January 2014

Snapchat came this close to triggering California’s new, stricter data breach law

Snapchat has been under heightened scrutiny after an unauthorized leak exposed the usernames and phone numbers of millions of people. Independent researchers are still pointing out holes in the app's security. Now, a review of California's privacy law suggests that Snapchat was extremely fortunate in this whole episode.

An update to the law that took effect Jan 1 expands the definition of personal information to include usernames, passwords and the security questions (and answers) that are routinely used to recover them. The additional provision covers Snapchat in a way that should leave its executives feeling relieved. In dealing with the Gibson Security hack, Snapchat got lucky in two ways. The first was that Snapchat narrowly missed having to obey the strengthened regulation. The attack took place over Christmas; if the hackers had simply waited another week, the start-up would have been subject to the new rules, and the leaked usernames previously ignored by the law would suddenly become legally relevant. Second, according to a spokesman for Ellen Corbett, the state senator who authored the revisions, the amended law's notification requirements are only triggered if both usernames and passwords are leaked. Because the Gibson Security hackers only compromised usernames and phone numbers, the company wouldn't have set off the notification requirement under either version of the law.

Judge: Sanction for Samsung's leak of Apple secrets is public shaming

US Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal was furious. Details of a patent licensing deal between Apple and Nokia that were turned over to Samsung's outside counsel with an agreement -- protected by court order -- that they would absolutely, positively never be seen by Samsung itself -- turned up in the hands of a Samsung licensing executive who told a shocked Nokia executive: "all information leaks." Judge Grewel delivered his answer: His "public findings of wrongdoing" -- plus court costs -- would be "sufficient both to remedy Apple and Nokia's harm and to discourage similar conduct in the future." To the judge, in his courtroom, a public finding of wrongdoing probably seems like a big deal. Outside the court, where most people live, his admonishment is likely to get lost.

Complaints about loud TV commercials drop

TV watchers are making fewer and fewer complaints about how loud commercials are.

A Federal Communications Commission report showed that the complaints it received for overly loud commercials had declined by nearly seven times from January to December of 2013. Under the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act, the FCC bars commercials from being broadcast at louder volumes than the TV shows they accompany. The FCC's rules prohibiting loud commercials went into effect in December 2012. In January 2013, the FCC received 4,405 complaints for commercial loudness. By December, that number had dropped to 656. “There continues to be a general downward trend in complaints related to loud commercials since December 2012,” the head of FCC’s enforcement bureau, P. Michele Ellison, wrote in the report. In all, the commission received more than 20,000 complaints since the rules took effect in late 2012. Of those, more than 14,500 were referred to the commission’s enforcement bureau.

White House soothes Brazil over NSA

The Obama Administration is making an effort to quell foreign concerns about spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence arms.

National Security Adviser Susan Rice met with Brazil’s foreign minister, Luiz Alberto Figueiredo, to update him on President Obama’s plans to rein in the spy agency. Rice “outlined the results of the review of US signals intelligence activities, and the reforms to be implemented,” the White House said in a statement. Though the White House has not specifically said whether the NSA would back off Rousseff, a senior administration official said at the time that they “have made determinations to not pursue surveillance on dozens of heads of state in government.”

How to stop the NSA? Start with new bills at each statehouse, activists say

State lawmakers nationwide have decided that they’re not going to wait for Congress to rein in the powers of the National Security Agency and the American surveillance state. Instead, they’ve proposed bills that would limit cooperation by state officials or slow the distribution of state resources. But even legal experts who might want some of these changes admit that states’ abilities to make an end-run around federal law is merely symbolic at best. At worst, it's perhaps illegal.

“This strikes me as bad policy, but irrespective of that, it is plainly unconstitutional under the First Amendment,” said Fred Cate, a law professor at Indiana University. Cate added that while he is “wildly sympathetic with the frustration motivating these bills,” he believes this approach is misguided. For the moment, nearly all the bills that have been proposed or floated appear to come from a group calling itself “Nullify NSA.” The group is organized by the Tenth Amendment Center and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, both groups that advocate constitutional nullification, the legal theory that an American state can nullify, invalidate, or ignore federal law that it doesn’t like. By Nullify NSA’s own count, 10 states have proposed some version of the “4th Amendment Protection Act.” Those states include Arizona, California, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Washington. Nullify NSA noted that a pair of related anti-surveillance bills is set to be voted on by New Hampshire's House Committee on Criminal Justice and Public Safety. If approved, they would be sent to the full state legislature.

Why it's time to recalibrate privacy

[Commentary] We are undergoing the "Uberfication" of our personal privacy. We freely exchange personal information for convenience. We tell Uber where we are, our credit card information and some personal information, all for a much better experience than most taxi services provide. This mindset extends to our shopping experiences. Most people wouldn't give their e-mail address when they first walk in the store, but in exchange for the convenience of having the receipt sent to our e-mail address, we now gladly give it out. At the same time, we are becoming much more hesitant to trust in the Internet and give up our personal data. Yet, so many vendors and services now have so much of our information, one has to wonder how they are protecting it. Going forward, we expect businesses and individuals will look at security and privacy more holistically as they evaluate the services and tools used for convenience and productivity. Security does not exist in a vacuum and must be regularly evaluated based on the latest vulnerabilities and technology available.

[Alan Dabbiere is chairman of AirWatch]

FCC Chairman Wheeler: FCC Will Put Some Flesh On Open Internet Principles 'Shortly'

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler said the commission will soon put more "flesh" on how the FCC will preserve basic Internet openness principles in the wake of the DC federal court's vacating and remand of the FCC's non-blocking and non-discrimination rules.

Following the FCC's public meeting Jan 30, Chairman Wheeler did not say how he would approach that, including whether or not that would be using the FCC's current authority or reclassifying broadband as a common carrier service, saying he was still considering all the tools in his toolkit. "As I have also said, we interpret the court decision as an invitation and we will accept that invitation," he said, echoing his statement following the court decision two weeks ago. Chairman Wheeler has signaled he might take a case-by-case approach to enforcing those principles, but was asked how that would square with giving stakeholders notice of what might run afoul of them. Chairman Wheeler repeated that he was in support of an open Internet and said he would be actively protecting it. But he would not provide any specifics.

NBCU, Comcast Offer Targeted Advertising

Jumping into the advance advertising business, Comcast and NBCUniversal introduced a suite of advertising products offering addressability and advanced analytics.

Being owned by a cable company should give NBCU an advantage in offering advanced advertising. At this point, satellite distributors DirecTV and Dish Network have been among the leaders in letting advertisers address advertising to targeted viewers down to the individual household level. The company is calling its offering NBCU+ Powered by Comcast. "This is the first product out of the marriage of Comcast and NBCU, targeting at scale," said Linda Yaccarino, president for ad sales at NBCU. Yaccarino said pricing for the product hasn’t been developed, but the ability to provide a higher level of addressability and greater return on investment “is probably a premium piece of inventory.” NBCU will be able to use anonymized data from Comcast combined with research from other sources including loyalty card data to better target national buys on its linear broadcast and cable networks and will be able target ads on the household level on its video on demand inventory. Comcast and NBCU will also be able to provide advertisers with more specific information about who has seen the ads allowing them to evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign.

Cable’s Share of Pay-TV Market Continues to Shrink as Telco IPTV and Satellite Surge

Market research firm Infonetics Research released excerpts from its latest Pay TV Services and Subscribers report, which forecasts and analyzes the cable TV, satellite TV, and telecommunications Internet protocol television (IPTV) services markets:

Worldwide video service revenue, including cable and satellite pay TV and telecommunications IPTV, grew again in the first half of 2013 (1H13), to $110 billion, a 2% uptick over the second half of 2012
Telecommunications IPTV and satellite revenue continue to rise, thanks to new subscribers and increased ARPU in the critical regions of North America and Western Europe
Meanwhile, cable revenue market share fell another percent in 1H13, primarily due to a slowdown in subscriber growth in the lucrative North American market, where video subscribers are declining at a pace of 1.5% to 2.5% annually
DirecTV remains the pay-TV revenue market share leader in 1H13
By 2017, Infonetics expects the global pay-TV market to hit $270 billion, a 2012–2017 compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 5%

Google paid $4B for patents: why the Motorola deal worked out just fine

[Commentary] A closer look at Google’s purchase and sale of Motorola shows the final price of the deal was around $4 billion for a big patent portfolio. That’s a reasonable price to pay in the face of a unreasonable patent system.

The bottom line is that the Motorola patents haven’t always worked out as well as Google might have hoped. But that doesn’t mean buying Motorola was a mistake. The Motorola patent purchase was a sane response to a patent system that is so irrational that all three branches of the US government are now trying to reform it.

Benton

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