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City libraries shut out of broadband stimulus money?

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Ars Technica - By Matthew Lasar - Jul. 29 (Special Report) - Millions of Americans are turning to the Internet to look for new jobs. But in many parts of the United States, public libraries are the only free provider of that crucial combo: a computer plus Internet access. This means that low-income job seekers depend on them when searching for employment. Oddly, as library development directors look for funds to beef up their networks, they're not finding the support they expected from the White House's $7.2 billion broadband stimulus package. The first round of stimulus grants "in effect de-prioritizes libraries and discourages them from applying for funding," complains the American Library Association in a letter sent to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. "The ability of our libraries to meet community needs is in jeopardy—especially when library use has heavily increased across the country in these difficult economic times."

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Raising a healthy gamer: seven tips for parents

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Ars Technica - By Ben Kuchera - Jul. 02 (Special Report) - Parenting is always a tough job, and video games are a tricky subject in today's families. Don't worry, we have you covered. Ars offers a no-BS guide to dealing with gaming and your children, and our advice is simple: you know your children better than anyone else.

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Judge sides with censored blogger against Chinese ISP - Ars Technica

Tue, 26 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Ars Technica - By Jacqui Cheng - May. 26 (News Report) - Do not adjust your monitors: a Chinese government critic has won a court case against his ISP in Beijing for taking his website offline. Economics professor Hu Xingdou's website was shut down by Beijing Xin Net for containing "illegal" content earlier this year, but a Daxing district court ruled last week that the ISP could not provide proof for its claims and ordered Xin Net to repay Hu's service fees from the past two years.

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Harvard prof tells judge that P2P filesharing is "fair use"

Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Ars Technica - By Nate Anderson - May. 19 (News Report) - Should Nesson win, he will essentially legalize the sharing of all digital goods, copyrighted or not, by noncommercial users. Given that he wants to make the case about big principles like fair use and the applicability of statutory damages—and not about whether Joel Tenenbaum did what he is accused of doing—the music industry is likely to fight even harder to ensure that Nesson's preferred outcome is not realized.

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Apple changes to App Store review policy worry developers

Sat, 09 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Ars Technica - By Erica Sadun - May. 09 (News Report) - Apple sent shock waves through the iPhone developer community Thursday when it announced that it would start exclusively reviewing applications using the iPhone 3.0 firmware.

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Voting machine expert criticizes "clueless" industry report

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Ars Technica - By Ryan Paul - Apr. 20 (News Report) - The Election Technology Council (ETC), a trade group comprised of the most prominent electronic voting machine vendors, has published a paper that argues against mandating source disclosure for electronic voting machine systems. The paper (PDF), which broadly conflates source disclosure and open source software licensing, dubiously contends that enabling public scrutiny of voting technology would lead to compromised security.

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Reinventing conservatism, one tweet at a time

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Ars Technica - By Julian Sanchez - Jan. 02 (Opinion) - Conservatism has much bigger problems right now than a paucity of Twitter skills. (I say this, for what it's worth, as someone who's often classified as part of the broad "right," my frequent criticisms of this administration notwithstanding.) Front and center is that the end of the Cold War and a governing party that made "small government" a punchline has left it very much unclear what, precisely, "conservatism" means. The movement was always a somewhat uneasy coalition of market enthusiasts and social traditionalists, defined at least as much by what (and who) they opposed as by any core common principles. The Palin strategy—recapturing that oppositional unity by rebranding the GOP as the party of cultural ressentiment—is just a recipe for a death spiral. Conservatives don't need to figure out how to promote conservatism on Facebook; they need to figure out what it is they're promoting. To the extent that a new media strategy is part of opening up that conversation, great, but it had better not become a substitute for engaging in some of that painful introspection.

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Leave net neutrality to the FCC? No way, says senator

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Ars Technica - By Nate Anderson - Nov. 14 (News Report) - With the Comcast case behind us (though now on appeal), ISPs have been telling anyone who would listen that the need for preemptive legislation is over. Much better for the markets to work everything out and for the FCC to step in on a case-by-case basis with the regulatory jackboot when someone steps over the line and starts violating the Internet Policy Statement.

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NebuAd, ISPs sued over DPI snooping, ad-targeting program

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Ars Technica - By Jacqui Cheng - Nov. 11 (News Report) - NebuAd, the company behind the highly-controversial behavioral-targeting ad platform, has been targeted itself—by a class-action lawsuit, that is. A suit has been filed in the US District Court of Northern California against the company, as well as a number of ISPs that tested NebuAd's technology, alleging numerous privacy violations, fraud, and unjust enrichment.

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Trying to solve the long-term nuclear waste storage problem

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Ars Technica - By John Timmer - Jun. 14 (Review) - Despite the uncertainties, the authors argue that there are very real reasons to start using Yucca Mountain: 60,000 metric tons of waste, currently stored in 72 sites, "many adjacent to metropolitan areas and all next to rivers, lakes, or the ocean." It's easy to default to inertia while waiting for greater certainty about Yucca Mountain or hoping something better comes along, but the authors argue that the current storage system creates far too much risk for this to be an acceptable path.

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Global warming hitting hops hard

Wed, 07 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Ars Technica - By Matt Ford - May. 07 (News Report) - In a Nature news article this week, Nature staff writer Rex Dalton reports on how the warming climate in Northern Europe is adversely affecting the hop crop. According to Peter Darby, a hop grower in the UK, the warm springs and mild winters have caused the hop vines to sprout early, stagnate, and produce little. On Monday a group of plant scientists met at a hop conference at the Hop Museum in Wolnzach, Germany to discuss ways to combat the impact of higher temperatures.

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Road to e-voting crisis paved with money, good intentions

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Ars Technica - By Jon Stokes - Apr. 07 (Opinion) - However, a Maryland voting activist organization, SAVEOurVotes.org, has released a report [PDF] on the costs of e-voting that (quite unintentionally) provides a useful and vivid illustration of exactly how and why we arrived at the present point. In a nutshell, there's one single event that set in motion the years-long train wreck that has been America's experiment with electronic voting: the 2002 passage of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).

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History Suggests Copyright Crusade Is A Lost Cause

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Ars Technica - By Timothy B. Lee - Mar. 04 (Special Report) - ...those who want to increase the power of copyright owners have tended to stress the similarities between copyrights and property rights. In contrast, those who who favor less restrictive copyright laws, as well as those who oppose copyright altogether, have resisted this analogy.

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Fixing US broadband: $100 billion for fiber to every home

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Ars Technica - By Nate Anderson - Jan. 31 (News Report) - US broadband might now be widely available, but it's slow and relatively expensive. Between 1999 and 2006, the US fell from third place to 20th in the International Telecommunications Union's broadband usage measurements. When it comes to average connection speeds, the US isn't beaten just by Japan but also by France, Korea, Sweden, New Zealand, Italy, Finland, Portugal, Australia, Norway, Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, and Germany. And it's not about population size or density, either; Finland, Sweden, and Canada beat us on most broadband metrics despite having lower population density.

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Congress considers bill to make radio

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0800

Ars Technica - By Nate Anderson - Dec. 19 (News Report) - While radio does pay a fee to songwriters, it pays no performance rights fee, in contrast to just about every other developed country on the planet. The broadcasters argue that they are providing free advertising to musicians, who then make money from touring and record sales.

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Net neutrality foes back FCC investigation into Comcast traffic blocking

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 15:27:58 -0800

Ars Technica - By Nate Anderson - Nov. 12 (News Analysis) - Network neutrality advocates and the industry-funded lobby groups that oppose it in Washington rarely agree on issues, especially when those issues involve network filtering or throttling. That's what makes last week's letter from Hands off the Internet (a telco-backed group opposed to government network neutrality regulations) such a surprise. The group told FCC Chairman Kevin Martin that it supported an FCC investigation into Comcast's alleged BitTorrent blocking.

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After years of use, e-voting gets first real federal testing guidelines

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 17:44:08 -0700

Ars Technica - By Jon Stokes - Nov. 02 (Opinion) - The federal Election Assistance Commission has posted a major update to its recommended guidelines for state and local electronic voting systems, bringing us much closer to the kind of proper national standard that we should have had before the e-voting debacles of the previous two election cycles. To read the new Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) is to marvel that the world's largest modern democracy didn't have these in place before the first electronic voting machine was ever authorized for use in an election.

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FCC chairman suspects "grassroots" astroturfing in à la carte cable debate

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 03:40:41 -0700

Ars Technica - By Nate Anderson - Aug. 27 (News Report) - FCC Chairman Kevin Martin isn't usually associated with groups like Consumers Union (publisher of Consumer Reports), Free Press, and the Consumer Federation of America, but he's with them on the issue of à la carte cable. The groups--and Martin--are in favor of à la carte cable, and all coincidentally believe that much of the "grassroots" opposition to the idea is actually cable-funded astroturf (that is, fake grassroots movements) meant to sway public opinion.

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FCC sets 700MHz auction rules: limited open access, no wholesale requirement

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 11:08:49 -0700

Ars Technica - By Nate Anderson - Jul. 31 (News Analysis) - As Commissioner Michael Copps put it, the FCC needs to set "ground rules for how some of the most valuable spectrum on earth will be used." Around 80MHz of high-quality spectrum is being auctioned off early next year, and the FCC has devised two separate plans to deal with those frequencies. The agency wants to create a national broadband network focused on public safety that will bring true interoperability to all public safety agencies around the country. But the FCC also wants to spur commercial wireless innovation, especially when it comes to creating a "third pipe" for broadband that can provide an alternative to cable/DSL duopoly that prevails in most of the country.

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Venezuela's counter-revolution won't be televised... but it will be on YouTube

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 23:50:00 -0700

Ars Technica - By Nate Anderson - Jun. 01 (News Report) - An opposition Venezuelan television station whose broadcast license has not been renewed by the government is now turning to YouTube to get its message out after its transmitter was taken over by a state-run channel. Hugo Chavez's "Bolivarian Revolution" has no time for media groups that criticize his government; Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV) is now off the air, and another channel, Globovision, could be next, according to CNN. RCTV journalists and producers have not been arrested or stopped from working, but their main link to the public has been removed. Rather than giving up, the station has turned to YouTube, where it now has its own channel for the show El Observador. A Colombian channel is also broadcasting RCTV content into Venezuela.

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What lurks below Microsoft's Surface? A brief Q&A with Microsoft

Wed, 30 May 2007 15:22:36 -0700

Ars Technica - May. 30 (Special Report) - Minority Report meets the kitchen table in the new Surface from Microsoft. Claiming that surface computing is "as significant as the move from DOS to GUI," the company today announced a tabletop device with an integrated 30-inch screen and five cameras to enable multitouch access to music, photos, the web, and more. According to Microsoft, Surface isn't simply a regular PC with a touch interface--it's a whole new category of computing device that will supplement rather than replace traditional machines. We talked with Microsoft about the concept and what's powering it.

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Disney: iTunes movie sales prove potency of format, pricing

Wed, 09 May 2007 08:09:17 -0700

Ars Technica - By Eric Bangeman - May. 09 (News Analysis) - That's the piece that the other major studios that have feared when it comes to Apple's movie prices--$12.99 or $14.99 for new films and $9.99 for older content--on the iTunes Store. As a result, most of them have eschewed the iTunes Store in favor of Wal-Mart's recently launched download store. Even though Wal-Mart's digital reach falls far short of Apple's (and its movies won't play on iPods or Macs, natch), the studios were comforted by Wal-Mart's DVD-style pricing for downloads: new releases will cost up to $19.98 each with the rest of the catalog is priced somewhere between that figure and $9.99.

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Internet radio dealt severe blow as Copyright Board rejects appeal

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 09:00:39 -0700

Ars Technica - By Eric Bangeman - Apr. 16 (News Report) - A panel of judges at the Copyright Royalty Board has denied a request from the NPR and a number of other webcasters to reconsider a March ruling that would force Internet radio services to pay crippling royalties. The panel's ruling reaffirmed the original CRB decision in every respect, with the exception of how the royalties will be calculated. Instead of charging a royalty for each time a song is heard by a listener online, Internet broadcasters will be able pay royalties based on average listening hours through the end of 2008.

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Chinese pollution makes American storms worse

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 08:35:47 -0700

Ars Technica - By Jonathan M. Gitlin - Mar. 12 (News Report) - They say all politics are local, but perhaps they should also say that pollution is global. We already know that the more severe effects of climate change won't be on the countries that contribute the most carbon but the poorest parts of the world, and that's not the only example. Although the past few decades have seen huge improvements made in air quality in the US, booming industrial production in China coupled with much more lax environmental regulation has seen the air quality in that nation plummet.

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Skype asks FCC to open up cellular networks

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 09:16:55 -0800

Ars Technica - By Nate Anderson - Feb. 21 (News Report) - Skype yesterday petitioned the FCC to lay the smack down on wireless phone carriers who "limit subscribers' right to run software communications applications of their choosing" (read: Skype software). Skype wants the agency to more stringently apply the famous 1968 Carterfone decision that allowed consumers to hook any device up to the phone network, so long as it did not harm the network. In Skype's eyes, that means allowing any software or applications to run on any devices that access the network. The reason for Skype's interest in the issue is obvious: they want to force network operators to allow Skype-enabled calling across their networks, something currently prohibited on wireless data plans. In its filing, Skype argues that this capability would offer "tremendous new sources of price competition provided by entities such as Skype," and that's exactly why wireless operators will fight the plan tooth and nail.

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