1. Monthly archive
  2. January 2014

January 2014

Taiwan Fines Apple for iPhone Price-Plan Meddling

Apple has been fined 20 million New Taiwan dollars (US$670,000) and ordered to stop interfering with mobile service providers and handset distributors' pricing, Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission said.

Apple can appeal but may face a fine up to NT$50 million if it doesn't comply, the commission said. It found the Cupertino-based company violated article 18 of Taiwan's Fair Trade Act by telling Taiwan's three main service providers how much to sell iPhones for. Apple also asked Chunghwa Telecom, Far Eastone Telecommunication and Taiwan Mobile to adjust rates. The US computer company has no right to meddle in companies' iPhone pricing plans after selling them distribution rights, the commission said. The three carriers can distribute or resell iPhones at their complete discretion after paying Apple for those rights, the commission added.

[Dec 25]

In telecom merger mania, skeptical eye from Obama administration

A pair of potentially transformative US telecommunications companies and cable deals could run afoul of Obama Administration regulators who worry that mergers among market leaders would hurt consumers.

With both cable and mobile phone operators grappling with slowing growth, speculation has intensified recently about potential takeovers of No. 4 wireless service provider T-Mobile US and No. 2 cable service provider Time Warner Cable. Some possible buyers, including Sprint and Comcast, may face headwinds in convincing US regulators that their deals would improve competition. "The Obama Administration definitely is more skeptical of large corporate combinations... They are concerned about the effects of market concentration on consumers," said former Federal Communications Commission member Robert McDowell. "It's not an impossible wall to climb over but it is a high wall nonetheless," he added. The Obama Administration's pro-consumer tack could threaten deals that eliminate big competitors within an industry, such as a Sprint bid for T-Mobile or a Comcast bid for Time Warner Cable. Regulators could, on the other hand, welcome transactions that bolster new entrants, such as one combining satellite TV service provider Dish Network with T-Mobile, experts say. "Dish/T-Mobile, from a regulatory standpoint, it would be a slam-dunk," said Stifel analyst David Kaut.

[Dec 24]

What mobile broadband in Africa can teach America about fiber to the home

[Commentary] Africa is the world’s final frontier for the Internet.

It has 1 billion people across some 50 countries. The average Internet penetration rate is so low, 14 percent, that it has nowhere to go but up. According to the ITU, fixed broadband subscriptions in Africa have not grown much and stand at just 0.3 percent today, but mobile broadband subscriptions have increased more than 50 fold in 6 years. When it comes to broadband, Africa’s future is mobile. Looking at how Africa has innovated with mobile provides a valuable lesson for many in the developed world who think that fiber to the home (FTTH) is the only choice for the future. Mobile will be the choice for Africa going forward because of its low cost relative to other networks, the geo-demographic features of the continent, and users’ comfort with the technology.

Informa, a leading telecom research firm, estimates mobile broadband connections in Africa to grow to 250 million by the end of 2015. These projections also include a doubling of smartphone ownership. However, the majority of Africans still connect to the Internet with ordinary phones and 2G and 3G networks. In the US, broadband will continue to be a key technology policy issue in 2014. The debate will pit the emotional, religious supporters of fiber against the rational, pragmatic perspective that a variety of technologies are needed to meet a variety of uses. In 2014 we can expect to hear more paeans that FTTH is the panacea to the world’s problems. To be sure, FTTH is an important technology, but it is should not be the one and only choice when considering a range of solutions to meet the broadband future. Its key disadvantage is that it is not mobile. Mobility and access to the Internet on mobile devices is ever more important. The broadband future demands not one, but many technologies. The US should take a lesson from Africa -- keeping an open mind in regards to future needs and technologies is a far better strategy than religiously subscribing to one technology as the only way forward.

[Dec 26]

Snowden: No concept of privacy in future

The surveillance practices in George Orwell’s book 1984 pale in comparison to reality, Edward Snowden said in a Christmas Day address.

The speech, less than two minutes long, was given on Great Britain’s Channel 4, which has long televised alternative addresses to Queen Elizabeth’s traditional Christmas address. Snowden, whose leaks about National Security Agency surveillance programs have him wanted for espionage by the Obama administration, called on governments to end mass surveillance. “We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go,” he said. “Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person. A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded unanalyzed thought. And that's a problem because privacy matters.”

[Dec 25]

FCC delays price cap on prison phone calls

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is temporarily delaying an order that telephone companies limit the amount they charge prisoners and their families for long-distance calls.

The draft regulation, which civil rights advocates had been urging for a decade, will be open for public comments for an additional two weeks as result of a request from the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections. The rule would prevent prisons from charging more than 21 cents per minute for the calls except in “extraordinary circumstances." Final reply comments on the FCC’s effort, which allow the public to weigh in on other praise and criticism, were originally due by Dec 30. Now those comments will be due by Jan 13, 2014. The deadline for initial comments, originally due by Dec 13, was pushed back to Dec 20.

[Dec 26]

NSA Struggles to Make Sense of Flood of Surveillance Data

William Binney, creator of some of the computer code used by the National Security Agency to snoop on Internet traffic around the world, delivered an unusual message in September to an audience worried that the spy agency knows too much. It knows so much, he said, that it can't understand what it has.

"What they are doing is making themselves dysfunctional by taking all this data," Binney said. The agency is drowning in useless data, which harms its ability to conduct legitimate surveillance, claims Binney, who rose to the civilian equivalent of a general during more than 30 years at the NSA before retiring in 2001. Analysts are swamped with so much information that they can't do their jobs effectively, and the enormous stockpile is an irresistible temptation for misuse. The NSA needs more room to store all the data it collects -- and new phone records, data on money transfers and other information keep pouring in. A new storage center being built in Utah will eventually be able to hold more than 100,000 times as much as the contents of printed materials in the Library of Congress, according to outside experts.

[Dec 25]

If not the NSA, who should store the phone data?

A measure that President Barack Obama is considering as a way to curb the National Security Agency’s mass storage of phone data is already facing resistance -- not only from the intelligence community but also from privacy advocates, the phone industry and some lawmakers. President Obama suggested that he was open to the idea of requiring phone companies to store the records and allowing the government to search them under strict guidelines.

Currently, the agency stores those records itself, part of a sprawling collection program that came to light through documents shared by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. But now, industry officials, privacy advocates and congressional officials are expressing resistance to any alternatives that involve mandating phone companies to hold the data for longer periods. And other possible scenarios, including having a private third party store the records, also raise concerns, they say. Civil libertarians consider mandated phone-company or third-party storage an unacceptable “proxy” for the NSA’s holding of the database. Recently, a group of privacy advocates met with White House officials and urged them not to seek legislation to mandate data retention, among other things. They endorsed an idea by a surveillance review group appointed by President Obama to halt the NSA’s bulk storage of the phone logs. The phone companies, for their part, argue that storing the data for the NSA would lead to a flood of requests from local prosecutors, federal agents and divorce attorneys, unless legislation mandates it be used strictly for government counterterrorism purposes. Even then, the companies see it as a major headache.

[Dec 25]

Edward Snowden is wrong: His mission has not been accomplished.

[Commentary] “For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” former NSA contractor Edward Snowden said. Snowden went on to explain that he had "already won" because the journalists working from the documents he secreted away from the NSA are giving the public a chance to weigh in on surveillance policies.

But while it's not quite flight-suit level deception, calling the current state of affairs mission accomplished is a significant change in the scope of Snowden's ambitions compared to when he first stepped forward as the source of the NSA documents. In a video interview with the Guardian released shortly after he stepped out of the shadows, he espoused many of the same hopes about the public having input on the secret machinations of intelligence agencies. But he also expressed a much loftier goal: substantive policy change. So far, Snowden's "greatest fear" has come true. Public opinion over his disclosures has been divided and no significant policy changes to NSA surveillance have emerged. And the administration is standing by the status quo despite the lack of evidence that it has been effective at its stated goal of halting terrorist attacks.

[Dec 26]

Emergency Alert System May Go Commercial

Federal emergency managers are considering replacing their current custom built system for notifying the public about emergencies with a commercial alternative, contracting documents show.

The custom built system, known as the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System - Open Platform for Emergency Networks, or IPAWS-OPEN, has not met a slate of minimum standards, such as operating with 99.9 percent uptime and allowing the president and other officials to alert the public about emergencies within 10 minutes, according to contracting documents posted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Dec 20. The current system has been dogged by glitches, too many layers of technical bureaucracy and insufficient storage space, FEMA said. Those flaws raise “the risk of loss of life and damage” during a disaster, FEMA said.

[Dec 26]

Researchers: It Is Trivially Easy To Match Metadata To Real People

In defending the NSA's telephony metadata collection efforts, government officials have repeatedly resorted to one seemingly significant detail: This is just metadata -- numbers dialed, lengths of calls.

"There are no names, there’s no content in that database," President Barack Obama told Charlie Rose in June. No names; just metadata. New research from Stanford demonstrates the silliness of that distinction. Armed with very sparse metadata, Jonathan Mayer and Patrick Mutchler found it easy -- trivially so -- to figure out the identity of a caller. Mayer and Mutchler are running an experiment which works with volunteers who agree to use an Android app, MetaPhone, that allows the researchers access to their metadata. Now, using that data, Mayer and Mutchler say that it was hardly any trouble at all to figure out who the phone numbers belonged to, and they did it in just a few hours.

[Dec 26]

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