October 2009

The kick-off for Texas Governor Rick Perry's 2010 re-election campaign was marred Tuesday by a Web site outage that staffers are now calling a denial-of-service attack. Perry had invited supporters to visit his campaign Web site at 11:30 a.m. Central time on Tuesday to attend a 10-minute online rally billed as "Talkin' Texas." Instead, site visitors were rebuffed with a computer error message. "Today's 'Talkin' Texas' Webcast by Gov. Perry was deliberately interrupted by a denial-of-service attack, preventing countless users from logging in to view the Governor's remarks," the Perry campaign said in a note posted to its Web site. "This planned and coordinated attack was political sabotage, and we are working to identify those responsible for this illegal activity." Before the site crashed, more than 22,000 visitors were able to access the event, the Perry campaign said. But according to local coverage of the incident, the outage did not entirely resemble a distributed denial-of-service attack, (DDoS) which renders the server extremely slow or inaccessible to most visitors. Instead, Austin's KXAN reported that the site displayed the message "Unable to connect to database server," generated by the Drupal content-management platform.

Time Warner Cable Inc., working to lure subscribers amid intensifying competition, plans to let digital-television customers watch shows whenever they want without paying more for a video recorder. The project, called Enhanced TV, has features that allow customers to watch hit shows without planning ahead, Chief Strategy Officer Peter Stern said. Subscribers can restart programs if they missed the beginning, watch shows up to three days after the air date, and eventually view programs older than three days. The new features also may persuade customers to keep watching cable instead of switching to the Internet for shows, Stern said. New York-based Time Warner Cable found 80 percent of people who watch on the Web do so to catch up on missed programs.

[Commentary] It seems like every time I talk to people about privacy, there's a feeling that younger users of online tools simply don't care about the issue. Often, I am asked why privacy advocates like CDT push government and industry to protect privacy more robustly- when "no one cares"? In short, people seem to be asserting that digital natives like myself do not value privacy online. While this point is oft repeated, I think that this argument is flawed, and does not address the subtleties of privacy in the cloud, social networks, and other new online technologies. Simply put, these technologies are giving digital natives (really, all users) greater control over their information - and we use it. Digital immigrants tend to think about privacy as the ability to conceal information from others. Digital natives instead share information within certain contexts, and with granular privacy controls on that information. And according to a new study on behavioral advertising, it is precisely the 18-24 year old age bracket that cares most about how information is used to make decisions about them to deliver news, advertisements, or discounts. In fact, one of the survey's authors told the New York Times that it's likely that young adults care more about their privacy and how companies use their information than expected.

The online education sector grew 13 percent last year and had been growing at about 20 percent in previous years. Nearly one in four students take at least some college courses online, up from one in 10 in 2002. Two million students, most older than the traditional 18-22 year-old undergraduates, take all their courses online and two million more take one or more online course. President Barack Obama pledged $500 million for online courses and materials as part of a multi-pronged plan aimed at expanding access to college. Twenty-nine percent of U.S. adults have a college degree, fewer than in many other industrialized nations. Only about 40 percent of Americans who start college graduate. The price of higher education, which rises by an average of 8 percent a year, contributes to the high dropout rate. Proponents of online education cite a recent Department of Education study that concluded course work is better absorbed online than material presented in live classrooms.