BBC: United hackers given million free flight miles

By Chris FoxxTechnology reporter

16 July 2015 BBC

US airline United has rewarded two hackers who spotted security holes in its website with a million free flight miles each.
The flight provider operates a "bug bounty" scheme that rewards hackers for privately disclosing security flaws rather than sharing them online.

It has given the maximum reward of a million flight miles, worth dozens of trips, to two people.

One security expert said the scheme was a big step forward for online security.

"Schemes like this reward hackers for finding and disclosing problems in the right way. That makes the internet safer for all of us," said security consultant Dr Jessica Barker.

"Bug bounties are common in tech companies as they tend to understand online security a bit more, but other industries are catching up," said Dr Barker.

Cash incentives
The idea of responsible disclosure, reporting issues and giving companies time to fix them, is not new.

Big technology companies such as Yahoo, Google and Facebook offer hackers cash incentives to report bugs privately.

In return for receiving their flight rewards, hackers are forbidden from revealing the nature of the security holes they discovered.

"We believe that this program will further bolster our security and allow us to continue to provide excellent service," United said on its website.

The company declined to comment further.

A million award miles could pay for dozens of internal flights in the US
"It's not always about hackers digging around looking for flaws. A hacker may be using a service and notice something a bit off," said Dr Barker.

"We all benefit if they look into that," she added.

Some critics of bug bounties say they can discourage companies from hiring professional security staff, because it's cheaper to offer hackers cash for disclosing bugs.

Dr Barker disagrees: "It should be part of an overall approach to security, but it's definitely a good approach.

"It encourages positive behaviour and shows young hackers that they can benefit from doing the right thing.

"Bounties can also benefit smaller companies who can't afford to give out cash rewards but can offer free products or services, so I hope we'll see more and more bug bounties," she said.

BBC: Darkode hacking forum forced offline

By Leo KelionTechnology desk editor  BBC

15 July 2015
From the sectionTechnology

The Darkode forum, which was created about six years ago, can no longer be accessed
Darkode - a notorious hacking forum used by Lizard Squad and other cybercriminals - has been shut down after an investigation carried out by authorities in 20 countries.
"We have dismantled a cyber-hornets' nest... which was believed by many, including the hackers themselves, to be impenetrable," said one of the US state attorneys involved.

Twenty-eight people have been arrested.

They include a 26-year-old man from Coventry, England.

In addition, the UK's National Crime Agency said an address in Paisley, Scotland, had been searched and material removed for examination. It said that five other suspected members of the site had previously been arrested.

The FBI added that dozens of other people linked to the site had been charged or had their property searched as part of the inquiry.

Restricted access
Darkode's members allegedly used the site to trade and to share hacking tools and information, including details of zero-day attacks - techniques that exploited flaws in products that neither their creators nor the wider security industry were aware of, and thus could not be protected against.

This information was password-protected.

"Only those proposed for membership by an existing user could join, but not until they posted a resume of the skills and achievements that could contribute to the criminal community," explained the NCA.

"There was a hierarchical membership structure, and the status of users determined who they could communicate with, and their access to the commodities and services on offer."

Although the site was not accessible to the general public, it was profiledextensively by the security blogger Brian Krebs, who posted several screenshots on his site.

Botnets - networks of hijacked computers used to mount co-ordinated attacks - were promoted on the site
"Most of the cybercrime forums are in Russian or some other language that's not English, but this was an English-language forum," he told the BBC.

"And it was a sort of meeting ground for cybercriminals from different nationalities and languages.

"A fairly significant number of people were selling botnet services there, and there were also services for deploying malware and phishing."

He added that the forum's visitors included members of Lizard Squad - a group of hackers which has carried out high-profile attacks on Sony, Microsoft and others.

"The guy that was most recently the admin of the forum used the nickname Sp3c," Mr Krebs recalled.

"He was a leading member of the Lizard Squad. What's interesting is that you don't see his name in the lists of those that were apprehended or charged as part of this.

"I don't really know what that means, but there was a definite connection between the Lizard Squad and this forum, at least in the last year or so."

The FBI said that Operation Shrouded Horizon had indicated up to 300 people had used the forum.

"During the investigation, the bureau focused primarily on the Darkode members responsible for developing, distributing, facilitating and supporting the most egregious and complex cybercriminal schemes targeting victims and financial systems," it said.

It added that its counterparts in Australia, Bosnia, Brazil, Israel, Colombia and Nigeria were among those involved in the international crackdown, and that efforts to trace other suspects were "ongoing".

BBC: Hackers 'stole data of millions of US government workers'

10 July 2015 BBC
From the sectionUS & Canada

OPM serves as the human resource department for the US government
Hackers that breached US government databases stole the personal information of at least 21.5 million people, officials said on Thursday.
Those affected include government job applicants, federal contractors, and over a million of their partners, the Office of Personnel Management said.

The figure is more than five times higher than the number of people that were feared to have been affected.

The data breach, which came to light in April, was widely blamed on China.

Authorities in Beijing have publicly denied any involvement.

The breach prompted a series of hearings in Congress and widespread criticism of the state of US cyber defences.

Politicians from both parties demanded OPM boss Katherine Archuleta be fired.

House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, a Republican, said President Barack Obama "must take a strong stand against incompetence in his administration and instill new leadership at OPM".

Last month, officials said personnel records of 4.2 million current and former federal government employees had been stolen in an incident.

'No misuse yet'
On Thursday, OPM said that while investigating that breach they discovered additional information had also been compromised, including the social security numbers of 21.5 million individuals.

The stolen data also includes health and financial information, criminal records, and the names and addresses of government employees and their relatives.

Those affected include 19.7 million people who underwent background checks and 1.8 million others, mostly the partners of job applicants.

OPM serves as the human resource department for the US government. The agency issues security clearances and compiles records of all federal government employees.
The agency said that it had "no information at this time to suggest any misuse or further dissemination of the information that was stolen from OPM's systems."

But it said that for anyone who underwent a background investigation in 2000 or afterwards "it is highly likely that the individual is impacted by this cyber breach."

Last month, US intelligence chief James Clapper said China was the "leading suspect" in the massive data breaches.

His comments came after three days of high-level talks in which China and the US agreed to a "code of conduct" on cyber security issues.

Earlier this week, US Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton said China was "trying to hack into everything that doesn't move in America".

China has dismissed claims of involvement as "irresponsible and unscientific".

Supreme Court declares warrantless searches of hotel registries illegal

Data included credit card, home address, driver's license, and vehicle license.


by David Kravets - Jun 22, 2015 11:00am PDT  Ars Technica


Todd Lappin

The Supreme Court gave a big boost to privacy Monday when it ruled that hotels and motels could refuse law enforcement demands to search their registries without a subpoena or warrant. The justices were reviewing a challenge to a Los Angeles ordinance requiring hotels to provide information to law enforcement—including guests' credit card number, home address, driver's license details, and vehicle license number—at a moment's notice. Similar ordinances exist in about a hundred other cities stretching from Atlanta to Seattle.

Los Angeles claimed the ordinance (PDF) was needed to battle gambling, prostitution, and even terrorism, and that guests would be less likely to use hotels and motels for illegal purposes if they knew police could access their information at will.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the 5-4 majority, ruled (PDF) that the Los Angeles ordinance violated the Fourth Amendment and is an illegal "pretext to harass hotel operators and their guests."

"Even if a hotel has been searched 10 times a day, every day, for three months, without any violation being found, the operator can only refuse to comply with an officer’s demand to turnover the registry at his or her own peril," Sotomayor wrote.

Enlarge

The hotel operators who brought the challenge faced six months in jail and a $1,000 fine for refusing to comply.

But the decision doesn't mean that hotel operators are forbidden from divulging the information upon demand if they choose to do so, the majority ruled.

"To be clear, we hold only that a hotel owner must be afforded an opportunity to have a neutral decision maker review an officer's demand to search the registry before he or she faces penalties for failing to comply. Actual review need only occur in those rare instances where a hotel operator objects to turning over the registry," Sotomayor wrote.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the dissent, said that "The law is constitutional in most, if not all, of its applications." He scoffed at Sotomayor saying the authorities should get a subpoena or warrant to acquire such information, which Los Angeles requires hotels to keep for at least 90 days. He said Monday's majority decision would hinder sex trafficking and human smuggling investigations, too.

"This proposal is equal parts 1984 and Alice in Wonderland," he wrote.

Sotomayor was joined by Justices Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan.

The case is the third high-profile Fourth Amendment decision the court has issued in three years. In 2012, the justices ruled that authorities generally need search warrants when they affix GPS devices to vehicles. And last year, the justices ruled that the authorities need warrants to peek into the mobile phones of suspects they arrest.

In the case decided Monday, Los Angeles hoteliers argued that the law violated their rights, and the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in 2013. The city of Los Angeles appealed, arguing (PDF) that the ordinance helps both local and federal authorities in investigations of all types. The case's briefs can be viewed here.

Whatever happened to green IT?

Sustainability and eco-awereness were a high priority for tech chiefs a few years ago, but it's rarely raised as an issue anymore.

By Mark Samuels | June 22, 2015 -- 09:30 GMT (02:30 PDT) | Topic: CXO  ZDNet

"Asking 'whatever happened to green IT' is a bit like asking whatever happened to the Loch Ness monster," says Andrew Donoghue, European research manager at 451 Research. Image: iStock

Five-or-so years ago, sustainability was a common theme for CIOs and tech suppliers, but it's now something that is rarely heard about.

So is it simply that the fashion has changed and the emphasis has moved onto new hot topics, or has the agenda of tech chiefs and tech vendors shifted so that green IT is no longer a relevant issue?

Sustainability has become part of best business practice

Ashurst LLP CIO Bruna Pellicci says that technology is now inherently greener. Awareness has grown, too. A raft of regulations means that, in many cases, green IT has become subsumed within broader best practice.

"When it comes to acting in an environmentally-sensitive manner, executives simply have to act green," she says. "It's become natural - great business is all about acting in the most efficient manner possible."

Ian Cox, a former CIO turned consultant at Axin, agrees that most businesses now see sustainability as accepted best practice. At the same time, he says the focus on green IT issues has definitely reduced - something that might cause unease for those who believe in sustainability as a necessary business objective.

"Green IT was a fad," he says. "Boards probably aren't as interested, but companies are now much more sustainable than they were five or ten years ago. Green IT has become more embedded in good business practice."

For reference, Cox points to changes in the way that businesses procure and use IT. He says internal data centres used to be a key concern for IT managers dealing with green IT. The move to the cloud during the past five years has reduced a great deal of the pressure for sustainability.

"By going on-demand, CIOs have reduced their internal data centre operations and outsourced many of their green concerns to providers," says Cox. "In many cases, targets for sustainability will be part of the contract and providers will be expected to comply."

Abi Somorin, senior IT manager at beachwear retailer Orlebar Brown, agrees that the move to on-demand has changed the way firms procure IT and, in effect, how they think about sustainability. He says his firm does not have an explicit strategy for green IT. "I don't think it's ever really been factored into the equation because our business has always been cloud-based," he says.

His approach suggests - once again - that many of the responsibilities for sustainability have been pushed from end user to supplier. "It's not happened directly; it's happened by design - it's just the way that the industry has developed," says Somorin.

Business matters when it comes to caring for the environment

Said Business School CIO Mark Bramwell says the standalone concept of green IT started to get lost as sustainability was over-hyped by IT marketing executives and green became accepted as a standard business practice. Like some of his other peers, he believes the concept of sustainability has been subsumed into the concept of forward-thinking technology leadership.

"Much of what we used to see as green IT is now accepted as common sense," he says, referring to concerns like the ethical sourcing of materials. Ethics, however, are not the only concern. The economic downturn, says Bramwell, was also crucial in terms of CIOs attempting to create business cases for their technology initiatives, especially in terms of sustainability.

"As economic conditions altered, green IT was no longer necessarily seen as best value. In fact, there are cases where businesses could sometimes be charged a premium for sustainability. But good IT departments don't re-invent the wheel. If someone else is doing something better than you, you're not scared of using his or her technology," he says.

"When I was CIO at the Wellcome Trust, we examined our use of technology in regards to sustainability on a regular basis. What we found as time moved on was that a large majority of our IT kit was green. Sustainability concerns started to be written into policy and major providers had to fulfil their obligations in regards to sourcing and recycling components."

It, therefore, seems as if a confluence of factors - the rise of cloud computing, the governance placed on providers, and the change in economic conditions - have helped to push green IT into the background. In fact, Andrew Donoghue, European research manager at 451 Research, doubts whether green IT was, in fact, ever relevant at all.

He says 451 Research has always avoided using the term 'green' in reference to sustainable technology. He says the researcher prefers the term 'eco-efficient IT', where eco refers to 'economical' foremost, but with some 'ecological' benefits.

"Asking 'whatever happened to green IT' is a bit like asking whatever happened to the Loch Ness monster," he says. "The truth is it never really existed, apart from a few unsubstantiated sightings. True green IT means building or managing IT in a way that is environmentally altruistic, no matter the cost to the business; effectively incurring costs in order to minimise environmental damage."

The reality, says Donoghue, is that most examples of so-called green IT were, and are, about capital or operating cost reduction. For senior executives, it just so happened that some of these measures could be spun as having environmental benefits as a by-product.

He says that even high-profile examples - such as Google's and Apple's multi-billion dollar investments in renewable energy for their data centres and offices, which have significant upfront costs - are expected to result in long-term savings as the cost of fossil fuel increases over time.

"Those deals also have payback in terms of tax incentives, marketing benefits, and potentially mitigating against future carbon regulation," says Donoghue. "So green has always been a pretty meaningless term. It's really always been about efficiency and effectiveness of IT development and management."

How Facebook is teaching computers to see

by
Stacey Higginbotham
@gigastacey JUNE 15, 2015, 1:15 PM EDT  Fortune


Facebook’s Moments feature uses facial recognition, but there’s a lot more Facebook can offer with better computer vision and AI.
Facebook today launched its Moments product, which uses Facebook’s image recognition abilities to scan your photos for your friends and then lets people create private photo albums with a particular group, such as the people in the photo. The idea is to make it easier to share photos from a big event among attendees without the cumbersome process of emailing snapshots to everyone or the awkward end-of-event huddle while six people take the exact same group shot. It’s not a cure for cancer, but behind the scenes of this new feature is an impressive technology that Facebook has been working on for years.

A key element of the Moments feature is the ability for Facebook’s algorithms to recognize people’s faces across different photos, so that Moments knows who was at the event. This requires computer vision expertise that companies such as Google, Microsoft, Baidu, and others are currently researching for everything from self-driving cars to silly web products such as Microsoft’s How Old Do I Look?

In launching the Moments product Facebook is sharing data about its own successes in computer vision research. Namely, that Facebook can recognize faces with a 98% accuracy, and it can do so quickly—the company says it can identify you in one picture out of 800 million in less than 5 seconds. Finally, it can do all of this even if it doesn’t have the full frontal shot of your face (or even if your face isn’t in the photo at all), thanks to a machine learning algorithm that can look at other elements in the picture and associated with the photo’s data.

Facebook
Inside Moments

Fortune spoke with Yann LeCun, Facebook’s director of artificial intelligence research, to understand how his team helped a computer understand who you are, and where Facebook is heading next with its AI research. Perhaps the first thing to understand is that when LeCun discusses computer vision, it’s not the same as how a person sees, although the process of teaching software how to recognize an object has some similarities.

For example, Facebook’s facial recognition, which is the basis of the current efforts, can’t identify you. It only can recognize if a person in one photo is the same as a person in another photo. 

Identification is a completely separate step.
Because Facebook is about connecting people, its computer vision efforts have focused on recognizing faces as opposed to cats, cars, or other non-human subjects. To do this, it uses a database of celebrity and politicians photos called Labeled Faces in the Wild. This collection of images has 13,000 photos of people with different hairdos, different outfits, sometimes wearing glasses and more. Facebook used this collection to train its machine learning algorithms. Other companies have used this data set as well, and some universities have even trained systems with a higher than 98% accuracy rate using Labeled Faces.

So how did Facebook get from giving a machine a picture of Angelina Jolie to somehow using that photo to help identify your sister across different photo albums on Facebook? LeCun is the man to ask. About 20 years ago when he was working at Bell Labs (now AT&T’s Image Processing Research Department), he happened upon a way of thinking about teaching computers to see that wasn’t really used outside of academia until about three years ago.

How computers learn to see

That technique is called convolutional neural networking, and takes its name from both a mathematical operation called a convolution, and inspiration from how the human brain learns. The brain learns by establishing connections between neurons, and the more often a signal is sent over those neurons, the denser those connections get. In a similar vein, when computers establish similarities between two images it assigns a weight to those similarities. In convolutional neural networks, the goal is to train the machine to recognize the changes in weights between those connections so it can tell with increasing accuracy if the image matches.

The process of doing this is incredibly complicated and involves different calculations that work to establish how important certain aspects of the image are to the actual process of recognizing what the image is. For example, if you want to train a computer to recognize faces, the pixels related to the background are less important. The tricky—and frankly amazing— part of this is that the machine learns on its own how to tell what part of the image is most relevant, and then can generalize those relationships going forward. It still takes a lot of human effort to nudge the computer into recognizing the right way to weight the similarities, but once the model is built, it can generalize going forward.

The process can take a few days on a powerful computer.

Convolutional neural networks have become the basis for almost all of the computer vision research done today, after a team of researchers led by Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto, used that technique to win a competition where image recognition algorithms vie to be most accurate. Hinton, whose team and startup were lateracquired by Google, won the competition with a test error rate of 15.3%, compared to 26.2% for the second-place winner.

Don’t post that photo!

As research continues, the opportunities for use in our day-to-day life are significant. Yes, there is the ability to match people’s faces in a crowd that might lead to greater government surveillance, but there is also an opportunity to use better facial recognition to manage your privacy. For example, with automatic facial recognition at scale, any picture of you uploaded to Facebook (or perhaps even the web) could result in a notification.

For example, if you are somehow captured in the background of a tourist shot of Times Square, you could get a notification and the option to blur your face. Applied to children, the blurring or removal could be automated. LeCun notes that Facebook is interested in such tools, but also stresses that Facebook’s interest in machine learning goes far beyond image recognition.

Facebook’s goal is to get a computer to understand empathy. Obviously, it won’t be able to feel what humans do, but it can be trained to recognize what emotions are and how people will react. With that level of understanding, Facebook could, say, offer a warning when you are about to post a photo of you drunk and ask if you really want to do that.

“This would not be face recognition,” said LeCun. “We don’t care who is in the picture. We would use other types of image recognition and train them differently to say that this looks embarrassing and then tap you on the shoulder to make sure you want to post this publicly.”

This isn’t something Facebook can do today, but LeCun offered these concepts as a thought experiment to show where Facebook could head with its AI research. Of course, this sort of expertise informed by an algorithm can make people deeply uncomfortable. Today Facebook doesn’t turn on its auto tagging features in countries like Canada and the EU because of privacy concerns, and there’s a certain creep factor in having a computer second guess your photo-sharing choices or having software trying to parse your jokes to try to understand what you find funny.

“What we’d like to do is make machines more intelligent, understanding text, images, videos and posts,” LeCun said. “Anything that can happen in the digital world we want to understand the context.” Because there is so much digital content people could easily become overwhelmed by the information flooding their feeds. The efforts of LeCun’s team will help connect people with the content that is most relevant to their interests and priorities. It’s a complex solution to a simple goal: to make sure that you see what you want to see on Facebook.

“That’s the big mission that we at Facebook are trying to fulfill,” LeCun said. “Machines that understand people.”

CETF 2015 Annual Survey of California Digital Divide

www.cetfund.org



The California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF) is pleased to share with you the results of the
2015 Annual Survey on broadband adoption in California that was released yesterday. The Annual Survey is sponsored by CETF and conducted by the Field Research Corporation in 6 languages with a sample size in excess of 1,600 randomly-selected households (50% by cell phone and a margin of error + 2.6 percentage points at the 95% confidence level). The results show that progress is being made in closing the Digital Divide with 79% of all California households now having high-speed connections at home to the Internet (8% by smart phone only), but there is still much work to be done because unacceptable percentages of disadvantaged populations remain offline—35% of low-income households (below $20,000 annual income); 30% of Latino families (37% Spanish-speaking); and 41% of people with disabilities. It is important to keep in mind that the Digital Divide is just another manifestation of the Opportunity Divide and Economic Divide, and that those who are stuck on the wrong side of the Digital Divide—urban low-income neighborhoods and remote rural communities—are faced with a multitude of challenges in daily life that CETF calls the “wall of poverty” that must be tackled with strategic interventions to improve education coupled with workforce preparation and economic development.

The Annual Survey information is very timely as the Federal Communications Commission takes up tomorrow the issue of a Broadband Lifeline Program, State policymakers continue to explore how best to tackle poverty, and local governments continue to struggle to balance budgets and generate jobs. The data underscores the need to incorporate Digital Inclusion into all major initiatives to promote economic prosperity and quality of life in California.

Please feel free to distribute the results of the 2015 Annual Survey, post it on your own website and/or link to the CETF website http://www.cetfund.org/progress/annualsurvey, and reference the data as you find useful. We look forward to continuing to work together to close the Digital Divide in California. Thank you for your commitment and leadership.

Sunne Wright McPeak
President and CEO
California Emerging Technology Fund

ITIF: Beyond the USA Freedom Act: How U.S. Surveillance Still Subverts U.S. Competitiveness

Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn
June 9, 2015  ITIF

A failure to sufficiently reform U.S. surveillance policies is hurting U.S. technology companies, costing American jobs, and weakening the U.S. trade balance.

View Report


Almost two years ago, ITIF described how revelations about pervasive digital surveillance by the U.S. intelligence community could severely harm the competitiveness of the United States if foreign customers turned away from U.S.-made technology and services. Since then, U.S. policymakers have failed to take sufficient action to address these surveillance concerns; in some cases, they have even fanned the flames of discontent by championing weak information security practices. In addition, other countries have used anger over U.S. government surveillance as a cover for implementing a new wave of protectionist policies specifically targeting information technology. The combined result is a set of policies both at home and abroad that sacrifices robust competitiveness of the U.S. tech sector for vague and unconvincing promises of improved national security.

ITIF estimated in 2013 that even a modest drop in the expected foreign market share for cloud computing stemming from concerns about U.S. surveillance could cost the United States between $21.5 billion and $35 billion by 2016. Since then, it has become clear that the U.S. tech industry as a whole, not just the cloud computing sector, has under-performed as a result of the Snowden revelations. Therefore, the economic impact of U.S. surveillance practices will likely far exceed ITIF’s initial $35 billion estimate. This report catalogues a wide range of specific examples of the economic harm that has been done to U.S. businesses. In short, foreign customers are shunning U.S. companies. The policy implication of this is clear: Now that Congress has reformed how the National Security Agency (NSA) collects bulk domestic phone records and allowed private firms—rather than the government—to collect and store approved data, it is time to address other controversial digital surveillance activities by the U.S. intelligence community.

The U.S. government’s failure to reform many of the NSA’s surveillance programs has damaged the competitiveness of the U.S. tech sector and cost it a portion of the global market share. This includes programs such as PRISM—the controversial program authorized by the FISA Amendments Act, which allows for warrantless access to private-user data on popular online services both in the United States and abroad—and Bullrun—the NSA’s program to undermine encryption standards both at home and abroad. Foreign companies have seized on these controversial policies to convince their customers that keeping data at home is safer than sending it abroad, and foreign governments have pointed to U.S. surveillance as justification for protectionist policies that require data to be kept within their national borders. In the most extreme cases, such as in China, foreign governments are using fear of digital surveillance to force companies to surrender valuable intellectual property, such as source code.

In the short term, U.S. companies lose out on contracts, and over the long term, other countries create protectionist policies that lock U.S. businesses out of foreign markets. This not only hurts U.S. technology companies, but costs American jobs and weakens the U.S. trade balance. To reverse this trend, ITIF recommends that policymakers:

• Increase transparency about U.S. surveillance activities both at home and abroad.
• Strengthen information security by opposing any government efforts to introduce backdoors in software or weaken encryption.
• Strengthen U.S. mutual legal assistance treaties (MLATs).
• Work to establish international legal standards for government access to data.
• Complete trade agreements like the Trans Pacific Partnership that ban digital protectionism, and pressure nations that seek to erect protectionist barriers to abandon those efforts.

US House passes Bill to end domestic NSA bulk data collection

Summary:American residents could soon be exempt from the NSA's dragnet, unless surveillance is approved by the secretive FISA court, with the USA Freedom Act passing the US House of Representatives and heading to the Senate.

By Chris Duckett | May 14, 2015 -- 07:04 GMT (00:04 PDT)
ZDNet

The US House of Representatives has voted 338 for and 88 against ending the NSA's dragnet collection of telephone, email, and other online data from millions of Americans, a controversial program that was revealed in 2013 by former security contractor Edward Snowden.

The USA Freedom Act is seen as a big win for privacy and civil rights advocates. The White House backs the reforms, saying the Bill protects privacy while preserving essential national security authorities.

After passing the House, the measure is now heading for a vote in the Senate, where the clash between reformists and supporters of the intelligence community, coming within the context of warnings on the increasing digital reach of the Islamic State terror group, transcends party lines.

Both liberals and staunch conservatives, often at odds on most major legislation, have united in opposition against domestic spying by the National Security Agency.

The Bill, which focuses on people in the US and not overseas, would amend controversial sections of the USA Patriot Act, which was passed in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks and will expire on June 1.

The reforms scrap the bulk collection detailed in Section 215 of the Patriot Act, replacing it with a targeted program that allows intelligence agencies to collect data from specific individuals or groups, but only with prior approval of the secret national security FISA court.


Under Section 215, the government stored the acquired data, but the new reforms would compel telcos and other data companies to keep the information to be accessible to intelligence agencies only through court order.The data dragnet was operating in complete secrecy after 2001, and has been under the supervision of the FISA court since 2006. It was consistently renewed by the administrations of George W Bush and Barack Obama.

"Today's vote was a major win for surveillance reform and a major rebuke for those who want to reauthorise the Patriot Act without change," said Center for Democracy & Technology president Nuala O'Connor.

Passage through the House was welcomed by Mozilla, whose head of public policy Chris Riley called for the Senate to swiftly pass the legislation.

"This legislation significantly curtails bulk collection under the Patriot Act and other authorities, and puts us on a path to a more private and secure internet," Riley said.

"We are staunchly opposed to any short- or long-term reauthorisation of these sections of the Patriot Act absent meaningful reforms. Now is not the time to delay on these much-needed reforms."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said US business is being hurt by the NSA's actions, and it hopes the Senate will add amendments to strengthen the Bill.

"The legislation is a good start to shutting backdoors," the EFF said. "The time to fix the backdoor problem is now."

The vote came just a week after a US appeals court ruled that the bulk data collection goes far beyond what congress authorised.

"The text of [section 215] cannot bear the weight the government asks us to assign to it, and that it does not authorize the telephone metadata program," wrote judge Gerard E Lynch last week.

Earlier this month, the French lower house approved legislation allowing authorities to spy on suspected terrorists without prior authorisation from a judge.

The new law, to go before the French Senate later this month, allows authorities to spy on the digital and mobile communications of anyone linked to a "terrorist" inquiry without judicial authorisation, and forces internet service providers and phone companies to give up data upon request.

Intelligence services will have the right to place cameras and recording devices in private dwellings and install keylogging devices.

As the US restricts some of its data surveillance schemes, Australia is in the midst of setting up its own data-retention scheme.

In this week's Australian Budget, AU$131 million was allocated by the government for the creation and maintenance of systems to store all Australians' telecommunications data for two years for warrantless access by law enforcement.

However, the money from the government is expected to cover only between one third and half of the cost to implement the scheme.

The Internet Society of Australia CEO Laurie Patton said the government should guarantee to top up the funding if it is inadequate for all ISPs.

"The government's original cost estimate was not based on widespread industry consultation, and the Internet Society is concerned that the costs have been significantly underestimated, especially in respect of small to medium-sized ISPs that don't have the resources to undertake the work in-house, and therefore will be required to pay for external assistance," he said in a statement.

BBC: Staff-tracking app faces legal scrutiny in US

BBC

The woman is alleging that an app which tracks movements 24/7 invaded her privacy
A US sales executive is suing her employer for invasion of privacy, alleging that she was fired after deleting an app which tracked her movements.
The action alleges that Intermex, a firm which arranges money transfers, tracked employees even when off-duty.

Myrna Arias alleges that she was "scolded" for removing the app and fired a few weeks later.

The company has not responded to the allegations.

According to court documents published by website Ars Technica, employees were instructed to download the app, called Xora, to their phones in April 2014.

Xora is described on its website as a workplace management app which allows companies to "remotely manage" their workers by keeping track of their hours and other aspects of their job.

Xora's website says that the app uses GPS to allow bosses "to see the location of every mobile worker on a Google Map".

According to the lawsuit, Ms Arias's manager "admitted that employees would be monitored while off-duty and bragged that he knew how fast she was driving at specific moments ever since she had installed the app on her phone".

"He confirmed that she was required to keep her phone's power on 24/7 to answer phone calls from clients," reads the court document.

It goes on to detail that Ms Arias had "no objection" to being monitored at work but felt that monitoring her location during non-work hours was an invasion of her privacy.

She likened the app to a prisoner's ankle bracelet.

Tracking employees
Her boss "scolded the plaintiff when she de-installed the app in late April in order to protect her privacy", reads the court document.

She was fired on 5 May.

Ms Arias is seeking damages for lost earnings in excess of $500,000.

Mark Weston, a partner at law firm Matthew Arnold & Baldwin, tod the BBC that an employer "would not be allowed to track an employee without the consent of that employee".

Clauses that allow for tracking apps would have to be built into contracts, he said.

As for the legality of firing an employee for refusing to use such an app, Mr Weston said: "In the US, things may be looser because many employees there are employees 'at will'. Accordingly, employers have far greater flexibility than in Europe to dismiss an employee who is not playing ball."

AOL: 2.1 million people still subscribe to dial-up Internet

BY BRANDON RUSSELL | MAY 9, 2015 TechnoBuffalo



AOL on Friday revealed that 2.1 million people in the U.S. still subscribe to its dial-up service, an astonishing and surprising number in the year 2015. A large majority of Americans have ditched the comatose service as faster broadband has become more accessible. But, either through ignorance, stubbornness, or sheer unavailability in certain areas, people are still clinging to the good old days of the early Internet.

Back in 2010, AOL revealed it had about 4.6 million dial-up users, so usage is on the decline, but it’s a slow, slow process, not unlike the service these people still get.

CNN Money notes that over 70-percent of Americans are connected through faster broadband, with an average speed of 11.4 Mbps, which is lighting quick compared to AOL’s 56k speeds. Compared to what the Internet looked like 20 years ago, 56k connections probably wouldn’t even be able to load a modern day website, much less stream a video on YouTube or Netflix.

Without fast Internet, online tech journalism just wouldn’t exist in the way it does today. And there would be no Twitch or Spotify. It would be a cruel, apocalyptic world.

The most shocking thing of all? Customers are paying AOL $20 a month for dial-up access, which means the company is still making a killing each year from these subscriptions. If you or someone you know is still using dial-up, it might be time for an intervention.

I get it: not everyone can afford broadband Internet, and there’s a minuscule chance they don’t have access to the faster speeds in their remote part of the wilderness. But 2.1 million is a hefty figure, and so long as people subscribe, AOL will continue to be an enduring time capsule of despair.

Warrants not required for police to get your cell phone cell-site records

Mobile callers' cell-tower history is fair game for cops—probable cause unnecessary.

by David Kravets - May 5, 2015 3:25pm PDT  ars technica


Michael Dorausch

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that the government does not need a warrant to obtain a suspect's cell-site location data records.

The 9-2 decision (PDF) by the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals said that the records of towers that a mobile phone uses to make calls are considered "business records" maintained by a "third party" and are not protected by the Fourth Amendment. That means the government may obtain these records if it believes they are relevant to an investigation.

The case concerns a Florida man, Quartavious Davis, who was sentenced to life in prison for a string of robberies in a prosecution that was built with the suspect's cell site records.

...Davis can assert neither ownership nor possession of the third-party’s business records he sought to suppress. Instead, those cell tower records were created by MetroPCS, stored on its own premises, and subject to its control. Cell tower location records do not contain private communications of the subscriber. This type of non-content evidence, lawfully created by a third-party telephone company for legitimate business purposes, does not belong to Davis, even if it concerns him. Like the security camera surveillance images introduced into evidence at his trial, MetroPCS’s cell tower records were not Davis’s to withhold. Those surveillance camera images show Davis’s location at the precise location of the robbery, which is far more than MetroPCS’s cell tower location records show.

The majority ruling by Judge Frank Hull is a big boost to the government. Warrantless cell-site tracking has become among the government's preferred methods of electronically tracking suspects in the wake of a 2012 Supreme Court ruling that the authorities generally needed a warrant to attach GPS devices onto vehicles and track their every move.

Meanwhile, the Atlanta-based appeals court had ruled the opposite way last year by a vote of 2-1. But the 11th Circuit revisited the case with a larger panel of 11 judges at the government's request. The outcome brings the number of appellate courts that have ruled for the authorities to four. There are 13 appeals courts nationwide. None have gone the other way. Without conflicting rulings, the US Supreme Court might not take up the issue any time soon.

In all the decisions, the appellate courts cited analog-aged 1979 US Supreme Court precedent, known as Smith v. Maryland, that allows the government's telephone metadata snooping program that Edward Snowden exposed.

Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor and a Fourth Amendment expert, said he agreed with the court's ruling—to an extent.

Granted, I want there to be a circuit split to get the case up to the Supremes. That leaves me in an odd position: Although I think a judge should follow Smith, I also kinda want a lower court to not follow precedent in order to tee up the issue for the Supreme Court.
The 11th Circuit originally decided in June that a warrant was required because the public had a reasonable expectation of privacy in their public movements.

"Thus, the exposure of the cell site location information can convert what would otherwise be a private event into a public one. When one’s whereabouts are not public, then one may have a reasonable expectation of privacy in those whereabouts," the court ruled. (PDF)

But what a different a larger panel of judges makes when it comes to deciding the constitutionality of so-called § 2703(d) orders:

The stored telephone records produced in this case, and in many other criminal cases, serve compelling governmental interests. Historical cell tower location records are routinely used to investigate the full gamut of state and federal crimes, including child abductions, bombings, kidnappings, murders, robberies, sex offenses, and terrorism-related offenses.

Such evidence is particularly valuable during the early stages of an investigation, when the police lack probable cause and are confronted with multiple suspects. In such cases, § 2703(d) orders—like other forms of compulsory process not subject to the search warrant procedure—help to build probable cause against the guilty, deflect suspicion from the innocent, aid in the search for truth, and judiciously allocate scarce investigative resources.
For the two-judge dissent, Judge Beverly Martin wrote:

"While I admire the majority’s attempt to cabin its holding to the technology of five years ago, its assurances in this regard seem naïve in practice. As a result of today’s decision, I have little doubt that all government requests for cell site location data will be approved, no matter how specific or invasive the technology."
The MetroPCS records at issue in the case were from August 1, 2010 to October 6, 2010. The defendant, Davis, made roughly 86 calls a day.

The data included the telephone numbers of calls made by and to Davis' mobile phone; whether a call was outgoing or incoming; the date, time and duration of calls. The key dispute in this case concerned other data that was turned over. That included the number assigned to the cell tower that wirelessly connected the calls from and to Davis, and the sector number associated with the tower.

Davis' attorney, Nathan Freed Wessler of the American Civil Liberties Union, said that the "dissenting judges recognized outdated legal doctrines from the analog age should not be mechanically extended to undermine our privacy rights in the voluminous digital records that come with modern life."



David Kravets / The senior editor for Ars Technica. Founder of TYDN fake news site. Technologist. Political scientist. Humorist. Dad of two boys. Been doing journalism for so long I remember manual typewriters with real paper.

Connect America Fund Offers Carriers Nearly $1.7 Billion to Expand Broadband to Over 8.5 Million Rural Americans

Carriers Have Four Months to Accept or Decline Offers on State-Level Basis | FCC PressRelease

Mountain of Electrical Waste Reaches New Peak

APR 19, 2015 09:55 AM ET // BY AFP  Discovery


Less than one-sixth of all e-waste is properly recycled.
A record amount of electrical and electronic waste hit the rubbish tips in 2014, with the biggest per-capita tallies in countries that pride themselves on environmental consciousness, a report said Sunday.

Last year, 41.8 million tons of so-called e-waste -- mostly fridges, washing machines and other domestic appliances at the end of their life -- was dumped, it said.

Stop Making Trash: How To Go Garbage Free

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Where Does Our Garbage Go?

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have figured out how to track trash. They are doing this to get a better sense of people's disposal habits, which they hope will improve recycling efforts.

That's the equivalent of 1.15 million heavy trucks, forming a line 23,000 kilometers (14,300 miles) long, according to the report, compiled by the United Nations University, the UN's educational and research branch.

Less than one-sixth of all e-waste was properly recycled, it said.

In 2013, the e-waste total was 39.8 million tons -- and on present trends, the 50-million-ton mark could be reached in 2018.

Topping the list for per-capita waste last year was Norway, with 28.4 kilograms (62.5 pounds) per inhabitant.

It was followed by Switzerland (26.3 kg per capita), Iceland (26.1 kilos), Denmark (24.0 kilos), Britain (23.5 kilos), the Netherlands (23.4 kilos), Sweden (22.3 kilos), France (22.2 kilos) and the United States and Austria (22.1 kilos per person each).

The region with the lowest amount of e-waste per inhabitant was Africa, with 1.7 kilos per person. It generated a total of 1.9 million tons of waste.

In volume terms, the most waste was generated in the United States and China, which together accounted for 32 percent of the world's total, followed by Japan, Germany and India.

Waste that could have been recovered and recycled was worth $52 billion (48.5 billion euros), including 300 tons of gold -- equal to 11 percent of the world's gold production in 2013.

But it also included 2.2 million tons of harmful lead compounds, as well as mercury, cadmium and chromium, and 4,400 tons of ozone-gobbling chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gases.

"Worldwide, e-waste constitutes a valuable 'urban mine' -- a large potential reservoir of recyclable materials," UN Under Secretary-General David Malone said.

"At the same time, the hazardous content of e-waste constitutes a 'toxic mine' that must be managed with extreme care."

Almost 60 percent of e-waste by weight came from large and small kitchen, bathroom and laundry appliances.

Seven percent was generated by thrown-out mobile phones, calculators, personal computers and printers.

Now you can download your entire search history from Google

ZDNet

Summary:Earlier this year, Google quietly rolled out a new feature that lets users download their search history.


By Liam Tung | April 21, 2015 -- 09:02 GMT (02:02 PDT)

With just a few clicks, anyone can now download their entire Google search history - that's every query ever made while the user was signed in.

To download the archive, Google Search users need to sign in and go to their Google Account History page, then click on the gear icon and select Download.

As the file is potentially sensitive, Google urges users to read its warnings, which are "not the usual yada yada". Google advises that the archive shouldn't be downloaded on a public computer and, if it is to be exported to another cloud storage service, that the user reads their export policy in the event they want to take their files elsewhere in future.

Google will send an email to notify a user when the download is complete, with a link to the data, which will be transferred to a Takeout folder in Google Drive. The user will find a .ZIP archive folder containing a series of .JSON files containing searches over quarterly periods.

Takeout is the feature that lets Google users download archives of multiple products, such as Gmail, YouTube, Google Photos, +1s, Hangouts, Calendars, and more. The featurelaunched in 2011 under its Data Liberation Front initiative, but it historically didn't include Search and still doesn't include Google Wallet.

The new capability was first spotted by the Google System blog, which noted that Google started testing the archive download feature for Search last year.

Google's product forums show that people have been using the feature, with mixed success, to download their history since at least February. Google toldVenture Beat that it released the feature in January.

Other companies that allow users to download and store an archive of their activities include Facebook and Twitter.

Two things worth noting are that downloading search history only gives the user a copy of their archive held by Google and doesn't delete the history from the users Web & App Activity page. Google provides instructions how to do that here.



About Liam Tung

Liam Tung is an Australian business technology journalist living a few too many Swedish miles north of Stockholm for his liking. He gained a bachelors degree in economics and arts (cultural studies) at Sydney's Macquarie University, but hacked (without Norse or malicious code for that matter) his way into a career as an enterprise tech, s... Full Bio

The numbers behind the broadband ‘homework gap’

APRIL 20, 2015

BY JOHN B. HORRIGAN Pew Research Center

Since the dawn of the internet, there’s been much talk about the digital divide – the gap between those with access to the internet and those without. But what about the “homework gap”?

In recent years, policymakers and advocates have pushed to make it easier for low-income households with school-age children to have broadband, arguing that low-income students are at a disadvantage without online access in order to do school work these days. Later this year, the Federal Communications Commission is expected to begin a rule-making process to overhaul the Lifeline Program, an initiative that subsidizes telephone subscriptions for low-income households, so that it would also cover broadband.

In 2013, the Lifeline program provided $1.8 billion worth of telephone subsidies for qualified low-income people. The FCC has not yet provided estimates of how much it would cost to add broadband subsidies to the program, but the debate will undoubtedly focus on overall program costs and how many households would be covered.



How big is the homework gap? A new Pew Research Center analysis finds most American homes with school-age children do have broadband access – about 82.5% (about 9 percentage points higher than average for all households). With approximately 29 million households in America having children between the ages of 6 and 17, according to Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data, this means that some 5 million households with school-age children do not have high-speed internet service at home. Low-income households – and especially black and Hispanic ones – make up a disproportionate share of that 5 million.

Pew Research analysis of the Census data finds that the lowest-income households have the lowest home broadband subscription rates. Roughly one-third (31.4%) of households whose incomes fall below $50,000 and with children ages 6 to 17 do not have a high-speed internet connection at home. This low-income group makes up about 40% of all families with school-age children in the United States, according to the bureau’s American Community Survey. (The survey asked questions on home internet use for the first time in 2013.)

By comparison, only 8.4% of households with annual incomes over $50,000 lack a broadband internet connection at home. In other words, low-income homes with children are four times more likely to be without broadband than their middle or upper-income counterparts.

The other notable difference in home broadband adoption pertains to the race and ethnicity of the householder. Lower-income black and Hispanic households with children trail comparable white households with children by about 10 percentage points.

Asian Americans, by contrast, outperform the other groups in broadband adoption for households with children, regardless of income level. A likely explanation is that Asian Americans have the highest educational levels of any racial group in the United States, which is a characteristic strongly associated with having broadband at home.

Note: The author is currently a senior researcher at Pew Research Center. Prior to joining the center, he served on the Federal Communications Commission team that developed the National Broadband Plan.

BBC: High price of '.sucks' to be investigated

13 April 2015 BBC

Vox Populi says its prices for ".sucks" website names are "well within the rules"

The authority that decides which letters a web address is allowed to finish with says it is concerned at the high charges for the new ".sucks" name.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Number (Icann) has asked the US and Canadian trade authorities to investigate Vox Populi, which secured the rights to sell the name.

The company denies any wrongdoing.

Many companies and celebrities have bought their name with controversial suffixes such as ".porn" or ".xxx".

Predatory selling

The last part of a web address that follows the final dot, such as ".com", ".org", and ".net", is referred to as a generic top level domain (gTLD).

Icann relaxed the rules governing gTLDs in 2012, and the latest to go up for sale is ".sucks".

Many companies and celebrities buy their brand or name with various gTLDs, to avoid any confusion with their official website addresses or to stop others buying them and posting negative content.

Taylorswift.xxx has been reserved but not used, to prevent others from buying it

For example, singer Taylor Swift bought up taylorswift.xxx to prevent anyone else from using it.

Specialist online website Domain Incite reports that actor "Kevin Spacey, Microsoft, Google and Apple have already bought up '.sucks' sites in a bid to protect their reputations".

This practice is known as "defensive registering".

Icann granted Vox Populi permission to sell the ".sucks" names but is now concerned at the price levels the Canadian company has set.

Kevin Murphy, from Domain Incite, told the BBC two key elements of the way Vox Populi was handling the sale were causing concern.

"They are charging a $2,000 'sunrise' premium to those wishing to register '.sucks' addresses early, before the addresses go on sale to the general public [next month]," he said.

"Also they are using a list of words or names that have been defensively registered in the past, for which they are charging the top amount."

Mr Murphy said the company was working from a list of keywords that had been part of web addresses bought up early on in similar new domain web address sales and using that to decide which ".sucks" addresses to charge more for.

The base fee for any ".sucks" web address is $199 a year

New gTLDs such as ".rocks" or ".forsale" typically sell for between $5 (£3.42) and $20 a year.

Beyond jurisdiction

But Murphy said: "They [Vox Populi] are charging a much bigger amount that you'd expect.

"They were considering a fee of $25,000 at one point when we spoke to them.

"I think they are charging as much as they can get away with.

"It [Vox Populi] justified the $2,000 premium price tag [for certain '.sucks' addresses] as being 'a reasonable part of a company's PR budget'.

"It appears they are basing prices on what firms can afford not on the product services they are providing."

In a strongly worded letter to Icann, the authority's own advisory body, the Intellectual Property Constituency (IPC), demanded a "halt" to Vox Populi's "illicit", "predatory" and "coercive" selling scheme.

But even though Icann approved the ".sucks" domain name sale and issued the licence to sell the related website addresses, it appears not to have jurisdiction over how they are sold.

There is no evidence that Vox Populi has done anything wrong, and the company told Domain Incite its pricing and policies were "well within the rules".

Icann has referred Vox Populi to the two bodies it believes may have the regulatory authority to investigate the company's practices: the Federal Trade Commission in the United States and the Canadian Office of Consumer Affairs, as the company is registered in Canada.

But unless the company has broken the law, it is not clear what powers Icann has over Vox Populi's handing of the sale of ".sucks".

Mass surveillance case against UK government heads to Europe's highest court

Summary:Three human rights and privacy groups suing the British government against mass surveillance will have their case heard by the European Court of Human Rights.


By Zack Whittaker | April 10, 2015 -- 15:36 GMT (08:36 PDT)
ZDNet

RAF Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, UK, home to a surveillance base (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

A lawsuit aimed at challenging the UK government's mass surveillance programs has been filed with the highest human rights court in Europe.

The case, filed by Amnesty International, Liberty, and Privacy International on Wednesday, is now in the hands of the European Court of Human Rights after the groups said they "exhausted" all legal avenues in the UK.



As the Snowden leaks began, there was "fear and panic" in Congress

Just a few minutes after the first NSA leak was published, the phones of US lawmakers began to buzz, hours before most of America would find out over their morning coffee.
Read More
The suit aims to determine that the UK and US mass surveillance operations were in breach of Europe's human rights laws.

The joint application was submitted just weeks after the UK's Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled that the UK intelligence agencies it oversees were not at the time breaching the laws. That decision was made because the UK government had by that point declassified how it was tapping the communications of millions of people, but noted that there was a prior lack of transparency.

However, the tribunal also found that the intelligence-sharing relationship between the UK and the US was unlawful prior to December 2014, because rules governing the UK's access to US mass electronic surveillance programs -- including the clandestine PRISM system -- were secret.

"It is ridiculous that the government has been allowed to rely on the existence of secret policies and procedures discussed with the Tribunal behind closed doors -- to demonstrate that it is being legally transparent," said Nick Williams, legal counsel for Amnesty International, in a statement Friday.

Although the case could go either way, the groups note that the Strasbourg court has a long history of pushing back on European member states' intelligence agencies, particularly when non-European countries are involved.



About Zack Whittaker

Zack Whittaker is a writer-editor for ZDNet, and sister sites CNET and CBS News. He is based in the New York newsroom. His PGP key is: EB6CEEA5.

5 Sad Facts About America's Ridiculously Slow Internet

3/31/15 6:00pm Gizmodo



Anyone who’s ever stared glass-eyed at a Netflix video that won’t load or stuttered through a glitchy Skype call knows that the United States leaves its citizens starving for bandwidth. But the latest data in Akamai’s annual “State of the Internet” report presents some prettypretty depressing statistics about America’s slow, shitty internet.



Why America's Internet Is So Shitty and Slow
You may have heard that the internet is winning: net neutrality was saved, broadband was redefined…Read more


In case you’re not familiar, Akamai is a cloud services company that counts giants like Apple, Facebook, and Twitter as clients. Those relationships yield data about internet traffic all over the world, including the details of connection speeds, cyberattacks, and network penetration. The latest report tells a tale of how far behind the US is in terms of upgrading infrastructure and ensuring internet faster speeds. And the US invented the damn thing.
America’s not even in the top 10 worldwide

If you want fast internet, you’d be better off moving to Latvia than settling down in middle America. Or South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Ireland, Czech Republic, or Finland. The US isn’t even in the top 10 countries with the fastest average connection speeds worldwide.

In fact, Akamai only mentions the US in this part of the report to note that broadband adoption had dipped slightly (a “negligible 0.3 percent drop”) and to point out that “in the United States, 50 million people—or roughly 16% of the population—are not connected to the Internet.” Later in the report, Akamai points out that the global rank for the US is number 16.




The top slots this year, yet again, belong to Asia. South Korea’s internet is probably the best in the world. It ranks at the top of every list, namely the list of countries with average broadband speeds above 10 Mbps. A rollicking 79 percent of South Koreans enjoy speeds of 10 Mbps or greater. The US didn’t even make the list.

Don’t blame size
A lot of people blame slow US internet speeds on the size of the country. The internet does demand a physical infrastructure to carry packets of data from one side of the nation to another, and in more isolated areas, that infrastructure is more sparse, making it tougher to offer high-speed connections. It means that the whole country’s average speed gets brought down by these dead spots.

But the data tells a different story. Ironically, some of the most remote states in the country enjoy some of the fastest internet speeds. Utah’s internet is number six in the nation, followed by Washington, Oregon, and North Dakota. North Dakota!

Meanwhile, Virginia is only slightly larger than South Korea, but its internet is almost 25 percent slower on average.

US speeds are tragically far from “broadband”
Uncompetitive internet speeds is hardly news to US officials. Acknowledging the massive gaps in access to high-speed internet across the country, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently redefined broadband in an effort to compel internet service providers to build faster networks. It used to be 4 Mbps. Now it’s 25 Mbps.

Guess what? Not a single state can boast anything close to widespread speeds greater than 25 Mbps. In fact, none of them can even claim full broadband coverage according to the old definition.



So if you want to move to a state with pretty good internet, Delaware is the state for you. It’s alsoa great place to incorporate a tech company.

Mobile internet is even worse
So all the above statistics refer to terrestrial broadband. Surely, the US must be better on the mobile front? Nope. Akamai’s findings for the fastest mobile connections in the five major continental regions, ranked:

• Europe: United Kingdom, 16.0 Mbps 
• Asia Pacific: Japan, 8.3 Mbps 
• South America: Venezuela, 6.3 Mbps 
• North America: United States, 3.2 Mbps 
• Africa: Morocco, 3.0 Mbps 

Venezuela’s mobile internet speeds are almost twice those of the US. Venezuela is struggling to feed its citizens, but they can stream YouTube on their phones faster than the average American.

America is home to a ton of hacker activity
Nevertheless, the US is second only to China as the biggest exporter of attack traffic. This isn’t necessarily related to speed, and it’s hard to draw conclusions from Akamai’s data about internet security. But one thing stands out: A sizable proportion of cyberattacks worldwide originate in the US.

China accounts for 41 percent of global attack traffic, while the US accounts for just 13 percent. There’s not really a third place. Taiwan and Russia are neck-and-neck with 4.4 percent and 3.2 percent, respectively. The report doesn’t offer much detail about the attacks themselves, but the data doesn’t lie. If you wanted to pick the top two belligerents in the ongoing global cyberwar, they would be China and the straggling United States.

[Akamai]
Contact the author at adam@gizmodo.com.

U.S. Internet users pay more and have fewer choices than Europeans

Areas of service rarely overlap between Internet providers

By Allan Holmesemail Chris Zubak-Skeesemail
5:00 am, April 1, 2015 Updated: 5:00 am, April 1, 2015

Center for Public Integrity

More than a quarter of Americans cannot go online at home to check their children’s grades at school, apply for jobs, pay bills or research health issues. They don’t have what has become a crucial service for participation in modern society: Internet service at home.

The proportion of households with Internet service had been rising steadily for decades, according to the Pew Research Center, until the past few years when the adoption rate slowed.

One reason? The high cost of broadband and the lack of competition that leads to those high prices.

A Center for Public Integrity analysis of Internet prices in five U.S. cities and five comparable French cities found that prices in the U.S. were as much as 3 1/2 times higher than those in France for similar service. The analysis shows that consumers in France have a choice between a far greater number of providers — seven on average — than those in the U.S., where most residents can get service from no more than two companies. The Center’s analysis echoes the findings of several studies on Internet pricing disparities worldwide.

By mapping the service areas of U.S. providers, The Center for Public Integrity also found that telecommunications companies appear to carve up territory to avoid competing with more than one other provider.

Higher broadband prices don’t just mean fewer dollars in Americans’ wallets at the end of every month. They make it difficult for low- to middle-income families to afford fast Internet service, which has become a necessity for job training, education, health care.

According to data in a report by the U.S. National Technology and Information Administration, more than 8 percent of U.S. households say they cannot afford broadband. President Barack Obama this year called for faster, more affordable Internet service for everyone.

“Just like we today expect clean running water, sewage and electricity as essential, so is broadband necessary to partake in society, to interact with government, to learn, to inform and be informed, to be a fully functioning member of society,” said Rudolf van der Berg, a telecommunications and broadband policy analyst who studies policy at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Many studies have been conducted looking at price and competition. The Center’s research isn’t as comprehensive. Rather, it’s a snapshot meant to show the state of broadband for some American cities. The high prices and lack of competition and in towns like these — and there are many — add to a growing divide between the connected and unconnected. And for the unconnected, the increasing gap will be measured in fewer economic opportunities, less access to healthcare and other inequities.