April 2014

The Broadcasting Board of Governors has condemned a recent decision by Russian authorities to cut off all remaining radio transmissions by US international media in Russia.

In a one-sentence letter dated March 21, Dmitry Kiselev, the director of the information agency Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today), stated that “we are not going to cooperate” with the BBG’s request to continue a long-standing contract for broadcasting on Russian soil.

Effective at the end of March, this decision removes the last vestige of Voice of America programming -- including news in Russian and English-language lessons -- from a local frequency in Moscow (810 AM). “Moscow has chosen to do the wrong thing and restrict free speech,” said BBG Chairman Jeff Shell. “This is a fundamental value shared by many countries around the world. The BBG will continue to reach audiences in Russia through digital platforms and via satellite transmissions.”

The ultra-slow Wi-Fi at your local coffee shop could soon be getting a big boost. Qualcomm announced plans for new technology that it says could triple Wi-Fi speeds in homes, offices and on public networks.

The company's new approach, which follows seven years of research, allows networks to transmit data to multiple groups of users simultaneously using algorithms that adapt on the fly to changes in usage. The technology is known as "MU-MIMO," which stands for "multi-user, multiple input, multiple output."

Qualcomm plans to sell MU-MIMO-enabled chips to manufacturers of wireless routers and access points, as well as to companies that make smartphones, tablets and other consumer electronics. When both the network and its users are employing the technology, Qualcomm claims it will boost speeds by two to three times.

"Using MU-MIMO is like using the carpool lane: the Wi-Fi Highway doesn't change, but grouping up with other users lets you go much faster while de-congesting the other lanes," the company said.

This report considers the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 alongside the use of network technologies to prolong IPv4 use in the face of depletion of further IPv4 protocol addresses, but it does not aim to address all issues surrounding the transition to IPv6 or to detail the economic incentives faced by various Internet actors.

It first provides a status update of address management issues and the run-out of IPv4. It then describes the advantages and limitations of increased use of network address translation as one response to sustain the use of IPv4 in the face of IPv4 address exhaustion. It provides an overview of the IPv6 protocol; the advantages of IPv6 deployment as a response to IPv4 address exhaustion and the IPv6 transition plan compared to actual deployment to date. Finally, the report examines the choices facing individual actors, their potential consequences, and the policy implications on openness and innovation for the future of the Internet.

The old-fashioned newspaper, long maligned for its stodginess and sagging profits, has one advantage over high-tech alternatives: You read it. It never reads you.

The digital sources that increasingly dominate our news consumption, by contrast, transmit information across the fundamentally public sphere of the Internet, leaving trails visible to anyone with the right monitoring tools -- be it your employer, your Internet provider, your government or even the scruffy hacker sitting next to you at the coffee shop, sharing the Wi-Fi signal.

A pay scale that doesn’t reward star employees makes hiring the best tech talent impossible. This is why privacy advocates have begun pushing news organizations, including The Washington Post, the New York Times and the Guardian, to encrypt their Web sites, as many technology companies increasingly do for e-mails, video chats and search queries. The growing use of encryption -- signaled by the little lock icon in your browser’s address box -- has emerged as perhaps the most concrete response to Edward Snowden’s revelations about the ability of the National Security Agency to collect almost anything that exists in digital form, including the locations, communications and online activities of people worldwide.

Encrypting something as complex as a news site is enormously difficult, according to technical experts within the industry. Several major news organizations offered encryption for some elements of their sites in recent years but largely stopped when problems arose in displaying content quickly and cleanly to readers, said Peter Eckersley, technology projects director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which tracks the use of the technology. In an era when news zings across the globe at the speed of light, making encryption work properly across an entire site is a challenge worth undertaking, advocates say. “No one has done it for real,” Eckersley said.