Revere Digital

A recent survey sponsored by Motorola Mobility and B2X found that one in seven Americans would rather give up their best friends for a week than part with their smartphones.

An even greater number -- 40 percent of respondents -- said it would be difficult, if not impossible, to surrender their phones for a day, even if offered $100 to shed their cellular handcuffs.

The 518 people surveyed said they keep their devices within reach, day and night. The desire to remain in constant contact is so great, they frequently don’t turn off their phones. The survey is intended to provide insights into customers’ needs and “pain points” when it comes to delivering services.

Federal Communications Commission officials defended a recently announced plan to spend $2 billion for Wi-Fi networks at public schools after teachers unions complained it wasn’t enough money and could hurt poorer schools by shifting funds away to wealthier areas.

The unions and other educational groups don’t think the proposal is the best way to move forward with improving the availability of high-speed Internet in schools and libraries. The money for the E-Rate program comes from a fee that is charged on consumers’ phone bills, called a Universal Service Fund (USF) fee. The FCC’s plan doesn’t go far enough because it doesn’t increase the amount of funding available to schools and will change the formula for how money is allocated, the National Education Association, National Parent Teacher Association and 11 other educational and union organizations complained.

The groups have “strong concerns” about FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s plan because it will “only dilute an already over-subscribed (program)” that they say is already “vastly underfunded.” The educational groups are concerned about a possible move to an allocation formula that would work on a per-pupil basis, instead of the current formula, which takes location and the local poverty level more into account.

Hackers operating somewhere in Eastern Europe have penetrated the networks of energy companies in the US, Spain, France and several other countries and may have gained the ability to carry out cyber-sabotage attacks, researchers at the security company Symantec said.

In what’s being described as a departure from typical hacking attacks that are intended to steal intellectual property, the attackers gained access to industrial control systems used to maintain power grids and oil and gas pipelines and had the ability to take over operations or even damage them.

Symantec says it “bears the hallmarks” of state-sponsored operations, but does not identify any specific country. It nicknamed the attackers “Dragonfly,” and said the only clue to their identity was the fact that they were operating during standard business hours in a time zone that includes the countries of the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Azerbaijan, but also the United Arab Emirates.

Another clue: They used an attack tool that appears to have been modified by a Russian-speaker.

AT&T said that it is selling its stake in America Móvil, the large Latin American cell phone company and parent of US prepaid brand Tracfone.

Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, the primary owner of America Móvil, will pay nearly $5.6 billion for AT&T’s stake, according to a regulatory filing.

“When we announced the DirecTV deal, we said that we would sell our stake in (America Movil) to facilitate the regulatory approval process in Latin America,” AT&T said.

Some T-Mobile subscribers turned to Reddit to complain about problems with the mobile carrier’s new music freedom program, which allows customers to listen to streaming services without incurring data charges.

A few customers wrote that they had been racking up data charges while listening to Spotify -- a problem they hadn’t encountered while tuning in to other streaming services, such as iHeart Radio or Pandora.

T-Mobile said it doesn’t have any indication that Spotify or any other music applications included in its program are drawing down customers’ high-speed wireless data buckets. A spokesman urged customers who are experiencing problems to contact T-Mobile’s customer care.

[Commentary] When I finally heard that the Supreme Court had shut down the groundbreaking digital video system, I was amazed by how universally joyful TV broadcasters and distributors were about the ruling and ensuing shutdown.

Too bad they weren’t in Anaheim with me, because despite Aereo’s now-illegal Rube Goldberg-esque transmission technology, it offered a distinctive and revolutionary way for broadcast TV to remain relevant to younger viewers.

Unfortunately, most TV execs probably never had a chance to actually use Aereo. And that’s too bad, because the well-designed service delivered a unique and compelling way for traditional TV -- still mostly watched on TVs -- to build an audience among digital natives.

Now that the Aereo experiment is over, network executives will be newly emboldened to continue to circle the wagons and mostly keep doing business in the same old way -- via traditional distributors and to the dumb devices that, when millennials do watch, they usually mostly ignore in favor of their favorite screens in their hands (disparagingly called the “second screen” by the traditional TV industry). Unfortunately, they will continue to see their audience decline -- and revenue along with it.

The broadcast upfronts just concluded, and even though there was a slight increase in the rates charged to reach each viewer, overall revenue is likely to be down across most of the English-language broadcasters, due to declining viewership.

[“Cord Cutter” works as Senior Digital Exec for a major programming company]

The Obama Administration provided a small peek into its intelligence surveillance efforts, releasing a new report on how many requests it made for information in 2013.

The report offers some new details about how many court orders it obtained in 2013 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) -- about 1,900, along with an additional 178 requests for business records -- as well as a few details about the 19,000 or so National Security Letters (which are a form of subpoena) the government sent.

The report may not be particularly meaningful since intelligence officials still use vague definitions to describe data requests and the figures can’t be placed in context because we don’t have data from previous years.

[Commentary] If you kept all your private physical information in a locked trunk, the government would need a warrant to search it. “Most people cannot lug around every piece of mail they have received for the past several months, every picture they have taken, or every book or article they have read,” the Chief Justice John Roberts said in Riley v. California. If people did, “they would have to drag a trunk behind them.”

Searching a trunk should, and does, require a warrant. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Riley v. California says that modern “trunks” like phones, computers and cloud services should be no different. In straightforward language, the Chief Justice demolishes the notions that have obscured the basic fact that the constitution entitles us to “the right to be secure” in our “persons, houses, papers and effects.”

Importantly for digital privacy and security companies, the Supreme Court had no time for the government’s complaints that common security features -- like encryption -- justified dispensing with Constitutional protections. It is clear that the justices saw encryption correctly, as an ordinary and prudent privacy protection, not as some exotic feature designed to thwart the needs of law enforcement.

[Edgar is Visiting Fellow, Brown University]

[Commentary] An astounding number of American technology companies employ engineers in Ukraine, but you might never know it. The Ukrainian tech industry is responsible for Ford’s in-car infotainment systems, Reuter’s award-winning photography app, Nokia’s customer retail experience, and Deutsche Bank’s Risk Management System, among many others.

Most US companies don’t have formal offices in Kiev, preferring to hire people through intermediaries. And many companies would prefer to not publicly acknowledge these employees exist, given that “outsourcing” is a dirty word in US politics. Ukraine’s IT sector is impressive.

As one of the country’s largest industries, IT in Ukraine is a key component of its future economic success. Today, the volume of exports of software service and development from Ukraine is about $2 billion annually. By 2012, there were more than 4,000 IT outsourcing companies in Ukraine, and the sector was growing 25 percent year over year; economists project that the $2 billion industry will grow 85 percent over the next six years. But given the continuing political crisis in Ukraine, now is the time to stand up and speak out. Many companies might think they are powerless to do anything but wait out the crisis -- but they’re wrong.

What can you do?

• Assure your Ukrainian coworkers that their jobs are safe through these trying times.
• Allocate travel funds for them if the situation escalates.
• Donate to nonprofit organizations like the Brain Basket Foundation, which provides educational opportunities for aspiring IT specialists, or this IndieGoGo campaign to send a Ukrainian startup to IDCEE, a respected international developers conference, held this October in Kiev.

[Wilson is Co-Founder and CEO, TubeMogul]

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler is visiting Silicon Valley to get an earful from the tech community about what they think about his network neutrality proposal.

Chairman Wheeler reportedly met with a group of venture capitalists for a roundtable discussion about net neutrality and is meeting with a group of startups today, according to a person with knowledge of the meetings. Among the attendees, representatives from Y Combinator, Mozilla, Andreessen Horowitz’s (and former DC mayor) Adrian Fenty, Homebrew’s Hunter Walk and Engine Advocacy, the public interest group which has been responsible for whipping up support among startups for net neutrality.

“An Open Internet is an essential foundation for startups to build upon so very glad that Chairman Wheeler is spending time in Silicon Valley meeting with entrepreneurs, tech execs and investors,” Walk said. Many of the people in the meetings represent companies that signed onto a letter raising concerns about Chairman Wheeler’s recent net neutrality proposal, which opens the door to allowing broadband providers to sell fast-lane service to content companies.