Washington Post

New results released by the Centers for Disease Control reveal that two of every five American households have ditched their landlines for cellphones -- and there are interesting differences between the health of households that still have landlines and those that are wireless-only.

The data are part of a preliminary study from the National Health Interview Survey, a part of the CDC's statistics department that regularly conducts tens of thousands of phone and in-person interviews to get a snapshot of Americans' health.

In 2003, the agency decided to also look at how many households have landlines to better tailor its survey. Since then, it's become the most prominent government agency collecting the data. Overall, 39.1 percent of adults are in wireless-only households; that number goes up to 47.1 percent when the figure also includes children.

You may expect that young adults are primarily driving the trend toward households that only use cellphones -- something that has certainly been true in the past. But 2014 marked the first time that, by a slim majority, adults 35 and older make up the largest portion of households that rely solely on cellphones. In line with other studies looking at the demographics of technology use, Hispanic adults are also far more likely to be living in households that only had wireless phones.

[Commentary] Even those who believe the National Security Agency’s vacuum-cleaner surveillance of electronic communications does not trample privacy rights should be troubled by this practical implication: If you try to know everything, you end up knowing nothing.

The NSA is gathering and warehousing enormous amounts of private information, most of it irrelevant because it concerns innocent individuals -- mostly foreigners but some US citizens as well. By “innocent,” I mean the NSA is convinced these people have no involvement with any activity that poses a threat. But the agency keeps their information anyway.

Middle East experts at major US think tanks were recently hacked by Chinese cyberspies as events in Iraq began to escalate, according to a cybersecurity firm that works with the institutions.

The group behind the breaches, called "DEEP PANDA" by security researchers, appears to be affiliated with the Chinese government, says Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer of the firm CrowdStrike.

The company, which works with a number of think tanks on a pro bono basis, declined to name which ones have been breached. Alperovitch said the firm noticed a "radical" shift in DEEP PANDA's focus on June 18, the same day witnesses reported that Sunni extremists seized Iraq's largest oil refinery.

The Chinese group has typically focused on senior individuals at think tanks who follow Asia, said Alperovitch. But in June, it suddenly began targeting people with ties to Iraq and Middle East issues. This latest breach follows a pattern identified by experts of Chinese cyberspies targeting major Washington institutions, including think tanks and law firms.

It's rarely clear why Chinese cyberspies hack specific American targets, but experts say there are a few clues to why the DEEP PANDA group may have been interested in Middle East experts at think tanks.

Some of the United States’ bigger urban library systems have begun lodging a public protest against the formula federal rulemakers are considering for the distribution of billions of dollars for wireless Internet infrastructure.

The Federal Communications Commission is thinking of divvying up so-called E-Rate funds to libraries based on square footage rather than users or some other metric, a calculation that city libraries argue gives an unfair advantage to their more sprawling suburban counterparts. And now perhaps the biggest name in the US public libraries has dipped into the debate.

The New York Library system - a billion-dollar entity with 92 branches and some 17 million volumes -- sent a letter to the FCC under the signature of Anthony "Tony" Marx, its chief executive and president. Marx reiterated the "smaller footprints but higher attendance rates" argument made by his peers in Hartford, Memphis, Seattle and elsewhere, but he put a local twist on it, writing that Internet access and Internet-enabled training programs, like ESL classes, are "essential in helping to address the inequalities we face in New York City and across the country."

Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from US digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post. Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else. Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to US citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to US citizens or US residents. The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages -- and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama Administration has not been willing to address. Among the most valuable contents -- which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations -- are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into US computer networks.

[Commentary] The world was introduced to Kickstarter when our Web site went live in 2009. One thing we didn’t have to worry about: access to the Internet. We didn’t have to negotiate a deal with a cable company or other Internet service provider (ISP). Such roadblocks would have created enormous logistical and financial hurdles -- ones so big they might have shut us down before we got started.

But that’s the world that start-ups will be born into if the Federal Communications Commission moves forward with its proposed rules allowing paid prioritization -- a system where Internet carriers can charge for access to a “fast lane.” Once a fast lane exists, it will become the de facto standard on the Web. Sites unwilling or unable to pay up will be buffered to death: unloadable, unwatchable and left out in the cold.

It won’t be enough anymore to have a great idea and to execute it well. New entrepreneurs will have to pay their ISP tax, too. This proposed system would incentivize entrepreneurs to divert resources from their customers and staff and into paid deals with ISPs. Trading healthy competition for deep pockets is a terrible way to create an innovative, competitive economy.

It’s also a terrible way to promote a vibrant culture and informed citizenry. Allowing paid priority access and content discrimination would threaten the free exchange of ideas that takes place online, between people from all around the world, every second of every day. That free exchange is key to what makes the Internet such a powerful force.

[Strickler is chief executive and co-founder of Kickstarter]

Facebook's newsfeed study isn't just controversial among Internet users and academics, it turns out. Now, even the journal that published Facebook's research says it has reservations about having done so. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the top scientific journals in the country, said it was publishing an editorial expression of concern regarding Facebook's study.

Although Facebook didn't technically break any rules on human-subject research, the journal said, Facebook's research "may have involved practices that were not fully consistent with the principles of obtaining informed consent and allowing participants to opt out."

Expressions of concern are a way for scholarly journals to notify readers of potential problems in published research, though PNAS said it did not believe Facebook needed to comply with the paper's human-subject research policies. PNAS added in a statement to the Washington Post that the announcement was aimed at acknowledging concerns about the research and that it does not intend to investigate the study further.

The clash between Amazon.com and publishing giant Hachette has taken a new turn, as hundreds of authors asked readers to write e-mails to Amazon's chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos to protest the web retailer's tough tactics.

One letter, spearheaded by author Douglas Preston and signed by nearly 400 authors -- including Stephen King, Pulitzer Prize winner Robert A. Caro and novelist ames Patterson -- takes Amazon to task specifically for not accepting pre-orders on Hachette authors' books, not discounting the prices of many Hachette books and slowing the delivery of many Hachette titles to consumers' doorsteps.

"We have made Amazon many millions of dollars and over the years have contributed so much, free of charge, to the company by way of cooperation, joint promotions, reviews and blogs. This is no way to treat a business partner. Nor is it the right way to treat your friends," the authors wrote.

As far too many of us have learned as a result of the recession, the public library is often the only place where out-of-work Americans can go to apply for jobs and unemployment benefits online. In many cases, the only way libraries can afford to offer those services is with help from the federal government. Through a public program known as E-Rate, Washington gives institutions a bit of money each year to defray the costs of buying Internet service and equipment.

That initiative got a big boost recently, with the Federal Communications Commission announcing plans to spend $1 billion a year for the next two years on better Wi-Fi, amid a broader push to modernize the E-Rate program. Now the FCC has to decide how to divide up that $2 billion -- and libraries are smack in the center of a brewing fight about it. Library directors from five cities, including Seattle, Memphis and Hartford (CT), have sent letters to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler saying that they stand to be shortchanged if the commission moves forward with a plan to tie the money to the square footage of their facilities.

Under the proposal, the FCC would give libraries a budget for WiFi funding at a rate of $1 per square foot -- which some say isn't nearly enough. "Wi-Fi costs are not merely a function of the square footage of a room with wireless connectivity," wrote Matthew Poland, chief executive of the public library system in Hartford (CT). "Wi-Fi performance is a function of users."

Poland argued that other libraries -- such as those serving wealthy suburbanites -- tend to be bigger. Not only would the proposed formula give more funding to suburban facilities, but those libraries would be taking in money that might be put to better use elsewhere. Inner-city libraries, Poland wrote, serve more users in a tighter space; their patrons tend to be less wealthy and disproportionately unemployed or under-employed. The upshot: It isn't fair for large, rich libraries to get even more money when small, needy libraries might get less.

You would think a company that had just been accused of breaking the law would keep a low profile. But if we've learned anything about John Legere, the fiery chief executive of T-Mobile, it's that he doesn't do low-profile.

Days after the Federal Trade Commission charged T-Mobile with illegally charging consumers in a practice known as "cramming," Legere is turning his guns away from his usual targets -- the giants of the wireless industry -- and training his sights on Washington instead.

"On Tuesday of this week, we all got to see Washington politics and the big carrier lobbyists at their best," Legere wrote in a lengthy, rough-around-the-edges blog post. "While I love our democracy, I hate the way DC works sometimes [sic], and I just could not sit still and let them get away with it."

Legere's company has pushed back hard against the FTC's allegations, saying it no longer allows companies that peddle spammy horoscope information or sports scores to bill customers that never signed up for their services. "T-Mobile has in the past and will continue to keep our pledge to bill customers only for what they want and what they have purchased for as long as I am CEO of this company! NO EXCUSES!" Legere wrote.