Dewayne-Net Technology Weblog

February 26, 2010
When American and European Ideas of Privacy Collide
By ADAM LIPTAK
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/weekinreview/28liptak.html>

WASHINGTON — “On the Internet, the First Amendment is a local ordinance,” said Fred H. Cate, a law professor at Indiana University. He was talking about last week’s ruling from an Italian court that Google executives had violated Italian privacy law by allowing users to post a video on one of its services.

In one sense, the ruling was a nice discussion starter about how much responsibility to place on services like Google for offensive content that they passively distribute.

But in a deeper sense, it called attention to the profound European commitment to privacy, one that threatens the American conception of free expression and could restrict the flow of information on the Internet to everyone.

“Americans to this day don’t fully appreciate how Europeans regard privacy,” said Jane Kirtley, who teaches media ethics and law at theUniversity of Minnesota. “The reality is that they consider privacy a fundamental human right.”

Google understands.

“The framework in Europe is of privacy as a human-dignity right,” said Nicole Wong, a lawyer with the company. “As enforced in the U.S., it’s a consumer-protection right.”

But Ms. Wong said Google’s policies on invasion of privacy, like its policies on hate speech, pornography and extreme violence, were best applied uniformly around the world. Trying to meet all the differing local standards “will make you tear your hair out and be paralyzed.”

The three Google executives were sentenced to six months in prison for failing to block a video showing an autistic boy being bullied by other students. The video was on line for two months in 2006, and was promptly removed after Google received a formal complaint. The prison sentences were suspended.

Still, Judge Oscar Magi’s ruling, in effect, balanced privacy against free speech and ruled in favor of the former. And given the borderless quality of the Internet, that balance has the potential to affect nations that prefer to tilt toward the values protected by the First Amendment.

[snip]

February 28, 2010
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change
By AL GORE
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28gore.html>

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.

But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

[snip]

Pentagon Ignores the Warnings of Splice and Jurassic Park in Breeding Artificial Life
By Christine Fall
<http://blogs.amctv.com/scifi-scanner/2010/02/pentagon-synthetic-organism-splice.php>

I was prepared for a robot revolution. Now I fear a different kind of man-made monster, one more akin to the Chimera seen on The Island of Dr. Moreau and in this year’s Sundance flick Splice. Why? Robots have fallen on hard times. While the military is scrapping plans for its own autonomous killing machines, guess what the Pentagon is up to? Trying to breed an army of synthetic organisms that can live forever.

In its 2011 budget, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has allocated $6 million for BioDesign, a project to create artificial life. The unclassified document doesn’t say how the new life-forms will be used, but I’m guessing they won’t be making biofuels or absorbing greenhouse gases. More likely, the agency is aiming for Moreau’s ungodly brand of “divine human.”

Here’s what we know: they want to develop “a robust understanding of the collective mechanisms that contribute to cell death,” so as to “enable a new generation of regenerative cells that could ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.” This could lead to one badass super-soldier.

[snip]

How the National Broadband Plan Will Encourage Investment

The National Broadband Plan will increase demand and impact supply in every part of the ecosystem in the long-term in a few ways.

First, the plan will accelerate the move of certain sectors from processes designed and optimized for the technology of the past to more efficient processes enabled by broadband.

Another way the plan could affect demand is by accelerating adoption. Right now, over 100 million Americans have not adopted broadband. About 14 million can’t adopt because there is no affordable broadband available where they live. For these Americans, the universal service fund-the reform of which is discussed below-will play a critical role.

Another big issue affecting investment is spectrum. From the perspective of economic growth, the worst use of spectrum is to leave it unused. Spectrum that lies fallow is a drag on the economy and does not foster the public interest. And there is no upside to letting it sit: unlike, say, oil, spectrum is a natural resource whose use today does not diminish its usefulness tomorrow.

The plan will provide an opportunity for the Commission to, for the first time, articulate how it will meet the Congressional directive that all people in the United States should have access to broadband. As part of that, the plan will lay out a staged approach so that, over time, universal service support will go to broadband services that include voice, rather than voice-only services. Intercarrier compensation is another complicated policy in which carriers charge each other for origination, transport and termination of traffic. The current system has long been criticized for distorting investment.

The plan will also make a series of recommendations designed to eliminate those distortions and regulatory arbitrage. Like the universal service recommendations, the plan will provide an opportunity for the Commission–again, for the first time–to lay out a staged approach so that intercarrier compensation reflects how companies will exchange traffic in an IP-based broadband world.

<http://blog.broadband.gov/?ArticleTitle=How%20the%20National%20Broadband%20Plan%20Will%20Encourage%20Investment>

Courtesy of the Benton Foundation <http://www.benton.org>

Making the Nation Ready for Broadband

[Commentary] At last week’s open Commission meeting, I explained how writing a National Broadband Plan is like solving a mystery. The mystery involves why some parts of the economy have embraced modern communications to greatly improve their performance while others lag far behind.

A recent book — Wired for Innovation — offers some clues. In researching why certain companies benefit from the use of information technology while others, similarly situated, do not, the authors found the benefits of the technology only come to life if the companies also change their fundamental processes and develop what the authors refer to as a digital culture. Having technology is not enough.

Similar clues can be found in the 1990 paper, “The Dynamo and the Computer”, which explored why major innovations in microelectronics, fiber optic communications and computing had not yet shown up in productivity statistics. Part of the answer turns out to be diffusion lag—it takes time for one technical system to replace another. The author points out in the early 1900’s factories didn’t reach 50% electrification until four decades after the first central power station opened. One cause of that diffusion lag was the unprofitability of replacing “production technologies adapted to the old regime of mechanical power derived from water and steam.” The problem was not just getting the electricity. It was the cost of completely reengineering factories to benefit from electric power over the tried and embedded techniques of an earlier time.

So today, some sectors of our economy have a diffusion lag in adopting their processes to take advantage of the modern communications era. But why? Solving the mystery of today’s diffusion lag turns out to be critical to what Congress asked us to do in directing us to give our country a plan for utilizing broadband to advance national goals.

<http://blog.broadband.gov/blog/index.jsp?entryId=189894>

Courtesy of the Benton Foundation <http://www.benton.org>

[Note: This item comes from reader Tom Williams. DLH]

From: Tom Williams <Tom@AirNetworking.com>
Date: February 25, 2010 6:44:21 AM PST
To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@warpspeed.com>
Subject: Broadband in rural America: Why I’m not holding my breath

<http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9160698/Broadband_in_rural_America_Why_I_m_not_holding_my_breath?source=CTWNLE_nlt_dailyam_2010-02-25>

[Note: This item comes from reader Tom Williams. DLH]

From: Tom Williams <Tom@AirNetworking.com>
Date: February 25, 2010 7:04:15 AM PST
To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@warpspeed.com>
Subject: Three Google execs convicted over Italian bullying video

<http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9161439/Update_Three_Google_execs_convicted_over_Italian_bullying_video?source=CTWNLE_nlt_pm_2010-02-24>

Mobile Broadband: A 21st Century Plan for U.S. Competitiveness, Innovation and Job Creation

At a new America Foundation event Feb 24, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski outlined spectrum-related recommendations for the National Broadband Plan. The goal, he said: To benefit all Americans and promote our global competitiveness, the U.S. must have the fastest, most robust, and most extensive mobile broadband networks, and the most innovative mobile broadband marketplace in the world. The plan, then, will be to accelerate the broad deployment of mobile broadband by moving to recover and reallocate spectrum; update our 20th century spectrum policies to reflect 21st century technologies and opportunities; remove barriers to broadband buildout, lower the cost of deployment, and promote competition.

The Broadband Plan will represent the first important step in what FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker has called “an ongoing strategic planning process on spectrum policy — to ensure that the agency’s stewardship of the public’s airwaves is smart, future-oriented, and serves as an ongoing engine of innovation and investment.” The National Broadband Plan will set a goal of freeing up 500 Megahertz of spectrum over the next decade.

The plan will propose a “Mobile Future Auction” — an auction permitting existing spectrum licensees, such as television broadcasters in spectrum-starved markets, to voluntarily relinquish spectrum in exchange for a share of auction proceeds, and allow spectrum sharing and other spectrum efficiency measures. The plan will also recommend applying a flexible approach to other frequency bands, where our rules-technical rules, service rules-may be holding back the broadband potential of large swaths of spectrum.

The Plan proposes resolving longstanding debates about how to maximize the value of spectrum in bands such as the Mobile Satellite Service (MSS) or Wireless Communications Service (WCS) by giving licensees the option of new flexibility to put the spectrum toward mobile broadband use-or the option of voluntarily transferring the license to someone else who will.

In addition, the National Broadband Plan will encourage innovative ways of using of spectrum, including what some call “opportunistic” uses, to encourage the development of new technologies and new spectrum policy models. The plan will also include a recommendation that we invest a sufficient amount in R&D to ensure that the science underpinning spectrum use continues to advance.

Finally, and critically, to improve mobile communications for our first responders, we will develop the 700 MHz public safety broadband network to achieve long overdue interoperability. The plan will also recommend that we establish and fund an Emergency Response Interoperability Center (ERIC) within the FCC to develop common technical standards for interoperability on the public safety broadband network from the start, and to update these standards periodically as broadband technology evolves.

<http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-296490A1.doc>

Courtesy of the Benton Foundation <http://www.benton.org>

Donovan: Broadcasters Already Using Spectrum Efficiently

Broadcasters’ top spectrum policy lobbyist said Wednesday (Feb. 24) that broadcasters are already using their spectrum efficiently and have only a fraction of the beachfront spectrum wireless broadband providers are eyeing.

In a statement responding to the Federal Communications Commission’s announced plan for a voluntary reclamation of TV spectrum, David Donovan, president of the Association For Maximum Service Television, said that he was “struck” by the “apparent focus” of the plan on broadcast spectrum. “We have exclusive use of only 5.1% of the so-called beachfront spectrum that broadband services desire,” said Donovan. “To this end, we have supported a spectrum inventory to assess spectrum use and demand by all entities using spectrum,” he said. Donovan said MSTV would examine the “voluntary” plan (his quotes) closely, and would work with the commission to help “facilitate the broadband plan.”

<http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/450807-Donovan_Broadcasters_Already_Using_Spectrum_Efficiently.php?rssid=20065>

Courtesy of the Benton Foundation <http://www.benton.org>

Why the FCC’s Plan to Provide Enough Mobile Spectrum Falls Short

[Commentary] A mobile future auction may not actually free up much spectrum. The plan might be effective in rural areas, where carriers don’t need more bandwidth anyway; meanwhile most broadcasters have already indicated they’ll balk at selling spectrum they use to reach over-the-air viewers in urban areas. And even if such a plan were successful, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Genachowski’s goal of delivering 500 MHz of new spectrum falls far short of the 800 MHz mobile network operators say they’ll need to meet increasing demand for data by the end of this year. So while both the mobile industry and the FCC agree that the National Broadband Plan must make new spectrum a priority, the FCC’s efforts as revealed so far won’t meet the industry’s needs.

<http://gigaom.com/2010/02/24/why-the-fccs-goal-to-provide-enough-mobile-spectrum-falls-short/>

Courtesy of the Benton Foundation <http://www.benton.org>