March 2012

Telecom groups fight back against free messaging

Just past the security gate for the world's largest cell phone trade show in Barcelona, executives of big mobile carriers can't avoid walking past a booth they would probably rather not see: It's for "Pinger," a small California company that offers free texting in the United States and Germany and has global expansion plans.

Pinger — along with an explosion of smartphone messaging services like iMessage, BlackBerry Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber Media, Facebook Messenger and KakaoTalk — have managed in just a few years to slash away at the important revenue that cell phone companies get from text messaging, and analysts say there's no end in sight to the financial bloodletting. They do it by offering messaging applications that let phone users chat for free on the carriers' data networks or Wi-Fi. Some, like Pinger, make money from advertisements and work on computers as well. The London-based Ovum research firm estimates telecommunications companies lost nearly $14 billion last year in text-messaging revenue as consumers migrated to applications allowing them to send messages over cell phone data networks. Ovum said the companies still took in an estimated $153 billion, but that was down 9 percent from a year earlier, and Pinger co-founder Joe Stipher wants to reduce the amount even more.

US court approves warrantless searches of cell phones

US police can search a cell phone for its number without having a warrant, according to a federal appeals court ruling.

Officers in Indiana found a number of cell phones at the scene of a drug bust, and searched each phone for its telephone number. Having the numbers allowed the government to subpoena the owners' call histories, linking them to the drug-selling scheme. One of the suspects, Abel Flores-Lopez, who was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison, argued on appeal that the police had no right to search the phone's contents without a warrant. The U.S. Court of Appeal for the 7th Circuit rejected that argument, finding that the invasion of privacy was so slight that the police's actions did not violate the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches.

Twitter, the Startup That Wouldn't Die

Life inside successful Web startups—especially the really successful ones—can be nasty, brutish, and short. As companies grow exponentially, egos clash, investors jockey for control, and business complexities rapidly exceed the managerial abilities of the founders. Venture capitalist Peter Fenton calls this phenomenon “the violence of a startup.” And nowhere has the violence been fiercer, or more public, than at a company Fenton invested in and has helped to guide: Twitter. Now something freakish is happening in San Francisco. Twitter, which for years treated the responsibility of earning money as an annoying distraction, may be turning into a viable business. The company has added seasoned executives, pushed its unique symbology like the hashtag (#) and at-symbol handle (@) into the mainstream, and rolled out new advertising products to the delight of big brands such as General Motors (GM) and Budweiser (BUD), which advertised heavily on the microblog service during this year’s Super Bowl.

Tribune Paid Bankruptcy Advisers $233 Million Since Filing for Protection

Tribune Company, the biggest news media company in bankruptcy, paid lawyers and other advisers $233.3 million since filing for court protection from creditors in December 2008.

The two main law firms in the case collected almost half of all the money spent to reorganize the newspaper and television company, according to records filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware. Sidley Austin LLP, Tribune’s main law firm, received $68.9 million in fees and expenses while Chadbourne & Parke LLP, which represents unsecured creditors, was paid $42.2 million. Alvarez & Marsal LLC, Tribune’s financial adviser, received $18.1 million. Tribune, valued earlier this year by the company at more than $7 billion, owes creditors about $13 billion.

Google privacy change taking effect today is illegal, EU officials say

European regulators claimed that Google's new privacy policy violates European law, but Google has started rolling it out to users anyway.

A French data protection commission investigating Google's privacy policy on behalf of the EU said this week that the privacy policy violates the European Data Protection Directive and that both the French "and the EU data protection authorities are deeply concerned about the combination of data across services and will continue their investigations with Google’s representatives." On March 1, an official with the EU agreed with the French position. "Data protection agencies in European countries have concluded Google's new privacy policy is in breach of European law,” EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding said. The policy violates European law in numerous ways, Reding said. "One is that nobody had been consulted, it is not in accordance with the law on transparency and it utilizes the data of private persons in order to hand it over to third parties, which is not what the users have agreed to."

Republicans push cyber bill that avoids ‘heavy hand of the government’

Eight Republican senators introduced their own cybersecurity bill as an alternative to the measure backed by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Susan Collins (R-Maine.).

Unlike the Lieberman-Collins measure, the Republicans’ Secure IT Act would not give the Homeland Security Department the power to require critical computer systems to meet certain security standards. The Republican bill is backed by Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Dan Coats (R-IN), Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Richard Burr (R-NC). The legislation would encourage private companies to share information about cyberthreats with the government and would empower the secretary of Commerce to set cybersecurity standards for government agencies. It would also update the criminal code for cybercrimes and toughen penalties.

Supporters Of Competing Cybersecurity Bills Prepare For Debate

Sponsors of the 2012 Cybersecurity Act are trying to round up support for their bill as several Republican committee leaders plan to introduce competing cybersecurity proposals.

After complaining about both the substance and the process for considering the Cybersecurity Act, six Republican senators are scheduled to formally unveil their own bill on March 1. They say it will rely on incentives and tools like research, education, information, and technology rather than regulation to improve cybersecurity in the United States. "The fundamental difference in our alternative approach is that we aim to enter into a cooperative relationship with the entire private sector through information sharing, rather than an adversarial one with prescriptive regulations," one of the GOP bill's sponsors, Sen John McCain (R-AZ), said when announcing the bill earlier this month. The four main sponsors of the Cybersecurity Act said they welcomed the new proposals, but they pushed back at concerns that the process is moving too fast.

Hello terabit age! This fiber is fat, fast and programmable.

You know what the Internet is going to need? More bandwidth. Because, really, when it comes to capacity on those long-haul cables under the sea or surrounding cities, there’s always a need for more bits per second. This is why Ciena’s announcement of a chip that can deliver 17.6 terabits per second over existing fiber cables is so amazing.

The company’s new chip that can provide speeds up to 400 Gbps on existing fiber and double the capacity of those cables from the current 8.8 Tbps to the 17.6 number. It says the same chip can provide 100 Gbps speeds over the 9,000-kilometer trans-Pacific cables connecting the West Coast and Japan. This chip, which should begin delivering traffic on networks before the end of this year, is also programmable via an API. So even if the speeds weren’t impressive, the potential for programmable access networks is. Much like programmable networks inside the data center are a game-changer, being able to adjust capacity on a fiber optic cable via software, as opposed to swapping out telecommunications gear, means operators have new options for their products and pricing.

Without Internet, Urban Poor Fear Being Left Behind In Digital Age

[Commentary] An estimated 100 million Americans have no way of accessing the Internet at home. They are on the wrong side of the so-called “digital divide” -- the chasm between those who are connected to technology and those who are not.

Some live in remote areas where broadband service doesn’t exist. Many live in blighted urban neighborhoods, unable to afford a computer, let alone Internet service. But being disconnected isn’t just a function of being poor. These days, it is also a reason some people stay poor. As the Internet has become an essential platform for job-hunting and furthering education, those without access are finding the basic tools for escaping poverty increasingly out of reach. "The cost of being offline is greater now than it was 10 years ago," said John Horrigan, vice president of policy research at TechNet, a trade association representing high-tech companies. "So many important transactions take place online. If you don’t have access to high-speed Internet, you're missing out on a lot."

Online Therapy Helps Teens Recover From Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Give some teenagers access to the Internet, and they'll feel better.

That's the conclusion of a new study that found that teens with chronic fatigue syndrome who got six months of online behavioral therapy were far more likely to recover than those given care in person. "The use of Internet seems to appeal to modern youth reflected in our high participation rate (96 percent of eligible adolescents entered the study) and follow-up rates (97 percent)," said the lead researcher, Sanne Nijhof. In the study, 68 teenagers who had had chronic fatigue syndrome for almost two years were given access to cognitive behavioral therapy online. It's a form of therapy that teaches people to change how they think about and respond to situations. The therapy is effective in reducing the fatigue, joint pain, and poor memory and concentration of chronic fatigue syndrome when delivered in person.

Benton

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