February 2010

Commerce Awards Recovery Act Broadband Expansion Grants Totaling More than $20 Million for Virginia

The Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced two grants totaling more than $21.5 million to expand broadband Internet infrastructure in Virginia. The two grants will add 575 miles of new high-speed Internet infrastructure in southern Virginia. The grants were announced during a press conference call with White House Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling, Sens. Jim Webb (D-VA) and Mark Warner (D-VA), and Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA).

Mid-Atlantic Broadband Cooperative: $16 million infrastructure grant with an additional $4 million in applicant-provided matching funds to add 465 miles of new fiber that will directly connect 121 K-12 schools in southern Virginia to an existing 800-mile, fiber, high-speed network. By improving connection speeds for these schools from 1.5 Mbps to at least10 Mbps, these new fiber connections will allow the schools, many in isolated areas, to take advantage of distance learning and virtual classroom opportunities. In addition, the expanded fiber network will spur affordable broadband service to local consumers by enabling more than 30 Internet service providers to connect to the project's open network.

Virginia Tech Foundation: $5.5 million infrastructure grant with an additional $1.4 million in applicant-provided matching funds to add 110 miles of open access, fiber-optic network between Blacksburg and Bedford City—an existing network operated by the Mid-Atlantic Broadband Cooperative. The resulting network will cross six counties in Virginia's Appalachian region, and provide direct, high-speed connections to Virginia Tech's main campus in Blacksburg and the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine in Roanoke, enhancing the ability for both institutions to collaborate on cutting-edge medical and other scientific research with institutions in the United States and abroad.

Verizon Blocks 4chan

According to 4chan, they have been "explicitly blocked" by the Verizon wireless network.

Why would Verizon choose to block the site now? Does this put Verizon on par with foreign ISPs that block torrent sites and social networks? Or is there more to the story? The incident calls to mind AT&T's temporary blocking of the site in July 2009. Eventually, AT&T said the block was due to a DDoS originating from 4chan IP addresses.

Verizon Wireless spokesman, Jeffrey Nelson, said two of 4Chan's related sites (not its main one) were sources of malicious attacks, which threatened the wireless network. He said the company didn't block the site but was addressing the security concerns. He said both sites should be accessible to users by the end of the day.

An Open Door to Open Government

Since early December, agencies have worked to create their own webpages to serve as the gateway for each agency's implementation of the Open Government Directive. These pages all went live this weekend, complete with the latest news and updates, downloadable information unique to that agency, and information about how each agency is moving to implement the President's call for a more transparent, participatory, and collaborative government. Importantly, each of these sites will be the focal point for the agency's open government plans that, after public feedback and suggestion, will make our work across the Administration more accessible to the American people. That's why each Open Government Webpage incorporates a mechanism to seek your ideas and insights. Most agencies are leveraging a new, no-cost public engagement app from the General Services Administration that allows them to pay less attention to designing tools and more attention to running, moderating, and analyzing public input. It will help to make the agency open government pages more effective at turning public suggestions into government actions.

Will Google's Translator Phone Lead Us to Babylon or Babble On?

Google's revealed it's working on extensions to its smartphone voice-control powers, debuted in the Nexus One, that'll automatically translate between languages.

Google's plans are to enhance the remote server-processed speech recognition systems in the Nexus One to include automatic, fast and accurate machine translation between languages, with a synthetic voice output. It's the stuff of pure utopian science fiction. But is it a good idea? The cultural impact could be absolutely shocking. For example, if Google's device succeeds, and is useful and ubiquitous (in other words, nearly everyone ends up using it, or a competing service)--nobody would need learn a foreign language. "Hooray!" you may be thinking, but this isn't necessarily a good thing. Because language plays such a fundamental part in connecting each of us as thinking creatures with the world around us, that the subtle nuances of language (which are different even in similar tongues, say the Latin-derived Spanish and Portuguese) actually shape how we think about the world.

Clutter Causing TV Ads to Lack Effectiveness

The bloom may be coming off the TV advertising rose. According to a joint Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research survey of more than 100 national advertisers, 62 percent of respondents think TV ads have become less effective in the past two years.

The main culprit cited by respondents was clutter, with 69 percent saying they would like fewer commercials per pod. Advertisers will be cautious with TV budgets this year, holding spending flat, the study found. Advertisers are also altering their media mix allocating 41 percent to TV compared in 2009 compared to 58 percent in 2008. Contributing to dissatisfaction with the medium was a lack of new audience metrics beyond reach and frequency. Eight-two percent of respondents would like individual commercial ratings. Seventy-eight percent would like to more precisely target consumers.

All that user-generated content? 95% is malware, spam

The latest research from Websense Security Labs paints a dreary but familiar picture of the state of online security threats. Echoing the bad news of other such recent reports, it seems the vast majority of the Web consists of malware and spam.

Worse yet, even legitimate, well-known sites are being used to pump malware, SEO poisoning, or phishing attacks. Websense uses a global network of systems to scan and analyze over 40 billion websites every hour, tracking malware and other unwanted content. The results for the latter half of 2009 show a 225 percent increase in malicious websites. Worse, 71 percent of websites found to contain some malicious code were in fact legitimate websites that had been compromised in some way. One way that hackers are infiltrating the Web is by "SEO poisoning," or using SEO techniques to pump up the ranking of malicious websites in search results to make them appear legitimate. On average, 14 percent of top search results for a given "hot" topic on Google led to a malicious website.

Internet prompts the publishing itch in over-60s

The Internet is helping older British readers rekindle a love of books and writing, and an overwhelming majority of senior citizens see the medium as a positive development, according to a survey. Some 31 percent of people over 60 are keen to go online to publish short stories and join book clubs, the survey by charity Booktrust in Britain found.

Canada enlists HIT in chronic disease campaign

More than 30 organizations from across Canada are forming partnerships in a $15.5 million series of initiatives aimed at preventing chronic disease - a challenge that the United States is also tackling. Electronic health records play a critical role in Canada's plan. Canada's Minister of Health Leona Aglukkaq announced Feb. 3 the launch of seven innovative chronic-disease prevention programs, supported by $15.5 million from the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer, the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Heart and Stroke Foundation.

BT to share its tunnel network with rivals

British Telecom is preparing to open up its underground ducts so that rivals can run their own high- speed broadband networks through the telecoms company's infrastructure. Action by BT could allow competitors to lay their optical fiber cables without the expense of digging up pavements. BT's willingness to open up its ducts marks an important policy shift and emphasizes the intensifying political and business pressure it faces.

Beijing Heralds Bust of Major Hacker Ring

China heralded a major bust of computer hackers to underscore its pledge to help enhance global online security, with state media saying officials had shut what they called the country's largest distributor of tools used in malicious Internet attacks. Three people were arrested on suspicion of making hacking tools available online, the state-run Xinhua news agency said on Monday. Their business, known as Black Hawk Safety Net, operated through the now-shuttered Web site 3800cc.com and generated around $1 million in income from its over 12,000 subscribers, the report said.

Benton

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