1. Monthly archive
  2. July 2016

July 2016

House Passes FCC-Blocking Finance Bill

The House passed the (FY) 2017 Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill (HR 5485) that cuts the Federal Communications Commission budget and would prevent it from enforcing its network neutrality rules, implementing a new set-top box proposal, regulating broadband rates, or adopting new broadband privacy rules. The prohibition on the privacy rules was a last-minute addition to that laundry list thanks to an amendment from Rep Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)—approved by a vote of 232 to 187. The amendment prohibits "the use of funds to implement, administer or enforce any of the rules proposed in the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking adopted by the FCC on March 31, 2016 (FCC 16-39), intended to regulate consumer privacy obligations as necessitated by the FCC's net neutrality regime."

The vote on the underlying bill was 239 to 185. The White House has signaled it will almost certainly veto the bill if those provisions remained since President Barack Obama publicly called for the new Open Internet order reclassifying Internet service providers under Title II and backed "unlocking" set-top boxes.

Public Knowledge Opposes Reckless House Spending Bill Targeting FCC and Consumers

Public Knowledge condemns this latest attempt to hijack critical funding legislation with dozens of provisions that will actively harm Americans, generally dislodge government processes, and once more take aim at the Federal Communications Commission's ability to do its job.

The anti-set-top box language is particularly egregious. The Commission’s current proceeding has been mandated by Congress for 20 years and would relieve millions of consumers of rental fees they currently pay to Big Cable for their set-top boxes. These fees total around $20 billion a year, and consumers have no choice but to pay. The bill also contains three unnecessary provisions intended to scale back the FCC's network neutrality rules, a victory for consumers lauded by millions of Americans. These misguided attacks on the FCC's ability to protect consumers and ensure an open internet fly in the face of the will of Americans nationwide. We are hopeful that moving forward, Congress will reject any bill burdened with language that conflicts with its duty to act in the best interests of the American people.

Austin (TX): A Model for Cities Working to Narrow the Broadband Gap?

In Austin (TX), population 885,000, some 55,000 residents say they don't use the Internet — at all. But the City Council refuses to accept this. “It is critical that every one of our residents has access to digital and communications technology, and understands technology and its relevancy to their daily lives, whether for helping with their kids’ homework, or looking for jobs, getting access to health information or accessing online government information,” the council writes. And the city’s Office of Digital Inclusion is charged with making that vision a reality by working with a range of private-sector and nonprofit providers to ensure connectivity and encourage Internet use.

Austin’s effort has drawn kudos as a model of how municipalities can help to narrow the broadband gap, recently winning a Digital Inclusion Leadership Award from the National League of Cities. “To have a city office dedicated to this, that is a pretty strong indication of the seriousness that they are giving to it,” said Colin Rhinesmith, author of [The Benton Foundation's] Digital Inclusion and Meaningful Broadband Adoption Initiatives and a senior lecturer at Boston's Simmons College.

Privacy Shield data pact gets European approval

A revised pact governing European Union-US data flows has been approved by European governments. The Privacy Shield agreement replaces the previous accord, called Safe Harbour, that was struck down in October 2015. Safe Harbour let US companies self-certify that they were doing enough to protect data about Europeans. The European Court of Justice threw out Safe Harbour after leaks showed data was being spied upon.

Member states of the European Commission have given "strong support" to the Privacy Shield said the European Commission's Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova. She said the approval paved the way for the formal adoption of the agreement early during the week of July 11. "The EU-US Privacy Shield will ensure a high level of protection for individuals and legal certainty for business," said Commissioner Jourova. "It is fundamentally different from the old Safe Harbour." The adoption of the Privacy Shield ends months of uncertainty for many tech companies such as Google and Facebook after the European court found the Safe Harbour agreement wanting. The agreement covers everything from personal information about employees to the detailed records of what people do online, which is often used to aid targeted advertising.

House Majority Leader pushes to preserve President Obama’s tech fellow program

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarty (R-CA) is pushing a bill to protect one of President Barack Obama’s tech priorities after he leaves office. The GOP leader’s bill would put the force of law behind President Obama’s 2012 Presidential Innovation Fellows Program, which brings on a small number of tech-savvy employees from the private sector every year and places them around the government for short stints of service.

President Obama already signed an executive order in 2015 making the program permanent. At the time, President Obama said he hoped the program would help build “a government that’s as modern, as innovative, and as engaging as our incredible tech sector is.” While unlikely in the case of the fellows program, executive orders can always be undone by the next administration. That is not the case with legislation signed into law. The program was part of a 2008 campaign promise from President Obama and was created with the help of former White House Chief Technology Officer Todd Park.

Facebook to Add ‘Secret Conversations’, Encryption to Messenger App

In 2014, Messenger, a photo and text messaging service, appeared to be almost an afterthought at Facebook, the social networking giant. Messenger often took a back seat to the limelight enjoyed by WhatsApp, the messaging app that Facebook had bought for $19 billion. And Messenger’s capabilities were so limited that you could not send friends an animated GIF of a dancing Shiba Inu, as you could with many other messaging services. But since mid-2014, Facebook has been playing a furious game of catch-up with Messenger.

That June, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, hired a PayPal executive, David Marcus, to take over Messenger and build it into a world-class competitor. The company has added a string of features to the service, including letting people send money to friends through the app, pull up a voice or video call, or order a private car from inside the app. On July 8, Facebook said it will also begin testing “secret conversations” inside Messenger, a feature that offers end-to-end encryption on some messages to be read only on the two mobile devices that users are communicating with. While it stops short of the full encryption that other messaging services like WhatsApp have adopted, it gives Messenger a heightened mode of security that Facebook hopes will attract global audiences to download the app.

FTC and Florida Charge Tech Support Operation with Tricking Consumers Into Paying Millions for Bogus Services

The Federal Trade Commission and State of Florida have taken action against defendants who ran an international tech support operation and allegedly misrepresented to consumers that malware or hackers had compromised their computers and that the operation was associated with or certified by Microsoft and Apple to fix their computers. A federal court has temporarily shut down the defendants’ operation, frozen their assets, and placed control of the businesses with a court-appointed receiver. The complaint alleges that defendants, based in Florida, Iowa, Nevada, and Canada, relied on a combination of deceptive online ads and misleading, high-pressure sales tactics to frighten consumers into spending hundreds of dollars for dubious computer “repairs” and antivirus software.

“Scammers like these use incredibly deceptive tactics that make consumers think they are receiving warnings from legitimate technology companies,” said Jessica Rich, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “We are proud to work with the Florida Attorney General’s Office to put an end to these fraudulent practices.” According to the complaint, the defendants caused consumers’ computers to display advertisements designed to resemble security alerts from Microsoft or Apple. These ads warned consumers that their computers could be infected with malware and urged them to call a toll-free number in the ad to safeguard both their computer and sensitive personal information stored on it.

The Department of Defense is looking for a few good hackers

The Defense Department is hosting a huge hacking competition in August to highlight vulnerabilities in the world’s growing network of “smart” devices — what is sometimes called the Internet of things. The contest, hosted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is designed to pit machine against machine in what DARPA calls the “world’s first automated network defense tournament.”

Smart televisions, wearable technologies and home appliances that can be connected to the Internet aren’t always designed with cybersecurity in mind. More important, critical connected infrastructure such as traffic lights, utility systems and power grids may be susceptible to cyberattacks, according to DARPA.To address these weaknesses, it may be necessary to automate the process of identifying and fixing software vulnerabilities, but the machines making the fixes must perform as well as human experts, DARPA officials said.

Commerce Data Service: A Tale of Two Pillars

[Commentary] Fun fact: The world’s premier weather watcher, storm chaser and climate monitor – aka, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – gathers enough data every single day to fill the Library of Congress twice. The public also owns countless other terabytes of data that the Department of Commerce produces every day: Economic data, from jobs to paychecks to the products and services we make, provide and sell. Trade data – imports and exports – drilled down to the commodity and the community. Patent and trademark data about inventions and brands, from the first patent in 1790 for Samuel Hopkins’ crop fertilizer ingredient, signed by President Washington, to Patent 9371560 last month for, “methods for the automated reconstruction of a genotype of a gene, fragment, or genomic region using exhaustive enumeration.” The list of invaluable data that Commerce produces goes on and on.

As Secretary Pritzker said, Commerce is “America’s Data Agency.” “No other department,” she said, “can rival the reach, depth, and breadth of our data programs.” I’ve reiterated in my blogs how making the vast trove of Commerce data more accessible, useful and usable to the nation is one of the five pillars of Secretary Pritzker’s “Open for Business” strategy. And now ESA is on point to help advance the data pillar. But another job we all share is to advance one of the other five pillars, operational excellence.

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