July 2014

Congress is about to vote on a terrible new cybersecurity bill

There's a new cybersecurity bill making its way through Congress, sponsored and written by Sen Diane Feinstein (D-CA), and critics are already calling it a new backdoor for surveillance by the National Security Agency.

The Cybersecurity Intelligence Sharing Act of 2014 (CISA) was just approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee, putting it on track for a Senate vote soon. But like its controversial predecessors, the bill is coming under fire as a step backwards in the fight for surveillance reform.

The bill's primary effect would be a new requirement for sharing information on "cyber threat indicators," a vague term that could refer to anything from an ongoing hack to a vulnerability in commercial software. Once a company makes a report to the government with information about a threat indicator, CISA would require broad sharing across federal agencies, including with the NSA, which would be given a more central role in threat management under the new scheme.

Advocacy groups have seized on the reporting requirements as a troubling expansion of NSA access to private networks. The Center for Democracy in Technology says the provision "risks turning the cybersecurity program it creates into a back door wiretap." CDT also notes the bill lacks many crucial privacy protections that were included in previous cybersecurity acts. The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls the bill "fatally flawed," and raised concerns that it would create a new pipeline of data from independent companies to the NSA.

Moffett: FCC's broadband redefinition would skew penetration numbers

A Federal Communications Commission proposal to raise the definition of broadband will skew penetration statistics, according to a report from MoffettNathanson.

The FCC is studying whether to raise the bar for broadband from 4 Mbps downstream/1 Mbps up to 10 or as much as 25 Mbps down and effectively disqualifying DSL as broadband.

"Raising the FCC standard will naturally lower the number of people who have 'broadband' (i.e. penetration will fall, at least initially)," wrote Craig Moffett. The change will also have wider implications because "it will reduce the portion of the country for which broadband is deemed 'available,' arguably bolstering the case for FCC authority to do something about the shortfall."

The FCC, in addition to throwing into question what areas are and are not receiving broadband, will also probably reshape the overall market share landscape, Moffett wrote. "Cable's share will, on paper, appear to rise. Importantly, so too will that share of the country where cable is deemed to be the only available option, bolstering arguments for FCC authority to intervene in the absence of effective competition," Moffett wrote.

NTCA Finds Fast Rural School Broadband

It appears that the rural-rural broadband gap applies to schools as well as the broader Internet marketplace. That seems the best explanation for two substantially different measurements of average school bandwidth in surveys conducted by NTCA -- The Rural Broadband Association and EducationSuperHighway, an advocacy organization focused on bringing better broadband to the nation’s schools.

The NTCA released the results from a survey of its rural telecom service provider members which found that schools served by those companies, on average, purchase broadband connections delivering 65 Mbps downstream and 13 Mbps upstream. But EducationSuperHighway, which surveyed schools nationwide, found a median bandwidth of 33 Mbps.

These results might seem surprising, considering that broadband is generally available more broadly and at higher speeds in metro areas than in rural areas because it is less costly to deploy broadband in metro areas. That phenomenon is known as the rural-urban gap. But FCC researchers also have noted a rural-rural gap: Rural areas served by small independent telcos generally have better broadband availability and higher speeds than rural areas where the incumbent local carrier is one of the nation’s larger carriers such as AT&T or Verizon.

Bell Labs Claims New Speed Record with 10 Gbps Over Copper

The research and development arm of Alcatel-Lucent, Bell Labs, announced a new speed record for the transmission of data over copper lines of 10 Gbps (10,000 Mbps).

The experiment was in a lab setting, using prototype technology called XG-FAST, which is a prototype extension of G.Fast, the next generation copper broadband technology.

G.Fast is being finalized as an ITU standard, and should start becoming commercially available sometime in 2015. The 10 Gbps over copper experiment used two bonded copper pairs with an expanded frequency range of 500 MHz. The transmission was over a very short distance of 30 meters (approx 100 feet).

How to Keep the Internet of Things From Repeating AOL’s Early Blunders

[Commentary] By today’s standards, America Online’s tightly controlled experience seems quaint -- and pretty silly. But that early-’90s scenario could very well repeat itself today, with the so-called Internet of Things.

Yes, this vast array of smart devices will all be connected to the public Internet, but they may already be evolving in a way where they can’t all talk to each other, where one set of devices is cut off from another, just as AOL was cut off from Prodigy or CompuServe in a pre-web version of proprietary wishful thinking.

The Internet of Things only really makes sense as a concept if lots of devices can talk to lots of very different devices -- your car to your thermostat, your fitness band to your coffee maker. Few hardware makers would openly disagree with that premise. But at the same time, corporate tech giants are racing to create competing standards through which devices will connect, and these are, in effect, the AOLs and CompuServes of today.

Adults without landlines are more likely to be smokers and heavy drinkers

New results released by the Centers for Disease Control reveal that two of every five American households have ditched their landlines for cellphones -- and there are interesting differences between the health of households that still have landlines and those that are wireless-only.

The data are part of a preliminary study from the National Health Interview Survey, a part of the CDC's statistics department that regularly conducts tens of thousands of phone and in-person interviews to get a snapshot of Americans' health.

In 2003, the agency decided to also look at how many households have landlines to better tailor its survey. Since then, it's become the most prominent government agency collecting the data. Overall, 39.1 percent of adults are in wireless-only households; that number goes up to 47.1 percent when the figure also includes children.

You may expect that young adults are primarily driving the trend toward households that only use cellphones -- something that has certainly been true in the past. But 2014 marked the first time that, by a slim majority, adults 35 and older make up the largest portion of households that rely solely on cellphones. In line with other studies looking at the demographics of technology use, Hispanic adults are also far more likely to be living in households that only had wireless phones.

FCC Enforcement Bureau Adds Decorated Prosecutor to its Leadership Team

The Federal Communications Commission’s Enforcement Bureau announced that Katherine Winfree has joined the Bureau as Chief of Staff. Winfree previously served as the Chief Deputy Attorney General for the State of Maryland -- the second highest law enforcement officer in the state.

Winfree is a nationally recognized leader in the area of prosecution and law enforcement. During her time as Chief Deputy Attorney General, Winfree supervised the 32 divisions of the Maryland Attorney General’s Office. In 2013, she successfully represented the state before the US Supreme Court in Maryland v. King, in which the Court upheld the constitutionality of the Maryland DNA Collection Act.

Before joining the Maryland Attorney General’s office, Winfree served for nearly two decades as a federal and state prosecutor, trying high-profile cases including federal public-corruption cases and the prosecution of the Beltway snipers, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo.

Among other roles with the US Department of Justice, she has worked in the Appellate Section of the Criminal Division and has served as Chief of the Economic Crime and Public Corruption Sections in the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.

Germany-Brazil World Cup Match Was Bigger Than Super Bowl on Twitter

The World Cup semifinal between Germany and Brazil became the most discussed sporting event ever on Twitter.

The match's 35.6 million tweets, peaking at 580,166 tweets per minute, were the most ever for a sporting event on Twitter, per the San Francisco-based company. The 2014 Super Bowl, for the sake of comparison, generated 24.9 million tweets.

In Google Newsroom, Brazil Defeat Is Not A Headline

If you do a Google search on the World Cup game in which Germany slaughtered Brazil 7-1, the top results will say things like "destroy," "defeat," and "humiliate." But Google itself is choosing to steer clear of negative terms.

The company has created an experimental newsroom in San Francisco to monitor the World Cup, and turn popular search results into viral content. And they've got a clear editorial bias. After the dramatic defeat by Germany, the team makes a revealing choice to not publish a single trend on Brazilian search terms. Copywriter Tessa Hewson says they're just too negative. "We might try and wait until we can do a slightly more upbeat trend."

In old-school newsrooms, the saying goes: if it bleeds, it leads. Because this new newsroom is focused on getting content onto everyone's smartphone, Agrawal says, editors may have another bias: to comb through the big data in search of happy thoughts.

PTC Seeks Indecency Complaints Against CBS’ ‘Reckless’

The Parents Television Council is calling on its members to file indecency complaints against CBS over a recent episode of Reckless. The episode was rated TV-14 (for sex, language and violence), so viewers were warned, but PTC says there was too much of that for a show that airs at 8 p.m. central/mountain and 9 p.m. ET.

PTC was concerned about scenes of sexual assault in a June 29 episode, scenes it called explicit and a violation of indecency rules.

Benton

Search