June 2009

Eight percent of all consumers in Britain, France, Germany and the United States admit to downloading video illegally from the Internet, according to a survey, showing the scale of the ongoing fight against piracy. Two-thirds of those surveyed in Britain often or sometimes watched TV, movies and video on their PC or laptop computer, with U.S. consumers not far behind. Of those, 15 percent did so illegally, the Futuresource Consulting survey showed.

The switch to digital TV has caused static and headaches for thousands of viewers in the Washington region. But for one local station, the transition has been something of a revival. MHz Networks, based in Falls Church, has carved out a niche for international programming over the past 15 years, showing Russian newscasts, Nigerian documentaries and Italian mysteries, to name a few of its offerings. To build its digital antenna and boost the signal's power, MHz shut off analog to its two channels in September -- the first station in the country to do so -- leaving many viewers who were not yet equipped to receive digital signals believing it had simply disappeared. But on June 12, when viewers hooked up converter boxes and scanned for digital stations, MHz came through at full strength.

Timothy Sparapani, who previously was an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, will now be responsible for shaping Washington's view of social-networking site Facebook. As a prominent privacy advocate, Timothy Sparapani, former senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that Internet companies had too much control over consumers' data. The self-described "privacy zealot" didn't join Facebook until seven months ago because he was uneasy about revealing personal information on the site.

On a computer, having to fill out a form and type in a credit card number to buy something is only mildly annoying. On a cellphone, it could make you want to skip the purchase entirely. This is why investors, start-ups and major corporations are pouring money into services that make it easier to use cellphones to buy goods and transfer money. The aim is to turn phones into virtual credit cards or checkbooks, enabling the kind of click-and-buy commerce and online banking that people have come to expect on their PCs. But shrinking down those services to fit onto cellphones presents serious challenges. The services must work on many different phones and through many cellphone service providers, which usually control the billing relationships with customers. That adds complexity to the already tricky business of safely and securely transferring funds among financial institutions and merchants.