Ars Technica

AT&T recently named 100 municipalities in 21 metropolitan areas where it might bring its fiber-to-the-home network, without actually saying how many customers would get the GigaPower service, which offers up to 1Gbps download speeds.

AT&T said the expansion "is not expected to impact AT&T’s capital investment plans for 2014," further muddying the picture.

That fiber announcement came a few weeks before AT&T announced a deal to buy satellite provider DirecTV for $48.5 billion. Yet it seems the two are intertwined: AT&T told the Securities and Exchange Commission that it needs approval of the DirecTV merger in order to bring fiber to 2 million locations.

"The economics of this transaction will allow the combined company to upgrade 2 million additional locations to high speed broadband with GigaPower FTTP (fiber to the premise) and expand our high speed broadband footprint to an additional 13 million locations where AT&T will be able to offer a pay TV and high speed broadband bundle," AT&T wrote in an SEC filing.

The expansions would happen within by 2018, AT&T said, as combining the companies will let AT&T gain "cost synergies" of more than $1.6 billion a year by 2017. The savings would largely be due to lower programming costs from increasing AT&T's size and bargaining power.

Serving as an outgoing United States magistrate judge, Brian Owsley had decided that one of his final judicial acts would be to unseal more than 100 of his own judicial orders involving digital surveillance that he himself had sealed at the government’s request.

But not long after Judge Owsley's move in 2013, a US district judge vacated Owsley’s order and resealed them all. That order itself was then sealed.

"I don't think it's that normal," Judge Owsley said.

In a rare move, the media company Dow Jones filed a new motion with the US District Court in the Southern District of Texas asking it to unseal all such documents and to make them available publicly online. The motion was filed in conjunction with a new report from The Wall Street Journal (Dow Jones is the newspaper’s parent company) showing that the sealing of such court files is on the rise. Those orders initially had been sealed as they had involved forms of digital surveillance that the government doesn’t want revealed, including the use of pen/trap orders, tower dumps, and stingrays (devices that act as fake cell phone towers).

The US Supreme Court issued rulings in two of the five patent cases it heard this term. In both cases, the high court unanimously struck down rules created by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the nation's top patent court.

The two rulings continue a pattern that has developed over the past several years, in which the Supreme Court has overturned key Federal Circuit rulings, finding them too favorable to patent-holders and too harsh on parties accused of infringement. All four of the companies involved in the legal opinion are competitors with real products -- none represent the much-debated "patent trolls," that is, companies with no business beyond patent lawsuits. Yet, the issue of patent trolls looms large in the background of these opinions.

Both decisions will make life easier for Internet and other tech companies frequently accused of infringement.

In the case of Limelight Networks v. Akamai Technologies, trolls were happy to use the Federal Circuit-approved theory about "induced infringement" to sue tech companies. They argued that even when a defendant didn't complete all steps of a patent itself, it encouraged its customers to do so. In the case of Nautilus v. Biosig Instruments, the Supreme Court has made it easier to throw out patents on the grounds that they're "indefinite." The ruling widens another path of attack that can be used against vague patents.

Software used by law enforcement organizations to intercept the communications of suspected criminals contains a litany of critical weaknesses, including an undocumented backdoor secured with a hardcoded password, security researchers said.

In a scathing advisory, the researchers recommended people stop using the Nice Recording eXpress voice-recording package. It is one of several software offerings provided by Ra’anana, Israel-based Nice Systems, a company that markets itself as providing "mission-critical lawful interception solutions to support the fight against organized crime, drug trafficking and terrorist activities."

The advisory warned that critical weaknesses in the software expose users to attacks that compromise investigations and the security of the agency networks.

"Attackers are able to completely compromise the voice recording/surveillance solution as they can gain access to the system and database level and listen to recorded calls without prior authentication," the researchers from security consultancy SEC Consult wrote. "Furthermore, attackers would be able to use the voice recording server as a jumphost for further attacks of the internal voice VLAN [virtual local area network], depending on the network setup."

In 2013, the US House Science Committee was considering a bill that would force the National Science Foundation to reconsider its funding priorities.

The Foundation has been tasked with funding basic research, but the bill would have directed it to only fund science deemed to be in the national interest -- things like research with defense applications or with obvious economic outcomes. The committee just put the final touches on the 2014 version of the bill, and in a bit of good news, some of the more problematic language was gone.

Although the current bill still wants the Foundation to perform "investment in strategic areas vital to the national interest," the actual funding requirements it stipulates provide the NSF with a broad leeway in interpreting the national interests. Grants can go to programs that aid in the "development of a STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] workforce and increased public scientific literacy" or the "promotion of the progress of science." But the Committee still wants to be able to blame someone if a grant it doesn't like gets funded, as it added a requirement that an NSF official provide "written justification" for any grants that are awarded.

Verizon and the rest of the country's biggest Internet service providers joined forces to argue that so-called "common carrier" regulations for utilities shouldn't be applied to broadband.

Such rules would force the Internet service providers (ISPs) to innovate less and spend less money than they do today on network upgrades, they argue. Yet Verizon obtains a variety of perks from the government for its FiOS Internet service by using public utility rules to its advantage, a new report drawing on public documents says.

“It's the secret that's been hiding in plain sight,” said Harold Feld, senior VP of Public Knowledge and an expert on the Federal Communications Commission and telecommunications. “At the exact moment that these guys are complaining about how awful Title II is, they are trying to enjoy all the privileges of Title II on the regulated side.”

“There's nothing illegal about it,” said Feld, who wasn’t involved in writing the report. However, “as a political point this is very useful.” Bruce Kushnick, telecommunications analyst, points to a New Jersey franchise agreement which states, "The construction of Verizon NJ’s fiber-to-the-premises FTTP network (the FTTP network) is being performed under the authority of Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 and under the appropriate state telecommunications authority granted to Verizon NJ."

Twitter has a 200-million-strong and ever-growing user base that broadcasts 500 million updates daily. It has been lauded for its ability to unsettle repressive political regimes, bring much-needed accountability to corporations that mistreat their customers, and combat other societal ills (whether such characterizations are, in fact, accurate).

In April, Twitter announced that, after reviewing the more than 1,300 proposals submitted from more than 60 different countries, it had selected six institutions to provide with data access. Projects approved included a study of foodborne gastrointestinal illnesses, a study measuring happiness levels in cities based on images shared on Twitter, and a study using geosocial intelligence to model urban flooding in Jakarta, Indonesia. There's even a project exploring the relationship between tweets and sports team performance.

Now, the company has taken aim at disrupting another important sphere of human society: the scientific research community. In its privacy policy, Twitter explains that most user information is intended to be broadcast widely. As a result, the company likely believes that sharing such information with scientific researchers is well within its rights, as its services "are primarily designed to help you share information with the world," Twitter says. "Most of the information you provide us is information you are asking us to make public."

The network interconnection deals between content providers and Internet service providers (ISPs) are often shrouded in secrecy, at least when it comes to the question of whether any money is changing hands. But it's possible to figure out which companies are directly exchanging traffic with ISPs by examining publicly available information if you know where to search.

Analyst Dan Rayburn shows which ISPs the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, Pandora, eBay, and Apple have direct connections with. The connections are "public information that anyone can look up simply by knowing the networks' Autonomous System number (AS) and looking at their peers," Rayburn wrote. "You don’t have to be a networking engineer to look at BGP [Border Gateway Protocol] relationships and see what is taking place. It’s all public info."

California has become the largest state to pass some version of the “4th Amendment Protection Act” in one of its lawmaking bodies.

The Golden State’s senate passed the bill, and the bill likely will come before the state assembly later this summer. As currently drafted, the California bill prohibits “the state from providing material support, participation, or assistance to any federal agency attempting the illegal and unconstitutional collection of electronic data or metadata, without consent, of any person not based on a valid warrant that particularly describes the person, place, and thing to be searched or seized or a court order, or in accordance with judicially recognized exceptions to warrant requirements.”

State Senator Ted Lieu (D-Torrance), who authored the bill, told Ars that the bill is a “substantive and symbolic” way to counter the effects of the National Security Agency (NSA). Lieu is an Air Force veteran who served as a prosecutor in the Judge Advocate General corps, and he currently serves as a Lt. Colonel in the Air Force reserves.

It's long been rumored that Apple is building its own content delivery network (CDN), and now it appears that the company is negotiating paid interconnection deals with "some of the largest ISPs in the US" in order to deliver Apple content to consumers.

Dan Rayburn, an analyst with extensive contacts in the CDN and Internet service provider industries, reported on Apple's latest moves.

"In February I blogged about a new group formed inside of Apple in 2013, tasked with building out their own CDN to deliver Apple software updates, apps and other Apple related content," Rayburn wrote. "Since my post, Apple has been very busy with their build-out deploying a lot of boxes running Apache Traffic Server and buying a ton of transit, co-location, wavelengths and other infrastructure services. Their CDN is quickly growing, and it won’t be long before we start seeing a portion of their content getting delivered from their new CDN."

According to Rayburn, "Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Pandora, EBay, and other content owners that have already built out their own CDNs" are also paying ISPs for interconnection.