May 2014

T-Mobile Adds More Customers Than AT&T, Verizon Combined

T-Mobile US added more subscribers in the first quarter than AT&T and Verizon Communications combined, heightening the carrier’s allure as Sprint pursues a merger.

Promotions and cheaper plans helped T-Mobile add 1.3 million new monthly subscribers in the period, topping the 998,000 projected by analysts and the 1.16 million customers that AT&T and Verizon added combined.

The subscriber growth came at a cost: T-Mobile’s fourth quarterly loss in a row. Sprint plans to push forward with a bid for T-Mobile after meeting with banks to make debt arrangements for that offer, Bloomberg News reported, citing people with knowledge of the situation.

T-Mobile Chief Executive Officer John Legere is delivering on a promise to shake up the US wireless industry. The fourth-largest US carrier has been on a campaign to lure customers away from larger rivals by providing financing for phones, cheap international rates and as much as $650 to people who switch service.

Yahoo is the latest company ignoring Web users’ requests for privacy

Yahoo announced that it will stop complying with Do Not Track signals that Web browsers send on behalf of users who wish to not be monitored for advertising purposes.

When users click the Do Not Track setting in their browser, an HTTP header is sent to websites to state the user’s preference not to be tracked.

"While some third parties have committed to honor Do Not Track, many more have not,” the project website states. “In February 2012, the major online advertising trade groups pledged at the White House to support Do Not Track by the end of 2014; that promise remains unfulfilled. Efforts to standardize Do Not Track in the World Wide Web Consortium have resulted in deadlock, despite frequent urging by American and European policymakers.”

Yahoo also refused to honor Do Not Track signals from Internet Explorer 10 in late 2012 because Microsoft decided to turn it on by default instead of asking users to make the choice.

Hulu faces trial over sharing users’ video history with Facebook

Streaming video service Hulu’s decision to use Facebook’s “Like” button on its webpages may have violated a federal law that forbids companies from sharing customers’ video histories, according to a San Francisco court decision that could spell trouble for other companies.

In a 27-page ruling full of technological details, US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler refused to dismiss a class action complaint that accuses Hulu of violating a 1982 law known as the Video Privacy Protection Act, or VPPA.

While the original purpose of the law was to prevent video stores from sharing their customers’ rental histories, it continues to trip up online media companies like Netflix, which paid $9 million in 2012 to settle a VPPA-related lawsuit.

Even though a recent update to the VPPA permits video companies to tell Facebook and other third parties what their customers are watching, Judge Beeler concluded that Hulu did not obtain the required consent. Hulu did not send lists of its subscribers’ viewing habits to Facebook. Instead, the company is in legal trouble because it shared customers’ movie choices indirectly as a result of the “Like” button.

Libraries Working To Bridge The Cultural Divide

[Commentary] Too often children in the United States are not exposed to print or digital materials that reflect themselves or their culture. This can have harmful effects on a child, as such an absence impacts self-esteem. Similarly damaging is a child's lack of exposure to other cultures, which fuels intolerance and cultural invisibility.

Although we know the diversity of our country continues to grow, the percentage of children's books released each year either by a person of color or with a multicultural theme has been virtually unchanged over the past 18 years. Every year since 1994, statistics gathered by the Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows that just over 8 percent of children's books published in the United States represented Nonwhites.

The most current data from CCBC shows that out of the more than 5,000 titles published in 2013 only 253 were about Nonwhites. Since there is a lack of diversity in children's books, as a parent how do you find high quality materials that highlight your culture and a host of others? How do you find print and digital resources, programs and events that will introduce your child to new cultures? The answer is simple - at your local public library.

Recently, the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), the world's largest organization dedicated to the support and enhancement of library service to children, released a white paper titled The Importance of Diversity in Library Programs and Material Collections for Children. Author Jamie Campbell Naidoo, PhD, states: “By including diversity in its programs and collections, the library has the potential for helping children make cross-cultural connections and develop the skills necessary to function in a culturally pluralistic society.”

[LaTronica is President, Association for Library Service to Children]

AT&T Could Probably Buy DirecTV. But Why?

[Commentary] Comcast and Time Warner Cable? Doable, but rough. Sprint and T-Mobile? Really rough. But if AT&T wants to buy DirecTV, it has decent odds of getting it done.

At least from the regulators’ perspective. So let’s say regulators say the deal is OK with them. What does it do for AT&T? That one is harder to parse. It’s hard to argue, as Comcast and Time Warner Cable can, that the two companies can find operational efficiencies -- since maintaining telecommunications/broadband pipes and operating satellite TV networks are two distinct things.

The most obvious answer is that combining the two companies will give them more power when it comes to negotiating licensing deals with TV programmers. But that’s only relevant if AT&T decides or is allowed to keep its pay TV subscribers. And even then, the combined company may not be able to do much more than it was doing as two separate companies. Analyst Craig Moffett estimates that AT&T might eventually end up saving $400 million a year in programming costs.

Brookings Institution
May 2, 2014
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM EDT
http://www.brookings.edu/events/2014/05/02-video-streaming-and-digital-c...

Read more about The Evolution of Video Streaming and Digital Content Delivery

The race to bring NSA surveillance to the Supreme Court

It’s been almost a year since the nation learned that the government has been heavily surveilling Americans using a web of programs that potentially violate the Constitution or at least some laws.

The legality of those programs has yet to be definitively challenged. Even if the programs are legal, many feel the government is at least obligated to be transparent about them.

There have been at least 25 major lawsuits have been filed against the National Security Agency, President Barack Obama, telecommunications companies that facilitated data collection, and others involved in the government’s surveillance programs since Edward Snowden’s first revelations on June 6th, 2013, according to investigative journalism nonprofit ProPublica.

There have been various rulings by lower courts and appeals courts, some of which contradict each other. So far, only one case has been dismissed. The lack of consensus suggests that some part of the NSA program should eventually come before the Supreme Court.

There are arguably three cases closest to reaching the Supreme Court, all challenging section 215 and the phone-record surveillance. Two were filed after the Snowden revelations, and one was filed back in 2006 but just recently cleared a legal hurdle: Klayman v. Obama et. al., ACLU et. al. v. Clapper et. al., and Jewel et. al. v. National Security Agency.

Edward Snowden: NSA Spies Most on Americans

Edward Snowden told a crowd of fans that the US government's surveillance programs collect more data on Americans than it does on any other country.

"Do you think it's right that the NSA is collecting more information about Americans in America than it is about Russians in Russia?" Snowden said. "Because that’s what our systems do. We watch our own people more closely than we watch any other population in the world."

Snowden also took several shots at the National Security Agency and its top officials, and criticized the agency for wearing two contradictory hats of protecting US data and exploiting security flaws to gather intelligence on foreign threats.

"US government policy directed by the NSA ... is now making a choice, a binary choice, between security of our communications and the vulnerability of our communications," Snowden said, suggesting the government was biased toward the latter activity.

The Dark Side of the Sharing Economy

[Commentary] Proponents of the “sharing economy” say websites like Airbnb that make it easy for people to rent a spare bedroom or an apartment on a short-term basis are a boon to cities like New York and San Francisco because they generate income for residents while giving visitors a cheap place to stay.

But advocates often ignore or casually dismiss big problems with these short-term rentals, including the fact that they are making housing less affordable in big cities by restricting supply. And in some cases the rentals may be illegal, which is one reason the New York state attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, has begun an investigation.

There are good reasons that governments regulate housing. For example, officials use zoning laws to separate hotels and residential development so apartment buildings are not overrun by tourists. Rent control policies exist to help ensure that lower-income tenants have a place to live. Laws against short-term rentals make sure landlords do not operate illegal hotels and reduce the number of apartments available to permanent residents.

Surveillance orders declined in 2013

Amid a major public and press furor over National Security Agency surveillance, federal surveillance orders and demands for national-security related information declined slightly in 2013, according to statistics made public by the Justice Department.

The Obama Administration said it filed 1,655 applications with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2013, down from 1,856 the previous year. The court maintained its controversial record of virtually never rejecting a government surveillance request, doing so zero times in 2013. The last rejection of such an application was in 2009. The court did modify 34 applications for surveillance and/or physical searches, the Justice Department said in a letter sent to leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees.

The government made 178 applications last year for business records under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act -- the mechanism used to authorize the NSA's now-famous telephone metadata program. That's down from 212 such applications in 2012.

All requests for 215 orders made in 2013 were granted, but judges made changes to the vast majority of those -- with 141 modifications reported by the Justice Department. The FBI's issuance of National Security Letters -- administrative subpoenas for certain types of information from telephone companies, Internet firms and other utilities -- also ratcheted back a bit in that year. There were 14,219 requests in 2013 covering 5,334 Americans or legal residents, DOJ said. That's down from 15,299 NSL's in 2012, covering 6,223 individuals.

Benton

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