July 2010

Jail-breaking law change will have limited impact: analysts, companies

The impact of the Copyright Office's cell phone jail-breaking decision probably won't have a big practical effect, analysts say.

For one: breaking open locked devices to download unauthorized applications takes some technical savvy. A separate copyright law prevents a cottage industry of breaking open phones. "It does not extend to allow businesses to set up services and tools to allow those individuals to crack the access controls, which is prohibited by another section of the [Digital Millennium Copyright Act]," wrote Rebecca Arbogast, head of tech policy research at Stifel Nicholaus. "So this means that clever, tech-savvy people can take advantage of this, aided by operations that are providing some tools to help them, but large-scale business models to provide a widely available service are unlikely to spring up because they still have liability risk."

Who is the World's Biggest Broadband Company?

Given that Asia dominates the list of 100 Fastest Internet cities and China is the most populous nation in the world, it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that China is home to the largest broadband service provider in the world.

The latest data gathered by Telegeography, a research firm, shows that at the end of the first quarter of 2010, China Telecom led the top 10 broadband service providers rankings. It was followed by China Unicom. The two Chinese ISPs account for nearly 20 percent of the world's broadband subscribers. At the end of the first quarter of 2010, there were close to 492 million broadband subscribers worldwide. The rise of these two carriers also mirrors the rise of China as an Internet behemoth, pushing the U.S. into the second spot. ?The United States had four broadband ISPs in the top ten list: Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable and Verizon. ?Korea Telecom cracked the top 10 and edged out Telecom Italia, pushing it to the No. 11 spot. These top 10 broadband service providers in total account for roughly 39 percent of world's total broadband customers, and they collectively added about 23.3 million new subscribers between the first quarter of 2009 and the first quarter of 2010.

Internet And TV Capture News Seekers

According to a new study by Gather, Inc., individuals are increasingly turning to the Internet to get, share, and discuss the news.

The report reveals trends in how people are receiving and interacting with the news, starting millions of conversations across America. Nearly half of adults surveyed consider the Internet their primary resource for news. Self proclaimed "news junkies" are more likely to rely on traditional media sources. 53% still cite the newspaper as their main source of news. Younger people get their news on demand. 65% of respondents younger than 25 years old described their news habits as interest-based, only reading about breaking news stories or stories of interest. 70% of respondents in this age group turn to the Internet to learn more about a breaking news story and share information about a news story. The majority of adults surveyed admitted to sharing news online, through either Twitter, Facebook, Social Networks such as MySpace, Email or Bookmarking sites like Digg. 90% of respondents younger than 25 years old use Twitter or Facebook to share news, double the amount of respondents 40+.

Reining in runaway IT projects is key to controlling costs, forum participants say

The government's top tech budget official said information technology spending is expected to rise above the current $80 billion level as agencies turn to IT to cut costs elsewhere.

"Over time that number is going to grow ... because we're going to make strategic investments that produce dividends," federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra told a group of thought leaders from industry, academia and government who had gathered in Washington to propose ways the government can turn around troubled IT projects. All were taking part in a daylong forum sponsored by the Center for American Progress, a Washington research institute. The event brought together officials known for effecting dramatic change at all levels of government, such as District of Columbia Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, to tackle citizens' decreasing confidence in Washington. One of the issues contributing to this distrust, according to government officials, is mismanaged IT projects that waste billions of taxpayer dollars annually. The Office of Management and Budget last month froze 30 financial systems to stem the problem until each program is replanned or cut. Simultaneously, OMB is developing recommendations, due this fall, for reforming the IT acquisition process to address the causes of project failures. The feedback collected from Tuesday's session is expected to inform the recommendations.

Survey tells two tales about feds' social media use

Social media applications for government are becoming more popular, but significant numbers of federal employees and agencies are not making use of those tools, according to a new Market Connections Inc. research survey of government social media use.

In a recent survey of 321 federal employees, 60 percent said they use social media at home or work, while 35 percent said they were not using social media; 5 percent said they do not know about social media, John Kagia, research director at Market Connections, said. Statistics on social media utilization are just starting to be released. On July 22, the Government Accountability Office reported that 22 out of 24 major federal agencies are using social media applications, including Facebook, Twitter, GovLoop, LinkedIn, wikis, blogs, videos and podcasts. However, Market Connections' survey found a smaller percentage of utilization. Twenty-nine percent of the employees surveyed said their agencies were using social media, 48 percent said their agencies were not using social media, and 23 percent did not know whether their agencies used social media.

What the U.K.'s Growing Rural-Urban Net Divide Can Teach the US

As the U.S. broadband expansion plan stalls at the starting blocks, officials could learn a trick or two from the old country.

The UK's Net development plans demonstrate both shining examples and pitfalls to avoid. It all boils down to a mix of engineering and fiscal issues. Supplying a Net connection to an end-user isn't as simple as just throwing a switch in a phone exchange--a lot of infrastructure is required behind the scenes to shunt data through the cable network and onto and off huge server arrays. Investing in this infrastructure is costly, and the return on the investment is always going to be bigger in cities as there are more subscribers per exchange, and fewer long tracts of "empty" cable, as you find in the country. It's raw economies of scale, in a subscribers-per-square-kilometer sense. And as newer technologies like fiber are coming online, ISPs are obviously going to invest in urban areas first.

Cybersecurity Conference Considers Challenges; Debates Need for New Solutions

Speaking at a conference on cybersecurity hosted by the Department of Commerce July 27, one expert argued that when it comes to cybersecurity threats, "we don't need a new strategy."

The speaker, Philip Reitinger of the Department for Homeland Security, made the observation in the introduction to his remarks on how combating cybersecurity might be accomplished in the current climate. "Heaven help us from a new strategy! We don't need a new strategy. We need to evolve our strategy," Reitinger said. "We can't let the urgent completely trump the strategic and critical. We all depend upon an Internet ecosystem that is fundamentally insecure. That doesn't mean it's bad, but it's designed in a way for resiliency but not necessarily in a way with security built in." Reitinger's remarks drew laughs from his fellow panelists Cita Furlani, Vint Cerf, Michael Barrett and Ken Silva in what was the fourth and final panel of the day-long conference. The prospect of a "new strategy" for dealing with cybersecurity was, Reitinger's speech excepted, cited as a necessity by almost every panelist and speaker at the event. One persistent theme that emerged from several speakers' remarks was the market failure involved in creating incentives for consumers to care about cybersecurity.

NIST seen as epicenter for cybersecurity

Sen Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) would like to enhance the National Institute of Standards and Technology's role in cybersecurity.

At the Commerce Department's Symposium on Cybersecurity in the Commercial Space on July 27, Sen Mikulski detailed plans to create a "National Cybersecurity Center for Excellence," to be headquartered at NIST. The NIST National Cybersecurity Center for Excellence would serve as a cybersecurity technology transfer center for academia and industry; will help fund, what she calls, "merit-based research" into cybersecurity; and also promote leap-ahead next-generation cybersecurity technology. She included language and funding for the idea in the recently approved Commerce Department appropriations bill. She says the goal is to boost NIST's role in setting the technical standards for the equipment that will protect all of the nation's cybersecurity infrastructure. "This new technology needs to be built to standards...and the standards should be and must be a United States standard, not a China standard. I believe that the country that creates the standards first, will create the products and the jobs first," she says.

The proposal to boost NIST's cybersecurity profile has been approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee as part of the Commerce Department appropriations bill. It now goes to the full Senate for consideration.

$400 million cable to double Internet capacity out of Australia

Two companies will invest an estimated $US400 million in a new 13,600-kilometer submarine cable that they say will double telecommunications capacity out of Australia and further reduce broadband costs to consumers. Telecommunications company Pacnet and a new company created specifically for the new cable, Pacific Fibre, will invest the money and have it built by 2013. They will tender for its build before year's end. The plan to build the cable was revealed in March, when Pacific Fibre was searching for an investment partner. The cable will travel between Australia and New Zealand and then on to California in the United States. Australia has five major submarine telecommunications cables that carry Internet traffic between it and other countries. The two companies intend to increase wholesale price competition between telecommunications providers such as Telstra, which has owned most of the cable capacity that leaves the country, and others, Pacnet chief executive Bill Barney said.

Trade policies force transfer of tech expertise to China

China's goal to become a technology giant is being helped by government policies that may force businesses to transfer their technical know-how for access to China's market, a new report finds.

These foreign technology products may be "re-innovated" by Chinese companies who will then take these products to market and emerge as new competitors. This is just one of the concerns described in a new report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce which looks at China's policies and warns that trade disputes may come of it. China's government has set ambitious goals to create entire homegrown industries, especially in the tech area, with the help of a policy called "indigenous innovation," which U.S. officials have said will force companies to transfer the fruits of their technical expertise in exchange for access to China's market.

"[China's] indigenous innovation political and economic campaign amounts to an all-hands-on-deck call to action for the Chinese nation to roll up its sleeves and complete the mission of catching up and even surpassing the West in science and technology," wrote James McGregor, a senior counselor for the consultancy Apco Worldwide and author of "One Billion Customers: Lessons from the Front Lines of Doing Business in China" (Free Press 2005), in the report commissioned by the chief U.S. industry body.

Benton

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