November 2012

Lawmakers urged to investigate Chinese cyber espionage

Lawmakers should investigate China's cyber espionage of U.S. military, government and commercial targets, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission urges in a new report.

The Commission made 32 recommendations to Congress, including reviewing legal penalties for companies found to engage in or benefit from industrial espionage. It also urged lawmakers to reexamine foreign direct investment from China to the United States and to consider requiring a mandatory review of controlling investments by government-controlled firms and adding an economic benefit test for Chinese investments. “We have recommended that relevant Congressional committees further review Chinese cyber espionage practices and report their findings in an unclassified format,” committee Chairman Dennis Shea said in his opening remarks at a congressional hearing on the report. “In addition, we have recommended that Congress review acquisition and procurement guidelines to ensure that the U.S. department of Defense has the necessary tools to mitigate cyber-related supply chain threats.”

US Broadband’s new reality: slowing growth

The go-go years of the US Broadband business might be behind it and the latest numbers from Leichtman Research Group (LRG) only confirm that. According to their data, broadband providers who represent about 93 percent of the total US market added 580,000 net new broadband customers in the three months ending September 30, 2012. The new additions are about 92 percent of net new additions during the third quarter of 2011. By LRG’s estimate there are about 80.7 million broadband subscribers in the US. For the first nine months of 2012, US saw an addition of 2.1 million net new broadband subscribers, down from 2.3 million during the first nine months of 2011.

Here are some notable stats:

Cable companies continue to dominate the business and added about 575,000 subscribers. Comcast added 287,000 broadband subscribers in the quarter – nearly 50% of the total for the top providers
Telephone companies added about 5,000 subscribers.
AT&T and Verizon added 749,000 fiber subscribers (via U-verse and FiOS) in the quarter, while having a net loss of 799,000 DSL subscribers.

FCC Avoids Easy Questions on Data Caps

[Commentary] Imagine your internet connection has a cap. You get an alert that you are getting close to the cap, but the numbers do not feel right. As a sophisticated user, you start measuring your own data usage and find that your ISP appears to be overestimating your usage by 20-30%. Furthermore, when confronted with the discrepancy, your ISP tells you that the way they measure your usage is proprietary – a secret. When faced with such a ridiculous situation your first instinct may be to turn to the Federal Communications Commission to get you some clarity. Unfortunately, since the FCC has spent the past few years studiously avoiding the issue of data caps, that instinct would get you nowhere.

Of course, this is no hypothetical. Slashdot contributor Soulskill had just this problem with AT&T, and just this instinct. It would have been great to be able to hop into the comments and tell him to file a complaint with the FCC to get this all resolved. But that would have been a waste of everyone’s time because there is nowhere for that complaint to go.

Chart-topping singers oppose Pandora's push for changes to music royalty rules

A coalition of 125 chart-topping singers and musicians — including Pink Floyd, Britney Spears and Rihanna — are speaking out against Pandora's efforts to modify the music royalty system.

In an open letter, the group questions Pandora's push for Congress to enact changes to existing royalty-setting rules. The singers and musicians argue that Pandora "is now enjoying phenomenal success as a Wall Street company," including "skyrocketing growth in revenues and users." "Why is the company asking Congress once again to step in and gut the royalties that thousands of musicians rely upon?" the letter reads. "That's not fair and that's not how partners work together."

Russian Internet Crackdown Shows Complexity of Modern Transparency

The list of nations with a comparatively open Internet took another hit this month with the creation of a Russian blacklist of banned websites.

The blacklist is ostensibly aimed at filtering out child pornography and keeping information promoting drugs and suicide out of the hands of youth, according to the Washington Post’s editorial page. But Russian investigative journalists report on Wired that the tool could “wind up blocking all kinds of online political speech” and the infrastructure supporting it could “become a tool for spying on millions of Russians.” The blacklist has been denounced by Reporters without Borders among others. This is especially galling considering Russia’s recent decision to join the Open Government Partnership, an international transparency coalition that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton played a role in organizing. It also underscores how complex transparency has become in the digital age. A nation can now genuinely open up the spigot of information for one audience while closing it tight for another.

Built to win: Deep inside Obama's campaign tech

The reelection of Barack Obama was won by people, not by software. But in a contest as close as last week's election, software may have given the Obama for America organization's people a tiny edge—making them by some measures more efficient, better connected, and more engaged than the competition.

That edge was provided by the work of a group of people unique in the history of presidential politics: Team Tech, a dedicated internal team of technology professionals who operated like an Internet startup, leveraging a combination of open source software, Web services, and cloud computing power. The result was the sort of numbers any startup would consider a success. But the tech had not always worked so well. Four years ago, the Obama camp was in much the same position as Romney found himself in 2012, coming out of the primaries with only a short amount of time in which to pull together a national campaign. Despite having some people with tech expertise, the 2008 Obama campaign lacked an internal IT team, relying on vendors and field volunteers to pull much of the weight.

5 Ways The Obama Campaign Was Run Like A Lean Startup

Five years ago, Barack Obama harnessed the power of social media to transform himself from a relative unknown into presidential-candidate 2.0, taking grassroots fundraising viral and defeating a field of more prominent candidates to become president. This year, his campaign staff put him in an even more technologically savvy roll: pivoter-in-chief. Obama’s reelection staff didn’t just pivot once, twice, or 10 times over the course of his campaign. By accident or design, they followed the “lean startup” methodology pioneered by Eric Ries, whereby a company launches a rudimentary product, sees if people want it, then fine-tunes its strategy if it’s not popular, or stays the course if it is. Only the Obama campaign did it not with products, but with ads and online strategies, constantly measuring their effectiveness and making changes whenever reality didn’t jibe with their assumptions.

Here are five ways that the Obama campaign was run like a lean startup:

They measured every single thing.
They used A/B testing.
They used behavioral targeting to increase engagement.
They streamlined the checkout process.
Their marketing was nontraditional.

Verizon’s First Lower 700 MHz Spectrum License Sale Agreement Inked with Nortex Communications

Nortex Communications -- an independent telephone company based in Muenster (TX) -- has signed a purchase agreement with Verizon Wireless to acquire the Texas RSA 6-Jack 700 MHz lower B-block license which covers a four-county area northwest of Dallas, subject to Federal Communications Commission approval.

The sale is the first to be signed as part of Verizon Wireless’ previously announced plans to offer for sale its lower 700 MHz licenses to other interested parties.
Verizon Wireless decided last spring to explore the sale of the lower 700 MHz A and B Block spectrum it had acquired in FCC Auction 73 in 2008. Since the 700 MHz licenses cover numerous major cities as well as dozens of smaller and rural markets across the country, the sale process was designed to encourage a wide variety of potential buyers, small and large, to participate. The company moved forward with the sale process as soon as the FCC approved Verizon Wireless’ acquisition of AWS spectrum as part of several transactions in August. Although the sale to Nortex is the first to be signed as a result of the announced sale process, Verizon Wireless has previously sold 24 of its lower 700 MHz spectrum licenses to seven different telecommunications companies operating in thirteen states. Verizon Wireless is also getting spectrum into the hands of 20 rural operators through its “LTE in Rural America” program. The company is currently evaluating bids for its other lower 700 MHz spectrum licenses. All transactions will require appropriate regulatory approvals.

How AT&T got service back after Sandy

The task was unlike any AT&T's workers had seen before.

Restoring service to a critical cell site on top of a 22-story building with no power in a flood zone presented a big problem: Building codes prevented on-site generators from being installed on the roof, and there was no hope of getting power restored anytime soon. But 2 Wall Street in New York's financial district, whose cell site serves the New York Stock Exchange, needed to be brought back online quickly after Superstorm Sandy knocked out power everywhere in Manhattan below 39th Street.

"We could prepare for almost every possible situation, but this was unique," said Tom DeVito, AT&T's general manager of the New York and New Jersey region.

Why the future of live sports is in ESPN's hands

It's the most common retort to cord-cutters, the first word of caution to anyone looking to get rid of their cable subscription: live sports.

You'll spend a lot of time in bars, I tell people, because without a cable subscription watching games becomes virtually impossible. There's still a lot of truth to the statement — live sports are the least-supported thing most cable-cancellers might want — but there's a surprisingly large amount of content out there available without a cable subscription. Of course, when you add up the costs of getting the games you want, you're probably better off just getting cable again, but the idea that you can only watch sports on your television is quickly becoming antiquated. The restricting factor for all live sports is TV deals. Every league makes millions or billions of dollars from ESPN, TBS, NBC, and countless other networks that want a monopoly over the broadcasts of their sports. In our diffuse media world, where everything is available whenever we want it, live sports are one of only a few things that qualify as "appointment viewing." That kind of engaged, current audience is incredibly valuable to advertisers, and networks aren't keen on sharing that attention with league-provided streaming services.

As long as TV remains the biggest source of leagues' revenue in the US (and that won't change anytime soon), broadcast companies will control how and where games are broadcast. That's why it won't be the NHL, or MLB, or NFL that take the steps necessary to make live sports a true streaming reality — it'll be ESPN.

Benton

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