March 2012

It’s not about piracy, it’s about a failure to adapt

[Commentary] The threat of rampant piracy — the downloading and re-distribution of what the content industries claim are billions of dollars’ worth of intellectual property — is continually raised to justify ever-more-draconian laws such as the recently proposed SOPA and PIPA bills. While they have been shelved (at least for now), the pressure on legislators to come up with new variations continues, as does the pressure to launch federal cases against service providers like Megaupload or Hotfile. Y Combinator founder Paul Graham argues that this phenomenon isn’t the natural order of things, but stems from the failure of those content industries to adapt to the new realities of the internet. He is right — as long as they continue to resist, the battle will go on.

County Overhauls Its Website to Engage Citizens in the Ways They Want

Maintaining an online presence that meets the expectations of today’s smartphone-carrying, Facebook-loving public isn’t easy. But Nevada County (CA) tackled this challenge head-on with a revamped website that lets users find content via guided navigation, content tabs and search — including public documents in the county’s document management system.

Users will also get information they’re seeking via pop-ups, rather than journeying through the site. “It’s no longer a postcard on steroids. It is now behaving more like an application,” said Bruce Gauthier, the county’s information systems analyst. The county, Gauthier said, hopes to deliver 80 percent of desired content to users from its home page, and is laying the groundwork for an online presence that will let users receive personalized information on the site, as well as via social networks and on mobile devices. The overhaul of Nevada County’s near-decade-old website was driven by an overall strategy to consolidate multiple back-end management systems onto a single content management platform, said county CIO Stephen Monaghan. Previously, he said, the county’s document, online content, business process and other management systems were different products, which led to a piecemeal approach in developing solutions for county departments and delivering content to the public.

Euro RSCG: 'Activist Consumers' Are Watching

Global agency Euro RSCG Worldwide has been publishing research and thought leadership content for years. It is expanding into a new series area, the Consumer Conscience Study. The study's raison d'être is that growing numbers of consumers are "activist consumers," thinking about where products come from and how they themselves can influence policy and corporate behavior with their purchases.

Kate Robertson, Euro RSCG UK group chairman talked about the findings from the first in the series “Blueprint for a Sustainable Brand.” It was released at the 4A’s Transformation Conference in Los Angeles. She warned that brands can no longer assume – and social media obviously is the elephant in the room – that they aren't the subject of close scrutiny. "The tidal wave of the social media revolution is inexorably rolling over us and exposing all—everything will come out, if not today then for sure tomorrow,” she said.

Commerce to run cybersecurity lab in the cloud

The federal government and the state of Maryland plan to jointly operate a new cybersecurity laboratory in the cloud and demonstrate the lab's successful findings through social media and mobile apps, according to the Commerce Department.

The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence is expected to be physically located in Montgomery County (MD) near the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Gaithersburg headquarters, but it will rely on hardware and software based at remote computer centers in the cloud. The facility will be a place where NIST scientists, industry developers and academic researchers can come together and test security applications for workplace and personal computers, government officials announced in February.

NTIA's $18 billion spectrum reallocation plan would force battlefield networks to move

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration said it would cost $18 billion to reallocate 95MHz of federal spectrum for commercial use and take at least a decade to complete.

NTIA released the findings in a detailed analysis of the plan. The agency wants to move more than 3,100 individual frequency assignments of 20 federal agencies out of the 1755-1850 MHz frequency band to other bands. It will pay for this shift from auctions of spectrum to commercial providers. "Current law requires that auction proceeds exceed expected federal relocation costs. Since federal relocation costs are expected to be high, any repurposing option needs to promote economic value while ensuring no loss of critical federal capabilities," NTIA said. The reallocation plan calls for shifting two key Army battlefield network systems, Warfighter Information Network-Tactical and the backpack version of the Joint Tactical Radio System, the agency said in an appendix to the analysis.

E-Book Sales For Kids And Teens Surge

New monthly stats from the Association of American Publishers show strong growth for both print and e-books in January 2012. The AAP is beefing up its monthly reports with data from many more publishers -- 1,149 for January 2012 compared to under 100 in past months -- and more detailed reporting on specific genres: Children’s/young adult e-book sales are now broken out and religious book sales are divided by hardcover, paperback and e-books.

The Philosopher Whose Fingerprints Are All Over the FTC's New Approach to Privacy

The brilliant New York University philosopher Helen Nissenbaum has put her approach to privacy at the center of the national agenda.

She's played a vital role in reshaping the way our country's top regulators think about consumer data. As one measure of her success, the recent Federal Trade Commission report, "Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change," which purports to lay out a long-term privacy framework for legislators, businesses, and citizens, uses the word context an astounding 85 times! Given the intellectual influence she's had, it's important to understand how what she's saying is different from other privacy theorists. The standard explanation for privacy freakouts is that people get upset because they've "lost control" of data about themselves or there is simply too much data available. Nissenbaum argues that the real problem "is the inappropriateness of the flow of information due to the mediation of technology." In her scheme, there are senders and receivers of messages, who communicate different types of information with very specific expectations of how it will be used. Privacy violations occur not when too much data accumulates or people can't direct it, but when one of the receivers or transmission principles change. The key academic term is "context-relative informational norms." Bust a norm and people get upset.

Two-Thirds Worldwide Say Media Are Free in Their Countries

A median of nearly two-thirds of adults (65%) across 133 countries and areas Gallup surveyed in 2011 say the media in their countries have a lot of freedom, essentially unchanged from the median of 67% found in 2010. These views still vary worldwide, ranging from a low of 23% in Belarus to a high of 97% in Finland. The countries where perceived media freedom is lowest span multiple regions, including the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and former Soviet Union countries. Fewer than 4 in 10 adults in 11 countries, including Gabon, Armenia, Palestinian Territories, and Iraq, say their media have a lot of freedom -- despite legal or constitutional provisions that guarantee freedom of the press or speech in most of these countries. Independent media evaluators, such as Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders, also rate these 11 countries poorly on their freedom of the press indicators. With a few exceptions, perceived media freedom is highest in developed countries in Asia, Europe, and North America. Ghana is the sole representative of sub-Saharan Africa in the list of countries worldwide where roughly 9 in 10 or more adults say their media have a lot of freedom. Freedom House recognizes the press in Ghana as among the most free in Africa.

Here’s a tech-friendly cheat sheet to understanding Congress

Recently-passed Federal Communications Commission reform legislation serves as a good example to help show technologists and entrepreneurs how DC works in terms they might relate to.

Statements from the CTIA, which represents the wireless industry and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association used almost the exact same language to describe the benefits of the bill. So did Greg Walden (R-OR), the bill’s sponsor. This is hardly an accident -- DC insiders use jargon, too, they just call them talking points.

DC isn’t binary even though it pretends it is. Partisanship rules the TV airwaves and media because conflict makes a great story. And while most politics is theater, designed to get a politician ratings and curry favor among his or her base, real compromises can and do happen behind the scenes.
Legislation doesn’t follow if-then statements either. In programming you can tell a computer that if item A happens, then it should implement Item B and D. But when it comes to legislation and regulation there’s no guarantee it will play out like you want.
No one talks about tradeoffs. In the tech world there are very clear tradeoffs that most engineers will admit. If you want faster memory, you might have to pay more for Flash. If you want a brighter display your battery life will go down. In DC the tradeoffs are there, but no one talks about them.

Why Tablets in the Classroom Could Save Schools $3 Billion a Year

A group of publishers and tech companies gathered in Washington tday to talk about getting digital textbooks into U.S. classrooms. The gathering, convened by the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Education, included everyone from Apple to Intel to McGraw-Hill, and it was premised on the idea that digitizing classrooms is a good thing. And for argument’s sake, let’s say it is. But not because doing so will save schools much money. At least not anytime soon.

The model assumes that the tablets the students use cost $250 a piece today, and will drop in price to $150 in the “future.” Presumably this assumes that device-makers end up working some kind of bulk purchase price with school districts.
But even as hardware costs drop, other costs won’t. Which means that while a school that equips its kids with a tablet and a mobile data plan will theoretically save $34 a student per year today, those savings creep up to only $60 a student in the “future,” even though tablet costs will have dropped by $100.
There are more than 49 million students in public elementary and secondary schools in the U.S., so $60 a student per year is still real money — nearly $3 billion. But that’s still less than 2 percent of the outlay per student per year. Which means there had better be lots of other reasons to make the switch.

Benton

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