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[Commentary] I want to know before the next FCC Chair bangs down the gavel for the first time that she or he actually intends to move a proactive public interest agenda. I want to know that she or he really “gets it” that our present news and information ecosystem has been harmfully diminished by years of hyper-consolidation and an almost equally long period of public policy abdication of critical public interest oversight responsibilities. So, yes, this is the time to seek and obtain tangible commitments. Without them, our news and information ecosystem will continue to hemorrhage. These issues go to the core of the challenges the nation confronts. They are central to their resolution. As for me, I don’t want to see any white smoke coming out of that chimney until we know the fire below is burning for the common good.
Selecting A New FCC Chair
On the outskirts of Shanghai, in a run-down neighborhood dominated by a 12-story white office tower, sits a People’s Liberation Army base for China’s growing corps of cyberwarriors.
The building off Datong Road, surrounded by restaurants, massage parlors and a wine importer, is the headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398. A growing body of digital forensic evidence — confirmed by American intelligence officials who say they have tapped into the activity of the army unit for years — leaves little doubt that an overwhelming percentage of the attacks on American corporations, organizations and government agencies originate in and around the white tower. An unusually detailed 60-page study, to be released by Mandiant, an American computer security firm, tracks for the first time individual members of the most sophisticated of the Chinese hacking groups — known to many of its victims in the United States as “Comment Crew” or “Shanghai Group” — to the doorstep of the military unit’s headquarters. The firm was not able to place the hackers inside the 12-story building, but makes a case there is no other plausible explanation for why so many attacks come out of one comparatively small area.
Chinese Army Unit Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against US
[Commentary] The need for greater cybersecurity is essential to both national security and the economy.
We're already at the point where an enormous amount of government and private business is transacted online. And there are parts of our physical infrastructure, including power plants and transportation systems, that are vulnerable to cyberattacks. Millions of people do the bulk of their banking online, and even if you're not one of them, your bank is connected to the Internet and your accounts are vulnerable to attack. Merely having a credit card, receiving government services or even applying for or attending school puts at least some of your data at risk. An attack on our physical infrastructure could hurt anyone, either by putting us at risk or -- more likely -- shutting down essential services that we all depend on. Whether you like it or not, we live in a global digital village where everyone's security affects everyone else. Clearly there is a role for businesses and government to protect citizen and consumer data, but individual users also have a civic responsibility to protect our own devices and the networks we access. A computer or smartphone infected with malware can spread that infection to other computers. Many cyberattacks take advantage of "zombie" networks of infected machines owned by innocent people whose machines have been unwittingly commandeered to help the hackers break into other machines and networks.
Our cybersecurity needs to improve
[Commentary] “America must … face the rapidly growing threat from cyber-attacks,” said President Barack Obama during the State of the Union address on February 12. “Now, we know hackers steal people’s identities and infiltrate private emails. We know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets. Now our enemies are also seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions, our air traffic control systems. We cannot look back years from now and wonder why we did nothing in the face of real threats to our security and our economy.” And with that the President announced that he had signed a new executive order aimed at strengthening U.S. cyber defenses, increasing information sharing, and developing standards to protect national security, jobs, and privacy.
Cybersecurity: Time to Act?
[Commentary] Who should be able to use the public airwaves?
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is reorganizing the electromagnetic spectrum — which enables television signals to reach into Americans’ homes, radio into their cars, Wi-Fi into their coffee shops and 4G cellphone service into their pockets — and The Post’s Cecilia Kang reports that high-tech companies are doing battle with telecommunications firms over who will get which share. Under a law Congress passed last year, the rights to use the portion of the spectrum currently devoted to UHF television broadcasting will be reclaimed and auctioned off to mobile broadband companies. That’s good. To ensure that strong signals don’t interfere with one another, the FCC would create “guard bands” between the blocks it would license off. The FCC would then open up those guard bands for anyone to use for free, as long as they weren’t used to broadcast high-power signals. The FCC should base the size of the guard bands on the best reckoning of engineers on how wide they must be to serve their primary technical purpose. Anyone who has browsed recently through mobile- app stores knows that lots of useful innovation happens after spectrum is sold off. It’s very reasonable, though, for some of the public airwaves to be more publicly accessible, allowing free use of the spectrum that’s left over and enabling anyone from Google to would-be inventors tinkering in their garage to design low-power devices that would take advantage of it.
Splitting up the spectrum
Regulators looking into the burgeoning federal program to provide subsidized phone service for the poor are finding growing cause for concern.
Last year, the government spent an estimated $2.2 billion on the Lifeline program, up from $819 million four years earlier, as dozens of small companies were authorized to start providing the service. Now, inquiries in states from Alaska to Florida are raising questions about the source of that growth, according to a review of documents in federal and state investigations. Investigators say they have turned up some unorthodox tactics by companies participating in the program, such as signing up customers in hospital rooms and enrolling subscribers by mailing them unsolicited phones. In other cases they have uncovered more straightforward attempts to sign up ineligible customers, according to federal and state documents. While the inquiries have touched only a small number of the dozens of companies that provide the wireless service, they reflect regulators' growing concern that a program aimed at ensuring people have the ability to call their families, jobs or for emergency help has got out of hand as the number of companies providing the service has exploded.
Abuse Worries Grow on Phone Aid for Poor
Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan have done an about face on the issue of allowing cameras to record Supreme Court oral arguments.
Even as the Supreme Court is digging in its heels, nations with legal systems similar to the one in the United States are moving in the other direction. The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, which was formed in 2009, allows camera coverage. Arguments in the Supreme Court of Canada have been broadcast since the mid-1990s, and more recently they have been streamed live on the Internet. In the United States, cameras are commonplace in state trial and appeals courts, and the lower federal courts have experimented with them. Only in the Supreme Court is there categorical resistance.
Bucking a Trend, Supreme Court Justices Reject Video Coverage
[Commentary] Stanford University ratcheted up interest in online education when a pair of celebrity professors attracted more than 150,000 students from around the world to a noncredit, open enrollment course on artificial intelligence. This development, though, says very little about what role online courses could have as part of standard college instruction. College administrators who dream of emulating this strategy for classes like freshman English would be irresponsible not to consider two serious issues. First, student attrition rates — around 90 percent for some huge online courses — appear to be a problem even in small-scale online courses when compared with traditional face-to-face classes. Second, courses delivered solely online may be fine for highly skilled, highly motivated people, but they are inappropriate for struggling students who make up a significant portion of college enrollment and who need close contact with instructors to succeed.
The Trouble With Online College
[Commentary] The big novelty of this historic moment is that our lives are now mediated through data-collecting computers. In this world, data can be used to make sense of mind-bogglingly complex situations. Data can help compensate for our overconfidence in our own intuitions and can help reduce the extent to which our desires distort our perceptions.
But there are many things big data does poorly.
- Data struggles with the social
- Data struggles with context.
- Data creates bigger haystacks.
- Big data has trouble with big problems.
- Data favors memes over masterpieces.
- Data obscures values.
This is not to argue that big data isn’t a great tool. It’s just that, like any tool, it’s good at some things and not at others.
What Data Can’t Do
Proponents of cellphone unlocking are trying to gain the White House's support through a petition drive, but they face a couple of non-trivial hurdles.
First, they have until Feb 23 to reach 100,000 signatures — the new threshold the Obama administration set for responding to petitions on its We the People site — and they were more than 25,000 short as of this writing. And second, even if they hit their target and win over the administration, it's not clear the White House can do much to help.
Proponents of cellphone unlocking ask the White House for help