The National Security Agency and its closest allies planned to hijack data links to Google and Samsung app stores to infect smartphones with spyware, a top-secret document reveals. The surveillance project was launched by a joint electronic eavesdropping unit called the Network Tradecraft Advancement Team, which includes spies from each of the countries in the “Five Eyes” alliance -- the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia. The top-secret document, obtained from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, was published May 20th. The document outlines a series of tactics that the NSA and its counterparts in the Five Eyes were working on during workshops held in Australia and Canada between November 2011 and February 2012.
The main purpose of the workshops was to find new ways to exploit smartphone technology for surveillance. The agencies used the Internet spying system XKEYSCORE to identify smartphone traffic flowing across Internet cables and then to track down smartphone connections to app marketplace servers operated by Samsung and Google. As part of a pilot project codenamed IRRITANT HORN, the agencies were developing a method to hack and hijack phone users’ connections to app stores so that they would be able to send malicious “implants” to targeted devices. The implants could then be used to collect data from the phones without their users noticing. Previous disclosures from the Snowden files have shown agencies in the Five Eyes alliance designed spyware for iPhones and Android smartphones, enabling them to infect targeted phones and grab e-mails, texts, web history, call records, videos, photos and other files stored on them. But methods used by the agencies to get the spyware onto phones in the first place have remained unclear.
"This leapfrogs us," says AOL President Bob Lord of the Verizon-AOL acquisition. "There's just no question in my mind." For nearly two years now, Lord has been in charge of building AOL's advertising technology operation. He's nearly finished with his biggest project: putting together all of the company's disparate software pieces -- which do everything from buy ad space to analyze campaign performance -- into a single unified system called One. Just a few integrations remain. The technology is widely considered to be good, but like every ad-tech offering on the market (with the exception of Facebook's, maybe), it's missing a key component: the ability to reliably link user identity on mobile devices and desktop.
Cookies, which ad-tech systems rely on, are ineffective on mobile devices, making it difficult for advertisers to run coherent campaigns targeted to people using more than one device. When the Verizon deal is complete, however, Lord will be free of that problem. "We're moving from a cookie-based environment in targeting to a people-based environment of targeting," he says. Though cookies will still be used in AOL's ad-tech operation, Verizon's concrete data on 131 million mobile subscribers gives AOL the ability to move past the cookie's greatest weakness.
Fourteen years after his first exit from the cable business, Jerry Kent is on the verge of leaving again. Kent is chairman and chief executive of Town and Country-based Suddenlink Communications, the soon-to-be subsidiary of Luxembourg-based Altice SA, which has agreed to pay $9.1 billion for the nation’s seventh-largest cable company. It should be no surprise that most St. Louis (MO)-area residents aren’t familiar with the company, located near Maryville University. Of 6,000 employees, only 270 are in St. Louis. And while it has 1.5 million customers in 17 states, only 60,000 of them are in Missouri, in areas like St. Joseph and Branson. It has no presence in Illinois. And now it appears the firm has been caught up in a transformation sweeping an industry facing a variety of challenges, including competition from the Internet, satellite providers and rising costs. The move represents a toehold in the US market for Altice, a cable and cellphone company controlled by billionaire Patrick Drahi. His company also is said to be interested in making a play for Time Warner Cable, the recent target of a failed bid by industry leader Comcast.
Putting some bad blood behind them, Comcast and Level 3 Communications announced that they have signed a long-term interconnection deal that “will help both companies meet their customers’ needs into the next decade and beyond.” Financial terms were not disclosed, but they said the deal expands on agreements already in place between the two companies, and that Comcast and Level 3 will enhance their existing network capacity while extending their mutual interconnection agreements, ensuring that both maintain ample capacity to exchange Internet traffic between their networks.
The agreement covers both companies’ existing networks as well as any expansion that may occur during the term of the agreement, they said. It also comes into play about five years after Level 3 and Comcast went public with a contentious peering dispute, with Level 3 complaining that Comcast was erecting a “toll booth” on the Internet soon after Level 3 landed a deal to be a primary content delivery channel for Netflix streaming traffic. At the time, Comcast argued that Level 3 wanted Comcast to accept a huge increase in traffic from Level 3 for free. Apparently, that’s all water under the bridge now.
The Comcast Gigabit public relations machine is in full swing, with several new markets for their 2 Gigabit service, Gigabit Pro, announced for future roll outs. The new markets include parts of Utah, Colorado (Denver and Colorado Springs), Houston, Oregon, and Washington. Beyond announced markets, there is very little known about Comcast’s Gigabit Pro service and not one paying residential customer has subscribed to the service. These new Gigabit Pro markets join the previously announced markets of Atlanta (GA), parts of California, Chattanooga (TN), Chicago (IL), parts of Florida and Nashville (TN). As I previously noted, Comcast (and others) seem to be taking their time, or maybe avoiding altogether, Verizon FiOS markets with these Gigabit services. Comcast has committed to passing 18 million homes with the Comcast fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service by the end of 2015.
Very few details beyond these announced markets is known about Gigabit Pro. Comcast says that only homes “within close proximity of Comcast’s fiber network” will be eligible and they will “require installation of professional-grade equipment.” In practice, little is known about what that really means. Is this a “fiberhood approach” like Google, where they will identify specific neighborhoods to target, or is it a case-by-case basis? Does the ongoing reference to “require installation of professional-grade equipment” translate to a high installation cost to the end customer?
[Commentary] The tech industry used to think big. As early as 1977, when personal computers were expensive and impractical mystery boxes with no apparent utility or business prospects, the young Bill Gates and Paul Allen were already working toward a future in which we would see “a computer on every desk and in every home.” And in the late 1990s, when it was far from clear that they would ever make a penny from their unusual search engine, the audacious founders of Google were planning to organize every bit of data on the planet -- and make it available to everyone, free. These were dreams of vast breadth: The founders of Microsoft, Google, Facebook and many of the rest of today’s tech giants were not content to win over just some people to their future. They weren’t going after simply the rich, or Americans or Westerners. They planned to radically alter how the world did business so the impossible became a reality for everyone. Whatever happened to the tech industry’s grand, democratic visions of the future? We are once again living in a go-go time for tech, but there are few signs that the most consequential fruits of the boom have reached the masses. Instead, the boom is characterized by a rise in so-called on-demand services aimed at the wealthy and the young.
I follow 882 accounts on Twitter that together have produced 92 tweets within the last 10 minutes. For all I know, there might be an evergreen pearl of content mixed in with these 92 tweets, but looking for it seems overwhelming. There’s just too much to sift through. Two new social networks think they have an answer for this conundrum: They allow users to post only once per day.
One of them, This. (spelled with a period), is launching an iPhone app on May 21. Named for the Internet shorthand for "read this," it was born inside of Atlantic Media but has since spun out to become its own company. Its founder, Andrew Golis, who was formerly an "entrepreneur in residence" at the media company, says it has signed up about 10,000 users since launching in November 2014. The other startup, Catchpool, is a scrappy independent site that launched its beta version in May of 2014. Its founder, Erica Berger, says a few thousand people have signed up for the beta version. This. is like a social network turned inside out. Its bet is that advertisers care not only that people see their ads, but what state of mind they’re in when they do. Just as publishers spend time on quality content that, on Facebook and Twitter, flies by in exactly the same way as a post about what its author ate for lunch, there’s not a social network to place the type of ad that might have once gone in a glossy magazine.
Farmers Business Network is announcing a $15 million round of funding led by Google Ventures. According to Andy Wheeler, a partner at the search giant’s investment arm, data is becoming ever more important to agriculture. That’s one reason why the firm also invested in a company called Climate Corporation, which uses weather data to provide insurance to farmers and eventually was acquired by Monsanto. “Agriculture has gone through waves of productivity increases in the past,” says Wheeler, who comes from a family of farmers in Iowa. “Now we’re entering the period of data being one of the primary drivers of that increase.” Among its 37 employees, Farmers Business Network has plenty of farmers on staff, but its founders, Amol Deshpande and Charles Baron, are straight out of Silicon Valley. Before launching the Network, Deshpande was a partner at Kleiner Perkins, while Baron was working as a product manager at Google. Baron says he always has been fascinated by his brother-in-law, who grows corn and wheat in Nebraska, and the sheer number of variables that went into his job. And yet, as a proud Googler, Baron says he couldn’t get over the fact that all of this information was siloed, inaccessible to other farmers.
On May 20, 2015, President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate Jessica Rosenworcel for a second term as commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission. The following may be attributed to Benton Foundation Executive Director Adrianne B. Furniss:
June 2, 2015: Board Committees 9:00a.m. -- 6:00 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time
June 3, 2015: Board Meeting 8:00 a.m. -- 10:00 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time
San Diego, CA
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2015-05-15/pdf/2015-11778.pdf
The Board of the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet) will convene an open public meeting on June 3, 2015, preceded by open public meetings of the Board Committees on June 2, 2015. FirstNet’s four Board Committees: (1) Governance and Personnel; (2) Technology; (3) Outreach; and (4) Finance.
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