[Commentary] According to the new Bank of America Small Business Owners report, 59% of Boomers said they could run their business indefinitely without a smartphone or tablet, but only 39% of Gen Xers and 22% of Millennials said so. In fact, 44 percent of Millennials and Gen-Xers said they could only successfully run their business without a smartphone or tablet for one day or less.
Ari Schwartz, who hails from the world of privacy activism, is now the White House senior director for cybersecurity.
During the heat of the anti-surveillance movement, he was placed on the White House National Security Council staff to instill civil liberties into cybersecurity and signals intelligence policies. Before taking the White House gig, Schwartz advised three Commerce Department secretaries on, among other tech issues, how to develop voluntary cyber standards in accordance with a landmark executive order.
The Department of Homeland Security is poised to ditch all records from a controversial network monitoring system called Einstein that are at least three years old, but not for security reasons.
DHS reasons the files -- which include data about traffic to government websites, agency network intrusions and general vulnerabilities -- have no research significance. But some security experts say, to the contrary, DHS would be deleting a treasure chest of historical threat data. And privacy experts, who wish the metadata wasn’t collected at all, say destroying it could eliminate evidence that the government-wide surveillance system does not perform as intended. The National Archives and Records Administration has tentatively approved the disposal plan, pending a public comment period.
Congress passed the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, better known by the “nerderatti” as the DATA Act, in an attempt to enlighten taxpayers about the mother lode of federal spending data. But it’s far from clear we’ll end up with the kind of transparency that matters most.
Building on USASpending.gov, which pulls grant and contract data from agency systems and makes it searchable on the Internet, the DATA Act requires the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget to undertake a fairly arduous transformation of spending data from disconnected documents into open, standardized data, and to publish that data online. Sounds good, right? But before we start counting our new-found riches, let’s explore further. There’s a difference between data transparency and useful information -- a distinction that’s likely to get lost in translation.
[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission whacked Marriott Corporation for a cool $600,000 for messing with guests’ Wi-Fi hotspots. (The hotelier had prevented guests at its Opryland resort from using their own hotspots by transmitting disabling signals to private hotspots, forcing them to pay what the FCC felt were exorbitant rates for the resort’s own Wi-Fi service.) The FCC’s theory was that Marriott was violating Section 333 of the Communications Act, which bars interference with lawful communications. While Marriott appeared to have accepted its come-uppance willingly (by signing onto a Consent Decree), it turns out there was more to the story.
While the consent decree was being negotiated, Marriott mustered some reinforcements and took the offensive. Joined by the American Hospitality and Lodging Association and Ryman Hospital Properties, Marriott filed a Petition for Declaratory Ruling or, in the Alternative, for Rulemaking asking the FCC to clarify exactly what operators of large venues may do to protect the security and quality of their own Wi-Fi networks. The petition was filed on August 25, 2014, but it took the FCC nearly three months to invite preliminary comments on it.
If you’ve got something to say about this, you’ve got until December 19, 2014 to do so.
[Commentary] Choosing to preempt broadcast network programming to cover the President’s immigration reform announcement demonstrates the commitment and value of local broadcasting to their viewers. The station preemptions -- and their tacit repudiations of the networks' decisions not the cover the speech -- demonstrate once again that stations take seriously covering issues they deem important to their viewers, even if it costs some ratings points and the revenue that goes with them or strains relations with the networks.
[Nov 21]
[Commentary] It’s been apparent for years that there is a concerted effort by broadcasting’s primary competitors to eliminate local TV as a competitive threat to their nirvana world — a world where “free” is eliminated from the telecommunications lexicon and programming content is only made available to those who will pay for it. In their world, the highest and best use of spectrum is used only by those who charge a fee for delivering content. But only of late have we been confronted with the bald-faced falsehood that 'localism is a myth.'
[Nov 20]
People with access to a smartphone or tablet now spend an average of 2 hours and 57 minutes on them each day, says digital analytics firm Flurry, putting phones ahead of televisions as time-sucks.
The old first screen on average gets about 2 hours and 48 minutes of attention each day, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The mobile device emerges as an even bigger winner when you filter the data for dedicated users. Flurry clocks daily mobile device users at 3 hours and 45 minutes per day, compared with 3½ hours for daily television watchers.
Are you concerned that the government is spying on you? A consortium of human rights activists claim a new app called Detekt will alert you if spies are watching.
Detekt works like an antivirus scan. Run it on your computer, and it tells you if the machine has been infected with malware that many government-sponsored hackers are known to use to spy on activists and journalists. Detekt is the work of Italian security researcher Claudio Guarnieri, Amnesty International, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and similar groups in England and Germany. Detekt is limited, though. It only works on Windows computers. Researchers don't have enough insight into how spyware works on Macs.
[Nov 20]
You can pay as little as $1 to turn off ads on some of your favorite websites. Google is experimenting with a new service that allows users to see fewer ads on certain websites in exchange for a small monthly fee.
The new service, called Contributor, will give users the option to pay between $1 and $3 a month. So if a website's ads are completely hosted by Google, users who pay the fee won't see a single ad. However, it won't block other ads that the website might have. Websites that have signed up so far include Mashable, the Onion, Imgur, ScienceDaily, wikiHow and Urban Dictionary.
[Nov 21]
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