June 2012

Amazon looks for sales-tax windfall from warehouses in 2 California cities

After years of wrestling with state officials about Internet taxation, Amazon finally agreed last fall to begin collecting sales tax from its California customers. But some of that tax revenue, perhaps millions of dollars a year, could wind up back in Amazon's pocket.

The potential windfall stems from Amazon's decision to build distribution centers in Patterson and San Bernardino. Amazon appears to be angling to grab a portion of the sales tax revenue that will flow to the two cities because of the warehouses. The company's stance irks some lawmakers and public-policy experts, who say cash-strapped cities shouldn't be coughing up tax dollars to curry favor with big employers. "Cities are induced to do a number of things -- they end up competing against one another for sales-tax generators and employers," said state Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord. He's considering introducing a bill next year that would limit -- or ban altogether -- how much cities can share sales tax dollars.

State regulators warn of cyber threats

An association of state utility regulators warned in a paper that the electrical grid could be vulnerable to cyberattacks.

The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners urged state regulators to work with electrical companies to ensure that their computer systems are secure from attacks. “It may fall to regulators to ask questions of utilities to determine if there are [cybersecurity] gaps and facilitate action,” the group said. “This may be the key role for commissions in cybersecurity. Commissioners do not need to become cyber industry authorities or enforcers, but asking a utility a question may motivate the development of a well-founded answer.”

Broadcast Groups Petition FCC to Reconsider Political File Posting Decision

Major broadcast groups have asked the Federal Communications Commission to reconsider its requirement that they put sensitive political information online "immediately and for everybody to see," offering an opt-in alternative for broadcasters they say would expand the reporting requirement without diminishing their ability to compete in the marketplace. In a petition filed on June 11, the deadline for filing for reconsideration of the FCC's April vote requiring the posting of TV station public files online, the broadcasters against pressed for a compromise of posting aggregate political spot figures. Broadcasters signing on to the petition are Barrington, Belo, Cox, Scripps, Hearst, Gannett, LIN, Meredith, Post-Newsweek, Raycom and Schurz.

The petition argues that a broadcaster alternative proposal has the following advantages over the FCC's order: "(1) online disclosure of useful aggregated information on spending by or about candidates that is not currently required to be disclosed; (2) broader disclosure of information on political issue ads generally, not just the limited category of issues for which disclosure is required under the BCRA (the McCain-Feingold bill) [but also including state and local issues not covered by BCRA]; (3) avoidance of online disclosure of competitively sensitive pricing information among competitors - which is a major defect of the Second Report and Order requirements; (4) online disclosure of specific, relevant, and useful information that will facilitate analysis by the general public, researchers, journalists, and scholars; and (5) clarification that the proposed alternative would be available on an "opt in" basis, meaning that individual broadcasters could instead elect to comply with the requirements contained in the Second Report and Order if they have concerns with respect to the Television Station Group's proposal."

FCC Commissioners Vote To Sunset Viewability Rule

Despite some last-minute lobbying by broadcasters and their allies, the Federal Communications Commission members were voting on the night of June 11 on an order to sunset the viewability rules, according to sources inside and outside the FCC.

"Viewability is going down," said one broadcast attorney. That means as of December, cable operators will no longer have to deliver dual analog and digital feeds of must-carry TV station signals to satisfy the FCC requirement that they be viewable to their subscribers. Instead, the FCC says that the no-cost and low-cost converter boxes cable operators offer will satisfy the still-important obligation to make must-carry stations accessible to viewers. While there had been a push by broadcasters to extend the six-month transition period beyond December, it remained six months.

How Microsoft and Yahoo Are Selling Politicians Access to You

Microsoft and Yahoo are selling political campaigns the ability to target voters online with tailored ads using names, Zip codes and other registration information that users provide when they sign up for free email and other services. The Web giants provide users no notification that their information is being used for political targeting. In one sense, campaigns are doing a more sophisticated version of what they've always done through the post office — sending political fliers to selected households. But the Internet allows for more subtle targeting. It relies not on email but on advertisements that surfers may not realize have been customized for them.

Murdoch ‘threatened Major over Europe’

Rupert Murdoch sat at John Major’s dinner table before the 1997 election and threatened that unless the Conservative government changed its policy on Europe, it would lose the support of News International papers, the former prime minister told the Leveson inquiry.

In a strong attack on News Corp’s influence on UK life, Sir John said that parts of Murdoch’s media empire, an apparent reference to The Sun, had “lowered the general quality of the British media.” “I think that is a loss. I think that it is evident which newspaper I am referring to and I think they have lowered the tone. Its interaction with politicians has done no good to press or the politicians. The sheer scale of the influence he [Mr Murdoch] is believed to have, whether he actually exercises it or not, is an unattractive facet of British national life.” He said he thought it was more likely that sensible legislation to control concentration of media ownership was “infinitely more likely to be enacted” if the major political parties put aside partisanship to unite rather than try to court the favor of media owners who might not like those measures. He pointed out the irony that in a “country that prides itself on one-man, one-vote, we should have a man who can’t vote with a large collection of newspapers and a large share of the electronic media outlets.”

Top politicians reveal Murdoch lobbying

Two leading politicians told the Leveson inquiry of the scale of lobbying by News Corp to change the landscape of the UK media.

George Osborne, the chancellor, suggested that James Murdoch, then chief executive of News Corp in Europe, had privately urged the government to “dismantle” the television license fee that supports the BBC. Earlier, Gordon Brown, told the inquiry how the Murdochs and their News International executives had pressed him to neuter the BBC, declaw Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, and pursue a campaign to further their commercial interests.

"Estonian Mafia" looking for the next generation of entrepreneurs

While Estonia’s prowess in cyberconflict and cyberdefense has grown in recent years, so too has its startup scene. After all, Skype was created in Estonia in 2003 and was acquired by Microsoft for $8.5 billion last year. Its success has inspired a new generation of Estonian startups, often collectively referred to on Twitter as the #estonianmafia, which were pitching themselves at the Latitude 59 conference held last week at Tallinn University of Technology. This university campus is also the location of Küberneetika, the Institute of Cybernetics, a Soviet-founded facility that dates back to the 1970s and became the first home of Skype decades later. AngelList, a site that aims to link startups with venture capital, currently has 52 Estonian entries, which on a per capita basis, puts it as the number two country after the United States—not bad for a country with just 1.3 million people.

Canadian tech town feels BlackBerry's decline

President Barack Obama couldn't bear to part with his BlackBerry. Oprah Winfrey declared it one of her "favorite things." It could be so addictive that it was nicknamed "the CrackBerry." Then came a new generation of competing smartphones, and suddenly the BlackBerry, that game-changing breakthrough in personal connectedness, looks ancient. There is even talk that the fate of Research In Motion, the company that fathered the BlackBerry in 1999, is no longer certain as its flagship property rapidly loses market share to flashier phones like Apple's iPhone and Google's Android-driven models. With more than $2 billion in cash, bankruptcy for RIM seems highly unlikely in the near term, but these are troubling times for Waterloo, Ontario, the town of 100,000 that was transformed by the BlackBerry into Canada's Silicon Valley.

Researchers find connection between Flame, Stuxnet computer viruses

Researchers at a computer security firm said they found evidence that the teams who created the Stuxnet and Flame viruses worked together. The report suggests that both viruses might have been the work of the United States government.

Researchers at Kaspersky Lab, a Russian firm that first identified the Flame virus, said they discovered nearly identical pieces of code in the two viruses, indicating cooperation between the developers of the viruses. Alexander Gostev, chief security expert for Kaspersky Lab, said in a statement that Flame and Stuxnet use "completely different platforms" and "have different architectures with their own unique tricks that were used to infect systems and execute primary tasks." "The projects were indeed separate and independent from each other," he said. But he concluded that the new findings prove that the virus developers "cooperated at least once." "What we have found is very strong evidence that [Stuxnet] and Flame cyber-weapons are connected," he said.

Benton

Search