Thursday, August 21, 2008
FCC Decision Pending on the Future of Wi-Fi
Unused parts of the spectrum, known as "white space" are a very valuable commodity. Wi-Fi expansion into this new white space is only possible if the FCC agrees to take these frequencies away from the broadcasters who have been using them for decades. Internet companies see room for expansion: bandwidth for the next generation of high-speed wireless devices and services. Visions of expanding "mesh networks" are dancing through their heads.
The economic consequences of this decision could be enormous. Will the FCC side with the powerful TV interests or will they open up the spectrum for future development of digital gadgetry and wireless services? How best to serve the public?
According to Schatz, here is what the Wi-Fi proponents have in mind:
"'I like to think of it as Wi-Fi on steroids,' Google co-founder Larry Page told FCC lawyers, congressional staff and lobbyists in June during his first lobbying trip to Washington. "It would make a huge difference for everybody."Here is a WSJ video report on an FCC test of the technology that would allow for a more efficient sharing of the airwaves:
White-spaces fans see a world in which empty TV channels could be used to deliver cheap, high-speed wireless Web access to consumers without forcing them to buy a latte. They envision installing a few antennas over a wide area to create a "mesh" network that delivers wireless Internet service. Previous efforts to do that with Wi-Fi antennas haven't been that successful, because their signals are weak and as a result the networks required a large number of antennas.
Letting wireless gadgets share TV-station airwaves could unleash a boom in new consumer electronics not seen since Wi-Fi took off about a decade ago, say companies including Google and Intel Corp., which are lobbying heavily for sharing.
"We have medical devices, laptops, even toys that are starting to incorporate Bluetooth. We want the wireless revolution to continue, but the little spectrum we have won't get us there," says Neeraj Srivastava, director of technology policy at Dell Inc."
Labels: Access, Broadband, FCC, Wifi
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Email Hacking Legal According to California Court
Washington Post writer Ellen Nakashima reports that a federal appeals court in California has ruled that email hacking is not illegal if the hack retrieves 'stored' emails instead of snagging them in transit, even when that storage lasts only a fraction of a second. The legal definition of "interception" needs to evolve to reflect the protocols of digital transmission. According to Nakashima:
"A federal appeals court in California is reviewing a lower court's definition of "interception" in the digital age, in a case that some legal experts say could weaken consumer privacy protections online.
The case, Bunnell v. Motion Picture Association of America, involves a hacker who in 2005 broke into a file-sharing company's server and obtained copies of company e-mails as they were being transmitted. He then e-mailed 34 pages of the documents to an MPAA executive, who paid the hacker $15,000 for the job, according to court documents.
The issue boils down to the judicial definition of an intercept in the electronic age, in which packets of data move from server to server, alighting for milliseconds before speeding onward. The ruling applies only to the 9th District, which includes California and other Western states, but could influence other courts around the country."
Federal laws about wiretapping limit surveillance by the government and private citizens. Now it seems that, at least in the 9th district, email privacy is not protected. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a brief raising concerns about this breach of privacy. Nakashima's article quotes from the EFF brief:
""The case is alarming because its implications will reach far beyond a single civil case," wrote Kevin Bankston, a senior attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in a friend-of-the-court brief filed Friday. If upheld, the foundation argued, "law enforcement officers could engage in the contemporaneous acquisition of e-mails just as Anderson did, without having to comply with the Wiretap Act's requirements." Those requirements are strict, including a warrant based on probable cause as well as high-level government approvals and proof alternatives would not work.
Cooper's ruling also has implications for non-government access to e-mail, wrote Bankston and University of Colorado law professor Paul Ohm in EFF's brief. "Without the threat of liability under the Wiretap Act," they wrote, "Internet service providers could intercept and use the private communications of their customers, with no concern about liability" under the Stored Communications Act, which grants blanket immunity to communications service providers where they authorize the access."
So, as long as emails are taken from "storage," rather than as they are transmitted then they can be collected by law enforcement, corporate spies, or anyone else who can convince an ISP to let them have access. It remains to be seen if this federal appeals court decision will provide a precedent for other districts as well.
The other interesting aspect of this case is that it began with an alleged attempt at corporate espionage in which a mainstream media trade association, the MPAA was trying to learn the secrets of Valence Media a company that created Torrentspy which was a search engine for people seeking the torrents used to download audio and video files. The MPAA needed this information to prove that Torrentspy was being used to facilitate the download of copyrighted materials. The MPAA won a $110 million judgement against Torrentspy and its parent Valence Media. Valence Media shut down Torrentspy during the litigation.
Labels: copyright, email, hacking, IP, privacy
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Future of Advertising According to Google's Nikesh Arora
Nikesh Arora (President EMEA Operations Google) discussing "the future of advertising" at the IESE Business School in Madrid in June of 2008
Labels: Advertising, Google, Internet, Marketing
Vinton Cerf @ Google Zurich on Future of the Internet
Vinton G. Cerf, aka the "father of the Internet," is the co-designerof the TCP/IP protocols that made the Internet possible and former Chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). He now works for Google as a vice president and "Chief Internet Evangelist."
Listen to Cerf discuss the history and future of the Internet in this speech given in November of 2007 at Google's Zurich headquarters.
Labels: Google, Internet, Vinton Cerf
Google CEO Eric Schmidt @ Fortune Brainstorm
Google CEO Eric Schmidt interviewed by David Kirkpatrick at Fortune Brainstorm on July 23, 2008
Labels: Google
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Merrill Lynch's Chief Technology Architect on Cloud Computing
ZDNet's Larry Dignan has posted a short video of Merrill Lynch's chief technology architect Jeffrey Birnbaum speaking at the LinuxWorld conference in California: LinuxWorld video: Merrill Lynch moves to stateless computing.
Birnbaum describes how the financial services firm is moving away from using dedicated servers and desktops loaded with software towards what he calls "stateless" or cloud computing. This "shared utility computing" model makes use of high bandwidth connections and massive server farms to provide on-demand services for corporate computing. A key point is his discussion of "virtualization" in the world of "distributed computing."
For more discussion of cloud computing:
Bridget Botelho's "Google et al. pitch cloud computing to wary IT pros," on SearchDataCenter.com
Labels: cloud computing, utility computing, virtualization
