April 2014

FCC’s Wheeler Said to Plan Limits for Wireless Airwaves Auction

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler is proposing to limit the amount of airwaves any single company can purchase at the largest US spectrum auction since 2008, a person briefed on the plan said.

Top US wireless carriers AT&T and Verizon Communications have said curbs will reduce revenue the government reaps from the planned sale, and unfairly favor smaller competitors Sprint and T-Mobile US. The agency is to sell airwaves given up by television stations so the frequencies can be used by the growing number of smartphones and other wireless devices connecting to the Internet.

Finding more spectrum to meet soaring mobile-Internet demand is a goal of President Barack Obama’s administration.

Heartbleed portends larger security threats

[Commentary] Tens of millions of Americans have been affected by the theft of their personal information in the digital age. Then, it was discovered that a bug had crept into OpenSSL that could allow intruders to read encrypted data contained in memory, such as passwords or credit cards. The bug has been called “Heartbleed” and could allow attackers to eavesdrop on communications, steal data and even impersonate users and Web services. We’re tempted to say this ought to be a wake-up call, but we have already had so many wake-up calls.

To put it bluntly: As a country and as a society, we have come to depend on a vast, interconnected system; if one small part fails, the impact is widespread. As noted in a forthcoming Atlantic Council report, the Internet was created to be based on trust, not security. Yet we continue to discover that it is vulnerable to theft, intrusion and disruption on an appalling scale. We are living in an age of growing danger but reacting with complacency.

The Administration unveiled a useful initiative, promising that sharing cyberthreat information among companies would not bring on antitrust liability. But this, and President Barack Obama’s other measures, including his voluntary cybersecurity framework, represent only what is doable given a continued lack of a consensus in Congress and a failure in the private sector to take all threats more seriously. They are timid measures in the face of an epic heartburn that will be costly for us all.

Here’s Why the Comcast-Time Warner Merger is Bad

[Commentary] Among the many threats to the future of Internet access in the United States, nothing tops Comcast’s proposed $45 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable. The combined company would be in a position to provide high-capacity data services to almost two-thirds of American households and to tightly control everything flowing over its pipe.

An episode from Comcast’s past shows why this plan is worrisome. Just two decades ago, Comcast distrusted the idea of giving one company the sort of power that Comcast now aims to amass. The consolidation and geographic clustering that swept the cable industry in the late 1990s eventually destroyed the compact among TCI, Comcast, and Cox that had made @Home possible. Comcast and Cox grew big enough that they didn’t feel the need to cooperate with TCI any more, and by 2002 the @Home company was no more.

But now the proposed merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable can be understood as the execution -- at long last -- of the @Home business plan. The result might feel just like the Internet -- but it won’t be the Internet. It will be AOL and @Home all over again. But this time there will be no .Com Committee constraining how ComcastTimeWarner treats different streams of bits.

Comcast’s recent interconnection tussle with Netflix, its strong support for Streampix, and the rumor that it is planning to license its X1 platform for free to all other cable operators foreshadow the curated walled garden that we have to look forward to.

[Crawford is a professor at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law]

NSA, Target, Heartbleed and Ethics

[Commentary] It’s no surprise that the National Security Agency may have used the Heartbleed exploit to tap into sensitive encrypted communication, including that of Google.

If you understand the nature of how the bug works, it goes hand in hand with undercover espionage. Heartbleed, the name given to the OpenSSL (Secure Socket Layer) flaw, allows sensitive information to leak (or bleed) from a server to any client connected to it. What makes this even more interesting is that the data is leaked to any computer connected to the server, so there’s no need to hijack someone else’s connection in order to exploit it. Here’s a simple scenario:

NSA connects to server with the Heartbleed flaw.
NSA stays connected, gathering leaked information until it receives the private SSL key of the server.
NSA stores private key and uses it to decrypt previous and future communication to the entire server’s domain, i.e., Google.com.

The worst part is that this vulnerability can be performed without any detection, and without leaving traces behind.

It’s important to note that the ability of not leaving any traces behind makes the bug even worse, because administrators cannot go back to determine what was lost. Now, this could have been used by the NSA, or it could have been used by a hacker. The end result is the same. Snooping and data loss are possible.

I would take this a step further and question whether breaches like Target’s data loss were the result of it.

[Martini, CEO, Iboss Network Security]

TV Bounces Back -- For a Few Months

Primetime TV ratings grew -- by about 4 percent -- during the first three months of 2014. Analyst Michael Nathanson says that’s TV’s best performance since the last quarter of 2007.

And it’s the first time TV has grown, period, in more than a year. Nathanson attributes the boomlet to a confluence of big live events in the beginning of the year — the Sochi Olympics, the Oscars, NFL playoffs and the NCAA tournament -- plus an insane winter that kept everyone locked up in their houses, huddling around the plasma for warmth.

More online Americans say they’ve experienced a personal data breach

As news of large-scale data breaches and vulnerabilities grows, new findings from the Pew Research Center suggest that growing numbers of online Americans have had important personal information stolen and many have had an account compromised.

Findings from a January 2014 survey show that:

18% of online adults have had important personal information stolen such as their Social Security Number, credit card, or bank account information. That’s an increase from the 11% who reported personal information theft in July 2013.
21% of online adults said they had an email or social networking account compromised or taken over without their permission. The same number reported this experience in a July 2013 survey.

ALA releases 2014 State of America’s Libraries Report

Libraries continue to transform to meet society’s changing needs, and more than 90 percent of the respondents in an independent national survey said that libraries are important to the community.

But school libraries continue to feel the combined pressures of recession-driven financial tightening and federal neglect. School libraries in some districts and some states still face elimination or de-professionalization of their programs.

Libraries witnessed a number of developments in 2013 in the area of e-books and copyright issues. E-books continue to make gains among reading Americans, according to another Pew survey, but few readers have completely replaced print with digital editions -- and the advent of digital reading brings with it a continuing tangle of legal issues involving publishers and libraries.

“Print remains the foundation of Americans’ reading habits,” the Pew researchers found. Most people who read e-books also read print books, they reported, and only 4 percent of readers described themselves as “e-book only.” After years of conflict between publishers and libraries, 2013 ended with all the major US publishers participating in the library e-book market, though important challenges, such as availability and prices, remain.

Other key trends detailed in the 2014 State of America’s Libraries Report:

More and more public libraries are turning to the use of web technologies, including websites, online account access, blogs, rich site summary (RSS) feeds, catalog search boxes, sharing interfaces, Facebook and Twitter.
The economic downturn is continuing at most institutions of higher learning, and academic librarians are working to transform programs and services by re-purposing space and redeploying staff in the digital resources environment.
President Barack Obama signed a $1.1 trillion spending bill in January that will fund the federal government through September and partially restore funding to the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) -- the primary source of annual funding for libraries in the federal budget -- that were dramatically cut in the 2013 fiscal year under sequestration.

Outcome document arrives before the doors open for the NetMundial conference

[Commentary] Wikileaks has posted a draft outcome document created by the Executive Stakeholder Committee of the NetMundial Internet Governance conference to be held in Brazil April 23 – 24.

Before the first multi-stakeholder invited to attend had taken a seat, the organizer had already decided what principles they were going to agree to and a road map for implementation. The main challenge of the document is this: while the principles may seem reasonable, even laudable, the roadmap for implementation has many challenges and potential hidden agendas. The Internet as a “Human Right”, access to information, free flow of data, freedom of association, expression, privacy, accessibility, etc., all sounds like principles we want to embrace.

And a governance process encouraged to be “open, participatory, multi-stakeholder, technology-neutral, sensitive to human rights and based on principles of transparency, accountability and inclusiveness”, sounds like a good idea we should be able to support. But now I’m wondering who will have the capacity to implement all this pro-free rhetoric?

Most likely, that job would fall to governments around the world. It would be up to them to let us know when we have hit our Internet Governance metric. Many of the items in the leaked outcome document are good aspirational goals. It’s deciding on the path to achieve them that will be the major challenge for the multi-stakeholders engaged in this process. Continuing to seek balance between governments, industry partners, content providers, and the end user will be an ongoing challenge.

[Tews is the Chief Policy Officer at 463 Communications]

The Transformative Impact of Data and Communication on Governance: Part 3

How sustainable are technology-based initiatives? Certainly in some cases they are intended as short-term solutions, such as is the case with post-disaster deployments of GIS platforms like Ushahidi.

But in other instances the ICT initiative must be relied on until the emergence of consolidated statehood. Until states around the developing world have fully functioning agricultural extension services, for example, farmers must rely on programs such as the Grameen Foundation’s Community Knowledge Workers.

It is too soon to say whether digital initiates of this sort have the staying power to serve as long-term alternatives to a fully functioning state exercising proper and accountable administrative capacity. There are also important questions about the scalability of ICT initiatives. Different NGOs and community groups pursue similar initiatives in different areas, and sometimes even in the same community. This creates a patchwork of uncoordinated efforts.

A final concern is found in what might be called governance displacement. To the extent ICT governance initiatives are successful in offering an alternative to a consolidated state, they may sap the motivation to improve state-sector governance capacity.

[Livingston is Professor of Media and International Affairs at The George Washington University]

Librarians’ evolving digital roles

As school increasingly incorporate digital technologies and strategies in classrooms, school libraries are changing, too, becoming hubs of communication, research, and technology-enabled teaching and learning.

Sixty percent of librarians said they recommend and/or obtain Common Core-aligned instructional and resource material, 55 percent help teach students the skills required by the Common Core, 43 percent collaborate with teachers on instructional lessons aligned with the Common Core, and 30 percent help to ensure that technology infrastructure is adequate to support the Common Core.

Sixty-three percent of librarians rated expanding instruction on the use of digital resources as a high priority in the next two years, and 53 percent said the same of increasing access to digital content. School librarians also recommend a variety of technology for purchase. Thirty-seven percent of librarians recommend apps for purchase, 34 percent recommend subscription databases, 27 percent recommend tablets, and 26 percent recommend educational games, in addition to other technology recommendations.

Benton

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