Bewildered, and at times angry, faculty members at Harvard criticized the university after revelations that administrators secretly searched the e-mail accounts of 16 resident deans in an effort to learn who leaked information about a student cheating scandal to the news media. Some predicted a confrontation between the faculty and the administration.
The anthropologist Margaret Mead once said that in traditional societies, the young learn from the old. But in modern societies, the old can also learn from the young. Here’s hoping that politeness never goes out of fashion, but that time-wasting forms of communication do.
[Commentary] The tumult in the news industry is driven by declines in advertising revenues. Readers still value news, both light blog posts and in-depth reporting. Some journalism will be unpaid, but the kind that makes a difference—that finds and questions Pol Pots and drug lords—will continue to cost money. We need to find ways of paying for it.
Between 1985 and 2000 Nigeria mysteriously spent more than $5 billion digitalizing a landline telephone network that ended up with just 300,000 connected users. At the time, Germany’s Siemens had a dominant share of contracts from state owned Nigerian Telecommunications Nitel. Nitel is now defunct, Siemens had to pay fines in Europe for bribing Nigerian officials, and a former Nigerian telecommunications minister, David Mark, now senate president, must rue the day he once declared that “telephones are not for ordinary people.”
They weren’t back in the 1990s – only one in 300 Nigerians had a line. The likes of France Telecom, BT, Vodafone and other big international telecoms companies misread this fact when Nigeria auctioned off GSM licenses in 2001. The companies decided against entering the market because they felt it was too risky and there were insufficient Nigerians with enough money to afford a phone to make investment worthwhile. The problem across Africa, however, was not that ordinary people did not have money for phones but the extraordinarily inefficient way in which state owned telecoms monopolies had been run.
Lawmakers from Mexico’s three biggest parties plan to present a wide-ranging telecommunications bill that ends a longstanding limit on foreign investment, one of the proposal’s architects said. The legislation, to be backed by President Enrique Pena Nieto, also will define the way cable and satellite companies should work with broadcasters, said Guadalupe Acosta Naranjo, an official with the opposition Democratic Revolution Party who has helped draft the bill.
In addition, it will provide regulators with greater recourse against providers that break the rules. The goal is to create more competition in the $30 billion- a-year Mexican communications industry, which is dominated by a handful of the country’s richest people. Smaller carriers that have struggled to compete against billionaire Carlos Slim’s America Movil (AMXL) SAB, for instance, could seek takeovers from non- Mexican companies for the first time.
China has issued a new call for international “rules and cooperation” on Internet espionage issues, while insisting that accusations of Chinese government involvement in recent hacking attacks were part of an international smear campaign.
The remarks, by Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, were China’s highest-level response yet to intensifying reports that the Chinese military may be engaging in cyberespionage. “Anyone who tries to fabricate or piece together a sensational story to serve a political motive will not be able to blacken the name of others nor whitewash themselves,” he said. Speaking to the news media on the sidelines of the annual session of the National People’s Congress on Saturday, Mr. Yang said that the reports were “built on shaky ground” and that cyberspace should not be turned into a battlefield.
[Commentary] Who owns your cellphone? Or, not to put too fine a point on it: who controls what you can do with your cellphone after you’ve paid for it? You probably saw a number of headlines this week in the vein of “White House: cell phone unlocking should be legal”, but the opinion released by the Obama Administration on March 4 is not the beginning of the story, nor is it the end – not by a long shot. Although the White House announced it agrees with thousands of We The People petitioners that smartphone and tablet users should be allowed to unlock their phones and use the devices on the network of their choosing, there's a long way to go to make that a reality.
The top lawmakers in both chambers with authority over cellphone unlocking are now saying they plan to move legislation to legalize the practice. The leaders of the House Judiciary Committee said that they will work with their Senate counterparts to allow consumers to unlock their phones, which lets them switch the devices to other networks.
The Judiciary Committees in both chambers have jurisdiction over copyright issues, including cellphone unlocking Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, came out in support of the practice earlier this week. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), the panel's ranking member, vowed to work on a bipartisan basis "to address the issue of cell phone unlocking to provide consumers with greater choices and affordability in this vital marketplace.” Reps. Howard Coble (R-NC), chairman of the Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet Subcommittee, and Mel Watt (D-NC), the subcommittee's ranking member, also said they will back legislation.
AT&T executive Joan Marsh issued a statement asserting that the ban on unlocking cellphones "will not negatively impact any of AT&T's customers." However, Marsh points out that several conditions apply. Activist Sina Khanifar, who helped organize a petition drive asking the White House to intervene, contends AT&T's unlocking policy does not go far enough. Khanifar supplied USA TODAY with this line-by-line assessment of Marsh's description of AT&T's unlocking policy.
Google is nearing a deal in which it would pay $7 million to resolve investigations with more than 30 state attorneys general over its controversial Street View program, in which it captured data from private Wi-Fi signals while taking street-level images throughout the world, said a person familiar with the looming agreement.
The deal, which is expected to be announced soon, would likely end the U.S. regulatory scrutiny of one of the most damaging episodes in the history of the California-based search giant. Google officials declined to comment on reports of a looming settlement with U.S. state attorneys general, but on March 8, spokeswoman Nadia Blagojevic said of the Street View program: “We work hard to get privacy right at Google. But in this case we didn’t, which is why we quickly tightened up our systems to address the issue.” The Connecticut attorney general’s office, which took the lead on the Street View investigation, declined to comment on reports of a settlement, saying that the probe is “active and ongoing.” The $7 million fine, if confirmed by the state attorneys general, would average less than $250,000 per state. It was not clear whether the agreement will include any admission of improper action by Google or any limits on its future practices.
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