The federal agency wants to develop accurate and uniform definitions for broadband to help in its development of a national broadband plan
By W. David Gardner
August 21, 2009 03:31 PM
The FCC has launched a campaign to define exactly what constitutes "broadband" and providers of the high speed service may not like how it is defined and how the FCC views their delivery of broadband.
In a notice Thursday, the FCC said it is seeking "tailored comment" on broadband in connection with developing a National Broadband Plan as it relates to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
"...Advertised throughput rates generally differ from actual rates, are not uniformly measured, and have different constraints over different technologies," the FCC noted in its posting and added that "it is unclear what the end points of the connection are over which throughput is measured or whether the performance of the end point is reflected in the stated throughput."
The FCC wants to develop accurate and uniform definitions for broadband to help in its development of a national broadband plan it expects to submit to Congress in February. The National Broadband Plan Notice of Inquiry has observed that "broadband can be defined in myriad ways."
U.S. broadband rankings have been slipping in recent years to the point that the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development found the U.S. was in the 19th place in the worldwide rankings with a 9.6 mbps advertised rate. Japan led the 2008 rankings with 92.8 mbps and Korean was second with 80.8 mbps.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has made the upgrade and spread of more robust broadband an important goal of his chairmanship.
From Information week
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Google Steals Spotlight With Caffeine Boost
Tony Bradley, PC World Tuesday, August 11, 2009 1:35 PM PDT
Google announced this week a project it has been working on to develop a faster, more accurate, and more comprehensive search engine. The announcement of the project, code-named ‘Caffeine' (a clever play on words implying that the project will boost speed), seems a little out of character for Google which usually makes these sort of search engine tweaks under the radar. One thing that the announcement of Caffeine accomplished though is to divert attention away from Microsoft's Bing search engine and the Microsoft/Yahoo partnership news and put Google search back in the headlines.
I don't believe Google is feeling all that threatened by Microsoft's Bing, or even by the search/advertising coalition formed by the partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo. I think perhaps it should be, but I think that the hoopla around Caffeine has more to do with ego than paranoia. I think Google was tired of seeing headlines about Bing and Microsoft and Yahoo.
I also don't believe that Google launched the Caffeine project in response to Bing. A Google engineer, Matt Cutts, posted on his blog that Caffeine is simply part of the normal process of improvement that Google goes through on a regular basis. He clearly states that Caffeine is not a response to Bing and says "I think the best way for Google to do well in search is to continue what we've done for the last decade or so: focus relentlessly on pushing our search quality forward. Nobody cares more about search than Google, and I don't think we'll ever stop trying to improve."
Assuming that is true, it again illustrates that the public hoopla around Caffeine is more about getting attention than it is about rolling out any revolutionary change in the Google search engine. Matt claims in his blog that this is all just standard operating procedure at Google and the kind of thing that goes on all the time without generating any headlines.
That said, maybe Google is a little more concerned with Bing and the Microsoft/Yahoo partnership than they let on. Bing has garnered accolades and has been supported by one of Microsoft's more successful marketing campaigns. Experts and users alike concede that Microsoft seems to have gotten things right with Bing, and Bing has been slowly chipping away at web search engine market share. With Yahoo basically surrendering its share of the search engine pie to Microsoft, Bing could jump to 30% or even 40% market share. Google would still be in the lead, but Bing poses a reasonable threat to Google's established dominance.
Google is also spreading itself thin, taking on dominant players in multiple markets simultaneously. Google is now arch-rivals with its previous BFF Apple, and mortal enemies with Microsoft in almost every market the two operate in. The last thing Google needs is to have to defend its home turf of web search at the same time. Only time will tell how these battles will play out, but at least for now Google won the news spotlight back with Caffeine.
Google announced this week a project it has been working on to develop a faster, more accurate, and more comprehensive search engine. The announcement of the project, code-named ‘Caffeine' (a clever play on words implying that the project will boost speed), seems a little out of character for Google which usually makes these sort of search engine tweaks under the radar. One thing that the announcement of Caffeine accomplished though is to divert attention away from Microsoft's Bing search engine and the Microsoft/Yahoo partnership news and put Google search back in the headlines.
I don't believe Google is feeling all that threatened by Microsoft's Bing, or even by the search/advertising coalition formed by the partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo. I think perhaps it should be, but I think that the hoopla around Caffeine has more to do with ego than paranoia. I think Google was tired of seeing headlines about Bing and Microsoft and Yahoo.
I also don't believe that Google launched the Caffeine project in response to Bing. A Google engineer, Matt Cutts, posted on his blog that Caffeine is simply part of the normal process of improvement that Google goes through on a regular basis. He clearly states that Caffeine is not a response to Bing and says "I think the best way for Google to do well in search is to continue what we've done for the last decade or so: focus relentlessly on pushing our search quality forward. Nobody cares more about search than Google, and I don't think we'll ever stop trying to improve."
Assuming that is true, it again illustrates that the public hoopla around Caffeine is more about getting attention than it is about rolling out any revolutionary change in the Google search engine. Matt claims in his blog that this is all just standard operating procedure at Google and the kind of thing that goes on all the time without generating any headlines.
That said, maybe Google is a little more concerned with Bing and the Microsoft/Yahoo partnership than they let on. Bing has garnered accolades and has been supported by one of Microsoft's more successful marketing campaigns. Experts and users alike concede that Microsoft seems to have gotten things right with Bing, and Bing has been slowly chipping away at web search engine market share. With Yahoo basically surrendering its share of the search engine pie to Microsoft, Bing could jump to 30% or even 40% market share. Google would still be in the lead, but Bing poses a reasonable threat to Google's established dominance.
Google is also spreading itself thin, taking on dominant players in multiple markets simultaneously. Google is now arch-rivals with its previous BFF Apple, and mortal enemies with Microsoft in almost every market the two operate in. The last thing Google needs is to have to defend its home turf of web search at the same time. Only time will tell how these battles will play out, but at least for now Google won the news spotlight back with Caffeine.
Sunday, August 09, 2009
Twitter Continues to Battle DDoS Attack
Tony Bradley, PC World Saturday, August 08, 2009 2:39 PM PDT
More than two days after experiencing a complete outage as a result of a distribute denial-0f-service (DDoS) attack, Twitter and other social networking sites such as Facebook are still battling a surge in traffic related to the attack. Twitter has taken some steps to mitigate the spike in traffic and ensure that the site is not knocked offline again, but some of those steps are having an impact on third-party tools that link to Twitter through API's (application programming interface).
Evidence gathered thus far from Twitter and other sites targeted by the DDoS attacks seems to suggest that the attack is actually a politically motivated attack aimed at silencing a Georgian activist. The victim, known by the online handle Cyxymu, uses blogs and social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to express views related to the tensions between Russia and Georgia. In a blog post, Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer of Internet security firm F-Secure, said "Launching DDoS attacks against services like Facebook is the equivalent of bombing a TV station because you don't like one of the newscasters.
To defend itself against the ongoing DDoS attack, Twitter has implemented various defensive actions, some of which are blocking third-party Twitter applications from being able to connect with Twitter API's. The mitigating steps are also affecting the ability of many users to post to their Twitter accounts via SMS (short message service) text messages.
Twitter is working diligently for a more permanent solution that doesn't impact third-party applications or SMS messaging. In the meantime though, Twitter has stated that as long as the attacks continue they can't guarantee that things will get better or provide any assurances that they won't get worse. The best they can do is to promise to do everything they can as fast as they can to ensure the site remains available.
Other steps that can be taken involve identifying and isolating sources of attack traffic and simply dropping all incoming packets from those sources. That can have some affect, but when an attack leverages a botnet and the attack traffic is literally coming from hundreds of thousands of sources simultaneously it quickly becomes cumbersome and impractical to try and filter the traffic in this way. Another temporary solution could be to filter all traffic intended for the suspected victim, Cyxymu, and block that so that it does not hog the network bandwidth or server processing horsepower.
When the dust settles, Twitter should look at ways they can build scalability and redundancy into their network to better withstand similar attacks in the future. Stuart McClure, VP of Operations and Strategy for McAfee's Risk and Compliance Unit and co-author of Hacking Exposed 6, says "Many of these newly emerging social engineering sites weren't built with security or high performance scalability in mind. They need to look at their current and desired states and make tough decisions that migrate them from homegrown applications to highly available cornerstones of commerce."
Tony Bradley is an information security and unified communications expert with more than a decade of enterprise IT experience.
More than two days after experiencing a complete outage as a result of a distribute denial-0f-service (DDoS) attack, Twitter and other social networking sites such as Facebook are still battling a surge in traffic related to the attack. Twitter has taken some steps to mitigate the spike in traffic and ensure that the site is not knocked offline again, but some of those steps are having an impact on third-party tools that link to Twitter through API's (application programming interface).
Evidence gathered thus far from Twitter and other sites targeted by the DDoS attacks seems to suggest that the attack is actually a politically motivated attack aimed at silencing a Georgian activist. The victim, known by the online handle Cyxymu, uses blogs and social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to express views related to the tensions between Russia and Georgia. In a blog post, Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer of Internet security firm F-Secure, said "Launching DDoS attacks against services like Facebook is the equivalent of bombing a TV station because you don't like one of the newscasters.
To defend itself against the ongoing DDoS attack, Twitter has implemented various defensive actions, some of which are blocking third-party Twitter applications from being able to connect with Twitter API's. The mitigating steps are also affecting the ability of many users to post to their Twitter accounts via SMS (short message service) text messages.
Twitter is working diligently for a more permanent solution that doesn't impact third-party applications or SMS messaging. In the meantime though, Twitter has stated that as long as the attacks continue they can't guarantee that things will get better or provide any assurances that they won't get worse. The best they can do is to promise to do everything they can as fast as they can to ensure the site remains available.
Other steps that can be taken involve identifying and isolating sources of attack traffic and simply dropping all incoming packets from those sources. That can have some affect, but when an attack leverages a botnet and the attack traffic is literally coming from hundreds of thousands of sources simultaneously it quickly becomes cumbersome and impractical to try and filter the traffic in this way. Another temporary solution could be to filter all traffic intended for the suspected victim, Cyxymu, and block that so that it does not hog the network bandwidth or server processing horsepower.
When the dust settles, Twitter should look at ways they can build scalability and redundancy into their network to better withstand similar attacks in the future. Stuart McClure, VP of Operations and Strategy for McAfee's Risk and Compliance Unit and co-author of Hacking Exposed 6, says "Many of these newly emerging social engineering sites weren't built with security or high performance scalability in mind. They need to look at their current and desired states and make tough decisions that migrate them from homegrown applications to highly available cornerstones of commerce."
Tony Bradley is an information security and unified communications expert with more than a decade of enterprise IT experience.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
Emergency alert provider sues Twitter over patents
Aug 5, 2009 5:07 pm
by Juan Carlos Perez IDG News Service
TechRadium, a provider of mass notification and emergency alert systems to school districts, municipal governments, the U.S. military and other organizations, has filed a lawsuit charging Twitter with patent infringement.
Twitter, the red-hot micro-blogging and social networking company, designed its system in a way that violates three TechRadium patents, an attorney for the plaintiff said.
“The problem is the Twitter architecture. The way they have it set up is technology that is squarely within TechRadium’s patents,” said Shawn Staples, an attorney with Mostyn Law, in a phone interview on Wednesday.
Consequently, organizations could use Twitter to do the type of mass notification that TechRadium provides via its IRIS (Immediate Response Information System) technology.
“There have been recently some municipalities and other organizations who have claimed they’ll use Twitter for emergency notification systems, and that’s technology that TechRadium has spent many years and a lot of money developing,” Staples said.
IRIS lets organizations broadcast a single message to multiple recipients who can receive it on a variety of devices like regular phones, cell phones and fax machines. It’s intended to quickly alert people about emergency situations.
The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Houston Division, seeks among other things unspecified damages, recovery of attorneys’ fees and a permanent injunction against Twitter.
The patents Twitter is allegedly infringing are patent number 7,130,389, granted in October 2006 for a “digital notification and response system”; patent number 7,496,183, granted in February 2009 for a “method for providing digital notification”; and patent number 7,519,165, granted in April 2009 for a “method for providing digital notification and receiving responses.”
Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment
From Macworld Web Services.
by Juan Carlos Perez IDG News Service
TechRadium, a provider of mass notification and emergency alert systems to school districts, municipal governments, the U.S. military and other organizations, has filed a lawsuit charging Twitter with patent infringement.
Twitter, the red-hot micro-blogging and social networking company, designed its system in a way that violates three TechRadium patents, an attorney for the plaintiff said.
“The problem is the Twitter architecture. The way they have it set up is technology that is squarely within TechRadium’s patents,” said Shawn Staples, an attorney with Mostyn Law, in a phone interview on Wednesday.
Consequently, organizations could use Twitter to do the type of mass notification that TechRadium provides via its IRIS (Immediate Response Information System) technology.
“There have been recently some municipalities and other organizations who have claimed they’ll use Twitter for emergency notification systems, and that’s technology that TechRadium has spent many years and a lot of money developing,” Staples said.
IRIS lets organizations broadcast a single message to multiple recipients who can receive it on a variety of devices like regular phones, cell phones and fax machines. It’s intended to quickly alert people about emergency situations.
The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Houston Division, seeks among other things unspecified damages, recovery of attorneys’ fees and a permanent injunction against Twitter.
The patents Twitter is allegedly infringing are patent number 7,130,389, granted in October 2006 for a “digital notification and response system”; patent number 7,496,183, granted in February 2009 for a “method for providing digital notification”; and patent number 7,519,165, granted in April 2009 for a “method for providing digital notification and receiving responses.”
Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment
From Macworld Web Services.
Saturday, August 01, 2009
Yahoo Labs chief sees real-time search opportunity
Fri Jul 31, 2009 8:10pm EDT
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc is considering developing new real-time search capabilities, even as it outsources its existing Internet search technology to Microsoft Corp.
Yahoo's Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs, said that the company could potentially "mine" messages from Twitter, the popular microblogging service, to offer Web surfers search results beyond those offered by Microsoft's Bing.
Bing is the Microsoft search engine that is to provide Yahoo's standard search results, under the terms of a long-awaited partnership announced this week.
"I've always held that the interesting thing of Tweets is not necessarily searching them but mining them. So we could real-time mine them, then assemble what we mine into the search engine," said Raghavan in an interview with Reuters on Friday.
By "mining" the data, Yahoo could offer search results far beyond a simple list of comments on Web sites, for instance, but instead could analyze data and group results by criteria ranging from topic to geography.
While Raghavan stressed that he was not "pre-announcing" any product plans, he said his comments were intended to paint a picture of some of the things that Yahoo is considering in its new form.
On Wednesday, Yahoo and Microsoft announced a 10-year partnership in which Yahoo will use Microsoft's search and search advertising technology. The move will allow Yahoo to save some $425 million in operating expenses, the company said.
Raghavan said much of the savings will come from back-end infrastructure technology, now that Yahoo no longer invests in the resources to crawl and index the world's vast number of Web sites.
But he said that Yahoo will continue to develop innovative search and communications products.
"In terms of satisfying user intent, the hard work and in some sense the bigger growth opportunities for differentiation are not the back-end of crawling and indexing, but really surfacing and assembling content the right way to satisfy user intent," he said.
Real Time search is an increasingly popular online activity where Yahoo's approach to search could provide a compelling user experience, Raghavan said.
Unlike traditional Internet search, which allows Web surfers to find Web pages on various topics, real-time search focuses on the flood of constantly updated messages posted by people using social networking services like Twitter.
A number of smaller private companies like Collecta and OneRiot have developed real time search products, as has Twitter itself, which offers its own search engine to cull through its Tweets.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc is considering developing new real-time search capabilities, even as it outsources its existing Internet search technology to Microsoft Corp.
Yahoo's Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs, said that the company could potentially "mine" messages from Twitter, the popular microblogging service, to offer Web surfers search results beyond those offered by Microsoft's Bing.
Bing is the Microsoft search engine that is to provide Yahoo's standard search results, under the terms of a long-awaited partnership announced this week.
"I've always held that the interesting thing of Tweets is not necessarily searching them but mining them. So we could real-time mine them, then assemble what we mine into the search engine," said Raghavan in an interview with Reuters on Friday.
By "mining" the data, Yahoo could offer search results far beyond a simple list of comments on Web sites, for instance, but instead could analyze data and group results by criteria ranging from topic to geography.
While Raghavan stressed that he was not "pre-announcing" any product plans, he said his comments were intended to paint a picture of some of the things that Yahoo is considering in its new form.
On Wednesday, Yahoo and Microsoft announced a 10-year partnership in which Yahoo will use Microsoft's search and search advertising technology. The move will allow Yahoo to save some $425 million in operating expenses, the company said.
Raghavan said much of the savings will come from back-end infrastructure technology, now that Yahoo no longer invests in the resources to crawl and index the world's vast number of Web sites.
But he said that Yahoo will continue to develop innovative search and communications products.
"In terms of satisfying user intent, the hard work and in some sense the bigger growth opportunities for differentiation are not the back-end of crawling and indexing, but really surfacing and assembling content the right way to satisfy user intent," he said.
Real Time search is an increasingly popular online activity where Yahoo's approach to search could provide a compelling user experience, Raghavan said.
Unlike traditional Internet search, which allows Web surfers to find Web pages on various topics, real-time search focuses on the flood of constantly updated messages posted by people using social networking services like Twitter.
A number of smaller private companies like Collecta and OneRiot have developed real time search products, as has Twitter itself, which offers its own search engine to cull through its Tweets.
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