January 2013

VP Biden calls for studies on video games, possible links to gun violence

Vice President Joe Biden called for additional studies to be conducted on violent video games and possible links to real-life violence during a Google Plus Hangout.

VP Biden said the Administration wants to collect the facts on violent video games and their effect on children, then let those findings determine what the government's path forward should be. He criticized some interest groups for discouraging further studies on the causes of gun violence. VP Biden noted that there's a lack of studies on video games and possible links to violence. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is prohibited from conducting research on gun violence because of a congressional ban that bars it from using funds on studies that may advocate or promote gun control. While there's currently "no hard data" that links violent video games to antisocial behavior in kids, VP Biden said further research should be conducted on the issue. During the video chat, he cited a study conducted by the American Academy of Pediatrics that found that some children who played multiple hours of video games a day were more prone to aggressive behavior, but he noted that it did not look into whether video games led to violence. "There is no hard data as to whether or not these excessively violent video games in fact cause people to engage in behavior that is antisocial, including using guns," he said. "Let these people go out and look at the pathology that's behind this, if there is a pathology related to gun violence," VP Biden said. "We shouldn't be afraid of the facts."

Sen Rockefeller reintroduces bill to study video game violence

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) introduced legislation that would require the National Academy of Sciences to study the impact of violent video games and other content on children. He introduced the same bill at the end of the last Congress, but there wasn't enough time for a floor vote. This time, his bill has bipartisan support from Sens. Mike Johanns (R-NE), Dean Heller (R-NE), Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT). Sen Rockefeller said the bill would lay the groundwork for Congress to consider new regulations of violent entertainment content.

NAB, Wireless Agree on Band Plan 'Core' Principles

Verizon, AT&T, the National Association of Broadcasters and others sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission making some key recommendations and offering a new band plan idea for reorganizing the broadcast/broadband band after the FCC's reverse incentive auctions to reclaim broadcast spectrum for wireless.

The band plan is only one part of the incentive auction process, but an important one for broadcasters who will have to share their former spectrum digs with wireless. According to a copy of the letter, broadcasters and wireless companies have come to consensus on a "core set of band plan principles" that they want the FCC to adopt.

Those include:

Adopt a contiguous "down from TV 51" approach with uplink at the top;
Maximize the amount of paired spectrum above TV 37 (rely on supplemental downlink configurations where spectrum is cleared but pairing options are not viable);
Rely upon 5 MHz spectrum blocks as building blocks for the band plan;
Incorporate a "duplex gap" or spacing between uplink (mobile transmit) and downlink (base transmit) of a minimum of 10 MHz, but no larger than technically necessary;
Avoid broadcast television stations in the duplex gap;
Preclude any operations in the duplex gap or guard bands that would result in harmful interference to adjacent licensed services;
Provide guard bands that are, consistent with the statute, "no larger than is technically reasonable" to guard against harmful interference between adjacent operations;
Provide a guard band between a high power broadcaster and mobile downlink that is sufficient to protect the wireless service from interference, which will likely be larger than the 6 MHz proposed by the FCC;
Permit existing operations in TV 37 to remain;
Facilitate international harmonization, prioritizing harmonization across North America and move forward expeditiously to coordinate with Canada and Mexico for new broadcast assignments."

US homeland chief: cyber 9/11 could happen "imminently"

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano warned that a major cyberattack is a looming threat and could have the same sort of impact as last year's Superstorm Sandy, which knocked out electricity in a large swathe of the Northeast.

Sec Napolitano said a "cyber 9/11" could happen "imminently" and that critical infrastructure - including water, electricity and gas - was very vulnerable to such a strike. "We shouldn't wait until there is a 9/11 in the cyber world. There are things we can and should be doing right now that, if not prevent, would mitigate the extent of damage," said Napolitano, speaking at the Wilson Center think tank in Washington and referring to the September 11, 2001 attacks. She urged Congress to pass legislation governing cyber security so the government could share information with the private sector to prevent an attack on infrastructure, much of which is privately owned.

Macmillan to launch two-year e-book library lending pilot

Big-six publisher Macmillan, which has kept its e-books out of libraries until now, is launching a pilot lending program.

The pilot is limited to 1,200 older titles from the Minotaur Books mystery and crime fiction imprint (part of Macmillan’s St. Martins division). Libraries will be able to lend out the e-books for two years or 52 times, whichever comes first, before having to buy a new copy. According to Library Journal, each e-book will cost $25. The e-books will be available through three different digital library distributors at launch: OverDrive, 3M Cloud Library and Baker & Taylor’s Axis 360.

A Free Database of the Entire Web May Spawn the Next Google

Google famously started out as little more than a more efficient algorithm for ranking Web pages. But the company also built its success on crawling the Web—using software that visits every page in order to build up a vast index of online content.

A nonprofit called Common Crawl is now using its own Web crawler and making a giant copy of the Web that it makes accessible to anyone. The organization offers up over five billion Web pages, available for free so that researchers and entrepreneurs can try things otherwise possible only for those with access to resources on the scale of Google’s. New search engines are just one of the things that can be built using an index of the Web, says Gilad Elbaz, who founded Common Crawl and who points out that Google’s translation software was trained using online text available in multiple languages. “The only way they could do that was by starting with a massive crawl. That’s put them on the way to build the Star Trek translator,” he says. “Having an open, shared corpus of human knowledge is simply a way of democratizing access to information that’s fundamental to innovation.”

AT&T Earnings: $3.8 Billion Net Loss, $32.6 Billion in Revenue, 1.1 Million New Wireless Customers

AT&T reported a big fourth quarter loss, though it was narrower than the one posted a year earlier as the company saw a significant jump in wireless subscribers.

The company posted a net loss of $3.8 billion, or 68 cents per share, on revenue of $32.6 billion. That compares to a net loss of $6.7 billion, or $1.12 per share, on revenue of $32.5 billion in the same quarter a year ago. Excluding various pension, storm and other charges, the company said its adjusted per-share earnings would have been 44 cents per share, up 10 percent from a year ago but a penny below what some analysts were expecting. On the wireless front, AT&T said it added 1.1 million total wireless subscribers, including 780,000 new contract customers. It also added 246,000 non-phone “connected devices” in the quarter. The company added that 6.6 million subscribers, or 9 percent of contract customers, are on one of its new shared data plans. AT&T also saw gains for its U-verse high-speed Internet TV service. The company added 192,000 TV subscribers, reaching 4.5 million in total and added 609,000 U-verse Internet customers. That gives it 7.7 million total U-verse Internet subscribers and allowed the company for the first time to have more U-verse Internet subscribers than it did DSL.

France seeking back tax from big Web firms: minister

France, which is studying ways of curbing legal tax avoidance by big Internet firms, has decided to go after all of them to seek payment of back taxes, Industry Minister Arnaud Montebourg said. The government had decided, Montebourg said, "to launch tax retrieval procedures covering all of the Internet giants." He did not elaborate and it was not clear whether the comment, made in a wide-ranging interview about French industry, referred specifically to existing tax investigations of the Internet search engine and retail giants Google and Amazon, or was suggesting a broader campaign.

Access to broadband internet is the new access to ports, rail, and electricity

In the 21st century, a small business in Kansas City, Missouri, has at least one very important thing in common with a small business in Seoul, Korea: Both have access to ultra high-speed internet—Kansas City via Google Fiber and Seoul on account of its government championing the rollout of fiber optic internet for over a decade.

That’s one way to look at Akamai’s quarterly “state of the internet” report, in which the content serving company samples requests to its own servers to reveal internet connectivity speeds all over the world.

As Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, emphasized to me the last time we spoke, the one reason a country as small as Sweden has a disproportionate share of successful internet startups is that Swedish teenagers grow up taking gigabit internet connections for granted. And it’s not just traditional web startups and IT giants that need fast internet connectivity. Arguably, as businesses move more functions to the cloud and mobile becomes increasingly important, everyone needs fast internet connectivity. Whether you’re a manufacturer who has to conduct remote meetings with suppliers in distant countries or a sales department that requires its cloud-based customer relations management software to be fast and responsive, fast broadband internet is now a core infrastructure requirement not unlike reliable transportation and energy.

Technology Promises a Better Informed Society, But Information Must Flow Freely

[Commentary] An informed society is one where citizens have the resources, education and skills to access and participate in the free flow of reliable and pertinent information. They do this through a diverse range of platforms and media organizations that empower them to make considered decisions about their economic, social and political lives. And we take it as a given that in a knowledge economy and an age of networked intelligence, better-informed societies are more successful.

But this is a time of information turmoil. Many traditional media organizations are struggling. Scores of newspapers have gone out of business in the United States alone in the last decade. Magazines, radio, non-fiction book publishing and even television are all in various stages of upheaval. The media of the industrial age is changing. Allowed to flourish, new media technologies offer the promise for societies to be better informed, more open and more successful than their industrial age counterparts. A World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Informed Societies will be encouraging governments to adopt a code of conduct to ensure their societies are informed.

This code includes:

Access: Government should take all steps possible to ensure that their citizens have access to both old and new media. Governments should enact policies that protect media freedom and the openness of the Internet.
Education: Education is a right and requirement for every citizen. In a world of growing resources and tools it is a disgrace that the quality of education is declining in many parts of the world.
Media literacy: Governments should ensure that citizens have access to complete, reliable and pertinent information, and know how to use it. Governments should not censor, but instead create an environment in which ideas can be exchanged freely both on and off the Internet.
Transparency: Governments should embrace transparency and freedom of information. This may include legislation, regulation, education and partnering with public and private sector organizations to encourage openness. Media organizations should act in a manner that is responsible, transparent and accountable.
Privacy: It is inevitable that the data available about each of us will continue to grow. Governments and business should understand that the need for security and profit must be tempered by the need for freedom, rooted in individual privacy. Governments should help educate citizens about the right to privacy.

Benton

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