October 2013

6 tech hurdles for fixing Obamacare

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius described an Obamacare website pushed out too early and still wading through technical problems, even as she defended the site’s security and vowed to fix the mishaps.

The website never crashed, she said, and it has undergone significant improvement since its Oct. 1 launch. People no longer receive blank screens when they log on, thanks to double the number of servers and nonstop work rewriting code. Here’s what the hearing revealed about what went wrong with the technology and hurdles ahead:

Testing: Responding to a barrage of lawmaker questions, Sec Sebelius confirmed that HHS failed to conduct enough testing to ensure the entire system would work and revealed that parts of the website did not get “loaded” until the third week of September.
Security: Sec Sebelius assured lawmakers that consumer information on the website is safe and dismissed accusations of a HealthCare.gov “breach.” But a “sort of skilled hacker” did find a means to access certain personal information from the website, she said, adding it was “a theoretical problem that was immediately fixed.”
Privacy: The Administration is working with contractor CGI to change “boilerplate language” on HealthCare.gov that suggests Americans should not have a total expectation of privacy, Sec Sebelius said. “It’s an error that needs to be taken down and we should be held accountable for protecting privacy.”
Window browsing: Sec Sebelius said officials turned off the browsing feature two weeks before the website’s launch to ensure HealthCare.gov would work. But its removal, which forced people to register first before reviewing options, appears to have helped cause the traffic overload.
Outages/Verizon: Verizon Terremark’s data center went down and affects the federal data hub that determines eligibility information for state-run and federal exchanges.
Cost: The Administration has spent about $118 million on the HealthCare.gov website itself and about $56 million on additional IT to support it, Sec Sebelius said.

FCC Seeks Comment On National Public Safety Telecommunications Council's 4.9 GHZ National Plan Recommendations Final Report

The Federal Communications Commission’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau seeks comment on the above-captioned 4.9 GHz National Plan Recommendations Final Report submitted by the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council (NPSTC) on October 24, 2013.

NPSTC filed this Report in connection with a Fifth Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking released by the FCC on June 13, 2013, which considered a number of issues to improve spectrum efficiency and to encourage greater use of the 4940-4990 MHz (4.9 GHz) band for public safety communications. In that proceeding, the FCC noted, inter alia, that it wanted “to reevaluate our existing policies and to consider approaches to spur robust and efficient use in this band.” Specifically, the FCC sought comment on alternative frequency coordination proposals, current uses of the band, cost-effective ways to improve accessibility, and proposals regarding expanded eligibility, as well as alternative licensing approaches.

Interested parties may file comments on or before November 22, 20136 and reply comments on or before December 13, 2013.

PRISM already gave the NSA access to tech giants. Here’s why it wanted more.

[Commentary] The National Security Agency already had robust front door access to those companies via PRISM. So why did it need a back door? There are some obvious reasons: The operations take place overseas, where many statutory restriction on surveillance don't apply -- and where the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court (FISC) has no jurisdiction.

In fact, the FISC ruled a similar, smaller scale program involving cables on US territory illegal in 2011. So if the NSA decides to harvest that data on foreign soil, it can skip most of the oversight mechanisms. Data are an essentially global commodity, and the backup processes of companies often mean that data is replicated many places across the world. So just because you sent an e-mail in the US, doesn't mean it will always stay within the nation's borders for its entire life in the cloud. The NSA may have preferred its back-door method of accessing the data because it was less visible to the technology companies holding the data. By accessing data without the knowledge of tech companies, it didn't have to worry that the volume of data iit was accessing could raise privacy alarm bells within those companies.

NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide, Snowden documents say

The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials. By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from among hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans.

According to a top secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to data warehouses at the agency’s Fort Meade headquarters. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records -- ranging from “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, to content such as text, audio and video. NSA documents about the effort refer directly to “full take,” “bulk access” and “high volume” operations on Yahoo and Google networks. The NSA’s principal tool to exploit the data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency’s British counterpart, GCHQ. The infiltration is especially striking because the NSA, under a separate program known as PRISM, has front-door access to Google and Yahoo user accounts through a court-approved process.

Analysis: NSA's data grab ought to boost privacy concerns

The latest revelation of how government spies tap into the personal data that US consumers so blithely place into the control of the Internet's advertising giants is the most profound yet.

"This is the first real evidence of deep intrusions by [the National Security Agency] and [the UK’s] GCHQ into the internal networks of major Internet companies," says Dave Jevans, chief technology officer of mobile security firm Marble Security. "By essentially copying all traffic that flows through these networks, the intelligence agencies can see everything that happens at these companies." MUSCULAR appears to give government snoops access to not just contact lists and address books -- Snowden’s recent revelation -- but all e-mail and business documents, including Google docs used by hundreds of thousands of companies. The steady flow of revelations from the Snowden document may be having the effect of keeping convenience-minded consumers more attuned to the intensive harvesting of their every online move by Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Microsoft, AOL and other major and minor players treating consumer privacy as a free profit-making resource. Consumers and companies should not take this lightly. "We can assume a whole new level of threat," Jevans says. "The NSA and GCHQ must have insiders either working at Google and Yahoo, or in the datacenters where their servers are housed." Global companies could be susceptible to similar government snooping and should assess the security of data transfers between various datacenters, he added.

EU researchers create prototype for a server-free future Internet

Today’s internet is based on client devices such as PCs or smartphones talking to centralized servers to get their data. If an EU-funded project called Pursuit takes flight, the future could be a whole lot more distributed.

White House Vastly Overstates Federal Transparency, Auditors Report

The US has only completed half the commitments it made in 2011 under an international government transparency agreement, an independent auditor found recently. That’s in stark contrast to a March 2013 report in which White House officials claimed the government had completed 24 of its 26 original commitments to the Open Government Partnership.

The government has made minimal progress at declassifying benign national security records or using new technology to make it easier for people to request documents under the Freedom of Information Act, according to the independent assessment. The White House claimed to have fulfilled both commitments, citing a presidential order to establish a National Declassification Center and several new websites that receive and manage Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Those initiatives have largely failed, so far, to make government more transparent to citizens, according to the independent assessment.

ABI: Android Extends Smartphone Lead Despite Windows Surge

Fueled by shipment growth from Huawei, Lenovo, Xiaomi and Samsung, Android-based smartphone shipments reached a record high 80.6% of global shipments in the third quarter.

Windows Phone shipments surged 165% higher year-over-year with Nokia accounting for 95%, according to the latest excerpts from ABI Research’s Mobile Handset Markets Research Service. “The race for the third ecosystem is clearly favoring Windows Phone with 4% market share, over BlackBerry’s 1.5%, but there remains little opportunity for new market entrants to make a significant impact on Android’s dominance,” ABI senior analyst Michael Morgan commented.

Phone-hacking trial: three ex-News of the World staff plead guilty

Three former News of the World employees have pleaded guilty to phone hacking charges, an Old Bailey jury was told, as part of the opening of the trial of Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson, Brooks's husband and four other former employees of the now closed Sunday newspaper.

The crown prosecutor revealed that the individuals had already pleaded guilty at an earlier stage in proceedings, as he outlined to the court that News of the World was at the center of three criminal conspiracies dating back to the year 2000, involving the two former editors. Andrew Edis QC said that those pleading guilty were former News of the World news editors Neville Thurlbeck, Greg Miskiw and James Weatherup. The court also heard that the private investigator contracted by the newspaper to undertake the alleged hacking, Glenn Mulcaire, had pleaded guilty. But the prosecuting counsel told the jury that journalism was not on trial. "There is no justification of any kind for journalists for getting involved in phone hacking. That is an intrusion into people's privacy which is against the law," Edis said. "The prosecution says that journalists are no more entitled to break the law than anyone else," he added.

The End of the Wired Telephone Network is Coming...But Not Soon Enough

A New York Times article cited complaints from some residents (one, actually) of Mantoloking, an island off the coast of New Jersey that was badly hit by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012. The problem? Verizon, one of the companies that provides voice communications for Matoloking, had decided not to rebuild the island’s copper telephone network, which was destroyed by the hurricane. Instead, the company offered residents a wireless phone service, at least as a short-term fix. “Verizon decides then and there to step on us,” the article quotes the resident. In a column, the Wall Street Journal’s Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. took issue with efforts to turn Mantoloking into an “object of pity” for being left without telephone service as a “second blow” after the hurricane. Verizon isn’t rebuilding destroyed Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) networks because they are cruel, but because there are already better options.

Indeed, natural disasters aside, most Americans have already made the switch to digital telephony, and have done so on their own schedule and for all the right reasons. The Internet’s packet-switching architecture, open standards, non-proprietary protocols, peered networks and digital hardware are clearly better than separate, closed networks based on older analog technologies. They are also cheaper to operate and maintain. Competition among Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers is fierce, and prices are falling. As the number of homes yet to cut the cord to the PSTN network continues its precipitous drop, the endgame is now in sight. Even the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the old network under rules largely unchanged from the days of the government-sanctioned telephone monopoly, has called for its quick and orderly retirement. But there’s a catch. Decades-old regulations still on the books require the continued operation of the decaying and obsolete analog network, no matter how few users it still has and regardless of cost. The legacy PSTN rules have unintentionally created an enormous black hole for regulated network operators.

Benton

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