January 2012

Official: Current Laws Protect Human Rights Online

New international laws are not needed to protect human rights online, even as they are increasingly under attack, a top State Department official said.

Kicking off the annual State of the Net Conference, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Michael Posner said governments should not feel entitled to repress human rights. "Let me state for the record that international law applies to online behavior. Full stop," he said. "We do not need to reinvent international human rights law, or our enduring principles, to account for the Internet. No deed is more evil -- or more noble -- when it is committed online rather than offline." The revolutions of the Arab Spring highlighted the power of the Internet -- and government efforts to suppress it, Posner said. "Repressive regimes trembled at the power of people connected." While Posner argued that Internet access itself is not a human rights, governments and corporations have a responsibility to respect and protect rights online.

Aide: Senate Nears Agreement On Cybersecurity Bill

The Senate could move ahead with a broad-ranging cybersecurity bill in as little as a week, an aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said.

Speaking at the annual State of the Net Conference, Tommy Ross, Reid's senior intelligence and defense adviser, said the Senate is on track to meet Reid's goal of eventually bringing the legislation to the floor in the next three to four weeks. While the bill, currently being developed by working groups, will not be truly comprehensive, Ross said it will cover a "pretty broad waterfront." He said there are no insurmountable disagreements, despite years of wrangling over the specifics of cybersecurity legislation. "What comes to the floor will reflect wide agreement," Ross said. If the bill does eventually clear the Senate, its future in the House remains murky.

ComScore Video Rankings: YouTube Usage Spiked 72 Percent Over 2010

As it seeks to launch nearly 100 new channels featuring professionally produced video, YouTube has a key advantage over original video competitors like Hulu and Yahoo: millions more viewers can see its promos.

According to comScore’s latest monthly report on online video usage, Google – driven primarily by the performance of YouTube – drew 157.2 million unique viewers to its video offerings in December. That marked a 9 percent rise from December 2010 and represented 86 percent of the total internet audience for the month, according to comScore. And with YouTube focusing on longer form, professionally produced video in its dedicated “TV” channels—not to mention other offerings like full-length movies—usage per unique viewer shot up 72 percent year-to-year to an average of 471.9 minutes per viewer.

Amazon Hit With Class Action Over Zappos Data Breach

Shoe retailer Zappos is facing a national class action suit one day after it warned customers that its servers had been hacked.

On Jan 16, the Amazon-owned shoe company sent a mass email stating that 24 million customer accounts had been breached. The incident resulted in hackers obtaining names, phone numbers, emails, encrypted passwords and the last four numbers of customer credit cards. The lawsuit claims Amazon violated a part of the Fair Credit Reporting Act by failing to properly encrypt and secure customer information, and seeks unspecified damages for 24 million customers. The lead plaintiff in the case is a Texas woman but the suit was filed in federal court in Louisville, Kentucky on the grounds that Amazon has servers located in that state.

Will a $6.7 million cyber heist spur a move toward fixing the Internet?

A remarkably lucrative $6.7 million cyber bank heist of South Africa's state-owned Postbank provides an outstanding case study of just why 2011 was the year of the cyber criminal: The insecurity of the Internet, coupled by organizations' failure to embrace sufficient security practices, make cyber crimes too high-value and low-risk for bad guys to resist.

Employees Three Times More Active on Social Networking Applications Than Previous Year

New research published by Palo Alto Networks, the network security company, indicates explosive growth in global social networking and browser-based file sharing on corporate networks, with a 300 percent increase in active social networking (e.g., posting, applications) compared with activity during the same period in the latter half of 2010. The Palo Alto Networks Application Usage and Risk Report provides a global view into application usage based on assessments of the raw application traffic from more than 1,600 enterprises between April 2011 and November 2011.

Social media use is more active; Twitter has gained significant mainstream traction in the workplace: Since October 2010, social networking usage patterns have become more active with bandwidth consumption for Facebook Apps, Social Plugins, and posting increasing from 5 percent (October 2010) to 25 percent (December 2011) when measured as a percentage of total social networking bandwidth. Twitter browsing at work alone grew by more than 700 percent year-over-year.

Widespread file sharing use requires a balanced response: File sharing sites continue to be used on most networks, appearing on the networks of 92 percent of the participating organizations. In total, 65 different browser-based file-sharing variants were found with an average of 13 being used in each of the analyzed organizations. The report also explores a variety of risks associated with browser-based file-sharing applications, which varies by application and use case. However, the use of evasive techniques by these applications implies that they are often operating unchecked on corporate networks.

The types of traffic on enterprise networks is changing: Web applications that use TCP port 80, the standard port associated with HTTP web browsing traffic, actually represent a minority of the traffic on enterprise networks for the first time ever. The 297 applications that use only TCP port 80 and no other port by default represent a mere 25 percent of the applications and 32 percent of the bandwidth observed, meaning that a standard web browsing-focused security model actually protects a minority of an organization's traffic.

AT&T: Open and Free Auctions are the Way to Go

The Federal Communications Commission has done some creative tinkering with auctions in the past, with dubious results. For example, the FCC created set asides for Designated Entities, which led to valuable spectrum laying fallow for years when a major DE landed in bankruptcy. They also imposed conditions on both the C Block and D Block spectrum in the recent 700 MHz auction. From AT&T’s perspective, however, we fear that this time around, some of its tinkering may be aimed at specific auction participants, like us. Why are we fearful?

Two years ago, in the license transfer deal between SkyTerra and Harbinger (now known as LightSquared), a mysterious condition appeared at the last minute that imposed conditions if LightSquared were to engage in a commercial relationship with AT&T or Verizon. Not a single commenter in that proceeding asked for any conditions, yet that one miraculously appeared at the 13th hour (the actual first mention of the infamous Verizon/AT&T condition was not posted on the FCC website (March 31, 2010) until 5 days after the FCC had approved the Order (March 26, 2010) – and over a month after that particular ex parte had been filed (February 26, 2010) at the agency, see screen shot below. And let’s not forget that the FCC’s annual Wireless Competition Reports no longer address the competitiveness of the wireless industry (which is frankly remarkable to anyone who just came back from CES). Instead, the report discusses the different “values” of different swaths of spectrum, like the below 1 Gigahertz spectrum that would be auctioned off under this legislation, which could make it harder for certain carriers to obtain that spectrum.

USDA Rural Development: Helping to Put Americans to Work

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack provided highlights of USDA Rural Development fiscal year (FY) 2011 investments in job-creating businesses, infrastructure and housing for Americans living in rural communities across the nation. According to estimates, Rural Development investments created or saved about 440,000 jobs last year. In the federal fiscal year that ended on September 30, Vilsack said Rural Development, through its Business, Cooperative, Utilities and Housing programs provided housing opportunities for over 143,000 families, upgraded community facilities, boosted the reliability of the electric grid, funded renewable energy projects, and through the Community Connect and other broadband programs supported efforts to provide affordable, reliable Internet service to rural homes.

Internet regulation matters to U.S. economic recovery

[Commentary] As policymakers puzzle over ways to put the U.S. economy on a more stable footing, many have overlooked two reports from 2011 that point to a root of our lingering economic problems, and to a possible solution.

The first report, an annual survey by the Federal Communications Commission, found that the rate of U.S. consumers adopting high-speed Internet is falling behind that of broadband superpowers like South Korea and Denmark, where people pay less to cruise along a faster Web.
The second report, from the McKinsey Global Institute, finds that Internet access has a significant impact on growth, jobs and wealth creation across all sectors of the economy, contributing more to the national GDPs of developed countries than energy, agriculture and several other critical industries. For the Internet to continue as a driver of economic growth both in the Pacific Northwest and beyond, governments need to "leverage" public spending on deployment to kick-start innovation.

America's declining Internet standing is reason for concern. But are our politicians even paying attention?

The Top 10 Countries for Broadband Internet

Asia continues to be the globe's leading region when it comes to the number of broadband Internet users, according to a report last week from Broadband-Forum.org. And despite the ongoing global economic recession, the broadband market saw its highest growth in two years.

Around the world approximately 581 million people subscribe to some sort of broadband Internet service. This number doesn’t include users who access the Internet via mobile phones. Most users (61.5 percent), according to the report, get broadband via a DSL subscription. Another 19.5 percent get service via cable and 16 percent of broadband Internet users have access to FTTx (fiber-to-the-home, building, curb, etc.) service. Fiber, the report notes, saw 8 percent growth in the third quarter of 2011 — twice the rate of growth compared to 2010. In the U.S., nearly 5 million more people have broadband Internet access compared to a year ago, with 90.5 million total users.

Benton

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