September 2015

Verizon Says Earnings In 2016 May Be Flat

Verizon said its earnings may plateau in 2016 as the US’s biggest wireless carrier by subscribers digests the changes it has made to its business amid bruising competition this past year. Verizon and its rivals have been battling over a limited number of new customers in a market that has matured. Amid the competition, Verizon has largely stayed above the fray. It added 1.7 million mainstream connections in the first six months of 2015. But the fight is finally catching up with Verizon.

Carriers have restructured their service plans in recent years to move away from two-year contracts and to separate the price of service from the price of the handset. Verizon has made that transition more slowly than its rivals, meaning it is now going through the pain of switching customers to lower-priced plans -- a shift that hurt its rivals in 2014. “The whole industry has been going through a process of repricing the base,” said Jonathan Chaplin, a telecommunication analyst at New Street Research. T-Mobile, Sprint and AT&T are much further along, however. “Verizon is behind the rest of the industry in the repricing process. They have the most pain still ahead of them.”

The best alternatives to the cable bundle are being offered by cable companies

The biggest threat to the cable TV bundle may actually be the companies provide them. Since Verizon Communications introduced in April cheaper, slimmed down bundles of just dozens of TV channels -- as opposed to hundreds, the company said that 30 to 40 percent of its new FiOs television customers have asked for the new packages. And in a new bet on mobile video, the telecommunication firm said it has signed up 25,000 people for the free streaming service Go90 that goes live later in September.

Just months ago, the idea of introducing alternatives to the fat cable bundle were anathema to an industry that has long fought to keep that profitable business model intact. But with declining ratings and advertising revenues and more people dropping their cable subscriptions altogether, the industry has shifted tone.

Your Twitter feed says more about your political views than you think, study says

You can get a pretty good idea of whether an American is liberal or conservative just by looking at his or her Twitter feed, new research shows. It’s not simply because liberals tweet phrases like “universal healthcare” while conservatives tweet about the military -- although there are certain political buzzwords each side tends to favor. Whether a person tends to tweet in the first-person singular (“I”) or plural (“we”) also can be revealing, and so can the intensity of emotion contained in the tweets.

“Language encodes who we are, how we think and what we feel,” Karolina Sylwester and Matthew Purver wrote in a study published in the journal PLOS ONE. “Even in a noisy Twitter data set, patterns of language use are consistent with findings obtained through classical psychology methods.” Those methods usually involve surveys, and survey-takers sometimes give answers that are more socially acceptable than honest. Even though only about 14 percent of American adults are on Twitter, their tweets have the advantage of being more candid, Sylwester and Purver wrote.

Where every new home comes with lightning-fast fiber-optic cable

When home buyers move into the Park Place development in Ontario they will be able to download a movie in less than six seconds and a photo in the blink of an eye. And they won't have to search for an Internet provider to wire their homes with fiber-optic cable. It's being built right into the project.

The 1,200-home subdivision, part of the Ontario Ranch master planned community, is on the leading edge of a technology wave sweeping new home developments nationwide, as builders look to make supercharged Internet service as common as a pool or greenbelt. The high-speed Internet initiative was unveiled by city officials and developers, with the eventual goal of hard-wiring the entire 47,000-home Ontario Ranch at speeds of 1 gigabit per second. That's about three times faster than premium high-speed Internet services available from providers such as AT&T. Park Place, being built by the Lewis Group and Stratham Communities, will be the first neighborhood to receive the gigabit service. The plan is to roll out the service to two other communities by early 2016.

Most 2016 campaign websites receive failing privacy grades

All but a handful of presidential campaign websites received failing privacy grades because of the common practice of sharing voter data with like-minded organizations, according to a review by a security and privacy group. The Online Trust Alliance, a nonprofit backed by businesses in the tech industry, found that 17 of the 23 candidate websites it evaluated received failing grades, almost solely because of their privacy policies. “Some websites failed due to nonexistent or inadequate privacy policy disclosures.

Others flunked because they reserve the right to liberally share or sell their donors and site visitors’ personally identifiable information … with unaffiliated third parties that the candidates deem as like-minded organizations,” the group said. That information includes addresses, phone numbers, employer information “and even passport numbers,” according to the group.

Nielsen Still Bullish On Code Reader Ratings

Nielsen’s top local-ratings executive expressed confidence in the company’s new code-reader measurement system – including the controversial component that derives demographic data from distant markets. The new system is now in the test stages and due to begin replacing paper diaries in 44 markets on Jan. So many questions – as well as objections voiced by local broadcasters – have arisen over the last few months during ongoing testing of the code readers and viewer-assignment test data that Nielsen earlier in September postponed its planned launch of the new system from Oct. 1 to the beginning of 2016.

Citizens Against Government Waste Warns of New Internet Tax

The lobbying arm of Citizens Against Government Waste is warning its supporters that they could be paying up to 19 percent more for broadband access after Sept 30 if Congress doesn't act soon. In part, the warning is a fund-raising effort, with the group urging contributions to help fight for the legislation. The Senate has yet to follow the House's lead and a permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act (ITFA), which is a permanent moratorium on taxes on Internet service, and the temporary extension of the old moratorium, which must be periodically renewed or it sunsets, expires Sept. 30.

ITFA has been extended five times since 1998, most recently until Sept. 30, when the moratorium was extended as part of a must-pass stop-gap appropriations bill. That stop-gap is running out as well, and some Republicans are threatening to shut down the government over the issue of funding Planned Parenthood.

Women's Media Center: Women Trail in Key Emmy Categories

According to a study released by the Women's Media Center in Washington in advance of the Emmy award broadcast Sept. 20 on Fox, only 22 percent of the nominees for writing, directing, producing and editing, which are the jobs WMC says have the most impact on what gets on the screen. That percentage is only slightly better for the current crop of nominees, with 25 percent in those categories women. "Clearly there is a connection between the broadcast, network, cable, and Netflix programs that hire exclusively male creators and the industry-wide gender divide," said Jane Burton, president of the center. "When there are few jobs for women, it is easy to see why so few women in non-acting categories are recognized for their excellence.”

The categories break out this way: From 2006 to 2015, women made up only 8 percent of directing nominations; 13 percent of writing nominees, 18 percent of editing and 28 percent of producing nods. “Clearly, the number of nominees for Emmys is not representative of the impact or the accomplishments of women writers, directors, producers, editors," said WMC board chair Pat Mitchell, "whose overall representation in all those categories is still far from equal to their talents or the opportunities."

Mass Surveillance As Art

He's not as well known as Edward Snowden or Julian assange, but Jacob Appelbaum is a key member of an international team of digital privacy Avengers. His art show, which opened Sept. 11 and runs until Oct 31, is titled "Samizdata: Evidence of Conspiracy," after a Russian word referring to the dodging of censors to share illicit material within the Soviet bloc -- think Alexsandr Solzhenistsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago". It is hosted at the NOME Gallery, which opened earlier in 2015 and has a strong bend for anti-authoritarian -- and, some might say, anti-American -- social commentary.

Time Has Come to Reform Laws Governing Law Enforcement Access to Data

[Commentary] Some of the laws governing the process by which the federal government gains access to electronic data are nearly 30 years old. As a result, electronic evidence today is, effectively, accessible to the government by fiat at a time and place of its choosing, often without regard for who is holding the evidence or even where, on the vast globe of a connected Internet, the evidence is being stored. Rules written for a time when smartphones and tablets didn’t even exist are hopelessly out of date in today’s world. It is time, and well past time, for Congress to begin the process of bringing federal electronic evidence-gathering law into the 21st century.

In the end, balancing legitimate law enforcement concerns with equally legitimate economic concerns about competitiveness and citizen’s privacy is more a matter of judgment and politics than it is of law. And that sort of judgment is precisely what we want Congress to do, rather than the executive branch acting unilaterally. While it is appropriate to hear out the federal government’s concerns, the pace of technological change is too great to warrant further delay. The time for reform of the laws governing law enforcement access to electronic data is now.

[Paul Rosenzweig is a senior advisor to The Chertoff Group and former deputy assistant secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security]

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