Marketers are finally convinced that there's money to be made peddling everything from soap to salad dressing to the legions of consumers glued to their smartphones and tablets: Spending on mobile advertising more than doubled in the first half of the year. Mobile-ad spending in the U.S. totaled $3 billion in the first half, up from $1.2 billion a year earlier, the Interactive Advertising Bureau estimates.
Worldwide shipments of personal computers fell in the third quarter of the year, the sixth straight quarter of decline as cheaper tablet computers and smartphones cut into demand, according to market research firms IDC and Gartner.
IDC said the market fell nearly 8 percent, to 81.6 million units, while Gartner put the decline at almost 9 percent, to 80.3 million. The two firms define PCs slightly differently. IDC expects that the PC market will hit bottom sometime next year, with a recovery starting in 2015 as companies and consumers finally replace aging PCs. Gartner says this year will be the worst, with flat shipments next year and single-digit percentage growth in 2015.
Has Dave Eggers written a parable of our time, an eviscerating takedown of Silicon Valley and its privacy-invading technology companies? Or has he missed his target, producing a sanctimonious screed that fails to humanize its characters and understand its subject?
Book critics are divided over the quality of Eggers’s highly anticipated novel “The Circle.” But in Silicon Valley and beyond, the book’s theme promises to spark an even bigger debate over the 21st-century hyperconnected world that Eggers describes.
Vodafone Group, Telefonica SA and others may have to pay bigger fees to the UK for rights to use spectrum after regulators increased the amount based on money raised in recent airwave auctions.
Under the proposed rules, fees for Vodafone and Telefonica’s O2 unit will increase fivefold. They’ll owe 83.1 million pounds ($132.4 million) per year for rights to use the 900 megahertz and 1800 megahertz spectrum bands, up from 15.6 million pounds previously, regulator Ofcom said. The new rules are expected to take effect next year, pending a consultation period that ends in December, Ofcom said. The British government asked Ofcom to recalculate the fees to reflect “full market value” after carriers spent billions on new licenses worldwide. This year, the UK raised 2.34 billion pounds in a spectrum auction for airwaves that would carry high-speed mobile Internet traffic.
Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the original author of the USA Patriot Act, plans to introduce legislation in the "next few days" to restrict the National Security Agency's surveillance power. His bill, which is co-authored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), will be titled the USA Freedom Act.
The legislation would end the NSA's bulk collection of U.S. phone records, strengthen prohibitions against targeting the communications of Americans and require the government to more aggressively delete information accidentally collected on Americans. The bill would also create a special advocate's office tasked with arguing in favor of stronger privacy protections before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In a speech at the Cato Institute, Sensenbrenner argued that the Patriot Act's "relevance" requirement was meant to prevent the kind of bulk collection the NSA is now conducting. Rep Sensebrenner argued that legislation from Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the heads of the Intelligence committees, is "a way to provide a fig leaf" to continue the surveillance programs unchanged.
The effort to protect the US from cyberthreats requires a better public understanding of government surveillance, National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander said during a conference hosted by the Telecommunications Industry Association.
“We’ve got to change the rhetoric on media leaks and fix the trust factor,” he said, referring to this year’s leaks about the U.S. government collecting phone data and electronic communications. “We’re not going to move much forward with all of that hanging out there,” he said. Gen Alexander called for cybersecurity legislation that would allow the government and the private sector to share information about cyberthreats. He said he wishes the intelligence community could be more transparent. “I would love to be transparent, if only the good guys would come into the room,” he said, but "we don't have a way of doing that."
Never discount the Internet’s ability to highlight the silly side of serious things, even if only for a marketing gimmick. Case in point: The promotion from GOG, a.k.a. Good Old Games, a digital store that caters to the nostalgic PC gamer. It’s offering a bundle of games for free to government workers who can prove that they’ve been furloughed (that same bundle is $25 for everyone else). Furloughed workers who want the bundle are asked to e-mail GOG with a picture of themselves holding their furlough letters.
Defenders of the National Security Agency's domestic spying have argued that Congress had full knowledge of the agency's programs, so if you want to be mad at anyone, be mad at them. "These programs were originally authorized by Congress," President Barack Obama said shortly after Ed Snowden made his initial revelations. "They have been repeatedly authorized by Congress. Bipartisan majorities have approved them. Congress is continually briefed on how these are conducted." But Rep Justin Amash (R-MI), a vocal opponent of NSA spying programs, says that congressional oversight of intelligence programs is "broken."
While the Senate Intelligence committee sent out briefing information about the programs to members of the upper chamber, Rep Amash says the House Intelligence Committee "decided it wasn't worthwhile to share this information" with members of the House. Instead, he says, the committee offered members an opportunity to attend some classified briefings and review the documents in the committee chamber. Rep. Amash describes those briefings as a farce. And his account of trying to get details out of those giving the briefings sounds like an exercise in frustration: “So you don't know what questions to ask because you don't know what the baseline is. So you have to start just spitting off random questions: Does the government have a moon base? Does the government have a talking bear? Does the government have a cyborg army? If you don't know what kind of things the government might have, you just have to guess and it becomes a totally ridiculous game of 20 questions,” Rep Amash said.
Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said that she would introduce a bill regarding health-related mobile apps in the coming days. The bill, which has existed as discussion draft for about a month, “will provide the [Food and Drug Administration] with the tools it needs to effectively protect consumers from the high-risk technologies” without subjecting lower-risk technologies to unnecessary oversight, she said.
When Canada blocked the sale of a fiber optic network to a company backed by an Egyptian telecommunications tycoon, it telegraphed its resolve to make national security paramount when considering whether to allow a foreign firm to acquire what it considers a strategic asset. That warning may effectively limit the pool of would-be buyers of BlackBerry, or foreigners interested in Canada's telecommunications industry. It could also rule out all but a few well-established players based in North America, industry executives, lawyers and analysts say.
The Canadian government's ruling was a blow to Manitoba Telecom Services, which wanted to sell its Allstream fiber optic network to Accelero Capital Holdings, controlled by Egyptian businessman Naguib Sawiris. But for BlackBerry, the embattled smartphone maker, Ottawa's decision may not make much difference as primarily North American companies appear to be interested in acquiring the parts of the company that would raise security concerns.
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