July 2017

Why You Still Can’t Ditch Your Cable Box

Not that long ago, the clunky cable box looked like it was on its way out. The federal government was pressuring cable companies to open up their near-monopoly on boxes to more competition, and industry leader Comcast promised apps that could render some boxes obsolete. That was then. Today, the vast majority of customers still need to rent a box to get full service from cable providers, and those box-replacing apps remain elusive.

Here's what happened. In 2015, tech companies and consumer advocates were pushing the Federal Communications Commission to open up the cable-box market. The goal was to let you buy a cable box the way you'd pick up a new smartphone, sparing you the expense of leasing them from cable companies for about $6 and up a month. The cable industry and Hollywood hated the FCC's February 2016 plan to "unlock the box." They pointed out that TV-watching apps were already available - more on that below - and laid out an industry proposal for new apps that could replace cable boxes. Amid industry pushback, the FCC's proposed rules languished ahead of the 2016 election. Afterward, President Donald Trump's new FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, shelved them permanently. The industry is no longer pushing its app proposal with the FCC, said Brian Dietz, a spokesman for the cable lobby group NCTA. And he noted that some cable and satellite companies have launched apps that let customers watch video without a cable box.

The White House isn’t at war with leaks. It’s at war with basic transparency.

[Commentary] President Donald Trump and his loyalists potentially find the release of nearly any information about what they’re doing to be offensive, no matter how mundane. Often this is couched in the use of the word “leaks.” There are real leaks in the White House, and information has been provided to the news media that is unusually sensitive in nature. There are also more anodyne leaks of the palace-intrigue variety. And then there are things that are called leaks but which aren’t. President Trump and his core allies want you to know only what President Trump wants you to know. Everything else is leaks or “fake news.” Or, somehow, both.

How seriously should we take Trump’s tweets? Apparently this debate will never end.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer had settled it when he said President Trump's tweets “are considered official statements by the president of the United States.” But Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) doesn't agree. In an interview about Trump's (Twitter-driven) attacks on Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Rep Stewart said this: “I quit reading the president's tweets quite a long time ago. I don’t pay that much attention to them, and I'd recommend other people not pay a whole lot of attention to it because I don’t think it's policy.” And House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) said, "I don't read that stuff."

45 percent of Republicans want the government to shutter “biased or inaccurate” media

A poll from The Economist/YouGov asked Americans whether they would support “permitting the courts to shut down news media outlets for publishing or broadcasting stories that are biased or inaccurate.” The results were scary for anyone concerned about the future of American democracy.

According to the poll, Americans are roughly evenly divided on whether the US government should have the power to shut down unfriendly media outlets: 28 percent favor, 29 percent oppose, and 43 percent are unsure. But the results become really striking when you break them down by partisan identification: A fairly large plurality of Republicans — 45 percent — support allowing media organizations to be shuttered. A scant 20 percent oppose the idea; that’s less than half the number who support it. The remaining 35 percent of Republicans have not made up their minds.

Apple has permission to test 5G internet for future iPhones

Apple has officially been granted Federal Communications Commission approval for an experimental license to test 5G data technology — specifically in the short-range millimeter wave spectrum in the 28GHz and 39GHz bands. The FCC portioned off those chunks of spectrum last summer for companies to begin testing 5G technology, so it makes sense that Apple would want to start exploring 5G, especially given that it’s a major player in the world of mobile data due to the sheer weight of the iPhone in the market.

Remarks Of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai At Telecommunications For The Deaf And Hard Of Hearing, Inc. Biennial Conference

The Federal Communications Commission is determined to be Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing’s (TDI) partner and meet this moment. I’d like to walk through the Commission’s multi-part strategy for improving the lives of Americans with disabilities through communications technology. The first part of this strategy is pretty straightforward: to uphold our legal obligations to promote accessibility and to advance new rules when appropriate. Part two of our accessibility strategy is encouraging the private sector to make accessibility a priority, rather than an afterthought. A third way that the FCC aims to promote accessibility is to lead by example. We are seeing real success with our direct video calling program—also called DVC. Bottom line: When it comes to accessibility, the FCC is practicing what we preach. The fourth and final piece of our accessibility agenda might not strike you at first as relevant to accessibility. But our work to bridge the digital divide is critically important to Americans with disabilities. We are aiming to connect every American with digital opportunity regardless of who they are or where they live.

ISAO SP 4000: Protecting Consumer Privacy in Cybersecurity Information Sharing V1.0

The purpose for this document is assist risk managers in making decisions with respect to privacy when sharing cybersecurity information. It builds upon the previously published basic principles by outlining actions to promote efficient and effective information sharing while minimizing the impact on privacy interests. Importantly, this document reflects the contributions of industry, civil society, and the government. This document supplements ISAO 300-1 Introduction to Information Sharing, Section 9 Information Privacy.

These cheap phones come at a price -- your privacy

Cheap phones are coming at the price of your privacy, security analysts discovered.

At $60, the Blu R1 HD is the top-selling phone on Amazon. In November 2016, researchers caught it secretly sending private data to China. Shanghai Adups Technology, the group behind the spying software on the Blu R1 HD, called it a mistake. But analysts at Kryptowire found the software provider is still making the same "mistake" on other phones. At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, researchers from Kryptowire, a security firm, revealed that Adups' software is still sending a device's data to the company's server in Shanghai without alerting people. But now, it's being more secretive about it. "They replaced them with nicer versions," Ryan Johnson, a research engineer and co-founder at Kryptowire, said. "I have captured the network traffic of them using the command and control channel when they did it."

Former FCC Chairman Wheeler Says Net Neutrality Repeal Will Turn the Internet Into Cable

Tom Wheeler, former chief of the Federal Communications Commission under President Barack Obama, warned the Trump Administration’s plan to repeal network neutrality rules could make accessing the internet like buying a cable TV package.

Wheeler, who led the passage of the embattled rules at the FCC in 2015, said the new Republican plan to undo them would let broadband providers like Comcast and Verizon carve up internet access like premium cable channels. “Do you want your access to the internet to look like your cable service?” Wheeler told a crowd in Baltimore. “Stop and think about it — cable operators pick and choose what channels you get. Cable operators pick and choose who they let on. Cable operators turn to you and say, ‘Oh you want that? That’s going to be a little bit more.'” “That is the difference between a closed network and an open network,” he said. “Net neutrality without Title II is net nothing.”

Over 190 Engineers and Tech Experts Tell The FCC It's Dead Wrong On Net Neutrality

One of the more notable recent filings from the Open Internet docket comes from a collection of engineers, technologists, professors, current and former Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and ICANN staffers, and numerous network architects and system engineers. Collectively, these experts argue that the Federal Communications Commission is not only making a mistake in killing net neutrality protections, it doesn't appear to understand how the internet actually works: "Based on certain questions the FCC asks in the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), we are concerned that the FCC (or at least Chairman Pai and the authors of the NPRM) appears to lack a fundamental understanding of what the Internet's technology promises to provide, how the Internet actually works, which entities in the Internet ecosystem provide which services, and what the similarities and differences are between the Internet and other telecommunications systems the FCC regulates as telecommunications services." The engineers single out numerous technical mistakes in the FCC's Notice for Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), including incorrect assessments and conflation of the differences between ISPs and edge providers (Netflix, content companies), incorrect claims in the NPRM about how the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 functions, how firewalls work, and more. But the engineers and architects also warn, as countless others have before them, that not having meaningful rules in place will result in an "balkanized" internet that will be nothing like the one that drove decades of innovation.

Benton

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