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[Commentary] Over the past year, state Attorney General Kamala Harris has tried to impose order in the wild west frontier of wireless applications though her legal powers are decidedly unclear. She's put forward a 22-page list of guidelines for app developers, networks, mobile carriers and others aimed at minimizing privacy conflicts and moving the mobile world away from sweeping up every shred of personal data.
The ideas call for plainer privacy warnings, pop-up messages when an app asks for additional information, and a request that app makers not ask for personal data when it's not essential for basic functions. Her privacy campaign is another instance of a familiar political adage: If Washington won't, then California will. In this case federal agencies are moving slowly in area of online protections, leading Harris to act. Other states may be poised to follow. As the country goes mobile, it's critical not to forget personal rights and protections. A huge changeover in technology shouldn't obliterate privacy. Harris is right to pursue this goal at a critical time.
Kamala Harris' push for online privacy
Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s announcement that he’ll retire in 2015 is the latest personnel move in a month that has thrown the legislative end of the online consumer privacy world into flux.
Sen Rockefeller (D-WX), who’s been the upper chamber’s most vocal proponent of strengthening online privacy laws, is the third privacy hawk in three weeks to make news for potentially being on the move. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), who co-introduced a privacy bill of rights in April 2011, has been tapped by President Barack Obama for secretary of state. That opens a Senate seat in Massachusetts that longtime privacy hawk and Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) wants and is likely to be focused on this session. Those three aren’t the only lawmakers interested in a growing technological issue —Sens. Al Franken (D-MN), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Mark Pryor (D-AR) have all made waves on consumer privacy and Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) has been alongside Rep Markey in the House. But the trio has been a standard-bearer, and the moves throw an issue, which was in many ways on target for a breakout year in 2013, somewhat up in the air.
Rockefeller retirement shakes up privacy battle
For many people, smartphone shopping comes down to a choice of Apple’s iPhone or one powered by Google’s Android software. But now consumers can get an iPhone and fill it with Google.
Google has become one of the most prolific and popular developers of apps for the iPhone, in effect helping its competitor make more appealing products — even as relations between the companies have deteriorated. While some of its Internet services were built into the iPhone from the start, Google has stepped up its presence in the last eight months, pumping out major new iPhone apps or improving old ones. It also has expanded efforts to hire developers to make more such apps.
Google Gains From Creating Apps for the Opposition
Behind all the dazzling mobile-ready electronics products on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is a looming problem: how to make the networks that support all these wireless devices function robustly and efficiently.
With less fanfare than you’d see in Vegas, potential solutions are arising in labs in Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and New Brunswick, New Jersey. The grand challenge is to overhaul the Internet to better serve an expected flood of 15 billion network-connected devices by 2015—many of them mobile—up from five billion today, according to Intel estimates.
Your Gadgets Are Slowly Breaking the Internet
AT&T hopes to reverse a trend that has seen Skype and other Internet telephony services start to displace its voice-call business over the past few years. The carrier is now encouraging outside programmers to create voice and messaging apps that use its customers’ traditional mobile phone numbers. In announcing a new programming interface, the company turned to one of its many disruptors, Tropo. That company already provides voice and messaging apps over the Internet, and its platform will form the basis for developers to write apps that manipulate mobile calls—changing how calls are placed, received, and forwarded—and that merge voice messages with text-messages and e-mail. Over the past year or so, operators around the world have moved in a similar direction.
In a Bid to Keep Voice Alive, AT&T Courts Developers
Samsung is willing to try anything. Actually, it’s willing to try everything. By building dozens of models across a range of product categories—it makes everything from phones to tablets to refrigerators to washing machines—Samsung can offer a device for every conceivable market niche.
As long as its devices meet a minimum level of quality—and in general, its products are very good—and it manages to kill the failures and push the successes with great marketing, Samsung is sure to keep its place at the top of a roiling tech business. This flood-the-market strategy isn’t elegant. It can be confusing for customers, a pain for Samsung’s carrier partners, and very difficult for the firm’s engineers and designers to keep up with. It also doesn’t have history on its side. Other firms that have tried the build-everything approach—see Apple in the early 1990s, or Hewlett-Packard over the last decade—eventually begin to lumber under their own complexity.
The Genius of Samsung
Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff and other county leaders announced plans to launch the nation's first bookless public library system, BiblioTech, with a prototype location opening in the fall. “If you want to get an idea what it looks like, go into an Apple store,” Wolff said. Inspired while reading Apple founder Steve Jobs' biography, Wolff said he envisions several bookless libraries around the county, including in far-flung suburbs. “It's not a replacement for the (city) library system, it's an enhancement,” Wolff said. “People are always going to want books, but we won't be doing that in ours,” Wolff said.
Bexar set to turn the page on idea of books in libraries
Chicago Tribune reporters Michael Oneal and Steve Mills, in a four-part series, tell the story of Tribune Company's journey into and through bankruptcy, throwing a spotlight on the key decisions and missed opportunities that marked a perilous time in the history of the company, the media industry and the economy.
The story behind Tribune's broken deal
Two days after Internet activist Aaron Swartz took his own life, the President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has issued a public response and will launch an internal investigation looking into the university’s role in the ordeal which first began in 2010. The university has come under widespread criticism in the wake of Swartz’s death. Swartz was first indicted on charges of computer fraud in 2011, after allegedly downloading approximately 5 million academic papers and files from the online service JSTOR, using MIT’s on-campus network.
While JSTOR eventually dropped the charges against Swartz after he handed over his hard drives, the U.S. attorney’s office continued prosecuting Swartz. MIT is considered to have tacitly supported the decision by U.S. attorneys Carmen Ortiz and Steve Heymann to continue pursuing Swartz’s criminal prosecution, which left him facing penalties of upwards of 30 years in prison and $1 million in fines.
MIT Responds to Death of Activist Aaron Swartz, Begins Internal Investigation MIT Probes Role in Case Leading to Web Activist’s Death (Bloomberg)
Europe’s telecommunications commissioner will lay down a series of far-reaching reforms this year to support the formation of a pan-European telecoms market, in order to foster greater competition and investment in a sector hard hit by the financial downturn.
Neelie Kroes, a vice-president of the commission, said that Brussels was determined to deliver the necessary policies to further harmonize the industry across national borders. “We’re working on a range of measures to create common and stable conditions across the EU for telecoms competition, investment and growth, which should also make cross-border consolidation more attractive,” said Kroes. “Various forms of asset sharing can promote competition and investment – regulated access to dominant infrastructure on terms that support further investment by all players, access to other utilities’ infrastructure on reasonable terms [and] sharing of wireless assets such as masts or spectrum under clear conditions.” She said that while she was keen to harmonize the market further, she was not considering pushing for the creation of a single telecoms regulator at this stage. Rather, she stressed the need to strengthen co-operation between the commission and national regulators to drive the changes that the industry needs.
EU to foster unified telecoms market