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  2. August 2016

August 2016

How Comcast convinced customers to buy “near-worthless” service plans

The Washington state attorney general's $100 million lawsuit against Comcast uses a sales script and transcripts of chats with customers to make the case that Comcast deceived subscribers when marketing what the state calls "near-worthless" service plans. Since January 2011, Comcast made $73 million selling Service Protection Plans (SPP) for up to $5 a month to 500,000 customers in Washington. But the service plans were sold to customers under false pretenses, with Comcast describing the plans as being far more comprehensive and useful than they were, Attorney General Bob Ferguson alleged.

One of Ferguson's key pieces of evidence is a sales script that Comcast used until June 2016. (Comcast recently made changes to address the attorney general's complaints.) Though Comcast service plans had various limitations and purportedly "covered" certain services that were actually available for free, the "sales scripts did not include any reference to limitations on the SPP's coverage," the AG's lawsuit said. "Nor did Comcast's training manuals teach its employees to disclose the limitations to Washington consumers."

San Francisco rejects 'tech tax' plan to require firms to back housing programs

San Francisco (CA) has voted against a proposal known as the “tech tax” which would have forced the area’s biggest technology firms to fund initiatives to provide affordable housing and tackle the city’s homeless problem. The tax, which would have been on the ballot in the city in November, would have imposed a 1.5% payroll levy on technology companies that generate more than $1 million in revenues a year, including Uber, Google, Twitter and Airbnb. It was proposed in June by supervisors Eric Mar, Aaron Peskin and David Campos. Supporters said the measure would have raised an estimated $140m every year, which would have been used to build affordable housing and shelters for homeless people. But it failed after it was rejected by the budget committee of the board of San Francisco’s supervisors.

“As a city, I don’t think we should subscribe to the politics of Donald Trump and the Republicans that they are saying certain people are not welcome here in San Francisco,” said Mark Farrell, one of two who voted to block the measure in the three-person committee, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Partly because of the technology boom, San Francisco has become one of the most unequal cities in the US, with its share of homes worth more than $1 million growing from 19.6% in 2012 to 57.4% in 2016. That has caused friction between the city’s richest residents and its poorest, as the city which is the locus of America’s most booming industry struggles to cope with the hundreds of people living in tented encampments on its streets.

Networks of ‘Things’

System primitives allow formalisms, reasoning, simulations, and reliability and security risk-tradeoffs to be formulated and argued. In this work, five core primitives belonging to most distributed systems are presented. These primitives apply well to systems with large amounts of data, scalability concerns, heterogeneity concerns, temporal concerns, and elements of unknown pedigree with possible nefarious intent.

These primitives are the basic building blocks for a Network of ‘Things’ (NoT), including the Internet of Things (IoT). This document offers an underlying and foundational understanding of IoT based on the realization that IoT involves sensing, computing, communication, and actuation. The material presented here is generic to all distributed systems that employ IoT technologies (i.e., ‘things’ and networks). The expected audience is computer scientists, IT managers, networking specialists, and networking and cloud computing software engineers.

Commissioner Clyburn Remarks at Launch of Mapping Broadband Health in America Platform

I am extremely pleased to be here with you as we launch the Federal Communications Commission’s newest consumer offering — the Mapping Broadband Health in America Platform. The FCC’s mapping effort is historic, because it directly addresses the serious and growing challenge, of ensuring that the transformative power of broadband in health, is available to everyone.

To use public health parlance, broadband connectivity has become a social determinant of health, along with income, education and rurality. Indeed, we believe that broadband availability is increasingly becoming a super-determinant of health. With each passing day, more people are living a greater portion of their lives “online.” The mapping tool we unveil today promises to provide a new and powerful roadmap for stakeholders, to leverage high speed connectivity to improve the health of our Nation. It will help us identify both gaps and opportunities, and empower us to construct bridges at the intersection of broadband and health precisely where they are needed.

Kentucky’s high-speed network project runs into delays

KentuckyWired hit a speed bump when the planned fiber optic network meant to spread high-speed Internet throughout the state became entangled in longer-than-expected efforts to gain access to utility poles, lawmakers were told. As a result, completion of the project’s initial phases could be delayed by 10 to 12 months, said Chris Moore, executive director of the Kentucky Communications Network Authority, which oversees and maintains the KentuckyWired project. Now the target date for completing those first phases is the third quarter of 2017, he said. The entire project could be wrapped up by the first quarter of 2019 — about four to eight months later than anticipated, Moore said.

The slowdown in the initial phases drew concern as a Kentucky legislative panel received an update on the vast project’s progress. “Now why would it take that long?” said state Rep Rita Smart (D-Richmond). Moore said that 85 percent of the fiber optic cables will be attached to utility poles, mostly in rural areas. The rest of the cables will be placed underground, mainly in urban areas. Project managers had to obtain agreements from owners of the poles, he said. “We ran into delays in getting pole attachment agreements with two of the largest pole owners in the commonwealth,” Moore said. Those agreements are now in hand, he said. But another potential slowdown has been obtaining easements from private landowners, he said. Potential cost overruns are “yet to be fully developed,” but project managers are working to minimize any additional costs, he said.

Frontier to extend 50 Mbps speeds to 2 million homes over the next year

Frontier Communications suffered a setback in signing new broadband subscribers during the second quarter due to issues with integrating the Verizon properties it purchased in April, but the company could turn things around with a plan to extend higher speeds over its existing copper network to more of its customer base. CEO Dan McCarthy said that Frontier plans to upgrade its copper plant to provide up to 50 Mbps-capable or higher speeds to additional homes. This included its existing markets and those it entered through the Verizon acquisition where FiOS is not currently available. Specifically, Frontier will upgrade customers from 7 Mbps to 50 Mbps and 100 Mbps.

Being a copper-based technology, the availability of specific speeds will depend on the condition of the copper loops and the distance between where customers reside and the nearest central office (CO) or remote terminal (RT) cabinet. “We have also continued to execute our broadband network upgrade program in both existing and new markets,” McCarthy said “This program will result in the expansion of 50 megabits or higher broadband capability to 2 million homes over the next year.” By extending higher speed services outside of the FiOS FTTH market, McCarthy said that it will be able to more effectively compete with cable providers like Charter Communications and Comcast -- two cable companies that can already deliver speeds of 100 Mbps and above.

President Obama: US Could Punish Russia for Hacks, With Enough Proof

Russia could face punishment for hacks on Democratic Party organizations if proof emerges that the state is the culprit, President Barack Obama said. But he added that the hacking situation is unlikely to significantly impact the already difficult relations between Russia and the United States. Following speculation over the involvement of Russian intelligence agencies in hacks on the computer servers at the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the campaign for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, President Obama said the US could punish Russian for its role in the cyberattacks. But he said it requires a strong amount of proof to reach that point.

“We have provisions in place where if we see evidence of a malicious attack by a state actor, we can impose potentially certain proportional penalties,” President Obama said at a press conference with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. “But that requires us to really be able to pin down and know what we’re talking about. I don’t want to get ahead of the legal evidence and facts that we may have in order to make those kinds of decisions.” President Obama’s comments come accusations that the Russian government orchestrated a series of hacks on Democratic Party entities, potentially to influence the 2016 presidential election.

Freedom of the press: Is Trump the next Erdoğan?

[Commentary] Multiple news organizations have been banned from reporting on an important politician and events of international significance. That politician has threatened to sue journalists and others who say unfavorable things about him. Reporters from major media outlets who try to cover political events are trashed by that politician who questions their honesty and trustworthiness. Who am I talking about? If you said the almost-deposed Turkish strongman Recep Tayyp Erdogan you’d be close. I’m actually talking about Donald Trump, but there are a lot of similarities between the Turkish president and our very own insecure GOP presidential candidate.

Trump is a man used to running things his own way, and having people do his bidding whether they agree with him or not. He is not accustomed to any dissent and we know from his actions to date that he will go to whatever lengths possible to prevent journalists from telling us about the real Trump. Given his actions so far, don’t be surprised if Trump bans many more new outlets between now and November, and finds more ways to keep journalists from his campaign events. He knows that’s the only way he can win the White House.

[Bamberger is a political journalist.]

Public Knowledge to FCC: Anonymized Data Still Needs Regulating

Public Knowledge says that just because a broadband customer's information is anonymized does not mean those customers should not have to give permission for it to be shared with third parties. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler, joined by the other Democrats, has proposed requiring customers to opt in to share their information with third parties, Internet service providers, who don't like the FCC proposal in general, have said that in any event the FCC need not apply its new framework to information that cannot be traced to an individual user. Public Knowledge strongly begs to differ and recently was trying to convince the FCC of its point of view.

In meetings with FCC staffers, according to an ex parte filing, Public Knowledge representatives said that Congress intended that customers should have control of how their information is used, period. Public Knowledge argued that it is clear that Congress's goal was not "merely to avert a negative harm of embarrassment or exposure of information to third parties, but a general desire to ensure that when a subscriber sends a communications transmission, that the transmission is in any way utilized by the carrier for its own gain." If that is the case, the group told the FCC, "then anonymization is no help," and would still "convey a windfall to the carrier at the expense of consumer control of the information in a way that Congress did not intend." ISPs argue that consumers also gain through third-party use of anonymized data since that supports the model of free online content that users have come to expect.

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