Wired

[Commentary] We'll never realize broadband's potential if large Internet service providers erect a pay-to-play system that charges both the sender and receiver for the same content. That's why we at Netflix are so vocal about the need for strong network neutrality, which, for us, means ISPs should enable equal access to content without favoring, impeding, or charging particular content providers.

The Federal Communications Commission has historically focused only on last-mile connections -- the final leg of the Internet that connects individual homes to the World Wide Web. Today's problem spots are further upstream, at the choke point where companies like Netflix pass our traffic off to the ISPs. If the FCC doesn't expand its purview to include these transactions, it would be better to have no rules than the ones being proposed -- which simply legalize discrimination on the Internet.

[Hastings is the CEO of Netflix]

South Korea now boasts nearly 99 percent coverage for LTE (Long Term Evolution) networks. Anyone who has tried to rely on consistent 4G coverage in the UK, even in the capital, will note that statistic with envy.

When this technology makes its way to Europe, Category 6 devices will allow those speeds to theoretically top out at 300Mbps. Considering most of us are lucky to get 15Mbps on home broadband it seems clear the significant impact this will have on our mobile lives.

According to the most recent national security revelations leaked by Edward Snowden, an intelligence officer told him that Tailored Access Operations (TAO) -- a division of National Security Agency hackers -- had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war.

The public didn't know that the US government was responsible, and if the NSA were caught, the finger could always be pointed at Israel, as people joked back at TAO's operations center.

Aside from massive surveillance, Snowden was even more disturbed to discover a new, Strangelovian cyberwarfare program in the works, codenamed MonsterMind, a program that would automate the process of hunting for the beginnings of a foreign cyberattack. When he was working for the defense contractor Booz Allen, analyzing potential cyberattacks from China, Snowden realized the United States had crossed the line.

“We're hacking universities and hospitals and wholly civilian infrastructure rather than actual government targets and military targets,” he said. Snowden went on to warn that such cyberattacks can be spoofed. “You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia,” Snowden explained.

Statistics from the New York Times say roughly half of the people who read it now do so with their mobile devices, and that jibes with figures from the latest Pew report on the news media broadly.

But if you were to assume that means people have given up reading actual articles and are just snacking instead, you'd be wrong.

Iotera is trying to crowdsource a new nationwide wireless network for devices that operate outside the home. Iotera believes we need something more than ordinary Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and cellular networks if we’re going to bring things like keychains and backpacks online, but the company aims to make this happen in a unique way.

Iota is also includes a wireless base station that connects those devices to the Internet.

Each station has a range of 3 to 4 miles, and it can communicate with any Iota device within range, including those owned by other people. Since every base station can be used by any Iota device, each user is essentially providing coverage for every other user within range. As more users come online, the wider the coverage will be. Eventually, the company may be able to achieve nationwide coverage.

Believe it or not, there are people in Congress listening to the Internet. We just have to get their attention -- and, more importantly, we have to keep their attention long enough to effect real change.

[Commentary] By today’s standards, America Online’s tightly controlled experience seems quaint -- and pretty silly. But that early-’90s scenario could very well repeat itself today, with the so-called Internet of Things.

Yes, this vast array of smart devices will all be connected to the public Internet, but they may already be evolving in a way where they can’t all talk to each other, where one set of devices is cut off from another, just as AOL was cut off from Prodigy or CompuServe in a pre-web version of proprietary wishful thinking.

The Internet of Things only really makes sense as a concept if lots of devices can talk to lots of very different devices -- your car to your thermostat, your fitness band to your coffee maker. Few hardware makers would openly disagree with that premise. But at the same time, corporate tech giants are racing to create competing standards through which devices will connect, and these are, in effect, the AOLs and CompuServes of today.

Beneath its slick interface and crystal clear GPS-enabled vision of the world, Google Maps roils with local rivalries, score-settling, and deception. Maps are dotted with thousands of spam business listings for nonexistent locksmiths and plumbers. Legitimate businesses sometimes see their listings hijacked by competitors or cloned into a duplicate with a different phone number or website.

In January, someone bulk-modified the Google Maps presence of thousands of hotels around the country, changing the website URLs to a commercial third-party booking site (which siphons off the commissions).

Small businesses are the usual targets. Attacks happen because Google Maps is, at its heart, a massive crowdsourcing project, a shared conception of the world that skilled practitioners can bend and reshape in small ways using tools like Google’s Mapmaker or Google Places for Business.

[Commentary] When the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Riley v. California, it definitively told the government to keep its warrantless fingers off your cell phone. But as the full impact of that opinion has rippled through the privacy community, some SCOTUS-watchers say it could also signal a shift in how the Court sees the privacy of data in general -- not just when it’s stored on your physical handset, but also when it’s kept somewhere far more vulnerable: in the servers of faraway Internet and phone companies.

In the Riley decision, which dealt with the post-arrest searches of an accused drug dealer in Boston and an alleged gang member in California, the court unanimously ruled that police need a warrant to search a suspect’s phone. The 28-page opinion penned by Chief Justice John Roberts explicitly avoids addressing a larger question about what’s known as the “third-party doctrine,” the notion that any data kept by a third party such as Verizon, AT&T, Google or Microsoft is fair game for a warrantless search.

But even so, legal analysts reading between the opinion’s lines say they see evidence that the court is shifting its view on that long-stewing issue for online privacy. The results, if they’re right, could be future rulings from America’s highest court that seriously restrict both law enforcement’s and even the NSA’s abilities to siphons Americans’ data from the cloud.

Newly uncovered components of a digital surveillance tool used by more than 60 governments worldwide provide a rare glimpse at the extensive ways law enforcement and intelligence agencies use the tool to surreptitiously record and steal data from mobile phones.

The modules, made by the Italian company Hacking Team, were uncovered by researchers working independently of each other at Kaspersky Lab in Russia and the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs in Canada, who say the findings provide great insight into the trade craft behind Hacking Team’s tools.

The new components target Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry users and are part of Hacking Team’s larger suite of tools used for targeting desktop computers and laptops. But the iOS and Android modules provide cops and spooks with a robust menu of features to give them complete dominion over targeted phones.

This is the first time that the modules used to spy on mobile phone users have been uncovered in the wild and reverse-engineered. Kaspersky has tracked more than 350 command-and-control servers created for this purpose in more than 40 countries. While Kaspersky found only one or two servers in most of these countries, the researchers found 64 in the United States -- by far the most. Kazakhstan followed with 49, Ecuador with 35 and the United Kingdom with 32.

As Kaspersky notes, it makes little sense for governments to maintain their command servers in foreign countries where they run the risk of losing control over the servers.