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“National security leaders across the spectrum have urged Congress to act. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Commanding General of Cyber Command urged us to act. In August, Senate Republicans and beltway lobbyists chose a filibuster over these Generals’ urgent requests. Now the Secretary of Defense is urging us again to do what we all know we must do to protect our country from cyber terrorists. This is a time for action, not more political obstruction.
Sen Rockefeller Urges Senate Action on Cybersecurity
[Commentary] Jack Messmer looked into the files of stations in three swing markets to see if he could ascertain the differences between what super PACs and other non-candidates are paying and what candidates are paying. The candidates should be paying less.
The law says that qualified candidates are entitled to buy spots in the run-up to elections at the lowest unit rate — that is, at the rate stations would charge their most-favored advertisers. Stations may charge non-candidates as much as the market will bear. Our look at the files confirmed that they are, but I was surprised by how big the disparity was. The candidate price was, in a couple of cases, 75% less than that of the non-candidate. Broadcasters are getting a lot in political advertising (up to $3 billion this year), they are getting considerably less than they could — and should — in a free and unregulated market. So, broadcasters should get some credit for selling time on the cheap. Keep in mind the ad time only has value to any advertiser because of the enormous investment broadcasters make in the news and entertainment programming that surround it.
Stations Doing Their Bit For Electoral Politics
The South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that accessing someone’s online e-mail without their permission doesn’t violate the 1986-era Stored Communications Act (SCA).
Though they differed in their reasoning, the justices were unanimous in ruling that e-mail stored in the cloud (like Gmail or Yahoo Mail) does not meet the definition of electronic storage as written in the statute. This new decision creates a split with existing case law (Theofel v. Farey-Jones) as decided in a 2004 case decided by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. That decision found that an e-mail message that was received, read, and left on a server (rather than being deleted) did constitute storage "for purposes of backup protection," and therefore was also defined as being kept in "electronic storage." Legal scholars point to this judicial split as yet another reason why the Supreme Court (and/or Congress) should take up the issue of the Stored Communications Act.
Reading someone's G-mail doesn't violate federal statute, court finds
Amazon makes no money on its Kindle hardware, CEO Jeff Bezos admitted to the BBC. He said that all models of Kindles, including e-readers and the more tablet-like Fire HD are a "break-even" proposition for the company, and it's counting on the content ecosystem to make the hardware line financially worthwhile. Taking lean or no profits on a content vector to reap money from the financially meatier content is not a new model, and is a specialty of Amazon's by now.
No more games: Amazon admits it needs content sales for Kindles to fly Jeff Bezos Reveals Amazon Makes No Dough On Its Hardware (Fast Company)
The Federal Communications Commission has released details of its Oct. 26 broadcaster workshop on the incentive spectrum auctions and their impact both on broadcasters who give up their spectrum and those who chose not to. The FCC is trying to reclaim as much as 120 MHz of spectrum from broadcasters to re-auction for wireless broadband. The workshop will attempt to pack a lot of info on spectrum repacking, auction design and station eligibility into under two hours.
FCC Outlines Incentive Auction Workshop
If all goes according to Deutsche Telekom’s plan, T-Mobile USA and MetroPCS will become one sometime in the second quarter of 2013. A lot has to happen between now and then: the MetroPCS board needs to vote and the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice need to weigh in. Assuming this deal gets blessed, what implications does the combined company (“T-Metro”) have for its customers?
- MetroPCS customers should expect to see the biggest changes for the simple reason that their networks and devices they use will simply cease to function in a two-to-three year period. By the end of 2015, T-Metro plans to remove all traces of Metro’s CDMA and LTE infrastructure from the grid, and it plans to replace every CDMA phone with a new HSPA device.
- For most T-Mobile customers the creation of T-Metro will mean business as usual. They’ll keep the same handsets, voice and data plans and coverage. Their device selection won’t change, but there may be one immediate benefit to customers in service plan choice.
How the T-Mobile/MetroPCS merger affects you, the consumer
One aspect of spectrum sharing that’s receiving less attention than it should is security — specifically, potential problems brought on by the very attributes that makes this technology work. There’s a basic concept in computer network security: If you don’t want A to attack B, make it impossible for A and B to communicate. That’s why sensitive military communications systems do not have links to the internet. Experts realize that, even with the best firewalls and filtering, if a connection exists, the system is inherently less secure. That’s exactly the security problem that arises with spectrum sharing: It creates connections that could be compromised.
[Rysavy is president of Rysavy Research, a wireless network engineering firm]
Spectrum sharing opens a potential attack route
One of the biggest questions in copyright law today is what kinds of repurposing fall under the "fair use" exception. If a university scans a book and allows students to download it, is that a violation of copyright law? What if students can't download it, but can search through it? What if only certain students can download it? These questions are at the center of a lawsuit brought by a group of authors, The Authors Guild, and several other associations against HathiTrust, a massive repository of digital books, founded and supported by many of the country's leading universities. For a few years, Google has been scanning the books held in these universities' libraries, retaining a digital copy for itself (the contents of which fuel Google Books' "snippet view" we all know and love/hate), and providing another for the universities, which all students can search but whose entire texts are only available to students with visual disabilities who do not have access to printed works. If you're a student who can see just fine, a search of copyrighted works (which make up about three-quarters of the 10 million scanned books) will only provide you with a page number, and from there it's off to the hard copy for you. The universities, Google, and HathiTrust all keep full, digitized copies.
Is this fair use? On Oct 10, in a decisive, make-no-bones-about-it opinion, a federal court in New York said yes, this was quite fair indeed. Two lines of argument run through the court's reasoning: 1.) remaking a text for search constitutes a "transformative use" and therefore falls under fair use, and 2.) the Americans With Disabilities Act does not merely make this activity legal, it may even require it.
Court Hands Huge Victory to Universities' Digitization Efforts
If there's a story to be told about the Internet's trajectory over the last few years, it's the diminishing distinction between on- and offline reality. At least in the West, our digital and physical lives are growing increasingly interconnected. Every song we listen to, every restaurant we visit, every photo we take can be logged and propagated automatically on Facebook via "frictionless sharing" without our input. More than 80 percent of Americans, meanwhile, enjoy broadband access to the Web. As the saying might go, We have met the Internet -- and it is us.
The Internet market in China is fast approaching a similar state. A set of buzzwords has grown up to describe this specialized cohort. Among the most popular terms? Netizen, or in Chinese, wangmin -- a portmanteau that literally means "a citizen of the Internet." Although Web users in China naturally prefer the non-English phrase to refer to themselves, the terms are synonymous and each is a direct translation of the other. Although the word has gradually fallen out of use around the rest of the world, China -- along with people outside China writing about it -- appear to be the exception. Netizen is more than a cute, trendy label. It speaks to the way Chinese Internet users have organized themselves as inhabitants of the same digital nation, one that's distinct from the physical nation in which they live. Citizenship in that digital state confers new privileges and opportunities. Most of these users aren't representative of the broader population -- they're mostly young, wealthy, educated urbanites -- which is all the more reason to assign them a name. In many ways, netizens might be considered the Chinese equivalent of the American Millennial. The big difference? Where many young Westerners are working to erase the boundaries between the online and the off-, the security of China's netizens requires that those delineated borders stay in place, at least for now.
'Netizen': Why Is This Goofy-Sounding Word So Important in China?
[Commentary] There’s vast trove of social traffic is essentially invisible to most analytics programs. I call it DARK SOCIAL. It shows up variously in programs as "direct" or "typed/bookmarked" traffic, which implies to many site owners that you actually have a bookmark or typed in www.theatlantic.com into your browser. But that's not actually what's happening a lot of the time. Most of the time, someone Gchatted someone a link, or it came in on a big email distribution list, or your dad sent it to you. There are a couple of really interesting ramifications of this data.
First, on the operational side, if you think optimizing your Facebook page and Tweets is "optimizing for social," you're only halfway (or maybe 30 percent) correct. The only real way to optimize for social spread is in the nature of the content itself. There's no way to game email or people's instant messages. There's no power users you can contact. There's no algorithms to understand. This is pure social, uncut.
Second, the social sites that arrived in the 2000s did not create the social web, but they did structure it. This is really, really significant. In large part, they made sharing on the Internet an act of publishing (!), with all the attendant changes that come with that switch. Publishing social interactions makes them more visible, searchable, and adds a lot of metadata to your simple link or photo post. There are some great things about this, but social networks also give a novel, permanent identity to your online persona. Your taste can be monetized, by you or (much more likely) the service itself.
Third, I think there are some philosophical changes that we should consider in light of this new data. While it's true that sharing came to the web's technical infrastructure in the 2000s, the behaviors that we're now all familiar with on the large social networks was present long before they existed, and persists despite Facebook's eight years on the web. The history of the web, as we generally conceive it, needs to consider technologies that were outside the technical envelope of "webness." People layered communication technologies easily and built functioning social networks with most of the capabilities of the web 2.0 sites in semi-private and without the structure of the current sites.
Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong