January 2012

Troubled Online Charter Schools

[Commentary] Charter schools, which receive public money but are subject to fewer state regulations, are operating in 40 states. A growing body of research shows that charter schools generally perform no better than traditional schools and are often worse as measured by student test data. This is particularly true of online charter schools, which educate more than 200,000 full-time students and are spreading quickly across the country.

Online programs that supplement traditional schooling have a place on the menu of education options. But there is growing evidence that full-time online schools may be inappropriate for a great majority of students and need to be monitored closely in states that allow them.

Research Bought, Then Paid For

[Commentary] Through the National Institutes of Health, American taxpayers have long supported research directed at understanding and treating human disease. Since 2009, the results of that research have been available free of charge on the National Library of Medicine’s Web site, allowing the public (patients and physicians, students and teachers) to read about the discoveries their tax dollars paid for.

But a bill introduced in the House of Representatives last month threatens to cripple this site. The Research Works Act would forbid the N.I.H. to require, as it now does, that its grantees provide copies of the papers they publish in peer-reviewed journals to the library. If the bill passes, to read the results of federally funded research, most Americans would have to buy access to individual articles at a cost of $15 or $30 apiece. In other words, taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.

[Eisen, an associate professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, is a founder of the Public Library of Science, an organization devoted to making research freely available.]

Can You Say 'WAH-wey'? Low-Cost Phones Find Niche

Huawei, the world's second-biggest maker of telecom-network equipment, has been stymied in trying to sell that gear in the U.S. due to security concerns in Washington. But the company's expanding device business has found a niche with American consumers. As carriers set their sights on one of the last sources of growth in U.S. telecom—smartphone adoption among lower-income consumers—Huawei has been there with some of the cheapest phones available, and it doesn't seem to matter that buyers can't quite get their heads around the name. Huawei, which ranks ninth world-wide in mobile-device sales, aims to be one of the top three mobile-phone brands by 2015.

New Fight Breaks Out Over Digital Rights to Old Books

A legal battle between HarperCollins Publishers and a company run by one of its former chief executives is putting the spotlight on a key issue in book publishing today: Who owns the e-book rights to decades-old titles?

Two days before Christmas, HarperCollins filed a copyright-infringement suit against Open Road Integrated Media in federal court in New York, seeking to block Open Road from selling an e-book edition of Jean Craighead George's 1972 children's novel "Julie of the Wolves." Open Road, which published the e-book version last August, is run by Jane Friedman, a former CEO of HarperCollins. The lawsuit appears likely to reopen a critical issue relating to e-book rights that was thought to be resolved about a decade ago. That is, whether book contracts written before the digital age granted publishers digital rights, or whether those rights were retained by the author and could be sold to an e-publisher.

Cyberattacks likely to escalate this year

Cyberattacks fueled by ideological ire are likely to escalate this year and continue to bedevil corporations and governments, while putting innocent consumers at risk.

That follows a surge of so-called hacktivist attacks in 2011 instigated by the loose-knit Anonymous and LulzSec hacking groups, say security experts and technologists. Hacktivists disrupted scores of websites, pilfered massive troves of data — and compared notes. "They are learning from each other," says Kris Harms principal consultant of network security firm Mandiant. "Corporations and governments need to recognize (more) break-ins are inevitable." The unprecedented spike in politically motivated cyberintrusions was capped by Anonymous' breach of Strategic Forecasting's website over the holidays.

Amazon Backs Hollywood Film Streaming Format

Hollywood’s effort to sell digital copies of movies got a boost when Amazon, the largest online vendor, agreed to use the industry’s common system for storing and streaming films.

Amazon is working with an unnamed studio to offer movies in the UltraViolet format, Bill Carr, the Seattle-based company’s executive vice president for digital media, said at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Amazon is the first major retailer to commit to using the platform. Amazon’s participation may speed adoption of Ultraviolet, the Hollywood-led initiative to allow consumers to purchase a title from any retailer, store it in a central online account and stream it to a variety of gadgets, from televisions to Blu- ray players to mobile devices like Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

Fighting Internet piracy: CES takes on SOPA vs. OPEN debate

While thousands of tech vendors frantically demoed new gadgets and apps at the giant Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a debate over the future of the Internet and how the government may regulate distribution of (often pirated) content was taking place down the hall.

With the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Online Protection & Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (OPEN) under debate in the House and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate, CES convened a panel including Congressional staff members, a musician, lawyers, a Web hoster, and a representative of the Copyright Alliance. It was moderated by former Rep Rick Boucher (D-VA). "While I really don't miss being in Congress, I really do miss being on the House Judiciary Committee and being able to take part in this particular debate," Boucher said in introduction. As Boucher explained, while PIPA and SOPA differ in some ways, they both would give the government ability to designate rogue websites, remove those sites from the Internet's domain name system, require search engines to remove the sites from results, prevent advertisers from doing business with the "rogue" sites, and lessen protections currently provided to site owners during Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown processes.

How ViaSat's Exede makes satellite broadband not suck

On the first open day at CES in Las Vegas, in a temporary building outside the Las Vegas Convention Center, ViaSat CEO Mark Dankberg and a team of executives and engineers were trying to do something very difficult: persuade people that broadband satellite isn't the worst idea ever.

ViaSat, which bought satellite broadband provider WildBlue in 2009, has invested $400 million in a new satellite—and millions more into a network of ground stations and a terrestrial fiber network— that Dankberg believes will change the image of satellite much in the way Hyundai has changed the image of Korean cars. A lot of that bet rides on the capacity of ViaSat-1, the satellite at the center of ViaSat's Exede broadband service (also being offered through Dish Network). Exede offers bandwidth that is better than most DSL services: 12 megabits per second down and 3 megabits per second up. That bandwidth is possible partly because of ViaSat-1, which is basically a giant bridge in the sky, providing 140 gigabits per second throughput between service users and the service's 20 terrestrial teleports distributed around the US. Each of those ground stations has gigabits of capacity, and are in turn connected to the Internet through high-capacity peering points. ViaSat-1's coverage beams reach about 75% of the of the US. The majority of the remainder—mostly in the Rocky Mountain timezone, except for ViaSat-1's islands of coverage around Denver and Phoenix—is covered by the WildBlue satellites, which are also getting upgraded service thanks to the investment made by ViaSat in the ground stations. Dankberg said that most of ViaSat's existing customers are clustered around population centers, so ViaSat's coverage zones were prioritized to reach the largest potential audience. ViaSat's next satellite will fill in the rest of the gaps.

AT&T, Verizon Dial Back Juniper's Prospects

Sometimes success in the technology arena boils down to little more than how big a check Randall Stephenson and Lowell McAdam plan to cut. The chief executives, respectively, of AT&T and Verizon have a combined annual capital-expenditure budget of over $35 billion. Unfortunately for Juniper Networks, and many others lately, those checks aren't growing.

Juniper joined the chorus citing weak spending by "service providers" like AT&T and Verizon as the reason behind December-quarter results coming in below expectations. Texas Instruments, Acme Packet, Cavium and Altera, among others, had made similar statements. Knowing that 60% of Juniper's sales are to service providers, Juniper investors were already prepared for the worst. Its shares didn't react much on Monday, though they are already down 33% in the past six months. But investors shouldn't expect much to change. Spending at AT&T and Verizon isn't getting a boost any time soon.

We need better infrastructure to bridge urban digital divide

[Commentary] The broadband stimulus program committed nearly $500 million to narrow the digital divide through broadband adoption campaigns and building computing centers in low-income areas. After distributing much of this money in 2011, these investments should start bearing fruit. But will they? Their success faces two challenges: a lack of sufficient broadband infrastructure in some low-income areas and broadband adoption efforts that miss the mark because policymakers don’t understand what leads to success. Fortunately, these issues can be addressed. Once we accept that success depends on how we spend that stimulus funding and what stakeholders expect (hope) to achieve.

Benton

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