January 2010

[Commentary] The authors respond to an op-ed Andrew Keen of Arts + Labs, a thinly veiled front group for AT&T, Verizon and handful of big media companies that has hired a crew of flacks and shills to attack anyone who dares to question the wisdom and benevolence of Ma Bell.

Keen, whom the popular blog Boing Boing has described as "a notorious spammer, failed Web 1.0 entrepreneur, blog-hating blogger, and luddite troll," is a natural fit there. He even once compared Nazis favorably to the Internet, saying "even the Nazis didn't put artists out of work."

When it comes to Internet freedom, the United States of America can be a beacon to the rest of the world. But we must start at home. We need to protect consumers, prevent discrimination and prohibit Internet service providers from interfering with Internet traffic just to increase their profits. A majority of the Federal Communications Commission is already committed to Net Neutrality. And when the agency asked for public input on the issue recently, they received comments from 200,000 individuals - running 9-to-1 in favor of strong Net Neutrality rules. If this is the fringe, we're glad to be in the middle of it. From here, it looks like AT&T, Comcast, Verzion, Time Warner Cable, even with all their lobbyists and paid mouthpieces, are the ones who are outside the mainstream. Maybe that isolation is why they're so angry.

When President Obama last month named Howard Schmidt to be the nation's cybersecurity coordinator, he filled a gap in the federal government's cybersecurity command structure. Schmidt joins a group IT decisions makers who share responsibility for keeping Uncle Sam's systems, information, and IT infrastructure safe from threats that are growing in number and sophistication.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is in charge of cybersecurity compliance guidance for federal agencies.

The Office of Management and Budget and Congress are highly influential in establishing cybersecurity policy.

The National Security Agency, Department of Homeland Security, and new U.S. Cyber Command are helping to protect both civilian and military networks.

Within each of those organizations, officials such as DHS deputy undersecretary Philip Reitinger are bringing new ideas -- and applying new pressure -- aimed at strengthening the nation's cybersecurity.

Who are other leading influencers in the federal government's cybersecurity efforts? They include Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, who has been nominated to be commander of the forthcoming U.S. Cyber Command, and Ron Ross, a senior computer scientist and information security researcher at NIST, who oversees the FISMA Implementation Project.

The past several years have seen laptop prices plunge to commodity levels at the same time that the explosion in WiFi access has made getting them on the 'Net much easier. That's prompted an explosion of one-to-one student:laptop programs, implemented by everything from individual schools to entire states. Hard data on the effectiveness of these programs, however, has been hard to come by. The most recent issue of The Journal of Technology, Learning and Assessment is devoted to looking at these programs, and it includes some hard data suggesting that they just might help students handle standardized tests.

There are six papers, all dedicated to looking at different attempts at 1:1 laptop programs at different levels of primary education in the US. A few of those are focused on self-reported surveys of how teachers and students view the programs, however; there are only two that focus on hard numbers obtained via statewide standardized tests. Still, all of the papers emphasize just how difficult it is to compare programs. Finding a nearby school system that isn't running a laptop program but has equivalent demographics and similar test scores to start with can be a real challenge. There's also substantial variation in how the laptop programs are implemented. Different schools devote different resources to training teachers, providing software and other key factors, and may not provide access to the hardware after school hours. The software and training involved may differ between disciplines, as well—the approaches that make laptops an integral part of science education, for example, won't necessarily work in an English class, where things like data entry never come into play.

Internet users worldwide spent an average of 5 and a half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December, an 82% increase from a year ago.

New data from Nielsen Online also shows that the global audience for social networks has increased 50% in the last three years, from 211 million to 307 million. When it comes to time spent on social networks, Australia led the world with an average of nearly 7 hours (6:52), trumping the U.S.(6:09), the U.K. (6:08) and Italy (6:00). But the U.S. had by far the largest audiences for social sites and blogs, with 142 million, followed by Japan (46.5 million) and Brazil (31.3 million). Total minutes devoted to social properties and blogs in the U.S. surged 210% over the last year, and average time per person increased 143%.

Twitter was the fastest-growing social site in the U.S., with its audience jumping from 2.7 million to 18.1 million in 2009. But Nielsen pointed out that month-to-month, Twitter traffic has actually declined 5%, underscoring other reports that growth of the microblogging service has fallen off since last spring.