October 2013

Foxconn Admits to Labor Violations at Factory

Hon Hai Precision Industry acknowledged that some student interns worked night shifts and overtime at a production site in northeast China in violation of company policy, the latest hit to the labor practices of the contract manufacturer for Apple and other electronics companies.

Hon Hai, which uses the trade name Foxconn Technology Group, has been under scrutiny by labor groups for its work practices. The same factory last year admitted to having temporarily hired underage interns. The Beijing Times reported that some engineering students from the Xi'an Institute of Technology were told that they wouldn't graduate if they refused to participate in the internship program in Foxconn's manufacturing site. The article said the students made Sony’s PlayStation game consoles at the company's Yantai campus.

Google disagrees with European privacy complaints

Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, said that he respects but disagrees with complaints about his company's privacy policies made by data protection authorities in six European countries.

Schmidt said the company has "very broadly communicated" its policies to authorities in the countries where the complaints have been made. Data watchdogs in France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands have said Google needs to provide additional guarantees to comply with national privacy protection rules in each of those countries. "I have reviewed this. I just don't agree with the (data protection authorities) that are making this complaint ... With respect I just disagree and we just disagree, and we'll let it play itself out," Schmidt said.

BT strikes mobile partnership with EE

BT will revive its consumer mobile operations by launching services under a partnership deal struck with EE, the UK’s largest mobile operator.

The two companies have agreed terms on a wholesale contract for BT to use the EE network, which includes its superfast 4G services, following a tender process. BT’s consumer mobile operations have been relatively forgotten in a wider corporate strategy that has focused on television and broadband in the past few years. BT already provides some mobile services, but mainly to businesses and the public sector. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. A BT executive, who wished not to be named, said that there was a significant opportunity in mobile telecoms, including offering its customers so-called “quad play” bundles of TV, broadband and fixed and mobile telecoms.

FCC Officials Push for Broadcaster Forum on Team Name

Reed Hundt, former-Federal Communications Commission Chairman and on-the-record opponent of using the name "Redskins" for the Washington football team, was among a number of former FCC officials signed on to a letter to current-FCC Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn asking the FCC to use some muscle to get the name scrubbed.

The letter asks that she "convene an open forum with broadcasters to determine whether they should self-regulate their use of the term 'XXXskins' when referring to the Washington DC football team." Among the couple dozen signees are former FCC commissioners and officials Tyrone Brown, Henry Geller, Jonathan Adelstein, Nicholas Johnson, and Blair Levin (a former Hundt top aide), as well as veteran media attorney Andrew Schwartzman, Minority Media & Telecommunications Counsel President David Honig and former NTIA head Larry Irving. “The image of Washington is prominent throughout this country and the world. To continue arguing that the name "XXXskin" is an honor to Native Americans requires willful ignorance, which casts enormous doubt on team leadership,” the letter said. “As all of us have learned in international diplomacy, strength is essential to leadership and that includes moral strength. To tie this name to Washington's football team hurts that strength.”

Facebook to sunset its search privacy settings

Facebook is following through on a year-old announcement to retire a search privacy feature. Users will no longer be able to hide their profile from search.

The feature, called “Who can look up your Timeline by name?” was removed from Privacy settings in 2012 for those who didn’t have it enabled. When enabled, the setting removes the ability for users to access a Timeline profile via search, even when a user puts in the exact name of the person he or she is locating. Facebook says in the blog post that the feature is a vestigial precaution that reaches back before the platform had a sophisticated search algorithm. When Facebook search acted as a mere directory, removing oneself from search made it more difficult for strangers to access a given profile. But now, as Open Graph opens up to search more settings and there is greater visibility of Timelines for friends of friends, the importance of finding a person through search has diminished while controlling the content on any given Timeline has become more important. Now, it’s more important to consider the content of the Timeline itself: a “private Timeline” is only such when content is marked explicitly “Friends Only.” As Facebook continues to make search easier, it’s important to keep in mind how these changes impact social media privacy at large.

What your Internet of things startup should learn from Netflix and the disaggregation of TV

The Internet, standards and open platforms have allowed businesses to break up content and services into discrete and disaggregated parts. Now instead of paying $80 a month for a pay-TV package and getting 60 channels you don’t want, you can assemble the shows you like via Netflix, iTunes or any number of other available services and get a relative bargain. The problem, of course, is that when you break things up, you might get exactly what you want, but you no longer have the assurance of the cable company delivering your single stream. Now you have Netflix’s servers (which are really Amazon’s), a content delivery network or two, an ISP and even your home Wi-Fi network all a factor in the quality of the experience. So when a video fails, who does the consumer call? This is a problem that the video industry is working out right now, with efforts from ISPs, big content companies and even startups trying to ensure quality of service on the network.

A few feet from failure: why Verizon FiOS in New York is a sad joke

Verizon has a contract with New York City that promises fiber access in every neighborhood. However, the availability of the service has been frustratingly spotty, skipping buildings, floors, and blocks without clear explanation.

Verizon says that’s because landlords aren’t letting them install fiber, but Brooklyn coder and entrepreneur Mike Caprio’s experience trying to get Verizon’s high-speed FiOS fiber Internet service since 2009 suggests that’s not always the case. Since he started telling the story on social media and on the radio, at least a dozen people have asked Caprio for help getting fiber in their buildings -- including his landlord. The city seems satisfied with how Verizon has held up its end of the bargain.

Electronic Frontier Foundation splits from tech companies over surveillance concerns

Recent revelations about government surveillance have begun splintering the Global Network Initiative (GNI), a group of Internet advocacy groups and tech companies dedicated to advancing human rights online. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced that it was leaving GNI.

EFF said it is concerned about the group’s ability to facilitate transparent conversations with member companies -- including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo -- which are bound by secretive surveillance laws. This year’s leaks about government surveillance programs have made it “clear that affected companies are unable even to talk about secret orders they have received from the US government,” the letter said. “As a result, EFF longer no believes we can sign our name onto joint statements that rely on shared knowledge of the security of company products or their internal processes.”

Shutdown derails implementation of cybersecurity order

Due to the government shutdown, the Commerce Department will miss its deadline to release a draft framework of voluntary cybersecurity rules.

President Barack Obama instructed the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to release the draft guidelines by Oct. 10 as part of an Executive Order he signed in February 2013. "The continued closure of the government has impacted our ability to conduct the final clearance process on the Cybersecurity Framework," James Hock, a Commerce Department spokesman, said. "We will reevaluate the release date when government operations are fully restored." The guidelines are intended to help operators of critical infrastructure, such as power plants and banks, better protect their systems from hackers.

Malone: Why Can’t We All Get Along?

Cable legend and Liberty Media chairman John Malone said the future of the cable industry will depend on its participants’ willingness and ability to co-operate to help solve the pressing issues of the day, and that consolidation could be just the way to do that.

“The fewer big players, the easier it is to align them,” Malone said at Liberty’s annual Investor Day meeting. “The smaller players are already willing and able to affiliate with technology schemes and brands, but they have to be underwritten by the biggest players who have more in common than they have to fear from each other.” Malone has been by far the biggest catalyst in the consolidation frenzy of the past several months, after Liberty invested $2.6 billion for a 27 percent interest in Charter Communications. He added that most of the innovations in the cable industry -- the digital set-top box, MPEG video compression and the Hybrid-Fiber Coax (HFC) architecture -- were all made possible through industry joint ventures and consortiums. But whether Malone’s vision will become reality depends on several factors, including the industry’s ability to work together. While Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts has considered licensing its X-1 user interface to other operators, thus creating the ubiquitous platform to launch products Malone was talking about, the Liberty chief said there are other issues at play that could throw a wrench in those plans, too.

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