Technology Review

What will happen if the Federal Communications Commission successfully eliminates President Barack Obama’s network neutrality rules? Unfortunately, that seems like anyone’s guess, and such an uncertain environment could leave us with even less investment by Internet service providers and content providers alike—more than 800 tech startups wrote FCC Chairman Ajit Pai recently, urging him not to kill the rules.

It’s plausible that we could end up with no regulations at all, at least for a time. The agency could try to enact new rules, which would likely be more business-friendly and allow certain things that weren’t allowed under Obama’s rules, like Internet fast lanes. Ultimately, Congress has the power to step in and clarify the situation with legislation that establishes some sort of yet-to-be determined protections for content providers. If recent history is any guide, however, it's a long shot that this Congress will come up with a compromise on net neutrality anytime soon.

New York is moving aggressively under Gov Andrew Cuomo’s (D-NY) “Broadband for All” initiative to connect all its residents by 2018.

New York’s efforts highlight the need for similar action on a national scale. Across the country, 12.6 million American households don’t have access to broadband (the Federal Communications Commission defines “broadband” as a download speed of 25 megabits per second and an upload speed of three megabits per second). Perhaps the bigger problem than expanding infrastructure, though, is the regular cost of an Internet plan. Internet access in America is much more expensive than it is in many other countries, and people with lower incomes are far less likely to be connected. Even New York’s initiative, which mandates that a 100-megabit-per-second connection be made available for $60 a month, is likely to mean that high-speed access remains functionally out of reach for many people. So while the blueprints for a more connected country may be laid before us, there remains a long way to go before the digital divide is closed.

When the maker of Snapchat filed recently to go public, it also stepped directly into the contentious political debate surrounding net neutrality, warning that if the government removes the Federal Communications Commission’s “open Internet” rules it could seriously harm its business. Smaller wireless streaming video providers like Snap are among those with the most to lose if the Open Internet rules are rolled back. In its filing for the Securities and Exchange Commission, Snap warned that if they are modified or removed, “mobile providers may be able to limit our users’ ability to access Snapchat or make Snapchat a less attractive alternative to our competitors’ applications.”

If the next president intends to improve American infrastructure and expand economic opportunities, there’s no better place to start than with the millions of people who still lack broadband access and computer skills.

Does everyone deserve access to affordable high-speed Internet, just like water, sewers, electricity, and telephone service? In Ma’Niyah Larry’s apartment and at the Ashbury Community Center, where Monica Moore rebooted her career, you can see that the argument could be made. “There is never a shortage of people who want to show up here and learn,” Bill Callahan, director of the Connect Your Community collaborative, remarked as we looked around the community center.

[Commentary] If I say that social media aided Donald Trump’s election, you might think of fake news on Facebook. But even if Facebook fixes the algorithms that elevate phony stories, there’s something else going on: social media represents the ultimate ascendance of television over other media. I've been warning about this since November 2014, when I was freed from six years of incarceration in Tehran, a punishment I received for my online activism in Iran. Before I went to prison, I blogged frequently on what I now call the open Web: it was decentralized, text-centered, and abundant with hyperlinks to source material and rich background. It nurtured varying opinions. It was related to the world of books.

Then for six years I got disconnected; when I left prison and came back online, I was confronted by a brave new world. Facebook and Twitter had replaced blogging and had made the Internet like TV: centralized and image-centered, with content embedded in pictures, without links. Like TV it now increasingly entertains us, and even more so than television it amplifies our existing beliefs and habits. It makes us feel more than think, and it comforts more than challenges. The result is a deeply fragmented society, driven by emotions, and radicalized by lack of contact and challenge from outside.

[Hossein Derakshan is an Iranian-Canadian author, media analyst, and performance artist who lives in Tehran]

Governments damage their economies when they shut down Internet applications and services, according to a new analysis. During the past year, 81 disruptions in 19 countries cost those economies at least $2.4 billion, according a study by Darrell West at the Brookings Institution that estimates the cost of disrupting a nation’s online activities. Governments can cut off citizens’ Internet access for a variety of reasons, including to quell dissent or force a company to comply with a law. In 2011, the Egyptian government shut down access for five days to prevent communication between protesters, while more recently, Brazil blocked the messaging app WhatsApp after it refused to comply with requests for user data.

Whether or not your ethnic group has political power in the country where you live is a crucial factor determining your access to the Internet, according to a new analysis. The effect varies from country to country, and is much less pronounced in democratic nations. But the study suggests that besides censorship, another way national governments prevent opposing groups from organizing online is by denying them Internet access in the first place, says Nils Weidmann, a professor of political science at the University of Konstanz in Germany.

Internet access is clearly linked to individuals’ socioeconomic status and the level of development where they live. These factors contribute to “digital divides” seen throughout the world. In the new analysis, Weidmann and his coauthors aimed to shed light on a factor that isn’t as well understood: political divisions between ethnic groups. excluded groups had significantly lower access compared to the groups in power, and that this can’t be explained by other economic or geographic factors (like living in rural vs. urban areas). Weidmann says the results add a new layer to our understanding of how national governments control Internet use. “You don’t have to censor if the opposition doesn’t get access at all.” He says organizations aiming to increase Internet access for humanitarian reasons must bear that in mind, and be careful not to reinforce such political bias.

[Commentary] Online censorship is about more than just the technical means of scrubbing information away. Its power to hinder effective communication can truly demoralize those seeking to oppose the status quo.

If memes and morphs are to become a tool for organizing, activists must engage and inspire young people before they can even think of educating them about the things being hidden from them, much less rousing them to action. Only then will the censors and their targets be playing on equal terms.

[Ng is a research fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab]

What makes somebody retweet information from a stranger? That’s the question addressed by Kyumin Lee from Utah State University in Logan and a few pals from IBM’s Almaden research center in San Jose.

These guys say that by studying the characteristics of Twitter users, it is possible to identify strangers who are more likely to pass on your message than others. And in doing this, the researchers say they’ve been able to improve the retweet rate of messages sent strangers by up to 680 percent. So how did they do it?

Wireless Internet access has become one of the enabling technologies of the modern world.

Indeed, many think of Wi-Fi is the oxygen of the computer generation. While wireless access is hugely useful, it is also a security threat. Anybody can access a wireless network by masquerading as a computer that already has access.

Christoph Neumann and pals at the Technicolor Security and Content Protection Labs in Rennes, France, say they’ve developed a way of uniquely identifying a computer by the way it accesses Wi-Fi resources. They point out that characteristics such as transmission rates and frame inter-arrival time, depend on the Wi-Fi card a computer uses as well as the drivers and the applications involved. The large number of permutations of these ensures that most computers have a “Wi-Fi fingerprint” that uniquely identifies them. And that could help distinguish an authorized user from a malicious one.

Neumann and co begin their work by analyzing all the wireless traffic broadcast on a particular Wi-Fi channel in a number of different environments. They then analyzed the training data set looking for the characteristics of the devices involved. Finally, they use these parameters to see if they can uniquely identify machines in the validation datasets.

And the results are pretty good. They say that in ordinary conditions such as their office network, they uniquely identify machines with an accuracy of up to 95 percent. It’s a low-cost and passive technique that is difficult for malicious users to detect.