Verizon said that its customers can now use their cellphones in Cuba, becoming the first US carrier to do so. However, the privilege won’t come cheap. Voice calls are $2.99 per minute, while data is $2.05 per megabyte. (Texts are at standard international rates.) That means a single megabyte or one-minute phone call is more than a typical Cuban worker makes in a day.
Since a European high court ruled more than a year ago that people could compel search engines to remove links to content about them, the debate over the “right to be forgotten” has been cast as a battle between various notions of privacy and Silicon Valley. But recently, numerous US media organizations joined the debate, saying the way French regulators have interpreted that right will burden publishers and news consumers on this side of the Atlantic.
On Sept 14, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press urged French regulators to rescind an order that the US organization says is on a “collision course with the protections for free expression and the right to receive information around the globe, including in the United States under the First Amendment.” The Reporters Committee, along with 29 other US media organizations -- from the Associated Press to BuzzFeed to newspaper chains like Advance and Tribune and industry groups like the Newspaper Association of America -- sent a letter to France’s data-protection authority, the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), objecting to one of its May 2015 orders. CNIL instructed Google that when it delists links from search results, upon request under the “right to be forgotten,” Google must delist the links from all of its domains worldwide -- even its primary domain, google.com.
Rev. Dr. Everett C. Parker passed away early in the morning on Sept 17 at the age of 102. He was the first director of Communications in 1957 for the newly-formed United Church of Christ. In that role he founded the United Church of Christ, Office of Communication, Inc, a media reform and accountability ministry with a civil rights agenda, that worked to improve the coverage and employment of women and people of color in broadcasting and other media. Dr. Parker was named one of the most influential men in broadcasting by the trade publication Broadcasting Magazine and is featured Museum of Broadcast Communications Encyclopedia of Television.
"We will always be grateful for Dr. Parker's role in bringing community voices to federal agencies. Much of the successful activism today related to Internet openness and media consolidation traces back to Dr. Parker's work in the 1950s and 1960s," noted Earl Williams, chair of UCC OC Inc. Before the litigation brought by UCC OC Inc. against the Federal Communications Commission in a famous duo of cases known as UCC v. FCC, ordinary people had no right to file comments or register their views at the FCC. Williams explained, "the millions of people who asked the FCC to protect net neutrality [in 2014] can credit Dr. Parker and his work at UCC OC Inc. for their right to do so."
All of us at the Benton Foundation are saddened by the news of Rev Everett Parker’s passing. His work inspires us, the public interest community, and all advocates for a better world. His mission, shared by the Benton Foundation, is to give help to people who are voiceless, so that they may be heard. In 2012, our founder, Charles Benton, received the Everett C. Parker Award in recognition of his many years of leadership and support for promoting the public interest in traditional and digital media.
In accepting the award, Charles highlighted three lessons from Rev Parker’s life that serve for a model for us at the foundation:
We are thankful for these lessons today and embrace them as we endeavor to carry on Rev Parker’s work for years to come.
As China’s President Xi Jingping prepares to visit the White House, the head of China's Cyberspace Administration, Lu Wei, is holding a summit with US technology companies in Seattle (WA). There, he's expected to further press US technology companies operating in China to sign off on a pledge that they will comply with Chinese information security policies -- potentially giving Chinese authorities direct access to user data.
The terms of the pledge, which the New York Times reports requires companies to “promise they would not harm China’s national security and would store Chinese user data within the country,” are similar in ways to the PRISM agreement between technology companies and the US government revealed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. But the pledge also goes further, pressing for systems to be “secure and controllable” -- suggesting that companies may have to provide direct backdoors to systems for surveillance and provide the Chinese government with source code to their applications.The pledge document begins, “Our company agrees to strictly adhere to two key principles of ‘not harming national security and not harming consumer rights.’”
Defying the expectations and desires of some -- who thought it might be time to move on -- Apple will ask the US Supreme Court to overturn a federal judge’s finding that it conspired to fix the prices of e-books when it launched its original iPad and iBook store in January 2010.
“This case . . . presents issues of surpassing importance to the United States economy,” the company argues in papers filed with the high court Sept 17. “Dynamic, disruptive entry into new or stagnant markets -- the lifeblood of American economic growth -- often requires the very type of” conduct that Apple engaged in, the company argues, and which US District Judge Denise Cote of Manhattan found to be illegal in July 2013. Judge Cote’s ruling against Apple was upheld this past June, 2-1, by a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. At the time of the appellate loss, Apple’s press statement hinted that it might take this step: “While we want to put this behind us,” the company asserted at the time, “the case is about principles and values. We know we did nothing wrong back in 2010 and are assessing next steps.”
The United Kingdom government is teaming up with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to build a new tracking system for civilian drones, which aims to ensure hobbyists and commercial drone operators operate safely within the same airspace. The proposed system would track and trace all drones flying below 500 feet (150 metres), irrespective of whether they are being flown by commercial or leisure pilots.
Lord Ahmad Tariq, the Under Secretary of State for Transport, confirmed the NASA partnership in the House of Lords. "The Government are in early discussions with NASA about the drone traffic management system," he said. "It is hoped that those discussions will lead to a UK involvement in the development of that system and the participation of UK industry in future trials to test the robustness of the technology." The UK's partnership with NASA follows news that Google, Amazon, and other US companies teamed up with NASA to create an unmanned air traffic control system for drones. One of the proposed ideas would be to hook drones into a cloud-based system, which would provide constant communication, navigation, and surveillance. Whether or not the system will be privately or publicly run hasn't yet been decided.
In keeping with its recent overtures to journalists, Facebook launched a new hub with tools designed to help news organizations mine Facebook and Instagram for content and story ideas. Signal -- a nod to the kernel of helpful information often buried in a sea of noise -- combines existing and entirely new curation tools from Facebook in a central dashboard, effectively providing a one-stop-shop for social discovery on the company’s two social networks. Some of the tools in Signal will look familiar. Newswire, a feed of vetted stories trending on Facebook surfaced by the social news agency Storyful, occupies one of three main columns in the dashboard’s landing page. Users familiar with CrowdTangle might also recognize the middle column, Trending Posts, which contains a stream of posts that are gathering momentum on Facebook. This feature is offered in partnership with CrowdTangle, the company that has helped BuzzFeed, Vox and others identify posts as that are becoming popular on the social network.
Signal also includes several tools that haven’t been introduced before. Leaderboards, a page that tracks and parses conversation data across thousands of pages, can be used to examine and curate posts around prominent figures like musicians and politicians. The dashboard also allows journalists to save images and posts gleaned from Facebook and Instagram into collections and offers a one-click embedding function.
One of the big new anticipated features in the just-released iOS 9 is Wi-Fi calling for AT&T iPhone customers. Though Sprint and T-Mobile users have been able to use Wi-Fi calling on the iPhone for some time, AT&T and Verizon have yet to deploy it.
Wi-Fi calling makes up for gaps or poor coverage in a carrier's phone service by offloading calls to a Wi-Fi network and routing them that way. While Wi-Fi calling with AT&T iPhones was expected to be available broadly with the launch of iOS 9, the carrier now says that it is delaying the availability of it pending approval from the Federal Communications Commission. Those that had beta tested iOS 9 prior to launch have been able to use the feature and will continue to do so, according to the carrier. As it stands now, the FCC has not provided a time table for when Wi-Fi calling will be approved for use by AT&T phones. AT&T has also not indicated when it will deliver the feature to devices other than the iPhone, though we expect that won't happen until after the FCC approval comes.
Internal watchdogs want to double-check that agencies have made as much progress practicing basic cyber hygiene as they told the White House in July. The Obama Administration in June launched a so-called 30-day cybersecurity sprint, commanding agencies to monitor computer logs, patch critical vulnerabilities and cut the number of "privileged" users with free rein over systems, among other things. “Right now, the agencies and the agency chief information officers are self-reporting a lot of their work” to the Department of Homeland Security and the White House, said Peter Sheridan, assistant inspector general for IT at the Federal Reserve and the Consumer Protection Financial Bureau.
The verification is partly a way for agency inspectors to maintain a role in data integrity oversight. The 2014 Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) tasked DHS with supervising governmentwide cyber operations. Taking a "collaborative approach," Sheridan said, the inspector general community asked: “Should the IGs now be coming in and validating the responses that the agencies provided” after the sprint? "We've developed a very good working relationship with the folks at DHS," Sheridan said. "I think the IGs will have a discussion once our FISMA work is done to see what other areas we might want to look at that might relate to the cyber sprint," said Kathleen Tighe, chair of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency IT committee. Already in the pipeline is a project related to the security of publicly accessible agency websites, she added.
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