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Rep Ed Markey (D-MA) urged House Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) in a letter to pass a bill aimed at securing the nation's electrical grid from cyberattacks.

In the letter, Rep Markey underscored the rising cyber threat the electric grid faces and described how it could take months to restore electricity after a crippling cyberattack. He cited a recently declassified National Research Council report published five years ago that warned how a cyberattack could result in thousands of deaths if it disabled the power grid during a heat wave or cold spell. Rep Markey also noted that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the Department of Homeland Security have sounded alarm about the havoc a cyberattack could wreak on the nation's critical infrastructure.

Apple did not invent the notion of using cellphones to play games and carry out small tasks, but it certainly made the concept its own.

Its app store is the one all developers want to get into, despite the much larger market share claimed by Google’s Android. There are so many competing devices using Android that developers say they have a hard time optimizing their app for that system. Besides, customers are used to spending money for Apple apps, but they tend to want Android apps for free. All this gives Apple power far beyond its operating system’s 20 percent share of the mobile market. At some point, however, that power might be detrimental for the Internet as a whole. The big Internet companies — Apple, Amazon, Google — are all pursuing a “walled garden” approach, where they hope to do so much for their customers that they will never leave. Internet policy experts did not like walled gardens when America Online built one in the 1990s, and they do not like the prospect of another one triumphing now.

The Obama campaign's team of technologists had elite and, for tech, senior talent -- most of them were in their 30s -- from Twitter, Google, Facebook, Craigslist, Quora, and some of Chicago's own software companies such as Orbitz and Threadless, where Harper Reed had been CTO. But even these people, maybe *especially* these people, knew enough about technology not to trust it. "I think the Republicans fucked up in the hubris department," Reed told me. "I know we had the best technology team I've ever worked with, but we didn't know if it would work. I was incredibly confident it would work. I was betting a lot on it. We had time. We had resources. We had done what we thought would work, and it still could have broken. Something could have happened." "We knew what to do," Reed maintained, no matter what the scenario was. "We had a runbook that said if this happens, you do this, this, and this. They did not do that with Orca."

A Boston-based investor that specializes in broadcast and wireless towers has paid $70 million for the antennas atop the John Hancock Center, another step in a plan by the skyscraper's owners to sell off the building's parts piecemeal.

An affiliate of American Tower Corp. closed in late October on the 34,000 square feet of rooftop space housing TV and radio transmission equipment, county records show. American Tower bought the property from a joint venture of Deutsche Bank A.G. and NorthStar Realty Finance Corp., which seized the landmark tower earlier this year after its prior owner, a joint venture led by a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. unit, defaulted on about $400 million in debt. Leased by TV networks, FM radio stations and governments, the Hancock's antennas are second only to the Willis Tower's in a city with limited broadcast capacity, according to David Denton, co-founder of Florida-based Tall Tower Ventures LLC. About nine FM stations in the Chicago market use the Hancock for their primary operations, while most TV stations use it as a backup site and operate from Willis, he said.