November 1, 2012 (Life After Sandy)
BENTON'S COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED HEADLINES for THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2012
EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS
Tips for Communicating in the Aftermath of Hurricane Sandy - press release [links to web]
FCC on Response and Recovery Efforts Post-Hurricane Sandy - press release [links to web]
FCC Details Storm-Related Cellphone Problems
Craig Fugate: FEMA not relying solely on the Web
How Sandy Slapped the Snark Out of Twitter - analysis
Campaign Aide Quits Over False Sandy Tweets
On Twitter, Sifting Through Falsehoods in Critical Times
Here’s what the Internet looked like on the East Coast during Sandy
Hurricane Sandy Broke Only 10 Percent of New York Area’s Internet
After Sandy, Wired New Yorkers Get Reconnected With Pay Phones
A Look inside Verizon's Flooded Communications Hub
New York's Silicon Alley makes do after Sandy [links to web]
When Floodwaters Rise, Web Sites May Fall
Telecom Firms Skirt Worst Damage; Most Users Manage to Stay Connected
Hurricane Sandy Slams Entertainment Industry With Production Delays, Lost Ticket Sales [links to web]
In NYC, Show Goes On, Even Sans Audience [links to web]
ABC Sites Log Record Traffic During Storm [links to web]
Networks Top Ratings with Storm Coverage [links to web]
After Sandy, Wi-Fi Becomes Precious Commodity
Comcast offers free Wi-Fi service to all in Sandy's path [links to web]
T-Mobile and AT&T Will Share Networks in Storm-Damaged Areas
Getting the Most Out of Your Smartphone Battery - press release [links to web]
Analyst: Hurricane Sandy to Cost Ad Industry $500 Million [links to web]
OWNERSHIP
The Math Behind Disney’s Star Wars Deal - analysis
What does the Disney buyout mean for LucasArts' gaming catalog? - analysis [links to web]
MEDIA AND ELECTIONS
By ignoring tech in the campaign, both candidates squander big opportunity - analysis
Two views of journalism clash in debate over Nate Silver’s work
For campaigns’ traveling press corps, social media has changed way game is played - analysis
Obama Does It Better
Anti-Obama text ads cause a stir
GoDaddy suspends GOP ad firm's websites for anti-Obama texts
Facebook admits error in censoring anti-Obama message [links to web]
Nonprofits, shell corporations help shield identity of ad backers [links to web]
Political Ad Market: From Feast to Famine [links to web]
Wanted: A definitive analysis of social media data [links to web]
Romney Would Limit Lobbyist Roles [links to web]
INTERNET/BROADBAND
US ambassador: Cybersecurity mandates should be excluded from telecom treaty
Sec Napolitano: US financial institutions 'actively under attack' by hackers
Sec Napolitano warns of cyberattack on utilities [links to web]
The Future, the Internet and Economic Growth - editorial [links to web]
Cable's Social Contract on America and Other Cable Scandals: But Who's Counting? - op-ed [links to web]
SPECTRUM/WIRELESS
Stolen cellphone databases switched on in US
Cellphone thefts on the rise [links to web]
Massachusetts Legislators Advise FCC to Mind the Border [links to web]
TELEVISION/RADIO
FCC Sets Comment Deadline on Program Access Questions [links to web]
United Church of Christ and Faith Community Ask to Keep Local Radio Local - press release [links to web]
Fox Message to Advertisers: World Series Still Has Lots of Value Despite Softer Viewership [links to web]
Massachusetts Legislators Advise FCC to Mind the Border [links to web]
Cable's Social Contract on America and Other Cable Scandals: But Who's Counting? - op-ed [links to web]
CONTENT
How to get your readers to love paywalls [links to web]
E-books: Developments and Policy Considerations - research [links to web]
Rosetta Stone Agrees to Drop Google Trademark Suit [links to web]
HEALTH
Health IT at Small-Care Providers Under Review [links to web]
EDUCATION
Technology Changing How Students Learn, Teachers Say
How Teens Do Research in the Digital World - research [links to web]
States Look to Better Regulate Online Universities [links to web]
GOVERNMENT & COMMUNICATIONS
How private are your phone calls? - editorial [links to web]
Smarter Use of IT Could Reduce the Deficit by $220 Billion, group says [links to web]
POLICYMAKERS
Tech Support: Who to Call in Congress [links to web]
Romney Would Limit Lobbyist Roles [links to web]
COMPANY NEWS
MetroPCS's Profit More Than Doubles [links to web]
STORIES FROM ABROAD
A Clash Across Europe Over the Value of a Click
UK lawmakers to grill Starbucks, Amazon and Google on tax [links to web]
EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS
FEMA AND THE INTERNET
[SOURCE: Politico, AUTHOR: Steve Friess]
FEMA chief Craig Fugate acknowledged that many Sandy victims can’t get help via the Internet. “Yes, I know there’s no power and the Internet is not going to help and you can’t call 1-800-FEMA. That’s why we also put people on the ground, starting [October 31], to go door to door, start getting into those neighborhoods,” Fugate said during a gaggle aboard Air Force One en route to New Jersey. On Oct 29, President Barack Obama urged people to stay indoors and keep an eye on a government website, ready.gov, for more information — despite the fact that that’s hard to do for people without power or Internet access. Neither President Obama nor local or national broadcasters provided emergency phone numbers at the start of the storm, in anticipation of power failures. Fugate also touted FEMA’s website for people who can still go online.
benton.org/node/138286 | Politico
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FCC DETAILS STORM-RELATED PROBLEMS
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Edward Wyatt, Brian Chen]
For all of the modern communications that keep people connected, cellphones rely on an age-old technology that has repeatedly demonstrated its own instability during emergencies — electricity. Power systems failures throughout the Northeast have been the main culprits in the shutdown of more than 20 percent of the cell tower sites in 10 states, causing millions of lost calls on Oct 31, government and industry officials said. Slow progress was made in restoring some services. Federal Communications Commission officials said that the percentage of cell tower sites not working in the storm-damaged areas declined “by a few percentage points” as of the morning of Oct 31, down from about 25 percent on Oct 30. Wired broadband and cable television systems remained out of service for “well under 20 percent” of homes in hurricane-affected areas, the FCC said, down from 25 percent on Oct 30. But widespread power outages as well as wind damage and submerged equipment continue to affect users of wireless and wired communications services.
benton.org/node/138306 | New York Times | Broadcasting&Cable
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SNARK AND TWITTER
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: David Carr]
[Commentary] Twitter is often a cauldron of snark, much of it funny, little of it useful. But as a social medium based on short-burst communication, Twitter can morph during large events — users talk about “watching” the spectacle unfold across their screens. It is, after all, a real-time service, which means that you can “see” what is happening as it happens. And then along came Hurricane Sandy. For most of Oct 29, people on Twitter were watching an endless loop of hurricane coverage on television and having some fun with it, which is the same thing that happens when the Grammys or the Super Bowl is on. But as the storm bore down, Twitter got busy and very, very serious. In the early days of Twitter, there was a very big debate about whether reporters should break news on Twitter. That debate now seems quaint. Plenty of short-burst nuggets of news went out from reporters on Twitter on Oct 29 and they were quickly followed by more developed reports on-air or on the Web. Some people used the friction-free, democratic nature of the medium to intentionally stir panic although John Herrman, writing in BuzzFeed, suggested that “Twitter is a Truth Machine,” writing that “during Sandy, the Internet spread — then crushed — rumors at breakneck speed.”
benton.org/node/138285 | New York Times
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SHASHANK TRIPATHI
[SOURCE: National Journal, AUTHOR: Adam Mazmanian]
Shashank Tripathi, campaign manager for Christopher Wight, a Republican candidate in New York's 12th Congressional District, resigned his post and apologized to New Yorkers for a series of deliberately false tweets put out as Hurricane Sandy was devastating New York City. In his apology, Tripathi took responsibility for the false tweets and sought to shield Wight from any fallout, writing that, "It is my sincere hope that the voters of New York will see him based on his merits alone, and not my actions of the last 24 hours." New York's 12th District contains includes large swaths of Manhattan.
benton.org/node/138284 | National Journal
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SIFTING THROUGH FALSEHOODS
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Jenna Wortham]
During Hurricane Sandy’s peak, Twitter was abuzz with activity, as tens of thousands of people turned to the microblogging service for alerts, updates and real-time reports and photographs of the storm. Trouble is, not all of it was true. Deliberate falsehoods, including images showing the Statue of Liberty engulfed in ominous clouds and sharks swimming through waterlogged suburban neighborhoods quickly spread through the service, as did word that power would be shut off for the entire city of New York and that the floor of the New York Stock Exchange had been flooded. Twitter says it cannot possibly regulate the millions of messages on its service, and that a bit of misinformation and mischief is to be expected. But in recent years, the service has become an indispensable funnel of information in critical times for many people, especially for those who lose access to power or cable TV. For them, it can be a crucial lifeline. Twitter has also become an invaluable tool for local government, news and relief organizations, which can monitor updates and dispatches from smartphone-wielding citizens. “The limits of Twitter come into play during a situation like a hurricane,” said John Palfrey, co-author of “Born Digital,” an examination of Internet technology’s impact on society. “There’s great power in it, but also great power for deception.”
benton.org/node/138302 | New York Times
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INTERNET USE BEFORE SANDY HIT
[SOURCE: GigaOm, AUTHOR: Stacey Higginbotham]
Sandvine, a company selling deep-packet inspection gear to Internet service providers, shared a blog post that in one East Coast city on the Monday ahead of Sandy’s landfall in New Jersey, Internet traffic was up 114 percent. Sandvine also tracked a more than 150 percent rise in Netflix traffic, which was later confirmed by Netflix. Skype usage was up as well. The Sandvine post noted that, “No single application was responsible for the surge; usage patterns were, for the most part, similar to what is observed on weekday evenings.” While the uptick in entertainment seems obvious, the results should encourage those worried about whether our networks can handle some problem that forces workers to stay home and attempt to telecommute. Apparently they can, or they can until the power goes out and the floodwaters swamp the telecommunications infrastructure.
benton.org/node/138283 | GigaOm
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INTERNET AND FLOODING
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Quentin Hardy, Jenna Wortham]
Here is a lesson every Web site manager may be taking away from Hurricane Sandy: It is probably not a good idea to put the backup power generators where it floods. As computer centers in Lower Manhattan and New Jersey shut down or went to emergency operations after power failures and water damage, companies scrambled to move the engines of modern communication to other parts of the country. Others rushed to find fuel for backup power generation. In some cases, things just stopped. As more of life moves online, damage to critical Internet systems affect more of the economy, and disasters like Hurricane Sandy reveal vulnerabilities from the sometimes ad hoc organization of computer networks. In places like Manhattan, advanced technology comes up against aging infrastructure and space constraints, forcing servers and generators to use whatever space is available. Power is the primary worry, since an abrupt network shutdown can destroy data, but problems can also stem from something as simple as not keeping a crisis plan updated.
benton.org/node/138281 | New York Times
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TELECOM FIRMS SKIRT WORST DAMAGE
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Spencer Ante, Thomas Gryta, Anton Troianovski]
Cellphone networks that were crippled or overloaded in past disasters held up relatively well in the wake of Sandy, but iPhone-toting residents of the Northeast are closely monitoring a new source of stress: battery power. People in the region hammered by the storm leaned on their smartphones for news of the outside world even after the lights went out. For those outside of hard-hit Lower Manhattan, where phone service was badly disrupted, the trick was keeping the batteries alive on devices that typically don't make it through a long work day. The scramble for a place to charge smartphones underscores a conundrum of modern life: People have more newfangled computing power at their fingertips, but it takes old-fashioned electrical power to keep it going.
benton.org/node/138280 | Wall Street Journal
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NEW YORK’S INTERNET
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Arik Hesseldahl]
Renesys concludes that about 10 percent of the networks in the New York metropolitan area went down, which is really low given the fact that the local electric company, ConEdison, actually cut power to the lower portions of Manhattan, where a lot of those networks are based. It also says something good about the planning of those whose networks stayed up and running, and those who keep the backup generators running and who aren’t getting much sleep. Even so, in the grander scheme of things, it’s still a lot: Renesys compares the impact of the networks that went down to that of an entire country the size of Austria going down. It is something we’ve seen before. Case in point: Egypt.
benton.org/node/138303 | Wall Street Journal
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PAY PHONES AFTER SANDY
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Ben Cohen]
Natural disasters tend to vindicate the public pay phone. With their clunky bodies mounted high and sometimes behind glass stalls, they generally remain serviceable during power outages, even amid flooding. When times get tough, in fact, the biggest challenge is often keeping the devices free of coin overloads. "Phones that normally do two dollars a day are taking in $50 a day," says Peter Izzo of Van Wagner Communications, one of 13 local pay-phone-operating franchises in New York City. "In times of distress, the people of the city love them." After the storm struck, people under umbrellas waited in line at some pay phones downtown. "During disasters, we sometimes have to empty them every day," says Thomas Keane, chief executive officer of Pacific Telemanagement Services, a pay-phone operator whose New York locations include transit stations, hospitals and police offices. "It takes 300 to 400 calls a day for that to happen."
benton.org/node/138305 | Wall Street Journal
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VERIZON’S FLOODED COMMUNICATIONS HUB
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Anton Troianovski]
Eleven years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Verizon Communications is once again scrambling to repair severe damage to a key switching facility inside its historic headquarters building in lower Manhattan. The massive facility for interconnecting key communications lines sustained heavy damage after planes struck the Twin Towers more than a decade ago. This time the enemy was water shoved ashore by Hurricane Sandy. The building is one of the worst hit of a number of facilities that carriers were rushing to fix Oct 31. The Federal Communications Commission said the number of cellphone tower outages dropped on the second day after the storm made landfall, with just over a fifth of the sites in storm-affected areas in the Northeast offline, down from about a quarter on Oct 30. The depth of the challenges facing telecom providers was on display inside Verizon's facilities in lower Manhattan. The company's headquarters—a key communications hub just north of the World Trade Center site at 140 West Street—was in a state of crisis not seen since the 9/11 attacks, which partially destroyed the building. Mud still covered parts of the ornate lobby. Down below, 3½ floors of the building's five-level basement were still submerged, the brackish water sloshing up the walls of the stairwell. Verizon employees said Monday night's storm surge was so powerful that it breached the protective plugs that surround cables coming into the building. As a result, water flooded the critical basement "cable vault" that takes in communications cables and directs them to switching gear upstairs, which wasn't damaged. On Wednesday, Verizon employees took a reporter inside the vault, illuminating the huge dark room with flashlights. The cables were still damp, and leaves littered the floor.
benton.org/node/138304 | Wall Street Journal
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WI-FI AFTER SANDY
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Arik Hesseldahl]
During an emergency, one of the most precious commodities is information and the ability to communicate it without impediments. When the old reliable phone networks are creaky and central offices are flooded and wireless phone networks are strained to the breaking point with demand for voice calls, one of the most precious things someone might be able to find is an open, free and reliable Wi-Fi connection. With power out south of about 34th Street in Manhattan and throughout much of New Jersey and Long Island, it seems a little ridiculous at first to wonder where the steadiest free and open Wi-Fi hotspots are. But the need is there.
benton.org/node/138275 | Wall Street Journal
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AT&T/T-MOBILE TEAM UP AFTER STORM
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Brian Chen]
In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, much of lower Manhattan has completely lost electricity and cell reception. T-Mobile USA and AT&T said that in the affected areas of New York and New Jersey, their customers would be able to use the networks of both companies, decreasing the likelihood of failed calls. In a statement, T-Mobile USA said that when customers of both AT&T and T-Mobile place calls, the calls would be carried by whichever network is available in the area. Both networks use similar technologies, so switching between them will be seamless, and there will not be an additional charge, the company said.
benton.org/node/138273 | New York Times | WSJ | The Hill | GigaOm
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OWNERSHIP
MATH BEHIND LUCASFILM DEAL
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Peter Kafka]
Disney is paying George Lucas $4 billion for his Star Wars empire. Did it get a good deal? That all depends, of course, on whether people want to see the next three Star Wars movies Disney says it is lining up. It’s a tricky bit of guesstimating, because the people who were young enough to be wowed by Lucas’ first installment when it debuted in 1977, are now oldsters who are 40 and much older. And many of those same people despise the last three movies he put out. But if a new generation of kids like this stuff, then Disney is in good shape. Bernstein’s Todd Juenger figures Lucasfilm does $860 million in revenue a year right now. Next you have to guess what kind of performance Disney will get from the new movies. If each of next three 3 movies does “Avengers”-like numbers, they’ll generate $1.5 billion at the box office, $2.8 billion overall, and generate $1 billion each in profits, and the deal works out for Bob Iger and his successor.
benton.org/node/138271 | Wall Street Journal
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MEDIA AND ELECTIONS
CAMPAIGNS IGNORE TECH
[SOURCE: San Jose Mercury News, AUTHOR: Chris O’Brien]
[Commentary] Silicon Valley has served as a huge source of cash for both presidential candidates -- but not as much of a source of ideas for their campaigns. That means both men are missing the chance to use technology to paint an optimistic, big-picture vision of where they want to take the country. Roosevelt had the New Deal; Reagan had "morning in America." Obama and Romney have what, exactly? "It really should be a part of the national discussion because it's so much a part of the national economy," said Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Palo Alto. "There are extraordinary opportunities ahead. I'm disappointed that there's not, out of either camp, the kind of discussion of technology issues that are so important to this country.” Both President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have tech-related positions in their platforms. And I wouldn't expect either candidate to be spending time on the stump talking about patent reform or spectrum licensing, topics vital to Silicon Valley that put the rest of the country into a coma. But what happened to the tech-savvy Obama of 2008 (remember his BlackBerry)? And while Romney's campaign is far more adept at technology than Sen. John McCain's, he also hasn't made technology issues a centerpiece.
benton.org/node/138255 | San Jose Mercury News
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TWO VIEWS OF JOURNALISM
[SOURCE: Poynter, AUTHOR: Andrew Beaujon]
By calling Nate Silver’s poll-driven journalism “overrated,” Politico reporter Dylan Byers has become a symbol of another view of journalism, creating a debate between practitioners and protectors of both types. Politico and Silver, who writes The New York Times’ FiveThirtyEight blog, both specialize in making you feel like an insider. Both approaches serve news consumers very well. One lets you consume politics as entertainment. The other, politics as math. Entertainment is fun, and math is hard.
benton.org/node/138265 | Poynter | Politico | Washington Post
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SOCIAL MEDIA AND CAMPAIGN JOURNALISM
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Jason Horowitz]
[Commentary] In many ways, little has changed for traveling reporters since the old days, most famously documented in Timothy Crouse’s 1973 classic book “The Boys on the Bus.” In both Mitt Romney’s and President Obama’s press corps, there are still all the indignities of pre-dawn wake-up calls and hours of travel to hear the same speeches in different locations. There is still the dependence on pool reports, the dangers of groupthink and the temptations of Stockholm clubbiness (Flag football with the Romney staffers on the beach, anyone? Mitt’s flipping the coin!). There is drinking (less now) and eating (more now), and tensions still surface among reporters (a shouting match over journalistic ethics broke out on the Obama plane). The boredom on the Romney trail has produced photo albums’ worth of gauzy, self-documenting Instagrams. In fundamental ways, though, nothing is the same. And not just since 1973, but since the last presidential election. Despite the usual complaints of lack of access to candidates — practically speaking, there isn’t any — the power dynamics between the campaigns and the media have shifted significantly toward reporters. And the old journalistic hierarchy that once aggrandized major newspapers and national networks has flattened out, giving any boy, girl or baby on the bus with a Twitter feed the same opportunity to drive the race as the most established brand names. In a political-media industrial complex built on conflict, this is a rare point upon which the opposing campaigns and reporters all agree.
benton.org/node/138264 | Washington Post
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OBAMA DOES IT BETTER
[SOURCE: Slate, AUTHOR: Sasha Issenberg]
When it comes to targeting and persuading voters, the Democrats have a bigger advantage over the GOP than either party has ever had in the modern campaign era. All targeting carries the risk of missing the mark, and there are regularly voters whose actual attitudes defy the predictions of statistical models. But regular misfires by Republicans—which at best only waste resources and at worst mobilize Democrats who might not have voted otherwise, or provoke a backlash among those still persuadable—illustrate a gap between how the right and left practice politics in the 21st century. Contrary to the wishful intimations of the Post and Times stories, while the groups on the right could conceivably catch up with Obama and his allies in the scope and funding of their ground-level activities, in terms of sophistication they lag too far behind to catch up in 2012. In fact, when it comes to the use of voter data and analytics, the two sides appear to be as unmatched as they have ever been on a specific electioneering tactic in the modern campaign era. No party ever has ever had such a durable structural advantage over the other on polling, making television ads, or fundraising, for example. And the reason may be that the most important developments in how to analyze voter behavior has not emerged from within the political profession.
benton.org/node/138259 | Slate
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ANTI-OBAMA TEXT
[SOURCE: Politico, AUTHOR: Steve Friess]
Hundreds of people reported receiving strident, unsolicited anti-Obama text messages in an unusual spamming incident that had Twitter and Facebook users in an uproar. “Voting for Obama means voting for same-sex marriage,” one message read. Others included “Obama stole $716 Billion in Medicare. We cant [sic] trust Obama to protect our seniors,” “Obama is using your tax dollars to fund Planned Parenthood and abortions. Is that right” and “VP Biden mocks a fallen Navy Seal during memorial. Our military deserves better.” While several people on social media sites angrily posted that the messages were coming from Republican Mitt Romney, there is no indication that the messages were sanctioned or produced by his campaign. The messages do not carry the customary notations of who approved or paid for political ads. The messages did not appear to be sent to particularly strategic targets — several hardcore Democrats were among the known recipients, as were children and people in non-battleground regions — but they came from several email addresses, including republicanett.com, votegopett.com, aiccomett.com and informedett.com. That suggests they were sent from the Internet rather than from other phones. Every domain checked by POLITICO was masked so Internet users could not trace their origins. It’s not known how many people received these messages.
benton.org/node/138253 | Politico
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TEXT SPAM
[SOURCE: The Hill, AUTHOR: Brendan Sasso]
Virginia-based GOP advertising firm ccAdvertising was behind a flood of anti-Obama text messages sent the night of October 30, according to Web domain records. By the morning of Oct 31, GoDaddy, a domain registrar, had suspended the firm's websites for spam and abuse. ccAdvertising did not respond to a request for comment. It is unclear how many people received the unsolicited messages, but many people in the Washington, D.C., metro area took to Twitter and other social media sites on Tuesday night to complain about the unusual campaign tactic. Federal Communications Commission regulations and the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 prohibit unsolicited autodialed text messages. Firms are subject to a $16,000 fine for each illegal text message.
benton.org/node/138269 | Hill, The | Politico
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INTERNET/BROADBAND
CYBERSECURITY AND ITU
[SOURCE: The Hill, AUTHOR: Jennifer Martinez]
The United States will argue that cybersecurity mandates should be excluded from an international telecommunications treaty in a new set of proposals it plans to send to a United Nations agency. Some countries are pushing to include cybersecurity proposals in the treaty that could lead to online censorship or put one regulatory body in charge of cybersecurity mandates, U.S. Ambassador Terry Kramer said on a conference call with reporters. He said "there is no one-size-fits-all text" that will provide the right solutions on cybersecurity, and for this reason, the upcoming treaty conference in Dubai this December is not the "proper venue" for discussing the national security issue. Kramer argued that including such regulations would be a "dead end" because countries need to be agile enough to respond to cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. He acknowledged that the threat of cyberattacks is a problem, noting that 67,000 malware attacks occur each day — double the number from 2009. Instead, the U.S. is advocating for a variety of organizations to guide countries on how to boost the protection of their critical computer networks and systems, foster international cybersecurity cooperation and cyber training.
benton.org/node/138268 | Hill, The
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US FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS UNDER ATTACK
[SOURCE: The Hill, AUTHOR: Jennifer Martinez]
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano warned that some of the largest U.S. financial institutions "are actively under attack" from cyber hackers. While Sec Napolitano sounded the alarm about the attacks at a cybersecurity event hosted by The Washington Post, she declined to provide any details about them. "Right now, financial institutions are actively under attack. We know that. I'm not giving you any classified information," she said. "I will say this has involved some of our nation's largest institutions. We've also had our stock exchanges attacked over the last [few] years, so we know ... there are vulnerabilities. We're working with them on that." When asked by Post editor Mary Jordan about whether hackers are stealing information or money from banks, Sec Napolitano answered "yes" and then quickly added, "I really don't want to go into that per se." "All I want to say is that there are active matters going on with financial institutions," she said.
benton.org/node/138252 | Hill, The
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SPECTRUM/WIRELESS
STOLEN CELLPHONE DATABASES
[SOURCE: IDG News Service, AUTHOR: Martyn Williams]
US cellphone carriers took a major step toward curbing the rising number of smartphone thefts with the introduction of databases that will block stolen phones from being used on domestic networks. The initiative got its start earlier this year when the Federal Communications Commission and police chiefs from major cities asked the cellular carriers for assistance in battling the surging number of smartphone thefts. In New York, more than 40 percent of all robberies involve cellphones and in Washington (DC) cellphone thefts accounted for 38 percent of all robberies in 2011. With the introduction of the database, carriers will be able to block stolen handsets from being used on their networks. Until now, such blocking had targeted the SIM card, so unauthorized calls could not be made on stolen phones, but putting in a new SIM card meant the phone could still be used. That meant a stolen phone could be sold on the second-hand market. The new database blocks the IMEI number, a unique identification number in the cellphone akin to a VIN (vehicle identification number) in a car. The ID number remains with the cellphone no matter what SIM card is used.
benton.org/node/138296 | IDG News Service
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EDUCATION
TECHNOLOGY AND LEARNING
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Matt Richtel]
There is a widespread belief among teachers that students’ constant use of digital technology is hampering their attention spans and ability to persevere in the face of challenging tasks, according to two surveys of teachers. The researchers note that their findings represent the subjective views of teachers and should not be seen as definitive proof that widespread use of computers, phones and video games affects students’ capability to focus. Even so, the researchers who performed the studies, as well as scholars who study technology’s impact on behavior and the brain, say the studies are significant because of the vantage points of teachers, who spend hours a day observing students. The timing of the studies, from two well-regarded research organizations, appears to be coincidental. One was conducted by the Pew Internet Project, a division of the Pew Research Center that focuses on technology-related research. The other comes from Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco that advises parents on media use by children. It was conducted by Vicky Rideout, a researcher who has previously shown that media use among children and teenagers ages 8 to 18 has grown so fast that they on average spend twice as much time with screens each year as they spend in school. Teachers who were not involved in the surveys echoed their findings in interviews, saying they felt they had to work harder to capture and hold students’ attention.
benton.org/node/138294 | New York Times
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STORIES FROM ABROAD
VALUE OF A CLICK
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Eric Pfanner]
Google got rich by selling a simple proposition: The links it provides to other Web sites are worth a lot of money, so much that millions of advertisers are willing to pay the company billions of dollars for them. Now some European newspaper and magazine publishers, frustrated by their inability to make more of their own money from the Web, want to reverse the equation. Google, they say, should pay them for links, because they provide the material on which the Web giant is generating all that revenue. In several of the biggest European countries, they are close to getting their way. A bill working its way through the German Parliament would enable publishers to collect a fee from Google and other search engines and news “aggregators” when they display excerpts from news articles alongside links to newspaper and magazine Web sites.
benton.org/node/138244 | New York Times
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