Perhaps with over 2000 reporters covering the Michael Jackson trial, Mark Lasswell’s article on local disruptive media techniques makes some sense. These interruptive techniques have been used by many organizations seeking attention, information or both.
Orlando Drops Municipal WiFi – What’s the Story?
Orlando shut down its expensively operated free Wi-Fi service, and Esme Vos asked why: A number of commenters had responses. I noted that for the area in question, $1,800 per month seems incredibly high. One commenter who lives there says that they couldn’t get on the network across a dozen attempts. Others point out the compromises in location and signal. Another suggests that Orlando is about to launch a larger-scale network….
Small Restaurant Find – South Sound Brook, NJ
On travel recently in New Jersey, I came across an excellent and inexpensive “Pakistani/Indian” restaurant: Maizban, located southwest of Newark in South Bound Brook [Map]. The Aloo Gobhi ($2.49) was wonderful. Highly recommended.
Do you have the right stuff to become an entrepreneur?
The Essential Traits:
- You can delegate
- You are a teacher
- You are self motivated
- You can work with numbers
- You don’t mind making mistakes
- You like to work
- You don’t mind selling
- You don’t quit easily
Very useful. We need more of this in Madison.
Broadband Nation?
Thomas Bleha on our lagging broadband capabilities. In essence, we’re falling further behind. Our “broadband” – DSL or cable modems are much slow than those available in Japan and Korea. Their services are priced similarily, yet 20X+ faster.
In the first three years of the Bush administration, the United States dropped from 4th to 13th place in global rankings of broadband Internet usage. Today, most U.S. homes can access only “basic” broadband, among the slowest, most expensive, and least reliable in the developed world, and the United States has fallen even further behind in mobile-phone-based Internet access. The lag is arguably the result of the Bush administration’s failure to make a priority of developing these networks. In fact, the United States is the only industrialized state without an explicit national policy for promoting broadband.
We Madisonians lag the rest of the country as well. We have very little public wifi. Our airport remains without wifi, years after others have implemented these inexpensive services.
Unauthorized Access to IRS Records
This problem will likely get worse, particularly with the recently passed gift to data thieves – the national ID act (Both Wisconsin Senators, Kohl & Feingold supported the National ID Act!). Caroline Drees has more:
The Internal Revenue Service is investigating whether unauthorized people gained access to sensitive taxpayer and bank account information but has not yet exposed any privacy breaches, an official said on Friday.
The U.S. tax agency — whose databases include suspicious activity reports from banks about possible terrorist or criminal transactions — launched the probe after the Government Accountability Office said in April that the IRS “routinely permitted excessive access” to the computer files.
The GAO team was able to tap into the data without authorization, and gleaned information such as bank account holders’ names, social security numbers, transaction values, and any suspected terrorist activity. It said the data was at serious risk of disclosure, modification or destruction.
Feinstein’s Double Talk on the Broadcast Flag
California Senator Diane Feinstein responds to her constituents opposition to the broadcast flag, with a rather large amount of Orwellian talk. Cory Doctorow says that “Practically every sentence in this letter is a lie”:
Thank you for writing to me about the digital broadcast flag. I appreciate hearing from you.
I feel strongly that we must prevent the theft of copyrighted works, and that includes digital television (DTV) programming. As we move forward in the digital age, it is increasingly easy for unauthorized copies of copyrighted works to be made and illegally distributed. Over-the-air digital content is the easiest to pirate.
As we contemplate the use of new technologies to protect copyrighted works, we must pay careful attention to ensure that a balance is struck between competitive protections and individual consumer interests. It is important to allow for the continued fair use of copyrighted material, even while we seek to stop unauthorized reproductions from being illegally distributed outside the home and over the Internet.
I continue to find it amazing that our elected representatives spend so much time on this, given Hollywood’s outsize influence relative to their economic size (The tech & consumer electronic industry dwarf Hollywood).
Objections to the SBC AT&T Merger
The proposed marriage of telecom titans SBC and AT&T would eliminate competition on the wholesale market and could lead to increased prices for business and residential customers, corporate rivals and consumer groups argued in briefs filed on Friday.
In written testimony presented to the California Public Utility Commission, critics of the planned merger spelled out why the deal would be bad for ratepayers and what conditions should be imposed to limit its negative impacts.
SBC dominates Wisconsin’s telco business.
McCain-Lautenberg Community Broadband Act
Two senators counter Rep. Sessions’s pro-incumbent bill with a pro-community networking bill: Pete Sessions, former SBC employee whose wife works at the company and who maintains direct ownership of large Bell stock and option holdings, introduced a brief and terribly broad bill that eliminates essentially all forms of municipal ownership and outsourcing of broadband. The bill he wrote is broad enough to shut down future airport Wi-Fi and other projects beloved by private forms.
Broadcast Flag Not in Federal Legislation
Good news for Silicon Valley and consumers: The infamous “Broadcast Flag” — digital restrictions on playback of broadcast video — is still dead, it seems, at least for the moment.
When it looked several days ago as though Hollywood would try to sneak the flag into a big appropriations bill, several alert organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge rallied citizens to the cause — to tell senators that they shouldn’t do this. Apparently, they didn’t slip this into the bill, and that’s cause for celebration.
Evidently, quite a few people contacted their Senators on this matter, which is wonderful. This is a great example of the last minute special interest schemes that go on all the time.