Lauren Frayer

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has told Congress he does not plan to close the set-top box docket, but signaled that was because it could still have some deregulatory legs. That came in a letter released April 21 in the FCC's periodic batch of chairman responses to congressional inquiries. Republican members of the House Commerce Committee had asked Chairman Pai to close the docket after FCC chairman Tom Wheeler was unable to get three Democratic votes for his "unlock the box," then "unlock the app" proposals.

Chairman Pai did not support Wheeler's approach and reiterated that in the letter. "I share your goal of promoting a clear, consumer-focused, fair, and competitive regulatory path for video programming delivery," he wrote. "Because I do not believe that the set-top box Order circulated by my immediate predecessor furthered this goal, I have removed it from circulation. As such, it is no longer pending before the Commission, and I do not intend to resurrect it." He said he agreed with closing dockets no longer under active consideration, but that it would be premature to put the set-top item in that category because in the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, which never got voted, there were unrelated issues teed up, including and in particular, on whether the FCC should eliminate the CableCARD reporting requirement.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is set to launch a community-driven online news service in response to the widespread distribution of deliberately misleading information masquerading as news. The project, Wikitribune, will be a hybrid model in which paid journalists will work with a broad network of contributors.

“We want to bring some of that fact-based, fact-checking mentality that we know from Wikipedia to news,” Wales says. Wikitribune will be financed through a crowdfunding campaign, launching April 24, that will determine the size of the initial team. Wales describes the core editorial mission of the platform as “facts matter” and intends that the site will be able to support “original reporting and investigative journalism”. “What’s fundamentally interesting is to get money to journalists to go out and research news stories,” Wales says. “One of the things that community guidance can do is to help figure out what do we not know? What are the things we need to know? Then you’ve got a lot of minds thinking about and discussing that this is the piece of the puzzle that needs more research.”

Google is demoting misleading and offensive content in its search by updating algorithms and offering users new ways to report bad results. The change follows increased attention to flaws in top search results, including the promotion of fake news — and deliberately misleading or false information formatted to look like news — during the 2016 presidential election.

Google said it has updated its algorithms to better prioritize “authoritative” content. Content may be deemed authoritative based on signals such as affiliation of a site with a university or verified news source, how often other sites link to the site in question and the quality of the sites that link. “We’ve adjusted our signals to help surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content, so that issues similar to the Holocaust denial results that we saw back in December are less likely to appear,” writes Ben Gomes, Google’s executive in charge of search, in a blog post published today. Additionally, users can now flag autocomplete features and highlighted results that are offensive, false or otherwise problematic. “We plan to use this feedback to help improve our algorithms,” writes Gomes.

Broadband networks are increasingly important to our national well-being and everyday lives. As such, we must maximize their availability and ensure that all Americans can take advantage of the variety of services that broadband enables, including 21st century health care. In this Public Notice, the Federal Communications Commission seeks information on how it can help enable the adoption and accessibility of broadband-enabled health care solutions, especially in rural and other underserved areas of the country. We expect to use this information to identify actions that the FCC can take to promote this important goal.

This Public Notice seeks comment, data, and information on a broad range of regulatory, policy, technical, and infrastructure issues related to the emerging broadband-enabled health and care ecosystem. Commenters should address the agency’s authority on all issues raised in this Notice. The comment, data, and information requested are intended to provide the Commission with a broader understanding and perspective on the current state of broadband health technology and other related issues; and it will also inform the Connect2Health Task Force's work and recommendations.
Comments due May 24, 2017; reply comments due June 8, 2017. [GN Docket No. 16-46]

"Who is the focus of these laws? Is it about protecting us, and giving us all the information we need and allowing us to make informed choices?" asked Molly Wood. "Or is it about allowing Comcast to keep up with Google and Facebook when it comes to business models that rely on your personal data? I think that is a tension that's part of being American."

That's more or less true, according to experts we talked with. Especially as new regulations spread through the European Union, privacy laws abroad are generally more comprehensive, easy to understand and consumer-friendly than the laws in the U.S. "[They have] this idea that privacy is something that's quite central, that it could be thought of in terms of if property rights," said Indiana University associate professor Scott Shackelford, who teaches cybersecurity law. "Having privacy be the starting point and carving out free speech."

In his first public appearance since leaving the White House in January, former president Barack Obama told young leaders that "special interests dominate the debates in Washington" and that he had failed to realize his "aspirational" goal of uniting Americans in red and blue states. "That was an aspirational comment," the former president said of his famous 2004 Democratic National Convention speech, prompting laughter from the audience at the University of Chicago.

He added that when talking to individual Americans from different political backgrounds, you learn that "there’s a lot more that people have in common" than it would appear. "But, obviously, it’s not true when it comes to our politics and our civic life." Obama, who has kept a relatively low public profile since the end of his second term, did not mention President Trump once during the 90-minute event. But he said he was determined to galvanize younger Americans to do more politically because they were the ones best positioned to bridge the current political divide.

US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced the hiring of Liz Hill as the Education Department's press secretary. Prior to joining the Department, Hill served as communications director for US Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, between 2016-2017, and as communications director to US Rep. Luke Messer (R-IN), chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, between 2013-2016. A former television news reporter and morning news anchor from 2005-2013, Hill has a BA in communications from Brigham Young University and a master's in strategic public relations from The George Washington University.

A blindness to boundaries is not uncommon for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. But in Travis Kalanick, that led to a pattern of repeatedly going too far at Uber, including the duplicity with Apple, sabotaging competitors and allowing the company to use a secret tool called Greyball to trick some law enforcement agencies. To develop its own business, Uber sidestepped the authorities. Some employees started using a tool called Greyball to deceive officials trying to shut down Uber’s service. The tool, developed to aid driver safety and to trick fraudsters, essentially showed a fake version of Uber’s app to some people to disguise the locations of cars and drivers. It soon became a way for Uber drivers to evade capture by law enforcement in places where the service was deemed illegal.

Uber engineers assigned a persistent identity to iPhones with a small piece of code, a practice called “fingerprinting.” Uber could then identify an iPhone and prevent itself from being fooled even after the device was erased of its contents. There was one problem: Fingerprinting iPhones broke Apple’s rules. Apple CEO Tim Cook believed that wiping an iPhone should ensure that no trace of the owner’s identity remained on the device. So Kalanick told his engineers to “geofence” Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino (CA) a way to digitally identify people reviewing Uber’s software in a specific location. Uber would then obfuscate its code for people within that geofenced area, essentially drawing a digital lasso around those it wanted to keep in the dark. Apple employees at its headquarters were unable to see Uber’s fingerprinting.

Mass hacking seems to be all the rage currently. A vigilante hacker apparently slipped secure code into vulnerable cameras and other insecure networked objects in the "Internet of Things" so that bad guys can't corral those devices into an army of zombie computers, like what happened with the record-breaking Mirai denial-of-service botnet. The Homeland Security Department issued alerts with instructions for fending off similar “Brickerbot malware,” so-named because it bricks IoT devices. And perhaps most unusual, the FBI recently obtained a single warrant in Alaska to hack the computers of thousands of victims in a bid to free them from the global botnet, Kelihos. On April 5, Deborah M. Smith, chief magistrate judge of the US District Court in Alaska, greenlighted this first use of a controversial court order. Critics have since likened it to a license for mass hacking

The cable industry supports 2.9 million jobs with an economic impact of $421 billion. That is according to an economic impact study by Bortz Media and Sports Group commissioned by NCTA–The Internet & Television Association. “Whether its building the powerful broadband networks that are transforming our lives or creating the award-winning TV that is entertaining us, this industry continues to be one of the most significant contributors to our nation’s economy,” said Michael Powell, president and CEO of NCTA–The Internet & Television Association. “We are not only an American industry with employees in every corner of the country but we employ people of all different skill levels and backgrounds, providing important jobs for hard working citizens everywhere.”