A Q&A with Rep John Conyers (D-MI). He, along with Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), proposed an amendment to the defense spending bill that would restrict the National Security Agency’s (NSA) ability to collect bulk phone records and metadata under the Patriot Act by defunding the program. The amendment has been denounced by the Administration.
Tech companies, floored by the initial revelations about their part in the National Security Agency’s surveillance program, responded by denying specific details in carefully worded statements — and pushing for more government transparency about national security requests. Now, the seven companies named in leaked documents remain on the edge of their seats as they wait for the next chapters in the PRISM story.
Plenty is still unresolved, and what happens next may affect the industry for years to come. Here’s a look at five big questions for tech.
[Commentary] The disappointing results from San Jose State's experiment with online courses shouldn't be interpreted to mean that such courses can't help students. But the classes the university offered in collaboration with online provider Udacity were practically a model of how to do online education badly: rushed into existence and sloppily overseen. No one was even aware that some students who had signed up for the classes lacked reliable access to computers.
The one thing the college did well was monitor the results of the three pilot courses and call a timeout when failure rates proved unacceptably high. Online courses should be developed thoughtfully, from within the colleges, not as a result of top-down directives from the governor. The subjects that are offered should be based on student demand and faculty analysis of which would work best online. The preferences of even the best-intentioned billionaires should not be part of the equation. Nor should online courses be viewed as major money-savers, as Brown has pitched them. It still takes well-educated people, interacting with those who need an education, to provide high-quality courses, whether that's via the Internet or in a classroom.
The Federal Communications Commission is proposing to auction off four bands of wireless frequencies, including one currently used by the military.
The additional spectrum will help wireless carriers meet their customers' skyrocketing demand for data, and the revenue from the auction could help the government pay for a nationwide communications network for first responders. The auction is separate from the FCC's broadcast incentive auction, in which the agency will buyback the licenses of TV stations. But the revenue from auctioning the four bands, collectively called "AWS-3," could give the FCC more flexibility in how it structures the incentive auctions.
Free Press, NABET-CWA, The Newspaper Guild-CWA, National Hispanic Media Coalition, Common Cause, and Office of Communication, Inc., of the United Church of Christ don't want the Federal Communications Commission to approve Gannett's plan to spin off some stations as part of its $2.2 billion purchase of Belo's TV stations.
The groups cited stations in five markets -- Phoenix; Louisville; Tucson; Portland (OR); and St. Louis --that would violate the FCC's newspaper/broadcast crossownership and local ownership cap rules if Gannett were not turning around and selling them to operating companies headed by former Belo group chief Jack Sander, and Ben Tucker, former head of the Fisher station group. The petitioners call those third-party "shell" companies that mask the "true intent" of the deal, which they say is to allow Gannett "to simultaneously influence and control multiple media outlet in the same local market in a way that is contrary to the public interest and otherwise prohibited by the Commission's rules....Even if they do not outright violate the rules, such sharing arrangements are not in the public interest because they reduce the diversity of viewpoints and reduce competition in the provision of local news and the sale of advertising." They want the FCC to deny those transfers, or at least designate them for hearing.
Pay-TV providers large and small asked the Federal Communications Commission to deny the transfer of the licenses of Belo's KMOV St. Louis; KTVK and KASW, both Phoenix; and KMSB and KTTU, both Tucson, or at least condition the transfer on disallowing coordinated carriage negotiations.
Those stations are part of Gannett's $2.2 billion (cash and debt) deal to buy Belo's broadcast holdings. But because they are in markets where Gannett already owns stations and could not own more without violating FCC local ownership limits, Gannett is spinning them off to new owners. Those are Jack Sander, former Belo group chief, and Ben Tucker, former head of the Fisher station group. But Gannett is still identifying those stations as part of a new Gannett Super Group, and plans to get credit from Wall Street by consolidating their performance into Gannett financial results.
Netflix invited The Associated Press to its Los Gatos (CA) headquarters for an unprecedented glimpse at the technical preparations that go into the release of its original programming.
"This is Silicon Valley's equivalent of a midnight movie premiere in Hollywood," says Chris Jaffe, Netflix's vice president of product innovation. Engineers are flanked by seven flat-screen televisions on one side of the room and two giant screens on the other. One big screen is scrolling through Twitter to highlight tweets mentioning "Orange Is The New Black," an offbeat drama set in a women's prison. The other screen is listing some of Netflix's most closely guarded information — the rankings of videos that are attracting the most viewers on an hourly basis. If all goes well, the pizza and snacks that Netflix's bleary-eyed workers have been munching will be washed down with a champagne celebration after the show starts streaming.
CBS and Time Warner Cable have agreed to take a little more time to hammer out an agreement in the retransmission dispute that threatens to remove CBS and Showtime from homes in Los Angeles, New York and Texas.
The two parties have agreed to extend their negotiations through July 29 at 5 p.m. ET. In previous standoffs between networks and cable companies over compensation for station signals, extensions have generally meant neither side wants to push the dispute to the point where cable customers lose access to channels. The negotiations initially had a deadline of July 24, but that deadline was extended until 9 a.m. ET July 25, due to Federal Communications Commission rules that bar cable providers from dropping a network during sweeps periods. The potential blackout would affect 3.5 million homes, approximately 29 percent of Time Warner Cable's video subscriptions.
Once so close, Apple and Google are now as far apart as anyone in the high-stakes tech game. And yet, there’s one thing they still have in common, one last piece of technological brilliance they freely share with each another.
Chances are, you’ve never heard of it. But nowadays, it’s an integral part every new Apple iPhone — and every new Android phone. It’s not an app or a web service or some sort of hardware contraption. It’s more important than that. It’s a tool that’s changing the way we build and run computer software — any computer software. This tool is known as LLVM, short for low level virtual machine. But don’t let that throw you. The acronym isn’t even an accurate description of what the thing does. It’s just a name. The thing to realize is that LLVM underpins so much of the work at both Apple and Google, helping create not only smartphone software, but operating systems and browsers and web services. Created by a team of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, LLVM is a way of building software compilers — those contraptions that receive raw code from the world’s programmers and convert it into real, live software applications. But it’s more than that. It’s also a better way of executing software applications on PCs and smartphones and tablets and other hardware. It lets you run programs on machines and microprocessors they weren’t explicitly written for.
[Commentary] For those of us who care about storytelling in the digital age, the question has become how do we create new forms of storytelling that incorporate the quantitative into the qualitative?
Television, frankly, has been awful at this. And sports television in particular has been surprisingly awful at creatively integrating statistics into its coverage. For the most part it has simply littered the screen with scores and tickers—it's done a great job of bringing us multiple streams of real-time information, but it's done a lousy job of using data to bring any new dimension to what we're watching. Nate Silver's arrival at ESPN just might change that. ESPN, which doth bestride the sports world like a colossus, isn't just the biggest sports network in North America, it's also one of the continent's largest news and information companies. When it comes to news and data-gathering ESPN has scale—massive scale—and that ability to capture and parse big data is ESPN's next competitive advantage. At ESPN Nate Silver is potentially an intellectual leader whose presence could be transformative to sports television. At the New York Times, Silver was a prognosticator and a brand, a conjuror who with his FiveThirtyEight.com blog was scarily accurate in predicting the outcomes of elections. That was the sizzle. But the actual steak is that Silver is able to tell stories we can all dine out on using data. That's what's so exciting.
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