September 2013

With privacy battle brewing, Facebook won't update policy right away

Facebook will not roll out controversial changes to its policies until next week, the giant social network said.

"We are taking the time to ensure that user comments are reviewed and taken into consideration to determine whether further updates are necessary and we expect to finalize the process in the coming week," Facebook said. Facebook has insisted that it is not changing its policies, just clarifying the language in them. Facebook denied it delayed the policy update. But Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said Facebook had to delay the update. "Facebook is being forced to justify its latest grab of user data to DC regulators," Chester said.

CBS and Time Warner win; viewers lose in cable dispute

[Commentary] So here's the final score: Time Warner Cable got some but not all of what it wanted. CBS got pretty much everything that it wanted. And after a month of being denied access to CBS, Showtime and other popular channels, Time Warner subscribers got the certainty of even costlier monthly bills and the assurance that money-grubbing squabbles among multibillion-dollar media giants will continue.

Why aren't our elected officials hopping mad about these ongoing industry food fights and racing to pass legislation aimed at finally giving consumers a break from the endless cycle of rising pay-TV bills? "We need regulators who are willing to stop powerful special interests, whether broadcasters or cable firms, that use consumers as pawns in their spats," said Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. "In the long run, we need better rules, including a la carte pricing, to help change the video marketplace," he said. Critics of a la carte say it would cause the average cost of channels to skyrocket and would curtail programming diversity because smaller niche channels would no longer survive. I don't buy those arguments. If the monthly cost of ESPN were to soar to $30, as some have predicted, subscribers would fall away in droves until either the channel came up with a more realistic business model or someone else managed to offer sports at a more reasonable price. That would no doubt involve sports teams and universities no longer soaking fans with ridiculously expensive licensing agreements.

Why Microsoft Had to Buy a Phone Company

[Commentary] Microsoft wants to sell you a phone, a tablet, and a TV box that are not only running Microsoft software and connected to Microsoft services but that are designed and manufactured by Microsoft as well. This is because, perhaps, it has no choice.

Microsoft has seen, again and again and again, what happens when it doesn’t build its own hardware for consumers, or know exactly what it’s doing when it does. While buying Nokia’s phone business, and truly becoming a different kind of company than it has been for most of its nearly forty-year history, could be a mistake that ultimately proves fatal to Microsoft as we know it, continuing to rely on other companies to determine its fate in a post-PC world seems like it would be the most fatal mistake of all.

The verdict on the Microsoft-Nokia deal is as clear as mud

Industry pundits have panned Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia.

The general feeling is that Microsoft had to do something to gain traction in the mobile market. Nokia was either going to switch to Android or was on the verge of going bankrupt and, had Nokia abandoned Windows Phone, then Windows Phone would be dead. Therein lies the tragedy, many pundits believe. The fundamental flaw in Microsoft's mobile strategy, they say, is Microsoft's operating system. Rather than trying to keep Windows Phone on life support, Microsoft should instead abandon its mobile OS. "Microsoft's strategy pays no respects to a very stark reality: Very few people currently love Windows Phone, and doubling down on the platform via a Nokia acquisition may be throwing good money after bad," PC World writes.

New York Dismisses Criticism of New 911 System

Unions for emergency workers question whether New Yorkers are now less safe because of 911 system mistakes. It is not human error, they say, but a gross indictment of the city’s $2 billion overhaul of the aging 911 computer network.

“They wanted it to be the system, because it feeds into this perception that the whole 911 system is a mess, that unified call taking doesn’t work, and on and on,” said Caswell F. Holloway, the deputy mayor for operations who is overseeing the project. “That is not the case.” Indeed, the system has not shown wide-scale cracks in its operation. Response times are mostly unchanged since the rollout of the Police Department’s new technology on May 29. During an average week, emergency responders from the Fire and Police Departments arrived at the scene just as fast this year as last year. Nonetheless, the suspicion that the network was at fault was particularly sensitive for the Bloomberg administration, which already suffered through a scandal-tarred upgrade.

A Newspaper in Las Vegas, at Risk of Closing, Divides a Family

Stephens Media, owner of The Las Vegas Review-Journal, wants to dissolve its joint agreement with The Las Vegas Sun, intended to preserve newspapers. In exchange, the Greenspun family, which owns The Sun, would receive the domain name lasvegas.com, a Web site the family currently leases from Stephens for up to $2.5 million a year and then subleases to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

Brian Greenspun is the president of The Sun. His family has owned the paper since his parents founded it in 1950. His brother, Danny Greenspun, and two sisters, Susan Greenspun Fine and Jane Greenspun Gale, all voted to accept the offer, but Brian wants to fight. Last month, he accused his siblings of “deciding to kill The Las Vegas Sun,” and he is suing Stephens, claiming that the offer gives The Review-Journal a local monopoly over news gathering and opinion. At stake, he says, is Las Vegas’s future as a two-newspaper town. Doing away with the joint operating agreement “is equivalent to buying The Sun and shutting it down,” he said, adding of his siblings, “It’s a business deal to them.”

NSA Foils Much Internet Encryption

The National Security Agency is winning its long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age, according to newly disclosed documents.

The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show. Many users assume — or have been assured by Internet companies — that their data is safe from prying eyes, including those of the government. The NSA treats its recent successes in deciphering protected information as among its most closely guarded secrets, restricted to those cleared for a highly classified program code-named Bullrun, according to the documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former NSA contractor. Beginning in 2000, as encryption tools were gradually blanketing the Web, the NSA invested billions of dollars in a clandestine campaign to preserve its ability to eavesdrop. Having lost a public battle in the 1990s to insert its own “back door” in all encryption, it set out to accomplish the same goal by stealth. The agency, according to the documents and interviews with industry officials, deployed custom-built, superfast computers to break codes, and began collaborating with technology companies in the United States and abroad to build entry points into their products.

How to remain secure against NSA surveillance

[Commentary] Now that we have enough details about how the National Security Agency eavesdrops on the Internet, we can finally start to figure out how to protect ourselves. I have five pieces of advice:

Hide in the network. Implement hidden services. Use Tor to anonymize yourself.
Encrypt your communications using TLS and IPsec.
Assume that while your computer can be compromised, it would take work and risk on the part of the NSA – so it probably isn't.
Be suspicious of commercial encryption software, especially from large vendors. Most encryption products from large US companies probably have NSA-friendly back doors, and many foreign ones probably do as well.
Try to use public-domain encryption that has to be compatible with other implementations. And the Linux operating system is safer than Windows.

The NSA’s surveillance capabilities may be powerful, but they're limited by the same economic realities as the rest of us, and our best defense is to make surveillance of us as expensive as possible. Encryption is your friend. Use it well, and do your best to ensure that nothing can compromise it. That's how you can remain secure even in the face of the NSA.

Brazil tries to elude NSA with new cables, satellite

Angered by recent revelations that the United States spied on its e-mails and phone calls and even its president, Brazil's government is speeding up efforts to improve the security of its communications - and hopefully keep more of its secrets under wraps.

By purchasing a new satellite, pushing bureaucrats in Brasilia to use secure e-mail platforms and even building its own fiber-optic cable to communicate with governments in neighboring countries, Brazil hopes to at least reduce the amount of information available to foreign spies. Brazilian officials also admit they face the same problems as many other countries upset by the recent NSA disclosures. That is, building new technology is expensive and difficult, and even then there is no guarantee of fully dodging the sophisticated dragnet employed by the US government.

Google argues for right to continue scanning Gmail

Google's attorneys say their long-running practice of electronically scanning the contents of people's Gmail accounts to help sell ads is legal, and are asking a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit that seeks to stop the practice.

In court records filed in advance of a federal hearing, Google argues that "all users of email must necessarily expect that their emails will be subject to automated processing." The class action lawsuit, filed in May, says Google "unlawfully opens up, reads, and acquires the content of people's private email messages" in violation of California's privacy laws and federal wiretapping statutes. The lawsuit notes that the company even scans messages sent to any of the 425 million active Gmail users from non-Gmail users who never agreed to the company's terms. Google argues that no human ever scans the emails and that the content of e-mails is only scanned for keywords for advertising purposes.

Benton

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