUC's decision won't help consumers.  He said challengers to cable won't come into markets if they're required to meet the universal service requirement. And, he asked, why would the government want to stand in the way of increased competition and lower prices for at least some consumers?

"You can't get 100 percent," Hazlett said. "If you can't, get 10 percent or 20 percent."

AT&T points out that universal service requirements weren't imposed on cable companies when they began offering telephone service to compete with AT&T's predecessor companies, SBC Communications and Southern New England Telecommunications Corp.  Also, the state has seen this situation before. In the mid-1990s, SNET introduced its Personal Vision product to compete with cable companies, but shut it down in part because of what AT&T now says was a universal service requirement.

But Blumenthal and other consumer advocates have a different view.

Competition won't benefit everyone and won't last unless AT&T - or others - have to serve all customers, said Blumenthal and William Vallee, a lawyer with the state Office of Consumer Counsel, which represents cable ratepayers.  They said the fear is that competition will develop only in those areas where AT&T finds it profitable to offer service. That would leave rural areas and, possibly, the poorest section of cities with no competitive choices, Blumenthal said.

He said that without statewide competition, areas without competitive choices would see prices increase more rapidly while customer service declines.  The attorney general also predicted that after a period of years, AT&T could become a new monopoly because of the advantage it would have of being able to pick and choose customers. It ultimately would replace cable TV and re-create the problem that competition is supposed to fix.

"The government will be giving its stamp of approval to essentially a different form of monopolistic power," Blumenthal said.

The two sides are due in court this week as AT&T challenges the DPUC's most recent decision.
Blumenthal: Make AT&T Get Cable License;  AG asks state DPUC to reconsider its decision in wake of federal court ruling 
DAY
By Ted Mann    
Published on 8/7/2007 

Hartford — Attorney General Richard Blumenthal petitioned the state Department of Public Utility Control Monday to force AT&T to seek a cable license for its Internet television service, in the wake of a federal court ruling that the new technology must be subject to the same regulations as conventional cable.

The ruling overturned a 2006 decision by the state agency, which had said AT&T was not required to seek a cable franchise for its Internet protocol television (or “IPTV”) service, since it was not the same as conventional cable.

“This service must be licensed as cable, regulated as cable,” Blumenthal said, standing alongside attorney William L. Vallee Jr. of the Office of Consumer Counsel, which brought the federal suit.

Blumenthal said he would urge the department to order AT&T to apply for a cable license that would compel the company to offer its services statewide, and would ask the department to require the company to halt its construction of infrastructure for the service and its effort to enroll customers until the license is granted.

A spokeswoman for the department, Beryl C. Lyons, said the agency would take no action until the deadline for AT&T to appeal the court ruling expires next week.

“It would be premature for us to go doing something that could just be overturned again,” Lyons said, but added that the DPUC board would respond if the court decision overturning the earlier ruling is upheld on appeal.

“Then we've got a federal court ruling overturning our decision, and then we've got to take appropriate action,” she said.

A spokesman for AT&T, Seth Bloom, called Blumenthal's action “premature,” and said the company's IPTV service, called U-verse, was the sort of offering specifically encouraged by a state law passed just months ago by the legislature that was intended to spur new entries in the state's cable market.

U-verse is already active in 30 cities and towns in Connecticut, Bloom said, and already providing consumers with new choices for television service.

“We're in the market today,” he said. “We've put our money where our mouth is.”

Blumenthal seeks 'new era in cable competition'
By PATRICK R. LINSEY, Hour Staff Writer
August 7, 2007

REGION — Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal will not be satisfied until all state residents have a choice in their cable television provider.

But AT&T, which is challenging traditional cable companies with its new fiber-optic service, said Blumenthal's efforts could backfire — stifling the very competition he hopes to create.

In the wake of a court decision last month, Blumenthal petitioned the state Department of Public Utility Control Monday to force AT&T to seek a traditional cable license for its television service.

"We are seeking to enforce a new era of cable competition," Blumenthal said. "The first steps are an emergency order that would stop AT&T from constructing new facilities and signing up new customers until it has a franchise."
The license would require AT&T to make its fledgling U-verse service available to all residents in the state. Blumenthal has accused AT&T of seeking to "cherry pick," offering service in affluent communities and not poorer cities.

The telephone company has invested millions of dollars into infrastructure for its digital television system, which is now available to residents in 35 Connecticut towns and cities. Included are wealthy suburbs — like Westport and Guilford — but also cities with a range of incomes — like Norwalk and Stamford — and Bridgeport — a city with significant poverty.

AT&T has argued that its service is distinct from traditional cable television and therefore does not require a cable license from the DPUC. The DPUC agreed, ruling last summer that television services like AT&T's do not need a cable franchise.

But the Office of Consumer Council, a public consumer group for utility payers, and Cablevision, a traditional cable company, filed lawsuits. Last month, a judge at the U.S. District Court in New Haven ruled that U-verse is subject to the same regulation as traditional cable.

"The federal court's ruling provides a legal foundation for the fact that an unequal playing field for video services is unacceptable and illegal," Blumenthal said, "and that the legal structures already in place in state and federal law demand balance among the service providers."

But AT&T spokesman Seth Bloom said the judge has yet to assign a remedy in the case and is currently taking input from all sides to determine an appropriate resolution.
Bloom also cited a law signed by Gov. M. Jodi Rell last month that encourages new entrants to the state's cable market. The law, which takes effect October 1, was not a factor in the recent court decision.

AT&T has no plans to restrict its U-verse service to affluent communities, Bloom said.

"We plan to bring U-verse to as many consumers as possible as quickly as possible," he said. "We stand behind our strong record building out DSL in Connecticut. With no one telling us we needed to, we got from 0- to over 90-percent availability in the state in a short seven or eight years."

AT&T has argued that customers in competitive cable markets pay lower rates. But forcing statewide service dissuades new companies from entering the market, Bloom said.

Cable service in the state is largely provided by regional monopolies. Cablevision provides service to the great majority of cable customers in central Fairfield County.

"For years nobody came in to offer (an alternative) service in the cable industry," Bloom said. "They would have had to ... get a franchise, which requires them to build out to the entire state, which doesn't make sense when you're a new entrant dealing with a monopoly. Nobody did and (traditional cable companies) took advantage and raised rates whenever they wanted "

New Law Could Nullify AT&T Ruling
By MARK PETERS | Courant Staff Writer
July 27, 2007

A federal judge ruled Thursday that AT&T must follow the same rules as cable TV companies as the phone giant competes for customers with its fledgling video service.

The decision by Judge Janet Bond Arterton strikes down a year-old ruling by the state Department of Public Utility Control. The agency had ruled that AT&T did not have to abide by cable franchise regulations, including requirements that prevent it from offering its service only in select markets.

But it's possible that the ruling from U.S. District Court in New Haven will be blunted or even nullified by a recently passed state law that establishes a new system to regulate cable TV and AT&T's video service.

AT&T, the state's Office of Consumer Counsel and others involved in the federal suit say they're reviewing the ruling to understand how it might affect AT&T's U-verse service. The service, which delivers TV programming over telephone lines, is available in parts of more than 20 Connecticut towns and cities.

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said Thursday that the federal ruling was good news for consumers, but will probably be negated by the new state law.

"Unfortunately, a new law guts the very safeguards that the court so resoundingly affirmed," he said in a statement.

AT&T said it's reviewing the decision, but pointed out that the court case concerns law that has been changed.

The federal lawsuit against AT&T and the DPUC was filed last July by the consumer counsel, which represents cable ratepayers, and the New England Cable and Telecommunications Association, whose members include Comcast Corp. and Cox Communications.

The trade association and consumer counsel argued that the DPUC was giving AT&T an unfair advantage as it enters the TV market in Connecticut. The phone company did not have to meet public access requirements, provide service to all homes in a franchise area, or go through the lengthy cable franchise renewal process that examines customer service.

AT&T has argued that the cable companies are only interested in keeping their monopoly and avoiding competition.

The cable association could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Bill Vallee, principal attorney for the state's consumer counsel, said Thursday that Arterton's decision supports his argument that AT&T should be treated the same as cable companies, even though the technology is different. He said the ruling could have an effect on AT&T's plans for other states because it is now more likely to be treated like a cable provider wherever it goes.

But the impact of the suit here is likely to hinge on the new state law, which legislators saw as a compromise between the cable industry and AT&T to ensure competition in the industry.

It was widely criticized by Blumenthal and Vallee for eroding consumer protections while continuing to give AT&T certain advantages.

AT&T Is Cable Operator, Says Connecticut Court
By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable,
7/26/2007 3:33:00 PM

A Connecticut U.S. District Court has ruled that AT&T's Lightspeed IPTV video service is a cable service subject to local franchising laws.

The summary judgment was a victory for the New England Cable & Telecommunications Association, and the cable industry at large.

It was a defeat for the Connecticut Department of Public Utility Control (DPUC), which had ruled that AT&T's service was an information service, like other data services.

Central to the DPUC's conclusion was the way AT&T delivers its service, which is not to deliver a channel until the subscriber's set-top box requests it, rather than constantly delivering all the channels. That, said DPUC, was a level of interaction that made the service a two-way data exchange, or as DPUC put it "“[AT&T’s] network is unique in comparison to cable operators such as it entails a switched, two-way client server IP-based architecture designed to send each subscriber only the programming the subscriber chooses to view and entails a high level of subscriber interaction

 The FCC defines cable service as one-way, though it includes VOD in that definition, so the DPUC concluded AT&T's service did not meet that definition.

 The court saw it differently. Although factual findings by expert goverment agencies are due judicial deference under the Chevron doctrine, the court concluded that DPUC's determination that AT&T's was a two-way system was a legal conclusion-on the appropriate definition of "cable service"--rather than a factual finding, and a wrong legal conclusion at that.

AT&T is a cable operator, its service is a cable service, and its network is a cable network, said the court.

The cable industry has argued that AT&T's service should be subject to the same franchise restrictions as their members, but the DPUC had ruled differently.
Microsoft to change Vista after Google complaint
REUTERS
By Peter Kaplan
Wed Jun 20, 1:07 AM ET

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) has agreed to modify its Windows Vista operating system in response to a complaint that its computer search function put Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG - news) and other potential rivals at a disadvantage, the Justice Department and Microsoft said on Tuesday.

Under an agreement with the department and 17 state attorneys general and the District of Columbia, Microsoft will build into Vista an option to let users select a default desktop search program on personal computers running Windows.

The function, known as "Instant Search," allows Windows users to enter a search query and get a list of results from their hard drive that contain the search term.

The agreement was made public as part of a joint report that the Justice Department and Microsoft filed late on Tuesday with the court overseeing Microsoft's compliance with a 2002 antitrust consent decree.

As part of the deal, a Microsoft official said the company also had pledged to place links inside the Internet Explorer window and the "Start" navigation menu to make it easier for people to access that default desktop search service.

The changes will be introduced in a service pack, or updated version of Windows Vista software. Microsoft said it anticipates a test version of the Vista Service Pack 1 to be ready by the year-end.

Under the agreement, Microsoft also promised to provide additional technical information to third-party developers, such as Google, in order to optimize the performance of their desktop search service on Vista.

"These remedies are a step in the right direction, but they should be improved further to give consumers greater access to alternate desktop search providers," David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, said in a statement.

The changes stem from a complaint Google filed with the Justice Department in December, in which it argued that a feature built into Vista that allows users to search a computer's hard drive did not leave room for competition from other desktop search applications.

Google said the feature violated the consent decree that monitors Microsoft's conduct as part of its settlement with the government.

"We are pleased that as a result of Google's request that the consent decree be enforced, the Department of Justice and state Attorneys General have required Microsoft to make changes to Vista," Drummond said.

The agreement is expected to be presented to the judge monitoring the consent decree, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, at a June 26 court hearing.

The Microsoft consent decree, which settled the government's landmark antitrust case against the company, is scheduled to expire in November. However, some provisions have been extended to November 2009.

Microsoft has called Google's complaint "baseless" and said it was in compliance with the antitrust settlement.


N E T    N E U T R A L I T Y  :   LWVCT the expert here!



Get background on this vital national issue here:  LWVCT FALL CONFERENCE  DEC. 1, 2007, all morning at the CAPITOL - watch it again, over and over, here!!!

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Comcast, FCC take net neutrality dispute to court
YAHOO
By JOELLE TESSLER, AP Technology Writer
Fri Jan 8, 2010 3:50 am ET

WASHINGTON – The Federal Communications Commission staked out new ground nearly three months ago when it began drafting rules that would require Internet providers to give equal treatment to all data flowing over their networks.

Now the FCC hopes to use a dispute with the nation's largest cable TV and Internet provider to establish its legal authority to adopt such "network neutrality" regulations. The rules would aim to prevent phone and cable companies from abusing their control over the market for high-speed Internet access.

A federal appeals court was holding oral arguments Friday in Comcast Corp.'s challenge of the FCC's 2008 order banning the company from blocking its broadband subscribers from using an online file-sharing technology known as BitTorrent.

The commission, at the time headed by Republican Kevin Martin, based its order against Comcast on a set of net-neutrality principles it adopted in 2005 to prevent broadband providers from favoring or discriminating against certain types of Internet traffic. Those principles have guided the FCC's enforcement of communications laws on a case-by-case basis.

Formally adopting those guidelines as binding regulations is a top priority for the FCC's new Democratic chairman, Julius Genachowski. The agency voted in October to start writing those rules.

And now, with Comcast appealing the FCC order against it, one key question that could come up in the courtroom is whether the commission has legal authority to mandate network neutrality. A ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, expected this spring, could bolster the FCC proceeding if the agency prevails.

"Comcast and others have challenged the FCC's authority to take action to protect consumers and ensure their access to a free and open Internet," FCC General Counsel Austin Schlick said. "This case provides the court of appeals an opportunity to reject those arguments and confirm that the commission has the power it needs to accomplish those goals."

The policy dispute over network neutrality has pitted some of the country's leading Internet companies, including Internet search provider Google Inc. and the Internet calling service Skype, against the big phone and cable operators.  The Internet companies say that without such rules, broadband providers could become online gatekeepers and prioritize traffic for those who can pay extra, while degrading or blocking cheaper Internet calling services or online video sites that compete with their core businesses.

Indeed, BitTorrent, the online file-sharing technology blocked by Comcast, can be used to transfer large files such as online video, something that threatens Comcast's core cable TV business.

But broadband providers such as Comcast, AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. argue that after pouring billions of dollars into their networks, they should be able to offer premium services to differentiate themselves from competitors and earn a healthy return on their investments.  They also insist they need flexibility to manage their systems so high-bandwidth applications such as BitTorrent don't hog too much capacity and slow down the network for everyone else.

For its part, Comcast wants to keep its challenge to the FCC order narrow. It argues that the order is illegal because the agency was seeking to enforce mere policy principles, which don't have the force of regulations or law.  As a result, the Philadelphia-based cable company says, it never had clear rules to follow and was never given fair notice of what conduct was prohibited. In fact, Comcast insists, the FCC proceeding to adopt the 2005 principles as formal regulations underscores its point.

Comcast also maintains that because that proceeding is still in the early stages, it remains unclear whether the agency even has legal authority to mandate net neutrality obligations. This larger question, however, should be left for another day, Comcast says.  Yet that is exactly the question that the FCC hopes the court will address. The commission argues that a 2005 Supreme Court ruling upholding its move to deregulate Internet service gives it the jurisdiction it needs.

The high court upheld the FCC's decision to define broadband as a lightly regulated information service, which is not subject to the obligations traditional telecommunications services have to share their networks with competitors. But a 1996 federal telecommunications law still gives the agency authority to set rules for information services — including, the FCC now argues, net neutrality rules.

An appeals court ruling that accepts this argument would "strengthen the agency's hand ... and provide validation" in its broader net neutrality proceeding, said Ben Scott, policy director for Free Press, a leading advocate for net neutrality rules. Free Press brought Comcast's actions to the FCC's attention after The Associated Press ran tests and reported that the cable company was interfering with attempts by some subscribers to share files online.  But even if the court concludes that the FCC lacks authority to adopt such regulations, it would not necessarily be a devastating setback — just a delay — for the commission.

That's because Congress, with a number of key Democrats in support of net neutrality, would likely step in to give the FCC the necessary powers.  Either way, Friday's oral arguments could provide a road map. After all, even if the court issues a very narrow ruling, the FCC's upcoming net neutrality regulations are likely to face a court challenge, too.
A different view...here.
'Net neutrality' would slow the flow
Washington Times
Sen. John McCain
Thursday, October 22, 2009

Ronald Reagan once famously said, "Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."

It appears that the former president foresaw the fate of the Internet. When the Internet first began to catch on with consumers as a new marketplace for purchasing books, clothes and music, state and federal legislators stepped in and attempted to tax Americans' Internet use.

Fortunately, a bipartisan group of lawmakers in Congress came forward and stopped taxation of Internet usage before it could start. But as Internet use continued to grow, the government just couldn't resist not regulating the greatest modern invention since the light bulb (particularly once the ability to tax it was taken away.)

On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission will vote on whether to regulate the historically open architecture and free flow of the Internet. The commission will seek to impose "net neutrality" rules that would rein in the network management practices of all Internet service providers, including wireless phone companies.

These new rules should rightly be viewed by consumers suspiciously as another government power grab over a private service provided by private companies in a competitive marketplace. Does this sound familiar? It should.

Earlier this year, the government moved to control much of the auto industry and the banking industry, so it should come as no surprise that the government now wishes to control the technology industry by regulating its very core: the Internet.

This government take over of the Internet will stifle innovation, which will in turn hinder job creation. The technology industry is the fastest-growing job market behind the health care industry.

In fact, the high-tech industry added over 77,000 new jobs in 2008 while most industries cut jobs due to the difficult economic times. Compare these 77,000 new (and generally high-paying) jobs to the 30,000 jobs the $787 billion, taxpayer-funded stimulus program has created or "saved," according to a report released last week by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. Maybe a better stimulus package for this 21st-century economy would be an administration decision to keep the Internet free of government control and regulation.

However, the administration can't resist imposing regulations on the Internet - particularly since Google Inc. and other Internet content providers were promised the imposition of such regulations as these companies seek to control what consumers see and don't see on the Internet - despite the fact that these regulations will only serve to hurt consumers.

Last year, almost 75 percent of all Americans went online, and 55 percent of all adult Americans have a high-speed Internet connection in their home. All of these Internet users benefited from the "fundamental architecture of openness" that is the Internet, according to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

The light-touch regulatory approach toward the Internet that was put forth by previous administrations has brought Americans social networking, low-cost long-distance calling, texting, telemedicine and over 85,000 almighty "apps" for the iPhone. It also brought us Twitter, YouTube, Hulu, Kindle, the BlackBerry and the Palm. It allowed the Internet to change our lives forever.

The wireless industry exploded over the past 20 years, in part due to limited government regulation. Wireless carriers invested $100 billion in infrastructure and development over the past three years, which has led to faster networks, more competitors in the marketplace and lower prices in the United States compared to any other country.

Meanwhile, wired telephones and networks have become a slow-dying breed as they are mired in state and federal regulations, universal service contribution requirements and limitations on use.

Regulation kills innovation. Let's not kill the Internet. An open and unfettered Internet may be the real stimulus during these difficult economic times, and it comes without a $787 billion price tag that is passed along to taxpayers at a significant cost for future generations.
Hurdles remain as FCC ponders Internet data rules
YAHOO
By JOELLE TESSLER, AP Technology Writer -
Sun Oct 18, 2009 12:57PM EDT

WASHINGTON -

With Democrats in charge in Washington, supporters of so-called "net neutrality" rules seem poised to finally push through requirements that high-speed Internet providers give equal treatment to all data flowing over their networks.

These rules — at the heart of a five-year policy debate — are intended to guarantee that Internet users can go to any Web site and access any online service they want. Phone and cable companies, for instance, wouldn't be able to block subscribers from using cheaper Internet calling services or accessing online video sites that compete with their core businesses.  Yet making that happen is proving thorny — and it's likely that the courts and perhaps even Congress will ultimately get involved.

The Federal Communications Commission is set to vote Thursday on a proposal by the agency's chairman, Julius Genachowski, to begin crafting regulations to prohibit broadband providers from favoring or discriminating against Internet traffic.  Although Genachowski has the support of the other two Democrats on the five-member commission, his proposal has run into strong opposition from the large phone, cable and wireless companies that provide the bulk of U.S. high-speed Internet connections.

Broadband providers such as AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp. argue that after pouring billions of dollars into their networks, they should be able to operate those networks as they see fit. That includes offering premium services over their lines to differentiate themselves from competitors and earn a healthy return on their investments.  Genachowski's proposal has also encountered misgivings among Republicans on the FCC and in Congress, who fear network neutrality rules could discourage broadband providers from continuing to expand and upgrade their systems.

"The risk of regulation really inhibits investment," said Republican Commissioner Robert McDowell. Noting the agency's estimated price tag of up to $350 billion to bring broadband connections to all Americans, he added: "How do we pay for all that?"

One thing everyone agrees on is that the FCC will have to sort through some tricky issues as Genachowski's plan moves forward.  One question is how much flexibility broadband providers should have to keep their networks running smoothly by ensuring that high-bandwidth applications such as YouTube videos don't hog too much capacity and impede other traffic like e-mail and online searches. In other words, when does legitimate network management cross the line to become discrimination?

Lawrence Spiwak, president of the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Policy Studies, a think tank that promotes free-market approaches, fears the FCC could hurt small, rural carriers that face higher costs to build out their systems. Without the ability to manage traffic, he said, these companies could be forced to make expensive network upgrades they cannot afford.  The FCC also needs to sort out how the rules would apply to wireless systems, which have less bandwidth capacity than wire-based networks and might have greater need for traffic management. AT&T, the exclusive U.S. carrier for Apple Inc.'s iPhone, already is running into capacity challenges given the popularity of the gadget and its scores of bandwidth-consuming applications.

"There could be unintended consequences of applying net neutrality to wireless," said Christopher Guttman-McCabe, vice president of regulatory affairs for CTIA-The Wireless Association, an industry trade group.

Genachowski's plan calls for the agency to formally adopt four broadband principles that have guided the FCC's enforcement of communications laws on a case-by-case basis. Those principles state that network operators must allow subscribers to access all online content, applications, services and devices as long as they are legal.

The FCC relied on those guidelines last year when it ordered Comcast to stop blocking subscribers from using an online file-sharing service called BitTorrent, which is used to transfer large files such as online video. Comcast is challenging the FCC ruling in court.  Genachowski also wants the FCC to adopt two more principles. One would make it clear that broadband providers couldn't discriminate against particular content or applications, either by blocking them completely or by letting other traffic jump ahead in the queue. The other would require providers to disclose network management practices.

He is also seeking to extend all six principles to wireless systems, which have been largely unregulated.

Thursday's vote will launch a proceeding to draft rules based on those principles and open them to public comment. The agency would likely adopt formal regulations by next summer.  Supporters of net neutrality regulations want to prevent broadband companies from becoming online gatekeepers by abusing their control over Internet networks. They warn that a startup like YouTube or Facebook might never have a shot if broadband providers can prioritize their own online services or those of business partners.

"If bandwidth is disproportionately consumed by those who can pay, it would destroy the Internet as a level playing field," said Ben Scott, policy director for the public interest group Free Press.

Colin Crowell, a senior counselor to Genachowski, described regulations as "sensible rules of the road to preserve a free and open Internet, which has been an economic and innovation engine for the nation."

But the service providers, along with many Republicans and even some Democrats in Congress, say the FCC chairman has not shown a need for more regulation given the few known examples of discrimination.  Besides Comcast's actions last year, the other major incident occurred in 2005, when a small telecom company in North Carolina blocked subscribers from accessing Vonage Holding Corp.'s Internet phone service. The company reversed course after the FCC stepped in.

"The FCC has a responsibility to prove a market failure before intervening in the market," said Rep. Cliff Stearns of Florida, the top Republican on the House subcommittee that oversees communications and technology. "I don't think they have proven that."

McDowell, the Republican commissioner, argues that antitrust laws — which aim to prevent companies from abusing their market power — already provide a clear framework to handle such incidents.

Meanwhile, looming over the entire FCC proceeding are questions of jurisdiction. In challenging the BitTorrent ruling, Comcast argued that based on the FCC's deregulation of Internet service in 2002 — a move the Supreme Court upheld three years later — the agency doesn't have authority to mandate nondiscrimination rules.

A decision in the Comcast case is expected next year and if the court rules in the company's favor, it could undermine the net neutrality proceeding at the FCC — forcing the agency to reverse course on deregulation or drawing Congress into the debate.

FCC chairman warns of `looming spectrum crisis'
YAHOO
By ELLIOT SPAGAT, AP Business Writer -
Wed Oct 7, 2009 4:01PM EDT

SAN DIEGO -

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission warns of a "looming spectrum crisis" if the government fails to find new ways to ensure there is enough bandwidth for mobile devices.

Julius Genachowski said at an industry conference Wednesday in San Diego that the government is tripling the amount of spectrum available to companies. The problem is that many experts predict wireless traffic will increase 30 times, because of video and other bandwidth-heavy applications.

The chairman called that gap between demand and supply "the biggest threat" to mobile services. He announced plans for a far-reaching review that addresses what to do about it.

The possibilities include reallocating existing spectrum that is now used for other purposes, and encouraging development of new technologies.

FCC begins probe of Google Voice
YAHOO
Joelle Tessler ASSOCIATED PRESS
Saturday, October 10, 2009

Federal regulators will look into complaints by AT&T Inc. that Google Inc.'s free messaging and calling service, Google Voice, blocks calls to rural communities where local phone companies charge high connection fees.

The Federal Communications Commission on Friday sent a letter to Google requesting information about its Voice service, which lets people sign up for one number that can route incoming calls to cell, office or home phones. The service also lets users place calls, including international calls, at low rates.

As part of a broader quarrel with Google, AT&T has complained that Google Voice blocks calls to phone numbers in some rural communities to reduce the access charges it must pay. So-called "common carrier" regulations prevent AT&T and other big phone companies from blocking those same calls.

Google Voice "has claimed for itself a significant advantage over providers offering competing services," AT&T said in a letter to the FCC last month. Those concerns were echoed in a letter sent to the FCC this week by 20 members of Congress who represent rural districts.

Among other things, the FCC is asking Google to explain how its Voice service works, whether it blocks calls to certain numbers and whether it informs users that it does so.

In a blog post Friday, Richard Whitt, Google's Washington telecom and media counsel, explained that Google Voice restricts calls to phone numbers held by companies that "charge exorbitant termination rates for calls" and "partner with adult sex chat lines and 'free' conference calling centers to drive high volumes of traffic."

He said Google could not afford to offer the service "if we paid these ludicrously high charges." Google also maintains that its Voice service should not be subject to common carrier laws because it is a free, Web-based software application, not a replacement for traditional phone service.

AT&T's complaint comes as the FCC prepares to vote Oct. 22 on "network neutrality" rules that would prohibit the big phone and cable companies from favoring or discriminating against Internet traffic flowing over their broadband networks.

That proposal has pitted Google and other Internet companies that support net neutrality against the big phone and cable companies, including AT&T, that want to be free of restrictions on what they can do with their networks.

AT&T's complaint to the FCC on Google Voice was an attempt to turn the tables on Google: AT&T claimed that Google Voice flouts net neutrality principles by blocking certain calling traffic.

But in his blog post on Friday, Google's Mr. Whitt said that "despite AT&T's lobbying efforts, this issue has nothing to do with network neutrality or rural America."

This is not the first time the FCC has looked at Google Voice. The agency has been investigating why Apple Inc. does not allow a Google Voice application to run on the iPhone - which is carried exclusively in the U.S. by AT&T.

That inquiry is ongoing, but it did prompt AT&T to reveal that under its agreement with Apple, Apple cannot enable any Internet calling applications that use AT&T's 3G network without AT&T's permission. AT&T reversed course on that rule this week.
I-BBC
Page last updated at 15:20 GMT, Monday, 21 September 2009 16:20 UK
Ethernet cable
Ethernet cable

US proposes net neutrality rules

The US has proposed new rules that would require internet firms to respect the principle of "network neutrality".

The head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said that "all web traffic should be treated equally".

The new rules are intended to prevent firms throttling bandwidth-sapping web traffic such as streaming video.

Networks on both sides of the Atlantic have long argued for a two-tier system, where those that can pay are given priority over those that cannot.

"There are few goals more essential in the communications landscape than preserving and maintaining an open and robust internet," FCC chairman Julius Genachowski said in a speech at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

"It is vital that the internet continue to be an engine of innovation, economic growth, competition and democratic engagement."

It is the first time that the Chairman has spoken out on the issue since being appointed in June.

'Extraordinary platform'

He proposed two new rules to guide the FCC's approach to network neutrality.

The first would prevent internet service providers (ISPs) from discriminating against bandwidth-intensive web-content and applications by slowing or blocking it.

"They cannot block or degrade lawful traffic over their networks, or pick winners by favouring some content or applications over others in the connection to subscribers' homes," he said.

"Nor can they disfavor an Internet service just because it competes with a similar service offered by that broadband provider."

The second would mean that ISPs would have to be more transparent about how they manage network traffic.

The two new rules join four previous guiding principles of the FCC, which state that all consumers must be able to access "lawful" content, applications, and services, and attach non-harmful devices to the network.

"I believe the FCC must be a smart cop on the beat preserving a free and open internet," Mr Genachowski said.

"This is not about government regulation of the internet," he added. "It's about fair rules of the road for companies that control access to the internet."

President Barack Obama backed the concept of network neutrality in the presidential race. It also has the support of large companies such as Google, eBay and Amazon.

However, telecommunications firms on both sides of the Atlantic argue that carrying high-bandwidth content, such as video, puts an extra burden on their networks and costs them money.

They argue the cost should, in part, be borne by the websites or the consumers.

The new rules will be formally proposed at a meeting in October.

FCC chairman proposes `open Internet' rules
YAHOO
By PETER SVENSSON, AP Technology Writer
Mon Sep 21, 2009 11:14AM EDT

NEW YORK -

Wireless carriers shouldn't be allowed to block certain types of Internet traffic flowing over their networks, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission chairman said Monday in a speech that figures to provoke a fight with the industry.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said wireless carriers should be subject to the same "open Internet" rules that the agency has begun to apply to home broadband providers.

It's unclear how the rules would apply in practice to wireless data. For instance, carriers officially restrict how Internet-access cards for laptops are used, but rarely enforce the rules. The government also has been investigating Apple Inc.'s approval process for iPhone applications, but Genachowski isn't directly addressing manufacturers' right to determine which applications run on their phones.

Essentially, Genachowski wants to codify the principles the FCC has already been applying to wired Internet traffic — and extend them to wireless.

Last year, the agency sanctioned Comcast Corp. for secretly hampering file-sharing traffic by its cable-modem subscribers. In making that ruling, the agency relied on broad "principles" of open Internet access that hadn't previously been put to the test. The cable company filed suit, saying the FCC didn't have the authority to tell it how to run its network. The case is still in federal appeals court.

The chairman is now proposing to make it a formal rule that Internet carriers cannot discriminate against certain types of traffic by degrading service. That expands on the principle that they cannot "block" traffic, as articulated in a 2005 policy statement.

Internet service providers, both wired and wireless, are struggling with the question of how to distribute network capacity among their subscribers. Heavy users can easily overwhelm cellular toward and neighborhood cable circuits, slowing traffic for everyone. Wireless carriers are also likely to object to new regulation by pointing out that their industry is intensely competitive.

At the same time, consumer advocates and Web companies like Google Inc. want to safeguard what has been an underlying "Net Neutrality" assumption of the Internet: that all traffic is treated equally by the network. If the carriers can degrade or block traffic, they become the gatekeepers of the Internet, able to shut out innovation, these critics say.

Comcast has already changed its system to one that does not look at what types of traffic subscribers are using. Instead, it throttles back the speed of heavy users if there is congestion on the network. However, there are other companies that might fall afoul of the new principle. Cox Communications, another cable company, has been testing a system that slows traffic that it deems less time-sensitive, like file downloads and software updates, to keep Web pages, streaming video and online games working faster.

In his speech Monday in Washington, which was broadcast on the Internet, the FCC chairman also proposed to make it a formal rule that Internet service providers have to tell customers about how they manage traffic to handle congestion. Some companies might be managing traffic in subtle ways without notifying customers.
Do you think Panasonic laying off 15,000 workers and closing more than a dozen plants had something to do with this?
House Votes to Delay Switch to Digital Television
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:29 p.m. ET
February 4, 2009

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congress voted Wednesday to give consumers four more months to prepare for the upcoming transition from analog to digital television broadcasting.

The House voted 264-158 to postpone the shutdown of analog TV signals to June 12, to address growing concerns that too many Americans won't be ready in time for the Feb. 17 deadline that Congress had set three years ago. The Senate passed the measure unanimously last week and the bill now heads to President Barack Obama for his signature.

The delay is a victory for the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress, who maintain that the previous administration mismanaged efforts to ensure that all consumers -- particularly poor, rural and minority Americans -- will be prepared for the switchover.

The Nielsen Co. estimates that more than 6.5 million U.S. households that rely on analog TV sets to pick up over-the-air broadcast signals still are not ready. People who subscribe to cable or satellite TV or have a newer TV with a digital tuner will not be affected.

"The passage of this bipartisan legislation means that millions of Americans will have the time they need to prepare for the conversion," the White House said in a statement. "We will continue to work with Congress to improve the information and assistance available to American consumers in advance of June 12, especially those in the most vulnerable communities."

Wednesday's vote came one week after House Republicans blocked the bill when it was in a special fast-track vote that required two-thirds support to pass. This time, the bill passed the House under a regular floor vote, which only requires a simple majority.
Broadband Link to U.S. Jobs Exaggerated: Experts
NYTIMES
By REUTERS
Filed at 4:13 p.m. ET
January 30, 2009

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A co-author of a widely cited forecast that nearly 300,000 U.S. jobs would be created for every percentage point rise in high-speed Internet use said on Friday these and similar estimates are "a gross overestimate."

"There is a great deal of overstatement in most of these studies," said Robert Crandall, a Brookings Institution economist and co-author of the frequently-cited paper with that estimate.

U.S. lawmakers are proposing grants between $6 billion to $9 billion and tax credits to encourage investment in high- speed Internet, as part of an economic stimulus plan winding its way through Congress costing up to $900 billion.  The 300,000 jobs estimate has been used in newspapers and cited by other publications advocating investment in high-speed Internet, or broadband.

The Brookings Institution study, published in July 2007, is not particularly relevant now because of differing employment and related migration trends at the time of the study, Crandall said.  Attempting to extrapolate it nationwide at this time is a "gross overstatement," he said.

Most the data on jobs and broadband is not relevant because it doesn't apply to underserved, mostly rural and high cost areas targeted in the stimulus package, said Shane Greenstein, a professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

"The experience of Manhattan in 2005 has no relationship to the experience in West Texas," Greenstein said.

Chris King, an investment analyst at Stifel Nicolaus said the proposals targeting unserved rural areas are not enough to propel rural providers to invest in any event, largely because they do not address ongoing operating costs.

"We believe the current plans are unlikely to stimulate private sector investment in unserved areas," King said.

King, concurring with several Wall Street analysts, said tax credits for ultra-fast Internet speeds for underserved areas would likely only benefit Verizon Communications Inc and perhaps some cable companies.

To see the Brookings study, go to: http://www3.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/papers/2007/06labor_crandall/06labor_crandall.pdf


Obama to Select Genachowski to Lead F.C.C.
NYTIMES
By Stephen Labaton
January 13, 2009, 8:59 am

President-elect Barack Obama intends to nominate Julius Genachowski , an adviser on technology issues and longtime friend, to become the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, advisers to Mr. Obama said.

Mr. Genachowski, 46, was a major fund-raiser for the Obama campaign who also played a leading role in the campaign’s highly successful online strategy. He remains very close to Mr. Obama—both men went to Columbia College and Harvard Law School and the two served together on the Harvard Law Review. They also were basketball buddies.

During the campaign, Mr. Genachowski shaped many of Mr. Obama’s telecom policies. He advocated an open Internet in the debate over so-called “net neutrality,’’ and media-ownership rules that promote a diversity of voices on the airwaves.

People involved in the transition said that Mr. Genachowski was a top candidate for both the chairmanship and a new White House position overseeing technology issues that has not been fully defined yet.

If confirmed, one of his first challenges at the commission will be what to do about the problems plaguing the conversion to digital television. The Obama transition team has asked Congress to delay the conversion, set for Feb. 17, because millions of viewers have been unable to obtain coupons to pay for converter boxes that would enable their sets to receive signals once all broadcasters lose their analog signal. (The conversion will not affect viewers who subscribe to cable or satellite television services.)

The chairmanship of the F.C.C. has played a more expansive role in regulating the economy, particularly with the rise of the Internet and wireless communications over the last 20 years. Now, as the new administration plans to make the expansion of broadband and Internet services a significant part of its stimulus package, Mr. Genachowski, with his close ties to Mr. Obama, could wind up with an even bigger role than his predecessors in shaping economic policy.

After graduating from law school, Mr. Genachowski clerked for federal appeals court judge Abner J. Mikva after Mr. Obama turned down the same job. Mr. Genachowski then clerked for Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter. He was chief counsel to Reed Hundt, a chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, during the Clinton administration. He then worked for eight years as a senior executive at Barry Diller’s IAC/Interactive Corporation. He also founded an investment and advisory firm for digital media companies and co-founded the country’s first commercial “green’’ bank.
Mr. Obama’s Internet Agenda
NYTIMES Editorial
December 16, 2008

President-elect Barack Obama recently announced an ambitious plan to build up the nation’s Internet infrastructure as part of his proposed economic stimulus package. Upgrading the Internet is a particularly smart kind of stimulus, one that would spread knowledge, promote entrepreneurship and make this country more competitive globally.

The United States has long been the world leader in technology, but when it comes to the Internet, it is fast falling behind. America now ranks 15th in the world in access to high-speed Internet connections. A cornerstone of Mr. Obama’s agenda is promoting universal, affordable high-speed Internet.

Mr. Obama, who had notable success with online fund-raising and voter turnout, spoke during the presidential campaign about the transformative power of the Internet to improve Americans’ quality of life. He argued that it could, among other things, reduce health care costs, create jobs and make it easier for citizens to participate in government decision-making.

In a speech this month about his economic stimulus plan, he said that he intends to ensure that every child has a chance to get online and that he would use some of the stimulus money to connect libraries and schools. It is a critical goal. Children trapped on the wrong side of the digital divide are deprived of a fair chance to educate themselves and to compete for high-skill, high-paying jobs.

Mr. Obama has also been a strong supporter of “network neutrality,” the principle that Internet service providers should not be able to discriminate against any of the information that they carry. Net neutrality laws are necessary to ensure that Internet service providers do not block content they disagree with or give financial breaks to big tech companies, squeezing out smaller competitors and stifling innovation.

Mr. Obama will need to work with Congress — and fight against corporate lobbyists — to accomplish some of his goals. Some he can achieve on his own. With the right appointments to the Federal Communications Commission, he should be able to get good net neutrality regulations.

“This is the Eisenhower Interstate highway moment for the Internet,” argues Ben Scott, policy director of the media reform group Free Press. Restoring America to its role as the world’s Internet leader could be an important part of Mr. Obama’s presidential legacy.
Free Broadband Plan Stirs Debate on Filtering
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:23 p.m. ET
December 14, 2008

WASHINGTON (AP) -- M2Z Networks' proposal to build a free wireless broadband network is not the only controversial part of its business plan. Just as contentious is its intention to filter the content delivered over that network to block any material deemed inappropriate for children.

Free-speech advocates on the left and right have expressed alarm at M2Z's plans to build a family-friendly network that would weed out objectionable sites by blocking particular Internet domain names.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin took up that idea in his proposal to auction off a chunk of spectrum that would be used in part to deliver a basic broadband service over the nation's airwaves. It would ultimately be up to the FCC to decide exactly how any filtering mandate would work, including whether the filters would be located on the network or on user devices.

M2Z co-founder John Muleta says any company that offers a free broadband service that is available to everyone must figure out how to protect children from illegal and unlawful material -- much as television networks must do with over-the-air TV broadcasts.

Yet this component of M2Z's plan has stirred a long-running debate about who should determine what constitutes ''appropriate'' content and about how effective content filters truly are. Critics say filters often make mistakes and block legitimate sites, including resources about health and sexual education.

John Morris, general counsel for the Center for Democracy & Technology, believes Martin's content-filtering rule would be unconstitutional because it would violate the First Amendment rights of people whose Web sites are blocked, and because parents already have access to a range of online tools to control what their children see on the Internet.

Indeed, the latter argument was one point cited by the Supreme Court in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, a landmark 1997 ruling that struck down a federal law regulating explicit material on the Internet.

To address these concerns, Martin's spectrum proposal would require the winning bidder to allow adults to opt out of content filtering.

But this raises a different problem, according to Berin Szoka, a fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation. That's because one benefit of a broadband service open to all is that it offers the potential for anonymity. The only way to allow adults to opt out of content filtering, however, would be to have users authenticate themselves, Szoka said. And that, he said, would sacrifice anonymity.
Casting a Wider Net
NYTIMES
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: June 25, 2008

Several leading lights of the Internet world believe that access to broadband is a civil right, like water, roads and sewage treatment, and have renewed their call for making such access a national priority. To further their goal, they have introduced a Web site, internetforeveryone.org.

They banded together Tuesday in New York to make their pitch to the media, saying that broadband access is so essential — to education, commerce and public discourse — that it is no longer a luxury but a necessity.

They want to raise awareness of the digital divide so that every home and business in America has access to high-speed Internet and they want to encourage competition among providers so that the price goes down.

The cause of universal Internet access is, of course, an old one, and over the last decade it has stirred little response among the powers that be. While it has languished, the United States has fallen further behind the rest of the world in making broadband available. Since 2001, the country has slipped from having the 4th highest percentage of homes with broadband per capita in the world to 15th.

Much of this has to do with the increasing price of broadband in the United States, where customers pay an average of $636 a year for a subscription.

Americans pay among the highest prices for some of the slowest speeds, and only about half the country is wired. The average broadband offering in Japan is 10 times faster than the average service available to Americans and at half the cost.

The telecommunications companies have resisted going into rural areas with small population densities and difficult terrains, according to a federal GAO report two years ago. They also point to the lack of “anchor” points around which to build broadband infrastructures, like a large government agency or health-care facility. In some cases, local municipalities have tried setting up their own wireless Internet access in areas not served by the big providers.

The advocates of internetforeveryone.org, who spoke Tuesday at the fifth annual Personal Democracy Forum, which was examining the intersection of technology and politics, included: Jonathan Adelstein, a commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission; David All, co-founder of Slatecard.com and TechRepublican.com; Brad Burnham, a partner with Union Square Ventures; Vint Cerf, chief technology “evangelist” for Google; Robin Chase, chief executive officer of Meadow Networks and the co-founder of Zipcar; Van Jones, president of Green For All; Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford; Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press; Michael Winship, president of the Writers Guild of America-East; Timothy Wu, a law professor at Columbia, and Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School.

While they backed the cause, it was not clear what further action they might take to advance it.

Mr. Silver said that the group did not want to push any particular piece of legislation at this point but instead wanted to build political and popular will around four basic principles: providing every home and business in America with access to a high-speed, world-class communications infrastructure; ensuring that people have an array of choices in their broadband providers; fostering openness so that consumers can practice free speech and commerce when online, and promoting innovation so the Internet can create jobs and foster economic growth.

He said the group planned to hold four public forums across the country to gather information from consumers about what they want in a national broadband policy. (No dates have been scheduled, but they will be announced on internetforeveryone.org.)

Mr. Adelstein of the F.C.C. expressed some frustration with the lack of movement by the government.

“It’s clear what we’re doing in Washington isn’t working,” he said, noting that he had a stack of proposals on his desk for a national broadband policy. “What we’re lacking is the leadership to implement them,” he said. “We need coordination.”

He added that the F.C.C. hasn’t made “any effort to involve the public,” and that the majority of the commission doesn’t think a national policy is necessary. The commission is, however, considering freeing up a portion of the wireless spectrum to be used for free wireless services.

Mr. Lessig, of Stanford, who serves as a technology advisor to the presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama, said it was no coincidence that the sluggish level of broadband penetration in the United States, relative to the rest of the world, had occurred during the Bush administration.

“The attitude of the last eight years has been, ‘let the private sector take care of this, we don’t have any obligation to do anything,’” Mr. Lessig said in an interview. “It was a hands-off attitude by the government, and the consequence has been, as predicted 10 years ago, radical increase in concentration over access to this essential infrastructure, and as concentration has gone up, price has gone up and quality has gone down.”

He added: “The existing companies that have the most power in Congress — telecomm being the most powerful — have a natural antipathy to types of government policy that would be necessary to build out and support the Internet.”

Internetforeveryone’s plan is to rally sufficient support among a broad range of interest, then perhaps seek legislation.

“This is a movement-building step,” Mr. Lessig said. “Once we have an administration that’s committed to doing it, then we can talk about the details.”

Here are some interesting factoids, supplied by internetforeveryone.org, about the digital divide:

• Not surprisingly, broadband access correlates closely with income: 82 percent of homes with household income over $75,000 are wired; only 19 percent of those with incomes below $15,000 have broadband.

• While rural Americans have equal access to telephone service and television, they do not have equal access to broadband. Nearly 20 million people live in rural areas that are not served by a single broadband provider.

• Of households in rural areas, 39 percent have broadband; in cities, 54 percent have broadband.

• The most-wired ethnic group in the United States is Asians (69 percent of households have broadband). Whites (non-Hispanics) are next, with 55 percent of households wired; next are blacks (36 percent); Hispanics (35 percent) and American Indians (30 percent).

• Broadband access in the United States is more expensive than in 21 other countries. The average monthly subscription in the United States is $53.06; Finland pays the least ($31.18).

• Broadband download speeds in the United States are slower than in 13 other countries (8.9 mbps, compared with 93.7 in Japan, the fastest).
Coalition seeks federal nudge for broadband 
DAY 
Published on 6/25/2008 

New York (AP) - One of the Internet's founding fathers and a commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission joined forces Tuesday in renewing calls for the U.S. government to more actively expand broadband service.

They and other members of a new coalition promised hearings across the country and set up a Web site at InternetForEveryone.org to outline principles such as universal access and competition to ensure lower prices and faster Internet connection speeds.

But the group offered few specifics, including any proposed legislation. Josh Silver, executive director of the Free Press advocacy group, said that given the complexities of broadband policy, the new coalition was focusing on raising awareness and establishing ideas for the next administration to consider.

The United States lags behind South Korea and other nations in high-speed Internet access despite being the Internet's birthplace. In many rural areas, broadband services aren't available at all or come from a sole provider.

Vint Cerf, a Google Inc. executive who had co-developed the Internet's core communications protocols in the 1970s, said a nudge from the government would be crucial because the Internet's benefits are so broad.

Jonathan Adelstein, one of two Democrats on the five-member FCC, said the coalition was hoping to mobilize the public to force his fellow policy makers to act.

Otherwise, he said, many Americans would be denied opportunities to remotely attend classes at a distant universities, or access resources at larger libraries and museums. Doctors wouldn't be able to confer with specialists over the Internet, and employees wouldn't be able to save energy by telecommuting.

Other members of the coalition include leading Internet scholars Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain; Michael Winship, president of the Writers Guild of America-East, which recently battled Hollywood over online rights; and Robin Chase, co-founder of the Zipcar automobile-rental service.   
Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic
NYTIMES 
By BRIAN STELTER
Published: June 15, 2008

Some people use the Internet simply to check e-mail and look up phone numbers. Others are online all day, downloading big video and music files.

For years, both kinds of Web surfers have paid the same price for access. But now three of the country’s largest Internet service providers are threatening to clamp down on their most active subscribers by placing monthly limits on their online activity.

One of them, Time Warner Cable, began a trial of “Internet metering” in one Texas city early this month, asking customers to select a monthly plan and pay surcharges when they exceed their bandwidth limit. The idea is that people who use the network more heavily should pay more, the way they do for water, electricity, or, in many cases, cellphone minutes.

That same week, Comcast said that it would expand on a strategy it uses to manage Internet traffic: slowing down the connections of the heaviest users, so-called bandwidth hogs, at peak times.

AT&T also said Thursday that limits on heavy use were inevitable and that it was considering pricing based on data volume. “Based on current trends, total bandwidth in the AT&T network will increase by four times over the next three years,” the company said in a statement.

All three companies say that placing caps on broadband use will ensure fair access for all users.

Internet metering is a throwback to the days of dial-up service, but at a time when video and interactive games are becoming popular, the experiments could have huge implications for the future of the Web.

Millions of people are moving online to watch movies and television shows, play multiplayer video games and talk over videoconference with family and friends. And media companies are trying to get people to spend more time online: the Disneys and NBCs of the world keep adding television shows and movies to their Web sites, giving consumers convenient entertainment that soaks up a lot of bandwidth.

Moreover, companies with physical storefronts, like Blockbuster, are moving toward digital delivery of entertainment. And new distributors of online content — think YouTube — are relying on an open data spigot to make their business plans work.

Critics of the bandwidth limits say that metering and capping network use could hold back the inevitable convergence of television, computers and the Internet.

The Internet “is how we deliver our shows,” said Jim Louderback, chief executive of Revision3, a three-year-old media company that runs what it calls a television network on the Web. “If all of a sudden our viewers are worried about some sort of a broadband cap, they may think twice about downloading or watching our shows.”

Even if the caps are far above the average users’ consumption, their mere existence could cause users to reduce their time online. Just ask people who carefully monitor their monthly allotments of cellphone minutes and text messages.

“As soon as you put serious uncertainty as to cost on the table, people’s feeling of freedom to predict cost dries up and so does innovation and trying new applications,” Vint Cerf, the chief Internet evangelist for Google who is often called the “father of the Internet,” said in an e-mail message.

But the companies imposing the caps say that their actions are only fair. People who use more network capacity should pay more, Time Warner argues. And Comcast says that people who use too much — like those who engage in file-sharing — should be forced to slow down.

Time Warner also frames the issue in financial terms: the broadband infrastructure needs to be improved, it says, and maybe metering could pay for the upgrades. So far its trial is limited to new subscribers in Beaumont, Tex., a city of roughly 110,000.

In that trial, new customers can buy plans with a 5-gigabyte cap, a 20-gigabyte cap or a 40-gigabyte cap. Prices for those plans range from $30 to $50. Above the cap, customers pay $1 a gigabyte. Plans with higher caps come with faster service.

“Average customers are way below the caps,” said Kevin Leddy, executive vice president for advanced technology at Time Warner Cable. “These caps give them years’ worth of growth before they’d ever pay any surcharges.”

Casual Internet users who merely send e-mail messages, check movie times and read the news are not likely to exceed the caps. But people who watch television shows on Hulu.com, rent movies on iTunes or play the multiplayer game Halo on Xbox may start to exceed the limits — and millions of people are already doing those things.

Streaming an hour of video on Hulu, which shows programs like “Saturday Night Live,” “Family Guy” and “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” consumes about 200 megabytes, or one-fifth of a gigabyte. A higher-quality hour of the same content bought through Apple’s iTunes store can use about 500 megabytes, or half a gigabyte.

A high-definition episode of “Survivor” on CBS.com can use up to a gigabyte, and a DVD-quality movie through Netflix’s new online service can eat up about five gigabytes. One Netflix download alone, in fact, could bring a user to the limit on the cheapest plan in Time Warner’s trial in Beaumont.

Even services like Skype and Vonage that use the Internet to transmit phone calls could help put users over the monthly limits.

Time Warner would not reveal how many gigabytes an average customer uses, saying only that 95 percent of customers use under 40 gigabytes each in a month.

That means that 5 percent of customers use more than 50 percent of the network’s overall capacity, the company said, and many of those people are assumed to be sharing copyrighted video and music files illegally.

The Time Warner plan has the potential to bring Internet use full circle, back to the days when pay-as-you-go pricing held back the Web’s popularity. In the early days of dial-up access, America Online and other providers offered tiered pricing, in part because audio and video were barely viable online. Consumers feared going over their allotted time and bristled at the idea that access to cyberspace was billed by the hour.

In 1996, when AOL started offering unlimited access plans, Internet use took off and the online world started moving to the center of people’s daily lives. Today most Internet packages provide a seemingly unlimited amount of capacity, at least from the consumer’s perspective.

But like water and electricity, even digital resources are finite. Last year Comcast disclosed that it was temporarily turning off the connections of customers who used file-sharing services like BitTorrent, arguing that they were slowing things down for everyone else. The people who got cut off complained and asked how much broadband use was too much; the company did not have a ready answer.

Thus, like Time Warner, Comcast is considering a form of Internet metering that would apply to all online activity.

The goal, says Mitch Bowling, a senior vice president at Comcast, is “ensuring that a small number of users don’t impact the experience for everyone else.”

Last year Comcast was sued when it was disclosed that the company had singled out BitTorrent users.

In February, Comcast departed from that approach and started collaborating with the company that runs BitTorrent. Now it has shifted to what it calls a “platform agnostic” approach to managing its network, meaning that it slows down the connection of any customer who uses too much bandwidth at congested times.

Mr. Bowling said that “typical Internet usage” would not be affected. But on the Internet, “typical” use is constantly being redefined.

“The definitions of low and high usage today are meaningless, because the Internet’s going to grow, and nothing’s going to stop that,” said Eric Klinker, the chief technology officer of BitTorrent.

As the technology company Cisco put it in a recent report, “today’s ‘bandwidth hog’ is tomorrow’s average user.”

One result of these experiments is a tug-of-war between the Internet providers and media companies, which are monitoring the Time Warner experiment with trepidation.

“We hate it,” said a senior executive at a major media company, who requested anonymity because his company, like all broadcasters, must play nice with the same cable operators that are imposing the limits. Now that some television shows are viewed millions of times online, the executive said, any impediment would hurt the advertising model for online video streaming.

Mr. Leddy of Time Warner said that the media companies’ fears were overblown. If the company were to try to stop Web video, “we would not succeed,” he said. “We know how much capacity they’re going to need in the future, and we know what it’s going to cost. And today’s business model doesn’t pay for it very well.”


Cable Prices Keep Rising; Customers Keep Paying
NYTIMES
By MATT RICHTEL
Published: May 24, 2008

Americans discouraged by higher gas prices and airline fares may decide to spend more vacation time at home, perhaps watching television.  But that, too, will cost them more than ever.

Cable prices have risen 77 percent since 1996, roughly double the rate of inflation, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this month.

Cable customers, who typically pay at least $60 a month, watch only a fraction of what they pay for — on average, a mere 13 percent of the 118 channels available to them. And the number of subscribers keeps growing.

The resiliency of cable is all the more remarkable because the Internet was supposed to change all things digital. Technology has led to more choices and lower prices for news and music as well as cellphone and landline minutes — not to mention computers, cameras, music players and phones themselves.

Yet here is a rare instance where Silicon Valley has failed to break a traditional media juggernaut. And not for lack of trying.

Technology companies keep insisting they will provide new low-cost ways to get video into the home, but so far their efforts have created more black boxes to stash under the TV, not real competition for cable that could bring prices down.

“A couple of years ago, there was a thesis that we were at the twilight of Comcast as the gatekeeper,” said Craig Moffett, a cable industry analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “That thesis still titillates some. But technologically and economically, it’s probably not going to happen.”

So why hasn’t technology had a bigger impact? One answer is the alliance between cable companies and Hollywood producers of content to sell channels in bundles, rather than letting consumers pay only for the channels they want.

The producers of cable television content share $15 billion to $20 billion a year in fees from cable subscribers, roughly equal to the $20 billion they receive in advertising revenue, Mr. Moffett said.

Without those fees, the cable companies say, prices would go up.

“If each channel depended on individual consumers electing to pay individually for it, this would slash potential viewership and seriously hurt the ability of most channels to attract their current level of advertising dollars,” said Jenni Moyer, a spokeswoman for Comcast. “Lost ad revenue would have to be replaced by higher license fees.”

The industry says the digital era has brought its customers better image quality, more on-demand services and solid value through packages that combine cable, phone and Internet service. It also says consumers are actually getting more viewing value for their dollar, at least relative to inflation. The National Cable & Telecommunications Association says that from 1998 to 2006, the price consumers paid for each viewing hour was essentially flat.

The chief economist of the Federal Communications Commission, Gregory S. Crawford, disagrees, saying the industry is not factoring in the real cost of the programming that subscribers are watching. By his analysis, the increase has been around 50 percent from 1997 to 2005.

The F.C.C. and some politicians have been in a pitched battled with the cable industry, trying to get it voluntarily to offer so-called à la carte pricing. But cable companies insist that this is not economically feasible.

Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the F.C.C., said in an interview that since 1996, when Congress increased competition in telecommunications, prices have dropped for many other services.

“We’ve seen the opposite occur in the cable industry,” he said. “The dramatic increases in pricing we’ve seen are one of the most troubling issues from a consumer point of view.”

In 2007, average monthly revenue for each Cablevision subscriber was $75, up from $65 in 2005, according to SNL Kagan, a research company. At Time Warner it was $64, up from $54.50.

The cable industry has never felt the pricing pressures the music industry is feeling. The most obvious reason is that Internet speeds have not been fast enough to permit easy downloading of movies and other video material.

That is changing, though. People are viewing millions of videos online each month — albeit mostly short video clips, and not Hollywood movies. At the same time, the use of file-sharing tools like BitTorrent to download illegally popular movies and television shows is growing.

Another factor helping the cable industry is the difficulty of getting video from the computer onto the TV. That may not be a deterrent for those who have grown accustomed to watching movies on their laptop. But the last thing many consumers want to do is hook up wires or program a new box before sitting back to relax and watch TV.

In that sense, the lure of cable appears to have a sociological component. In a stress-filled life, cable television is easy to use.

“I work eight hours a day facing a computer. When I come home, the last thing I want to do is mess with another computer,” said Eric Yu, 24, a college student in San Francisco who pays around $80 a month for cable.

Mr. Yu said he watches only a handful of channels, including some in high definition like National Geographic. But to get them, he has to pay for a premium package. “I just pay the bill and try to forget about it,” he said. “It lessens the pain.”

Evelyn Tan, 22, a friend of Mr. Yu, takes a different approach. She pays Comcast $33 a month for Internet access and does not get cable television — but she does watch TV programming.

In fact, she watches ABC shows like “Desperate Housewives” and “Gray’s Anatomy,” which are free on the Web. When she wants to watch shows or movies that are not readily available online, she says she easily pirates them. “I would not pay for cable TV at all,” she said.

Broadcast networks like ABC, NBC and Fox are starting to put their programming on the Internet. But most cable channels do not because they depend on subscriber revenue.

Albert Cheng, executive vice president for digital media at the Disney-ABC Television Group, said the industry was trying to prepare for an era in which more video is watched on computers.

“It wasn’t lost on us what happened to the music industry,” Mr. Cheng said. Even though the audience is growing for ABC shows online, he said, this is supplementing, rather than undercutting, the television audience.

Enter Silicon Valley. It is trying to marry the content people want with their preferred setting for viewing it. There is a host of new set-top boxes and consumer devices aimed at bringing video and other content from the Internet to the TV.

Apple’s iTunes store offers 20,000 episodes of some 800 shows at typically $1.99 or $2.99 an episode, effectively creating an à la carte option. But consumers must either watch on their computers, wire the computer to the television or get an Apple TV.

This week Roku, a Silicon Valley start-up, began selling a $99 box that streams movies from Netflix straight to the TV. And this summer Hewlett-Packard is expected to introduce a device called the MediaSmart Connect, a sleek box connecting computer and TV that lets users watch Internet videos as well as rent or buy some 6,000 movies through CinemaNow, an H.P. partner.

But the box will also demonstrate how much of a gap still separates the computer screen and the TV screen.

Carlos Montalvo, vice president for marketing of connected entertainment at H.P., said the MediaSmart Connect and similar devices would not offer much of the programming provided over cable, or even programming that content companies allow to be delivered over the Internet to computers. The reason, he said, is that this content is licensed to be shown only on a computer, not delivered via computer to a TV.

“Simply because the technology is there doesn’t mean that the large opus of content — both television and movies — that is available on the two-foot screen can move automatically to the large-screen TV,” he said.

Rell, Blumenthal push to assure Internet privacy
Stamford ADVOCATE
By Brian Lockhart, Staff Writer
Published December 29 2007

Gov. M. Jodi Rell and Attorney General Richard Blumenthal want to make Internet privacy a priority in the 2008 legislative session.

The officials are proposing separate initiatives they hope will protect residents' personal information from being posted online for anyone with computer access.  Rell announced she wants to create a registry residents could join to remove some or all of their private information from Internet search sites, credit card solicitations and direct mail lists.

The registry would be modeled on the state's Do Not Call List, established in 2001 for residents seeking to limit unwanted telephone solicitations.

"Anyone who goes to white-pages.com or 411.com will find personal information published that many people may want protected," Rell said in a statement. "With a few clicks of the keyboard, anyone can find the age and gender of a person, where they live, where they work, birthdates and other identifying information. This is a safety and security issue - particularly for our elderly citizens who too often are targeted by scam artists."

Sites such as whitepages.com also provide links to sponsors who, for a fee, conduct more exhaustive searches, such as reunion.com and ussearch.com.

Rell said she was prompted to make the proposal in response to several complaints from concerned constituents.  State Sen. Andrew McDonald, D-Stamford, whose Judiciary Committee is likely to view any proposal, said it is worth considering but questioned whether Rell's goal is realistic.  Web sites typically obtain personal data from public documents, he said.

"Voter registration cards have a lot of this information," McDonald said. "This presents some challenging legal hurdles that I'm not certain the governor has researched or resolved."

Rell spokesman Christopher Cooper acknowledged that the governor has asked the Department of Consumer Protection to research her proposal and has not secured a legal opinion.

"We're exploring this," he said. "There are a lot of public documents where that information always would be available."

Cooper said Rell is concerned that Internet companies may combine the information to create a one-stop profile.

"I think the real key thing is giving the individual some control over the kind of information out there about themselves," he said.

McDonald said he also wonders how Connecticut could legislate the activities of Internet sites managed in other states. 

University of Connecticut professor David Atkin, who has a background in communication technology and its impact on society, gave Rell credit for making Internet privacy a priority.

"I think probably (residents') hair would curl if they did see how much is out there," Atkin said. But he also questioned how far Connecticut could go to protect residents in the computer age.

"I don't know if it's a bit quixotic - like sticking a finger in a rising floodgate," Atkin said.

He said Rell's proposal could face some First Amendment hurdles because she is looking to restrict Internet access to public information.  Blumenthal agreed.

"There would have to be a great deal of care and attention to detail in this proposal," he said. Rell's plan is "vague on exactly what information she has in mind or how she would prevent it from being distributed and who would be prevented (from distributing it)," Blumenthal said.

He proposed allowing residents to join a registry to ban the tracking of their visits to Internet sites.

"There are means that are used to note sites people visit, where they make purchases and where they get information to see their spending habits and other characteristics. Marketers very much prize that information," Blumenthal said. "It is as if someone followed you from one store to another in the mall and then compiled that information and sold it without your consent."

He said his proposal, modeled on one used in Canada, will face far fewer legal hurdles than Rell's.

"It's not absolutely black and white, but one involves use of public information and the other involves creation of information as a result of shadowing or tracking someone on the Internet," Blumenthal said. "Tracking, following or monitoring someone without their consent raises many fewer free speech issues, if any."

Atkin said he hopes the proposals raise public awareness about issues pertaining to personal privacy and the Internet.

"Although concerns like 'identity theft' are now beginning to attract attention in the media, my sense is that the public is generally unaware of the extent to which their movements - financial and otherwise - are tracked in cyberspace and in the larger information society," Atkin said. "People need to be more militant about questioning private as well as public operatives about the need to record personal information from one's driver's license, etc. as part of any routine transaction."


Comcast blocks some Internet traffic
By PETER SVENSSON, AP Technology Writer
October 19, 2007

NEW YORK - Comcast Corp. actively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online, a move that runs counter to the tradition of treating all types of Net traffic equally.

The interference, which The Associated Press confirmed through nationwide tests, is the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S. Internet service provider. It involves company computers masquerading as those of its users.

If widely applied by other ISPs, the technology Comcast is using would be a crippling blow to the BitTorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella file-sharing networks. While these are mainly known as sources of copyright music, software and movies, BitTorrent in particular is emerging as a legitimate tool for quickly disseminating legal content.

The principle of equal treatment of traffic, called "Net Neutrality" by proponents, is not enshrined in law but supported by some regulations. Most of the debate around the issue has centered on tentative plans, now postponed, by large Internet carriers to offer preferential treatment of traffic from certain content providers for a fee.

Comcast's interference, on the other hand, appears to be an aggressive way of managing its network to keep file-sharing traffic from swallowing too much bandwidth and affecting the Internet speeds of other subscribers.

Comcast, the nation's largest cable TV operator and No. 2 Internet provider, would not specifically address the practice, but spokesman Charlie Douglas confirmed that it uses sophisticated methods to keep Net connections running smoothly.

"Comcast does not block access to any applications, including BitTorrent," he said.

Douglas would not specify what the company means by "access" — Comcast subscribers can download BitTorrent files without hindrance. Only uploads of complete files are blocked or delayed by the company, as indicated by AP tests.

But with "peer-to-peer" technology, users exchange files with each other, and one person's upload is another's download. That means Comcast's blocking of certain uploads has repercussions in the global network of file sharers.

Comcast's technology kicks in, though not consistently, when one BitTorrent user attempts to share a complete file with another user.

Each PC gets a message invisible to the user that looks like it comes from the other computer, telling it to stop communicating. But neither message originated from the other computer — it comes from Comcast. If it were a telephone conversation, it would be like the operator breaking into the conversation, telling each talker in the voice of the other: "Sorry, I have to hang up. Good bye."

Matthew Elvey, a Comcast subscriber in the San Francisco area who has noticed BitTorrent uploads being stifled, acknowledged that the company has the right to manage its network, but disapproves of the method, saying it appears to be deceptive.

"There's the wrong way of going about that and the right way," said Elvey, who is a computer consultant.

Comcast's interference affects all types of content, meaning that, for instance, an independent movie producer who wanted to distribute his work using BitTorrent and his Comcast connection could find that difficult or impossible — as would someone pirating music.

Internet service providers have long complained about the vast amounts of traffic generated by a small number of subscribers who are avid users of file-sharing programs. Peer-to-peer applications account for between 50 percent and 90 percent of overall Internet traffic, according to a survey this year by ipoque GmbH, a German vendor of traffic-management equipment.

"We have a responsibility to manage our network to ensure all our customers have the best broadband experience possible," Douglas said. "This means we use the latest technologies to manage our network to provide a quality experience for all Comcast subscribers."

The practice of managing the flow of Internet data is known as "traffic shaping," and is already widespread among Internet service providers. It usually involves slowing down some forms of traffic, like file-sharing, while giving others priority. Other ISPs have attempted to block some file-sharing application by so-called "port filtering," but that method is easily circumvented and now largely ineffective.

Comcast's approach to traffic shaping is different because of the drastic effect it has on one type of traffic — in some cases blocking it rather than slowing it down — and the method used, which is difficult to circumvent and involves the company falsifying network traffic.

The "Net Neutrality" debate erupted in 2005, when AT&T Inc. suggested it would like to charge some Web companies more for preferential treatment of their traffic. Consumer advocates and Web heavyweights like Google Inc. and Amazon Inc. cried foul, saying it's a bedrock principle of the Internet that all traffic be treated equally.

To get its acquisition of BellSouth Corp. approved by the Federal Communications Commission, AT&T agreed in late 2006 not to implement such plans or prioritize traffic based on its origin for two and a half years. However, it did not make any commitments not to prioritize traffic based on its type, which is what Comcast is doing.

The FCC's stance on traffic shaping is not clear. A 2005 policy statement says that "consumers are entitled to run applications and services of their choice," but that principle is "subject to reasonable network management." Spokeswoman Mary Diamond would not elaborate.

Free Press, a Washington-based public interest group that advocates Net Neutrality, opposes the kind of filtering applied by Comcast.

"We don't believe that any Internet provider should be able to discriminate, block or impair their consumers ability to send or receive legal content over the Internet," said Free Press spokeswoman Jen Howard.

Paul "Tony" Watson, a network security engineer at Google Inc. who has previously studied ways hackers could disrupt Internet traffic in manner similar to the method Comcast is using, said the cable company was probably acting within its legal rights.

"It's their network and they can do what they want," said Watson. "My concern is the precedent. In the past, when people got an ISP connection, they were getting a connection to the Internet. The only determination was price and bandwidth. Now they're going to have to make much more complicated decisions such as price, bandwidth, and what services I can get over the Internet."

Several companies have sprung up that rely on peer-to-peer technology, including BitTorrent Inc., founded by the creator of the BitTorrent software (which exists in several versions freely distributed by different groups and companies).

Ashwin Navin, the company's president and co-founder, confirmed that it has noticed interference from Comcast, in addition to some Canadian Internet service providers.

"They're using sophisticated technology to degrade service, which probably costs them a lot of money. It would be better to see them use that money to improve service," Navin said, noting that BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer applications are a major reason consumers sign up for broadband.

BitTorrent Inc. announced Oct. 9 that it was teaming up with online video companies to use its technology to distribute legal content.

Other companies that rely on peer-to-peer technology, and could be affected if Comcast decides to expand the range of applications it filters, include Internet TV service Joost, eBay Inc.'s Skype video-conferencing program and movie download appliance Vudu. There is no sign that Comcast is hampering those services.

Comcast subscriber Robb Topolski, a former software quality engineer at Intel Corp., started noticing the interference when trying to upload with file-sharing programs Gnutella and eDonkey early this year.

In August, Topolski began to see reports on Internet forum DSLreports.com from other Comcast users with the same problem. He now believes that his home town of Hillsboro, Ore., was a test market for the technology that was later widely applied in other Comcast service areas.

Topolski agrees that Comcast has a right to manage its network and slow down traffic that affects other subscribers, but disapproves of their method.

"By Comcast not acknowledging that they do this at all, there's no way to report any problems with it," Topolski said.
Dodd To Block Bill That Would Protect Telecoms;  Senator Says AT&T, Others Are Complicit In Spying Programs 
DAY
By Ted Mann     
Published on 10/19/2007 

Sen. Chris Dodd announced Thursday that he will block a Senate bill aimed at reforming the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, saying he is concerned that the measure grants immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in a federal warrantless-surveillance program.

Dodd, a Democrat of Connecticut and a candidate for the party's presidential nomination, made the announcement just hours after the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee reportedly reached a deal with the Bush administration on the bill.  The compromise would shield telecom companies from civil liability for their participation in administration surveillance programs on the grounds that they believed them to be legal. Critics of the warrantless surveillance, including Dodd, have questioned the program's legality.

“The president has no right to secretly eavesdrop on the conversations and activities of law-abiding American citizens, and anyone who has aided and abetted him in these illegal activities should be held accountable,” Dodd said Thursday in a written statement. “It is unconscionable that such a basic right has been violated, and that the president is the perpetrator.

“I will do everything in my power to stop Congress from shielding this president's agenda of secrecy, deception and blatant unlawfulness.”

Dodd announced his intention to block the FISA reform using a power afforded to individual senators, and often used in secret: the placement of a “hold” that blocks a full Senate vote on a bill until it is lifted.  The senator alerted Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., of his decision in writing on Thursday, his office said, even as the Intelligence Committee prepared to begin a markup of the FISA bill. The bill must clear both the Intelligence and Judiciary committees before reaching the Senate floor.

The move set off another constitutional showdown between President Bush, who has threatened to veto any bill that does not include liability protection for the telecom industry, and Democratic lawmakers who are concerned that the administration's surveillance practices erode civil liberties.  Rather than wait until the measure hit the floor, as is customary, Dodd went on the offense and sent personal e-mails announcing his intention to thwart the bill — despite support for the measure from his own party.

By blocking the bill, Dodd said he was making good on his promise to restore constitutional safeguards he believes have been eroded since Bush took office.  Dodd's hold may not even be necessary to stop the bill, as Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, also criticized the compromise with the White House Thursday.

Discussing the FISA reforms during confirmation hearings for Michael Mukasey, Bush's nominee for attorney general, Leahy said that “the Intelligence Committee is about to cave on this,” The Hill newspaper reported.

The administration's leaders knew their surveillance programs were “illegal conduct,” the paper quoted Leahy as saying, “and that there is no saving grace for the president to say, 'Well, I was acting with authority.' Otherwise there wouldn't be so much pressure on us to immunize illegal conduct by either people acting within our government or within the private industry.”

Top Republicans predicted that the telecom industry would ultimately win legal protection from lawsuits for helping the administration track terrorists.

“I predict Congress will give them immunity,” said Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, which has oversight over the bill in that chamber. The telecommunications industry should be applauded for helping intelligence agencies protect the country, Smith said.

But Dodd won instant praise from civil liberties groups, which have alleged in federal courts around the country that AT&T, Verizon and other telephone companies violated the privacy rights of customers by participating in the surveillance program without a court warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as required by law.

Groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy-rights group based in San Francisco, and the American Civil Liberties Union say the telecom giants illegally participated in the president's warrantless-eavesdropping program at the expense of the public's constitutional rights.

“Senator Dodd is clearly on the right side of this issue,” said Caroline Fredrickson, executive director of the ACLU's Washington legislative office. “It would be wrong for the Senate to legalize warrantless surveillance of Americans on American soil. It would be wrong for the Senate to let administration officials off the hook for illegally spying on Americans. It would be wrong for the U.S. Senate to let telecom companies off the hook for selling private information to the government.”
Information superhighway indeed!  More like "power play?"
Agency urges caution on net neutrality
Associated Press
June 27, 2007

WASHINGTON - The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday urged policymakers to proceed cautiously on any regulation of high-speed Internet traffic.
 
The agency issued a report addressing the controversial subject of network neutrality, which is the notion that all online traffic should be treated equally by Internet service providers.

The issue pits consumer groups and content providers such as Google Inc. against large telecommunications companies, such as AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. The latter group wants the option of charging customers more for transmitting certain content, including live video, faster or more reliably than other data.

FTC Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras said that without evidence of "market failure or demonstrated consumer harm, policy makers should be particularly hesitant to enact new regulation in this area." The Federal Communications Commission and Department of Justice have jurisdiction over high-speed Internet access, while Congress has considered legislation that would mandate network neutrality.

The agency also said that certain practices that would discriminate among Internet traffic, such as prioritizing some data or providing exclusive deals to content providers, "can benefit consumers."


CAUCASUS MILITARY ATTACK AND THE ATTACK OF THE BOTNET BEGINS...OTHER MILITARY THREATS;  SPAM AT FIRST THEN IT GETS POLITICAL
The types of Internet attack, according to I-BBC report:  Denial of service, hacking, espionage (China) and online financial fraud (Brazil).  Some compromised locations (click here).


Admiral Blair
Glad we have an admiral incharge of the "Cyber Pearl Harbor" defense.

Intelligence Chief Says Cyberattack Threat Is Growing
NYTIMES
By MARK MAZZETTI
February 3, 2010

WASHINGTON — The threat of a crippling attack on computer and telecommunications networks is growing, America’s top intelligence official told lawmakers on Tuesday, as an increasingly sophisticated group of enemies has “severely threatened” the sometimes fragile systems undergirding the country’s information systems.

“Sensitive information is stolen daily from both government and private sector networks, undermining confidence in our information systems, and in the very information these systems were intended to convey,” Dennis C. Blair said in his prepared remarks to a Senate committee.

“Malicious cyber activity is occurring on an unprecedented scale with extraordinary sophistication,” he said.

The decision by Mr. Blair to begin his annual testimony before Congress with the cyber threat points up the concerns among American intelligence officials about the potentially devastating consequences of a coordinated attack on the nation’s technology apparatus, sometimes called a “Cyber Pearl Harbor.”

The spy chief’s assessment of the terrorism threat was somewhat starker than last year’s testimony, when he cited considerable progress in the campaign to debilitate al Qaeda and its affiliates. Last February, Mr. Blair reported that the global economic meltdown, rather than the prospect of a major terrorist attack, was the “primary near-term security concern of the United States.”

In another departure from last year’s testimony, Admiral Blair is appearing alongside other top intelligence officials, including the heads of the C.I.A., F.B.I. and Defense Intelligence Agency. Last year, the intelligence director sat alone before the committee, a partly symbolic gesture intended to demonstrate the authority of the Director of National Intelligence, an office that has long been criticized for commanding little power over America’s 16 intelligence agencies.

The decision was interpreted by some lawmakers as hubris, as Mr. Blair had only been in the job a matter of weeks.











Survey Finds Growing Fear of Cyberattacks
NYTIMES
By JOHN MARKOFF
February 2, 2010

A survey of 600 computing and computer-security executives in 14 countries suggests that attacks on the Internet pose a growing threat to the energy and communication systems that underlie modern society.  The findings, issued Thursday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the computer-security company McAfee, echoed alarms raised this month by Google after it experienced a wave of cyberattacks.

“One of the striking things we determined is that half of the respondents believe they have already been attacked by sophisticated government intruders,” said the study’s director, Stewart A. Baker. “It tells us that this is a serious problem right now.”

More than half of the executives called their own nation’s laws inadequate for deterring cyberattacks. Half identified the United States as one of the three most vulnerable countries; the others were China and Russia.  Moreover, the United States was identified most frequently as a potential source of cyberattacks.

“When they were asked which country ‘you worry is of greatest concern in the context of network attacks against your country/sector,’ 36 percent named the United States and 33 percent China — more than any other country on a list of six,” the report said.

China’s security measures also came in for praise from the executives.

“It was striking how much of an outlier China is on a number of measures,” said Mr. Baker, a Washington lawyer who formerly served as assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security and as general counsel for the National Security Agency. “They have confidence in their government, and they are adopting security measures at a higher rate than other countries.”

The report focuses on “critical infrastructure” — essential networks and services that include the financial system, transmission lines for gas and electricity, water supply, and voice- and data-communication networks. At the heart of these systems are networks known as Scada systems, which are the basis for manufacturing, power generation, refining and other basic operations in advanced economies. (The acronym stands for supervisory control and data acquisition.)

The increasing use of Internet-based networks “creates unique and troubling vulnerabilities,” the report says. In the past, the data used by such industrial systems was largely carried on proprietary networks that were often better insulated from the outside world.  The advantage of the Internet lies largely in the lower cost of developing systems because of the low cost of commodity products. But the report’s authors stopped short of calling for a complete separation between those systems and the open Internet.

“Remote access to control systems poses a huge danger,” said Phyllis Schneck, McAfee’s vice president for threat intelligence. “We must either protect it appropriately or move it to more private networks and not use the open Internet.”

The report found considerable pessimism among the executives, whose responses were anonymous.

“Remarkably, two-fifths of these I.T. executives expected a major cybersecurity incident (one causing an outage of ‘at least 24 hours, loss of life or ... failure of a company’) in their sector within the next year,” the report said. “All but 20 percent expected such an incident within five years. This pessimism was particularly marked in the countries already experiencing the highest levels of serious attacks.”

Obama to Name Chief of Cybersecurity
NYTIMES
By JOHN MARKOFF
December 22, 2009

Nearly seven months after highlighting the vulnerability of banking, energy and communications systems to Internet attacks, the White House on Tuesday is expected to name a technology industry veteran to coordinate competing efforts to improve the nation’s cybersecurity in both military and civilian life...full story here, along with what we searched on the Internet via Google.
Obama ready to announce cybersecurity chief
guardian.co.uk
Bobbie Johnson, San Francisco
Tuesday 22 December 2009 09.23 GMT

Barack Obama is due to name a senior adviser to take control of America's cybersecurity efforts, nearly seven months after first declaring that protecting the country from internet attacks was a "national security priority".

Reports suggest that Howard Schmidt, a government veteran who previously served as an adviser to President Bush, will be named as the White House's cybersecurity coordinator on Tuesday - with responsibility for overseeing the online defences provided by the Pentagon and intelligence agencies.

The job of bringing together the disparate groups is seen by some as an impossible task - particularly since the various agencies often battle against each other for political gain - but some Obama administration officials see it as a vital role.

The announcement is likely to head off criticism that the White House has failed to follow through on its own plans to establish a new office to deal with cybersecurity, which were announced in the summer.

In one of his earliest acts on taking office, President Obama ordered a lightning review of US internet security. When the results were published in May, the president urged a major revision of the way American defence, security and intelligence agencies worked to protect the country's computer systems, calling hacking a "weapon of mass disruption".

"Cyberspace is real, and so is the risk that comes with it," he said, adding that it is "one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face".

The issue became even more pressing after a series of reports suggested that a string of major attacks on US institutions had taken place - including the country's electricity grid and computers containing information on the Joint Strike Fighter programme, a $300bn project being conducted by the Pentagon and other governments around the world.

The continuing lack of an appointment to the post had caused some concern in Washington - but while officials said that delays in making an appointment were merely part of the process, reports suggested a number of candidates had turned the job down.

As a result, the appointment of Schmidt is seen by many as a decision to put the task in safe - if familiar - hands.

Schmidt, who worked for eBay and Microsoft after retiring from government in 2003, previously held the role of special adviser on cyberspace security for two years during George W Bush's first term in office.

His career has given him significant pull in the technology community, but some elements - including a controversially delayed scheme to introduce new ID cards for federal employees - have been criticised in the past.

He may find the winds in his favour, however. Last weekend it emerged that Russian and American officials had been meeting to discuss potential collaboration over internet security and cyberdefence - a move which could mark a significant breakthrough in the often-frosty relations between the two countries online.

Rod Beckstrom, the former director of the US Cybersecurity Center, told the Guardian that he had met with Russian officials too - and had encouraged such collaborations while working to a brief that is similar to Schmidt's.

"We do see international collaboration improving," said Beckstrom, who now runs the internet administration body Icann. "We are pleased to hear that superpowers such as Russia and the US are addressing these topics."
Drone Breach Stirs Calls to Fill Cyber Post

By SIOBHAN GORMAN, YOCHI DREAZEN and AUGUST COLE
 DECEMBER 19, 2009

U.S. lawmakers called on the White House to quickly fill vacant cybersecurity posts in the wake of revelations that Iraqi insurgents have learned to intercept video feeds from unmanned military drones.  Lawmakers also expressed frustration that no action was taken until this year, even though the vulnerability of the video feeds had been known since the 1990s. The story was first reported Thursday by The Wall Street Journal.

"It outrages me that this vulnerability was known since the 1990s, and they never fixed the problem," said Rep. James Langevin, a Rhode Island Democrat and a member of the intelligence and armed services committees. "It makes them look like a bunch of Keystone Kops. Who else had access to these video feeds?"

Rep. Langevin said he would press for answers when Congress returns in the New Year: "They're going to get both barrels when I return to D.C."

Revelations that militants intercepted key military intelligence using inexpensive software available on the Internet dogged the top U.S. military officer Friday as he traveled to Iraq.  Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed that insurgents in Iraq had intercepted Predator drone feeds. He told reporters the breach hadn't caused significant military damage, and the signals have since been secured. He gave no further details.

The news cast a spotlight on the vacancy for a cyberchief at the White House, a position announced by President Barack Obama six months ago.

"That revelation obviously raises great concern about the state of our security," said Rep. Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who co-chaired a cybersecurity commission with Rep. Langevin. "It's time for action" on the White House cybersecurity post, he said.

The administration has considered dozens of candidates and been "turned down innumerable times," said James Lewis, a cybersecurity specialist who advises the administration. "The president is personally committed to finding the right person for the cybersecurity coordinator job; a rigorous selection process is well under way," said White House spokesman Nick Shapiro.

Without a central figure in the White House to set priorities, the administration could miss security gaps like the unprotected drone videos, said J.R. Reagan, who heads the cybersecurity practice at Deloitte Consulting. "It underscores why it's so important that we get this position filled."

A White House chief would be responsible for ensuring cybersecurity competes with priorities like health care and the economy, said Billy O'Brien, a cybersecurity aide in the Bush White House.

The top contenders are Franklin Kramer, a former assistant defense secretary in the administration of President Bill Clinton, and Howard Schmidt, a former top security officer at eBay Inc.  While the White House search continues, the Pentagon's new Cyber Command has gotten off the ground slower than expected because of congressional uncertainty about its scope and mission.  The Pentagon had said the entity -- designed to gather all the military's cyber defense and cyber offense programs under a single rubric -- would be operational by October.

Nearly three months later, the command doesn't yet have a chief. Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the current head of the National Security Agency, has been tapped to run the command, but his nomination has been held up on Capitol Hill.  It may be months before the general receives his confirmation hearing. A spokesman for Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, who chairs the panel, said Friday that "no date has been set and I don't anticipate it will take place anytime soon."

A recent Pentagon briefing document said Lt. Gen. Alexander was expected to be confirmed in January, but people familiar with the deliberations said it might not happen until March.

Cybersecurity remains a major focus for the defense industry. While some companies are concerned the administration's attention has waned, executives are investing on a bet the market will grow next year with billions of dollars in new government spending.

The biggest companies, such as Raytheon Co., Northrop Grumman Corp., Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp. continue to acquire cybersecurity firms to bolster their expertise. They are also spending millions of dollars to tout their expertise in advertising campaigns.