Academics will discuss the economics of broadband at the FCC’s Oct. 2 net neutrality workshop, the Office of Strategic Planning & Policy Analysis said Thursday (http://bit.ly/1u3hpri). The panelists at the 1:30 p.m. event will be Jonathan Baker, a professor at American University’s Washington College of Law; Nicholas Economides, a New York University Stern School of Business economics professor and executive director of the Networks, Electronic Commerce and Telecommunications Institute; Thomas Hazlett, a Clemson University economics professor; Christiaan Hogendorn, a Wesleyan University associate economics professor; and John Mayo, an economics, business and public policy professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.
The entire big data market worldwide will reach $48.3 billion by 2018, said a report Friday by Transparency Market Research, a data analytics consultant (http://bit.ly/1okAbEN). In 2012, the global big data market was estimated at $6.3 billion, the report said. Between 2012 and 2018, the report expects North America to maintain its dominance globally, achieving a 54.5 percent share of the total market during the forecast period.
Recipients of round two of Connect America Fund Phase I support have until Feb. 24 to identify location information, including latitude and longitude, for each location to be counted toward satisfying their deployment obligations, said the FCC Wireline Bureau in a public notice (http://fcc.us/1u355Hx) Thursday. The starting date for deadlines to meet the deployment obligations is when the amount of round two funding was finalized, the PN clarified. Recipients of Phase I round two support must complete deployment of broadband-capable infrastructure to two-thirds of the required number of locations within two years of providing notice of acceptance of funding, and must complete deployment to all required locations within three years, the PN said.
The FCC Media Bureau extended the comment deadline in a proceeding on requests from programmers and broadcasters to expand protections of highly confidential documents involved in the review of the Comcast/Time Warner Cable deal and AT&T/DirecTV. Comments are due Sept. 29, the bureau said Friday in a public notice (http://bit.ly/1u3pzQu). Comments were originally due Sept. 26, after the bureau issued a public notice Sept. 23. A public interest attorney urged the FCC to reexamine how it handles highly sensitive documents in review of pending transactions. The practices should be reexamined “to insure that all documents considered by the Commission staff are within the direct jurisdiction of the Commission and made part of the record,” said Andrew Jay Schwartzman of the Georgetown University Law Center, in comments filed in dockets 14-90 and 14-57 in his personal capacity. Until the FCC changes the procedures to provide full transparency, interested parties “will not be able to participate fully in the Commission’s review of assignments and transfers, and the Commission runs the risk of judicial reversal in these or other future proceedings,” he said in comments. The FCC’s practice of “making house calls” to the Justice Department to review documents that aren’t included in the record before the agency is “fundamentally unfair and exposes the commission to great jeopardy on judicial review,” he said. There’s no need to adopt the proposed measures to give additional protection to sensitive documents, he said. The FCC has ample authority to modify its ordinary protective order process to impose a higher than usual degree of protection if circumstances arise, Schwartzman said.
Yahoo is shutting down Yahoo Education, Yahoo Directory and mobile app Qwiki, the company said in a Friday post (http://bit.ly/1vnMJAn). Yahoo Education is a platform for education providers and their content, while Yahoo Directory is a website listing used more heavily before the advent of search engines. Qwiki creates short movies using a series of photos.
The Department of Homeland Security gave the recently discovered “Shellshock” bug an impact score of 10 out of 10 (http://1.usa.gov/1uNsOsZ) Friday. The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) said the vulnerability compromises “the common command-line shell used in most Linux/UNIX operating systems and Apple’s Mac OS X,” in a Thursday alert (http://1.usa.gov/Zgw72T). “The flaw could allow an attacker to remotely execute shell commands by attaching malicious code in environment variables used by the operating system.” In a statement, Apple said, “The vast majority of OS X users are not at risk.” Only those who have configured their computers for “advanced UNIX services” are at risk, the company said. “We are working to quickly provide a software update for our advanced UNIX users.” The Heartbleed security flaw was the last major open source software vulnerability to get similar widespread attention (WID April 11 p10).
A New York State appeals court ruled that Facebook can continue with its lawsuit claiming the Manhattan district attorney violated the Fourth Amendment by obtaining search warrants for the information of 381 Facebook user profiles (http://bit.ly/1u3cary). Justice John Sweeny of the Appellate Division of the First Department also on Thursday granted requests from major technology companies like Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Twitter to file amicus briefs on Facebook’s behalf. A full panel of First Department judges plans a hearing on the issue in December. Facebook is arguing the district attorney’s requirement that the company not inform its users of the search warrants violated those users’ constitutional rights.
Friday was the FTC’s 100th anniversary, which Chairwoman Edith Ramirez marked with a blog post (http://1.usa.gov/1BgyCxq). “In the years after President Wilson signed the FTC Act, then-cutting edge technologies like movies and radio dramatically reshaped U.S. commerce,” she said. “Our economy is now being transformed by, among other things, wireless communications services, the Internet of Things and big data.” The FTC’s role, however, has remained the same -- “promoting competition and the interests of American consumers using the tried-and-true tools of law enforcement, sound public policy, and consumer education,” said Ramirez. The commission is “on the cutting edge of rapid economic and technological changes,” she said.
Though the 5.5-inch screen of the iPhone 6 Plus is 38 percent larger than the 4-inch screen of the iPhone 5S, it costs only 15 percent more to build, said a preliminary analysis by the website Teardown.com (http://bit.ly/1mycAVA). The estimated combined cost of Apple’s new A8 processor with Qualcomm’s MDM9625M modem are the largest chunk ($59.50) of the phone’s total cost ($242.50), the site said. The 5.5-inch display and touchscreen assembly costs $51, while a Toshiba-sourced NAND flash device adds $9 and a Samsung DRAM chip, $5, it said. The site pegs no estimated cost for the NXP Semiconductor PN548 device that brings near field communication functionality to an iPhone for the first time. The same PN548 component is housed within the iPhone 6, which costs $227 to build, including $41.50 for the 4.7-inch display and touchscreen assembly, the site said. “Some key notes on the assembly included our analysts observing that the board design and the use of ’tried and true’ chipsets allowed Apple to maintain a high margin on the devices,” the site said. With a two-year contract, pricing starts at $299 for the iPhone 6 Plus, and at $199 for the iPhone 6, both for the versions with 16 GB of onboard storage. However, without the two-year activation, the phones cost hundreds of dollars more. Verizon, for example, has priced the iPhone 6 at $649 and the iPhone 6 Plus at $749 without the two-year contract.
Peer-to-peer file sharing network BitTorrent launched its first “paygated” file, said a company news release Friday (http://bit.ly/1BhhGa4). The bundled file is musician Thom Yorke’s new album Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, it said. “The torrent mechanism does not require any server uploading or hosting costs or ‘cloud’ malarkey,” said a separate release (http://bit.ly/Zghr3M). Paygated files “could be an effective way of handing some control of Internet commerce back to people who are creating the work,” it said. Yorke is frontman of Radiohead.