Vice

After spending the better part of the last decade fighting against more accurate broadband mapping data, the broadband industry recently proclaimed the sector was now “leading the charge” for better data. But industry experts are skeptical of the industry’s sudden about face, and worry the effort’s real goal is decreased broadband data transparency.

Democratic lawmakers continue to push their new network neutrality bill through Congress, but there’s signs that several members of the party are already eager to water down the proposal. During March 12 hearings on the proposal in the House Communications Subcommittee, some Democratic lawmakers, like Rep Darren Soto (D-FL), stated the bill was simply an “opening offer” and that Democrats would be open to amendments for the bill. Others, like Rep Kurt Schrader (D-OR), insisted that additional “compromise” would be needed to ensure passage.

In response to questions from Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR), T-Mobile has revealed another case of abuse, in which a “bad actor” acquired location information without consumer consent. “It is now abundantly clear that you have failed to be good stewards of your customers’ private location information,” Sen Wyden wrote in another letter March 13 addressed to all of the major telecoms. In the newly revealed incident, in Aug 2014, LocAid—a company that aggregated location data from the telecoms and then sold it onto other clients—informed T-Mobile it was suspending the account of a particular customer

The surprisingly complex journey a text message takes every time we hit 'send.'

Engineers would say that, when the phone senses voltage fluctuations over the ‘send’ button, it sends the encoded message to the SIM card (that tiny card your cell provider puts in your phone so it knows what your phone number is), and in the process it wraps it in all sorts of useful contextual data. By the time it reaches my wife’s SIM, it goes from a 140-byte message (just the text) to a 176-byte message (text + context).