120 million Chinese households have fiber home connections, more than the entire rest of the world. That's actual connections (including businesses), not availability or homes passed. The Chinese government decided a few years ago that a faster Internet was good for the country. They made it so, with the cooperation of government-controlled carriers.
Smart cities are realizing they need to act or risk being left behind. However, many do not want to embrace the purely-municipal broadband network model, where the city would engage in direct competition with existing providers. One way for those communities to move forward is with a public-private partnership (PPP). But for all the excitement around this model, there are few concrete examples from which to draw lessons. This paper explores lessons from PPPs and offers in-depth case studies of three high profile models: Westminster and Ting in Maryland, UC2B and iTV-3/CountryWide in Illinois, and LeverettNet in Massachusetts.
The Federal Communications Commission is trying once again to limit the prices prisoners and their families pay for phone calls, proposing a new, higher set of caps in response to the commission's latest court loss. A March 2016 federal appeals court ruling stayed new rate caps of 11¢ to 22¢ per minute on both interstate and intrastate calls from prisons. The stay remains in place while appeals from prison phone companies are considered, but FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and Commissioner Mignon Clyburn recently proposed new caps of 13¢ to 31¢ per minute in an apparent attempt to satisfy prison phone companies and the courts.
Prison phone companies Global Tel*Link (GTL) and Securus Technologies had argued that the FCC's limits fell short of what the companies are contractually obligated to pay in "site commissions" to correctional facilities. The new Chairman Wheeler and Commissioner Clyburn proposal still wouldn't ban the commissions or limit what prisons can charge companies for site access. However, they say that the caps of 13¢ to 31¢ per minute account "for the possibility that jails and prisons bear legitimate costs in providing access to ICS [inmate calling services]." The FCC will vote on this proposal at its August 4 meeting.
[Commentary] Donald Trump hardly has a record as a champion of the press. It's somewhat surprising that his choice of running mate, Gov Mike Pence (R-IN), over the years has been a stalwart champion of freedom of the press.
During his years in Congress, Pence was a leader in the persistent, but ultimately unsuccessful, effort to pass a shield law, which in many instances would protect journalists from being forced to identify confidential sources. In an op-ed in The Washington Times in 2008, Pence gave a ringing endorsement to the importance of an aggressive press in a free society, one that would have been right at home in a dispatch from the American Society of News Editors. But Pence stumbled mightily over the government/media relationship early in 2015 when his administration made plans to set up what essentially would have been a government-run news service. According to documents obtained by The Indianapolis Star, the news service was to feature articles by state press secretaries that would be published on a website and made available for use by news outlets around the state. Once the plan leaked, it was instantly derided as a ploy to disseminate government-sanctioned news that would be more at home in a totalitarian state than in a democracy.
News organizations have been preparing for the possibility of their employees covering political unrest during the Republican National Convention, with some offering training and equipment typically reserved for war correspondents. Yet even a body armor-clad reporter or photographer could miss the action if arrested.
The National Press Photographers Association recently conducted a series of trainings with Cleveland (OH) police to help minimize the chances that journalists will spend a few hours, or a night, in jail. Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel for the NPPA, described preventing the arrest of journalists as a “triple win.” “Officers and departments wouldn’t get sued for violating people’s constitutional rights,” he said. “Citizens and journalists would be able to exercise those rights. And ultimately the public would be informed as to what’s going on.” Osterreicher held those hour-and-a-half training sessions with police in June in Cleveland ― and more recently in Philadelphia (PA), site of next week’s Democratic National Convention. The NPPA received a grant from the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation of the Society of Professional Journalists for the trainings. “We greatly appreciate those departments’ willingness to help avoid unnecessary and improper interference, harassment and arrests of those doing nothing more than exercising a constitutional right,” the Society of Professional Journalists said.
Two of the largest US technology firms rolled out products recently that reflect a new normal for those who operate important online networks. Now under attack "constantly" by cyber criminals, government agents and other hackers, companies are finding the best way to keep their users and customers safe on the Internet is to innovate.
The new tools from Facebook and AT&T are designed to do just that in this heightened threat environment. After more than three years of development, AT&T demonstrated a new security tool in San Francisco (Ca) it says will allow it to respond to network threats 95% faster. The product, called Threat Intellect, combines machine learning analysis with all the data that AT&T has collected on myriad cyber threats. Facebook, meanwhile, launched a new encryption feature for users of its Messenger service. The so-called end-to-end encryption can be applied to any two users who select it for an online conversation. The technology produces a set of two encryption keys — known only to the users — that make it impossible even for Facebook to see the content of the messages.
A new lawsuit alleges that the US Department of Justice intentionally conducts inadequate searches of its records using a decades-old computer system when queried by citizens looking for records that should be available to the public. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) researcher Ryan Shapiro alleges “failure by design” in the DoJ’s protocols for responding to public requests. The FOIA law states that agencies must “make reasonable efforts to search for the records in electronic form or format”.
In an effort to demonstrate that the DoJ does not comply with this provision, Shapiro requested records of his own requests and ran up against the same roadblocks that stymied his progress in previous inquiries. A judge ruled in January that the FBI had acted in a manner “fundamentally at odds with the statute”. Now, armed with that ruling, Shapiro hopes to change policy across the entire department. Shapiro filed his suit on the 50th anniversary of Foia’s passage in July. FOIA requests to the FBI are processed by searching the Automated Case Support system (ACS), a software program that celebrates its 21st birthday this year. Not only are the records indexed by ACS allegedly inadequate, Shapiro said, but the FBI refuses to search the full text of those records as a matter of policy. When few or no records are returned, Shapiro said, the FBI effectively responds “sorry, we tried” without making use of the much more sophisticated search tools at the disposal of internal requestors.
© 1994-2024 Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. All Rights Reserved.
