The House adopted a proposal to limit the Administration's ability to advance with plans to cede certain management of Internet domains.
Passed 229-178, Rep. Sean Duffy's (R-WI) amendment to the 2015 Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations bill would prohibit the use of funds to relinquish the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's responsibility of assigning Internet domains.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife pledged $120 million to help schools in low-income Bay Area communities in what amounts to their biggest publicly announced donation to a local cause.
"The world's most innovative community shouldn't also be a home for struggling public schools," Zuckerberg said. "There are many heroic educators doing their best to serve students here," Zuckerberg wrote. "But the challenges are much greater than the resources they receive." The couple donated stock worth more than $1.5 billion to a fund administered by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation -- which made them the nation's biggest charitable donors in 2013. The latest gift, which also comes from that fund, will help "improve education for underserved communities" over the next five years, Zuckerberg said. Some of the $120 million will help start new public and charter schools in the Bay Area while the rest will pay for equipment, training and other programs at existing schools. The first $5 million will go to needy schools in the Ravenswood and Redwood City school districts and other "high-need" neighborhoods of San Francisco. Priscilla Chan, Zuckerberg’s wife, is a children's doctor who once worked as a schoolteacher.
Google’s decision to lay bare its lack of diversity ramps up the pressure on other Silicon Valley companies to increase the number of women and minorities among technology workers.
Google’s disclosure follows increasing calls from investors and activists for companies in the technology hub -- which prides itself on being liberal and culturally inclusive -- to embrace diversity. “Silicon Valley has been confused on the idea of meritocracy.” Said Mitch Kapor, the former chief executive officer of Lotus. He’s organizing a conference on diversity with Google later this year. “Aspirationally, it’s a meritocracy, but in practice it really isn’t.” The lack of diversity among Google’s 50,000 employees isn’t unusual. In 2013, 74 percent of U.S. workers in computer and mathematical occupations were men, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In software development, a fifth of the jobs were held by women.
Scientists in the Netherlands have moved a step closer to overriding one of Albert Einstein’s most famous objections to the implications of quantum mechanics, which he described as “spooky action at a distance.” Physicists at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at the Delft University of Technology reported that they were able to reliably teleport information between two quantum bits separated by three meters, or about 10 feet.
Quantum teleportation is not the “Star Trek”-style movement of people or things; rather, it involves transferring so-called quantum information -- in this case what is known as the spin state of an electron -- from one place to another without moving the physical matter to which the information is attached. Classical bits, the basic units of information in computing, can have only one of two values -- either 0 or 1. But quantum bits, or qubits, can simultaneously describe many values. They hold out both the possibility of a new generation of faster computing systems and the ability to create completely secure communication networks. Moreover, the scientists are now closer to definitively proving Einstein wrong in his early disbelief in the notion of entanglement, in which particles separated by light-years can still appear to remain connected, with the state of one particle instantaneously affecting the state of another. They report that they have achieved perfectly accurate teleportation of quantum information over short distances.
Sassan Soleimani, the director of “Happy in Tehran,” a viral YouTube tribute to Pharrell Williams that offended Iran’s conservative judiciary, was released on bail, according to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, a New York-based advocacy group. Evidence of the director’s freedom, after nine days in custody, came in the form of a self-portrait he sent to Kambiz Hosseini, a popular expatriate satirist whose Jon Stewart-like riffs on current events reach Iranians via the Internet or on satellite channels financed by the United States government.
Sheikh Abdullah al-Mutlaq, a senior Saudi Arabian cleric, has issued an edict against online chatting between the sexes, equating such activity to the prohibitions on the physical mingling of unrelated men and women.
A group of House Democrats are pushing back on a Republican amendment mean to limit the administration’s ability to move ahead with its plans to relinquish oversight of key technical Internet functions.
In a letter to Democratic members, Reps Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Anna Eshoo (D-CA) urged members to vote against an amendment from Rep Sean Duffy (R-WI) to the Commerce Department’s appropriations bill that would limit the ways the agency can use its funding.
“We strongly urge you to oppose the Duffy Amendment and stand up for a global Internet free from government control,” the lawmakers wrote. The amendment would “greatly increase the likelihood of authoritarian control of the Internet, exactly the opposite outcome its author seeks and that we share as a nation,” they said.
After more than a year in waiting, residents who committed hundreds of thousands of dollars toward the expansion of Urbana-Champaign Big Broadband finally have an answer about its future.
During the next few years, officials, the network will be built out to the rest of the cities -- a crucial step forward in keeping the system afloat over the long run. And much as they envisioned, it will be a private company that comes in to do the work and provide the service.
Family Video subsidiary iTV-3 will take over the operation, maintenance and customer service of what's now operating as UC2B. The network's 1,100 customers will be allowed to continue on their existing contracts if they choose.
Moving forward, however, they will get their service from the private provider instead of UC2B. But the linchpin of the deal has bigger ambitions: iTV-3 also plans to build out the high-speed fiber network to neighborhoods where at least half of the residents agree to purchase a subscription. That means hard-wired and high-speed Internet, TV and voice connections to homes which can muster up support in their areas.
Officials hope that, eventually, the high-speed fiber network will reach every home in the community. "It was articulated that that was what we would need to sustain this and grow this," said UC2B manager Sabrina Gosnell.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler said, "Congratulations to Urbana-Champaign Big Broadband (UC2B) and iTV-3 on making gigabit services over fiber available throughout the community. This public-private partnership provides a valuable model for communities and companies throughout the country and a demonstration of the creativity that is stimulated when localities are free to work with the private sector to improve broadband offerings."
Software used by law enforcement organizations to intercept the communications of suspected criminals contains a litany of critical weaknesses, including an undocumented backdoor secured with a hardcoded password, security researchers said.
In a scathing advisory, the researchers recommended people stop using the Nice Recording eXpress voice-recording package. It is one of several software offerings provided by Ra’anana, Israel-based Nice Systems, a company that markets itself as providing "mission-critical lawful interception solutions to support the fight against organized crime, drug trafficking and terrorist activities."
The advisory warned that critical weaknesses in the software expose users to attacks that compromise investigations and the security of the agency networks.
"Attackers are able to completely compromise the voice recording/surveillance solution as they can gain access to the system and database level and listen to recorded calls without prior authentication," the researchers from security consultancy SEC Consult wrote. "Furthermore, attackers would be able to use the voice recording server as a jumphost for further attacks of the internal voice VLAN [virtual local area network], depending on the network setup."
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration is hosting the first of several workshops focused on community broadband as we explore ways to build on the momentum of our successful broadband grant programs and explore what comes next.
The 2009 Recovery Act included more than $7 billion to expand access to high-speed Internet services to close the digital divide and spark economic growth. Through our Broadband Technology Opportunities Program, NTIA invested about $4 billion of that in 230 projects across the country that have built critical network infrastructure, opened or upgraded public computer centers and established broadband adoption programs. And through our State Broadband Initiative Program, we invested another almost $300 million to help states collect broadband data for the National Broadband Map and expand their statewide broadband capacity.
These investments are now enabling one-to-one computing programs and replacing old-fashioned textbooks with engaging online instructional materials in North Carolina classrooms. They are allowing Arkansas physicians to remotely examine patients located hundreds of miles away in far-flung rural corners of the state. They are supporting digital literacy training in low-income Latino communities across California. And they are bringing 4G LTE wireless broadband service to parts of the Navajo Nation that previously lacked even basic landline phone service.
As of the end of 2013, our grantees had built or upgraded more than 112,000 miles of fiber -- enough to circle the earth four and a half times or get you halfway to the moon. They had connected more than 21,000 community anchor institutions, including about 8,000 K-12 schools, 1,300 libraries and 2,400 medical facilities. And they had established or upgraded 3,000 public computer centers and helped more than 600,000 households sign up for broadband.
At the same time, our State Broadband Initiative Program has supported more than 200 local broadband planning teams across the country. So the question now is: where do we go from here? It’s a question that affects communities across the nation that are investing in broadband to ensure they have the advanced telecommunications infrastructure – and tech-savvy citizenry -- needed to drive growth, attract new businesses and remain competitive in the 21st Century economy.
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