Education has long played a part in the annual deliberations at Davos, Switzerland. But this time, many participants may have detected “a lot of attention.” The fast rise of massive open online courses, known as MOOCs, is one reason.
“Forty years ago, a hacker was someone who took great joy in knowing everything about computers,” said Susan P. Crawford, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. “The word was really used in admiration. Now it is used to describe and condemn both professional cyberattackers and amateurs who are swept together within the broad description of the word.”
The cases of Daniel Spitler and Aaron Swartz are examples of the justice system’s misunderstanding of what a hacker actually is. To many people who understand computers and the law, there is a danger in lumping people who have not sought financial gain with armed robbers. Where people should receive slaps on the wrist, they face decades in prison.
Technology companies are holding out hope that high-skilled immigration reform can finally get through Congress, despite previous failed attempts over the years.
A Q&A with President Barack Obama.
Asked about reform with the Republican Party, the President says, “One of the biggest factors is going to be how the media shapes debates. If a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest, then you'll see more of them doing it…. The same dynamic happens on the Democratic side. I think the difference is just that the more left-leaning media outlets recognize that compromise is not a dirty word. And I think at least leaders like myself—and I include Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in this—are willing to buck the more absolutist-wing elements in our party to try to get stuff done.”
In an excerpt from his new book, The Future, the Nobel Prize winner and former vice president talks global networks, Marshall McLuhan, and how computing is changing what it means to be human.
For a glimpse of how out of control sports bidding wars have become, look no further than your cable television bill.
Time Warner Cable subscribers in Southern California will eventually see their monthly bills increase thanks to an impending $7 billion deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers, believed to be the most lucrative for any sports team in history. DirecTV, the country’s most popular satellite service, and Verizon FiOS have started adding a $2 to $3 monthly surcharge in markets like New York and Los Angeles to pay for regional sports networks. Per-subscriber fees for sports networks keep going up: ESPN, the granddaddy of them all, passed the $5-a-month mark last year. The eye-popping price tags have restarted debate about a topic near and dear to sports fans, fairness: many TV customers never watch the mightily expensive channels at all, yet almost all must pay.
There was a shudder in the industry when John Malone, the business tycoon who helped create the modern-day cable system, said in November that “runaway sports rights” costs amounted to “a high tax on a lot of households that don’t have a lot of interest in sports.” The only short-term fix, he said, was government intervention.
Smack in the middle of the nation, Kansas City (KS) is about as far as possible from the hubs of high-tech innovation on both coasts. An effort last spring to excite new Web entrepreneurs in a place better known for cattle drives and barbecue sauce turned up just a dozen people. Three months into Google’s much-publicized, high-speed Internet experiment, signs of new business life have emerged. Just as the move from dial-up modems to higher-speed Internet connections helped launch Netflix, Facebook and YouTube, policymakers and Google hope this next leap forward will breed a whole new slate of innovations.
Facebook and the three largest email providers told The Hill this week that they require police to obtain a search warrant before accessing their users' private online communications.
The policies of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook go beyond the privacy standards of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), a 1986 law that only requires police to obtain a subpoena, issued without a judge's approval, to read emails, instant messages and other forms of digital communication that have been opened or that are more than 180 days old. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) is pushing legislation that would update ECPA to require police to obtain a warrant before seizing electronic messages, regardless of how old they are. He argues the law is badly out of date and fails to protect Internet users' privacy. But the four Web companies said they all already refuse to turn over their customers' communications unless the police have a warrant. The companies argue that the Fourth Amendment provides more legal protection to their users than ECPA does.
In this Order and Notice of Proposed Rulemaking the Federal Communications Commission takes immediate, interim steps to address certain practices related to the provision and marketing of Internet Protocol Captioned Telephone Service (IP CTS) that appear to be contributing to a recent and dramatic spike in reimbursement requests to the Interstate Telecommunications Relay Service Fund (TRS Fund or Fund), of sufficient magnitude to constitute a serious threat to the Fund if not promptly and decisively addressed.
IP CTS permits people who can speak, but who have difficulty hearing over the telephone, to speak directly to another party on a telephone call and to use an Internet Protocol-enabled device to simultaneously listen to the other party and read captions of what that party is saying.
In this Order, the FCC finds good cause to adopt without notice and comment interim rules:
(1) prohibiting all referrals for rewards programs (as described below) and any other form of direct or indirect inducements, financial or otherwise, to subscribe to or use, or encourage subscription to or use of, IP CTS;
(2) requiring each IP CTS provider, in order to be eligible for compensation from the Fund for providing service to new IP CTS users,
(i) to register each new IP CTS user,
(ii) as part of the registration process, to obtain from each user a self-certification that the user has a hearing loss that necessitates IP CTS to communicate in a manner that is functionally equivalent to communication by conventional voice telephone users, and
(iii) where the consumer accepts IP CTS equipment at a price below $75 from any source other than a governmental program, to also obtain from the user a certification from an independent, third party professional attesting to the same; and
(3) requiring IP CTS providers to ensure that equipment and software used in conjunction with their service have a default setting of captions off at the beginning of each call, so that the consumer must take an affirmative step to turn on the captions each time the consumer wishes to use IP CTS.
In addition to adopting these interim rules, we clarify our TRS payment rule, in an interpretive rule modification not subject to notice and comment, to explicitly provide that the Fund administrator shall not be obligated to pay any request for compensation until it has been established as compensable.
The College Station (TX) City Council entertained a proposal to allow business and residents access to cheaper high-speed Internet connections that could allow for virtual reality simulations, real-time genomic sequencing, ultra-high definition video streaming and other applications in the not-too-distant future.
Blair Levin, executive director of nonprofit Gig.U, delivered a presentation to the council during its workshop session. Levin, who was the Federal Communications Commission chief of staff during the Clinton presidency, called upon the councilmembers to consider policy changes that could bring more gigabit-per-second speed Internet connections to town -- roughly 20 times as fast as what's available to most residential phone and cable subscribers, proponents said. The proposal, and Levin's visit, were organized by freshman councilman James Benham, owner of a technology company in Downtown Bryan. Benham's business, along with the others downtown, already has access to the gigabit speeds, but he said he wants to see the service expanded to benefit residents, the business community and to attract businesses.
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