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Oregon's tech economy is booming.
Sort of.
Although jobs are surging among Oregon software startups, those young companies remain a tiny piece of the state's total work force.
The rebound has stalled in larger, more established parts of the state's tech sector, according to jobs numbers out yesterday. They show tech employment up just 1.2 percent over last year, and still below 1990s levels.
Though venture capital investment in Oregon startups surged in the first quarter of 2013, last year was one of the state's worst years for venture money since the dot-com era.
So how do we judge how well the state's tech economy is doing, and how to we evaluate ongoing economic development efforts?
Don't focus too much on tracking incremental numbers like money raised and awards won, says Mark Skinner, vice president of the Ohio-based State Science & Technology Institute. And don't spend too much time comparing yourself to others.
Instead, he says, focus on outcomes: Jobs, wages and revenues. Impressed by Oregon's efforts to nurture its tech industry, SSTI picked Portland to host its annual convention in September. Skinner was in town this week to prepare for the event.
In his view, many regions spend too much time focusing on what others are doing and too little time focused on their own strengths. What's notable about Oregon, he said, is the way the state seeks to bolster its own assets.
"There's a lot of private sector things going on there," he said, "and the public sector initiatives are building on that."
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The face of agriculture is changing with the advancement of internet technology, and Illinois' future farmers appear to be more than willing to embrace it.
Thousands of FFA Chapter members convened in Springfield this month for the organization’s annual statewide conference – most with handheld devices in their pockets and the power to access any agriculture information instantly.
The business of farming is booming with potential thanks to these new applications, according to Bryan Barnett, FFA chapter advisor and agriculture teacher at Winchester High School.
Barnett said that internet technology has made a tremendous impact in Illinois agriculture. From the availability of on-demand information to GPS-guided equipment, the way farmers work is changing.
“A farmer can be out in the field and look on his phone as far as fertilizer, soil types, what chemicals to use,” he stated. “He can really look that up in a moment’s time and figure out what the problem is and the solution to it.”
Barnett tells his students that mobile apps can be a remarkable advantage in the field.
“They’re going to become more and more important as we move on,” Barnett said. “Once upon a time, information wasn’t in the palm of your hand like it is now. Farmers use this greatly on a regular basis.”
His FFA students have had no trouble evolving with the massive changes in agriculture technology.
Alex Rueter, FFA chapter member from Winchester, said he’s impressed with the advantages a GPS-guided tractor has on his family’s land.
“It automatically steers the tractor, combine or any piece of machinery for you, so it keeps straight rows,” he said. “I’m almost positive it helps the yields.”
Sarah Sellars, Section 13 President at Illinois Association FFA, said being connected to a mobile network also benefits the business side of farming.
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Privacy Commissioner of Canada Jennifer Stoddart and 36 of her provincial and international counterparts have issued a joint letter urging Google Inc. to respond to questions and concerns related to Google Glass, the company’s new Internet-connected glasses.
“Google Glass raises significant privacy issues and it is disappointing that Google has not engaged more meaningfully with data protection authorities about this technology. We are urging Google to take part in a real dialogue with us about Google Glass,” says Commissioner Stoddart.
The letter is as follows:
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Learning capabilities at Western Illinois University’s School of Agriculture has received a major boost thanks to MTC Communications.
Through the Illinois Broadband Innovation Fund, the Colchester-based telecommunications outfit was awarded $35,000 toward the new fiber optic network.
WIU’s School of Agriculture is located approximately one-and-a-half miles north of the main campus.
“Up until last year, they had basically a dial-up service for their internet,” said Bill Buchanan, president of MTC Communications. “So anything that had to happen in their classroom had to be done on (main) campus. The labs and things done on the farm couldn’t be done in a broadband aspect.”
The main campus was already home to an extensive fiber network. MTC simply extended a line from that network to the agriculture facilities.
The new connection gives agriculture students at WIU the opportunity for distance learning and much more.
For example, the school regularly partners with swine management group Carthage Veterinary Service for educational opportunities.
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As Google reels from stinging condemnation for its tax avoidance from Margaret Hodge's parliamentary committee, and the hi-tech companies are embarrassed by allegations of state surveillance, the general response has been one of astonished disbelief.
But we should not be surprised. The "iCapitalists" have long been zealots for a radically neoliberal vision of capitalism. It is their skill at making this harsh approach palatable to the modern zeitgeist which will probably save their skin – though with potentially disastrous consequences for our economy.
Big tech, originating in California's Silicon Valley, has always been about more than cutting-edge engineering. It embodies a value system that merges a counter-cultural 60s romantic individualism with a cold-eyed commitment to free markets. Apple's Steve Jobs, the Zen Buddhist of canny entrepreneurialism, captured the worldview with Apple's famous 1997 slogan: "Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers …" And it is this rebellious pose that reconciled a whole swath of the educated professional classes – the "creatives" – to free-market capitalism. In the 1980s, it was besuited corporates who were in the vanguard of Thatcher's and Reagan's neoliberal revolution – people such as the hard-faced, downsizing financier Mitt Romney.
The iCapitalists, however, presented a far more appealing vision to liberals – one of denimed democracy, of gender-blind and colour-blind egalitarianism. For many of us, Google's own Big Brother house-style offices, with their Play School sofas and pool tables, seemed the very epitome of a creative, "happening" workplace; while Facebook's Silicon Valley HQ was a mini-utopia of subsidised gyms, dentists, and personal stylists.
But this is an egalitarian utopia only for the networked and highly educated, not for the many. For the iCapitalist culture is not so much liberal as libertarian, and is founded on the belief that we should be led by elite hi-tech businesses and their shinily packaged semi-conductors and microchips; the state, a lumbering, bureaucratic drag on creativity and innovation, has a minimal role.
This worldview lies behind Eric Schmidt's defending Google's tax affairs with reference to the company being "a key part of the electronic commerce expansion of Britain, which is driving a lot of economic growth for the country." It is not necessary, it seems, to worry about taxation, and indeed the state, as long as company profits are trickling down to the rest of us.
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Recently, Stop the Cap! published stories about Verizon’s decision to discontinue traditional wired landline service for approximately 500 customers on Fire Island and offer them a wireless alternative called Voice Link. This is an important change for Verizon and our customers, and we wanted to clarify several points about the service and how Verizon is deploying it.
In places like Fire Island, New York and some communities along the Jersey Shore, such as Mantoloking and Seaside Heights, Verizon evaluated the extent of the damage to its facilities – which in many cases were literally washed away by Super Storm Sandy – and conducted extensive research before deciding the best course of action to take in terms of restoration.
Fire Island is a popular beach community with only a few hundred year-round residents, but the population swells each summer. Verizon’s equipment on the eastern side of the island was not too heavily impacted, so repairs were made and services restored.
On the western side of the Island, however, a large percentage of Verizon’s copper facilities were damaged beyond repair.
We studied the voice traffic on and off the island and where it was originating from on both Verizon’s wireline and wireless networks. The company discovered that 80 percent of the voice traffic was already wireless. If other wireless providers were factored in, it is likely that the percentage is closer to 90 percent. This made it clear that people had already made the decision as to what technology works best. They had abandoned copper long before Sandy.
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While the wireless industry is still far from agreement over how the Federal Communications Commission should auction off the blocks of airwaves that it will reclaim from TV broadcasters, many have expressed opposition to the FCC's latest proposed band plan.
In the plan known as the “Down from 51 Reversed” band plan, the FCC would clear broadcast TV channels starting at channel 51 and expand downward; the downlink would begin after a guard band at channel 51, followed by a duplex gap and then the uplink band. Parties representing a diverse cross-section of the wireless and broadcasting industries have weighed in on this and other technical and policy issues, and some, including AT&T Inc., have said the plan potentially “overvalues” the FCC's goal of offering different amounts of spectrum in different geographic markets. AT&T urged the FCC to focus instead on devoting resources to “refining” what has been termed by industry as the “straight” Down from 51 band plan.
“By requiring one more guard band--between the 600 MHz downlink blocks and the 700 MHz uplink blocks--than does the Down from 51 band plan, the Down from 51 Reversed band plan would unwisely, and perhaps unlawfully, reduce materially the amount of spectrum available for licensed use, thereby diminishing the revenue potential and increasing the likelihood of auction failure,” AT&T wrote in comments filed June 14 with the commission.
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Like the Federal Communications Commission chairman before him, Tom Wheeler is a broadband and wireless devotee, which should come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with President Obama's nominee for chairman.
In statements before the Senate commerce committee Tuesday, Wheeler, in a voice made for radio, articulated the administration's policy that all Americans should have access to broadband.
As focused on broadband as his predecessor Julius Genachowski, Wheeler is likely to carry on the broadband focus of the FCC. His approach and the key to the nation's broadband future, he told the committee, is "extension, expansion and exploitation."
But first, he'll have to orchestrate the most complex auction of wireless spectrum in the history of the world.
Without committing to the specific 2014 tentative deadline set by Genachowski, Wheeler, who called the auction of spectrum voluntarily relinquished by broadcasters a "monumental undertaking," promised he would try his best. "I will make every effort to meet that schedule," Wheeler said. “I think this is something that needs to move on an expedited basis.”
For the most part, the three-hour hearing played right into Wheeler's experiences with wireless and cable policy, allowing him to remind members that he lived through the TV digital transition and represented the wireless industry when it was last allocated spectrum.
A little bit of history caught up with Wheeler over a 2011 blog post when he suggested that extracting merger conditions from AT&T and T-Mobile could serve as a substitute for regulations.
Pressed by Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), Wheeler called the blog post a "hypothetical musing. If confirmed, I'm guided by the facts and the laws before me."
Wheeler was asked about several other issues, including retransmission consent and what the FCC could do to stop blackouts and whether the FCC could use its authority to increase political disclosures. Like a good diplomat, Wheeler made few commitments but explained how he would approach the issues, without giving a straight action.
For example, in response to Sen. Maria Cantwell's (D-Wash.) probe about whether or not broadcast shared service agreements should be counted toward media ownership rules, Wheeler said he wasn’t informed enough. "I have long been an advocate of diversity of voices. When the commission looks at this issue, competition, localism and diversity should be the touchstones. I am not informed enough to be explicit on that, but I am going to be," Wheeler said. "I am specifically trying not to be specific," he added.
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Most of our concerns over electricity power begin and end with a yes or a no: Electricity either emanates from a socket, or does not.
Most of us accept on faith the flurry of electrons through copper. In an era of expanding “smart” grids, is ignorance bliss?
Ask the chipmunk that burned to death Sunday in Burlington while burrowing into a live switch — a lapse of judgment that also plunged parts of the city into a three-hour blackout.
Or ask Ken Nolan, Burlington Electric Department’s manager of power resources.
“We were pretty quickly able to determine what line was out,” Nolan said Tuesday.
But, he added, BED’s trouble-shooting system, referred to and pronounced by technicians as “SCADA” (supervisory control and data acquisition), was insufficiently informed to pinpoint the problem.
“We still had to send out crews,” Nolan said. “It turned out to be an underground line; it was still a manual problem.”
More detailed diagnoses and more prompt repairs are in the wings when the upgraded SCADA connects more thoroughly with Burlington’s web of new, advanced meters.
Three years ago, BED received a $6.9 million stimulus grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to kick-start the utility’s transition to 21st-century technologies.
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Last fall, we noted the absolute hypocrisy of the major Hollywood studios, who repeatedly argue that they're fighting for copyright to make sure "the little guy" on the movie set gets paid. However, as we pointed out, it appeared that they were violating labor laws by not paying their interns. Lots of companies do unpaid internships, and they're almost always illegal. There are some very specific rules you need to follow to have an internship be legal if it's unpaid. Most internships, by law, are supposed to be paid -- but it appears the Hollywood studios didn't bother to follow the rules. They just wanted the free labor.
And, now they may have to pay, as an early ruling in the case has gone against Fox Entertainment Group and its Searchlight Pictures subsidiary, meaning a class action lawsuit for all its unpaid interns can move forward. Fox, cheap as always, tried to claim that it wasn't the employer, but rather the fake company it sets up for each movie was the real employer. If you're familiar with Hollywood accounting, you know that each movie is set up as its own "company" whose sole purpose is to lose money. That is, the studio -- which owns the company -- "charges" the company tons of fees for basically nothing, and then the "movie" can be seen as losing money, even as the studio makes a ton, and then the movie never has to pay out residual checks to the silly people who agreed to get a cut of the net. There's almost never a net.
Of course, since this is effectively a sham company, the judge quickly saw through that claim, and properly noted that Fox is the real employer.
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With the California state budget passed by the legislature and sent on to Governor Brown for his expected signature, broadband subsidy bills are starting to move forward again. Senate bill 740 and assembly bill 1299 were approved last month in their original chambers, and have now swapped places.
SB 740 is the bill that will determine the future of the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF). Originally, it would have added $100 million to CASF and made it possible for a wide range of independent Internet service providers and local agencies to apply for broadband infrastructure grants and loans.
But cable and telco lobbyists got their hooks into members of the senate energy, utilities and communications committee and stripped the extra money out of the bill and added restrictions that would make it very difficult to fund projects out of whatever might be left. Potentially, SB 740 as currently written could even scuttle projects already under review. It was approved by the full senate on a near unanimous vote and sent to the assembly, where it was just assigned to the assembly utilities and commerce committee.
Which was the home of AB 1299, a proposal to take $25 million (or whatever might be left in CASF) away from broadband infrastructure and give it to public housing projects. That bill was also approved with chop licking endorsements from incumbent lobbyists and sent over to the senate, where it’s been given to, surprise, the energy, utilities and communications committee. All very neat and tidy.
Under standard procedures, the senate committee has about three and a half weeks to figure out what to do with AB 1299, but the assembly committee can muck about with SB 740 until mid-August. One possible outcome being discussed is to combine the bills into either A. a compromise that keeps CASF in business or B. sees legislators and lobbyists roll over and have a smoke.
Any bets?
Say what you will about the National Security Agency, but you can’t say it doesn’t know how to share — or how to build technology that can scale. In fact, Accumulo, the petabyte-scale database technology the agency built, has been available as an open-source project for a couple of years. Now, however, a more-polished version of Accumulo is up for sale to the general public thanks to a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup called Sqrrl.
On Wednesday the company announced the general availability of its product, Sqrrl Enterprise, which is a cleaned-up and more-functional version of the open source Accumulo software. That means users will get an experience a lot more similar to what NSA data analysts get than what the core database code allows.
How do we know this? Because Sqrrl’s co-founder and CTO Adam Fuchs helped build Accumulo and the applications that run on top of it during his previous life working for the spy agency. (If you want to know more about the history of Accumulo and the types of massive graph analyses the NSA is using it for, you can check out my coverage of the NSA citizen-spying scandal from two weeks ago (here and here).) So, instead of just downloading an open-source take on Google’s BigTable data store, Sqrrl users get things like built-in analytic functions and search; support for JSON data structures; and data encryption both at rest and in motion.
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Revelations of a massive cyber-surveillance program targeting American citizens holds particularly chilling consequences for immigrants and communities of color. Given the history of such programs, going back to the pre-digital age, these groups have reason to fear.
Who is mined, who is profiled, and who suffers at the hands of an extensive regime of corporate and government surveillance raises issues of social and racial justice.
PRISM, the National Security Agency’s clandestine electronic surveillance program, builds on a history of similar efforts whose impacts have affected racial and ethnic minorities in disproportionate ways. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Counter Intelligence Program (“COINTELPRO”), established in 1956, represents one of the forbearers of PRISM. Created at a time when political decision makers worked to promote the idea of national security in the public consciousness, the program targeted first Communist sympathizers and later domestic dissenters under a broad remit which allowed COINTELPRO to monitor and interrogate groups that threatened social order at the time.
Though COINTELPRO targeted whites and nonwhites, journalists and researchers have shown that some of the program’s most controversial—and life-threatening—targeting focused on African Americans, or what the FBI categorized as “Black Nationalist Groups.” The lion’s share of COINTELPRO targeting fell upon the Black Panther Party. The agency also targeted mainstream civil rights groups, like the NAACP, Congress for Racial Equality, and Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as well as mainstream civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. Other minority groups, including those representing Arab Americans, Filipino Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans, also found themselves under COINTELPRO’s watch.
Though COINTELPRO was eventually dismantled and held up as an example of overbroad, abusive exercise of government surveillance, subsequent administrations have expanded government surveillance programs, including most recently with the aid and abetment of digital technologies. Former Attorney General Ashcroft, for example, amended guidelines to permit the FBI to purchase data profiles from commercial data mining companies (e.g., Axciom) without cause for suspicion. Ashcroft’s guidelines also permitted the FBI to store such information for an indefinite amount of time.
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So, remember when the Xbox One release confused the hell out of everyone and then Microsoft confirmed a bunch of hated, needless restrictions on used games and internet connection requirements?
Then there was that whole thing at E3 where the crux of Sony's presentation was, "Hey, at least we're not Microsoft?"
The backlash, as you can imagine was immensely fierce, with pissed off gamers who know inherently how important the used game market is and how stupid and insulting online requirements are.
Well, Microsoft apparently now knows it too, as they have done a serious about-face on nearly every single one of these plans. Xbox chief Don Mattrick stated on the Xbox blog:
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Apple® today announced that HBO GO and WatchESPN are now available directly on Apple TV® joining the great lineup of programming offered to customers. iTunes® users have downloaded more than one billion TV episodes and 380 million movies from iTunes to date, and they are purchasing over 800,000 TV episodes and over 350,000 movies per day.
“HBO GO and WatchESPN are some of the most popular iOS apps and are sure to be huge hits on Apple TV,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “We continue to offer Apple TV users great new programming options, combined with access to all of the incredible content they can purchase from the iTunes Store.”
Apple TV users can choose from an incredible selection of programming including over 60,000 movies and over 230,000 TV episodes, as well as the world’s largest collection of music on the iTunes Store®. Apple TV also offers great content from Hulu Plus, Netflix’s streaming catalog, live sports from MLB, NBA and NHL as well as Internet content from Vimeo, YouTube and Flickr.*
In addition to HBO GO and WatchESPN, three new content providers* are also available today on Apple TV including Sky News, Crunchyroll and Qello offering live news, sports and current TV programming.
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The maker of the popular Firefox browser is moving ahead with plans to block the most common forms of Internet tracking, allowing hundreds of millions of users to eventually limit who watches their movements across the Web, company officials said Wednesday.
Firefox made the decision despite intense resistance from advertising groups, which have argued that tracking is essential to delivering well-targeted, lucrative ads that pay for many popular Internet services. When Firefox’s maker, Mozilla, first suggested in February that it might limit blocking, one advertising executive called it “a nuclear first strike” against the industry.
Widespread release of the blocking technology remains months away, and no release date has been set. But Mozilla officials spoke confidently Wednesday about the growing sophistication of tools they are building to limit the placement of “cookies” in users’ browsers.
These bits of code, often placed by data-collection companies that users have never heard of, allow the companies to learn what sites the browser visits over months or even years. Firefox would still allow tracking if users gave a Web site express permission, or if users visited regularly — as is common with shopping, social media or news sites.
“We’re trying to change the dynamic so that trackers behave better,” said Brendan Eich, chief technology officer for Mozilla, a nonprofit group. Its Firefox browser is used by about 20 percent of the world’s desktop computers, according to NetMarketShare.
The blocking technology that Mozilla is developing borrows heavily from Apple’s Safari browser, which blocks all “third-party” cookies, meaning tracking codes from sites that users do not intentionally visit.
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The race to build ultra high-speed gigabit networks is on. From Kansas City to Chattanooga, everyone’s talking about “getting to a gig.” But what will we do with all that speed and why do we need it?
US Ignite, a non-profit organization funded in part by the National Science Foundation, is tackling this question. They’re fostering the development of next-generation applications for education, healthcare, energy and more. And they’re not just building applications for applications sake. These apps are going to provide transformative public benefit to our society.
Next week, US Ignite will convene a summit in Chicago, bringing together developers, entrepreneurs, technology companies, research universities and federal agencies to provide a first glance at these gigabit apps.
We’ll see demos on real-time emergency response systems that combine ultra-fast broadband and radar to improve hazardous weather warning and response. The project also focuses on aircraft surveillance by identifying and tracking small, low-flying aircraft by developing new detection algorithms that operate digitally on uncompressed, high-bandwidth radar data.
We’ll see a real-time audio-visual app for ambulances uses high-quality, robust data communications that let doctors interact with patients while they’re en route to the hospital. This app, called WiMed, is application aware and able to cross-layer and cross-application optimize when wireless connectivity changes due to ambulance location.
In addition, the Electronic Visualization Laboratory is being developed right here at the University of Illinois Chicago. This interdisciplinary research lab specializes in the design and development of advanced visualizing, virtual reality and networked collaboration display system, all utilizing high-performance networking. The project is a mash up of researchers, with artists and computer scientists working together to solve real-world problems.
Click here to for a full list of applications that call for high bandwitdth connectivity.
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What would the cable industry be if it weren’t for screens? They display the content we create for TV and deliver the visuals for everything our broadband networks offer.
Screens played an especially big role in this year’s The Cable Show. One popular demonstration on the show floor featured huge (and gorgeous) 80 inch 4K TVs – so named because of their ability to display 4,000 lines of resolution. This is impressive, especially when compared to today’s HDTV’s, which show about 1,000 lines.
Remarkable screens continued inside The Observatory, the industry exhibit at the center of the show floor. Visitors were greeted by huge video and images on an all-encompassing custom curved 270-degree screen.
But the screen that really took The Cable Show to a whole new level was the monster 72-foot backdrop screen behind the General Session stage. Projection screens like that are most often used for live sporting arenas, operation control centers, and broadcast news stations, but we put it to good use displaying everything from multi-media keynote addresses to cutting-edge tech demonstrations. We think the tech and specs behind this system are really impressive, and with the show over, well worth a second look.
Just check out what was needed to build and manage the system used in the 72-foot General Session screen:
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Ciena® Corporation, the network specialist, today announced that CANARIE, Canada’s Advanced Research and Innovation Network, has deployed Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform equipped with third generation WaveLogic Coherent Optical Processors to support the 100G (100 Gigabits per second) upgrade and network expansion of a route connecting Montreal and New York. The new ultra-high-speed network link will sustain the “big data” streams used in today’s advanced academic and scientific research. For example, the 100G link can allow a full two hour HD movie to download in 4/10ths of a second.
Given today’s increasingly data-intensive and global environment, it is vitally important that CANARIE work with cutting-edge equipment, such as that provided by Ciena, to support their bandwidth requirements.
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Platforms for jobs, government and other services are increasingly moving online, but 30 percent of Americans do not have an Internet connection to access to those resources, a new Census Bureau report says.
The number in Arizona mirrored the nation, with just over 31 percent of state residents having no Net connectivity in 2011, the year profiled in the report.
“It may be surprising to some people, because a lot of people think everyone has a computer, everyone has Internet at home, everyone knows how, and that’s not true,” said Annette Vigil, manager of South Mountain Community Library in Phoenix.
The lack of access is particularly common for seniors, with about 54 percent of Americans 65 and older having no Internet access. That makes computers and computer classes at libraries and senior centers “really popular,” said Vigil, whose library offers free computer classes in English and Spanish every week.
South Mountain’s experience is not unusual, said Kathryn Zickuhr, an analyst from the Pew Research Center, which has reported on the digital divide.
“When seniors or other people who don’t use the Internet very much need to go online, to access government forms that are now online-only, they go to libraries for help,” Zickuhr said.
The Census survey described a “connectivity continuum” that ranged from people with no computer at home and no Net access up to those who have multiple devices with which to access the Internet.
Nationally, 15.9 percent of people had no home computer and another 14.4 percent had a computer but no Internet access in 2011, the report said. In Arizona, the numbers were 16.2 percent and 15.4 percent, respectively. On the other end of the spectrum, 37.3 percent of Americans were “highly connected,” with access from home and elsewhere. In Arizona, 36.5 percent of residents fell in that category.
Men and women were about even in terms of access, while Asians and whites had higher levels of connectivity than blacks and Hispanics.
Greta Byrum, an analyst from the Open Technology Institute at New America Foundation, said it is essential that “people from all walks of life have access to the Internet and digital resources.”
“This should be a leading policy priority and a focus of investment,” Byrum said.
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The Director of the National Security Agency is defending his organization's practice of collecting and storing for several years the phone records of millions of Americans, but he told a panel of lawmakers Tuesday that his agency may be willing to relinquish some control over that massive database.
Gen. Keith Alexander told the House Intelligence Committee that cellphone metadata such as phone numbers and call duration has been used in foiling "a little over" ten "potential" terrorist attacks on U.S soil. But the agency may look at asking phone companies to hold onto their call records and only turn over details on specific accounts being investigated by the government, he said.
Several lawmakers expressed concern at the hearing that the NSA was collecting and storing too much information connected to Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom could not possibly be connected to terrorism. Leaving the metadata with the phone companies, rather than copying it into NSA's databases, could alleviate some of those concerns at a time when the electronic spy is facing renewed scrutiny of its secretive intelligence-gathering efforts.
"FBI, NSA are looking at the architectural framework of how we actually do this program," Alexander said. "If you leave [telephone metadata] at the service providers, you have a separate set of issues in terms of how you actually get the information; how you have go back and get that information [from them] how you follow it down and the legal authority for how you compel them to keep that information for a certain period of time."
But Alexander cautioned that having the data in-hand at NSA allowed the agency to respond quickly to potential threats, and that going to the phone companies with repeated requests might take too long. "The concern is speed in a crisis," he said.
Alexander's statement came in response to a question from Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, who wanted to know the prospects for changing a section of the Patriot Act such that telecommunications companies would be required to retain the metadata, and only hand it over to the government when they were specifically queried.
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"It is important for cities to realize that this [broadband] is the way forward and, if used correctly, it can have a lasting impact on their economic, environmental and special development," says Julia Pulidindi, National League of Cities Senior Associate in their City Solutions and Applied Research Department.
Pulidindi joins Gigabit Nation to present steps that communities should take to get constituents on the same page and moving forward to getting better broadband. She highlights creative ideas that have enabled communities to build highspeed Internet infrastructure, and drive various constituents to use the networks.
Pulidindi gives listeners insights to the type of national broadband policy issues that the NLC is advocating for in D.C., and invites comments from the audience on these issues. NLC also has state affiliates, we explore how these provide cities and towns with valuable access to information and communication channels that can help local broadband efforts.
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As we noted earlier this year, there have been a steady stream of rumors that AT&T is cooking up some speed increases, even though the timeline for deployment remains anything but clear.
This thread in our forums is full of rumblings from those claiming to be AT&T techs, who say the faster speeds are being trialed in several markets with a rumored launch sometime this year. Such upgrades are long overdue, given that cable operators have been offering considerably faster speeds than AT&T's top offering for some time now.
Those rumors have spread to the official AT&T community forums now as well. People there claiming to be AT&T employees claim that speed bumps up to 60 Mbps downstream, 10 Mbps upstream may arrive sometime in July:
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Well, this is embarrassing. Researchers from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany have figured out that the security provided in the iPhone’s Wi-Fi hotspot isn’t actually all that secure. In fact, they’ve shown that the randomly generated password that Apple provides can be cracked in under a minute.
In a paper published this month, the trio of researchers writes:
"We show that Apple iOS generates weak default passwords which makes the mobile hotspot feature of Apple iOS susceptible to brute force attacks on the WPA2 handshake. More precisely, we observed that the generation of default passwords is based on a word list, of which only 1,842 entries are taken into consideration. In addition, the process of selecting words from that word list is not random at all, resulting in a skewed frequency distribution and the possibility to compromise a hotspot connection in less than 50 seconds."
Basically, the list the passwords for protecting the iPhone’s mobile hotspot are drawn from is just too small. And the “randomly generated” passwords are not random enough, according to their findings, which makes the passwords incredibly easy to crack for someone who knows what they’re donig.
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Last week I attended the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh. I’m working on writing up those notes to share later. In the meantime, there were a few recurring themes worth sharing, such as within 15 years the world’s population will be 70 percent urban. I think we need to decide what that means to us as a country, as a state and as a community.
On a very basic level it means some rural communities aren’t going to survive. Are we OK with that? And if you live in a rural community are you OK with your community not surviving. Because another these was the importance of technology and broadband.
If you don’ t have broadband, I think you lessen the odds that your community will make it, which leads to the need to effect policy to promote broadband and a new report, State USF White Paper: New Rural Investment Challenges.
The authors point out…
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