Welcome to BarelyAdequate.info!

Computers are marvelous machines. They have revolutionized the way we work, the way we communicate, the way we shop, the way we live. But that same technology is also disruptive: it threatens to radically change or make obsolete whole methods of commerce; makes it infinitely harder for members of governments to hide their excesses and misdeeds from the citizens they allegedly serve; makes it easier for citizens to secure their activities, records and communications from surveillance by government, law enforcement and corporate interests who have grown used to spying on us unasked; and gives those same government and corporate interests powerful new tools to search for and aggregate data about us.

The focus of this page is to provide commentary on news events that concern the intersection of technology, law, politics and the freedoms granted to citizens by the US Constitution; and illuminate attacks upon these freedoms by bureaucrats, law-enforcement officials, Congresscritters, government agencies domestic and foreign, and numerous moneyed interests. Many of the articles commented on here will also deal with what, for lack of a better term, I call "fairness in the digital age." And because I am a techie, I'll also comment on cool technological happenings in my industry, and uncool ones as well!

Some of those in positions of power — particularly in government, law enforcement and certain key industries — feel that if they are to preserve their power over society and/or protect their profits as we move into the digital age, the law needs to be changed to the detriment of our freedoms! Every time I learn about one of these issues, you will read about it here!

Once again, welcome to BarelyAdequate.info! Enjoy your stay and come back often!

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Last Updated: February 1st 2012



January 24th 2012



The continuing battle over the PROTECT IP or PIPA in the Senate and Stopping Online Piracy Act or SOPA in the House continue to polarize Congress and bring out supporters and detractors:

In an telling article titled Why The Movie Industry Can't Innovate and the Result is SOPA, Steve Blank notes:

This year the movie industry made $30 billion (1/3 in the U.S.) from box-office revenue.

But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion. Where did the other $57 billion come from?

From sources that the studios at one time claimed would put them out of business: Pay-per view TV, cable and satellite channels, video rentals, DVD sales, online subscriptions and digital downloads.

The music and movie business has been consistently wrong in its claims that new platforms and channels would be the end of its businesses. In each case, the new technology produced a new market far larger than the impact it had on the existing market.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has scheduled a hearing the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on January 18th to hear testimony from technology experts including: former Department of Homeland Security policy director Stewart Baker; venture capitalist Brad Burnham; DNS expert Dan Kaminsky; American Civil Liberties Union attorney Michael Macleod-Ball; Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier; Leonard Napolitano, director of the Center for Computer Sciences & Information Technology at Sandia National Laboratories; and Reddit.com co-founder Alexis Ohanian.

In a Forbes Magazine article titled Online Piracy Bills Rely on Ignorance, Fiction — Not Facts, Understanding and Reality, Ed Black, President & CEO of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, warns:

[MPAA head Jack Valenti] told Congress in 1982 the VCR was as dangerous to the American public as the Boston strangler was to a woman home alone. Yet home video is now Hollywood’s most profitable business. The two bills are similar in key ways and both will extinguish innocent parties.

With such unreliable claims of copyright harm, serious doubts about effectiveness, and the risk to the dynamism of the Internet economy, we ask lawmakers to weigh these realities and study the technology itself and how the Internet operates — seeking advice from cybersecurity experts and those who understand Internet architecture — before voting on these flawed bills.

Want to boycott businesses that support SOPA? There’s an app for that! Really. At least for Android phones. Scan a product’s barcode and it will let you know if its maker supports SOPA!

As I mentioned earlier, the mainstream press has virtually ignored the debate over SOPA, because it’s corporate owners are backing the law! So Free Press has posted a site that you can visit to send a message to Big Media asking them to end their SOPA news blackout!

Comcast reported that it has finished upgrading its system to support DNSSEC, which is "a set of extensions to DNS, which provide: a) origin authentication of DNS data, b) data integrity, and c) authenticated denial of existence." The Domain Name System is essentially the Internet’s "phone book" which tells users’ computers where to find Web site servers. The Internet community has been moving for years to deploy this improvement to make it harder for bad guys to hijack traffic intended for one site and send it to another (a process called DNS redirection) . . . which is the process SOPA is asking ISPs to use! This means that Comcast is effectively no longer able to use DNS filters to block websites! So if SOPA passes, Comcast can no longer comply with it! Too bad, so sad!

January 18th was Web Blackout Day, where Web sites blacked out portions of their sites in protest over SOPA and PIPA, in an attempt to warn users of the consequences if these bills become law!

The White House finally posted a press release communicating the President’s intent to veto SOPA or PIPA if they come to him in their current form, saying:

Proposed laws must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the Domain Name System (DNS), a foundation of Internet security. Our analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online. We must avoid legislation that drives users to dangerous, unreliable DNS servers and puts next-generation security policies, such as the deployment of DNSSEC, at risk.

Faced with numerous protests and a veto threat, the House tabled SOPA. until a consensus could be reached. But although this is a battle won, the war is far from over. The MPAA and fellow travelers are committed to getting a law passed to block illegal content. Fortunately the tech world has finally woken up and is now paying close attention. But as ZDNet’s David Gewirtz warned:

Do not let your guard down. This anti-piracy idiocy is too deeply entrenched in the DNA of the entertainment industry to ever (ever!) go away.

The "hacktivist" group Anonymous took down websites belonging to the Department of Justice; Big Media front groups the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and record companies Warner Music Group, BMI, and Universal Music; for supporting SOPA and PIPA.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) posted an open letter on Huffington Post asking everyone to keep up the fight to stop SOPA & PIPA, saying:

We are up against a group of the biggest, most powerful, well-funded and well-organized interest groups in Washington. No one thought millions of Internet users would speak up or that those voices could overcome the power of these interests. Today you showed that the Internet is not just a platform for ideas, commerce, and expression, but also for political action that will defend those principles. Your voices must continue to be heard.

Senator Wyden put a hold on PIPA and has vowed to filibuster if necessary to stop its passage.

Tech journalist Jeff Jarvis, in a Huffington Post article titled We Are the Lobbyists Now, sees the Web Blackout event as a sea change in politics, saying:

In the discussion about the movement yesterday, I heard someone in Washington quoted, saying that these geeks should hire lobbyists like everyone else.

No, we're all lobbyists now, and that's just as it should be. This movement didn't need influence peddlers. It didn't need political commercials. It didn't need media. It needed only citizens who give a shit. Democracy.

I'm delighted that the discussion rose to the level of principles, a discussion I've argued has to take place if we, the internet public, are to protect our tool of publicness.

There's much more going on under this battle: the disruption of media business models, a fundamental change in our view of the value of content, the undercutting of institutions' power, the lowering of national boundaries. But for now, nevermind that and concentrate on what was born yesterday: a political movement, a movement whose cause is freedom.

In an InfoWorld article titled Twitter, Facebook fuel SOPA protests, Sharon Gaudin notes:

A lot of the interest and concern about the protests germinated from a flood of tweets and status updates in recent weeks on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other social networks. Multiple Internet companies, along with everyday users, took to various social networks to spread the word and build opposition to the bills.

Technology company founder Patrick Gray, in a ZDNet article titled Where SOPA supporters went wrong, noted:

It’s probably fair to say that most Americans understand that intellectual property theft is not a victimless crime, but where the outrage over SOPA comes in is that it brings out the worst in heavy-handed government intervention to a problem that seems a bit petty when couched against other socioeconomic challenges. I would imagine the bipartisan majority that signaled their support for SOPA spent about eight seconds considering the law before concluding something to the effect of: How can anyone be against IP theft? What they didn’t realize was that the law provided a howitzer-sized deterrent to a peashooter problem. Couple this with volumes of copyright law and SOPA feels a bit like double-secret probation: punishing an activity that’s already illegal with particularly draconian countermeasures.

In a Media Matters article titled News Networks Ignore Controversial SOPA Legislation, Ben Dimiero notes:

As the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) makes its way through Congress, most major television news outlets — MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS, and NBC — have ignored the bill during their evening broadcasts. One network, CNN, devoted a single evening segment to it.

He goes on to report:

ABC and CBS are listed as supporters of the bill on the House Judiciary Committee website, along with Comcast/NBCUniversal (which owns MSNBC and NBC News), Viacom (CBS), News Corporation (Fox News), and Time Warner (CNN). Disney Publishing Worldwide, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Corporation, which owns ABC, is also listed as a supporter, as are other Disney properties such as ESPN and Hyperion publishing.

To their credit, the online arms of most of these news outlets have posted regular articles about the fight over the legislation, but their primetime TV broadcasts remain mostly silent.

This brings up a good point: if you are solely dependant on television for your news, you are not properly informed!



The Suffolk County, Massachusetts, District Attorney has subpoenaed Twitter for records associated with the Occupy Boston movement during the time clashes occurred between protesters and police in Boston's Dewey Square. Free speech advocates view the subpoenas as a violation of the First Amendment.



A Cato Institute study shows that MPAA statistics quoted by Rep. Lamar Smith to support SOPA show that, if enacted, the law wouldn't save any jobs for the U.S. economy! The author notes:

As one expert consulted by GAO put it, "effects of piracy within the United States are mainly redistributions within the economy for other purposes and that they should not be considered as a loss to the overall economy." In many cases — I’ve seen research suggesting it’s about 80 percent for music — a U.S. consumer would not have otherwise purchased an illicitly downloaded song or movie if piracy were not an option. Here, the result is actually pure consumer surplus: The downloader enjoys the benefit, and the producer loses nothing. In the other 20 percent of cases, the result is a loss to the content industry, but not a let loss to the economy, since the money just ends up being spent elsewhere. If you’re concerned about the overall jobs picture, as opposed to the fortunes of a specific industry, there is no good reason to think eliminating piracy by U.S. users would yield any jobs on net, though it might help boost employment in copyright-intensive sectors.

In a 55-minute video you really need to watch, Canadian journalist and science fiction author Cory Doctorow warns about the slippery slope we are on if we let special interests try to throttle the general-purpose nature of computers and the Internet. Here’s a brief excerpt:

. . . it doesn't take a science fiction writer to understand why regulators might be nervous about the user-modifiable firmware on self-driving cars, or limiting interoperability for aviation controllers, or the kind of thing you could do with bio-scale assemblers and sequencers. Imagine what will happen the day that Monsanto determines that it's really... really... important to make sure that computers can't execute programs that cause specialized peripherals to output organisms that eat their lunch... literally. Regardless of whether you think these are real problems or merely hysterical fears, they are nevertheless the province of lobbies and interest groups that are far more influential than Hollywood and big content are on their best days, and every one of them will arrive at the same place — "can't you just make us a general purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can't you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?"

And personally, I can see that there will be programs that run on general purpose computers and peripherals that will even freak me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general purpose computers will find a receptive audience for their positions. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, or protocols, or messages, will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy; and as we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits; all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship, which is why all this stuff matters. Because we've spent the last 10+ years as a body sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it's just been the mini-boss at the end of the level, and the stakes are only going to get higher.

If you’d rather read, the transcript is here.



Barnes & Noble was reported to be considering spinning off of its Nook business from its brick-and-mortar bookstore business, which, like most bookstore companies, is seeing steadily-reducing sales. Makes sense to me: since I bought my Nook Tablet, I’ve bought all my e-books online, and I don’t expect I’ll be going into another bookstore again. Multiply that by the millions of book lovers who "went digital" by getting a Nook or Kindle over the holidays, and you can see where the book market is headed.

However, Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch basically said "no way," (video) when asked about a spin-off, saying:

Speed isn't a factor here. We may do nothing. We called it [examining a spinoff] an exploratory. If you look at that business, in two years, it's an amazingly valuable space. The world of digital copyright content will continue to grow. We grew share faster than anybody in e-books last year, apparently, according to publishers. We continued to do that last week coming off a holiday. We think it's undervalued.

Barnes & Noble reported that holiday sales of the Nook line were up 70 percent over last year, driven by sales of the Nook Tablet.



Speaking of Nook, here’s an unexpected side benefit I discovered after buying my Nook Tablet: I am a huge fan of Science Fiction (or SciFi as its abbreviated), and quickly found that if you go directly to the publishers’ Web sites you have a much better selection, often at better prices! For instance Baen Books, which publishes much of the SciFi I read, was one of the first publishers to embrace eBooks, and sells them in all formats. They also have a Baen Free Library, where their authors can voluntarily post full-length e-books of their choice that you can download for free! They are usually the first books in a series, so it’s a great way to discover new authors and series for free! They also sell what they call eARCs, or electronic Advance Reader Copies, which they describe as, "an unproofed manuscript guaranteed to be full of typos and errors. It is pretty much raw from the author’s word processor. But you get the entire eARC well in advance of even the WebScription release." Sort of like beta books! I imagine other publishers offer similar enhancements.



Jonathan Peters, a lawyer and the Frank Martin Fellow at the Missouri School of Journalism, wrote an insightful article for The Nation titled What Are the Rights of Reporters Covering Protests?. Interesting stuff.



A federal judge in Missouri ruled that the FBI did not need a warrant to attach a GPS device to a suspect's car and track his location for two months, saying the plaintiff had no reasonable expectation of privacy.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court ruled, "The Government's attachment of the GPS device to the vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle's movements, constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment."



Federal prosecutors in Denver, Colorado are seeking a court order that would force a defendant to enter the password to decrypt her laptop computer. They are looking for files that would help convict her and her former husband in an alleged mortgage fraud scheme that stole more than US $900,000 from banks in the Colorado Springs area. Interestingly, prosecutors aren’t asking her to divulge her password; only enter it so they can gain access to the information on the computer. Assuming a judge rules they have probable cause and issues a warrant, this is the right way to go about getting the information. Good on them.



Hard drive prices are finally starting to drop. The Western Digital 2TB Caviar Black drive I’ve been tracking the price of is down to $226. That’s a far cry from the $127 it cost before the Thai floods, but almost $50 less than two weeks ago.



Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has scheduled a hearing on January 18th to hear testimony from techies about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Scheduled to testify are Stewart Baker, the former Department of Homeland Security policy director; DNS expert Dan Kaminsky of DKH; Brad Burnham, Partner at Union Square Ventures; Michael Macleod-Ball, attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union; Lanham Napier, chief executive officer of Rackspace; Leonard Napolitano, director of the Center for Computer Sciences & Information Technology at Sandia National Laboratories; and Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit.com.



Google is rumored to be developing a 7-inch tablet PC for release in March or April. It will run the Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" OS, and is targeted to compete with Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet, not the larger, pricier iPad.



Intel and Apple have developed a new 10 Gbps I/O port technology called Thunderbolt, which allows direct transfer of data between PCI Express (PCIe) and DisplayPort-connected components on two computers or devices.



NASA is gathering all its open-source software and is making it available on its Code NASA Web-site.



The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) has issued a report on the Election Systems & Software (ES&S) DS200 electronic ballot scanning device, saying that it misreads ballots, fails to log critical system events and is subject to freezes and sudden lockups!



The Consumer Electronics Show was held earlier this month in Las Vegas. For those who don’t know, CES is typically when the Next Big Things in consumer electronics, computers and software are first unveiled. Highlights of the convention (from my perspective of course!):

• Microsoft's Steve Ballmer made the keynote address, which was more a sit-down Q&A with Ryan Seacrest. The talk concentrated on Windows 8, Windows Phone, and a February 1 release of Kinect for the PC .



• Android-based smart TVs are here! Lenovo was showing off their Android K91, a 55-inch 240Hz LCD HDTV, with 3D and IPS support, running the full Android 4.0 OS. In addition to "regular" TV, it has built-in on-demand video and can run Android apps (Angry Birds on a 55-inch screen!). Unfortunately, Lenovo isn’t planning a US release so far. But this is a good sign of what’s coming in this space!



• New smart phones displayed include the Nokia Lumia 900 running Windows Phone, the new Droid 4 and Droid RAZR MAXX from Motorola,



• Apple wasn’t at CES (gasp!) but rumors about a new iPad 3 release in March were!



• There were a large number of new tablet PCs on display at CES, but ZDNet’s John Hiner suggests that they are not focusing on the right features. Echoing what I suggested last month, Mr. Hiner notes:
  

  . . . the technology market is no longer dominated by technology lovers. Google, Samsung, ASUS, Acer, Toshiba, and others like them need to stop acting like the PC clone makers of the 1980s and 90s, and thinking as if they’re building computers for the technically-inclined. The market is a lot bigger than that today and it’s now dominated by people who couldn’t care less about a gigahertz or a megapixel.
  
  . . . If you look at the two tablets that have succeeded — the Apple iPad and the Amazon Kindle Fire — both Apple and Amazon have treated their tablets as simple screens connected to powerful sets of software and services. Amazon spent a year getting its services lined up before it even launched its tablet, and that turned out to be a brilliant move.
  



• Liftmaster was showing off Internet-connected garage door openers that you can open and close using an iPhone app!

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has sued the Department of Transportation (PDF) under the Freedom of Information Act to find out who has requested authorization from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly drones over US air space. The Freedom of Information Act request the EFF filed in April of 2011 was ignored by the FAA, thus the lawsuit.



Currently, the digital archive of the National Institutes of Health has information on the results of taxpayer-funded biomedical research that you can visit for free. However HR 3669, Research Works Act, introduced by Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), would prohibit the NIH from requiring scientists to submit their articles to the online database. Which means taxpayers would have pay $15 to $35 to access a publisher’s paid site.



Microsoft will be including a new Resilient File System or ReFS in Windows 8 and Windows Server 8, which will replace the venerable New Technology File System (NTFS) first used in Windows NT 3.1 Server and Workstation, and still used by XP, Vista and Windows 7.



The National Security Agency has released a security-enhanced version of Android dubbed SE Android, which provides stricter access-control policies than the versions found on most smart phones. Of course, this would be implemented by phone manufacturers.



I mentioned this several months ago, but the venerable Built-In Operating System (BIOS), that every PC has had since the first IBM model, is being replaced with the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). The BIOS has several problems. First it is susceptible to malware such as rootkits. Since it resides in a chip on the system board, it's much harder to upgrade than software. In fact, the BIOS in most PCs is never updated! In comparison, while the UEFI will likely run from nonvolatile memory on the system board, it can also run from a disk, or from a network share! And unlike the BIOS, which is unable to see and interact with most of a system’s hardware, the UEFI can access all of a PC hardware, including the mouse, video cards, USB ports, and network adapters, and can even access the Internet — all before the system OS even starts booting up.

The reason I am bringing this up again is that Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Certification Requirements require UEFI, and with Windows 8 probably only a few months away, your next PC will likely be running it!



Apple is making distribution agreements with publishers to sell electronic versions of textbooks using Apple’s iBooks file format.

However, Apple is getting heat for the end-user license agreement for its iBook Author publishing tool, used to create the e-textbooks: If the author wants to sell his or her books for profit (duh!) they have to sell them exclusively through Apple’s iBookstore!

There is also the question why they abandonded the ePub format they had a hand in developing.



The Department of Justice's Civil Rights division rejected South Carolina’s new law (PDF) requiring government-issued photo ID to vote, claiming it violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The state is expected to challenge the decision in court



Old-school photography giant Kodak, which invented digital photography but never leveraged it effectively, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company has already been closing down film manufacturing and processing operations.



The Supreme Court has rejected appeals from two Pennsylvania school districts that were successfully sued by students who were disciplined for mocking their school principals online! The decision let stand an appeals court decision ruling that disciplining students for what they post online away from school is a violation of their Free Speech rights.



At CES, YouTube reported that users are viewing over 4 billion videos a day; and every month the service streams 3 billion video-hours, and serves 800 million unique visitors!





December 29th 2011




The Department of Justice, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center), and the FBI conducted an operation known as Operation In Our Sites, which seized 150 domains selling counterfeit goods.

I’m all for stopping the import of counterfeit goods, but shutting down an entire domain? That’s like burning down the whole apartment building because the guy in 4C is selling drugs! This could be problematic if there are also legitimate businesses using it.



Wired’s David Kravets posted an article titled 9 Reasons Wired Readers Should Wear Tinfoil Hats that suggests ways readers can protect themselves against privacy intrusions.



A company called Path Intelligence has created a technology also called Path Intelligence that uses monitoring units set up around a property that detect active cell phones’ Temporary Mobile Subscriber Identifier to track where the cell phone goes within the property! The company offers no “opt-out” for cell phone users other than turning off their cell phones!

After finding out that two east-coast malls were planning to deploy this technology, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), , posted a press release critical of the technology, and asking the company to modify the system to allow cell phone holders to opt out.



A European Court of Justice judge ruled that computer programming languages can’t be copyrighted, only the programs created with them. The ruling came out of a lawsuit where database giant SAS sued a small software company World Programming, which made a competing software development package that use the SAS programming language.



An Illinois appeals court judge overturned a lower court ruling that ordered a newspaper publisher to divulge the email and IP addresses of an individual who made comments using an online pseudonym and ordered Comcast to reveal the individual's identity, saying:

Encouraging those easily offended by online commentary to sue to find the name of their 'tormentors' would surely lead to unnecessary litigation and would also have a chilling effect on the many citizens who choose to post anonymously.

The Federal Communications Commission posted a Staff Analysis and Findings Document critical of the AT&T/T-Mobile merger that said the merger was not in the public interest. It is assumed that AT&T’s earlier announcement that it was withdrawing its request for FCC approval was intended to avoid FCC criticism getting out. Guess that didn’t work very well for them! AT&T responded, calling the FCC report "one-sided" and accused the agency of favoring AT&T’s competitors.



Library of Congress employee Morris Davis was fired over a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed he wrote as a private citizen, on his own time, using a personally-owned computer, to complain about the government decision to try Guantanamo detainees via military commissions rather than in a court of law. It should be noted that, until he resigned from the position and retired from the U.S. Air Force in protest over plans to torture prisoners, Mr. Davis was Colonel Davis, the chief military prosecutor at Guantánamo. As the article notes, "The irony of being fired for exercising free speech while employed at Thomas Jefferson’s library evidently escaped his bosses." The case will likely end up in the Supreme Court.



The Federal Trade Commission and Facebook agreed on a proposed settlement (PDF) stemming from complaints filed by consumer and privacy advocacy groups, claiming that Facebook mislead its users about who had access to their personal information. The four-point agreement would require Facebook to:

• Get users' consent before sharing their information (i.e. Opt In)


• Implement a comprehensive privacy program


• Ensure a user’s personal information cannot be accessed after a user deletes his or her account


• Submit to independent privacy audits for the next 20 years!

House Republicans released a Joint Majority Staff Report titled A Decade Later: A Call for TSA Reform (PDF) that is very critical of the Transportation Security Administration, calling it a enormous, inflexible and distracted bureaucracy, more concerned with human resource management and consolidating power, and acting reactively instead of proactively." Sounds about right to me!



ZDNet’s Tom Foremski reports Google has changed its search results to favor large brands, increasing its revenues by billions of dollars while undercutting small businesses affiliates.



The report that smart phones sold by wireless carriers AT&T and Sprint are running a hidden app called Carrier IQ, caused Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) to send a letter (PDF) to Carrier IQ President and CEO Larry Lenhart, telling him, "These actions may violate federal privacy laws, including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act," and asking him to answer 11 questions including what specific information the software records; whether that information is transmitted to Carrier IQ, the wireless provider, or to other companies; and whether that information is shared with any third party.

Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) chimed in on Sen. Franken’s call to Carrier IQ to fess up anbout what it does and who it tells.

Outraged smart phone owners responded to the news by filing lawsuits against Carrier IQ and phone makers HTC and Samsung, claiming the tracking software violates the Federal Wiretap Act. Another lawsuit was filed against phone makers Apple and Motorola, and wireless carriers Sprint and AT&T.

In an online statement, Carrier IQ explained that its software is intended to "measure and summarize performance of the device to assist Operators in delivering better service," and claimed:

While a few individuals have identified that there is a great deal of information available to the Carrier IQ software inside the handset, our software does not record, store or transmit the contents of SMS messages, email, photographs, audio or video. For example, we understand whether an SMS was sent accurately, but do not record or transmit the content of the SMS. We know which applications are draining your battery, but do not capture the screen.

However, ComputerWorld’s Jaikumar Vijayan notes that Carrier IQ’s own marketing documents say otherwise!

For the Carrier IQ story from a wireless provider’s perspective, David Gewirtz interviewed T-Mobile VP Frank Sickinger (Video).

As computer security guru Bruce Schneier described in a 2007 article, "Full disclosure — the practice of making the details of security vulnerabilities public — is a damned good idea. Public scrutiny is the only reliable way to improve security, while secrecy only makes us less secure." This has been the prevailing standard in the software industry for years. But as the Carrier IQ issue points out, those in other industries often react poorly when security flaws are brought to light.

The FCC and FTC are investigating Carrier IQ to see if consumer rights or privacy laws were broken!

FBI Director Robert Mueller told Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) that his agency has not used Carrier IQ data in any of its investigations. Of course, now that it’s been brought to Director Mueller’s attention . . . !

Wireless service providers Sprint and AT&T, and phone makers HTC and Samsung are in lock-step over Carrier IQ, saying that language in their end-user licensing agreements allows them to use Carrier IQ software to monitor certain phone functions.

Gizmodo posted The Complete List of All the Phones With Carrier IQ Spyware Installed. The list identifies phones from AT&T, Sprint, and Cricket. The article also reports, "Carrier IQ is also packaged in the free AT&T Mark the Spot application, available for Android and RIM."



As interesting as the story about Carrier IQ itself, is the legal interplay that occurred between Carrier IQ and Trevor Eckhart, the man that discovered it and posted the video about it on YouTube:

Right after news of Mr. Eckhart’s video exploded in the tech news arena, Carrier IQ sent him a cease and desist notice (PDF), ordering him to put out a public press release containing a statement (dictated by their attorneys!) saying that Carrier IQ doesn’t do what he proved it does!

Trevor instead approached the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who sent back a letter (PDF) saying, "We have now had a chance to review your allegations against our client, and have concluded that they are entirely baseless." and proceeded to lay out the law in detail and explain why Carrier IQ would lose in a court battle! Carrier IQ quickly offered a contrite apology, saying, "we realize that we would have been better served by reaching out to Mr. Eckhart to establish a dialogue in the first instance." Ya think? Of course, the tech press was peeking in, beginning to end!



Free Speech advocacy group Free Press delivered a petition with over 40,000 signers to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, the current president of the United States Conference of Mayors, saying, "These signers are calling on mayors around the country to stop suppressing the press and commit to defending journalists' right to do their jobs without interference."



In her New York Times article titled The New Digital Divide, Susan P. Crawford warns:

Increasingly, we are a country in which only the urban and suburban well-off have truly high-speed Internet access, while the rest — the poor and the working class — either cannot afford access or use restricted wireless access as their only connection to the Internet. As our jobs, entertainment, politics and even health care move online, millions are at risk of being left behind.

The FCC set December 22nd as the deadline to submit comments regarding its recent proposal to require broadcasters to post their Public Files online.



TV journalist Dan Rather — in a speech he gave after receiving the Committee to Protect Journalists' Burton Benjamin Memorial Award for 2011 — challenged his fellow journalists to "buck the current system:"

It was Thomas Jefferson who noted in 1799 that, "Our citizens may be deceived for awhile, and have been deceived; but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust to them for light."

Jefferson trusted the press — not to stir up heat, but to deliver insight.

Of course freedom of the press and of speech both come with pitfalls. People can peddle opinions as if they were facts. Those armed with the big, expensive megaphones drown out those blowing whistles.

But now, we see our fellow citizens taking to the streets. And, that my friends, is our cue to get back to work. As the People of our nation begin rising up, they expect the business of news to be about inquiry and accountability.

And, luckily for us, we can still do that . . . but it may not be within the confines of big corporate media. As you know, we are living in an age when big money owns everything . . . including the news.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is trying to build a consensus across both parties to develop alternative legislation less damaging to the Internet than the that proposed by the Protect IP Act (PIPA).



The FCC will examine the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system’s recently-established "Cell Service Interruption Policy" to see if it passes Constitutional muster. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski noted: "For interruption of communications service to be permissible or advisable, it must clear a high substantive and procedural bar."



Microsoft will release a public beta of Windows 8 in "late February, 2012." They also plan to open a Windows 8 app store at the same time, as the official source for apps running the Windows 8 Metro interface.



TechRepublic’s Jason Hiner posted an article titled Four industries about to be transformed by the Internet. Here are the industries, and my take on his predictions:

• Movies. He predicts, "Hollywood is experimenting with the idea of selling movies directly to consumers at home (streamed over the Internet) at the same time the movies arrive in theaters." In my opinion, this is long overdue. For some time, movie-watching has be broken down into four distinct but very different, and somewhat exclusive markets:
  
  • Theater goers. People who go to movies in theaters do so as much for the experience as the movie. And some go rarely, or never, due to preference or budget!
  
  
  • Buyers. People who buy outright the movies they want to keep.
  
  
  • Renters. People who rent (or stream, purchase pay-per-view, etc.), movies they want to see before they come out on cable.
  
  
  • Cable viewers. People who are willing to wait until it shows up on cable TV as a free view.
  The key here is that, while each of us fall into all of these categories at different times, for any one film most of us initially fall into only one category. For some of us, a movie that really attracts our interest will likely see us in line at the theater to see it. Conversely, someone who hates going to the movies won’t go regardless of their interest in the movie, but may be more than willing to pay to see it through their video provider before it comes out for free viewing. And most of us these days only buy a movie on DVD or Blu-Ray after we’ve viewed it once and determine it worthy to sit in our library! Bottom line: simultaneous release of movies in theaters, online, and on DVD/Blu-Ray will not affect theater sales. In fact, I believe it may just spark increased media sales, as people fresh from the theater go home and buy it online!
  


• Healthcare. He predicts, "the move to electronic medical records — and a portable EMR that the patient (not the healthcare provider) controls — is long overdue." I agree. I get my health care through the Veterans Administration (VA), and they have had electronic healthcare records for many years. I can go into any VA medical facility in the US and they can call up my full medical record, including every blood test, x-ray, etc. I’ve had. There is no reason the civilian healthcare industry can’t do likewise, except that it would cost too many people their jobs, and reduce others’ ability to game the system like they do now!



• Book publishing. He predicts:
  

  [Book publishing] is still ruled by publishing houses, who serve as the gatekeepers and filters for what gets published and decide which titles deserve the most promotion (and potential sales). However, just as it did for news publishing, the Internet is about to completely democratize the publishing process for books. The combination of e-readers, electronic audiobooks, and print-on-demand have lowered the barriers to entry and made it so that authors no longer need publishing houses. They can take their work straight to the masses — or, more accurately, straight to their niche audiences, in most cases. This completely changes the economics of book publishing for an author by making it very profitable to sell only 5,000-10,000 books.
  

  As ZDNet’s Jason Perlow predicts, this holiday season will be when tablet PCs come into their own, particularly the Amazon’s Kindle series, and Barnes & Noble’s Nook series. This is when e-book sales will slowly but inexorable eclipse paper book sales. But not only books: I predict resurgence in magazines, as they move to electronic versions. I should also note that part of Mr. Perlow’s prediction, about authors taking their works "straight to the masses," is already happening: Amazon has announced its Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) program, which will allow authors to add their e-books to the Kindle Lending Library if they agree to market them exclusively in the Kindle Store for 90 days!



• Financial payments. He predicts, "consumers will soon be able to carry all of their accounts as digital tokens in their smartphones and then interface with a merchant to verify identity (with two-factor authentication) and choose which account to pay from." I don’t disagree that this is coming. I just don’t think it will happen as soon as he thinks! There are still many folks out there who believe in paying strictly with cash!

Chances are, unless you’re an Apple fan boy (i.e. style and image mean more to you than substance!), chances are your computer, smart phone and tablet PC all run different operating systems. And you probably don’t care, as long as they work. This will become even more common in the future.



There’s a rumor running around the tech industry that Bill Gates may return to manage Microsoft. Most everyone says "no way!", but . . .



Hewlett-Packard said it would be releasing WebOS to open source, including the Enyo application framework. It’s interesting to note that HP bought out Palm for $1.2 billion in April 2010, reportedly to get its hands on WebOS. 20 months later they are giving it away! HP has set up a blog for developers interested in writing apps for WebOS.




It is rumored that Microsoft Office for the iPad is under development. But if so, MS isn’t talking about it so far.



Technology industry groups, including the Consumer Electronics Association and the Information Technology Industry Council have written letters to legislative leaders, asking them to reconsider support for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), warning that such a law will have unforeseen, detrimental effects on the country's digital economy.

Two former House and Senate senior staffers have been hired on by the RIAA and MPAA to help lobby for passage of SOPA and the Protect IP Act.

In a Washington Post article titled The nightmarish SOPA hearings, Alexandra Petri discusses her horror while observing the Judiciary Committee’s markup meeting on SOPA:>br>

If I had a dime for every time someone in the markup used the phrase "I’m not a nerd" or "I’m no tech expert, but they tell me . . .," I’d have a large number of dimes and still feel intensely worried about the future of the uncensored Internet. If this were surgery, the patient would have run out screaming a long time ago. But this is like a group of well-intentioned amateurs getting together to perform heart surgery on a patient incapable of moving. "We hear from the motion picture industry that heart surgery is what’s required," they say cheerily. "We’re not going to cut the good valves, just the bad — neurons, or whatever you call those durn thingies."

This is terrifying to watch. It would be amusing — there’s nothing like people who did not grow up with the Internet attempting to ask questions about technology very slowly and stumbling over words like "server" and "service" when you want an easy laugh. Except that this time, the joke’s on us.

Indeed!

That sentiment was echoed by Mother Board’s Joshua Kopstein in his article Dear Congress, It's No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works, who said:

The fact that there was any debate over whether to call in experts on such a matter should tell you something about the integrity of Congress. It’d be one thing if legitimate technical questions directed at the bill’s supporters weren’t met with either silence or veiled accusations that the other side was sympathetic to piracy. Yet here we are with a group of elected officials openly supporting a bill they can’t explain, and having the temerity to suggest there’s no need to “bring in the nerds” to suss out what’s actually on it.

In a lengthy Stanford Law Review article, professors of law Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, & David G. Post question the legality and Constitutionality of SOPA and the Protect IP Act, saying:

Credit card companies, banks, and other financial institutions could be ordered to "prevent, prohibit, or suspend" all dealings with the site associated with the domain name. Online advertisers could be ordered to cease providing advertising services to the site associated with the domain name. Search engine providers could be ordered to "remove or disable access to the Internet site associated with the domain name," and to disable all hypertext links to the site.

These drastic consequences would be imposed against persons and organizations outside of the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts by virtue of the fiction that these prosecutorial actions are proceedings in rem, in which the "defendant" is not the operator of the site but the domain name itself. Both bills suggest that these remedies can be meted out by courts after nothing more than ex parte proceedings — proceedings at which only one side (the prosecutor or even a private plaintiff) need present evidence and the operator of the allegedly infringing site need not be present nor even made aware that the action was pending against his or her "property."

This not only violates basic principles of due process by depriving persons of property without a fair hearing and a reasonable opportunity to be heard, it also constitutes an unconstitutional abridgement of the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment.

The House Judiciary Committee adjourned for the holidays without passing SOPA to the House floor. Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) moved to delay releasing the bill: he first wants to bring in technical experts to testify about the risks of messing with the domain name system!

Meanwhile, Forbes reports that Internet techies, planning for the worst, are already working on technological ways to circumvent site blocking!

After being hounded by its customers, domain name registrar Go Daddy announced it was dropping support for SOPA. Despite the change of heart, a boycott of Go Daddy, scheduled before the announcement, will continue as planned anyway, just to underline their anger!



The US Copyright Office is considering two requests to amend the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA):

Free speech advocacy group Public Knowledge wants to see technology legalized that would allow people to copy movies from encrypted DVDs to their other devices, and make back-up copies of the movies. Let the MPAA screaming begin!

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wants owners to be allowed to jailbreak their gaming consoles, and calls for the elimination of federal and civil lawsuits against persons who jailbreak legally purchased devices. The request notes that people "who bundle 'mod kits' with pirated games" should still be prosecuted.

Note that periodic review of the DCMA was built into the law, to allow the Copyright Office to adapt it to new technologies. Results have been mixed, but Big Media almost always tries to squash any changes they feel will reduce their control.



Another sign that the AT&T/T-Mobile merger is dead: the Department of Justice plans to file a motion to stay or dismiss its lawsuit to block the merger because the agency believes there's no deal pending, since AT&T pulled its request for FCC approval!



CNet’s Download.com is getting heat for bundling popular free security utilities with third-party software, without the security software authors’ knowledge. This brings up a point: even well-known software vendors such as Adobe have started offering "free" software (notably toolbars from Google, Yahoo, et. al.), to install concurrent with the application you’re trying to download. They all offer a checkbox, which is usually checked by default, that you have to uncheck if you don’t want the extra software bloating up your PC. So you unfortunately have to be very watchful these days to avoid accidentally installing extra software you don’t want or need.



Unmanned drones owned by the federal government are being used to assist local law enforcement, but have yet to get any discussion in the press.

Discussing this troubling expansion of law enforcement surveillance, Glenn Greenwald, in a Salon article titled The growing menace of domestic drones, warns:

It’s beyond obvious that policy planners and law enforcement officials expect serious social unrest. Why wouldn’t they: when has sustained, severe economic suffering and anxiety of the sort we are now seeing — along with pervasive, deep anger at the political class and its institutions — not produced that type of unrest? Drones are the ultimate tool for invasive, sustained surveillance and control, and one would have to be historically ignorant and pathologically naive not to understand its capacity for abuse.

Believe it or not, Intel is the latest company to feel pain from the hard drive shortage. The drive shortage has affected PC sales, which in turn affects the sales of CPUs, chipsets, etc. that go into those PCs. In fact, Computerworld reports that the industry expects to ship 3.8 million fewer PCs than originally forecase in the first quarter of 2012.

Note that, at least here in Portland, Oregon, hard drive prices are still rising: the 2TB Western Digital Caviar Black drive I’ve been watching the price of (because I need two of them!) is currently up to $269. At that price it’s now over twice the $125 cost of the same drive prior to the Thai floods.

Seagate and Western Digital are reducing their warranties for new hard drives. The move is blamed on the drive shortage, but the industry views that as an excuse to decrease costs.



NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity has found what scientists say is evidence that water used to flow on Mars.



The FBI has refused a Freedom of Information Act request about its use of Carrier IQ, claiming it would interfere in an ongoing investigation.



According to Nielsen, Facebook is the most popular Android app among adult smart phone owners in the US (sigh!).



Despite a memo from Police Chief Kelly warning them not to interfere with members of the media during police actions, New York Police Department officers were caught on video assaulting and blocking camera shots of journalists covering a demonstration at the World Financial Center



Representatives Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Jared Polis (D-CO) have come out against SOPA in its current form. But rather than kill it, they are looking to just tone it down a bit.



In an open letter to Congress that will appear as advertizing nationwide, a who’s who of Internet luminaries — including Google co-founder Sergey Brin, eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Flickr and Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake, PayPal co-founder Elon Musk and Twitter’s co-founders Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams — warn that the PROTECT IP Act in the Senate and Stop Online Piracy Act in the House would chill innovation, "deny website owners the right to due process" and give "the U.S. government the power to censor the Web using techniques similar to those used by China, Malaysia and Iran."

A similar open letter to Congress about SOPA & PROTECT IP was submitted by eighty-three engineers, including TCP/IP co-designer Vint Cerf, and ARPAnet founder Robert W. Taylor, who warned:

If enacted, either of these bills will create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure. Regardless of recent amendments to SOPA, both bills will risk fragmenting the Internet’s global domain name system (DNS) and have other capricious technical consequences. In exchange for this, such legislation would engender censorship that will simultaneously be circumvented by deliberate infringers while hampering innocent parties’ right and ability to communicate and express themselves online.

Yet another example of why we need Net Neutrality: Verizon announced it was blocking the Google Wallet mobile payment app on their new Galaxy Nexus phone. Verizon is apparently working on it own mobile payment app called Isis, and apparently doesn’t want the competition!



The FCC approved new rules to implement the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act. The law calls on the Advanced Television Systems Committee created by the new law to write a technical standard to ensure commercials aren’t louder than the programs they sponsor. This sounds easier than it is: commercials are added to the video stream at various points in the transmission process: by the original programmer, by the originating channel, or by the local provider. Any technology developed will have to be able intercept all three and reduce their volume, so it will likely end up being integrated into new TV receivers, DVRs, set top boxes, etc.



Google has bought out development house Clever Sense, publisher of the Alfred personal concierge software, which makes restaurant and bar recommendations. It’s rumored this may be the beginnings of a Siri-type app for the Android OS!



EPIC filed a reply motion (PDF) in its pending Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, seeking additional information about full-body scanners, including radiation risks and testing results, agency fact sheets, and examples of images produced by the machines, that the feds left out the first time!



The Android-based mobile OS has become the latest growth leader for malware. This is primarily due to the open nature of the Android Market app store, which is probably a little to easy to post to!



A joint U.S./UK research team has found that full-disk encryption using common encryption techniques is usually unbreakable by law enforcement. The quoted article exhibits an obvious pro-law enforcement bias, but I disagree. I like to quote Jeff Schiller, who was an executive member of the Internet Engineering Task Force, and network manager for Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the time that the feds were trying to get back doors written into Internet protocols. He disagreed, saying, "Law enforcement was not supposed to be easy. Where it is easy, it's called a police state!"

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...

Which clearly allowed citizens to hide or lock up their papers, and not have to produce them without a search warrant or court order. Electronically locking a hard drive is the same concept, only moved into the digital world, where our documents are saved as bytes on a hard drive instead of papers in a safe. If law enforcement can’t read encrypted data, that’s a good thing. It requires that they find probable cause, convince a judge, get a search warrant, and request access — just as they would have to do to access a safe! Unfortunately, the current thinking in law enforcement is that they need the access to find probable cause. Too bad. Do your job within the rules.



The news of U.S. surveillance programs — both illegal and those made legal by updates to the PATRIOT Act! —, are forcing overseas companies to reevaluate decisions to put their data in cloud systems hosted in the US, and foreign companies are using these fears to steer potential customers to their own services. This was inevitable. This country’s due process laws were once one of the strongest incentives we had for foreign businesses to move their data to our shores. Now, we’re just as unreliable as the rest. Sad.



Researchers at McGill University and Sandia National Laboratories have developed 15 nanometer circuits with conductors only 150 atoms apart!



Rep. Lee Terry (R-NE) has pulled the plug on H.R. 3035: Mobile Informational Call Act of 2011 which would allow robocalls to cell phones! Despite backing from the industries wanting to make the calls; consumer groups, citizens, and even many congresscritters themselves came out against the idea of getting cold calls on their cell phones, and let their loathing be know.



A federal judge has thrown out a cyberstalking case in which a man was accused of harassing a religious leader via Twitter and a blog. The judge showed a good understanding of how Twitter and blogs work, and compared them to Colonial times, saying:

If one colonist wants to see what is on another’s bulletin board, he would need to walk over to his neighbor’s yard and look at what is posted, or hire someone else to do so.

In other words, the complainant had to visit the blog or Twitter and didn’t have to read what the defendant posted!



As Bill Boyarsky reports in TruthDig, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) warns about the threat big money in politics has to prevent congreecritters from voting their consciences:

Noting that the six largest banks on Wall Street have assets equal to 65 percent of the national gross domestic product, he asked what happens in Congress "when an issue comes up and impacts Wall Street . . . to break up these huge banks and members walk up to the desk and have to decide [whether] to vote against it with full knowledge that if they vote against the interest of Wall Street that two weeks later there may be ads coming down into their state attacking them. Every member of the Senate, every member of the House, in the back of their minds, will be thinking … ‘If I cast a vote this way, if I take on the big money interest, am I going to be punished … will a huge amount of money be unleashed in my state?’ Every member knows this is true. It is not just taking on Wall Street, maybe it’s taking on the drug companies, maybe it’s taking on the private insurance companies, maybe it’s taking on the military-industrial complex. … You’re going to think twice about how you cast that vote."

Beginning this month, Microsoft will start pushing silent updates for Internet Explorer, without user permission, including upgrades to the next version of the browser. Users will have the option to turn the upgrades off, however.



AT&T finally announced it was giving up on its plans to merger with T-Mobile. Once the FCC and FTC filed their lawsuits it was only a matter of time.



ZDNet posted an interesting article titled Which Tablet has the Best Display?, that discusses testing of the iPad 2, Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet displays. As you’d imagine, all three have pluses and minuses, but the overall winner was the Nook Tablet!



Speaking of Nook Tablets, as I threatened earlier, I bought one of these tablets, and have been very pleased with it so far. It has three minor down-sides, however, which I found out the hard way:

For the first issue: when you initially turn it on it takes you through a very nice automated setup process, which worked flawlessly, including prompting you to connect to your Wi-Fi network. Unfortunately, once you are connected it leave Wi-Fi on, which proceeds to suck up your battery charge! So in only a few hours, the battery is dead! So once you are finished with Wi-Fi, turn it off to save battery life.

For the second issue: the device comes with a USB port that doubles as a port for the wall charger it comes with, and it works fine for both uses. However, unlike most new smart phones and other similar devices, the Nook Tablet cannot be charged from a computer USB connection, only from the included charger using their custom USB cable; nor, per the docs, can you use the charger with a generic USB cable without damaging the tablet (and no, I wasn’t stupid enough to risk damaging it to try!).

Finally, when you connect to a PC with provided custom USB cable, the tablet shows up on the drive list in Windows Explorer as expected, and you can side-load content to the tablet . . . but only to the tablet’s built-in 1GB user area. The MicroSD memory card is not reachable from the PC! Instead, if you wish to side-load the MicroSD card, you need to remove the card (after powering down the tablet!), and plug it into your PC’s card reader.

Again, I consider these all minor inconveniences that are not troubling enough to abandon the device, which is way cool in all other respects!



AMD is shipping its Radeon HD 7970 graphics card, which ZDNet reports, is currently the fastest video card available!



An indication of tablet PCs’ impact on the market: Dell has discontinued its Netbook PCs, and will limit it’s notebook PC offerings to larger, more powerful models. We can expect to see that trend continue.



Windows 8 is going to have a new security feature called Picture Passwords that allows users to log on by touching selected features of a photo in the correct order.

Network World reports that Kenneth Weiss, who pioneered the concept of two-factor authentication, was not impressed with Picture Passwords, calling it, "more like a Fisher-Price toy than a serious choice for secure computer access." That may be true in a corporate environment, particularly for remote access, where VPN should be the mandatory gateway in. However, I think it’s perfectly fine for use in a home setting.



NetworkWorld posted a lengthy article on the Department of Homeland Security’s attempts to us so-called "sock puppet" user accounts on various social networking sites to capture users’ personal information! Scary stuff! Read it. Then start watching what you post online, and who you accept as a friend.



EPIC has a filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of information Act (PDF) against the Department of Homeland Security to force them to fess up details about a proposed social network monitoring program outlined in the Federal Register.



EPIC has had to filed a motion in federal court (PDF), asking the court to enforce an order directing the Department of Homeland Security to begin writing rules modifying its use of airport body scanners. The court previously ruled that installing body scanners without first soliciting public comment violated federal law, and that travelers had a right to opt-out of the airport body scanners. DHS ignored that ruling.



ProPublica has posted a series of articles titled Body Scanners - Risking Health to Secure Airports.



Google has paid Mozilla $300 a year for three years to keep Google as the default search engine in Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser, apparently outbidding Microsoft and Yahoo. This is good news for Mozilla, whose prospects look bleak after it was announced that Google’s Chrome beat out Firefox as the number two browser!



In a Reason article titled Restraining Orders: The government’s unconstitutional restrictions on our freedom to travel, Judge Andrew Napolitano takes exception to some of the practices Transportation Security Administration (TSA) personnel use to interfere with citizens’ right to travel unimpeded.



A federal appeals court unanimously refused to rule on the merits of a case (PDF) brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which claims the public’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated by a warrantless surveillance program begun during the Bush administration following the 9/11 attacks. The EFF is now free to appeal this case to the Supreme Court. However, in a separate opinion, the court dismissed a companion case against the country’s large telecom companies, including AT&T, quoting an act of congress granting the telcos retroactive immunity.





November 28th 2011




Microsoft is warning that Windows Update for Windows 8 won’t provide updates for thiord-party software.



Western Digital has started selling storage arrays. The boxes run the Microsoft Storage Server 2008 Essentials OS on an Intel D525 Dual Core Atom system. A 4TB array lists for $950, and the 8TB version lists for $1,450.



A new multi-core Intel CPU named Knights Corner still in development has reached the speed of one teraflop, which is one trillion calculations per second!



The Department of Justice has begun interpreting the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in such a manner that lying about yourself on your Facebook page, or using a pseudonym online could get you busted for computer fraud.

The DoJ’s high-handed actions prompted a coalition of rights groups, including the ACLU, the the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and FreedomWorks, to send a letter (PDF) to the House Judiciary Committee, saying:

These activities should not be “computer crimes,” any more than they are crimes in the physical world. If, for example, an employee photocopies an employer’s document to give to a friend without that employer’s permission, there is no federal crime (though there may be, for example, a contractual violation). However, if an employee emails that document, there may be a CFAA violation. If a person assumes a fictitious identity at a party, there is no federal crime. Yet if they assume that same identity on a social network that prohibits pseudonyms, there may again be a CFAA violation. This is a gross misuse of the law. The CFAA should focus on malicious hacking and identity theft and not on criminalizing any behavior that happens to take place online in violation of terms of service or an acceptable use policy.

The tech news was awash with FUD over Carrier IQ, a monitoring app built into the firmware of almost every smart phone, that reports phone usage info back to the wireless operator over the SSL link. The app was accused of all sorts of evil surveillance capabilities. However, while what it reports is customizable by the wireless operator, a Network World article reports that a close examination of the app shows that, although key presses are logged in some cases, the app is not a keylogger, and while it reports location info when prompted, it doesn’t track it continuously.

Probably the biggest complaint about Carrier IQ is that users would care a whole lot less about it if the carriers hadn’t try to hide it for so long! Now that the word is out, we can expect newer phones to no longer have it. Of course, since it is embedded in the phone’s firmware, existing phone may or may not be upgradable to remove Carrier IQ, depending on whether the phone’s OS is upgradeable.



An interesting quote about the Occupy movement protests from actor Alec Baldwin:

OWS talks a lot, too much in fact, about One Percent versus Ninety Nine Percent. As if success itself were a crime. That's a mistake. But what OWS has helped to remind me is that One in Five is a far more unsettling ratio. Twenty percent unemployment. In the 21st Century United States.

There won't be enough cops anywhere in this country to rip down all the tents that are going to pop up in places you never imagined if we hit that figure. That's what OWS has taught me.

Hewlett-Packard is shipping its first "ultrabook" light-weight notebook geared for business. The HP Folio 13 sports a 13.3-inch screen, a 128GB solid-state drive, Intel Core i5 CPU, and claimed battery life of nine hours.



Barnes & Noble new $249, 7-inch Nook Tablet hit the market earlier than expected. I had a chance to play with one briefly at the Beaverton, OR Barnes & Noble store (they were limiting play time!), and it’s a very cool device! The light weight was particularly notable: it’s a bit heavier than a paperback book, but far lighter than a hard-bound book, so it should be easy to read from in bed. The screen was also plenty bright, and easy to read even in the well-lit store.



Amazon started selling its Kindle File tablet at the same time as the Nook Tablet, but ExtremeTech was not very flattering about the device, calling it "sluggish," and "a front end for Amazon’s massive meatspace and digital distribution networks."

ChangeWave Research predicts that, while the Apple iPad is still a holiday shopping target for many, 22 percent of "planned purchasers" (their term! Don’t ask me!) planned to buy an Amazon’s Kindle. Commenting on the survey, ZDNet’s Larry Dignan explained the results, saying:

When the Kindle Fire comes up in conversation, nearly everyone in my neighborhood has wanted to try it out. The ROI case is simple: These parents want a tablet that’s inexpensive and can play app for the kids. And if you have two kids, you can buy two Fires for the cost of one iPad and save yourself some refereeing.

Makes sense to me! I’ll still be buying a Nook Tablet, though, for reasons previously mentioned!

If I weren’t, here’s another reason not to buy a Kindle Fire: the DRM Amazon uses on its content can sometimes go horribly wrong causing you to lose access to everything you purchased from Amazon!



ZDNet’s James Kendrick complains that Amazon and Barnes & Noble want Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet owners to buy their content from the company making the tablet, and decries the memory limitations that he says force that behavior. Mr. Kendrick is correct in part. But I think he fails to grasp the obvious here: in most cases consumers with existing relationships with Amazon or Barnes & Noble will most likely be happy to continue purchasing content from the outlet they are most comfortable with. In fact that existing relationship will likely have a lot to do with which device they choose: unlike previous technology, with low-end tablet PCs and eBook readers it’s less about which is most technologically cool, and more about how easy it is to get content to fill it! So I suspect techies like Mr. Kendrick are going to be surprised at how popular the new Kindle and Nook tablets are.



Microsoft hopes that changes they are planning to their patch delivery process for Windows 8 will be more user friendly. Most notably, updates will not be announced from the desktop, which users have complained interferes with their work. Instead, users will be prompted to install updates at logon.



As I expected, publishers are screaming about Amazon’s Kindle lending library, saying that the move breeches contracts. Based on a strict interpretation of Fair Use rules, if Amazon bought a large number of copies of a digital book from a publisher, they can legally loan out up to that many, less any copies they sell outright, without violating the book’s copyright. This is no different than the local library buying books and loaning them out, but publishers don’t always think rationally when it comes to digital media, because it can be copied so easily with no degradation of the content. It will be interesting to see how this plays out!

Penguin Books pulled it’s titles from Amazon’s Kindle lending library, "due to new concerns about the security of our digital editions.”



Every election year, the subject comes up: why can’t we vote over the Internet? Security isn’t the real issue: if we can set up systems to process credit card transactions, authentication for voting would be easy: PIN assignment, lock-outs to prevent more than one voting session per PIN, etc. So why is there so much resistance to it? Political parties, used to using gerrymandering to set up districts friendly to their party are afraid they will lose control of that power. If anything, that alone is a good reason we should do it!



Intel's new Core i7-3960X CPU is being sampled out. The new "hexa-core" (6-core) CPU uses Intels high-end Sandy Bridge-E 3960X chipset, which supports 64GB of RAM, and PCI-E 3.0.



The House Judiciary Committee held a lengthy hearing Stop Online Privacy Act in which the bill’s chief sponsor, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), claimed "I’m not a technical expert on this," and expressed reservation about the law he proposed, after learning that it could break the Domain Name System computers use to find other computers on the Internet!

An Ars Technica article about the hearing called the witness list "hugely stacked" in favor of the bill. Of the six groups allowed to speak, Google — who the other spokespersons, most of whom represented Big Media interests, characterized as supporting online piracy! — was the only witness to speak against the law, even though a huge number of groups, including the ACLU, the Consumer Electronics Association, hundreds of law professors and lawyers, and many foreign civil rights groups wanted to speak, primarily concerned with the free speech aspect of this bill.

GigaOm posted a disturbing article titled What the web is saying about SOPA, that posts some of the more revealing online quotes concerning the bill.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) (my man!), who already placed a hold on the proposed legislation, promised to filibuster SOPA if it, or it’s evil House twin, the Protect IP Act, come up for a floor vote!

IDG’s Grant Gross points out the hypocrisy of Republican lawmakers who, on the one hand voted against Net Neutrality because it was "regulation of the Internet," but support SOPA, which would allow the wholesale shutdown of Web sites!



In what is viewed as a direct response to SOPA, the European Court of Justice ruled, "E.U. law precludes the imposition of an injunction by a national court which requires an Internet service provider to install a filtering system with a view to preventing the illegal downloading of files".



A battle playing out in New York City may effect nationwide the practice of sports teams cutting exclusive deals with video providers to limit the showing of games on other local video providers: after the FCC Media Bureau ordered Cablevision’s Madison Square Garden subsidiary to make its High Definition feeds available to Verizon and AT&T, Cablevision sued the FCC trying to keep its exclusive contract. I personally hate these exclusive deals. I have DirecTV at home, but for years Comcast cable had an exclusive deal to broadcast Portland Trailblazers games, cutting other regional video providers out.



In a troubling ruling here in Oregon, a federal judge has ruled that a blogger isn’t protected by the Oregon’s strong Media Shield Law. The judge stated

. . . the record fails to show that she is affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system. Thus, she is not entitled to the protections of the law.

Hunh? Under such a ruling, I assume even this writer, who has been blogging on tech news issues since 1996, is also not protected. I have to hope that this case is going forward, and that the defendant gets competent legal support!

This case serves to point out that we need a new definition in this country about what the "press" is. In our founding fathers’ day, if you owned a printing press, you were a "member of the press." That’s where the term came from! Today, the Web is the newest version of the "press." Someone who posts content online should be given the same consideration as those who work for the moneyed interests that pay for the newsprint, radio and TV news.
"


In an InfoWorld article titled Why the big carriers won't build out their networks, Bill Snyder suggest that the Big ISPs are holding back on building out their networks in part because the congestion can be used as a club to help push content providers to pay a premium for faster delivery of their content!



Facebook has had a busy week:

Internet video phone pioneer Skype is integrate their services with Facebook, to allow Facebook users to make video phone calls through Facebook to their friends.

PayPal has developed an app called Send Money, that will let Facebook users to send money to their friends!



When Linear Technology analog chip designer Jim Williams died unexpectedly, the company donated it to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California, who shrink-wrapped his desk, shipped it to the museum, and put it on display exactly like he left it! Very cool!



The Shackleton Energy Company says it intends set up the first permanent lunar base by 2020, and begin extraction of water to make liquid oxygen and hydrogen in order to set up a propellant refueling depot for spacecraft!



I’ve talked about the hard drive shortage due to the Thai floods, and its lingering effects on the PC market. But companies like Google and Facebook, who build their own custom servers to save money, are running into supply shortages of their own!



According to the New York Times, representatives for newspaper companies The New York Times Company, The Associated Press, The New York Post, The Daily News, Thomson Reuters and Dow Jones & Company; local New York television stations, WABC, WCBS and WNBC; and press trade groups the National Press Photographers Association, New York Press Photographers Association, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the New York Press Club, signed a letter to the New York Police Department, decrying the “numerous inappropriate, if not unconstitutional, actions and abuses” by the police against both “credentialed and noncredentialed journalists in the last few days,” during the eviction of Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park on November 15t. The letter requested an immediate meeting with the city’s police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly.



Amateur cell-phone videos of a police officer spraying sitting UC Davis protesters with pepper spray became the most shared video clips on YouTube that weekend The school’s chancellor briefly tried to justify the attack, but had to quickly distance themselves from the police , . Had these citizens not taken time to post the videos, the cops and the school administration would have been able to spin it their way.

In her comments on this incident — and others where pepper spray was used on non-violent protesters, Arianna Huffington said "governments that purport to be democratic shouldn't assault their own citizens in the name of keeping them safe."

Our Founding Fathers placed Freedom of the Press in the Bill of Rights to counter the power of government, by giving the press free reign to shine a light on government excesses and misdeeds. Recent actions like the one above only points out that the "mainstream press" has slowly let government limit their actions to the point that when government excesses and misdeeds occur, they are not there to witness them. In such cases, it has never been more important for citizens to take up the responsibility to report the truth as they witness it.



We have all experienced it: you buy a new computer with great specs, only to find that the crapware the OEM put on it slows it to a crawl! At this point, techies usually do an extensive clean-up. Non-techies usually have to live with most of it (or have a techie clean it up for them!). Microsoft hopes to eliminate this new PC clean-up ritual with Microsoft Signature, a marketing program to maximize the performance of new PCs. Machines sporting the Signature logo must meet the following criteria:

• No crapware


• Minimal startup programs


• A clean desktop with no gadgets or icons (besides the Recycle Bin)


• No unnecessary system try icons.


• Microsoft’s free Security Essentials antivirus software is preinstalled and activated


• Windows Update configured to install updates automatically


• The Microsoft Signature theme pack preinstalled and set as the default desktop background.


• The following software installed and activated:
  • Windows Live Essentials (Messenger, Movie Maker, Photo Gallery & Mesh)
  
  
  • Office 2010 Starter Edition (a stripped down versions of Word & Excel)
  
  
  • Zune (music & video player)
  
  
• No added mouse/keyboard navigation systems besides the Windows Start menu and taskbar.

We’ll have to see how this works, and whether the computer OEMs can resist all the money they are offered to put crapware on their PCs!



The RIAA is trying to claim that First Sale rights — which allow the purchaser of a copy of intellectual property to legally loan, sell or destroy the copy they purchase — doesn’t apply to digital music, because the particular copy of the digital file the purchaser buys is modified through use, moving, etc.! Sorry RIAA! That’s like saying a book I bought isn’t mine because my kid scribbled in it! Same analogy.



Want to spy on your neighbors? Prox Dynamics is developing a PD-100 Personal Reconnaissance System, lightweight nano-UAVs that fit in your hand! Apparently the Britts are going to buy some to send to Afghanistan once they are shipping! No telling if your local police are as well! You might want to look into that!





October 31st 2011




Josh Levy from Free Press explains why they sued the FCC over their Net Neutrality rules: They think wireless Internet connections should be included. So do I!
<> Verizon has also appealed to the court to squash the FCC’s Net Neutrality rules, but for the usual, greedy Big Internet reasons.



In a report titled The Information Needs of Communities (PDF), the FCC warns that traditional media news is becoming less news and more entertainment as stations try to increase profits for shareholders. And although the Internet has filled the news gap abandoned by mainstream media, the lack of universal broadband access is leaving rural and urban poor without reliable, unbiased news.

Speaking before an FCC hearing to publicize the report, Free Press Policy Counsel Corie Wright,


According to a report published in Rolling Stone titled The GOP War on Voting, Replublican-led efforts have led to restrictive state laws on identification, voter registration drives, and early and absentee voting.

Another report by New York University School of Laws’s Brennan Center for Justice titled Voting Law Changes in 2012 (PDF), warns of the same restrictions, and notes, "These new restrictions fall most heavily on young, minority, and low-income voters, as well as on voters with disabilities."

I should note that Oregon has had Vote by Mail since 1998. And a recent report,produced by Reed College on behalf of the Commission on Federal Election Reform, noted:

Vote by mail increases turnout, perhaps by as much as 10%. However, the turnout increases result from the retention of existing voters and not from the recruitment of new voters into the system, and the increase is noticeable only in low profile contests. There is no evidence that it provides any partisan advantage. In summary, there is some evidence that VBM results in a small increase in the size of the electorate, and no evidence that it changes the composition of the electorate.

The U.S. Secret Service and the police departments of Minneapolis and St. Paul Minnesota have settled a lawsuit brought by three of the 40 journalists who were illegally arrested while covering the Republican National Convention in 2008, and later released without charges being brought against them.



I’ve been watching the Occupy Wall Street protests and other similar protests that sprang up in other cities nation-wide, to see if police behavior has improved. So far, the results have been gratifying overall. More on this as events occur.



Evil Patent Troll of the Week: a company named Innovatio, which managed to get its hands on some p[atents covering Wi-Fi technology — and is being sued by Motorola and Cisco, who claim the patents are invalid! — are not going after the companies making Wi-Fi gear. Instead they are going after restaurants and coffee shops who offer free Wi-Fi to their customers!



The Supreme Court let stand a federal appeals court ruling that downloading a song is not "public performance" under copyright law. Most people, based on common sense, understand the difference between downloading a song and playing it. Now the lawyers do, too!



As you probably already know (even if you live under a rock!), Apple founder Steve Jobs died. The press notwithstanding, I wouldn’t go so far as to call Steve Jobs an inventor. There were many MP3 players out before the iPod, many cell phones before the iPhone, and numerous tablet PCs on the market off and on before the iPad. But Mr. Jobs was good at two things: marketing his products, and making sure that content was available from Day One to use on them. iTunes was the innovation, not the iPod. And the iPhone would have been nearly useless without the App Store. The iPad, of course leverages features of the other two.



The rise of the e-book is proving to be as disruptive to the publishing industry as MP3s were to the music industry. The difference is that publishers, and retailers like Amazon, have apparently learned from Big Music’s mistakes, and are trying to develop pricing models that make sense.



With the Internet all but eliminating traditional means of correspondence (when was the last time you mailed a personal letter?!), the US Postal Service thinks it has found a way to stay in the game: promote the use of junk mail! As if we didn’t get enough already . . . !



Tennessee is the latest state to pressure Amazon into collecting state sales taxes when Tennesseans make purchases online.



FCC chairman Julius Genachowski announced a proposal to reform the $8 billion Universal Service Fund — currently used to subsidize rural phone systems — and instead reallocate the money to develop broadband Internet connections in rural areas.

The American Cable Association, the trade group for the cable industry, came out against the proposal, because it would give incumbent telecom carriers the right of first refusal, and allow then a 10-year exemption from competition as long as the offer broadband to at least 35% of their current coverage area.



Sony may be buying out Ericsson’s half of the Sony Ericsson mobile phone brand. I guess the phones will be called Sony only from here out.



The Center for Democracy and Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a long list of others, including Roger L. Easton, who invented the Global Positioning System (GPS), submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court regarding US v. Jones, asking them to reject the use of the technology for warrantless location tracking.



Only somewhat tech-related, but The Huffington Post posted a very good series titled Beyond The Battlefield: From A Decade Of War, An Endless Struggle For The Severely Wounded that points out the long-term challenges returning disabled veterans face, and some of the technologies developed to help them make their lives better. Disclaimer: I am an active Life Member of the Disabled American Veterans, currently serving as Adjutant for the Department of Oregon. So I have more than a passing interest in the welfare of our disabled veterans.



An interesting Columbia Journalism Review article titled Who’s A Journalist?, points out that New York City only hands out press credentials to established news reporters with a verifiable record of covering news stories. Anyone caught in the middle of protests when the police close in who don’t have such credentials are arrested along with the protestors, even if they have a badge identifying them as a member of the press! Sounds like a clear violation of Freedom of the Press to me!



The new Apple iOS 5 update for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod has a new iMessage service that doesn’t use the normal SMS channel like other smart phones use for texting. Instead it uses the normal 3G or 4G data stream. As a result, the message is seen by the system as a 160-byte data transfer, which on a normal data plan is almost free! Worse for the phone company, if your plan was charging you for each text, moving to iMessage cuts those profits out!

This is only the beginning. Most in the industry expect that Voice over IP will eventually erode per-minute voice charges as well, if services like Skype, already stealing land-line phone companies’ lunch on long distance calls, move to wireless in a big way, turning voice "minutes" into data "megabytes," which will surely be cheaper! At the same time, look for customer and possibly political pressure to reduce data charges as well.








October 14th 2011




I just finished watching the new TV Show Person of Interest. My reaction to the revelation in the show — that everyone is being watched all the time (at least in New York City!), and computers are correlating everything the cameras see — was that this show seems to be an open acknowledgement by society of the direction that everyone in the technology-vs.-civil rights community has been warning for years we've been heading towards. The scary part is that too many people watching this show will likely say, "Awe, it’s just a TV plot." Unfortunately, the sad fact is that if we aren’t there already, we will be soon. My advice? If your city does not yet have surveillance cams sprouting like mushrooms from every light pole, fight the attempts by the police, in the name of enhanced crime fighting, to put them there!

Something every professional learns is that tools are neither good nor evil, and can be used for either. A hammer that pounds nails can also pound heads. It isn’t the hammer that’s evil, it’s the intent of the person wielding it. As with hammers, so with surveillance systems. Even if you totally trust you city police to not use a camera system for illegal surveillance (probably unwise these days!), doesn’t mean county, state or federal cops won’t waltz in and help themselves to the video. Or lawyers, janitors, criminals, hackers . . . you see where this can quickly go. Once the tool exists, it will eventually be used to do bad things. The temptation is just too great. So stomp on attempts to deploy such technology in your home town before it is put in place.



Smart phone maker HTC is considering buying a mobile Operating System (OS). I hope not! HTC has made some of the best Android-based phones on the market (I just got my grandson a Droid Incredible 2 that he’s calling "my precious!"). They should stick with Android.



An Illinois judge ruled that, even though the state's shield law covers student journalists who belonged to the Medill Innocence Project, the over 500 email messages that passed between David Protess, the Medill professor who oversaw the project, and his students, who were investigating a 33-year-old murder case, must still be turned over to state prosecutors. The judge decided that, by working with defense attorneys, the students acted as "investigators in a criminal proceeding" on the defense’s behalf. I imagine this ruling will be appealed.



A federal court has ruled (PDF) that the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) "substantially prevailed" in its open government lawsuit filed in November 2009 against the Department of Homeland Security, requesting information about the agency's airport body scanner program.



The First Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in Glik v. City of Boston that "the filming of government officials engaged in their duties in a public place" is protected by the First Amendment. In that case a man, who used his cell phone to film a police arrest, was arrested himself! The court noted that members of the public enjoy the same rights as credentialed members of the press, saying, "the public's right of access to information is coextensive with the press," and held that, by arresting Mr. Glik, the City of Boston violated the "probable cause" requirement of the Fourth Amendment.



The White House's Office of Management and Budget has signed off on the Federal Communications Commission's 's Net Neutrality rules. Barring legal challenges (which are expected!), the rules could go into effect in a few months.



The city of Portland Oregon (my home town!) has posted their Broadband Strategic Plan (PDF), which has five goals:

1. Strategically invest in broadband infrastructure to attract innovative broadband-intensive businesses and institutions that create knowledge jobs in Portland.

2. Eliminate broadband capacity, equity, access and affordability gaps so Portland achieves near universal adoption of broadband services for all residents, small businesses and community-based organizations.

3. Develop highly technology-skilled and employablale residents, students, small businesses and workforce.

4. Promote and plan for the use and wide-spread adoption of broadband technologies in government, energy conservation, transportation, health, education and public safety.

5. Create future-oriented broadband policy, modernize government organizations and institutionalize digital inclusion values throughout the region.

Author Glenn Greenwald speaking at the ACLU of Massachusetts annual Bill of Rights Dinner

Whistleblowing is one of the very few means left that we have for learning what the government does behind this massive wall of secrecy. Almost every single political controversy of significance over the last decade from Abu Ghraib to the NSA eavesdropping scandal to the torture regime and on and on has been the by-product of brave people in government stepping forward and informing the nation of the seed or criminality. And yet this administration is conducting literally a war on the activity of whistleblowing even though candidate Obama in Astons’ website, you can go read it said I believe that whistleblowing needs to be encourage not prosecuted because these are patriotic and courageous people and yet as a New York article by Jane Meyer two weeks ago just pointed out there are more prosecutions under the Obama administration, under the Espionage Act than all other presidents combined in history to the point where as one person put it President Obama has a greater fixation on stopping leaks and whistleblowing than even Richard Nixon had.

A plan thought up by large regional telecoms AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, Frontier Communications, Windstream and FairPoint Communications, dubbed America’s Broadband Connectivity Plan, would deny states the ability to regulate reimbursement rates between companies within the state, which state regulators claim is a violation of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The proposed law would allow the Big Telecoms to reduce intra-state transfer payments to small rural telecoms, which would force them to increase the fees they charge their customers or go out a business.



Intel is playing up Ultrabook PCs, a "a new category of extraordinarily responsive, stylish, and thin devices,” that Intel says are the key to transforming the personal computing industry as we know it! Expect the first batch out by the holiday season this year.



Google and Intel have formed a partnership to port Google’s Android mobile OS to Intel chips. Up to now, Intel has been all but locked out of the smart phone market. This is a way to get back into the game!



ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes posted a installation walk-through of the Windows 8 developer build. Interesting stuff.



ZDNet’s Jason Perlow says Microsoft is in denial about Apple’s Steve Jobs’ contention that the "Post PC Era" has begun. I disagree (with both Steve and Jason). There will always be a place for desktop PCs, just not as many as we have today. Granted, many families, whose computing needs extend to e-mail, and light word processing, are already living with laptops only, and Tablet PCs are replacing some of those, while much of the Web surfing has moved to smart phones. But in a corporate environment? No way! At least not soon.



The ACLU has posted a report titled A Call to Courage: Reclaiming our Liberties Ten Years After 9/11 (PDF) hat reviews the many ways our civil liberties have been eroded in the name of fighting terrorism, and challenges us a citizens to challenge our politicians to start reversing that trend, saying:

It is not too late to strengthen our laws, to take back our data, and to ensure that government surveillance is conducted under effective and reasonable constraints, subject to meaningful oversight. But we have to speak up now, before our surveillance society is irrevocably entrenched and we find that we have permanently sacrificed our essential values. Otherwise, we risk changing our national character and surrendering one of the key freedoms we strive to protect — our right to privacy and our ability to speak, dissent, exchange ideas, and engage in political activity without the chilling fear of unwarranted government intrusion.

According to a 24/7 Wall St article, the ten states with the slowest Internet connections are Missouri, Alaska, Nebraska, Arkansas, Iowa, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. Not surprising: these are all low-population, rural states which have typically been ignored by the Big Internet Service Providers as not cost effective.



Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) has again introduced a journalist shield law H.R. 2932, Free Flow of Information Act of 2011. Unfortunately, this proposed law defines a journalist as someone who regularly reports and writes for a substantial portion of their livelihood, or for substantial financial gain, which would likely exclude many bloggers.



Sony has amended its terms of service (TOS) and user agreement for its online services to specifically preclude users’ rights to file class-action lawsuits against them! If you’ll remember, Sony faced numerous lawsuits after a a series of data security breaches exposed the personal information of more than 100 million users of the company’s online gaming and media services.



A federal appeals court has reinstated a US $675,000 illegal filesharing verdict against Joel Tenenbaum based on a legal technicality. A jury in the original case awarded the large verdict — for making 30 songs available over a peer-to-peer filesharing network— but the judge in the case found the amount "unconstitutionally excessive" and reduced it to US $67,500, but the Appeals Court said the judge did so in an legally incorrect way. The Appeal Court also noted that, "This case raises concerns about application of the Copyright Act which Congress may wish to examine."



Technology giant IBM is celebrating its 100th anniversary, and for many of those years the company has been a leader in the technology of the time.



In an attempt to stem the tied of angry customers exiting the company’s DVD-by-mail and Internet streaming movie rental services, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings posted an apology explaining why the two services are separating, and backing away from the increased pricing for customers using both services.

So far the move hasn’t gone over well in the media. Numerous industry watchers posted articles similar to this ZDNet article, that claims "Analysts say Netflix looks like it’s panicking over backlash to pricing changes." Well of course! Question is, will customers of Netflix and Qwickster (the new name for the DVD-by-mail service) buy the apology and stay on board? Time will tell.



Sony is a little late to the Tablet PC party with their Tablet S, based on the Android Honeycomb OS. Sony is hoping its styling, exclusive Sony apps, and PlayStation certification for mobile gaming will differentiate it from the increasingly crowded market.



Need yet another example of why we need Net Neutrality? Yahoo! is apologizing for blocking emails that contained a link to the protesters' website occupywallstreet.org, which documents the protests currently underway on Wall Street. Yahoo! is claiming the problem was caused by an overly aggressive spam filter, but a live human had to decide to add that domain to the filter at some point.



The FCC published its Net Neutrality rules in the Federal Register, which makes them official. Let the court challenges begin!

Electronic free speech advocacy group Free Press, long supporters of Net Neutrality, filed suit against the FCC over the new rules, saying they don’t go far enough!



The trial brought by the DoJ to stop the AT&T/T-Mobile merger is scheduled to begin on February 13th 2012.



We're a step closer to the Star Trek-style computer we just talk to: IBM’s Watson computer has made great strides in interpreting human language. Hey, IBM, while you’re at it, it’s time to look at programming Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Rebotics into that bad boy, before giving it control of anything serious!



The venerable Built-In Operating System (BIOS) we’ve all come to know and love (or at least learn to live with!) is being replace with a new Unified Extensible Firmware Interface or UEFI. Although firmware-based like the BIOS, it will not be limited to the system board. Rather, it can also be placed in a folder on the hard drive, or even on a network share. Note that while all current desktop OSs support it, only the upcoming Windows 8, some custom Linux builds, and the Mac OS X Bootcamp boot manager actually take advantage of it.



Scientists at UC-Berkeley are working on a way to decode human thoughts as pictures! While this sounds cool, I can think of some really bad uses for such a technology when it’s used on someone involuntarily! Talk about invasion of privacy!



The bankruptcy of Borders bookstores has prompted a privacy battle over the extensive personal information the bookseller has on file concerning its customers. Rival bookseller Barnes & Noble, who won the right to purchase Borders intellectual assets at auction, objects to a ruling by a Consumer Privacy Ombudsman appointed by the bankruptcy court that Barnes & Noble must have the consent of Borders’ customers before they can use their personal information. Barnes & Noble says handling the information under its own privacy policy is good enough.

The Federal Trade Commission agreed with the Ombudsman (PDF), saying:

The representations Borders made to its customers about the privacy of their information, including email addresses and purchase history, would likely be considered very important to many customers. In particular, information about the types of books and videos customers have purchased would be considered personal to many customers. Consumers who bought such items would likely be very concerned if their information were to be transferred without restriction to an unknown purchaser for unknown uses.

Unfortunately, the lawyers in the case agreed in an out-of-court settlement that Barnes & Noble would email Borders’ customers and give them 15 days to opt out, and "split the cost of an advertisement in USA Today giving customers information on how to opt out."



The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled (PDF) that a lawsuit challenging the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), brought by a coalition of civil liberties groups and attorneys, may proceed.



An ATM skimming gang invested some of its ill-gotten gains in a 3D printer, which they used to create extremely accurate skimmer parts that looked identical to those on the original ATM!



According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, "Americans turn to a wide range of platforms to get local news and information, and where they turn varies considerably depending on the subject matter and their age." Local television, for instance, is primarily used to gain information on "weather, breaking news, and to a lesser degree, traffic", while "newspapers play a much bigger role in people’s lives than many may realize."



Senators Al Franken (D-MN), Chris Coons (D-DL) and Charles Schumer (D-NY) have voiced their concerns about an OnStar announcement, via email to their subscribers, that the company would continue to collect location data from -equipped cars even after their owners cancel their OnStar service, and that they were reserving the right to sell anonymized data to third parties!

Faced with public and official government outrage, OnStar quickly abandoned its new privacy policy!



Amazon announced it will release its Kindle Fire on November 15, 2011. The new tablet PC will list for $199, run a customized version of the Google Android OS, and will sport a 7-inch color multi-touch screen, 8GB internal storage, Wi-Fi support (802-11b/g/n with WEP, WPA and WPA2 security), and free cloud storage for "Amazon content" (not sure what that means!). It also boasts an innovative new mobile Web browser app called Silk.

ZDNet posted a preliminary review of the Kindle, but won’t have one to touch until November 15th. They did note, though:

In terms of hardware, the Kindle Fire doesn't offer any sort of photo or video camera capability, memory expansion, video output, GPS, Bluetooth support, or cellular data connection.

For software, you're really limited to the Amazon way of doing things. The underlying software may be Google's, but key Android features, such as Maps, Gmail, Navigation, and the Google App Market, are all absent.

So this isn’t a real replacement for a iPad, unless the lacks noted above don’t bother you.

However, ExtremeTech posted an article 5 ways Kindle Fire beats the iPad, that says besides its lower cost, the smaller size, lighter weight, more available content, and faster Silk browser make it more useful than the larger iPad.

I’m not sold yet, but I am thinking about maybe getting an e-book reader so I can get books from my favorite authors before they come out in paperback. And the wife would appreciate having fewer books on the shelf! But until I actually heft one, I won’t know if it's light enough to hold up while reading in bed at night!



As if they weren’t already getting enough bad press lately: Netflix is trying to have some of the privacy provisions of the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act overturned, saying that the law makes it illegal for Facebook to interface with Netflix and automatically post on customers’ Facebook pages what movies they are watching. Privacy watchdogs object, saying users already have the capability to post that information themselves.



Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) and Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA), who co-chair the House Bipartisan Privacy Caucus, sent a letter to the FTC complaining about the use of "supercookies" in Web sites that retain significant information about the computer’s users, while resisting user attempts to delete them.



After paying $1.2 billion for it last year HP is apparently looking to sell off Palm, and Amazon might be buying!



Microsoft is blaming a faulty AV update for reports from users of its Microsoft Security Essentials free security software suite that the software removed the Google Chrome Web browser from their systems, claiming it was a virus!





September 29th 2011




Earlier this month, a coalition of privacy, consumer rights, and civil rights organizations submitted comments to the Department of Homeland Security, asking them to suspend their controversial Watchlist program, a secret government database in which the Feds record "encounters" with persons on the list. Back in July 2010, DHS announced expansions to the program, and claimed it was exempt from the Privacy Act of 1974. The coalition is asking the agency suspend the program and comply with its obligations under the Privacy Act.



After only a few months of dismal sales, HP is pulling the plug on its Touchpad tablet PC, and the WebOS operating system it ran on. Remember that HP bought out Palm specifically to get its hand on the Palm’s WebOS. Unfortunately, by the time they released the Touchpad, Google’s Android had already roped in the "everything not Apple" market. This may end up being loked at as smart management in the end (dropping WebOS and the Touchpad, not buying Palm in the first place!). But that will be little consolation to those who paid full price for a Touchpad!

HP also announced it was looking to spin off its PC business, like IBM did when it sold off it’s PC business to Lenovo in December 2004.

Following the announcements, HP’s shares, which closed the previous day $29.51 dropped $5.95, or 20.2 percent, closing at $23.56!



AT&T is getting a lot of heat for discontinuing their $10 per 1,000 texts plan, leaving users with the choice of either paying $20 a month for unlimited texting, or have no plan and pay $0.20 per message. As a September, 2009 Time Magazine article reported:

SMS messages are not only extremely short (maxing out at 160 characters), but they also cleverly exploit today's digital phone networks, leveraging transmission channels between phone and cell tower that were originally designed to coordinate voice calls. "They cost the mobile carriers so little that you could argue that they're free," says [Christopher Collins, a senior analyst with Yankee Group]

In other words, the channel SMS messages use has to be kept open at all times by the company anyway! So charging at all for texting is questionable!


Infoworld’s Bill Snyder complains that the billions of dollars spent by Google and other to snatch up patents would be better spent putting unemployed techies to work! Instead the mergers involved almost always result in techies losing jobs!



Apple filed a patent to allow live event venues to automatically disable the camera in iPhone users’ phones ! As Josh Levy from Free Press noted:

Imagine if police or repressive governments used the same technology to stop citizens from documenting abuses. Want to capture police brutality on your phone? The police could disable your camera and continue their crimes. Want to share scenes from a democratic protest in the Middle East with the rest of the world? Ditto.

Josh also quoted Bryan Preston of Pajamas Media, who said:

I OWN the phone. Apple has no right to turn it off remotely. This opens up all sorts of disturbing possibilities, especially in totalitarian states, where the company might have an incentive to trade profits for personal liberty.

Amen, Brother Bryan! Technology like this, that limits what we can do with a device after we buy it, should be illegal.



A recent poll conducted by TechRepublic, as many as 75 percent of enterprise computers are still running Windows XP. The article notes that most "upgrades" are doene by replacing older PCs with new machines running Windows 7.



In an interesting twist on the BART cell phone blocking brouhaha, telecom lawyer Harold Feld says turning off the cell phone system violated California and Federal common carrier laws, saying:

From my perspective, and the perspective of traditional telecom law, BART could just as well have turned off the local central office and all this chatter about whether or not BART is a public forum is just a distraction.

He goes on to quote statutory and settled case law to show that BART broke the law. Of course, no prosecutor is falling over themselves to take BART to court.

. . . so far! A coalition of rights groups including Public Knowledge, the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commissionasking the regulators to declare that BART's actions violated the federal Telecom Act.



There is a quiet war going on between computer users who value their privacy, and Web sites and advertisers, over how much information our Web browsers should be able to report about our browsing habits! In a Network World article titled Browsing and Privacy: How to Not Get Tracked, Shane O'neill reports on new technologies companies are using to get around browser security settings, and how you can defeat them!



The NSA has posted a guide titled Best Practices for Securing Your Home Network (PDF) that every home computer user with a broadband connection to the Internet should read. It has lots of good ideas on managing wired, wireless and mobile devices!



Ouch! Researchers at the Belgium Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and Microsoft found vulnerabilities in the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) used to secure online transactions and wireless networks. Fortunately, it would take "billions of years of computer time" to break it, so we’re all probably OK for now!



The report posted by Mother Jones notes that the Federal Bureau of Investigation employs almost 15,000 undercover agents that regularly infiltrate communities where they think terrorist-minded individuals might be hanging out, then encourage otherwise-unwilling participants to plot out terrorist attacks by providing weaponry, funds and direction, then arrest them before they actually do anything bad.



A proposed class-action lawsuit filed in a Chicago federal court accuses online tracking and analytics firm comScore of illegally accessing consumer’ systems and capturing their personal information. The long list of actions includes reading users’ documents, e-mail and modifying their Web browsers, instant messaging applications, and even firewall settings!



A new computer worm dubbed Morto uses the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to infect systems that have RDP enabled and weak Windows administrator account passwords!



According to an article titled Telecommunications industry working overtime to misrepresent net neutrality, a shadowy group called Americans for Job Security, which refuses to disclose its membership beyond the claim that its members are "businesses, business leaders and entrepreneurs from around the country," is flooding the TV airwaves with spots claiming that Net Neutrality will cost America jobs.

The article goes on to state:

Why should it be that babysitting the telecoms — keeping them from straying outside of their only legitimate mission (moving data through the pipes) — should be framed as "loss of jobs" or "lost profits"? The quick answer is that this is manipulative framing. We don’t allow carpenters to do plumbing. We don’t allow surgeons to do architecture. "Gatekeeper to the Internet" is not a legitimate job function of telecoms, so it’s ludicrous for them to claim that they are being deprived of money they could make if only they were allowed to do things other than the things they should be doing.

Exactly! The Big Internet companies perceive a chance to increase profits by being able to control which sites have priority on their networks, in two ways. First, is the ability to charge content providers (Google, YouTube, Netflix, etc.) extra for "enhanced service," i.e.: a faster connection to their customers than those that don’t pay (like the millions of non-commercial sites like this one!). Secondly, ISPs like Comcast that are also content providers, would like to be able to give their own content priority over others on their network. Either way, this gives sites willing to pay unfair priority access to the ISP’s users, compared to sites that won’t or can’t afford to pay to put their site in the fast lane! And that unfairness is, in the opinion of many (including myself!), an unwarranted restriction of Free Speech!



The boom in tablet PCs led by Apple’s iPad has led to a new subscription path for newspapers and magazines. Most smart phone users haven’t wanted to read "news print" on their phone’s small screen, but the large tablet screen is perfect for displaying such content. And tablet PC owners have started subscribing!



Does anyone out there not know by now that Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple? Of course, Mr. Jobs has been elected chairman of Apple's board, so he isn’t leaving completely.



Apple’s iTunes and Apple TV customers will no longer be able to "rent" (i.e. stream) TV show episodes. Apple’s research showed that customers "overwhelmingly prefer buying TV shows" as opposed to renting them. People are apparently beginning get smart, I guess!



In a case that will test the limits of online free speech, William Lawrence Cassidy was jailed on federal charges of online stalking after using numerous pseudonyms to publish over 8,000 threatening and insulting Twitter posts about Alyce Zeoli, a Buddhist community leader. Mr. Cassidy’s lawyers argue that Twitter is a public forum, and that even offensive speech there is protected by the First Amendment. The Electronic Frontier Foundation agreed and submitted an amicus brief (PDF) with the court, urging that the case be dismissed, saying:

As the ways people express their thoughts adapt to new technology, it is important to maintain our Constitutional guarantees at the electronic frontier. While not all speech is protected by the First Amendment, the idea that courts must police every inflammatory word spoken online not only chills freedom of speech, but is unsupported by decades of First Amendment jurisprudence. . With these concepts in mind, this Court should protect online freedom of expression by dismissing the indictment and invalidating the portion of 18 U .S.C. § 2261A(2)(A) criminalizing online speech directed at public figures that causes "substantial emotional distress" as inconsistent with the First Amendment.

I agree.



ZDNet’s Phil Wainewright thinks broadband connections should be considered a utility, and given the same priority for new connections as water and electric when a users moves into a new home! Good luck with that! Getting same week response from most cable or telecom providers is not likely!



This is not tech related, but . . . : Alabama’s new immigration law, is cruel, thinly-veiled racism of the worst kind. Where Blacks had Jim Crow in the 1960’s, Latinos in Alabama have Jaime Cuervo today: same hate, different target. And before someone responds "this isn’t about race," I say watch how many (if any) pale-skinned Canadian and European immigrants are accosted! My guess will be only the few stupid enough to openly flout their illegal status. Meanwhile, every Latino in Alabama will be assumed guilty unless proven innocent by documentation they’d better not forget to carry! Shame on you, Alabama.



The Department of Justice has announced its intent to block the AT&T merger with T Mobile, saying that America’s second-largest wireless provider buying out the fourth-largest would “substantially lessen competition” in the industry, violating U.S. antitrust law.



UCLA engineers have developed stretchable organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). I can see it now: Spandex with advertizing videos!



Have an HP TouchPad? Now that HP has dropped it off the market, before you decide to see how many skips it will make at the local lake before it sinks, you might want to hold onto it: a group of programmers calling them selves Touchdroid are working to port the Android operating system over to TouchPads!



Speaking of HP TouchPads: ZDNet’s David Chernicoff wonders: was HP’s TouchPad/WebOS "cancellation" a marketing ploy to allow them to deep-discount the tablets and build market share? Particularly since HP is readying a "final" production run of about 200,000 units!



A proposed federal class action lawsuit filed in Seattle claims that the camera app built into Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 OS was intentionally coded to ignore a configuration setting that turns off location tracking! This might be a tough sell. Proving something was done "intentionally" requires proof of intent (duh!). And assuming to was intentional, I don’t see Microsoft being stupid enough to leave evidence of same lying around!



A woman who purchased a used laptop from one of her students — that turned out to have be school! — is suing the software company whose tracking software was installed on the PC, claiming that while conducting a search for the PC company employees captured sexually explicit exchanges between the woman and a man, which they printed out and gave to the police. In their lawsuit the two claim the software company, the city and the police illegally intercepting their communications! The US District Judge in the case agreed, writing:

It is one thing to cause a stolen computer to report its IP address or geographical location in an effort to track it down. It is something entirely different to violate federal wiretapping laws by intercepting communications of the person using the stolen laptop.

Ya think? I imagine this will change the way software of this type is used, which will limit its usefulness!



Amazon’s Android OS-based Kindle tablet PC is getting a lot of love from reviewers. Given that Amazon has lots of content on its site to support it is probably it’s biggest selling factor.



Groklaw reports that the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled (PDF) affirms in all respects SCO Group's loss to Novell over ownership of Unix. If you’ll remember, since 2003 SCO has been using it alleged ownership of Unix to sue Unix and Linux users. As Groklaw publisher Pamela Jones noted, "SCO has fallen downstairs, hitting its head on every step, to the very bottom, just like I told you in May of 2003, in the first article I ever wrote about SCO."

It’s worth noting that Groklaw followed this story from its very beginning, and has become the authoritative site for researching points of law regarding open source software. Good on you, Pam!



With Facebook, Google and Twitter all the recent subjects of federal investigations, the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness (CRE) has petitioned the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), asking them to publish rules under which these and other Web-based companies can legally operate.



ZDNet has posted an interesting article titled The next four industries to be revolutionized by the Internet: movies, healthcare, book publishing, and financial payments. Actually, I think this article is late to the party, at least in my life:

• Movies. Both my new HDTV and my Blu-Ray player have built-in Internet connections with built-in software to access Netflix and other streaming video. But I haven’t used either, since my DirectTV DVR can record movies for later viewing. Meanwhile, you can hardly find a video rental store any more (unless you count those ubiquitous Red Box kiosks!), and Netflix has divorced its old-school DVD-through-mail rental business from its new-school streaming video service. Not to mention movie theaters trying to move their movie distribution to the Internet. Do the math. Movies on media are dying out fast!


• Healthcare. I get my healthcare through the VA, and they have been doing computer-based records for years. Any doctor at any VA facility in the US can access a patient’s complete record. Everything is digitized, including X-Rays, CAT scans, etc. And with federal law mandating mandating Electronic Medical Records by 2014 the rest of the US is not far behind.


• iPad, Kindle, Nook. E-readers penetration as high as . Need I say more?!


• Financial payments. I get monthly bill statements almost exclusively via e-mail these days, and all but one of my bills (garbage!) is paid online via a company Web site or the Bill Pay page my credit union’s Web site.

Does this mean I’m ahead of the curve? I don’t think so. Many people I know live the same way.



During a interview on the 21st anniversary of the World Wide Web, Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee advocated strongly for Net Neutrality, pointing to its use to coordinate peaceful overthrow of the government in Egypt, and warning that if ISPs are allowed to give some Web sites priority over others, it could endanger democracy, saying:

"Some people worry that without net neutrality during election time that individual political parties might be able to buy bad connectivity for their opponents. Imagine that parties will be able to use campaign dollars to prevent the Internet from becoming a neutral space for democracy."

AMD is shipping its 16-core Interlagos CPU. The new CPU, now called the Opteron 6200, is intended for the server market, and much of the output is already promised to Cray for supercomputers!



Turkish tech manufacturer Vestel is showing off the first BitTorrent-certified TV! Yes, that means you can search for, download and play videos from BitTorrent. Don’t plan on seeing one sold in the US.



The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit upheld a lower court ruling ordering the US Department of Justice to provide the American Civil Liberties Union with the names and case docket numbers of cases in which it "accessed cell phone location data without a warrant." The Feds have claimed from the beginning that they don’t need a warrant to get location information about you from your cell phone provider! The ACLU (and most sane citizens outside law enforcement, including me!) disagree. It’s expected that this case will be submitted to the Supreme Court for consideration.



Faced with complying with the Energy Independence and Security Act, which bans bulbs 40 Watts and over by 2014, the lighting industry is moving to LED light bulbs, if they can figure out how to make them cooler and cheaper.




August 28th 2011




Local American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) groups have submitted nearly 400 requests for information to determine how law enforcement agencies use mobile device location information to track citizens. They particularly want to know if the cops are obtaining warrants prior to tracking users, and how often they do it.



The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. has ruled that the U.S. Transportation Security Agency violated federal law when it installed full-body scanners in American airports because it failed to follow federal laws that require federal agencies to first notify the public of the proposed rule change and seek comment.



An archive of documents obtained from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) provides a troubling glimpse into the corporate influence being wielded to shape conservative policies. ALEC is a secretive conservative policy group bent on standardizing state laws around their agenda, that provides "model legislation" to assist state legislators in doing just that.



TechRepublic posted a good article on Comparing Android and iOS security. Both compared favorably in the article, but in my opinion the basic difference in security philosophy between the two wasn’t clearly addressed. Apple’s iOS assumes that every app being installed has been "blessed" by Apple, which assumes Apple’s people actually have the time to fully test every app in their App Store (right!). Android, on the other had lets you know up front at install time what services and behaviors the app is going to configure and/or use. So the question to ask is: whose judgement do you trust more: some underpaid dude (or dudette!) at Apple, or yourself! I choose me!



According to the 2010 Wiretap Report (PDF) published by the Director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, federal and state courts issued 3,194 orders interception orders in 2010, 34% higher than 2009. Federal judges authorized 1,207 orders, and state judges authorized 1,987, with California, New York and New Jersey having the largest number of applications. Only one wiretap authorization request was denied.



California passed an amendment to the California Public Records Act (pdf) that protects library patron privacy from "any person, local agency, or state agency” without consent of the person. Exceptions include administrative use by library personnel, with court order, or anonymized statistical research.



The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 includes two new exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act contained in The provisions contained in the spending measure would allow the US government to exempt from FOIA requests data about US critical infrastructure and flight information. Concurrently, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted 17-9 to keep its deliberations on the bill closed to the public.



A new design for a fanless rotating heat sink Air Bearing Heat Exchanger has been developed by Sandia National Laboratories.



Sales of Intel’s Atom CPU dropped last quarter. The chip giant is retargeting the low-end CPU at the netbook, tablet and smart phone markets.



New users of Comcast’s Xfinity service are finding that running the software the ISP gives customers to install changes their Firefox homepage to comcast.net, and won’t let them set it to anything else! This primarily affects Mac users! Comcast says a fix is in the works!



Faced with nearly universal condemnation of full-body scanners put in use in US airports, the TSA has announced an upgrade called Automated Target Recognition (ATR) that would replace the naked image with a silhouette or outline with any suspicious objects superimposed over it.



Google’s Chrome Web browser increased its user share from 7.24% to 13.11%, mostly at Internet Explorer’s expense.



Truthdig’s David Sirota reports that electronics sold in the U.S. but manufactured overseas are often being "preloaded with spyware, malware, and security-compromising components." He explains:

The process through which this happens is straightforward — and its connection to our current trade policies is obvious. First, an American company or governmental agency orders computer hardware or software from a tech company. Then, because the "free" trade era has incentivized that company to move its production facilities to low-wage countries, much of that order is actually fulfilled at foreign factories where security standards may be lacking.

Mr. Sirota says this issue is largely being ignored because "examination of supply chain vulnerabilities would force us to question free-trade theologies that powerful interests don’t want challenged."



Streaming video service Hulu is apparently up for sale, and Apple is thinking about buying it. This would not make Netflix very happy.



Zurich American Insurance Company is suing Sony, saying that policy the media giant has with Zurich doesn’t cover the security breaches Sony suffered earlier this year, and that they are therefore not required to defend Sony against the growing number of lawsuits that have resulted.



A Google techie conducting maintenance at a one of its data centers noticed "unusual search traffic" and further research revealed users’ computers were infected with malware that was redirecting their Google searches to suspect websites. Google has begun notifying users whose PCs appear to be affected, and has provided a link to an article to help users clean them out! This presents us IT types with a dilemma. We’ve been telling our users to ignore messages purported to be from legitimate companies, claiming they are likely phishing messages, since big companies would never contact you via e-mail! " And now Google has done just that .



Spotify, a streaming music service once limited to Europe, had 70,000 subscribers sign up in its first week of US operations.



How about streaming your own music?! A new service called AudioGalaxy is available that provides free apps to install on your PC and your smart phone that lets you stream music files on your PC to your phone! The service is free (at least for now!), and does require you to create an account.



California real estate escrow company Village View Escrow is suing its former bank, claiming that Professional Business Bank was negligent, and failed to comply with the terms of its own online banking contract, resulting in Village View Escrow losing over $465,000 when the account Village View Escrow had with the bank was hacked last year.

For years, computer security professionals have been saying that banks won’t start taking security serious until they are held fiscally responsible for the losses when hackers break in. This case, and a similar case where a bank was ruled responsible, may be the start of that. If enough case law comes down in banking customers’ favor, no one will be able to hack a bank!



Jammie Thomas-Rasset — the first person the RIAA took to court over illegal filesharing — had her $1.5 million jury verdict reduced to $54,000. in reducing the verdict, US District Court Judge Michael Davis called the original verdict "so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportionate to the offense and obviously unreasonable."



The state of Florida made more than US $60 million last year selling information the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles has on its citizens to employers, insurance companies, and data aggregators.



July 27th was the 30th anniversary of Microsoft’s MS-DOS.



All the new tech toys users are buying — smart phones, tablets, etc. &mdash can become a nightmare for IT support folks when they bring them to work and plug them into the corporate network!



Being able to remotely unlock your car door using a phone app is cool. But a thief doing the same thing wouldn’t be! Unfortunately, researchers have figured out how. It’s only a matter of time before hackers are selling an "off-the-shelf" solution that the thieves can buy!



San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system — which has been dealing with angry protests designed to disrupt service since a transit cop shot and killed a homeless person on a train platform last month — made a really bad decision to block cell phone service in its downtown San Francisco stations, to prevent the protesters from coordinating their actions.

If this isn’t government interference with free speech, I don’t know what is! But BART spokesman Linton Johnson disagreed, saying "Inside the fare gates is a non-public forum and by law, by the Constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court, there is no right to free speech there." Somehow, I don’t think he asked the esteemed bodies he refers to before using their names.

The Center for Democracy & Technology disagreed with Mr. Johnson’s interpretation of the law, saying:

BART ignored the huge difference between protesting on the BART train platforms and talking about protesting on the BART platforms. BART was clearly wrong in saying, as it did in a statement issued soon after the first shutdown, that all "expressive activities" are prohibited on the BART platforms and trains. To the contrary, even on the platform or train, a passenger has the First Amendment right to wear a button saying "BART stinks" and one person cannot be prohibited from saying to another "I think BART is mishandling these protests."

Moreover, BART’s legal analysis missed a crucial point: that there is another "forum" at issue, not the physical forum of the train platform but the virtual platform of the cell phone and wireless Internet communications network. The telltale flaw in BART’s legal analysis was that, on the day in question, it did not shut down the physical platform, but rather it shut down the cell phone and Internet platform and in the process it quashed clearly lawful speech.

The FCC is investigating the action, and the ACLU is looking into a possible civil rights lawsuit against BART and the city.




Nintendo announced that, starting August 12, the price of its 3DS portable game console was dropping from $249.99 to $169.99. My son had one of these but kept losing the stylus. He has an iPod Touch now, but doesn't play music on it, only games!



California enacted a new online sales tax. Under federal law, which doesn’t require a company to charge sales tax unless they have a physical presence in the state, the new California law applies to any company that has a business "nexus" such as an affiliate in California.

Online retailing pioneer Amazon, long a foe of online sales taxes, quickly responded by emailing its California affiliates and warning that they were severing ties with them, which is quickly resulting in once-thriving businesses closing their virtual doors!

Amazon submitted a petition with the state calling for a referendum to let voters decide whether to overturn a new law in the next statewide vote in February!



A large-scale survey of SSD return rates, conducted by Andrew Ku of Tom’s Hardware, shows that Solid State Drives are not really more reliable than the traditional spinning-platter models. Of course, this study concentrated on large data centers, rather than PC users, which is a very different market.



During a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing reviewing the appointment of National Security Agency (NSA) general counsel Matthew Olsen as head of the NSA National Counterterrorism Center, the subject of NSA tracking of US citizens using mobile-device location data came up. Mr. Olsen, calling the issue a "very complex question," said the NSA, under some circumstances, would have the authority under the Patriot Act to use mobile device location data to track US citizens within the US.



Adobe is beta testing a new Web animation tool dubbed Edge, that uses HTML5. This is seen as a response to Apple’s strong, public rejection of support for Adobe’s Flash in its iOS operating system, which runs on its wildly popular iPhone and iPad. Taking a hint from Apple, other mobile app developers have already turned to HTML5.



Two companion bills, H.R.2701, and S.1452, dubbed the Main Street Fairness Act, would require online retailers to collect sales taxes. Online retail giant Amazon supports it because it would simplify online-tax collection, but eBay objects to the proposed legislation, saying:

Forcing small businesses to take on the same costs and tax burdens as national retail businesses is unrealistic, unfair and will unbalance the playing field between giant retailers and small business retailers on the Internet

And as has always been the case with similar proposed federal laws in the past, there is no provision clearly protecting residents of states like Oregon which have no sales tax.



Google’s Google TV set top boxes, which the search giant hopped would tempt consumers to embrace it’s Web-based content delivery system, are not selling very well. In fact some vendors complain they are returning more boxes than they have sold so far! Google is hoping that significant price cuts on the boxes, and a revamped service, will stir up demand.



Google has purchased a large group of patents from IBM. This move was seen as a response to Apple, RIM and Microsoft beating out Google to purchase over 6000 patents from Nortel Networks in June.



EPIC filed an amicus brief (PDF in US v. Pool, a case before the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit which challenges the constitutionality of a federal law requiring that every felony defendant submit a DNA sample as a condition of bail, pending trial. The sample is profiled in the national DNA index system named CODIS, and retained indefinitely. EPIC’s brief says in part, "Today's science shows that DNA reveals vastly more personal information than a fingerprint."



This has got to be embarrassing: ManTech International Corporation, which has a five-year, US $100 million contract with the FBI to manage its cyber security, was hacked by online activist group AntiSec, who have has released 400 megabytes of documents they say were taken from contractor!



Starting October 1st, 2011, existing AT&T smartphone customers with unlimited data plans may find their connections slowing down if they move large amounts of data. AT&T stopped offering unlimited data plans last year.



The FCC published a report titled Measuring Broadband America (PDF) which documents the results of a wide-scale study measuring the real-world performance of most major U.S. Internet service providers. As you would expect, while some providers are delivering the speed they promise, many providers are far slower than the speeds they advertized!



With all the Internet-connected features showing up in cars today, the US Department of Transportation has issued a Request for Information, asking for "informed views on the perceived needs, prevailing practices, and lessons learned concerning the cybersecurity and safety of safety-critical electronic control systems used in various modes of transportation and other industry sectors."



Shades of Dick Tracy: a company called WIMM Labs is working on an Android-based wrist computer!



Leonard Pitts Jr. wrote a nice article titled Only offending police should object to cameras , noting:

If it is OK for police to use cameras to catch us in our misdeeds, why is it not OK for us to use cameras to catch police in theirs?

There is something chilling and totalitarian about this insistence that cops have the right to do as they wish without what amounts to public oversight. What is it they fear? After all, the officer who is being videotaped can protect himself by doing one simple thing:

His job.

I agree. We need a law that makes taking videos of law enforcement officers legal.



The San Mateo county district attorney's office decided not press charges against Gizmodo or its former editor Jason Chen for the online news site’s 2010 reporting about a lost Apple iPhone 4 prototype that came into their possession.



Visa has announced plans to eventually ditch the magnetic strip on its credit cards in favor of a chip-and-PIN technology. The technology will initially added as a second layer of authentication for in-person and will require users to enter PINs when making purchases in person, just like they do now for debit cards. at terminals that are compatible with the new technology, which is already in wide use in Europe. Starting in October 2012, Visa will exempt US merchants from PCI DSS compliance standards if they conduct at least 75 percent of their Visa transactions with the new terminals. The new technology will need to be in place US-wide by April 2013.



Another fun tech term: Juice Jacking. Most smart phones these days use mini or micro USB jacks to mate with computers, and the same jack also serves as a power port for charging. Have you seen the public charging stations set up in airports and public events, offering a free charge? They can be modified by installing a computer inside that, while it is charging your phone, will also suck out everything you have stored in the phone: contacts, pictures, documents, etc! Best bet: if you have to use one, power off the phone first!



Google stunned the smart phone industry with the announcement it was buying out Motorola Mobility, the company’s mobile phone division. Motorola was the first major player in the mobile device market to embrace the Android OS, and holds a large body of patents in that space. This move is likely to end any threats of patent litigation on the part of other device makers.



A significant number of smart but poor people, who couldn’t afford a PC and traditional Internet service, are buying smart phones to get Internet access for about the same cost as their existing cell phone contract. That and other lifestyle choices, particularly among younger users, have increased the number of people who connect to the Internet almost exclusively using their smart phones.



Be careful what you post on social networking sites! A British man was sentenced to 15 months in prison for using information his friends posted on their Facebook pages to answer security questions and access their bank accounts and steal over $57,000!



The Department of Homeland Security sent a letter (PDF) to state governors notifying them of their intent to terminate Secure Communities program agreements with 40 state and local governments. However they and will continue collecting biometric data without local permission! Apparently, some states were not willing to play nice with the feds, so they are playing by themselves!



Transportation Security Administration screeners at Boston’s Logan International Airport are being trained in behavioral profiling of air travelers: asking them personal questions concerning their travel plans, etc. Based on their responses, travelers could be subjected to additional "screening."



The new Serial ATA revision 3.1 (SATA3) drive interface was released in July. This latest revision increases the data throughput from SATA2’s 3Gbs (gigabits per second) to 6Gbs. While it may be a while before the speed increase becomes needed by traditional rotating-platter hard drives, some newer Solid State Drives (SSDs) can stream data at speeds in excess of 200Gbs! Intel, Micron, OCZ and Samsung have all announced SATA3 SSC drives. Unfortunately, Marvell Semiconductor, who is currently the only manufacturer making SATA 3.0 chips, confirmed that its 88SE9123 SATA3 chip has issues. So it may be a while before we see SATA3 add-in cards, and even longer before it starts showing up in a new PC.



A Network World article titled Military Plans to Squash Civil Unrest in the USA , links to numerous federal documents to paint a disturbing picture.




August 10th 2011




Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and John Cornyn (R-TX) have introduced S.978, the Commercial Felony Streaming Act, making illegal streaming of video over the Internet a felony. The bill was approved by Judiciary Committee, and moved to the Senate floor.



Major US Internet service providers (ISPs) Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon have agreed to a system (PDF) that establishes a Center for Copyright Information, which will run a Copyright Alert System to report copyright violations by the ISP’s customers. After six reported violations, the ISPs could implement "mediation measures" that include reducing Internet speed, redirecting users to "educational" pages about copyright infringement, or disrupting users’ Internet service! The plan does not directly call for cutting off accessbut the ISPs are free to do so. The agreement was brokered by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), after wholesale lawsuits of music and movie lovers backfired and turned public opinion against them!

Users are not totally without recourse. There is an Independent Review process the user can invoke. But it will cost them $35 for the privilege! And a full airing of the issue could result in the user having to expose his or her personal information in order to do so!

In a joint statement about the system, the Center for Democracy and Technology and Public Knowledge warned:

Among our concerns, we are particularly disappointed that the agreement lists Internet account suspension among the possible remedies. We believe it would be wrong for any ISP to cut off subscribers, even temporarily, based on allegations that have not been tested in court.

I agree.



Britain's best-selling Sunday newspaper, the 168-year-old News of the World, published its final edition on Sunday, July 10. The paper — owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who also owns the "Unfair and Unbalanced" Fox News —, was closed amid serious allegations of wide-spread hacking of cell phone voicemail accounts belonging to murdered children, terror victims, British soldiers killed in Iraq, and a long list of celebrities, politicians, and person in the news. Cooperation of police members has been alleged, resulting in the resignation of Scotland Yard’s chief inspector.

I mention this event, which most have read way too much of, primarily to pass on a valuable lesson all cell phone users should take away from this story: many of the voicemail accounts hacked were using the default PIN code supplied by their phone provider, or used a PIN code that was easy to figure out (1234, etc!) or easy to research (like a birthday, anniversary, etc.). Make sure your PIN is hard to guess, and make it as long as your service allows.



A federal appeals court overturned a 2007 Federal Communications Commission rule allowing publishers to own both newspapers and broadcast stations in the biggest U.S. cities. The court upheld FCC limits on local broadcast ownership and sent the cross-ownership rule back to the FCC for further consideration.



The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which sets open standards for the Web, issued a public call for prior art, seeking to invalidate two patents issued to Apple for technologies which are core components of the W3C's Widget Access Request Policy, which the W3C intended to incorporate into Hypertext Markup Language version 5 (HTML5), the next version of the language used for creating standard for Web pages and applications. As a member of the WC3, Apple should have offered the technologies up free for use, but didn’t. Thus the call to find prior art to invalidate them.



Windows Phone 7, the latest iteration of the software giant’s mobile device operating system previous called PocketPC and Windows Mobile, is not successful yet according to company CEO Steve Ballmer. According to a June survey, the mobile phone OS market was dominated by Android with 54%, Apple’s iOS was second with 26%, followed by RIM at 15%, Symbian at 3% and Windows 2%. Respondents claim they chose Android over iOS because it’s easier to use, their companies’ plans and operators are better, and the phones are cheaper.



Microsoft says that any PC that can run Windows 7 or Vista will be able to run Windows 8.



Based on information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is warning that government agencies attempt to "friend" people they’re interested in, in order to gain access to information about them.



A proposed bill being circulated by House Republicans to free up spectrum for mobile broadband use, would also remove Net Neutrality rules on the new spectrum and allow television stations that give up spectrum to request an FCC waiver of agency regulations, including media ownership limits, in lieu of sharing in the proceeds of a spectrum auction! This would be a good one to die before it becomes law!



Federal prosecutors are fighting a lawsuit challenging their authority to seize Internet domains suspected of promoting piracy. Puerto 80,which owns the Spanish domains Rojadirecta.com and .org, is seeking to have those domains returned. The government seized the domains in Operation in Our Sites using a civil seizure law the government usually uses laws used to seize drug houses!



Want lots of friends on Facebook, even if you don’t know them? There are companies out there that will sell you Facebook Friends or Twitter followers!



ClearWire, the dominant wireless company deploying WiMax, which has a large presence here in Portland, has announced it will be deploying LTE Advanced service as well in "densely populated, urban areas of Clearwire's existing 4G markets where current 4G usage demands are high." Note that LTE Advanced is primarily being deployed as a mobile device, or "smart phone" solution. In fact, most wireless carriers’ so-called 4G solutions are based on LTE.

ClearWire’s move has led some industry watchers to believe that this is the first indication that WiMax may be dying! But I don’t see why both can’t run in parallel. We’ll see.



As of a February 2011 Microsoft update, Windows no longer supports AutoRun for USB drives. AutoRun is a Windows feature that would automatically examine a removeable drive, CD, DVD, etc., and look for and run a program. Microsoft’s Security Response Center posted a lengthy explanation for the change.

As far as I’m concerned they can remove Autorun all together. It’s too risky in this age.

Why? A related story says it all: the US Department of Homeland Security dropped USB thumb drives and CDs in parking lots around government facilities, and 60 percent of those who picked them up plugged them into their office computers. If AutoRun was active the media installed a program that reported the use back to DHS! They don’t say, but I’ll bet the other 40 percent plugged them in at home!



Commercial spaceflight company Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) broke ground on a Vandenberg Air Force Base launch site for the Falcon Heavy. Dubbed "the world's largest rocket," Falcon Heavy will be able to lift over 117,000 pounds to orbit.



According to a study published in the journal Science, our growing dependence on the Internet has changed how and what our brains choose to remember: we’re less likely to remember something we can easily look up online. I've been doing this for years, First with a FRanklin Planner, then a PcketPC PDA, and now with my smart phone. Why remember what you can look up? It save more brain space for stuff I really need to remember!



As Microsoft gets closer to releasing Windows 8, and with Vista dropping out of support on April 10, 2012, there are still over 300 million XP machines in use! MS hopes many will migrate to Windows 7 or 8. But many are on corporate desktops, and won't be upgraded, only replaced, and only when they are no longer "good enough" for what they need to be used for.



Oracle filed a federal lawsuit (PDF) against Google, charging that the Android OS violates Java’s open source license, because Google left out some features of the full Java GPL package, and used components it developed itself! Sounds like patent troll behavior to me!




This is different: 10 Android apps that could get you fired if you install them on a company-owned phone!





July 29th 2011




Microsoft is getting heat for enforcing Android-related patents it holds. I know I’ve ranted against patent trolls in the past, but this is different. Microsoft legitimately bought them from the original patent holder, and deserves to profit from their use by others.

The LG Ally, the Android-based smart phone I purchased earlier this year, had a nice write-up in InfoWorld that covers its feature set nicely. One thing I didn’t know about the phone, though: it was apparently featured in the Iron Man 2 movie. Cool! I’m still very happy with the phone, by the way.



Since the iPad came out, every computer manufacturer is touch-based tablet computer crazy, trying to compete. Numerous manufacturers are making Android Honeycomb OS-based tablets, and HP has released its HP TouchPad, running a proprietary HP webOS.

PC Magazine has posted a nice head-to-head comparison of tablet PCs. Too bad I haven’t been able to convince myself I need one for anything!

TechRepublic’s Jason Hiner points out Three areas where HP TouchPad trumps Apple’s iPad (video). All are based on a productivity for work assumption. Given HP’s enterprise focus, that’s not surprising.

PC Magazine’s James Kendrick thinks the reason tablet PCs aren’t taking off as well as they might is that manufacturers are trying to get them to do too much.



The FTC is investigating Twitter over its relationships with companies that develop apps for the site.



Microsoft is touting its Office 365, a cloud-based "Microsoft Office Lite," targeted at small businesses. There are still a lot of unresolved questions about Office 365, like how you get tech support if something breaks!

If the concept of cloud-based apps interests you (or the low cost does!), InfoWorld posted an article titled Office 365 vs. Google Apps that compares the two similar products.



Microsoft admitted that despite strong European Union privacy laws, US law enforcement can still use the Patriot Act to access data from US companies’ overseas branches anywhere world-wide.



The FCC’s Net Neutrality rules have been sent to the Office of Management and Budget, the last step before being published. Expect immediate lawsuits by the big Internet Service Providers once it hits the street.

The members of the White House press pool are complaining that journalists assigned to the pool that are also twitter users are getting White House news out before the official press pool report goes out! Sounds like its time for a process change!



A consortium of Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, Research in Motion, and Sony purchased over 6,000 mobile phone patents sold at auction by Nortel, as part of their Chapter 11 bankruptcy.



US District Judge James Ware ruled that Google can be sued for accessing unprotected wireless networks from its Google Streets vehicles.



The Social Intelligence Corporation, which mines social networking sites looking for dirt on job applicants on behalf of their potential employers, passed muster with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) , who said their practices don’t violate the Fair Credit Reporting Act as long as job applicants are informed they lost the job based on information the company reported! A nice quote regarding the issue of social networking was made by Marcus J. Ranum of the SANS Institute:

"What happens on the web - stays on the web. Forever."



According to the 2010 Wiretap Report released by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, wiretap requests made by federal and state law enforcement agencies were up 34% compared to 2009, with 68 percent of all court-approved wiretaps being requested in just three states: California, New York and New Jersey.



Internet Explorer’s market share continues to drop, while use of Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari continue to gain ground. Most of Safari’s increase can be attributed to the iPad.

A nice quote on privacy, courtesy of the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez, in an article titled National Security and a Less-Restrained FBI:
"If we aren't willing to say enough is enough, our privacy will slip away one tweak at a time."



In a 7 to 2 decision, the Supreme Court, in Brown, Governor Of California, et al. v. Entertainment Merchants Association et al. (PDF) has ruled that a California law that prohibits the sale or rental of “violent video games” to minors violates the First Amendment.

The Supreme Court, in IMS Health v. Sorrell (PDF), also ruled that a Vermont law prohibiting pharmacies from selling customers’ prescription information to data mining firms was a violation of the data mining firms First Amendment rights! (Really!

The Supreme Court also granted certiorari to hear three important privacy cases:

• U.S. v. Jones, which challenges warrantless GPS tracking by law enforcement



• FAA v. Cooper, which concerns a violation of a rule in the 1974 Privacy Act limiting the ability of government agencies to share personal information



• Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of the County of Burlington, which argues that privacy is a civil right

A new question being asked in the workplace: Can a company keep the social networking contacts you made during your tenure? I can see all sorts of controversy developing over this one!



VerizonWireless discontinued unlimited data plans for new smart phone users starting on July 7th. Instead, Verizon will offer four new data plans: $10 for 75MB per month, $30 for 2GB, $50 for 5GB and $80 for 10 GB, with an extra $10 charge per each 1GB users go over their limit. Existing customers contracts will remain as is until expired.



According to computer security journalist Brian Krebs, only four banks are supporting the bulk of fake antivirus scams that regularly afflict PC users. A previous story by Brian pointed out that over half of all sales rogue Internet pharmacy Glavmed were charged to credit and debit cards issued by the top seven banks!

Funny how quick the big banks have been to cut off funding for Wikileaks, while at the same time they continue to enable massive cybercrime!



An Internet connection is the latest addition to new TVs, allowing users to surf video sites, and directly download movies from companies like Netflix. This could be the beginning of the end of proprietary set-top boxes. (By the way, why do we still call them "set top boxes," since they won’t fit on top of the flat screen? Too narrow!)



The House Judiciary Committee voted 19-10 to approve H.R.1981 - Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, which would require ISPs to retain customer IP addresses for up to a year, to allow law enforcement to investigate online child pornography.



Google has opened it’s own clone of the social networking site dubbed Google+ that it is positioning directly against Facebook: "circles" and "hangouts" replace "Friends," and "sparks" are the equivalent of Twitter’s tweets. They even offered an open-source Facebook Friend Exporter as an extension of their Chrome Web browser that allowed you to export your friend data from Facebook! Of course, Facebook quickly block the Friend Exporter!



TSA Chief John Pistole has been taking his agency’s obnoxious, intrusive search techniques out of the airports and on the road: he has formed Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) task forces that can show up at malls, stadiums, bridges, special events, etc., and screen people there. Again, as in the airports, no warrant or even probable cause required. The teams conducted 8,000 searches last year.



The FCC has posted rules on Caller ID spoofing (PDF) implemented under the Truth in Caller ID Act of 2009. Under the new rules, the violators can fined up to $10,000 for each instance where they change their caller ID information with the "intent to defraud, cause harm, or wrongfully obtain anything of value."



As you probably know, outsourcing is the practice of moving business processes — most often customer service, tech support, or software development — outside the company to a contractor, often halfway around the world! But language and cultural differences have caused many issues, particularly for software development and call center support (NBC even created a situation comedy show based on an overseas call center!). As a result, many outsourced activities have been pulled back in-country. The latest rage now is Rural Sourcing, or contracting out to companies located in lower-cost rural locations. The idea is to reduce costs while still having a person you can understand on the other end of the call!



The European Space Agency has built a one billion pixel camera that, when launched in 2013, will help them build a 3D picture of the Milky Way Galaxy.



Facebook has announced that it’s 750 million users can now video chat with each other courtesy of Skype through the Facebook website. No group calling however (so far!).



Gizmo’s Freeware newsletter posted a list of 391 sites to obtain free legal downloadable e-books and audio books! Now if I just had the time to visit them all . . . !



Controlling computers and other devices with your mind is just around the corner.



With Facebook approaching 1 Billion users, there is some concern about the threat of someone using facial recognition against those 1 Billion profiles, and figure out who you are. It’s only a small streach from their to stalking or identity theft.



In a new report titled Drastic Measures Required, the ACLU warns Congress that "secrecy poisoning" is killing American democracy, saying:

Government secrecy kills public accountability and cripples the government’s system of checks and balances, two essential elements of our constitutional democracy. As former Secretary of State Colin Powell put it, terrorists "are dangerous criminals, and we must deal with them," but "the only thing that can really destroy us is us."

I started this site in 1996 as a test bed for trying out new HTML programming techniques. However, over the years it has turned into something much more serious. Please bear with me as I continue to bring issues to light and discuss them here, and feel free to send your constructive criticism and suggestions to the e-mail address below.

Our only chance to preserve our rights is to rise up as citizens and demand that they be protected. Hopefully this site will provide you some of the knowledge necessary to do that effectively. Please return often, and direct others here to learn what is at stake in the battle to secure our rights in a digital age!

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"So what's with the wierd name?"

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