April 2015

The future of television in the United States may hinge, oddly enough, on the government’s interpretation of an 80-year-old law. Regulators are close to determining whether some Internet TV services, like Sling TV and whatever Apple is planning, should be treated like more traditional pay TV services. The decision will have a large impact on what kind of programming is available in these new Internet bundles and how they compete with other options. The proceeding is being handled by the Federal Communications Commission. It hasn’t received much attention among the press or general public, but many of the companies affected by the ruling, from Disney to Verizon to AMC Networks, weighed in during a comment period that ended this week. The FCC’s decision is expected later in 2015.

The most important implication of that rule change is that programmers would then be forced to negotiate with Internet TV services just as they have to negotiate with cable companies. Services like Sling TV and Sony’s PlayStation Vue currently offer small bundles of channels from companies with which it has been able to strike deals. The same is expected of Apple. But if the definition of MVPD is changed to include these new services, they could have access to many more channels, and thus offer a more diverse slate of programming.

Rep John Garamendi (D-CA) has introduced legislation directing the Department of Defense to create a backup alternative to the Global Positioning System (GPS) for military and civilian purposes. The California Democrat argued that the prevalence of GPS in cellphone use, map systems and military capabilities increases the urgency for a contingency plan in the event of a disruption caused by nature or a terrorist attack. "We are increasingly reliant on the precision, navigation, and timing services that GPS provides. From land navigation on cell phones to a timing source for our national infrastructure, we need a reliable backup system to GPS," he said.

Rep Garamendi's measure would require the alternative system to be able to reach locations inside buildings and underground, and be compatible with the government's unused long-range navigation system infrastructure known as Loran. "This would help first responders and law enforcement more effectively protect the public," Rep Garamendi said. The bill would require the Pentagon to develop a fully operational backup system within three years.

One of the most important new concepts to emerge in the world of privacy in recent years is the European Union's "right to be forgotten." Although the idea was first proposed during the revision of the EU's data protection rules in 2012, it was a judgment handed down in May 2014 by Europe's highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), that gave it legal force. According to that ruling, the results of search engines operating in the EU are subject to the data protection laws there, since they frequently contain personal data. One consequence is that people have a right to demand that certain kinds of information should be deleted from those search results -- but not necessarily from the sites they link to. Strictly speaking, then, the "right to be forgotten" is more a "right to be remembered correctly."

However, that right is not absolute: it has to be weighed against the public interest. Links to outdated material that the person concerned believes is no longer relevant do not need to be removed if "there are particular reasons, such as the role played by the data subject in public life, justifying a preponderant interest of the public in having access to the information when such a search is made." That places a considerable burden on search engines, which are required to weigh the competing interests of the data subject and the public when requests to remove links are made. Given that the CJEU decision is less than a year old, it is not surprising that all parties affected by it -- EU data protection authorities, Internet companies, privacy lawyers, and individuals -- are still trying to understand exactly what it means in practice.

The operator of an underground marketplace hosted within the Tor network has reported a flaw in Tor that he claims is being used for an ongoing denial of service attack on the site. The problem, which is similar to one reported by another hidden site operator in December on the Tor mailing list, allows attackers to conduct a denial of service attack against hidden sites by creating a large number of simultaneous connections, or "circuits," via Tor, overwhelming the hidden service's ability to respond.

The problem is still under review, but it appears to be related to abuse of the "introduce" message in the Tor Hidden Services protocol, which is used to negotiate the connection between the client and the hidden server. By sending multiple "introduce" requests to the same hidden service, an attacker could make the targeted server create multiple circuits (paths over the Tor network used for the session), eating the server's available CPU and network resources and making it inaccessible to users. While the problem has been reproduced by at least one Tor developer, short-term fixes proposed to prevent the attacks have, thus far, not panned out. A number of long-term fixes have been proposed that require substantial changes to Tor's Hidden Services Protocol implementation, including the use of dedicated bridges to connect larger hidden sites to Tor (part of Tor's Proposal 188, first put forward in 2012 by Tor co-founder and developer Roger Dingledine in June 2012).