June 2015

10 Gigabit Broadband Gains Further Momentum with Calix News

Ultra-high-speed broadband gained further momentum today with an announcement from Calix that the company will support increased capacity and 10 Gbps connectivity on its popular E-Series broadband access equipment. To enable the capability, based on the ITU/FSAN NG-PON2 standard, customers will install new line cards for the E-Series.“Demonstrations of both NG-PON2 with tunable TWDM wavelengths and fixed wavelength 10G PON will take place this fall,” said Michael Langlois, Calix senior vice president of systems products.

TWDM uses time and wavelength division multiplexing to boost the speeds of fiber-to-the-home infrastructure. Calix also touted the ability of its previously announced GigaCenter customer premises equipment and Compass cloud-based software to enhance NG-PON2 capabilities. GigaCenter combines the functionality of an optical network terminal, home gateway and high-speed 802.11ac Wi-Fi access point. Using the three offerings together will enable service providers to detect issues such as device bandwidth contention and sub-par Wi-Fi performance “before they manifest themselves to subscribers,” Calix says.

Spotlight on NTIA: Laura Breeden, Director of External Affairs for BroadbandUSA

Laura Breeden has certainly made her mark on the digital world. While she describes herself as a “minor player,” Breeden, director of external affairs for the Office of Telecommunication and Information Applications’ Broadband USA program, has spent much of her career tracking the evolution of technology and the Internet. After a three-year stint heading the Federation of American Research Networks, a nonprofit trade association for Internet service providers, Breeden began working for NTIA in 1994 as the director of the Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program. The federal grant program was focused on developing Internet-based services for the public sector. Breeden helped develop the $60 million program from the ground up, which involved writing the program rules, designing the application and review processes, and selecting the final candidates.

She left NTIA in 1996 to start a consulting practice focused on technology planning and project development, and in 2000 joined the Education Development Center to lead a national technical assistance program for community technology centers. In 2009, Breeden came back to NTIA to work for the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) as the program director of grants focused on public computer centers and broadband adoption. In this role, she helped oversee more than 100 successful projects, totaling $450 million in grants, focused on expanding digital literacy and broadband adoption. With BTOP winding down, Breeden is now working on NTIA’s latest broadband initiative, BroadbandUSA, which is utilizing the expertise NTIA gained through managing its BTOP projects to provide technical advice to communities seeking to expand broadband in communities.

FCC’s Pai Announces His Plan to Support Broadband Deployment in Rural America

Those living in rural America need high-speed broadband in order to compete in the digital economy. Today, I'm announcing my plan to help deliver the online opportunities they deserve. I am putting on the table a concrete and specific plan for giving rate-of-return carriers a chance to participate in the Connect America Fund if they want to do so.

First, I have concluded after careful study that targeted changes to existing universal service rules can solve the stand-alone broadband problem. Second, I believe that we need to open a path so that rate-of-return carriers that want to participate in the Connect America Fund can do so before the end of 2015. To be sure, taking these steps will not complete our work on the Universal Service Fund. But we should not let division on other high-cost reforms delay the adoption of a commonsense, broadly appealing solution to a specific problem. Let's get rural America connected once and for all.

PayPal walks back its controversial robocalling policy

PayPal is changing its tune on sending you automated phone calls and text messages in the face of pushback from regulators and consumers. The company is again amending its user agreement just two days before its updated policies were to take effect. Under the changes, PayPal promises not to robocall you unless you've previously given the company your prior, express written consent. That means it also won't require users to opt-in to receiving robocalls as a condition of continuing to use the mobile payments service. And the company is also clarifying its user agreement to state that PayPal will primarily use robocalling to "detect, investigate and protect our customers from fraud" or to notify users about account activity.

"We have also been working proactively with regulators to clarify that our focus is on our customers, on consumer protection and on doing the right thing," PayPal said. "We appreciate the feedback our customers have provided to us on this issue and apologize for any confusion we may have caused." "I commend PayPal for taking steps to honor consumer choices to be free from unwanted calls and texts," said Federal Communications Commission Enforcement Bureau Chief Travis LeBlanc. "These changes, along with PayPal’s commitments to improve its disclosures and make it easier for consumers to express their calling preferences, are significant and welcome improvements."

App Developer Settles FTC and New Jersey Charges It Hijacked Consumers’ Phones to Mine Cryptocurrency

A smartphone app developer has agreed to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission and the New Jersey Attorney General that it lured consumers into downloading its “rewards” app, saying it would be free of malware, when the app’s main purpose was actually to load the consumers’ mobile phones with malicious software to mine virtual currencies for the developer. The Ohio-based defendants behind the app, called “Prized,” agreed to a settlement that will permanently ban them from creating and distributing malicious software. The settlement also includes a $50,000 monetary judgment against the defendants payable to the state of New Jersey, of which $44,800 is suspended upon payment of $5,200 and compliance with the injunctive provisions of the stipulated order.

The defendants, Equiliv Investments and Ryan Ramminger, began marketing the Prized app around February 2014, making it available in the Google Play Store, Amazon App Store and others. Thousands of consumers downloaded the app believing they could earn points for playing games or downloading affiliated apps and then spend those points on rewards such as clothes, gift cards and other items. Consumers were promised that the downloaded app would be free from malicious software -- malware -- or viruses, according to the complaint. What consumers got instead, according to the complaint, was an app that contained malware that took control of the device’s computing resources to “mine” for virtual currencies like DogeCoin, LiteCoin and QuarkCoin.

Supreme Court declines Google appeal in copyright case

The Supreme Court declined to hear Google’s appeal of an ongoing dispute with Oracle over whether certain elements of the Java programming language can be copyrighted. At the core of the case is a question of whether certain elements of software can be freely copied to make different systems work together. When Google was developing the Android smartphone operating system, it copied parts of Java so that Java software could work on its system. Application programming interfaces (API), as such technical elements are called, are used by many software developers to allow different systems to communicate with one another. Oracle, which had bought the company that made Java, sued Google for using the API without permission -- setting up the current legal battle.

With its decision June 29, the Supreme Court let a 2014 ruling in favor of Oracle stand and sent the case back to a lower court. "We will continue to defend the interoperability that has fostered innovation and competition in the software industry,” said a Google representative. Oracle painted the court’s decision as protecting, not hindering, innovation. "Today's Supreme Court decision is a win for innovation and for the technology industry that relies on copyright protection to fuel innovation,” said Oracle’s General Counsel Dorian Daley.

Competition and choice in wireless broadband

[Commentary] Unfortunately, the wireless industry today is anything but competitive. Two carriers, AT&T and Verizon, have a de facto duopoly with two-thirds of the market. With it, they have the financial and political power to drive the other carriers completely out of the market. If this happens, customers -- individuals and businesses alike -- would face sharply higher prices, reduced service and less innovation. To keep the wireless broadband playing field from becoming hopelessly tilted toward the “Big Two,” Congress authorized the Federal Communications Commission to promote competition by preventing the excessive concentration of spectrum in an upcoming auction of low-band spectrum licenses.

In keeping with congressional direction, the FCC adopted rules that ensure any bidder that holds less than one-third of the available low-band spectrum can buy spectrum in the auction. Achieving the goal of competitive wireless broadband will depend upon how the FCC uses its regulatory power to structure the upcoming auction of low-band wireless spectrum. We need to prevent the loss of innovation, investment and deployment that even more market power would create. That’s why the FCC, under the able leadership of Chairman Tom Wheeler, should increase the spectrum reserve to at least 40 MHz. If the FCC follows suit and increases the spectrum reserve for competitors to at least 40 MHz, we’ll have better service, faster connection times, lower prices, more options and new innovation. Isn’t that what we all want as consumers? And isn’t that what our economy needs?

[Waxman currently serves as Chairman at Waxman Strategies, a public affairs and strategic communications firm]

More than 26 million people have changed their Facebook picture to a rainbow flag. Here’s why that matters.

In the wake of a landmark Supreme Court decision that made same-sex marriage a right nationwide, a whopping 26 million people slapped a rainbow flag over their Facebook photos to “celebrate pride.” The movement, fomented by a photo-editing tool that Facebook launched June 26, is a response to major news events that we’ve seen before: Profile picture change campaigns have become as common as cat videos on certain social networks. There were green filters for Iranian protesters in 2009, yellow ribbons for Hong Kong in 2014, black dots to oppose sexual violence in India, Arabic “Ns” to support Iraqi Christians. Profile pictures, arguably, are a very particular and effective type of message. They don’t dictate how you should or must behave, as laws and PSAs typically do; instead, they simply tell you how your peers are behaving. In other words, they support marriage equality; why don’t you?

“When people try to change behavior, they often focus on … telling people what they should do,” the social psychologist Melanie Tannenbaum explained in 2013. “We often underestimate just how strongly we respond to what other people actually do.” Case in point? Facebook itself has found that people tend to change their profile pictures in response to their friends’ picture changes: In a paper on the HRC’s 2013 campaign, published in February, Facebook data scientists found that users were more likely to adopt the equal-sign icon if they saw multiple friends doing so. The more friends they saw, up to a point, the more likely they were to change. That social influence was more of a factor, in fact, than even religion, politics or age.

Coding for Liberty: On the Ground at Rand Paul’s Presidential Hackathon

Virtually everyone at #HackForRand brings up privacy rights and the National Security Agency within ten seconds of explaining why they’re here, and the goal of the hackathon -- a 24-hour marathon competition of programming judged by a three-person panel -- is to work on building an app that advances “liberty and privacy.” The “liberty and privacy” directive comes from Ron Schnell, the CTO of Sen Rand Paul’s (R-TX) Presidential campaign, whose job it is to build a tech-soaked Republican political machine that even Silicon Valley can get behind. "I know all of you care about privacy, and that’s why the theme of this hackathon is privacy and liberty,” Schnell, also a competition judge, told the couple-dozen attendees as the event kicked off. “We know the Valley cares a lot about privacy, we don’t want to see the government building backdoors into our systems."

The first-place team would be whisked away to an undisclosed location (later on, someone told me Monterey) to meet the Senator in person, and both first- and second-place winners would receive copies of the Constitution signed by Sen Paul himself. The grand prize went to Team Checkmate, a trio of French aerospace software engineers who had driven up from Orange County (CA) the day before. Schnell said their secure payments system, a nifty tool that uses biometric authentication (ie a fingerprint) instead of a password, couldn’t be used on the Paul campaign because of regulations. Still, he and the other two judges were impressed with the “innovative” hack.

NBC under pressure to cut Trump ties

More than 200,000 people have signed a Change.org petition calling on NBCUniversal to cut its ties with Donald Trump because of remarks the Republican presidential candidate made about Mexican immigrants. The petition, written by Guillermo Castañeda Jr., requests that the network cancel Miss USA and Miss Universe, which are co-owned by Trump and NBC, as well as "The Apprentice," which Trump hosts. Castañeda accuses NBC of "supporting a hateful and narcissistic individual without any kind of values" and "supporting a growing trend of bigotry and division in this country."

The petition comes amid a public dispute between Trump and Univision that began when the Spanish-language broadcaster announced it would end its business relationship with the Miss Universe Organization based on what it described as Trump's "insulting remarks about Mexican immigrants." At his campaign launch, Trump had said he would build a wall to stop Mexico from dumping "rapists" and criminals on US soil. He later accused the media of trying "to distort my comments regarding Mexico and its great people."

Benton

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