Blog Archives
Bill's remaining cyber-emergency provisions no surprise
By Kenneth Corbin | August 28, 2009As Congress looks ahead to a busy fall session, cybersecurity legislation is expected to resurface as one of the top priorities of the Senate Commerce Committee.
The committee's chairman, West Virginia Democrat John Rockefeller, had [introduced with Maine Republican Olympia Snowe a sweeping bill that would revamp the federal approach to cybersecurity policy](/government/article.php/3813391/Senators+Introduce+Cybersecurity+Overhaul+Bill.htm), providing incentives for education and training, streamlining the bureaucracy and establishing a framework for government coordination with the private sector.
But the bill would also install a cyber high command in the White House, and grant the president certain authorities in the event of a so-called cyber emergency.
That provision looked to be a sticking point. On the bill's introduction, advocacy groups were up in arms over the idea that the government could, in worst-case-scenario theory, take control of the private Internet, bring traffic to a halt and run roughshod over Americans' privacy in the process.
Well, after substantial revisions to the legislation, that provision might still be in the bill when it comes up for a hearing and markup in the fall.
DHS study praises IT sector's resiliency
By Kenneth Corbin | August 27, 2009A new report from the Department of Homeland Security and a private-sector coalition has given the nation's digital infrastructure high marks for its resiliency in the face of cyber attacks.
Working with the Information Technology Sector Coordinating Council (IT SCC), DHS earlier this week released its IT Sector Baseline Risk Assessment (PDF), a tool to identify and prioritize cyber threats.
Drawing on extensive field research, the report offers scenarios modeling potential threats and recommendations for how to mitigate risk.
"While elements of the assessment have already been adopted, the establishment of this iterative platform for assessing IT sector risk will also enable us to address ever more sophisticated threats," Gregory Schaffer, DHS' assistant secretary for cybersecurity and communications, said in a statement.
As a joint effort between DHS and IT SCC, the new assessment is an example of the sort of public-private partnership that is widely seen as the lynch pin to effective cybersecurity policy.
IT SCC counts several dozen big-name tech firms as members, including Microsoft, Cisco and Google.
Texting while driving and a very violent PSA
By Kenneth Corbin | August 26, 2009So at what point does a public-service announcement cross the line from making its scared-straight point to a maudlin, violent spectacle that young children would find supremely upsetting?
A hopelessly subjective question, just the sort that's ripe for debate on TV shows like the Today Show.
The controversy comes from Wales, where the police department from a town called Gwent developed the following PSA warning about the dangers of texting while driving:
So there you have it, four minutes and 15 seconds of broken glass, sirens, choked-up screams and tragedy. All because Cassie was giggling over a text message with her friends while her hands should have been at 10 and 2.
What a shame.
The ad isn't airing on American TV, but the concerns about distracted driving have wafted up to policy circles, with text-messaging the latest bete noire. Several states have passed or are considering laws or stiffer penalties against the practice, and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood recently convened a summit on the matter.
You can find the Gwent police department's explanation of the PSA here.
Opposition coalition to Google Book Search debuts
By Kenneth Corbin | August 26, 2009True to their word, a handful of the biggest players in tech have thrown their lot in with the Internet Archive to derail Google's settlement with authors and publishers concerning its Book Search project.
Word of the Open Book Coalition surfaced last week, with the expectation that the group would have its inaugural partnerships in place for a launch sometime this week.
The group officially went live today, and, as one might expect, its founders struck a combative tone in their opening blog:
"One of the most significant developments in the history of publishing could be co-opted by the settlement of a class action lawsuit that creates an unprecedented monopoly and price-fixing cartel," the group declared.
Wikipedia's editing policies headed for a shakeup
By Kenneth Corbin | August 25, 2009Wikipedia is moving closer to a major policy change that could help keep embarrassing gaffs off the site, like changes to the entries on Edward Kennedy and Robert Byrd earlier this year that pronounced the senators dead after an incident at the presidential luncheon on inauguration day.
As of this writing, both men are still alive.
The online encyclopedia, which essentially works under an open-door policy that allows anyone to come in and edit entries, could be moving toward a more traditional editorial framework where -- gasp! -- changes to an entry about a living person and certain organizations would have to get a sign-off from an editor before they go live.
That kind of fact-checking runs counter to the wisdom-of-the-crowds method of policing the site that was so integral to the incubation of the Web 2.0 ethos. It's a community, to be sure, and the forum pages of Wikipedia are rife with spirited debate over how the entries should be constructed.
But that quicksilver culture of information sharing -- where speed is paramount, accuracy secondary -- has led to no shortage of high-profile inaccuracies showing up on Wikipedia over the years, some innocent mistakes, others calculated strikes.
The self-policing mechanism of the Wikipedia community generally ensures that they all get cleaned up, eventually. But Jimmy Wales, cofounder of the site, has been wondering if it might not be better if they never saw daylight in the first place. So, enter the editors.
As one might expect, some Wikipedians are less than thrilled about the proposal to set up an editorial queue to fact-check revisions and curb the practice of vandalism on the site.
Profiling the good, the bad, the secretive Steve Jobs
By Kenneth Corbin | August 17, 2009It's more than a bit fitting that a company would seek to block publication of a profile of its founder and chief executive seeking, among other things, to explore the culture of secrecy that shrouds both company and leader and ask the question if the former can exist without the latter.
In the tech industry, there is only a short list of companies that would qualify as the subject for such a profile. A list of approximately one.
And so, writing in England's Sunday Times, Bryan Appleyard offers 4,300 words about Steve Jobs, genius and tyrant, the company he co-founded, was expelled from and then resuscitated as a conquering hero and its future without him.
Apple, apparently, was not on board with the project.
Appleyard writes: "The secrecy is all about preserving the magic of each new product. Apple hates personality stuff and press intrusion. 'We want to discourage profiles,' an Apple PR tells me stiffly, apparently unaware she is waving a sackful of red rags at a herd of bulls. Another PR rings the editor of this magazine to try to halt publication of this piece."
DoJ OK with RIAA's Thomas-Rasset award
By Kenneth Corbin | August 17, 2009The Department of Justice has given an approving nod to a Minnesota court's ruling that Jammie Thomas-Rasset pay the Recording Industry Association of America $1.92 million in statutory damages for the illegal downloads of 24 tracks on the peer-to-peer site Kazaa.
That amounts to $80,000 per track, a figure Thomas-Rasset is challenging on both constitutional and procedural grounds.
In its brief, the DoJ hearkens back to the dawn of copyright law in America, noting that the original 1790 Copyright Act contained a statutory damages provision, a monetary penalty that has grown in each subsequent iteration of the law.
A 1999 amendment of the 1976 Copyright Act capped damages for willful infringement of a work at $150,000 per offense, in Thomas-Rasset's case, digital downloads of songs. That means the per-track penalty the court settled on was just slightly more than half the maximum allowed by current copyright law.
The $1.92 million award was the product of the second trial for Thomas-Rasset. Her attorneys are now asking for a third proceeding.
Swamped agencies delay broadband application deadline
By Kenneth Corbin | August 14, 2009Got to give it to my colleague Alex Goldman on this one -- he called it. Earlier this week, Alex mentioned to me a rumor that the servers handling the online applications for broadband stimulus funds were overloaded. He was right!
The two agencies overseeing the grant and loan process have pushed the deadline back by almost a week because the servers couldn't keep up with the volume of applications.
So the deadline, originally set for today at 5 pm, has been rolled back to 5 pm next Thursday, Aug. 20, though the agencies said that applicants must have set up a pending application by this afternoon to be eligible for the extension.
The National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA) and Rural Utilities Service said they have added more servers to power the Easygrants System.
In order to secure "pending" status, the applicant must register and log into the Easygrants System at BroadbandUSA.gov and click through to create an application.
The broadband stimulus program is doling out $7.2 billion in three phases over the next year. The first tranche makes $4 billion of that money available, including almost all of the funding allocated to RUS for deployments in rural areas.
Apace with the application-review process, the Federal Communications Commission is holding a series of staff workshops as it sets about developing a national broadband strategy to be presented to Congress in February. The FCC, which is also serving as a technical advisor to NTIA and RUS, was directed by the stimulus bill to compile a suite of recommendations for how policymakers should proceed toward the goal of delivering affordable, universal high-speed Internet access.
Social Web: Sexual predators need not apply
By Kenneth Corbin | August 13, 2009Illinois Governor Pat Quinn has hung a big "keep out" sign on the social Web, signing into law a bill that would make it a felony for registered sex offenders to hang out on sites like Facebook and MySpace.
In fact, the bill goes so far as to bar them from any site that has visitors create an account.
Here's the operative definition:
"'Social networking website' means an Internet website containing profile web pages of the members of the website that include the names or nicknames of such members, photographs placed on the profile web pages by such members, or any other personal or personally identifying information about such members and links to other profile web pages on social networking websites of friends or associates of such members that can be accessed by other members or visitors to the website. A social networking website provides members of or visitors to such website the ability to leave messages or comments on the profile web page that are visible to all or some visitors to the profile web page and may also include a form of electronic mail for members of the social networking website."
Pretty broad, no? No Flickr. No Delicious. Dear god, no Twitter.
Sites like Facebook, MySpace and Craigslist have all had their run-ins with the seedy side of human activity, and lord knows they've seen their share of sexual predators. They've also taken some steps, albeit generally at the behest of law enforcement, to keep their sites clean. It's an uphill climb.
But any Web site with profile pages? Given that more and more sites are trying to build communities around their content, which means registrations and profile pages, the Illinois law seems headed down a slippery slope that (if taken literally and obeyed) would become a much wider ban than just Facebook and its ilk. Seems an unwise approach for dealing with people we're trying to reintegrate.
Internet be damned, newspapers to stop their slide?
By Kenneth Corbin | August 07, 2009This is an odd one.
Borrell and Associates, a market research firm based in Williamsburg, Va., that focuses on media and advertising, is forecasting that newspaper revenues from print advertising will not only level off over the next few years, but actually increase.
Not all ad revenues (print and Web). Just *print*.
"With news stories of bankruptcies, reduced distribution, and outright closures, it is easy to see why some observers think the newspaper is an endangered medium," writes Borrell President Colby Atwood. "But amateur pundits often make the error of forecasting with a ruler, extrapolating current trends straight into the ground."
Borrell looks for the precipitous decline in ad revenues to end this year, projecting that newspapers will post a 2.4 percent increase in print-ad sales next year. By 2014, Borrell estimates that newspaper income will have climbed 8.7 percent from this year's mark, which it's pegging at $35.9 billion.
Lawmakers warn of ICANN's split with Commerce
By Kenneth Corbin | August 05, 2009A group of lawmakers is appealing to the Commerce Department to take action to keep up its close ties with the organization that oversees the system of assigning names on the Internet.
Since its inception in 1998, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has operated in partnership with the Commerce Department, but the Joint Project Agreement (JPA) that keeps it tethered to the U.S. government is set to expire on Sept. 30.
In a letter sent to Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, 10 lawmakers, including the chairmen of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the subcommittee that oversees Internet issues, appealed for a more binding and permanent agreement with ICANN, which has been widely criticized for operating without the transparency and accountability its constituents would like to see.
"Rather than replacing the JPA with additional JPAs or Memoranda of Understanding that expire every few years, we believe the time has come for a permanent instrument to which ICANN and the Department of Commerce are co-signatories," they wrote.
The lawmakers outlined several principles they'd like to see included in the arrangement, which would involve guarantees from ICANN that it will remain a nonprofit group based in the United States. Many of the signatories were on hand to grill outgoing ICANN CEO Paul Twomey at a House subcommittee hearing in June.
Twomey, for his part, said that ICANN planned to remain a U.S.-based nonprofit, and that while the group wouldn't likely renew the JPA, he tried to assure the representatives that nothing substantive about its operations would change after September.
FTC still probing Apple-Google ties
By Kenneth Corbin | August 04, 2009Apple's announcement yesterday that Google CEO would give up his seat on its board might have been a necessary step to avoid an ugly confrontation with regulators in Washington, but the companies are still under the microscope.
For Schmidt was but one of the companies' shared directors.
Arthur Levinson, the chief executive of biotech giant Genentech, also serves on the boards of both Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG).
The Federal Trade Commission, which has been investigating the ties between Apple and Google since May, issued a statement of nodding approval in response to Schmidt's resignation, but seemed to indicate that Levinson's dual-role was still a problem.
"We have been investigating the Google/Apple interlocking directorates issue for some time and commend them for recognizing that sharing directors raises competitive issues, as Google and Apple increasingly compete with each other," said Richard Feinstein, the director of the agency's bureau of competition. "We will continue to investigate remaining interlocking directorates between the companies."
Hathaway out as acting cyber czar
By Kenneth Corbin | August 03, 2009Melissa Hathaway, a veteran intelligence official of the Bush administration who spearheaded President Obama's recent cybersecurity review, is resigning from her position as White House acting senior director of cyberspace security (or, in the vernacular, cybersecurity czar), according to the [Wall Street Journal](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124932480886002237.html).
Hathaway had long been rumored as a top candidate for the permanent position, which Obama has said would be organized under both the National Security Council and the National Economic Council.
The Journal reported that she took her name out of contention for that position two weeks ago, and that her resignation -- for "personal reasons" -- will take effect Aug. 24.
Hathaway joins other notables, [including former Virginia congressman Tom Davis](/government/article.php/3826631), who have taken their names off the short list of candidates for a position that some think Obama will have trouble filling.
After all, the person who takes the job will have the daunting task of bringing together the various agencies, Congress and private industry to form a coherent federal approach to cybersecurity -- and do so from a relatively low position on the bureaucratic totem pole.
Net neutrality sees first light in new Congress
By Kenneth Corbin | August 03, 2009Just short of eight months into the 111th Congress, the first full-throated attempt to make Net neutrality the law of the land has materialized in the House.
It came from Reps. Ed Markey and Anna Eshoo, both Democrats. Markey has attached his name to Net neutrality efforts in the two previous Congresses.
The Internet Freedom and Preservation Act, introduced on Friday, would codify the right of Internet users to access lawful content on broadband networks without discrimination, while clarifying that ISPs are entitled to engage in reasonable network management.
It also would also call on the Federal Communications Commission to set rules regarding the enforcement of the legislation, which includes requirements of meaningful disclosure to subscribers about how the network they pay to access is being managed.
From the bill: "As the nation becomes more reliant upon such Internet technologies and services, unfettered access to the Internet to offer, access and utilize content, services and applications is vital."
