April 2012

Obama hits back at online spying

[Commentary] Foreign-policy sanctions usually target oil tankers, rogue regimes and moneybags dictators. President Obama is now adding a new category - "digital guns for hire." Fittingly at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the President took aim at Syria and Iran, whose leaders have tapped compliant phone companies and Internet services to hunt down dissenters. It's not clear how effective the tech sanctions will be, but Obama's move follows a deepening awareness of the power that smart-phone apps and social media can play in rallying forces for change. Since last year, for example, the U.S. State Department has aided protest groups in countries where autocrats and their censors want to curb the Internet. By itself, the White House action isn't likely to produce an end to such fighting. But it should put other countries on notice that censoring and manipulating the free-running Internet won't escape notice or a response from Washington.

White House pushes for privacy safeguards in cybersecurity bill

Senior administration officials stressed the importance of including strong privacy protections in cybersecurity legislation. Without adequate protections, "the companies that run the Internet would no longer be accountable to the laws that protect privacy" and could "disclose very broadly, private sensitive information to the government," one official said. The call for strong privacy protections came ahead of a House vote scheduled this week on the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). The officials declined to discuss specific legislation during the call, but the House bill has drawn heated opposition from civil liberties groups worried about how it would affect privacy.

Conservative groups slam House cybersecurity bill

Six leading conservative groups urged Congress to re-work the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). In a letter to bill sponsors Reps. Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD), the conservative groups wrote that CISPA "risks unduly expanding federal power, undermining freedom of contract, and harming U.S. competitiveness in the technology sector." The letter was signed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, TechFreedom, FreedomWorks, Americans for Limited Government, the Liberty Coalition and American Conservative Union Chairman Al Cardenas.

Broadcasters Unite Over Political File Counter-Proposal

Broadcasters on April 20 presented a united front on a compromise proposal to post political ad info online. According to a filing at the Federal Communications Commission, the National Association of Broadcasters, the stations groups owned by ABC, CBS, NBC, Univision and Fox joined with TV station groups that had proposed the compromise and a number of state broadcaster associations to present the proposal before the sunshine period triggered for the planned April 27 vote on online disclosure of TV station public files, including political files. Station groups pitching a compromise had indicated more groups might be willing to sign up. The unified broadcaster proposal includes a schedule for updating the information. The broadcasters say they are OK with phasing in the requirement by starting with about 200 stations in the top markets, as the FCC has proposed to help test it.

Amazon Cautions Congress About Data Caps, Specialized Services

Amazon exec Paul Misener plans to tell Congress that while bandwidth pricing is OK, unreasonable caps are not and neither are specialized services that disadvantage competition.

According to a summary of Misener's written testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee April 24, Misener says that "although subscribers should pay for the bandwidth they use immutable or unrealistically priced data caps could hinder or prevent competitive products and services made possible by online video." He also warns that so-called specialized services -- ones that do not travel over the public Internet and are not subject to Federal Communications Commission network neutrality rules -- need to be watched carefully to insure they don't "impede" the growth of online delivery and are not offered on unequal terms. He says that inequality would be more pronounced in rural areas where alternative choices are more limited.

Network Neutrality Suit Players Agree to Briefing Schedule

It looks like the legality of the Federal Communications Commission's network neutrality rules will likely be debated through the end of the year in federal court filings.

The parties to the Verizon/MetroPCS/Free Press challenges to FCC network neutrality rules, which have been consolidated into a single case, have agreed on and submitted to the court a schedule for briefs before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. If the court agrees, the first briefs will be filed July 2 and the final briefs not until Nov. 21 (Thanksgiving is Nov. 22). The parties have asked that Verizon, Free Press, and MetroPCS be allowed to file separate briefs, even though they have all challenged the rules. That is because Verizon and MetroPCS are on opposite sides in a separate challenge to FCC data roaming rules (though the two also want to file a joint brief as well). In that challenge, Verizon and MetroPCS disagree over the FCC's authority to regulate wireless broadband, which is also at issue in the network neutrality rules challenge. Free Press wants to file separately because it is challenging the rules because it thinks they don't go far enough, not because they go too far, as the others contend. In addition, the parties say there need to be separate briefs for the pro-FCC interveners in Free Press' challenge to the rules. That is because CTIA, the intervenor in the Free Press, is supporting the FCC's decision not to impose its rules fully on mobile broadband and is not addressing or defending the FCC's regulatory authority, while the pro-FCC intervenors in the Verizon/MetroPCS challenge support the FCC's statutory authority to adopt the rules, which the cell companies are challenging.

Netflix Not Buying Comcast Excuse about Xfinity Data

In a letter to investors, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings suggested that Comcast was competing unfairly in the streaming-video sector.

As part of his company's first-quarter earnings report, Hastings wrote that Comcast was providing the company's Xfinity Web-video service a competitive advantage not offered to Netflix or other competitors. "Comcast caps its residential broadband customers at 250 gigabytes per month," Hastings wrote. "On the Xbox the Netflix app, the Hulu app, and the HBO GO app, are all subject to this cap. But Comcast has decided that its own Xfinity Xbox app is not subject to this 250 gigabyte cap. This is not neutral in any sense." Hastings has begun to regularly complain in public about Comcast's decision not to count Xfinity's data against the company's cap. Netflix doesn't typically criticize competitors in public so this is likely a sign that the issue is important to the Web's top video service.

CBO: House cyber e-gov bill would cost $710 million

A government anti-hacking bill slated for a House vote this week would cost an additional $710 million to implement, according to an independent federal agency. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that H.R. 4257, bipartisan legislation to automate many requirements under the 2002 Federal Information Security Management Act, would not violate House pay-go rules requiring offsets for mandatory spending. Much of the money doled out between 2013 and 2017 would cover salaries, expenses and equipment.

Tech firms behaving badly

What’s Silicon Valley’s latest export? Try corporate misbehavior.

In the past two weeks, Google has been spanked for obstructing federal regulators, Apple was slapped with a Justice Department suit for conspiring to drive up e-book prices, and seven tech companies were told they’ll go on trial for allegedly colluding to stop employees from jumping from one to the other. It’s a major turn of events for an industry that once held itself up as a “don't be evil” alternative to old-school corporate greed. And suddenly, consumers, courts and regulators are having a hard time seeing tech titans in a different light than any other industry or even the robber barons whose actions gave rise to antitrust laws they’re now accused of breaking.

Bloated website code drains your smartphone's battery

Regular smartphone users know that watching a video or playing a game can quickly drain the battery, and we recently learnt that free apps are also power hungry, but even simple web browsing has an energy cost. Now, researchers at Stanford University and Deutsche Telekom have discovered that many popular sites, such Wikipedia, IMDB and even iPhone manufacturer Apple's homepage, are wasting energy due to bloated code.

The researchers have also shown how to reduce this energy usage by almost 30 per cent, without affecting user experience. Stanford computer scientist Narendran Thiagarajan and colleagues used an Android phone hooked up to a multimeter to measure the energy used in downloading and rendering 25 popular websites. The team then repeated the measurements with locally saved versions of the website, allowing them to separate out the energy required to render a page from that need to download it. Most modern websites use Javascript and CSS files to provide additional functions and styles that aren't possible using basic HTML, but the researchers discovered that many of the websites they looked at were loading large files that weren't being used in the page.

Benton

Search