Technology News

A divided Federal Communications Commission has ruled that Comcast Corp. violated federal policy when it blocked Internet traffic for some subscribers and has ordered the cable giant to change the way it manages its network.

In a precedent-setting move, the FCC by a 3-2 vote on Friday enforced a policy that guarantees customers open access to the Internet.

The commission did not assess a fine, but ordered the company to stop cutting off transfers of large data files among customers who use a special type of “file-sharing” software.

Comcast says its practices are reasonable — that it has delayed traffic, not blocked it — and that the FCC’s so-called network-neutrality “principles” are part of a policy statement and are not enforceable rules.

Republican FCC Chairman Kevin Martin proposed the enforcement action and was joined by Democratic commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps in voting for approval. He was opposed by members of his own party, commissioners Robert McDowell and Deborah Taylor Tate, who both issued lengthy dissents.

The commission’s authority to act stems from a policy statement adopted in September 2005 that outlined a set of principles meant to ensure that broadband networks are “widely deployed, open, affordable and accessible to all consumers.”

The principles are “subject to reasonable network management,” a concept the agency has not explicitly defined.

While the FCC action did not include a fine, it does require Comcast to stop its blocking practice by the end of the year. The company must also provide details to the commission on the management techniques it has used and let consumers know details of its future plans.

Martin was particularly critical of the company’s failure to disclose to customers exactly how it was managing its traffic, saying this action “compounded the harm.”

Martin said Comcast managers were not “simply managing their network, they had arbitrarily picked an application and blocked their subscribers’ access to it.”

Comcast spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice said in a prepared statement that the company was “disappointed in the commission’s divided conclusion because we believe that our network management choices were reasonable….”

She said the company believes the order “raises significant due process concerns and a variety of substantive legal questions.”

The FCC’s action means network operators are subject to the FCC’s enforcement process and the agency will act on consumer complaints.

Martin told The Associated Press in an interview before the meeting that the agency will consider fines for future violations, but he declined to speculate on how large they would be.

The FCC action arose when bloggers reported that Comcast customers who used file-sharing software like BitTorrent were noticing their transmissions were aborting prematurely.

The Associated Press ran tests and reported Comcast was indeed cutting off transfers by masquerading as its one of its customers.

The report led to a complaint by public interest group Free Press and others that the company was violating agency principles.

Comcast has said it did not block traffic, but delayed it, and only among users of the file-sharing, peer-to-peer programs that were responsible for taking up a disproportionate share of bandwidth and endangering service for other customers.

The company has pledged to stop using its network management practice by the end of the year and switch to a “protocol agnostic” technique that will not single out any particular type of user.

The action is the first test of the agency’s network neutrality principles.

The enforceability of the principles have been questioned by many, including Martin, who said when the policy statement was adopted in 2005 that they “do not establish rules nor are they enforceable documents.”

Members of Congress, including presumed Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, have pushed for network neutrality legislation without success.

Large Internet service providers have fought such regulation, arguing that companies that spend billions on their networks must be free to manage traffic.

Verizon Communications Inc., AT&T Inc. and the U.S. Telecom Association all released statements saying the FCC action proved there was no need for federal network neutrality legislation.

By JOHN DUNBAR, Associated Press Writer

U.S. federal agents have been given new powers to seize travelers’ laptops and other electronic devices at the border and hold them for unspecified periods the Washington Post reported on Friday.

Under recently disclosed Department of Homeland Security policies, such seizures may be carried out without suspicion of wrongdoing, the newspaper said, quoting policies issued on July 16 by two DHS agencies.

Agents are empowered to share the contents of seized computers with other agencies and private entities for data decryption and other reasons, the newspaper said.

DHS officials said the policies applied to anyone entering the country, including U.S. citizens, and were needed to prevent terrorism.

The measures have long been in place but were only disclosed in July, under pressure from civil liberties and business travel groups acting on reports that increasing numbers of international travelers had had their laptops, cellphones and other digital devices removed and examined.

The policies cover hard drives, flash drives, cell phones, iPods, pagers, beepers, and video and audio tapes — as well as books, pamphlets and other written materials, the report said.

The policies require federal agents to take measures to protect business information and attorney-client privileged material. They stipulate that any copies of the data must be destroyed when a review is completed and no probable cause exists to keep the information.

(Reporting by Paul Eckert, editing by Alan Elsner)

Forget about forgetfulness: IBM (NYSE: IBM) Latest News about IBM scientists have come up with a high-tech way to help you remember every name, face and phone number you encounter. The technology — named “Pensieve,” in a nod to the magical memory machine from the Harry Potter series — uses data from your mobile devices to build and store connections from your day-to-day experiences.

Pensieve, its creators claim, can actually recognize not just information but also the context in which it occurred — conceptually mimicking the human mind’s association-based memory system. The tool isn’t yet publicly available but is nearing completion in IBM’s Israel-based lab.
A Personal Assistant

Pensieve requires a bit more human interaction than its Hogwarts counterpart. The technology works by piecing together bits of data collected on devices you’re already carrying. For example, after meeting someone new, you might take a photo of him on your cell phone. You could then take a photo of his business card, and Pensieve would link the two images together with time and location information — from either your phone or another mobile device, such as a GPS Latest News about global positioning system (global positioning system) — to help you remember all the details.

“This is like having a personal assistant for your memory,” IBM Haifa Research Lab Lead Researcher Dr. Yaakov Navon explained. “Our daily routines are overflowing with situations where we gain new information through meetings, advertisements, conferences, events, surfing the Web, or even window shopping. Instead of going home and using a general Web search to find that information, Pensieve helps the brain recall those everyday things you might normally forget.”
Interaction Abilities

The software also interacts with your existing technology, such as phone- or computer-based calendar systems. If you were to plan a future meeting with your newly acquainted associate, for example, Pensieve could refresh your memory of the circumstances surrounding the original meeting — including what else happened immediately before and after the event.

“This is where the real power of collaboration kicks in,” researcher Eran Belinsky commented. “You can recall the name of the person you met right before you entered a meeting by traversing a timeline of your experiences, or share a business trip with colleagues by creating a mashup that shows a map with an animation of your trail and the pictures you took in every location.” Broader Benefits Technology aside, the actual act of taking photos and later reviewing the data could prove to be just as beneficial as the system itself.

“The extra effort to do all this and sync it with your computer later would definitely help one’s memory for the information improve,” Ken Paller, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, told TechNewsWorld. “The difficulty is partly in making this extra effort in the first place.”

Pensieve’s limiting factor, no doubt, is its need for the user to take frequent proactive steps such as regular photo-taking — particularly considering that the typical user, by definition, already has a hard time remembering things. Incorporating something such as camera glasses, Paller suggests, could remove that difficulty — and could work just as well with or without Pensieve in place.

“[The glasses] could be set up to snap a photo of whatever you’re looking at when you signal, say, by blinking your eyes,” Paller noted. “Later, you could rehearse your whole day and store all the most important bits of information.”

An iPhone application that would let the iPhone act as a computer modem was shot down by Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) Latest News about Apple shortly after its launch. It was only available for a few minutes on the Apple App Store before it disappeared, but it was there was long enough to be noticed.

The application, NetShare by Nullriver Software, went on sale on iTunes Thursday night for US$9.99. Traces of the application lingered after it was taken down, and users searching frantically for it saw this cryptic message:

“The item you tried to buy is no longer available.”

Now, according to the App Store, it no longer exists at all.

“We’re trying to get a hold of Apple right now. Until we hear from Apple, it’s hard to say what the real reason is, because, if it was AT&T (NYSE: T) Latest News about AT&T, well, AT&T is not the iPhone service Rackspace now offers green hosting solutions at the same cost without sacrificing performance. Make the eco-friendly choice. provider outside the U.S.,” Maksim Rogov, a spokesperson for Nullriver Software, told MacNewsWorld.

Nullriver posted a short explanation and apology on the home page of its Web site, noting, “NetShare did not violate any of the developer or App Store agreements … Sorry to all the folks that couldn’t get it in time. We’ll do our best to try to get the application back onto the App Store if at all possible. At the very least, we hope Apple will allow it to be used in countries where the provider does permit tethering.”
So How Did It Work?

For years, users of some smartphones have been able to connect or “tether” their devices to laptops and use the phone’s data plans and Internet access to provide Internet access to their PCs. It’s just not done all that much, partly because WiFi has been widely available in most cities and partly because business users that typically have had smartphones also have had the budgets to simply buy dedicated wireless laptop cards and pay for the extra monthly Internet access service plans.

“NetShare is a SOCKS (sockets) proxy for the iPhone. It allows users access to the Internet on their computer through their iPhone while on the go. The connection is made over EDGE or 3G,” Rogov said, adding that Nullriver isn’t providing copies of the application via any other method — and that Nullriver wants to get the issue sorted out with Apple.

Apple didn’t respond to MacNewsWorld inquries by press time.
Does Apple Really Care?

It’s likely that Apple itself doesn’t object to tethering per se, but it must live up to the agreements it’s made with exclusive carriers like AT&T, Andrew Brown, an analyst of wireless enterprise strategies for Strategy Analytics’s global wireless practice, told MacNewsWorld.

“Apple wouldn’t care, and I don’t think Apple does care,” he said. “At the same time, they have service agreements with the carriers that they need to abide by.”

If pressure from AT&T is indeed behind NetShare’s disappearance, it’s not because the carrier is developing a tethering utility or extra service of its own.

“The iPhone is not intended to be used as a tethering device, and we have no plans to offer separate tethering plans for it,” Wes Warnock, a spokesperson for AT&T, told MacNewsWorld.

“We offer LaptopConnect cards that you can use to access our wireless data network New HP LaserJet P4014n Printer Starting at $699 after $100 instant savings.. Those cards offer typical download speeds as high as 1.7 Mbps (megabits per second),” he added.

The service plan for AT&T’s LaptopConnect cards start at $60 per month.
What Gives?

Most carriers, Brown said, want to keep their customers compartmentalized, and they’re reluctant to change their service plans in ways that could possibly cannibalize another service.

“To me, I don’t see why it would cannibalize their business. I see it as an opportunity not to be missed,” Brown said, noting that most 3G Latest News about 3G networks are probably running at only 20 to 30 percent capacity, which means there’s little risk that carrier networks could be overloaded by iPhone usage.

Plus, the fine print in carrier contracts usually caps data usage at 500 MB or 1 GB — even on so-called unlimited plans — which would prevent customers from attempting to download things like movies, Brown said.

Only 9 to 11 percent of users with phones that are capable of tethering actually bother with tethering, according to Strategy Analytics research. Only a small demographic of tech-saavy users are even aware that the capability exists, Brown noted. “Most people don’t tether, and they tend to let carriers lead them around by the nose,” he said.

“You can use pretty much any of the mainstream smartphones as modems, so this does seem a little unfair that this is being done to Apple with the iPhone,” Brown added.

Consumers have embraced digital media, primarily content such as music, photos and video. They generate their own content, transfer their analog data to digital formats, and download media from the Internet.

The percentage of U.S. households with platforms for image and video capture, as well as music playback, has grown significantly in the past three years. At the same time, the number of “media hubs” — consumer electronics devices that connect to premium content services and can receive and/or store it — has grown tremendously.

As these consumer electronics devices link to a growing number of Web and television-based premium content services, they’ll be shouldering more of the burden for storing this content, just as they are increasing the storage needs of the household. Digital media stored on multiple devices will grow fourfold by 2012, reaching nearly 900 GB.
The Backup Gap

We are not talking about just mass-market media, either. A portion of this digital content holds significant emotional value, making the backing up of these files even more imperative.

However, while consumers indicate concern about losing data and media files (due to computer glitches or catastrophic events such as floods, theft or fire), they’re doing very little about it. Today, there is a wide disparity between the 40 percent of consumers who indicate that they are interested in properly backing up their content and those actually accomplishing this task.

Only about one in 10 households is actually backing up its data on a regular basis. More often than not, “backup” is the infrequent burning of a CD or DVD — not exactly the most robust way in which consumers can safeguard their precious memories and high-value downloaded or ripped music or video files.

Consumer storage solutions aimed at simplifying backup and the safekeeping of data and digital media will be essential to convincing more consumers to adopt in-home (direct-attached storage, networked storage, and home servers) and online or network-hosted solutions.

The categories of consumer storage solutions aimed at adding backup and safekeeping of consumer data and digital media include the following:

* Network-hosted storage, also called “online storage” or “in-the-cloud” storage, provides consumers with a means of backing up important data and the ability to access it anywhere at anytime. Frequently, network-hosted storage solutions double as content-sharing platforms that allow digital media to be shared with friends and family or in a social networking environment Rackspace now offers green hosting solutions at the same cost without sacrificing performance. Make the eco-friendly choice.. These solutions partner with other applications to provide services such as the ability to edit photos or documents online.

* Direct-attached storage (DAS) devices connect to a computer or server but are not accessible for sharing files or storage space. Designed to sit alongside the central processing unit (by plugging in via a universal serial bus, FireWire Latest News about FireWire, or serial interface), DAS devices provide backup or additional storage for the consumer. If a device houses more than one disk drive, it can use mirroring and RAID (redundant array of independent drives) technology to either provide better performance or duplication of files for loss prevention. Capacity for these hard drives ranges from 250 GB to 2 TB, and prices range from US$70 to $600.

Getting Organized

A second major catalyst for the development of new storage solutions is the growing need by consumers to better aggregate, organize, stream and share their digital media. With large libraries of family photos and video, consumers want a means of sharing files as well as storing them. Frequently, this sharing comes in the form of online sites where the consumer can upload files and then grant access to friends and family.

With most NAS (network attached storage) devices, users can view, upload and download their files via the Internet from any location, which is a highly desirable feature among NAS purchasers. More than 50 percent of consumers who bought an NAS device in 2007 indicated that its ability to share content was a significant driver in their specific product purchase decisions. Extending up the ladder of sophistication, home servers can also deliver content to other devices throughout the home, making content available on home entertainment networks for uses such as viewing digital pictures on a television screen.

The market for solutions aimed at data backup and safekeeping and content sharing will be growing robustly over the next few years. The solutions in this category include:

* The aforementioned network-hosted/online storage solutions that include content-sharing mechanisms.
* Portable/mobile storage solutions that use flash and low-cost disk drives will allow for “sneaker-net” media-sharing use cases. Data and content are offloaded from one device (like the PC), and the user plugs the storage device into another computer, a TV, or an iPod dock. In lieu of most homes being equipped with robust home networks to zip files from the living room to the back bedroom, we’re banking on a growing number of consumer electronics companies supporting flash or portable HDD (hard disk drive) connections to their devices.
* Network-Attached Storage devices tie into the home network New HP LaserJet P4014n Printer Starting at $699 after $100 instant savings. and have capabilities for file and storage space sharing. Their specially designed user interfaces allow for easier setup of features and access to stored files. Many NAS devices include media streaming and organization features, frequently combined with device discovery protocols (DLNA) and value-added software, which allows them to function as home servers in addition to being storage and backup devices.
* Home servers, also referred to as “media servers,” primarily store digital photos, music and videos. They subsequently aggregate and stream the digital media to other networked devices throughout the home, such as media adapters. Home servers also offer data backup solutions although not its primary function. Home servers come with powerful processors and rely on additional software to expand on NAS functionality.

Properly Selling Advanced Storage Solutions

Currently, most storage solutions reside in the personal computing Understand and Reduce Virtualization Costs with Acronis. Download White Paper. section of consumer electronics stores. While this placement captures those customers looking for data backup solutions, it misses potential buyers wanting storage for other devices or media. Retailers need to move these devices from the computing aisles to either the music section, the home entertainment section, or the camera section in order to obtain the desired attention from their targeted audience.

With storage devices in different target areas of the store, manufacturers and retailers can modify the marketing E-Mail Marketing Software - Free Trial. Click Here. message to attract different consumers. For instance, if a retailer places a storage device in the home entertainment section, then the focus of messaging can migrate to video storage and streaming capabilities. Targeted marketing provides an opportunity for positioning brand names in the consumers’ minds as well. Only 20 percent of consumers indicate that brand name played the most important role for purchasing an NAS device. There is room for companies to build a reputation and become frontrunners in the market — with proper positioning.

By Jane Shields and Kurt Scherf
TechNewsWorld