October 2013

Microsoft encourages Internet use for kids

Most parents approve of their children using the Internet without their supervision, Microsoft said in a blog post, promoting the benefits of Internet use for young children.

According to a new Microsoft survey, “eight years old is the average age at which parents allow independent Internet and device use,” the company wrote. The survey asked parents to identify the age at which they would give their children “unsupervised access to technologies such as mobile devices, social sites and online services.” At 94 percent, “almost all parents … allow their kids to use at least one online service or device,” the company’s Director of Online Safety Kim Sanchez wrote in the post.

The NSA’s giant Utah data center will probably hold a bunch of spam

The National Security Agency's data-collection activities are so resource-intensive, the agency can't complete its new server farms fast enough. But when it does, a significant share of what gets held on those servers could wind up being worthless spam.

We now know the NSA collects hundreds of thousands of address books and contact lists from e-mail services and instant messaging clients per day. Thanks to this information, the NSA is capable of building a map of a target's online relationships. Sometimes, however, that process goes awry -- such as when one Iranian e-mail address of interest got taken over by spammers. Such incidents have caused huge amounts of unimportant information to flow through the NSA's systems, according to a chart in a top secret NSA presentation. Every day from Sept. 11, 2011 to Sept. 24, 2011, the NSA collected somewhere between 2 GB and 117 GB of data concerning this Iranian address. The exact numbers aren't clear because details of the chart have been redacted.

Aaron Swartz’s last gift to journalism and online privacy finds a new home

Before Aaron Swartz's suicide in January, he had nearly completed work with Wired's Kevin Poulsen on a secure system to accept messages and documents from anonymous sources over the Internet. The result of that effort was DeadDrop, an open-source python platform. The system assigns each source a unique code name so that a relationship can be established without news organizations ever knowing the source's identity.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation announced it will be taking over the project, renaming it SecureDrop and providing on-site installation for news organizations along with ongoing technical support. Trevor Timm, the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said that the anonymity made possible by the project is all the more important in light of recent NSA revelations and prosecutions against whistleblowers, which he believes "have shown the grave challenges to this relationship and the lengths governments will go to undermine it."

Our tweets are getting shorter

Good tweeting is often an exercise in good editing -- cramming any thought into 140 characters can be a challenge in itself, let alone coming up with something smart or witty. In 2009, the share of tweets numbering 40 characters or fewer was pretty balanced against the proportion of tweets numbering 120 characters or more. The following year saw a spike in the proportion of tweets numbering around 120 characters. But ever since then, tweets have been getting shorter and shorter — to the point that long tweets now account for only a tiny fraction of all tweets.

How Edward Snowden is nudging our privacy desires

Market research company Lab42 released results of a study in which 54% of respondents said they desire more privacy at the risk of government security.

"With the recent NSA leaks making headlines, consumer awareness toward their digital privacy is at an all-time high," said Jonathan Pirc, Founder of Lab42. The reason the National Security Agency has sought out information about our interests, acquaintances and preferences -- which we so freely divulge in search engines, social web sites and mobile web apps -- is elementary: the data exists. And the reason it exists is to support the online advertising industry which, led by Google and Facebook, is expected to generate record revenues topping $40 billion this year, according the Interactive Advertising Bureau, But Lab42's survey also shows that the intensive online tracking of US consumers online behaviors, carried out ostensibly to deliver more relevant ads, quite often delivers ads no one really cares about. While Google and Facebook may prefer that the online advertising ecosystem remain as is, with the rich getting richer, there are dozens of smaller players in the advertising industry that have adopted a more Europe-like approach to giving consumers control of their privacy information and earning consumer trust.

Google Fiber now explicitly permits home servers

Google Fiber's terms of service caused some controversy in July 2013 when Google found itself defending the legality of a ban on servers. After a complaint, Google told the Federal Communications Commission that its clause stating that "you should not host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection" did not violate network neutrality rules because it was just "reasonable network management." At the time, Google told customers and reporters that its ban only applied to business servers and that the "use of applications such as multi-player gaming, video-conferencing, home security and others which may include server capabilities but are being used for legal and non-commercial purposes are acceptable and encouraged."

Here’s why it’s legal for Google and Facebook to use your face in ads

Facebook puts your profile picture in advertisements. Google is about to do the same and other sites like Twitter will likely follow one day. How exactly is this legal? What if you don’t want to be in an ad: can the companies use your picture anyway? The short answer is yes. But as to whether any other company can do so, no. This is because under American state privacy laws, there is a “right of publicity” that allows you to control public displays of your image. However, you cannot sue Facebook or Google for using your image because you agreed to this in the terms of service when signing up for an account. The companies also reserve the right to make any changes to their policies from time to time.

German researchers smash wireless speed record

A team of German researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics (IAF) and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has broken the world record for the fastest wireless Internet speed, clocking 100Gbps.

They successfully completed a 100Gbps data transmission over a wireless radio network in the ultra-high-frequency 237.5 GHz spectrum. Acting like super-charged microwave links, the setup is thus far not ideal for individual homes, because 237.5 GHz wireless has trouble penetrating walls. But the high wireless frequency does have possibilities for extending the reach of fiber optics networks into rural or outdoor areas, and it certainly serves as an important foundation to continue making strides in speed.

What a 100 G Wireless Personal Area Network Could Mean for Telecom

The IEEE said it has created a study group to explore ultra-high-speed, short-range wireless communications to support wireless personal area networks (WPANs). The target speed is 100 Gbps over distances as great as several hundred meters using unlicensed spectrum in the terahertz range.

One goal of this technology is to allow various wireless devices to communicate with one another, like a much higher-bandwidth alternative to Bluetooth. The new study group will develop a project proposal for an amendment to the IEEE 802.15.3 standard for information technology for local and metropolitan area networks. Potentially, service providers could also add previously unheard-of cutting edge multimedia offerings to their video services. WPANs also represent an opportunity for service providers to expand their tech support offerings by helping customers install these devices in their homes or businesses. The technology may have another potential application of particular interest to wireless service providers in wireless backhaul and fronthaul, the latter which describes the connection from the top to bottom of a cell tower. While currently, fronthaul connections are often made using fiber – which can be a major challenge to install and maintain in bad weather – WPAN may be able to simplify fronthaul equipment installation and maintenance. Third, the ability to use 100 G high-bandwidth wireless connectivity in data centers may be a good way to simplify installation and maintenance of data center equipment as well.

High-capacity Broadband and E-rate: Libraries as Community Leverage

[Commentary] Broadband, especially of the high-capacity variety was once mostly the province of network engineers and large organizations. Now it is everyone’s concern. For libraries, this need and expectation for speedy Internet response is even more pronounced. A single broadband connection to one library provides access for thousands of people over the course of a year. And with these Internet connections come the full range of resources and expertise that libraries and librarians offer. Bolstering broadband investment in libraries is truly a fabulous way to leverage scarce community and national resources and support local economies. The open proceeding on the E-rate program at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the President’s proposal for a ConnectED initiative are truly exciting developments for the library community. What better way to leverage libraries than building on a successful E-rate program, and make a quantum jump from basic connectivity to high-speed broadband for libraries across the land?

[Alan S. Inouye, Ph.D. is Director of the American Library Association's Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) in Washington, DC.]

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