March 2011

State Department official: Internet freedom work won't be rushed

The Internet freedom work at the State Department uses taxpayer dollars to combat the stranglehold many foreign leaders have over Internet use in their countries and the Obama Administration apparently considered rushing these funds out the door to save them from budget cuts. "We certainly all feel the climate of austerity. There has been pressure to just push money out the door and just spend the money, but what we've decided to do — and what we owe the taxpayer — is to make it a strategic process," a State Department official said.

Australian government bans free email services over security concerns

The Australian government has announced it will block free Web-based email services like Gmail and Hotmail due to security concerns. The move comes in response to a security audit that found staff in the Prime Minister and Cabinet department were allowed to access the unsecured email services for business reasons. The auditor said the public email systems provide a point of entry for hackers and could lead to information disclosure.

Rep Issa wants details on FCC White House visits

House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) wants to know if top Federal Communications Commission officials were discussing network neutrality with the White House while formulating their rules, and how much the White House may have been directing the conversation.

Chairman Issa wrote to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski asking as much. In the letter, Chairman Issa informs Chairman Genachowski that his previous response to inquiries on the topic were incomplete, and asks for full records and logs of all meetings. "In the fourteen months since my initial request, the FCC has done little to demonstrate its independence from the White House," Chairman Issa wrote, noting Chairman Genachowski made 81 visits to the White House in less than two years — between January 2009 and November 2010 — according to White House records. "The large volume and timing of the meetings gives the appearance that they are more than coincidental. As such, the Committee requires more information about the nature and substance of these discussions," Chairman Issa said. In addition to a list of all participants and topics discussed at the meetings, Chairman Issa requested all e-mails between White House staffers and the FCC regarding the controversial network neutrality rules, which House Republicans recently voted to repeal. Chairman Issa's requested a reply by Wednesday, April 6.

Brill Sells Fledgling Company Journalism Online

Steve Brill’s Journalism Online, the startup he launched two years ago with the idea that it would be the savior of reporting, has had limited impact so far. But Brill’s sale of the company to R.R. Donnelley & Sons could help it gain the scale it’s lacked so far.

Launched in April 2009, Journalism Online never gained much traction and its growth potential has appeared limited. No major metropolitan papers have signed on, raising the question of whether the concept can work on a broad scale. For R.R. Donnelley & Sons, the purchase is a way to help its newspaper and magazine customers stay in business, and it helps the company with its continuing effort to reduce its reliance on its core printing business. Brill and his co-founder, former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, are reportedly staying with the company.

Survey: Teachers want more access to technology, collaboration

The second part of a national survey on college and career readiness and the challenges facing US teachers reveals that educators consider the ability to differentiate instruction for their students as essential for students’ success -- and more access to technology will help them do this, they say.

MetLife’s “Survey of the American Teacher: Preparing Students for College and Careers” looks at student differences, how teachers are addressing them, and how well students feel their needs are being met. The first part of the survey, “Part 1: Clearing the Path,” released earlier this month, examines what college- and career-ready means for different stakeholders. Given limited resources, teachers say opportunities for collaborative teaching (65 percent), access to online and technology resources (64 percent), better tools for understanding students’ learning strengths and needs (63 percent), and instructional strategies for teaching English language learners (62 percent) would have a major impact on their ability to address the different learning needs of individual students. “Teachers say that more opportunities for collaboration with other teachers and greater access to technology and other instructional tools would significantly improve their ability to help diverse learners succeed, both now and in the future,” according to the report.

The Facts and Fiction of Broadband Caps and Congestion

[Commentary] AT&T recently announced the elimination of one of broadband Internet’s most prized features: unlimited use at a flat rate. While the trend toward metered bandwidth is not inherently pro-consumer, ISPs have staked out a singular public rationale: data caps are necessary to limit the consumption of “bandwidth hogs” in order to protect the network experience for everyone else. Such concepts are simplistic and easy to imagine. They are also completely wrong. In the fixed-cost network model (used by most ISPs here in the U.S.), there’s very little connection between raw consumption levels and the relative cost of serving consumers. The heaviest of users may often be the most profitable customers, depending on when they consume network resources. Wait. What? Heavy users are the most profitable? Yes. Because overall congestion, not individual consumption, is the single driver of network costs. It’s not the “how much” but the “when” that really matters.

[Klinker is CEO of BitTorrent]

Italian Ruling on Piracy Puts Websites on Notice

Italy has developed a reputation for antagonizing the world’s biggest Internet companies. Legal actions targeted at the likes of Google and Facebook have created a fractious relationship between the government and leading technology brands. In a recent case, heard by Rome’s ninth circuit, the makers of the award-winning Iranian film drama About Elly sued Yahoo. The movie’s Italian distributor, PFA, claimed that pirated clips and links to illegal film downloads were appearing in Yahoo Video searches and demanded that the company remove the videos from the search results. When Yahoo didn't respond, the case was taken up by Open Gate, a regulatory lobby group run by Tullio Camiglieri, a former journalist and executive in Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Italia.

Pentagon seeks $3.2 billion for revised cyber budget

Protecting military computer networks in fiscal 2012 would cost nearly $1 billion more than the Pentagon publicly reported last month, an increase that reflects the growing number of programs being re-categorized as cybersecurity-related, agency officials said.

When the Obama Administration released its 2012 budget in mid-February, the Pentagon announced it was requesting $2.3 billion to bolster network security within the Defense Department and to strengthen ties with its counterparts at the Homeland Security Department, which is responsible for overseeing civilian cybersecurity. But on March 23, Pentagon officials said that the total request for boosting cybersecurity is $3.2 billion, including information assurance activities, program elements dispersed across the Defense services and agencies, and non-information assurance initiatives that are critical to the department's cyber stance. Based on the new figures, the military is proposing to spend more than three times the $936 million that the Department of Homeland Security is requesting for cyber operations.

Attention to Japan's Earthquake Dominates Social Media

For only the second time since PEJ began measuring social media in January 2009, the same story was the No. 1 topic on blogs, Twitter and YouTube. Social media users last week responded in huge numbers to the aftermath of the catastrophic earthquake in Japan, including the growing concern about damaged nuclear reactors.

For the week of March 14-18, a full 64% of blog links, 32% of Twitter news links and the top 20 YouTube news videos were about that subject, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. The only other time that one topic led the news on blogs, Twitter and YouTube was June 15-19, 2009, when unrest following the disputed elections in Iran-also known as the "Twitter Revolution"-was the No. 1 story. While all three social media platforms focused on the earthquake last week, each performed distinct functions. The blogosphere offered a place to release and share emotional responses to the disaster and calls for support for the Japanese people. Twitter became a place to seek out and share breaking news as users retweeted stories from news sources. YouTube, the visual medium, captured the astonishing visceral power of tsunami waves that destroyed virtually everything in their path.

Rural Internet solution found

A little thinking outside the box will make it possible for the Reedsburg Utility to install fiber-optic Internet cable outside the city.

A $5.2 million federal grant awarded to the utility in July was in jeopardy when bids to expand high-speed Internet to the rural northern third of Sauk County came in at more than $10 million. The project originally had been expected to cost $7.5 million, and the utility already had taken out a $2.3 million loan in August to supplement the grant. The Reedsburg Utility Commission approved moving forward with a plan to bid out rental contracts worth approximately $4 million to install the underground cables that provide wireless Internet. Superintendent Dave Mikonowicz said this measure will allow the utility to move forward on the project, which already has been delayed. The federal grant is part of the Department of Agriculture's Broadband Initiatives Program, funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Benton

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