1. Monthly archive
  2. January 2014

January 2014

June 9–10, 2014
San Francisco, CA
St. Regis Hotel
http://www.technologyreview.com/summit/14/digital/

To be discussed:

  • The Internet of Things (Connected cars, homes, commerce, health, and cities)
  • The Disappearing Interface
  • Digital Privacy

Friday, January 31, 2014
9:00 a.m. -- 12:00 p.m.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/pcast/meetings

PRIMARY TOPICS:

  • Scientific reproducibility and big data
  • Challenges and opportunities in science and technology at the Department of Commerce

KEY SPEAKERS:

  • Glenn Begley, Chief Scientific Officer and Senior Vice-President R&D, TetraLogic Pharmaceuticals
  • Donald Berry, Professor, Department of Biostatistics, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
  • Dan MacArthur, Group Leader, Analytic and Translational Genetics Unit, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School
  • Marcia McNutt, Editor-In-Chief, Science
  • Philip Campbell, Editor-in-Chief, Nature and Nature Publishing Group
  • Veronique Kiermer, Executive Editor and Head of Researchers Services, Nature Publishing Group
  • Patrick Gallagher, Director, National Institute of Standards and Technology and Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology, US Department of Commerce
  • Lawrence Strickling, Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information and Administrator, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, US Department of Commerce

REGISTRATION: To attend in person, please register online, here.

WEBCAST: This event will be live-streamed on the web. No registration is required to watch the live-stream.

For more information, visit: http://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp.


Exploring Digital Libraries: Foundations, Practice, Prospects

An overview of the progress, nature, and future impact of digital libraries, from their collections and technology-centered foundations over two decades ago to their emergent, community-centered engagement with the social web.

Written to suit the needs of working librarians, library leaders, LIS students, and educators, this landmark text:

  • Brings students and working librarians up to date on the progress, nature and impact of digital libraries, bridging the gap since the publication of the best-known digital library texts
  • Frames digital library research and practice in the context of the social web and makes the case for moving beyond collections to a new emphasis on libraries’ value to their communities
  • Introduces several new frameworks and novel syntheses that elucidate digital library themes, suggest strategic directions, and break new ground in the digital library literature
  • Calls attention to digital library research, but is written from the perspective of strategy and in-depth experience
  • Provides a global perspective and integrates material from many sources in one place - the chapters on open repositories and hybrid libraries draw together past, present and prospective work in a way that is unique in the literature

President Obama touches on NSA reform in State of the Union address

President Barack Obama repeated his call to reform intelligence surveillance programs, saying US intelligence agencies need the trust of people inside and outside the country, during his State of the Union speech.

President Obama promised to work with Congress to reform surveillance programs, presumably those at the National Security Agency exposed in the past eight months by leaker Edward Snowden. "The vital work of our intelligence community depends on public confidence here and aboard, that privacy of ordinary people is not being violated," President Obama said. The President's remarks on surveillance reform were brief, but seemed to track with his call last week to reform NSA programs. President Obama also addressed a handful of other issues related to the tech industry. He called for patent reform, saying Congress needs to allow US businesses to innovate instead of facing "costly and needless" patent lawsuits.

i2Coalition Statement on State of the Union Address

Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2Coaliton) Co-Founder and Board Chair Christian Dawson released the following statement in response to President Obama’s State of the Union address: “In regards to NSA surveillance, it is imperative that we strike the appropriate balance between privacy and security. Without actions that include meaningful reforms to both bulk surveillance, and the indiscriminate use of National Security Letters, all together such a balance is unlikely to be achieved. Bulk collection programs employed by the National Security Agency are neglecting civil liberties and undermining privacy. Reports of unchecked and often warrantless electronic surveillance deepen the concerns that our customers have over their information’s security, at home and overseas. This has a strong economic impact on US Internet companies, potentially costing US based cloud providers up to $35 billion in revenue. […] The Internet is a story of economic success, and one that shines especially bright in a struggling overall economy. The President and Congress need to work together to ensure that all impacted industries have a seat at the table so that this engine of economic growth continues to move forward. Washington must rise up to the challenge to ensure that Internet innovation continues to fuel the economic recovery.”

German government faces legal action over NSA spying

The German government and the German Federal Intelligence Service are facing legal action because they allegedly aided the US National Security Agency (NSA) data collection program.

"We will send the legal action to the authorities [February 3]," said Constanze Kurz, a German computer scientist and spokeswoman for the Chaos Computer Club (CCC). "There are several persons as well as organizations which are suing our government and other named persons in charge," she said, adding that one of them is the International League for Human Rights, a German section of the International Federation for Human Rights. The complainants will bring charges over the alleged involvement of the German government in the NSA spying programs, she said. "That is one reason," she said, adding that the action was also started "because they did not even try to stop them from tapping into phones, hacking and spying on computers and collecting massive amounts of data although we have clearly laws that forbid foreign espionage." Kurz said the legal complaint will comprise more than 50 pages, and will be published soon.

AT&T's U-Verse Universe Expands to 10.7M Subscribers

AT&T added 194,000 U-verse TV subscribers in the fourth quarter and 924,000 for all of 2013, extending its TV total to 5.5 million.

“Some companies are excited about actually gaining customers; we added almost 200,000 subscribers in the quarter and nearly 1 million for the year, plus we had our lowest TV churn ever in the fourth quarter,” AT&T CFO John Stephens said. AT&T also added 630,000 U-verse broadband subscribers in the period, giving it a record of 2.7 million adds for the year, and broadening its grand total in the category of 10.4 million. With traditional DSL losses factored in, AT&T lost 2,000 net broadband subscribers in the fourth quarter, but managed to gain 35,000 broadband subs for the full year, ending 2013 with 16.42 million. At the end of 2013, 63% of all AT&T wireline broadband subs were on U-verse, versus 47% in the year-ago quarter. About 59% of all U-verse broadband subs were taking a tier of at least 12 Mbps (downstream). “We believe we have [reached] a tipping point with U-verse broadband with the growing base of U-verse subscribers we feel confident that we can grow broadband subscribers even stronger this coming year,” Stephens said. AT&T ended 2013 with 10.7 million total U-verse subscribers (TV and broadband).

Stephenson said a court’s recent decision to vacate much of the FCC's Open Internet Order “really changed nothing” in terms of how the telecommunications company will conduct broadband operations.

FCC Grants Authorization for Use of Time Division Duplex Equipment in Upper 700 MHz A Block Licenses Held by Access Spectrum

Access Spectrum, which holds wireless spectrum licenses in the Upper 700 MHz A Block covering two-thirds of the United States, announced that the Federal Communications Commission has granted authorization for the use of time division duplex (TDD) equipment within this spectrum band.

This decision confirms that TDD equipment, which uses a single frequency for both transmission and reception, can be deployed in full compliance with FCC regulations in the Upper 700 MHz A Block. By complying with these rules and through the careful design that has gone into its development, TDD equipment can be deployed in the A Block without causing harmful interference to devices in neighboring portions of the spectrum. These developments are crucial steps in showing that enterprises can use the A Block for productive, innovative applications through the secondary spectrum market. “The FCC’s authorization for the use of TDD equipment marks an important milestone in the development of the Upper 700 MHz A Block,” said Michael Gottdenker, Chairman and Chief Executive of Access Spectrum. “This approval demonstrates that the equipment complies with the regulatory technical rules that apply to the A Block.”

Bloggers versus the courts

A roundup of some recent court rulings and what they might mean for still-evolving protections of online speech.

Net neutrality forecast: Clear tomorrow, stormy weather ahead

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission has, until recently, taken a distinctly hands off approach to broadband services. The results have been nothing short of amazing. The Internet is a free market success story, and the US is the star. All that success ultimately wasn’t enough, however, to keep the FCC from seeking to extend its regulatory reach from the old legacy telephone networks onto the Internet.

Starting a decade ago, the FCC began considering “net neutrality” rules that would impose 20th Century style common-carrier regulations on broadband Internet service providers. On January 14, the DC Circuit handed down a decision in Verizon’s lawsuit challenging the rules. The court overturned the FCC’s prohibition on “discriminatory” (read “customized”) Internet service contracts between ISPs, on the one hand, and content and application providers on the other. But there was also a dark side to the court’s decision. While ruling that the FCC does not have authority to pursue the specific regulatory approach it adopted, the court seemed to go out of its way to suggest an alternative legal approach which, if adopted by the FCC in the future, would likely pass legal muster. The FCC’s level-headed Chairman, Tom Wheeler, wasted no time issuing a declaring that while the court decided that FCC has the authority to regulate broadband networks, he has a “strong preference” for doing so in a “common law fashion, taking account of and learning from the particular facts” of each case. Chairman Wheeler’s comments suggest an FCC takeover of the Internet in the short run is pretty unlikely. But while chairmen come and go, statutory authority is forever. For those who value Internet freedom, the expansive authority apparently granted to the FCC by the DC Circuit’s decision will hang as a dark cloud on the horizon for a long time to come.

[Jeffrey Eisenach is Director of the Center for Internet, Communications, and Technology Policy]

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