March 2013

The Federal Trade Commission is cracking down on affiliate marketers that allegedly bombarded consumers with hundreds of millions of unwanted spam text messages in an effort to steer them towards deceptive websites falsely promising “free” gift cards.

In eight different complaints filed in courts around the United States, the FTC charged 29 defendants with collectively sending more than 180 million unwanted text messages to consumers, many of whom had to pay for receiving the texts. The messages promised consumers free gifts or prizes, including gift cards worth $1,000 to major retailers such as Best Buy, Walmart and Target. Consumers who clicked on the links in the messages found themselves caught in a confusing and elaborate process that required them to provide sensitive personal information, apply for credit or pay to subscribe to services to get the supposedly “free” cards.

Remember the early days of mobile content, before the iPhone, when you’d fire up your mobile browser and see your operator’s “portal”? Those portals are still around, incredibly, but not for much longer.

Juniper Research has just put out a report about mobile content business models and, according to the UK analyst firm, just 6 percent of content downloads now come from these portals, with the rest being attributable to third-party stores, chiefly Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play store. Frankly the 6 percent figure is surprisingly high – report author Windsor Holden told me the portals in question belong to “China Mobile and two or three others”, and even those are “going to wither away over the next few years”. And the real money isn’t even in app sales. In selling apps, the standard developer-OS vendor split is 70-30, meaning the carrier needs to try to wrangle some share out of that 30 percent cut. Is that just wishful thinking on the operators’ part? Not necessarily.

The Pentagon is scuttling a program that awards grants to reformed hackers and security professionals for short-term research with game-changing potential, according to cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab.

The Cyber Fast Track program, first reported by Nextgov, is managed by Peiter Zatko, a gray-hat hacker himself who goes by the nickname "Mudge." The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency initiative seeds months-long research on strategies, as opposed to multi-year, multi-million dollar systems that, the thinking goes, proceed slower than hackers’ brains. Bad actors typically devise new threats faster than it takes most government-funded efforts to develop protections.

"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." It's one of the most famous phrases in the English language, and it was relayed live from the moon via a radio system that a man named Dean Cubely used to manage. These days, Cubely works as CEO of ERF Wireless, and still uses radio waves hopscotched over short to medium distances. His mission? To bring high-speed wireless Internet to places that wires or fiber optic cables can’t reach.