Pretend you’re a journalist (if you really are one, ignore that but read on anyhow) and someone calls and says “I’ve got a good and timely story that I think your readers/listeners would like to know about. There is a government agency that has both the authority and the responsibility to help clean up our broken big-money election campaigns—and it is refusing to do its job.” Let me explain.
May 31 is the first day in what will ultimately be another digital transition for broadcasters. At 10 am May 31, the Federal Communications Commission will begin its first-ever two-sided spectrum auction, with the first side (reverse auction) being broadcasters bidding to give up spectrum to be re-auctioned once the reverse auction is complete. The first day will consist of one six-hour round, followed by one four-hour round June 1. The auction then transitions to two rounds per day of two hours apiece at 10 am and 3 pm.
The FCC has set an initial clearing target of 126 MHz, which is actually 100 MHz of spectrum plus what is needed for guard bands between channels to prevent interference between broadcasters and the wireless companies bidding on the freed-up spectrum. If the FCC is able to clear that 126 MHz and get enough money in the forward portion of the auction to cover its payout to broadcasters, the auction is over. If not, it must move to its next lowest clearing target (114 MHz) and resume the reverse auction from where it ended, now needing less spectrum and less forward auction money.
[Commentary] Following through on a promise it made in January, the Federal Communications Commission has proposed to eliminate one element of its local public inspection file rules for broadcasters, and it has now proposed to do the same for cable operators as well. On the chopping block: for commercial broadcasters, the obligation to maintain in their public files copies of correspondence from the public concerning station operation; and for cable operators, the requirement that their public files include a listing disclosing the location and designation of the system’s principal headend.
The two to-be-dispatched rules have been on the books for decades. Their contribution to the “public interest” has, as far as we can tell, been indiscernible. Indeed, the cable headend disclosure requirement may have been contrary to the public interest – at least according to some cable operators who expressed concern for the security of their headends as long as the locations of those headends were, by Commission mandate, available to anyone and everyone. So tossing both of these rules is truly a no-brainer.
Recent research has pointed to a method of device fingerprinting that uses the miniscule, unique imperfections in each phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope—basically, its hardware—to create a profile of that phone that can be used to track its user’s activities across the web, without her knowledge. Unlike location data, most sites don’t ask for permission to access a phone’s motion sensors. But this was mostly theoretical, until now.
Many websites already collect this type of information, possibly for advertising purposes, according to new research from investigators at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “We can conclude that motion sensor fingerprinting is a realistic threat to mobile users’ privacy,” the researchers write in a paper. “Smartphone users who use private browsing or clear their cookies to avoid tracking would find that these protection measures are rendered ineffective by fingerprinting, and they can still be tracked,” said Nikita Borisov, one of the study’s authors.
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