June 2014

Congress isn't protecting you from the NSA. Here's how to do it yourself.

In 2013, Americans started learning about the true extent of domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency. Now, a coalition of technology companies and civil liberties groups are taking matters into their own hands.

The one-day campaign is called Reset the Net, a campaign to encourage the use of technologies that make the Internet more resistant to NSA snooping. What does Reset the Net recommend I do to protect my privacy?

For your cell phone, Reset the Net recommends ChatSecure, TextSecure, and RedPhone. As the names suggest, these products enable users to communicate securely over instant messaging, text messaging, and voice calling. Reset the Net also encourages users to set a password on their phone so its contents can't easily be accessed by criminals or the police.
For your Mac or PC, the bundle includes secure instant messaging software (Adium for Mac or Pidgin for PC) as well as Tor, software that helps preserve your anonymity by allowing you to browse your address without revealing where you're browsing from.
Finally, Reset the Net has tips for improving password security. You should avoid re-using the same password on multiple sites. Instead, keep track of your passwords with a password manager or just write them down on paper.

FirstNet vexed by shifts in public-safety LTE standards-setting

A brewing controversy over technical standards and hiring issues are some of the latest bugaboos haunting the First Responders Network Authority (FirstNet) as it crafts plans for the national public-safety broadband network (NPSBN).

During board committee meetings here, held June 2 prior to the annual PSCR Public Safety Broadband Stakeholder meeting, FirstNet board member Kevin McGinnis noted that the mission of enabling mission-critical voice communications over LTE is progressing, as the 3GPP standards body moves ahead on technological specifications for the service as part of the group's work on Releases 12 and 13.

However, McGinnis expressed displeasure at the fact that "certain vendors" are attempting to shift LTE public-safety standardization out of 3GPP and into the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA). McGinnis said he did not know which vendors are behind the move, but he has been told that they aim to move proceedings "to a standards body where those vendors presumably have more influence." He called the move "distracting," and said it detracts from the progress that has been made within 3GPP.

Why Sprint wants to buy T-Mobile so badly

You may have heard Sprint is edging closer to an acquisition of T-Mobile. What's this all about, and how does it affect people like you and me? If the deal goes through, T-Mobile would be eliminated from the marketplace, and consumers would lose a newly resurgent player who's willing to needle the nation's largest carriers.

To some regulators, that's a compelling argument not to approve a Sprint-T-Mobile merger. But Sprint claims that it needs to merge with T-Mobile precisely so it can better compete against Verizon and AT&T. Could snapping up the nation's fourth-largest wireless carrier actually improve competition rather than worsen it?

To understand what's happening, we need to look at the other companies that operate in this space. Sprint's chairman, Masayoshi Son, has called the current marketplace a duopoly. Regulators have said they like having four national carriers rather than three. Eliminating T-Mobile might concentrate too much power in the hands of a few.

Sprint's role as technology outlier may keep it on a road less traveled

Sprint will soon jump into LTE Advanced carrier aggregation as part of its Sprint Spark initiative, and the operator is also taking hard looks at numerous other cutting-edge technologies, such as SON and even Cloud RAN, for inclusion in its long-term roadmap, said a top executive.

"Historically we've looked to technologies a bit differently than everyone else. We're the only ones deploying TD-LTE. We're the only ones deploying 8T8R," observed Ron Marquardt, vice president of technology for Sprint technology innovation and architecture. That willingness to stand out from the crowd means technologies that other US operators may not consider could find a home at Sprint.

"We're evaluating everything from CoMP (coordinated multipoint) to even Cloud RAN on the more speculative end, just because of the backhaul requirements for that," said Marquardt.

Advanced self-organizing network (SON) technologies, enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (EICIC), high-order MIMO options and other advanced antenna systems "are all under consideration," Marquardt added. "We're actively investigating all sorts of SON options--architectures as well as specific implementations," he noted, though cautioning that "we're not even close to making any decisions, much less any announcements."

Sprint's Hesse says there is no plan to attack wired broadband market in near-term

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said he does not see the carrier going head-to-head in the near-term with the likes of Comcast, Verizon Communications and AT&T in the market for wired home broadband Internet access.

Hesse's comments, made during a Sprint meeting with industry analysts and relayed by an analyst, stand in contrast to the long-term vision of Sprint Chairman and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, who has said Sprint could eventually compete in and shake up the wired broadband market in the US. According to Jackdaw Research analyst Jan Dawson, Hesse said that Sprint isn't planning to go after the home broadband market actively, and that it would be difficult to make money in that market, especially given how much video wired broadband customers tend to use.

AT&T, for instance has said its average, non-U-verse broadband customers use around 21 GB of data per month; overall average monthly usage on North American fixed access networks was 51.4 GB, according to a May study from network vendor Sandvine. Those numbers are much bigger than the average monthly data consumption by wireless phone users.

Dawson said that Sprint is simply focused on other business priorities right now and does not plan to aggressively compete in the home broadband market. He said that such a plan is "not on the roadmap" right now but could be somewhere down the line as the carrier expands its Spark service and increases speeds. For now though, Dawson said, Hesse was acknowledging that Sprint's spectrum position and the realities of deploying Spark make it infeasible to actually enact Son's vision.

"The difference is between the strategic vision Masa Son is laying and the operational reality of running the Sprint business today with the spectrum holdings they have," he said.

Verizon LTE Multicast Mimics Broadcast Model

Verizon has begun to demo a new approach to delivering video over its vast LTE wireless broadband network that will allow it to mimic and compete with broadcasting.

The technique, which the company calls LTE Multicast, permits Verizon go beyond one-to-one delivery to broadcasting-like, one-to-many delivery. For its most recent demonstration of the technology, Verizon transmitted multiple camera angles of race coverage from the Indianapolis 500 to some crew members in the pit at the track.

The wireless carrier used an undisclosed number of cell sites near the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the demo. The crews, which were given Samsung Galaxy Note 3 smartphones and Sequans tablets enhanced with special LTE Multicast chipsets to receive the Verizon broadcast, used the devices to view specific camera angles of the race and give their drivers a tactical advantage.

The Indy trial of LTE Multicast follows its rollout at a special technology showing in New York City’s Bryant Park as part of the festivities surrounding Super Bowl XLVIII on Feb 2. “This is a very spectrally efficient way to deliver large quantities of data, primarily video, to a particular area,” says Verizon spokesperson Debi Lewis.

Still reeling from Heartbleed, OpenSSL suffers from crypto bypass flaw

A researcher has uncovered another severe vulnerability in the OpenSSL cryptographic library. It allows attackers to decrypt and modify Web, e-mail, and virtual private network traffic protected by the transport layer security (TLS) protocol, the Internet's most widely used method for encrypting traffic traveling between end users and servers.

Library updates are available on the front page of the OpenSSL website. People who administer servers running OpenSSL should update as soon as possible. The underlying vulnerability, formally cataloged as CVE-2014-0224, resides in the ChangeCipherSpec processing, according to an overview by Lepidum, the software developer that discovered the flaw and reported it privately to OpenSSL. It makes it possible for attackers who can monitor a connection between an end user and server to force weak cryptographic keys on client devices. Attackers can then exploit those keys to decrypt the traffic or even modify the data before sending it to its intended destination.

"OpenSSL's ChangeCipherSpec processing has a serious vulnerability," the Lepidum advisory stated. "This vulnerability allows malicious intermediate nodes to intercept encrypted data and decrypt them while forcing SSL clients to use weak keys which are exposed to the malicious nodes. There are risks of tampering with the exploits on contents and authentication information over encrypted communication via web browsing, e-mail and VPN, when the software uses the affected version of OpenSSL."

Web browsing is copyright infringement, publishers argue

Europeans may browse the Internet without fear of infringing copyrights, as the European Union Court of Justice ruled in a decision that ends a four-year legal battle threatening the open Internet.

In the case, the court slapped down the Newspaper Licensing Agency's (NLA) claim that the technological underpinnings of Web surfing amounted to infringement. The court ruled that "on-screen copies and the cached copies made by an end-user in the course of viewing a website satisfy the conditions" of infringement exemptions spelled out in the EU Copyright Directive.

The NLA's opponent in the case was the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA). The PR group hailed the decision. The NLA is the body that distributes reproductions of newspaper content. Its main argument was the cost that the licensing public relations companies pay for the reproductions should factor in to what is temporarily copied on a reader's computer.

The weird Google searches of the unemployed and what they say about the economy

If you really want to know how the economy is doing now, just Google it. At least that’s the goal of a growing number of researchers who are turning to big data in hopes of unlocking the secrets of the economy at the speed of the Internet.

The movement -- dubbed “nowcasting” -- is piquing the interest of policymakers in Washington and around the world frustrated by the long lag in official government statistics as they make decisions where timing is everything. Want to figure out where prices are headed in 86 countries on a given day? A project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tracks them at thousands of retailers. How many people will file for unemployment benefits in one week?

Economists at the University of Michigan are tapping Twitter to estimate the number of new applicants. Are more young men finding jobs? Google suggests the incidence of searches for adult entertainment can provide a clue.

“Statistics serve us really well and are completely essential as benchmarks for where the economy is -- or more precisely, has been,” said Matthew Shapiro, an economist at the University of Michigan working on the Twitter project. “But we don’t have a lot of indicators that tell us what’s happening right now, particularly when the economy is changing direction.”

The government’s meticulous method of collecting data still relies heavily on phone conversations with families and businesses. Though its numbers are considered the gold standard, the aftermath of the Great Recession has shown the data can come too late for policymakers at crucial moments in the recovery. In the midst of the recession, Google’s chief economist Hal Varian released a paper showing how to use the company’s search data to measure auto sales and consumer spending, among other things. Now, researchers both inside and outside of government are using it to estimate everything from unemployment to mortgage delinquencies.

The Rich Could Tackle Many Social Ills by Supporting a National Digital-Library Endowment

[Commentary] Here’s a not-so-modest proposal for the 400 richest Americans (together worth over $2-trillion, or more than the entire bottom half of our population).

Work toward a national digital library endowment to modernize Andrew Carnegie’s vision of giving the brightest the tools to rise to the top.

Carnegie asked cities and towns to pay for the upkeep and other continuing needs of the libraries he financed, but today’s America is different. Local governments have cut back. A permanent revenue stream from a national endowment could at least help libraries cope with continuing costs ranging from e-books to salaries.

Civic-minded billionaires could get the endowment rolling with a goal of $10-billion to $20-billion for the first five years. The endowment could also help local libraries start Kickstarter-style campaigns through which local donors could send money to their favorite local library projects. The money raised would be crucial to improving school and public libraries -- and the reading and math skills of America’s students. Much of the money could go to hire and train librarians, family literacy workers, and others, especially in the very poorest areas. The endowment could also help pay to narrow the digital divide.

Imagine the chance to upgrade Wi-Fi in libraries and other places where the poor and middle class -- and, yes, library lovers among the well-to-do -- want to read and maybe even connect in person. The extra money for content to feed wireless devices made available for use would be a godsend for libraries, affording them more bargaining power with publishers, who would also win through an expanded library market.

[Rothman runs LibraryCity, a site that advocates spreading digital libraries]

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