Josh Wheeler, director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression in Charlottesville (VA), has been named to the First Amendment advisory council of the Media Institute. The Media Institute is a First Amendment think tank supported by media companies and a driving force behind Free Speech Week.
Fledging cooperation between the United States and China on fighting cybercrime has ground to a halt since the recent US indictment of Chinese military officials on hacking charges, a senior US security official said. At the same time, there has been no decline in Chinese hackers' efforts to break into US networks, the official said. US and Chinese officials had started working together to combat certain types of online crime, including money laundering, child pornography and drug trafficking, the US official said. But that cooperation has stopped.
[Commentary] The two major technology-related decisions handed down by the Supreme Court this week have been widely greeted by people in the tech industry as one win and one loss.
The win involved cellphone privacy: The court, siding with tech policy advocacy groups, ruled that the police must obtain a warrant to search the phones of people they arrest.
The loss was Aereo, the brazen TV streaming start-up. The court ruled against the company, which created a cablelike service without paying broadcast networks for the rights to their content.
But when you examine the rulings, a different conclusion emerges. These were both wins for the industry, because they revealed something that should be quite gratifying for every technologist: The Supreme Court understands technology.
At a broad level, it understands the Internet and how the worldwide network has transformed our understanding of the law. More than that, the justices (aided, surely, by their Snapchatting clerks) seem to understand some of the deeper distinctions between various kinds of tech, distinctions that are vital to how we should regulate the gadgets now infiltrating our lives.
[Commentary] When you call 911 for help, you're gaining access to a local government public safety communications system that faces greater challenges than dropped calls and video buffering.
And it's not just the patient whose life may depend on that communication system. Volunteer firefighters, emergency medical technicians and search-and-rescue personnel count on it, too.
These emergency personnel need it to dispatch them to those in need, and they use it to acknowledge a page and until they return safely to their own homes or jobs. The recent breakdown in that system in my area made a difficult situation more hazardous. And as you can imagine, that was followed by a deluge of uncomfortable but informative conversations among volunteers, local government officials and service providers.
Here are some things you should know about public safety communications systems in rural areas.
Who Owns Those Towers? In my county, Langlade County, located in northeastern WIsonsin, two of the towers are owned by the county. Others are owned by private enterprises.
It's Not Easy Being Green. You don't have to be this wooded to experience significant communications challenges in a rural area. In your area the problem may be the distance or other terrain features. Or it may just be that the equipment isn't up to the tasks we expect it to perform.
It Can Be a Tower of Babel. It's not just fire departments, emergency medical systems (EMS) and law enforcement using local government channels. The airways are crowded with other users that may include the Department of Natural Resources and public utilities.
It's Always about Money. While it's possible to get a used mobile radio for as little as $300, new units run more than $1,000 each, making the radios a significant expense for small rural fire departments and ambulance services. The systems that support them are a significant expense for units of government like our county. That makes sharing space on a cell tower look pretty good compared to the $500,000 or more it would cost to erect a county-owned tower.
Is It too Much to Ask? We should all try to defer opinions about what our communities can't afford until we've made some effort to learn about the systems and services lives depend on.
Building on the Administration's efforts responding to the driving demand for gigabit broadband networks, in 2012 the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation supported the launch of the US Ignite initiative, a private/public partnership that is fostering transformation of the public sector by accelerating the development and deployment of next-generation applications.
An independent 501(c)3 non-profit organization, US Ignite is working closely with its partners to create an ecosystem of 60 applications and 200 test beds for next-generation applications that will have a profound impact on how Americans work, live, learn, and play. These applications capitalize on the potential for gigabit broadband networks to improve education and workforce development, advanced manufacturing, health, transportation, public safety, and clean energy.
As the Chief Geek at Fitnet, which was recently named Apple's best new mobile app for health and fitness, Bob Summers has developed and marketed consumer Internet applications since 1994. Summers developed iSpQ VideoChat, a desktop video conferencing software, to reach over 3.0 million users from 196 countries and territories, and continues to be passionate about creating compelling online video experiences.
The app combines unique fitness content, computer vision based biometric feedback, and social sharing. A global network of fitness trainers provide weekly video workouts (ex: yoga, Pilates, karate, kickboxing) delivered instantly to mobile and gigabit connected devices. Computer vision technology accurately tracks human motion relative to the trainer to provide real time feedback. Data from the algorithm is stored for goal progression, workout recommendations, analysis, and sharing.
[Maynard is Assistant Director for Telecommunications Innovation at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy]
Google’s Chromecast team has found an interesting way to pair Chromecast streaming sticks with mobile devices that are not on the same Wi-Fi network.
Pairing is done through inaudible, ultrasonic sounds, which should make sure that your neighbor won’t suddenly rickroll your TV screen.
Chromecast Engineering Manager John Affaki said that the goal was to make the social use of Chromecast in the living room easier.
Google’s YouTube app already allows users to build collaborative queues for on-the-fly YouTube parties, and Affaki said that the support for these kinds of queues will be added to the Chromecast software developer’s kit to bring it to other apps as well. However, the challenge is that users need to be on the same Wi-Fi network, and sharing Wi-Fi passwords can be cumbersome.
“The initial step of getting on the same Wi-Fi network can be really complicated,” said Affaki.
According to ESPN, there were 1.7 million concurrent streams of the US-Germany World Cup match on its WatchESPN service. That crushes the previous high of 750,000 concurrent streams set by the last match between Mexico and Brazil.
The Federal Communications Commission’s complex and highly anticipated 2015 airwave auction is “absolutely not a train wreck,” according to Commissioner Mignon Clyburn.
FCC Commissioner Clyburn said that the agency “must be vigilant” as it prepares for the first-of-its-kind auction in 2015. That auction will involve the agency purchasing airwaves from television broadcasters, repackaging those airwaves and then selling them to spectrum-hungry wireless companies looking to boost their cellphone networks.
Much of the attention surrounding the auction has focused on whether the FCC would limit how much spectrum certain wireless companies -- namely industry giants AT&T and Verizon -- can purchase through the auction. At its May open meeting, the FCC voted 3-2 to limit those companies’ participation.
The limitations were less than those originally proposed by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler after Democratic Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel pushed for lessened limits in the hopes of driving up the auction’s revenue, which will go toward funding a nationwide network for first responders.
On the other side of the auction, some are worried about the incentives TV broadcasters have to show up to the auction and sell their airwaves at all.
[Commentary] The Aereo decision also suggests that one cannot underestimate the power of broadcasters to establish themselves, even now, as benefactors of the public interest, localism, “free” content and candidates for elective office.
In short order (at least for Congress) local broadcasters got relief, including the right to force cable operators to block channels containing duplicative networks and syndicated content, such as Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune.
Perhaps amending the Copyright Act was the most expedient legislative option to devise a mechanism whereby broadcasters received compensation and consumers, including first time, rural residents, continued to have the opportunity to view content.
Reliance on 1976 Copyright Act amendments may have an adverse impact on new technologies and entrepreneurial business plans. Any venture offering cloud-based storage of content now has to consider whether it may incur secondary liability for the direct infringement of their customers.
In the follow-up to the recent defeat of Aereo by the US Supreme Court wehere broadcasters successfully argued that Aereo engaged in unauthorized exploitation of their content, headlines about rampant cord-cutting are not backed up by the data, says Dan Rayburn, a principal analyst with Frost & Sullivan.
“Are cable companies still having record profits? Yes. The industry has not lost more than 1% in any one quarter. People are saying cable is dead and broadcast is dead.” Online services, he says, are a complement -- not a disrupter -- to cable. US pay-TV subscribers -- cable, satellite and Internet protocol TV -- rose by 202,670 during the first quarter, although cable subscribers alone in the US fell by 132,330, according to recent analysis by global information company IHS Technology.
The bigger cable players have been showing more resilience. But some see television and other content providers slowly merging.
“There’s the old Trojan Horse argument,” says Aram Sinnreich, media professor at Rutgers University. “Movies and TV are the lures, but eventually the television itself will just become equally important for entertainment, gaming, communications.”
That’s not to say that financially-strapped Americans are not exasperated. Cable bills have more than doubled over the last decade and the national average bill -- currently around $90 a month -- will reach $200 in 2020, estimates market researcher The NPD Group. Indeed, 2.7% of pay-TV customers say they’re thinking about cutting the cord in 2015, according to a 2013 survey by research firm Magid Advisors, up from 2.2% the year before and 1.9% in 2011.
But Rayburn says what people say in surveys and what they actually do in real life are very different: “If you want to ask anyone if they want to stop paying for something, what do you think they’re going to say?”
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