March 2013

Almost Half of the World’s Spam Comes from Just 20 ISPs

Just 20 ISPs are responsible for half of the world's entire haul of Internet scam and spam emails, says a study. The thesis, entitled "Internet Bad Neighborhoods" is the work of a pair of researchers, Moreira Moura and Giovane Cesare, from the University of Twente, who researched over 42,000 Internet Service Providers worldwide and found the following trends:

Most spam comes from the U.S.
Most phishing comes from Asia--of that, Indian network BSNL came top of the list.
The most crime-ridden network is Nigeria's Spectranet.
The majority of bad ISPs are to be found in India, Brazil, and Vietnam.

Four TV broadcasters sue to keep rates secret from public

When the media take the government to court over public records, they’re usually trying to pry the records in question loose on behalf of the public’s right to know. But this month, the corporate owners of four local television broadcasters separately have sued Click Cable TV – and by extension The News Tribune – to keep records containing their financial agreements with the city-owned cable network secret.

Pierce County Superior Court Judge Ronald Culpepper is set to weigh arguments from all sides during a hearing to decide whether the court should grant a preliminary injunction to stop the records from being disclosed to the newspaper. If granted, the order would temporarily halt release of the records pending a full-blown trial over the issue. The broadcast companies are prepared to contend the records – so-called “retransmission agreements” that detail how much they charge Click to air broadcast signals for KING, KOMO, KIRO, KCPQ and KSTW – contain protected trade secrets that are exempt from public disclosure.

CenturyLink DSL usage caps cause subscriber confusion

CenturyLink may be following the growing usage-based billing (UBB) trend where service providers place usage caps on bandwidth consumption, but the telco's policies are anything but clear for its end users. According to a thread in the Broadband Reports forum, a number of subscribers said they were confused about the bandwidth caps.

Some users were given a warning they went over their cap, while other "heavy users" got no warning or were told the service provider does not implement usage caps. One subscriber said their service was disconnected for consuming 250 GB for various months; another said that he was told "they absolutely don't have a data cap even on their slower speeds."

AT&T, Verizon DSL price hikes need FCC's attention, says Sen. Blumenthal

Recent moves by AT&T and Verizon to increase their DSL rates has drawn fire from U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), who has asked Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski to look more closely at rising broadband rates. "Both of [these rate hikes] trouble me," said Sen Blumenthal. "We ought to pay closer attention."

White House employs cross-agency goals to broaden oversight of cyber

The White House is re-energizing two long-standing cybersecurity initiatives by getting more than just the chief information officer involved.

The Administration recently updated all 14 cross-agency priority goals on the Performance.gov portal, giving all new targets for agencies to hit over the next two years. But the Office of Management and Budget also is using the opportunity to better connect agency performance improvement officers to the Trusted Internet Connections and Homeland Security Presidential Directive-12 efforts, which started with high expectations but have floundered over the last few years. Michael Daniel, the White House cyber coordinator, said giving PIOs better awareness and responsibility over meeting cyber goals has been a missing piece to the puzzle that equals success.

Comcast now nation's second largest advertiser

Comcast -- now with movie, news, and entertainment giant NBCUniversal under its corporate umbrella -- rose to second-largest advertiser last year behind Procter & Gamble.

The New York research firm Kantar Media says Comcast uncorked $1.7 billion in ads on consumers in 2012. Procter & Gamble, whose brands include Tampax, Pantene, Pampers, and Duracell, spent $2.8 billion. No. 3 was General Motors with $1.6 billion. Kantar tracks advertising on multiple platforms - radio, TV, billboards, the Internet, magazines, and newspapers - and then estimates the cost. Comcast's direct-mail fliers aren't part of its estimate. Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury said that the cable-TV and media company does not publicly disclose its corporate advertising budget but noted, "Certainly, with Comcast and NBCU, we are one of the largest advertisers in the United States."

Poor coverage of Google’s Street View scandal settlement

Google paid $7 million to 38 states earlier this week to settle its Street View privacy scandal. This was a serious privacy violation and despite the fact that this story has been unfolding for three years, much of the coverage of the settlement was surprisingly poor.

Intel offers snapshot of an ‘Internet minute’

It sometimes it feels like we’re all moving a mile a minute. Now, an Intel infographic showing a 60-second snapshot of the Web demonstrates that life in a connected world moves at a truly staggering pace.

In one minute on the Web, Intel wrote in a company blog post, we send 204 million e-mails, buy about $83,000 in goods on Amazon and send about 100,000 Tweets. Six new Wikipedia articles get published, Google fields 2 million search queries and Facebook gets 6 million views. Multimedia also makes up a huge amount of the data that go back and forth every 60 seconds. For example, Intel estimates that, per minute, YouTube gets 1.3 million video views, Flickr users add 3,000 photos, and Pandora streams 61,141 hours of music. All that, the company said, amounts to about 640,000 GB of data per minute. And with the number of devices that connect to the Internet — not just phones, computers and tablets but also health accessories, home appliances and vehicles — that number’s expected to grow quickly. Intel projects that the number of connected devices will double the world’s population by 2015.

George W. Bush White House Website Frozen in Time

The Bush White House's homepage will be stuck on January 20, 2009, for all eternity (or as long as the server that houses it exists). As described by the site's top banner, it is "historical material, 'frozen in time.' " Study it as you would an archaeological site. For one, you'll see how much more sophisticated web design has become over the past four years. But also take it as the history of the Bush years as seen by the Bush administration.

No progress for female bylines

VIDA’s third annual survey of female representation at several prominent print publications — “The Count” — was released on March 4. For the third year in the row, the number of male bylines and works by male writers reviewed vastly outnumbered those of women almost across the board, and a look at all data from all three years indicated that things haven’t improved over time (in fact, at several publications, the percentage of women represented decreased between 2011 and 2012). In previous years, VIDA demanded better from those publications. This time, it seemed to meet the results with a resigned sigh.

Benton

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