April 2012

IT engineers are studying what may be an easier way to fix a long-existing weakness in the Internet's routing system that has the potential to cause major service outages and allow hackers to spy on data.

The problem involves the routers used by every organization and company that owns a block of IP addresses. Those routers communicate constantly with other routers, updating their internal information -- often upwards of 400,000 entries -- on the best way to reach other networks using a protocol called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP enables routers to find the best path when, say, a network used to retrieve a web page from South Korea is not working properly. Changes in that routing information are distributed quickly to routers around the world in as few as five minutes. But the routers do not verify that the route "announcements," as they are called, are correct. Mistakes in entering the information -- or worse yet, a malicious attack -- can cause a network to become unavailable. It can also cause, for example, a company's Internet traffic to be circuitously routed through another network it does not need to go through, opening the possibility the traffic could be intercepted. The attack is known as "route hijacking," and can't be stopped by any security product.

For a generation now, a campaign manager has been able to select a list of, say, 100,000 names to receive a pre-election get-out-the-vote reminder and feel confident that the reminder will reach only those 100,000 voters—and not their neighbors. The voters’ addresses can be delivered to a mail vendor (who merges them onto glossy leaflets) or placed on a walk list (which a field director hands to canvassers), or the voters’ telephone numbers can be given to a phone vendor (whose call centers will reach them with live operators or by robocall).

This year, for the first time, campaign managers in races of all sizes will have a new option: individual-level targeting of Web ads. In this scenario, there is a crucial intermediate step. The 100,000 names selected for targeted communication are then matched to Internet cookies, which allows a campaign to buy ads on only those pages visited by its targeted voters. This represents one dimension of the most important innovation of the 2012 election cycle: the ability to match an individual’s online and offline identities. It means that campaigns can now target voters wherever they are, even if they’re at their vacation home for the summer or spend most of their online time in corners of the Internet where people do not typically seek out political content. As a result, individual targeting marks a crucial step in the maturing of the Web from a media platform and forum for fundraising and activist organizing to a corridor for direct voter contact. But even if campaigns have finally acquired the technical capacity to target Web ads with the precision of mail or a door-do-door canvass, they are not using it that way.

One of my favorite things about Silicon Valley, and the tech start-up culture that emanates from there, is the idea that failure is good. There’s a certain joie de vivre shared by everyone from entrepreneurs to their millionaire investors who fund their ideas that a total bomb can lead to a magnificent success. In fact, they embrace it. Perhaps it’s because many entrepreneurs are spending other peoples’ money, and thusly don’t feel so bad when it all goes up in smoke on some half-baked idea. Or perhaps it’s because some of the best ideas in tech today have come out of those that weren’t so good. (Remember, Apple's first tablet devices was called the Newton.) There’s a word used to describe this get-over-it mentality that I heard over and over on my trip through Silicon Valley and San Francisco this week: “Pivot.”

T-Mobile says Verizon and its SpectrumCo cable partners are “throwing up a smokescreen” in the face of opposition to a proposed spectrum agreement. A T-Mobile spokesman said that “SpectrumCo has not raised anything new that has not already been addressed by T-Mobile in this proceeding."

He called a recent letter Verizon et al sent to the Federal Communications Commission a "hodgepodge of complaints" and said it was a "smokescreen to try to hide the serious anticompetitive impacts that would result from this highly problematic transaction." "The FCC’s focus must be on whether vigorous competition will continue following this spectrum transaction between Verizon and the cable companies," he said. "T-Mobile USA and many other parties have demonstrated that the long-term result would be less competition if Verizon is allowed to warehouse the last swath of spectrum likely to be available in the near term to provide meaningful nationwide competition in mobile broadband,” the spokesman said.