December 2013

Crowdsourced Wi-Fi provider Fon is hoping to generate buzz for its community Wi-Fi service from the hip residents of Brooklyn.

It’s targeting the borough’s downtown for a dense hotspot and residential deployment. Fon’s bandwidth-sharing model works best when it has dense clusters of members all in the same geographical area -- in the UK, France and Japan, Fon is in one of every six households thanks to its partnerships with local carriers.

First, Fon is bringing its community network to hot zones, working with the New York Economic Development Corporation and DAS Communications to install outdoor Foneras in high-traffic commercial corridors in downtown Brooklyn. Second, its recruiting Brooklyn businesses into the network with the help of the Downtown Brooklyn Project in hopes of bring 50 to 150 storefronts online. And finally, it’s giving 1,000 Foneras to Brooklyn residents in an effort to seed neighborhood streets with Wi-Fi signals.

Fon’s model is pretty simple: if you share your Wi-Fi with the community, you get access to every other community member’s Wi-Fi. Fon’s router splits its signal into private and community networks, so members’ privacy is protected. Globally it has about 12.3 million access points, but in the U.S. the number is still tiny – mainly the handful of people who have either brought in Foneras from overseas and the veterans of Fon’s aborted attempt to the enter the U.S. seven years ago.

The Federal Communications Commission has proposed fining the Maryland Public Broadcasting Commission, licensee of five Maryland noncommercial stations, $20,000 for Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) violations and misleading the FCC, though with no finding that it was intentionally misled.

It could have levied a much heavier fine. In a notice of apparent liability, the FCC's Media Bureau said that the Maryland Public Broadcasting Commission had "apparently willfully and repeatedly" violated its EEO rules by not notifying job referral entities of vacancies, by not doing a self-assessment of its EEO performance, as required, and by "providing incorrect factual information of a material nature to the Commission without a reasonable basis for believing that the information was correct and accurate."

[Commentary] The National Security Agency is breaking trust in democracy by breaking trust in the Internet. Every day, the NSA records the lives of millions of Americans and countless foreigners, collecting staggering amounts of information about who they know, where they've been, and what they've done. Its surveillance programs have been kept secret from the public they allegedly serve and protect. Despite his endorsement of NSA bulk surveillance, President Barack Obama may not even know everything the agency is up to; the White House and the NSA can’t even agree about whether the President knew the agency was tapping German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone. In the face of political blinders and professed ignorance, several Congressional leaders now want to retroactively authorize the NSA’s mass spying programs rather than audit them. Do we need to be afraid of the NSA, as one might be afraid of a boot stamping on a human face, forever? Probably not. But the erosion of American civil liberties won’t appear out of thin air as an Orwellian caricature of totalitarianism. It looks more like a computer server silently blinking in a Utah data center, as it reconstructs the connective tissue of your entire life: a thorough diagram of your existence that can be recalled at any time by someone with the right permission level and the right query. Who’ll be behind the machines in four years? How about in 20? Who will our enemies be then?

Former Google executive Michelle Lee has been named deputy director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and will run the agency until a new director is named.

Lee is a former deputy general counsel and head of patents and patent strategy at Google. Currently head of the US patent office's Silicon Valley outpost, Lee begins her new job on January 13. Lee said she planned to attack the backlog of unexamined patents and work to improve patent quality, an issue at the center of the ongoing debate over frivolous infringement lawsuits.