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Verizon Communications' fourth-quarter loss widened, dragged down by restructuring, pension and Superstorm Sandy costs. The company activated a record number of new devices on its contract-based plans during the period. The parent of the country's biggest wireless carrier lost $4.23 billion, or $1.48 per share, for the period ended Dec. 31. That compares with a loss of $2.02 billion or 71 cents per share, a year ago. Adjusted earnings were 38 cents per share, when stripping out costs related to restructuring, pension, Superstorm Sandy and other items. Operating revenue rose 6 percent to $30.05 billion from $28.44 billion. Analysts polled by FactSet expected earnings of 50 cents per share on revenue of $29.82 billion. The company's stock fell 59 cents to $41.95 in premarket trading.
Verizon Communications 4Q loss widens Verizon Earnings Fall as Discounts Yield Customer Record (Bloomberg)
After “social local mobile” or “SoLoMo,” the buzzword heard around Silicon Valley the most these days isn’t a neologism, it’s a country: “China.” It’s the key international growth market that so many U.S. tech companies want to break into — especially social Web companies like Facebook. Problem is, there’s this whole state censorship thing they’ve got to deal with. (Just ask Google how easy that is.) Perhaps, however, there’s a subversive way of sneaking free expression in the back door. (Listen up, Facebook.) “It’s really hard for the government to censor things when they don’t understand the made-up words or meaning behind the imagery,” said Kevin Lee, COO of China Youthology, in conversation at the DLD conference in Munich on Monday. “The people there aren’t even relying on text anymore It’s audio, visual, photos. All the young people are creating their own languages.”
Toward a More Visual Language: How Social Networks Skirt Censorship in China
Google proposed an annual €50 million payment to news publishers to resolve a long-simmering copyright dispute, but the publishers decided to hold out for more, according to a report in Le Monde.
The offer came before Christmas as part of ongoing discussions over whether Google should pay to index web content. According to the report, French publishers turned down the €50 million (USD $66.6 million) offer and demanded a figure of €70 to €100 million instead. They also objected to the way Google proposed to disburse the money. The company reportedly offered to spend a third of the €50 million in the form of direct ad purchases while using the rest for commercial advertising partnerships between Google and the publishers. The publishers reportedly complained that too much of the proposed money was contingent on sales figures. The proposed deal would have been similar to the one Google reached with Belgian newspapers in December. The Belgian deal, in which Google paid about $6 million, allowed Google to claim that the money was part of a partnership venture — and not a copyright pay-out. Google has long insisted that copyright law permits it to index webpages and, in some cases, offer news snippets.
Report: Google made €50 million copyright offer, French publishers want €100 million Les négociations entre Google et les éditeurs de presse s'enlisent (Le Monde)
A coalition of privacy advocates wrote to the European Union, urging it to ignore the advice of the U.S. government and push ahead with proposed data privacy regulations of Web companies like Facebook and Google.
Representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Consumer Federation of America, the Center for Digital Democracy and the Friends of Privacy USA met with EU officials on Monday in an effort to counter the lobbying of the U.S. government. "There is a dramatic expansion of data collection of online users, a digital 'arms' race that is being fought in the U.S., EU, Asia Pacific, and other areas. Personal data are being compiled and sold to the highest bigger in 'milliseconds' via online auctions — all with the knowledge or consent of the consumer," the privacy groups wrote in a paper.
Privacy groups lobby EU to crack down on Web companies
Media outlets across Europe face being tightly regulated by independent agencies with sweeping powers to investigate complaints and enforce fines if the recommendations of a Brussels-appointed panel become law.
The high-level group set up more than a year ago by Neelie Kroes, a European Commission vice-president, concluded that it was essential to introduce new rules to ensure journalists and media organizations act responsibly and do not abuse their power. “All EU countries should have independent media councils with a politically and culturally balanced and socially diverse membership,” says a report by the group, chaired by Vaira Vike-Freiberga, Latvia’s former president. “Such bodies would have competences to investigate complaints [and] should have real enforcement powers, such as the imposition of fines, orders for printed or broadcast apologies, or removal of journalistic status,” it states. “The national media councils should follow a set of European-wide standards and be monitored by the commission to ensure that they comply with European values.”
Brussels tables tighter EU media laws
Internet Essentials is not a government program, although that would be difficult to tell from the poster. Instead, it is a two-year-old program run by Comcast, the country’s largest Internet and cable provider, meant to bring affordable broadband to low-income homes.
Any family that qualifies for the National School Lunch Program is eligible for Internet service at home for $9.95 a month. The families also receive a voucher from Comcast to buy a computer for as little as $150. The program is not charity: Comcast started Internet Essentials in order to satisfy a regulatory requirement to provide Internet access to the poor, which also happens to be one of the few remaining areas for growth for cable companies across the country. More than 100,000 households in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco and other major markets have signed up for Internet Essentials. But as the program gains popularity, the company has come under criticism, accused of overreaching in its interactions with local communities — handing out brochures with the company logo during parent-teacher nights at public schools, for instance, or enlisting teachers and pastors to spread the word to students and congregations.
Mixed Response to Comcast in Expanding Net Access
In the early days of 2011, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology learned that it had an intruder. Worse, it believed the intruder had been there before. Months earlier, the mysterious visitor had used the school’s computer network to begin copying millions of research articles belonging to Jstor, the nonprofit organization that sells subscription access to universities. The visitor was clever — switching identifications to avoid being blocked by M.I.T.’s security system — but eventually the university believed it had shut down the intrusion, then spent weeks reassuring furious officials at Jstor that the downloading had been stopped. However, on Jan. 3, 2011, according to internal M.I.T. documents obtained by The New York Times, the university was informed that the intruder was back — this time downloading documents very slowly, with a new method of access, so as not to alert the university’s security experts. “The user was now not using any of the typical methods to access MITnet to avoid all usual methods of being disabled,” concluded Mike Halsall, a senior security analyst at M.I.T., referring to the university’s computer network.
How MIT Ensnared a Hacker, Bucking a Freewheeling Culture
Reviews on Amazon are becoming attack weapons, intended to sink new books as soon as they are published.
In the biggest, most overt and most successful of these campaigns, a group of Michael Jackson fans used Facebook and Twitter to solicit negative reviews of a new biography of the singer. They bombarded Amazon with dozens of one-star takedowns, succeeded in getting several favorable notices erased and even took credit for Amazon’s briefly removing the book from sale. “Books used to die by being ignored, but now they can be killed — and perhaps unjustly killed,” said Trevor Pinch, a Cornell sociologist who has studied Amazon reviews. “In theory, a very good book could be killed by a group of people for malicious reasons.”
Swarming a Book Online
The Federal Communications Commission has signaled an interest in regulating phone service for inmates, stepping into a long-running legal battle over prisoners' rights.
Inmate lawsuits dating back more than a decade argue that exclusive arrangements between prisons and service providers have restricted their phone choices and driven up rates—chilling their speech in violation of the First Amendment. In a notice to be published Jan 22 in the Federal Register, the FCC says that "regular telephone contact between inmates and their families is an important public policy matter," and points to studies that show that regular contact with family reduces inmate recidivism. The notice asks for public comment on a range of possible regulations, including rate caps and the elimination of per-call charges.
Inmate Phone Service Draws FCC Scrutiny
[Commentary] One of the biggest struggles that California will face over the next several decades is preserving access and quality at its famed higher educational institutions, the California State University system and the University of California. Years of shrinking state support have led to enormous tuition hikes and left the university systems scrambling for ways to maintain their integrity. But the state universities need to move cautiously on the matter of online education.
Done right, online education may offer a useful supplement to the classroom experience. Done poorly, it could cheat students and teachers out of a robust learning experience, tarnish the state universities' brand and fail to provide much in the way of financial savings. How, exactly, will online education fit in with the universities' mission? Will online education be created in a way that maintains the quality and integrity of university instruction, or is it just an idea to reduce costs? Where is the data to guide administrators in making effective choices about what kinds of coursework can go online, and what can't? How will this affect the student experience?
Act carefully on online education