March 2013

ITC Postpones iPhone Ban Decision

The U.S. International Trade Commission was scheduled to issue a final decision in Samsung’s patent infringement case against Apple this week. Instead it issued a postponement.

The ITC said that it is delaying its ruling on Samsung’s complaint until May 31 while it considers the consumer impact of an import ban against the Apple devices alleged to have infringed. With that in mind, the agency requested briefs on what effect the banning of certain models of iPad and iPhone would have on the smartphone and tablet markets and whether there are acceptable substitutes those devices if they were to be banned. The postponement of the ITC ruling is good news for Apple, but the rationale for it suggests potentially bad news ahead. If the commission is soliciting comment on the implications of a product ban, it is clearly considering doling one out. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t bother itself with public interest considerations.

Berkeley e-mail tax is not the answer

[Commentary] Give Berkeley Councilman Gordon Wozniak points for creativity. Noting that the struggling U.S. Postal Service has been undercut by, among other things, the prevalence of e-mail, Wozniak suggested to the city council that "a very tiny tax on e-mail" might be a way to shore up the service's vital functions. He suggested that a tiny amount, like a cent per gigabyte, might be enough to earn the postal service "billions" of dollars a year. It sounds like an only-in-Berkeley idea, but in fact Wozniak is not the first person to suggest such a thing. More than a decade ago, the United Nations looked at a tax, thinking it could help fund a "global communications revolution." It seems the revolution proceeded without the tax, thank you very much.

Google Hastens to Show Its Concern for Privacy

Google has repeatedly redefined how people communicate and acquire knowledge in the 21st century, and it has repeatedly been accused of breaking the rules in the process. The company says it has taken its mistakes in the Street View case to heart and has already changed.

Never again, it says, will a midlevel engineer be able to do anything like what one did in Street View: start a program to scoop up data secretly from potentially millions of unencrypted Wi-Fi networks around the world, without his bosses bothering to know. To make sure of this, a coalition of 38 states has drawn up numerous specific steps for Google to take, ranging from educating its engineers to educating its lawyers. Whatever Google was doing before to improve its privacy controls was not enough, the states say. Google’s internal compliance will not be directly monitored. But if states feel Google is not upholding its side of the deal, they can bring the matter up to the executive committee that brokered the deal, including the attorneys general of Illinois, Massachusetts and Texas. Some privacy experts think the program has a fair chance of success.

Recalculating the privacy debate after Google Maps penalty

[Commentary] By now, consumers and citizens may have detected a pattern: New technologies allow new types of privacy invasions, which then lead to ad hoc remedies – until the next type of intrusion. As the string of Google violations shows – along with dozens of new privacy laws passed since the 1970s – the pace of this cat-and-mouse privacy quest has quickened in the Digital Age.

Even a mighty Internet company like Google, whose informal motto is “do no evil,” can falter when it creates new technologies with new uses without always knowing exactly what privacy guardrails society expects. The basic need is to better define the purposes of privacy rather than simply react to the fear of losing it. If tech users, companies, and government had a broad consensus on the benefits of privacy, then it would be easier to design comprehensive and consistent policy. Lawmakers and law enforcers would not always be playing catch-up with the latest “violation,” and coming up with a patchwork of solutions.

Sen. Franken Pushes In-Store Tracker Euclid to Seek Shopper Permission

Euclid, a Palo Alto (CA)-based start-up that tracks consumer shopping habits in stores via their Wi-Fi enabled smart phones has run smack dab into the ongoing privacy debate in Washington about whether consumers should have to opt-out of being tracked or whether companies should ask permission first. Sen. Al Franken (D-MN), one of the leading privacy hawks in Congress, is a big proponent of the philosophy that consumers should be asked if they want to be tracked before companies track them without their knowledge. In a letter to Euclid CEO Will Smith, Franken pressed the company to obtain permission from consumers before tracking them in stores, "especially in the offline world where they are less likely to expect it." "Recent news reports suggest that Euclid's technology has tracked 50 million unique smart phones or other Wi-Fi enabled devices.... I find this troubling."

NAB Slams Wireless Call for BAS Spectrum

The National Association of Broadcasters is not happy with the wireless industry's request that the Federal Communications Commission look to reclaim some broadcast auxiliary services (BAS) band spectrum for commercial reallocation, calling it a threat to public safety.

That spectrum is currently used for electronic newsgathering (ENG) and is where they moved ENG when they reallocated satellite spectrum. ENG spectrum was reclaimed and users repacked/moved from the 2 GHz band to a new home between 2025 and 2110 as part of the relocation of mobile satellite spectrum. That wireless request came in a letter from CTIA: The Wireless Association to the FCC. CTIA points out that the FCC has until February 2015 to identify 15 MHz of contiguous spectrum for reallocation and licensing for mobile broadband. That would be a short-term spectrum injection compared to the spectrum being reclaimed from broadcasters in the incentive auction. The National Telecommunications & Information Administration is charged with coming up with 15 MHz of government spectrum to reallocate, and CTIA says the BAS band is a natural fit.

Who pays the bill for a cyber war?

One clear impact of the White House cybersecurity push is pressure on business to do more.

Stewart Baker, a former senior official at the Homeland Security Department and National Security Agency, says he just met with Silicon Valley execs who are feeling the heat. “Their boards of directors are asking questions about their cybersecurity and whether they’ve had intrusions and how they’ve responded to them,” says Baker, who is now a partner at Steptoe & Johnson. “And that’s a direct result of the kinds of publicity we’re seeing for these attacks.” Whether it’s companies or governments, figuring out the right budget for digital defense is tricky. They never really know when they’ve spent too much. And they only know if they’ve spent too little when they get hacked. Experts don’t even agree on how much is actually being spent now. "One number says annual global spending on cybersecurity is $18 billion. Another number says it’s $60 billion," notes Jim Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former State Department official.

Can a company 'hack back' to retrieve stolen secrets?

What happens when a company has already been attacked? Kim Zetter, senior writer for Wired, says that companies can't "hack back," or try to retrieve stolen data.

"You can be self-defensive, you can protect yourself against an attack. You can't go back after the hacker or the computer that appears to be attacking you because that's basically doing what the attacker is doing," said Zetter. President Obama signed an executive order last month designed to make it easier for the government to warn private companies of cyber threats and to set up a system of voluntary cybersecurity standards. The government is in a better position than corporations to fight back after a company has been hacked. "The government can take certain legal measure," Zetter said. "They can go after the servers and get them taken down. They can't hack the servers, but they can go after the authorities who host the servers and get those taken down."

Aaron Swartz Lawyers Accuse Prosecutor Stephen Heymann Of Misconduct

Federal prosecutor Stephen Heymann engaged in prosecutorial misconduct by withholding key evidence from the defense team of Aaron Swartz, the late Internet activist's legal team alleged in a letter to an internal Justice Department ethics unit.

Heymann took the lead in the much-criticized effort to imprison Swartz, who committed suicide in January, and was the attorney who handled the case on a day-to-day basis, reporting to U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz. Swartz' attorney Eliot Peters has filed a complaint with the Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility, a step that indicates just how egregious the defense team considers Heymann's professional behavior.

Consumers Visit Retailers, Then Go Online for Cheaper Sources

Target and Best Buy have been fighting back against showrooming, where people check out the goods in brick-and-mortar stores with the express intent of finding them cheaper online (hello, Amazon). But Placed, a mobile analytics company, found that those retailers are far from alone in being showroomed.

Placed gets its data from measuring the physical location of mobile phone users who consent to be tracked and overlaying it with survey data about people's brick-and-mortar shopping behaviors, and also dug up some interesting data about showrooming habits by gender. And there's more reason for retailers to be concerned. According to Gartner research, less than 10 percent of consumers give the business to the online site of the retailer that they showroomed.

Benton

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