Category Archives: Editorial

Comcast’s Time Warner Deal Is Bad for America

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The reason this deal is scary is that for the vast majority of businesses in 19 of the 20 largest metropolitan areas in the country, their only choice for a high-capacity wired connection will be Comcast. Comcast, in turn, has its own built-in conflicts of interest: It will be serving the interests of its shareholders by keeping investments in its network as low as possible — in particular, making no move to provide the world-class fiber-optic connections that are now standard and cheap in other countries — and extracting as much rent as it can, in all kinds of ways. Comcast, for purposes of today’s public , is calling itself a “cable company.” It no longer is. Comcast sells infrastructure subject to neither competition nor a cop on the beat.

via Comcast’s Time Warner Deal Is Bad for America – Bloomberg.

What happens with digital rights management in the real world?

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An increase in the security of the companies you buy your media from means a decrease in your own security. When your computer is designed to treat you as an untrusted party, you are at serious risk: anyone who can put malicious software on your computer has only to take advantage of your computer’s intentional capacity to disguise its operation from you in order to make it much harder for you to know when and how you’ve been compromised.

 

via What happens with digital rights management in the real world? | Technology | theguardian.com.

Here is where DRM and your security work at cross-purposes. The DMCA’s injunction against publishing weaknesses in DRM means that its vulnerabilities remain unpatched for longer than in comparable systems that are not covered by the DMCA. That means that any system with DRM will on average be more dangerous for its users than one without DRM.

Academics should not remain silent on hacking

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NIST’s standard for random numbers used for cryptography, published in 2006, had been weakened by the NSA. Companies such as banks and financial institutions that rely on encryption to guarantee customer privacy depend on this standard. The nature of the subversions sounds abstruse: the random-number generator, the ‘Dual EC DRBG’ standard, had been hacked by the NSA so that its output would not be as random as it should have been. That might not sound like much, but if you are trying to break an encrypted message, the knowledge that it is hundreds or thousands of times weaker than advertised is a great encouragement.

via Academics should not remain silent on hacking : Nature News & Comment.

The great Verizon FiOS ripoff

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After decades of demanding and getting rate hikes and tax breaks in return for promising to deliver broadband internet access to schools, libraries, hospitals and every home and business in their territories, Verizon is now making it clear that it is no longer expanding FiOS, its fiber optic cable service.

via The great Verizon FiOS ripoff.

America is 15th or 33rd in the world in broadband, depending on which international or research group you believe. The failure to properly upgrade the PSTN, and the con of FiOS expenditures, has cost a large swath of America — from Massachusetts through Virginia and the old GTE territories, such as parts of California — a generation of technology, innovation and GDP growth.

Open Source is Not Just About Cost

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While some in the past have associated open source with cost – it’s the cheaper alternative to proprietary approaches – that’s not the point anymore. The innovation model for open collaboration enables multiple competitive vendors to co-operate on core functionality and then compete on value added support and services.

via Red Hat CEO: Open Source is Not Just About Cost – Datamation.

T-Mobile No-contract Advertising: WA Court Orders Retraction

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Under T-Mobile’s new setup, subscribers can purchase handsets by making a relatively small up-front payment and then paying the remaining cost of the phone over the following 24 months. For example, Apple’s iPhone 5 costs $99 down followed by 24 monthly payments of $20. While customers do not need to sign a standard contract committing them to T-Mobile’s wireless service for two years, they do have to sign an agreement taking responsibility for full equipment costs.

via T-Mobile No-contract Advertising: WA Court Orders Retraction | BGR.

Charging $(24×20) + $99 = $579 for an IPhone when you can get a decent tablet with a bigger screen and similar features for under $200 is ridiculous.  It amazes me how people will complain when gas goes up a nickel a gallon but don’t think twice about over paying for cell phones by hundreds of dollars.

Stop standardizing HTML

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It is well past time, though, for the W3C and the browser vendors to stop talking as if they constrain the markup developers can use and focus instead on the many things they can do to make the browsers supporting that markup processing more capable. HTML’s legacy vocabulary is a great foundation on which developers can build their own toolsets. The Web will benefit, however, from letting developers solve their information problems in their own ways, rather than trying to stuff too many things into a single vocabulary.

via Stop standardizing HTML – Programming.

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act Is a Failed Experiment

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Over the years, legislatures and the courts progressively have treated the unauthorized movement of data bits over someone else’s chattel into a “trespass” of that chattel–an activity I’ll call “online trespass to chattels.” For example, many states have enacted computer crime laws that restrict unauthorized use of Internet and telecommunications equipment.

via The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act Is a Failed Experiment – Forbes.

As a result, these proposed changes will end the adverse consequences from the online trespass to chattels experiment while letting chattel owners prevent socially disadvantageous online usage of their chattels.

The Pauls’ New Crusade: “Internet Freedom”

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The manifesto, obtained yesterday by BuzzFeed, is titled “The Technology Revolution” and lays out an argument — in doomsday tones —for keeping the government entirely out of regulating anything online, and for leaving the private sector to shape the new online space.

via The Pauls’ New Crusade: “Internet Freedom”.

Let’s see here, the government gives away public rights of ways to run wires and fibre to large telecoms yet should have no say in making sure those public resources aren’t used to exploit the public through monopolistic practices?

Who paid off Ron Paul?