November 2010

Internet picked over buses in ideal Australian suburb

Australians value access to the Internet over public transport links and schools in their ideal suburb, new research shows.

Homeowners want to live in a suburb wired with the latest technology and surrounded by good restaurants more than they want access to good buses, trains or education facilities, a study by The Buzz Insurance claims. A safe suburb is the most valued attribute of all, considered as "extremely" or "very" important by 95 per cent of the online survey of 957 Australians aged 25 to 64. Access to the latest technology like broadband and pay TV came in as the second most desirable attribute (83 per cent), followed by services like shops, cinemas, cafes & restaurants (77 per cent). The My Ideal Suburb study undertaken by Newspoll also found people want a good coffee or movie nearby over being close to good quality schools.

Verizon: Feds shouldn't reign over Internet service providers

Verizon Communications, ahead of a change in Congress, urged self-regulation of the Internet as the Federal Communications Commission attempts to assert more authority over broadband service providers like it.

Tom Tauke, Verizon's executive vice president of public affairs, said in a meeting hosted by the Optoelectronics Industry Development Association, that so-called network neutrality rules proposed by the FCC and its push to govern broadband service providers "have resulted in court rebukes and considerable uncertainty." "After haggling over the issue for over five years, we are essentially in the same place we were when this debate started," Tauke said. "There still is no identifiable problem to be solved, and instead, as predicted, technology and market forces are ensuring that access to the Internet is open to consumers, as well as to developers of content and services."

What a Do Not Track option might look like

How would a Do Not Track registry work? Not quite like the popular Do Not Call list its name implies, experts say. The latter is a phone list that's off limits to telemarketers. The former would be a tool on Internet browsers designed to block third-party companies from collecting information on the Web sites a user visits.

"It employs a very different approach; the developing consensus is not around a list or registry," said Stanford University computer science researcher Jonathan Mayer. Rather than entering their names on a centrally maintained list, Internet users who don't want advertisers and other firms to follow them on the Web, would use technology to block tracking -- specifically, a tool on their Web browsers. DoNotTrack.us, a collaboration by Stanford Universities offers one idea for how such a tool would work: Whenever an Internet browser requests content or sends data using HTTP, the protocol that underlies the Web, it can optionally include extra information, called a "header." Do Not Track simply would add a header indicating that the user does not want to be tracked.

Parents Television Council says Online Video hurting kids

Online video services such as Hulu are failing to protect kids from explicit content, according to a new report from the watchdog Parents Television Council.

The PTC gave Hulu a grade of "D" on protecting children from harmful content, the highest grade out of four services evaluated. Hulu features television shows and content from NBC Universal, Fox and Disney. The other services evaluated by the PTC were Comcast's Fancast, AOL's Slashcontrol and online video streaming from AT&T. Of the 602 videos evaluated during the a three-week period, 46 percent were unrated and available to all users. The sites also failed to notify users when shows contained sex, violence or explicit language. "Our report clearly shows that these corporate entertainment behemoths, which invest millions of dollars promoting their online video distribution outlets, are failing to protect kids on the Web," said PTC President Tim Winter. "The content ratings and parental control devices they tout as a solution to indecent material on television are not being applied to similarly-indecent material on their websites."

Religious Broadcasters Want Government Help

National Religious Broadcasters President Frank Wright said that government-funded broadcasters have become the poster-children for "government directed charity," while religious nonprofits have not taken "a dime of tax money" and served the spiritual needs of millions of the public through shelters, soup kitchens, rescue missions, military support groups, pregnancy centers, reading programs and anti-crime efforts.

"While some are saying that public broadcasters like NPR and PBS are the only trusted media outlets," said NRB SVP and General Counsel Craig Parshall, "they are forgetting one crucial component of the non-profit media world: non-commercial religious broadcasters, and in particular, Christian radio and television." Parshall says that, unlike NPR and PBS, religious broadcasters are not asking for a bailout. And while there has been talk recently about phasing out federal noncom funding, he points out that there has also been talk about "super-funding" noncommercial media as a way to respond to the sea change in the commercial news model brought about by the Internet and a tanked economy.

Rather than creating a giant government-run media elite, NRB says, it should be helping religious broadcasters, which he calls an underappreciated resource. That help, says NRB, could come in the form of allowing them more latitude in on-air fund-raising for other nonprofits, and more latitude in program sponsorships from corporate underwriters.

Barton's Bid For House Commerce Gavel Gets Boon From Colleagues

In the latest salvo of the battle for the gavel of the powerful House Commerce Committee, Republican members of the House wrote their fellow colleagues to support Rep Joe Barton's (R-TX) bid for chairmanship.

Reps Cliff Stearns (R-FL) and John Shimkus (R-IL), two of the signatories, had previously been identified as candidates for the position but have now made their deference to Rep Barton formal. Other lawmakers signing the letter are Reps. Ralph Hall (R-TX), Joe Pitts (R-PA), Lee Terry (R-NE), Michael Burgess (R-TX), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and Steve Scalise (R-LA).

"Under Joe's leadership, and despite being outnumbered and outgunned, we subjected the Democrats' health bill to 17 days of brutal markup, including a 10-day retreat by the Democrats to regroup despite their overwhelming superiority of numbers," the letter states. Democrats "won, but it was stubborn, intelligent Joe Barton who made certain that they'd won a Pyrrhic victory."

The letter also pointed to Barton's pushback on cap-and-trade and credited him with killing current Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman's network neutrality bill.

China Hijacked US Government Internet Traffic

For almost 20 minutes this spring Internet traffic from sensitive US agencies was re-routed to go through Chinese servers. In total about 15 percent of the entire world's traffic went through those servers, but it does seem targeted at US government and military sites, according to a new report released today by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

The report reads: "This incident affected traffic to and from U.S. government (''.gov'') and military (''.mil'') sites, including those for the Senate, the army, the navy, the marine corps, the air force, the office of secretary of Defense, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Commerce, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and many others. Certain commercial websites were also affected, such as those for Dell, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and IBM.116"

The commission comfortingly goes on to say that it has no idea "what, if anything, Chinese telecommunications firms did to the hijacked data."

UK Government Thinks ISPs Should Be Free To Abandon Network Neutrality

UK communications minister Ed Vaizey said Internet service providers should be allowed to abandon network neutrality and prioritize users' access to certain content providers.

The move away from network neutrality in the UK will prove controversial as it opens the door for ISPs to favour some websites in terms of the volume and speed of the delivery of their content to users, while others given lower priority could see their Internet traffic suffer. Vaizey said ISPs should be free to favour one content provider over another as long as they inform customers in order to manage Internet traffic.

"Under the new provisions providers must present information about their service, including the nature and extent of their traffic management policies and their impact on service quality in a clear, visible and easy to understand form for all their customers," Vaizey told a telecoms conference hosted by the Financial Times in London. He said a lightly regulated Internet was "good for business, good for the economy and good for people".

"Consumers should have the ability to access any legal content or service. Content and service providers should have the ability to innovate and, most importantly, to reach users," Vaizey added. Vaizey said that early responses to Ofcom's consultation showed there was "broad agreement on the need for traffic management." He added "there is not yet evidence of any impact either on competition or consumers from traffic management."

"We are still at an early stage here. Such impacts and harms could arise in the future, and greater transparency is required to combat this," Vaizey said.

Cyber Defense To Be On NATO Critical Capabilities List

Cyber defense is set to be on a top 10 list of capabilities to be agreed at the upcoming NATO summit in Lisbon, a NATO official said Nov. 16.

The list, which will be made public, sets out areas that NATO countries will prioritize for investment. The list is also expected to include helicopter transport, strategic air transport, wide body aircraft for long-range transport, counter-IED technologies and training, and medical support. NATO already has a cyber defense capability in the form of its Computer Response Incidence Center (CIRC), manned on a 24 hours/seven days a week basis, which helped Estonia when it suffered a series of Internet attacks a few years ago. The official said that NATO was "increasingly worried by the growing number and sophistication of cyber attacks on military and civilian infrastructure," adding that NATO deals with "about five major cyber incidents per day."

Analyzing Public Comment on Comcast-NBC Merger

The Federal Communications Commission held a public forum in Chicago on July 13, 2010, on the proposed merger of Comcast and NBC Universal, which included a public comment period for members of the public. Chicago Media Action analyzed the comments delivered by 69 commenters in that comment period and has released the results of that analysis.
Among the key findings:

Only eight persons who commented specifically approved the proposed Comcast/NBC Universal merger.
None of those who spoke approvingly of Comcast mentioned any reasons relevant to the proposed merger in favor of it; the only reasons offered were discursions to the question of the merger, mostly by Chicago-area nonprofit organizations who received Comcast support.
34 commenters offered a wide range of criticism and concerns of the proposed merger, and represented a more diverse set of concerned groups and individuals.

Benton

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