USAToday

President Barack Obama uses email as part of a specialized system allowing him to send and receive messages from only a limited number of high-ranking administration officials, the White House said.

"There are some common-sense security measures that have put in place to protect the president's e-mail. I think for obvious reasons, we don't discuss a lot of those measures publicly," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said. "But the fact that it's not easy to predict exactly what the president's e-mail address is, is in fact one of those measures." The White House has acknowledged Obama's email use since the earliest days of his presidency, saying he uses it to keep in touch with a small circle of friends and senior officials. But the subject reemerged following revelations that President Obama used a pseudonym in his emails to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Comcast plans to begin offering its own wireless service by the middle of 2017.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said the company planned to launch a wireless service by the middle of 2017. The service would deliver connectivity over the Verizon Wireless network and Comcast's own millions of Wi-Fi hotspots around the US. It essentially would be, he said, "the Verizon network maybe improved with our 15 million hotspots." Comcast can lease bandwidth on Verizon's network as part of a Justice Department agreement four years ago in which Verizon bought $3.6 billion in wireless spectrum from Comcast and other pay-TV companies. Current Comcast customers -- and those within its service areas -- would be able to sign up for larger bundles of Comcast services with the availability of wireless service added to current TV, broadband and phone offerings. "We believe there is a big payback with reduced churn, more stickiness, better satisfaction and better product purchasing," Roberts said.

New York City wants its broadband and is taking on Verizon for failing to deliver. City officials have told Verizon Communications that it considers the telecommunications provider in default of its agreement to provide broadband and pay-TV services throughout the city. Verizon, which is headquartered in New York City, says its agreement with New York covers only cable TV and that the terms of the 12-year agreement, signed in 2008, are being met.

"The City has now chosen not to work with us to resolve impractical processes for getting access to more buildings which seems at odds with bringing the benefits of competition to New Yorkers," Verizon spokesman Ray McConville said. This isn't the first time that New York City and Verizon have had conflicting views of their agreement. In June 2015, the city released an audit that found Verizon had failed in extending its FiOS network throughout the city by June 30, 2014. "Through a thorough and comprehensive audit, we have determined that Verizon substantially failed to meet its commitment to the people of New York City,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said at the time.

A federal appeals court has dismissed a case brought by the Federal Trade Commission against AT&T for throttling, or slowing data speeds, on millions of customers with unlimited smartphone data plans. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in a decision filed Aug 29, reversed a lower court's denial of AT&T's motion to dismiss the throttling lawsuit. The appeals court ruled that because AT&T was a common carrier, the service provider cannot be held liable for the violations that the FTC brought in its case.

The FTC filed the complaint in October 2014 charging that the nation's second-largest wireless carrier failed to adequately unlimited-data customers that their data speeds are reduced, or throttled, if they use too much data in a given billing cycle. Throttling would often make many common smartphone functions such as using the Web, getting directions and streaming video difficult or nearly impossible to use. The FTC had alleged that AT&T began throttling data speeds in 2011 and, overall, throttled at least 3.5 million unlimited data customers a total of more than 25 million times. AT&T did not offer new unlimited plan contracts after June 2010, but customers who had them could keep them. AT&T and other carriers that offered unlimited plans at the time argued that at some point they must throttle customers who used excessive amounts of data as part of network management. "We're pleased with the decision," AT&T said.

[Commentary] In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a standard view of how we would interact with a personal computer: we were sitting at a desk, with a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse. Today, computing is very different. We still use desktops, but we also have laptops, tablet computers, smart phones, and some of us even have wearable computers such as the Apple Watch. And that "we" includes people with disabilities, who are a part of this rich, flexible world of computing but access it differently.

People who are deaf or hard of hearing need captioning for video, or transcripts of audio. People who are blind need a Web page to have appropriate markup, such as text describing the images (such as the shopping cart icon on a retail website), and appropriate labels on forms (e.g. “first name”, “last name”, “city”), so that they can listen to the Web page using a screen reader such as VoiceOver, JAWS, Window-Eyes, or NVDA. Having the same level of interaction, the same ease of use, the same access to content, is a form of innovation. It's also a civil right.

[Jonathan Lazar is a Professor of Computer and Information Sciences at Towson University.]

While playing the popular augmented reality game Pokémon Go in Long Beach (CA), a city which is nearly 50% white, Aura Bogado made an unsettling discovery -- there were far more Pokéstops and gyms, locations where people pick up virtual goods or battle one another, than in her predominantly minority neighborhood in Los Angeles. It turns out Niantic, which makes Pokémon Go, relied on a map from a previous augmented reality game called Ingress, which was crowd-sourced from its mostly male, tech-savvy players. The result is a high concentration of Pokéstops in commercial and downtown areas of some cities, while there are typically fewer Pokéstops in non-white or residential areas, if there are any at all. The Urban Institute says the racial divides in the game amount to redlining — a term used when a community is cut off from essential services based on its racial or ethnic make-up. “Inequity is not just in one police shooting, it’s not just in one prison, it’s not just in 100 potholes in one certain area on the black side of town – it’s everywhere,” Bogado said. “It’s built into the fabric of society, and increasingly built into our technology."

The race to deliver the highest possible broadband speeds is on, with companies like Alphabet (Google Fiber), AT&T (GigaPower) and Comcast (Gigabit Internet) vying to deliver lightning fast Internet. But while most everyone agrees that the zippiest network speeds coupled with low latencies will ultimately provide a boon to consumers, it is not necessarily obvious how that future might play out, much less how soon we could get there?

To help every day folks imagine what’s possible, CableLabs, a non-profit innovation and R&D lab founded by leading companies in the cable industry, has released a short promotional film called “The Near Future,” to outline its vision through family vignettes. CEO Phil McKinney maintains it is about showing “what we believe the home of the future will look like that will require high-speed networks.” McKinney is talking network speeds of 1-gigabit-per-second, 3Gbps, and ultimately 10Gbps. CableLabs has been pushing a telecommunication standard called DOCSIS, shorthand for Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification. It's an approach for delivering fiber-like speeds over existing cable lines.

It appears Verizon wasn't done making acquisitions. One week after snagging the core assets of ailing tech giant Yahoo for $4.8 billion, Verizon announced it will acquire fleet management solutions company Fleetmatics for about $2.4 billion. The Dublin-based Fleetmatics boasts technology to allow small- and medium-sized companies to manage mobile workforces. The company employs 1,200 workers, and serves 37,000 customers as of March of 2016. "Fleetmatics is a market leader in North America -- and increasingly internationally," said Andrés Irlando, CEO of Verizon Telematics. The deal is expected to close during the fourth quarter of 2016.

John Legere wishes Verizon luck with its pending acquisition of Yahoo’s core assets. T-Mobile’s CEO, never shy about bashing rivals, kept up the refrain when asked about Verizon's $4.8 billion Yahoo deal, which Verizon executives hope will make it a major competitor in mobile media.

“It becomes clear that they see customers as units of advertising revenue,” Legere said, noting Verizon has spent over $10 billion, including on AOL, to make this transformation into a media platform. “They’re going into that game against the most powerful companies, Facebook and Google. I think it’s going to be a slippery slope for them.” Legere added that, “I don’t think it impacts us.”

Demand is spreading far faster than Google Fiber is. Fiber operates only in a handful of cities, with six more being built out, and it's in discussion with 13 more cities. Consumers on social media are vocal about wanting it in their cities, and mayors — eager to flaunt access to cutting edge Internet – vie to be chosen by Google.

The slow pace of expansion is frustrating some consumers and it's allowing competitors to race ahead. Among them: AT&T, whose GigaPower Network is already in 25 major metropolitan areas and is expanding to an additional 31, many of them this year. AT&T is also experimenting with a 5G wireless service in Austin (TX) with speeds of up to 14 gigabits per second in early tests. Comcast has rolled out gigabit service in Atlanta (GA) and Nashville (TN), and plans to introduce it this year in Chicago (IL), Detroit (MI) and Miami (FL) with more markets coming. It also offers 2-gigabits-a-second service called Gigabit Pro. And Comcast is testing a new wireless service that delivers speeds approaching one gigabit. Welcome to the gigabit wars. Who will win? You.