April 2014

Tribune Newspaper Arm to Pay Dividend to Parent

The newspaper-publishing division of Tribune Company will pay its parent company a dividend of up to $275 million immediately before it is spun off into a separate company.

The publishing division, which is home to newspapers including the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, plans to raise about $325 million in debt to finance the dividend payment, the company said in a regulatory filing. Tribune, which emerged from bankruptcy reorganization at the start of last year, has said it planned to split its newspaper division from its more-profitable television-broadcasting division by midyear.

Space entrepreneur seeks end to spy satellite launch monopoly

A high-stakes battle is underway in Washington over launching the US government's most sophisticated national security satellites.

Space entrepreneur Elon Musk is pitted against the nation's two largest weapons makers, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, in a fight for military contracts worth as much as $70 billion through 2030. For eight years, the Pentagon has paid Boeing and Lockheed -- operating jointly as United Launch Alliance -- to launch the government's pricey spy satellites without seeking competitive bids. Now, the arrangement is embroiled in controversy on Capitol Hill over escalating costs and the cozy partnership. The monopoly drew fire this month as lawmakers repeatedly peppered Defense leaders with questions about the arrangement. A bipartisan group of seven senators also wrote Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel asking for more scrutiny. That came days after the Government Accountability Office reported that the program had tripled in cost in the last five years. The letter urged Hagel to "take all necessary steps to ensure the Air Force fulfills its commitment to provide meaningful competition." That's good for Musk and his Hawthorne firm, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX. Over the years, Musk has repeatedly battled to break the grip of entrenched aerospace giants on the nation's space programs.

Keeping the Internet Free -- for Now

[Commentary] The Obama administration somehow thinks sacrificing U.S. control of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will satisfy regimes eager further to undermine the open Internet.

Assistant Commerce Secretary Lawrence Strickling argues: "Taking this action is the best measure to prevent authoritarian regimes from expanding their restrictive policies beyond their borders." The opposite is true. Granting these countries access to ICANN and the root zone filenames and addresses on the Internet would give them the potential to close off the global Internet, including for Americans, by deciding rules for how all websites anywhere must operate. If President Obama still thinks giving up US protection of the open Internet and its multi-stakeholder community is such a great idea, he should ask Congress to vote on it. He won't, because there is zero chance that an Abandon the Internet Act would ever pass.

Comcast turns to K. St

Comcast is turning to a growing cadre of lobbyists to convince government regulators to approve its $45 billion purchase of Time Warner Cable. The company has hired new teams of influence peddlers in the weeks since announcing the deal, and has steered its existing fleet of lawyers towards defending the acquisition on Capitol Hill and at regulatory agencies around Washington. The cable giant says that its lobbying efforts are typical for a company of its size, which deals with a multitude of issues before lawmakers. But consumer advocacy groups critical of the deal accuse it of trying to muscle the merger through Washington. “Comcast is pulling out the heavy hitters to ensure that Congress does not interfere with its merger plans,” said Craig Holman, a lobbyist with Public Citizen.

Google, once disdainful of lobbying, now a master of Washington influence

Google -- once a lobbying weakling -- has come to master a new method of operating in modern-day Washington, where spending on traditional lobbying is rivaled by other, less visible forms of influence. That system includes financing sympathetic research at universities and think tanks, investing in nonprofit advocacy groups across the political spectrum and funding pro-business coalitions cast as public-interest projects. The rise of Google as a top-tier Washington player fully captures the arc of change in the influence business. Nine years ago, the company opened a one-man lobbying shop, disdainful of the capital’s pay-to-play culture. Since then, Google has soared to near the top of the city’s lobbying ranks, placing second only to General Electric in corporate lobbying expenditures in 2012 and fifth place in 2013. The company gives money to nearly 140 business trade groups, advocacy organizations and think tanks. That’s double the number of groups Google funded four years ago.

Samsung Calls on Google Executive to Defend Innovation

In Apple’s latest patent fight with Samsung Electronics, lawyers on both sides are relying on the power of a good story to sway a jury. And Samsung is borrowing one from Google.

When Hiroshi Lockheimer joined Google in 2006, an early version of the company’s Android operating system was running on a prototype device. The first smartphone including Android was released over two years later. Google is not officially a defendant in this case. Apple is seeking about $2 billion in damages from Samsung for violating a handful of mobile software patents. But most of Samsung’s phones include Android, and some of the Apple patents involve features that Google put in Android. Samsung’s lawyers called Lockheimer as a witness so he could demonstrate how Android was already well into development before the iPhone was introduced, making it unlikely that Apple was copied by Google and, by extension, Samsung.

Using Free Wi-Fi to Connect Africa's Unconnected

As young pitchmen shout to potential passengers over blaring music, a graffiti-covered private minibus fills up more quickly than the other dozen in the scrum. It has free Wi-Fi. The specially outfitted matatu, as the minibuses are known in Swahili, is part of an experiment by Safaricom Ltd. to connect Africa's unconnected, offering a glimpse of what it takes to bring some of the world's most price-sensitive users online.

Tech companies world-wide are trying to reach billions of people just beyond the middle class, and many of them are in Africa. Only about 16% of Africa's one billion people use the Internet, according to the International Telecommunication Union industry group. That is well behind Asia, with 32%, and Arab states, with 38%. But Africa is the fastest-growing region for accessing the Internet by phone. Mobile-broadband penetration on the continent rose to 11% last year from 2% in 2010, the group says. "The numbers can only move in one direction," says Erik Hersman, who founded a Kenyan crowdsourcing site and a tech incubator here in the capital. The key to unlocking that growth is discovering ways to bring the Internet to people for whom even phone calls can be too expensive.

Early learning, assisted by technology

Susan Kelly is excited about the possibilities when her school welcomes its first class of students this fall. Kelly is the vice principal of VINCI School in Ottawa, Canada, one of a series of new early learning schools that model the approach of VINCI Education: a hands-on blend of low-tech and high-tech instruction, guided by a skilled classroom teacher.

The tablets and curriculum come from VINCI Education, whose ClassVINCI solution includes more than 70 digital games and lessons and is available for purchase by other institutions. Each activity is rooted in cognitive science and is aligned with the Common Core State Standards.

Digital games are accompanied by a robust learning management system that teachers can use to schedule and assign specific activities for their students, Kelly said. And while the children are working on these activities, the software closely tracks and analyzes their progress -- giving teachers an easy way to see if their students have grasped the material.

“Teachers can see exactly how each child is doing -- how many times the children have attempted a lesson, and whether they were successful or not,” Kelly said. This allows teachers to hone in on concepts that are giving their students problems and offer more personalized, one-on-one support.

NSA Denies It Knew About Heartbleed Bug Before It Was Made Public

The National Security Agency says it did not know about a critical security bug until it recently became public.

The NSA was responding to a report from Bloomberg that the agency had known about the vulnerability known as "Heartbleed" for two years and instead of alerting the tech community, it exploited the bug to "gather critical intelligence."

In a statement, the NSA said Bloomberg's report was simply "wrong." The US, the NSA said, would reveal this kind of vulnerability to developers if it ever came upon it.

No joke, this company wants to be hacked with Heartbleed

Most of us have spent the last few days trying not to fall victim to the Heartbleed bug -- changing passwords, checking routers, making sure we're protected, and so on. But one company is actively inviting hackers to try to steal a secret key from a server that contains the vulnerability.

How can this possibly be a good idea?

Well, if the challenge works, it could help security researchers better understand Heartbleed and the danger it represents. Cloudflare, the Internet infrastructure company behind the hacking challenge, says that if somebody can prove that stealing that security key is possible, it would have tremendous implications for the Web's smooth performance.

So the company set up a dummy server with the Heartbleed vulnerability and is encouraging people to use it to break in.

The company's own tests suggest it's really hard to steal a certificate and impersonate someone. But it's impossible to be 100 percent sure; you can never really prove that something won't happen. So throwing more manpower at the problem will help tell us just how hard it is to steal a key. Cloudflare is now tracking "thousands" of people plugging away at the challenge. So far, nobody's solved it. Let's hope it stays that way.

Benton

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