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  2. December 2015

December 2015

Arthur R. Taylor, Ex-CBS President Who Sold Yankees to Steinbrenner, Dies at 80

Arthur R. Taylor, a former corporate wunderkind who became president of CBS at 37, unloaded an underperforming network-owned property, the New York Yankees, and then, as a sometimes nettlesome overachiever, was fired by William S. Paley, the imperious CBS chairman and founder, died on Dec. 3 in Salisbury Township (PA). He was 80. The cause was pulmonary failure, his wife, Kathryn, said.

Taylor was also instrumental at CBS in instituting television’s family viewing hour, a short-lived effort, pushed by the Federal Communications Commission and adopted voluntarily by the networks, to reduce prime-time programming deemed unsuitable for children. Taylor was also the founding president of the Entertainment Channel, a joint venture by the RCA Corporation and what is now the Rockefeller Group. A premium cable channel that offered quality programming, it lasted less than a year, but it led to another joint cable venture, the Arts and Entertainment Network, better known as A&E.

BuzzFeed editor to staff: It's OK to call Trump a racist

BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith told staff in a memo on Dec 8 that it's permissible for them to call Donald Trump a racist as a fact on social media. Smith wrote the memo in response to queries from staff about what was OK for them to post on social media networks such as Twitter or Facebook about Trump.

While BuzzFeed News has a policy that staff not be political partisans on social media, Smith said Trump "is operating far outside the political campaigns to which those guidelines usually apply." BuzzFeed's entertainment staffers have more leeway when it comes to expressing opinions. "It is, for instance, entirely fair to call him a mendacious racist, as the politics team and others have reported clearly and aggressively: he's out there saying things that are false, and running an overtly anti-Muslim campaign. BuzzFeed News's reporting is rooted in facts, not opinion; these are facts," Smith wrote.

Cogent sues Deutsche Telekom over congested interconnection ports

Cogent Communications is suing Deutsche Telekom, claiming that DT violated the terms of its contract with the Internet transit provider. Filed in US federal court in Virginia, Cogent claims that DT has allegedly congested the Internet connections Cogent's content provider customers use to deliver services to their customers in Germany.

Cogent wants the court to force DT to increase its capacity at interconnection points to alleviate the congestion, as well as pay damages. "Deutsche Telekom has interfered with the free flow of internet traffic between Cogent customers and Deutsche Telekom customers by refusing to increase the capacity of the interconnection ports that allow the exchange of traffic," said Robert Beury, Cogent's chief legal officer. "The congestion results in degraded service to customers of both companies. Deutsche Telekom is using its market power as the dominant provider of residential Internet service in Germany in an attempt to extract a toll, directly or indirectly, from companies in the US that provide internet services that Deutsche Telekom's customers want to use."

Attack floods Internet root servers with 5 million queries a second

Early during the week of Nov 30, one of the most vital organs of the Internet anatomy came under an unusual attack. On two separate occasions lasting an hour or more each, a flood of as many as many as five million queries per second hit multiple domain name system root servers that act as the final and authoritative reference for determining which IP address is returned when a user types a domain name into a browser.

The first barrage took place on Monday, November 30, and lasted for about two hours and 40 minutes. The second one happened a day later and lasted for almost exactly an hour. Most but not all of the 13 root servers that form the Internet's DNS root zone were hit. The attacks started and stopped on their own and consisted of billions of valid queries for just two undisclosed domain names, one for each incident. There's no indication of who or what was behind the attack. While the load was large enough to be detected on external systems that monitor the Internet's root servers, they ultimately had little effect on the billions of Internet end users who rely on them. That's partly because root servers provide IP translations only when a much larger network of intermediate DNS servers fail to do so and partly because of the robust design of the hundreds of servers that run the dozen-plus root authorities.

Why Apple Walked Away From TV (For Now)

[Commentary] Yes, Apple has walked away from the negotiating table with the TV guys, which means you won’t be getting a subscription TV service from Apple anytime soon. And yes, there’s a dispute between Apple and the TV guys about how much Apple should pay the TV guys. But there’s a conflict about money in any negotiation. Apple’s beef with the TV Industrial Complex is a bit more nuanced. It’s also a significant one: If Apple gets its way, TV will undergo a significant change, just like the music business did when Apple launched its iTunes store in 2003.

Industry executives say Apple has spent much of 2015 pushing for a “skinny” bundle of TV channels -- limited to perhaps a dozen core networks -- delivered over the Web, which would retail for no more than $30. So while the price of the individual channels that Apple wants to package has been an issue, it’s the composition of the package itself -- which channels go in and which don’t make the cut -- that is just as important to both Apple and the programmers, according to sources. If Apple gets its way, it means the traditional pay TV package, which averages around 100 channels, will get shrunk by nearly 80 percent. And while TV executives will say they understand that consumers don’t want to pay for channels they don’t watch, all of them will argue that their channels are must-haves.

Filtered extremism: how ISIS supporters use Instagram

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently called ISIS the "most effective recruiter in the world," and pushed tech companies to help curtail the group's ability to woo recruits through online videos and social media. While studies like one by researchers from George Washington University show that Twitter is still ISIS's most significant online recruitment tool, the group also uses more intimate platforms, like Instagram.

Compared to Twitter, ISIS's presence on Instagram is more informal. Users often post pro-ISIS images and memes, as opposed to the screenshots and video clips disseminated by the group's official channels. For users in Syria, Instagram allows them to project a semblance of normal life under ISIS: home-cooked meals and views out their window, for instance, with hashtags and symbols declaring support for the group. Overall, these accounts normalize radical ideas, says Sarah Gilkes, a research associate at George Washington University's Program on Extremism who worked on the study. Of the 71 Americans charged with crimes relating to ISIS, the study found that almost all spent time in ISIS's insular online communities. After seeing hundreds of memes with Islamic State ideology superimposed, the ideas suddenly don’t seem so extreme. Plus, many radicalized people often come from troubled backgrounds or unstable family situations. These platforms can give them a sense of community.

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