May 2010

Eircom will begin a process that will lead to cutting off the broadband service of customers found to be repeatedly sharing music online illegally. Ireland is the first country in the world where a system of "graduated response" is being put in place. Under the pilot scheme, Eircom customers who illegally share copyrighted music will get three warnings before having their broadband service cut off for a year. The Irish Recorded Music Association (Irma), whose members include EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner, reached an out-of-court settlement with Eircom in February 2009 under which the telecoms company agreed to introduce such a system for its 750,000 broadband users. The mechanism by which it operates was challenged in the courts by the Data Protection Commissioner.

[Commentary] Five years ago, I was asked whether or not consumers would be willing to cut off their wireline data service in favor of a mobile-only option. At the time it seemed absurd. Wireless options, while offering mobility, were slower, unreliable and astronomically expensive compared to DSL and cable. Fast forward and suddenly it's not such a silly question.

With hundreds of devices -- smartphones, tablets, netbooks and notebooks -- coming off the shelf with built-in connectivity and service providers increasingly heading toward unlimited data plans, the assumption that consumers will always have a wireline data service is looking outdated. Somewhere between 10% and 15% of consumers will make some kind of move to eliminate a portion of their pay TV in the next 12 months. So does this mean the pay TV world, be it cable operators, satellite providers or IPTV operators, is about to implode? Hardly. In most cases, we don't anticipate most of that 10%-15% to take the most radical step and completely cut off service. Instead, we envision more consumers dropping premium channels, limiting the number of movies they purchase via video on demand or pay per view and dropping to the most basic levels of service. In place of those premiums and VOD/PPV movies, consumers will use the plethora of new devices, including Google TV, Roku boxes, connected Blu-Ray players and, most importantly, gaming consoles to find content via Hulu, YouTube and the dozens of sites dedicated to niche or not so niche content. Indeed, the number of consumers with gaming consoles outnumbers even the largest MSO subscriber counts, and those consoles have far more processing power than even the most advanced set-tops.

As the Obama administration's National Coordinator for Health Information Technology in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Dr. David Blumenthal is guiding the deployment of up to $27 billion in federal stimulus money over 10 years to help health care professionals and organizations overcome the uneasiness that underpinned his own resistance to change at his hospital.

Dr Blumenthal has spent the last year refining Congress' blueprint to encourage doctors and hospitals to adopt EMRs. He says those who "get on board" will be paid more by Medicare and Medicaid, beginning in 2011. But in 2016 the subsidies disappear and those still using paper records risk sanctions, including reduced Medicare fees. Some critics say five years isn't enough time for health care professionals to achieve a government standard called "meaningful use." In late 2009, federal officials announced a preliminary definition of that standard, but it is still being refined. Nonetheless, it is expected to tie any increased Medicare or Medicaid payments to doctors or hospitals using EMRs to enhance delivery of care by ensuring that the systems have capabilities such as electronic prescribing that would warn against dangerous drug interactions and electronic access to information such as records of immunizations and mammograms that could also cut out unnecessary procedures. Proponents, including Blumenthal, say the health care system has dallied long enough on EMRs, and that having an electronic infrastructure for better system-wide information exchange is critical to achieving goals of medical care quality and cost-control.

Computer security researchers at the University of Calgary have developed a way to distribute adware without having to convince potential victims to install the adware on their computers.

The researchers -- associate professor John Aycock, assistant professor Mea Wang, and students Daniel Medeiros Nunes de Castro and Eric Lin -- call their attack as "Typhoid Adware" because it spreads like a contagion from an infected computer to other computers connected to the same WiFi hotspot or wired network. "Not only are ads annoying but they can also advertise rogue antivirus software that's harmful to your computer, so ads are in some sense the tip of the iceberg," said Aycock. What makes the attack interesting is that the user of the contagious computer, like the historical figure Typhoid Mary, is likely to be unaware of his or her role in spreading ads to other computers on the same network. What's more, those receiving the ads won't find any malware on their machines, assuming it's adware rather than malicious software that's being spread.