January 2014

Weather Channel asks DirecTV to waive customers' cancellation fees

The Weather Channel wants DirecTV to waive its steep cancellation fees for customers seeking to drop the satellite service because it no longer carries the network.

The request is being made in an open letter being sent to DirecTV's board of directors and in advertisements scheduled to be published in several newspapers including the Los Angeles Times and New York Times. In the letter, Weather Co. Chairman and Chief Executive David Kenny writes that since the network was dropped Jan. 13, "many thousands have called your customer service centers asking to terminate their contracts since they are now getting less content for the same price. But DIRECTV is threatening them with termination fees of $200 to $400." Apparently, 90,000 people have pledged to Weather Channel to drop DirecTV, but they can't afford to follow through because of the fees associated with canceling their subscriptions. "They should be allowed to switch when you take something away they really value," Kenny said, adding that "fairness should trump fine print sometimes."

Showtime, HBO, Starz blast NPD study that says they lost subscribers

Pay-TV channels HBO, Showtime and Starz are blasting a much-ballyhooed study from a research firm that said all were losing subscribers to digital services such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime.

The study from NPD Group said pay-TV channels had lost 6% of their subscribers in the last two years while online services had gained 4%. "It’s clear that some consumers are trimming their premium-TV subscriptions,” Russ Crupnick, senior vice president of industry analysis for NPD Group, said of the study. But it's not so clear to the nation's three major pay channels, all of whom say they have grown their subscriber bases. "Showtime and every other premium network have increased both subscribers and penetrations over the last two years," a Showtime spokesperson said, adding that the NPD study "does not accurately reflect actual subscriber counts."

Amazon Denies It Has Plans to Create an Over-the-Top TV Service

Amazon denied a report that it was seeking to license TV channels to launch a broadband-delivered television service. A representative said the company has no such plans. “We continue to build selection for Prime Instant Video and create original shows at Amazon Studios, but we are not planning to license television channels or offer a pay-TV service,” said Amazon VP of public relations Drew Herdener.

Yale Students Tangle With University Over Website

Yale shut down a website that offered a better, more user-friendly version of the university’s online course catalog, helping to turn a local campus issue into something of a civil rights cause.

Now, after a few days of controversy, a similar tool is up and running, and it appears to be Yale that has gotten a schooling. University administrators said they were concerned that the site was available to people who were not Yale students, that it gave undue prominence to numerical ratings without including descriptive evaluations that went with them, and that it infringed on Yale trademarks. Designers Peter Xu and Harry Yu, twin brothers at the university, offered to make those fixes, but instead got notice to shut down the site. To Mr. Xu and Mr. Yu, that seemed like a violation of free speech -- a right held dear by both academics and Internet activists, many of whom rallied to the brothers’ cause as The Yale Daily News, The Washington Post and other news organizations reported on the shutdown. Brad Rosen, a lecturer in Yale’s computer science department who teaches “Law, Technology and Culture,” said the debate got at a central tension of contemporary life. “Different stakeholders have different assumptions about how information is going to flow,” he said.

Chinese Internet Traffic Redirected to Small Wyoming House

In one of the more bizarre twists in recent Internet memory, a large portion of Internet traffic in China was redirected to a small, 1,700-square-foot house in Cheyenne (WY) on Jan 21.

A large portion of China’s 500 million Internet users were unable to load Web sites ending in .com, .net or .org for nearly eight hours in most regions of China. The China Internet Network Information Center, a state-run agency that deals with Internet affairs, said it had traced the problem to the country’s domain name system. And one of China’s biggest antivirus software vendors, Qihoo 360 Technology, said the problems affected roughly three quarters of the country’s domain name system servers. Those servers, which act as a switchboard for Internet traffic behind China’s Great Firewall, routed traffic from some of China’s most popular sites, including Baidu and Sina, to a block of Internet addresses registered to Sophidea Inc., a mysterious company housed on a residential street in Cheyenne.

Source: Snow or No, FCC Auction Still a Go

Neither snow, nor more snow, will apparently stay the Federal Communications Commission from getting spectrum into the wireless market. According to an FCC source on background, the H Block spectrum auction is still scheduled to start Jan 22 despite an East Coast snowstorm that closed government offices Jan 21 in Washington and Pennsylvania (the FCC's Gettysburg office is auction central). The H block is the first of three spectrum auctions, the last being the broadcaster incentive auction scheduled for mid-year 2015.

FTC Settles with Twelve Companies Falsely Claiming to Comply with International Safe Harbor Privacy Framework

Twelve US businesses have agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that they falsely claimed they were abiding by an international privacy framework known as the US-EU Safe Harbor that enables US companies to transfer consumer data from the European Union to the United States in compliance with European Union law. The companies settling with the FTC represent a cross-section of industries, including retail, professional sports, laboratory science, data broker, debt collection, and information security. The companies handle a variety of consumer information, including in some instances sensitive data about health and employment. The twelve companies are:

Apperian, a company specializing in mobile applications for business enterprises and security;
Atlanta Falcons Football Club, National Football League team;
Baker Tilly Virchow Krause, an accounting firm;
BitTorrent, provider of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing protocol;
Charles River Laboratories International, global developer of early-stage drug discovery processes;
DataMotion, provider of platform for encrypted email and secure file transport;
DDC Laboratories, DNA testing lab and the world’s largest paternity testing company;
Level 3 Communications, one of the six largest Internet service providers in the world;
PDB Sports, d/b/a Denver Broncos Football Club: National Football League team;
Reynolds Consumer Products, maker of foil and other consumer products;
Receivable Management Services Corporation, global provider of accounts receivable, third-party recovery, bankruptcy and other services; and
Tennessee Football, National Football League team.

A market for anti-NSA technology emerges

Since Edward Snowden blew the lid off the National Security Agency's surveillance activities, a number of vendors, organizations and individuals have announced plans designed to disrupt the agency's authority and cyber-surveillance operations.

Examples of anti-spyware innovations include Decentral, a pocket-sized device to block NSA spying, and the anti-spying Blackphone. None of the established vendors and consultancies that work in tech security and privacy, however, have figured out how to convince customers that they have solutions for sale that will impede the agency. All know the NSA would view attempts to compete in such a market as a direct challenge; a challenge the founders of Lavabit, Silent Circle e-mail and Cryptoseal might describe as "insurmountable."

Amazon Considering Online Pay-TV Service

Amazon has approached big entertainment companies about licensing their television channels for a new online pay-TV service it is considering launching, in what would mark a significant expansion of the company's online video efforts.

The new service under consideration would offer live TV channels, such as those available now on cable or satellite TV. Through its Prime Instant Video service, Amazon now offers various TV shows and movies on demand for subscribers to its Prime free-shipping service. Still, Amazon's initiative is in the early stages, and it isn't clear whether it will move forward. Several other tech companies including Sony and Google are pursuing similar initiatives. Amazon has approached at least three big media conglomerates seeking rights to distribute their channels online, according to people familiar with the matter. Unlike some other new entrants, Amazon already has relationships with a range of TV networks and studios that it can use as a starting point for negotiations. Amazon invested about $1 billion in content in 2013, according to Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Youssef Squali. Spending on streaming video, along with other initiatives like grocery delivery and mobile devices, has hurt the company's profit margins.

White hat hacker says he found 70,000 records on Healthcare.gov through a Google search

The federal health insurance marketplace at Healthcare.gov still has major security issues according to some experts, including a flaw that allows user records to show up in Google results.

At least 70,000 records with personal identifying information including first and last names, addresses, and user names are accessible by using an advanced Google search and then tweaking the resulting URLs, according to David Kennedy, founder of the security firm TrustedSec. Kennedy notes that he never modified any URLs, just that he noticed that it was possible. It's just one of several issues he's identified with the site, and it's actually one of the easier ones to fix: Kennedy estimates it would take just a few days to hide the records.

Benton

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