Ars Technica

The question of whether online broadcast television is to remain in the hands of a stodgy industry that once declared the VCR the enemy is being put directly before the Supreme Court.

Aereo isn't exactly a cloud provider. Yet what the broadcasters say it can't do has the cloud industry closely following the startup's legal battles and business model. Aereo essentially maintains that they are providing offsite "rabbit ears" for their customers, allowing consumers to record freely available content that their rented antennas captured in their local markets.

If Aereo is blocked from allowing consumers the ability to stream their content at will, what's preventing rights-holders from making the same claim against cloud-storage providers?

Mission-critical satellite communications relied on by Western militaries and international aeronautics and maritime systems are susceptible to interception, tampering, or blocking by attackers who exploit easy-to-find backdoors, software bugs, and similar high-risk vulnerabilities, a researcher warned.

Ground-, sea-, and air-based satellite terminals from a broad spectrum of manufacturers -- including Iridium, Cobham, Hughes, Harris, and Thuraya -- can be hijacked by adversaries who send them booby-trapped SMS text messages and use other techniques, according to a 25-page white paper published by penetration testing firm IOActive. Once a malicious hacker has remotely gained control of the devices, which are used to communicate with satellites orbiting in space, the adversary can completely disrupt mission-critical satellite communications (SATCOM).

Other malicious actions include reporting false emergencies or misleading geographic locations of ships, planes, or ground crews; suppressing reports of actual emergencies; or obtaining the coordinates of devices and other potentially confidential information.

"If one of these affected devices can be compromised, the entire SATCOM infrastructure could be at risk," wrote Ruben Santamarta, IOActive's principal security consultant. "Ships, aircraft, military personnel, emergency services, media services, and industrial facilities (oil rigs, gas pipelines, water treatment plants, wind turbines, substations, etc.) could all be impacted by these vulnerabilities."

Google Fiber began as a service just for residents and public buildings like schools, libraries, and community centers, but it's now being expanded to cover businesses as well.

Google will start a pilot program to connect small businesses in Kansas City before rolling out a more widely available service.

"We are working hard to finalize our service offering for small businesses and would like to invite you to be part of the process," Google says. "We are looking for a few businesses in Kansas City to provide feedback about using Fiber at work.

"Over the next few months, we’ll be connecting a limited number of small businesses to our network in exchange for feedback about the service." Since Google is still figuring out logistics, there's no word yet on when it will be launched to bigger portions of its service area.

A Google Fiber job posting in New York City has a bunch of tech news sites excited about the prospect of Google bringing its fiber Internet service to the Big Apple.

But Google says there are no such plans.

"We're entirely focused on building out our networks in Kansas City, Austin, and Provo, and on exploring the possibility of bringing Fiber to the 34 locations we announced in February," a Google spokesperson told Ars. Google recently announced that it chose nine metro areas around the country for potential Fiber deployments.

The closest ones to New York City are Raleigh-Durham in North Carolina and Atlanta, Georgia.

New York City already has fiber in the form of Verizon FiOS, and Google has focused mostly on underserved areas where municipal officials are willing to provide expedited permitting and other perks. There are still millions of Americans without broadband, so there are plenty of areas where Google Fiber is needed.

Verizon doesn't want to deploy high-speed wired broadband service to all New Jersey residents, despite receiving financial perks from the state for the past 20 years in exchange for building a statewide network.

To make sure it doesn't have to complete the buildout to all of New Jersey's 8.9 million residents, Verizon led an astroturf campaign that flooded the state Board of Public Utilities (BPU) with hundreds of identical e-mails purporting to support Verizon's case. One person who is listed as having written one of these e-mails said that he didn't submit anything, and if he did, "I would've slammed them."

A report in Stop the Cap found several other Verizon "supporters" who had no idea e-mails were submitted under their names. LinkedIn searches show that some of the people sending the aforementioned e-mails are Verizon employees, with titles such as "field tech" or "sourcing process leader." Three hundred twenty-seven people sent e-mails with that text in a six-day span, with 315 of them coming on March 19 and 20.

With all of the talk of Facebook’s efforts to blanket the planet with drones that the company promises will provide global Wi-Fi accessibility, another technology leader, the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), has also entered the drone Wi-Fi game.

Through DARPA’s new “Mobile Hotspots Program,” the agency has planned to retrofit a fleet of aging RQ-7 shadow drones that were once deployed for various surveillance missions by the US military in Iraq. The repurposed drones will now be used to help the military carry out operations in remote locations that lack Internet connectivity.

The hotspot program aims to provide a 1Gbps communications backbone to deployed units. In order to establish a secure connection from ground stations without requiring large antennas, each drone will be equipped with a lightweight, low-power pod, holding low-noise amplifiers, which DARPA claims can boost signals while minimizing background noise. The drones can apparently run for nine-hour shifts to provide continual coverage as needed.

Netflix's decision to pay Comcast for a direct connection to the Comcast network has resulted in significantly better video streaming performance for customers of the nation's largest broadband provider.

Netflix has bemoaned the payment, asking the government to prevent Comcast from demanding such interconnection "tolls." But there's little doubt the interconnection has benefited consumers in the short term.

Average Netflix performance for Comcast subscribers rose from 1.51Mbps to 1.68Mbps from January to February, though the interconnection didn't begin until late February.

In newly released data, Netflix said average performance on Comcast has now risen further to 2.5Mbps, a 65 percent increase since January. Comcast's increased speed allowed it to pass Time Warner Cable, Verizon, CenturyLink, AT&T U-verse, and others in Netflix's rankings. Comcast remains slower than Cablevision, Cox, Suddenlink, Charter, and Google Fiber.

It's no surprise that Comcast donates money to members of Congress. Political connections come in handy for a company seeking government approval of mergers, like Comcast's 2011 purchase of NBCUniversal and its proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable (TWC).

But just how many politicians have accepted money from Comcast's political arm? In the case of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which held the first congressional hearing on the Comcast/TWC merger, the answer is all of them. Sen Chuck Schumer (D-NY) led the way with $35,000 from the Comcast federal political action committee (PAC) between 2009 and 2014, Sen Patrick Leahy (D-VT) received $32,500, and Sen Orrin Hatch (R-UT) received $30,000.

These figures are the combined contributions from Comcast to the senators' campaign and leadership committees. Out of 18 committee members, 10 Democrats and eight Republicans, 17 got money from Comcast's federal PAC, according to the database at OpenSecrets.org.

Anti-Comcast Sen Al Franken (D-MN) isn't listed as having received anything from Comcast's PAC, but that's apparently because the database didn't take into account money collected by Sen Franken's recount fund from when he needed a vote recount to get elected to the Senate. Sen Franken’s popularity with Comcast's overlords has obviously gone downhill since the recount fund donation, though.

The senator argued that the Comcast/TWC merger would stifle competition and lead to higher prices and worse service for consumers. “There’s no doubt that Comcast is a huge, influential corporation, and I understand that there are over 100 lobbyists making the case for this deal to members of Congress and our staffs,” Sen Franken said during the hearing. "But I’ve also heard from over 100,000 consumers who oppose this deal, and I think their voices need to be heard, too.”

When does an online threat become worthy of criminal prosecution? The Supreme Court is being asked to decide that unanswered question as prosecutions for online rants, from Facebook to YouTube, are becoming commonplace.

Authorities are routinely applying an old-world 1932 statute concerning extortion to today's online world, where words don't always mean what they seem. The latest case involving the legal parameters of online speech before the justices concerns a Pennsylvania man sentenced to 50 months in prison after being convicted on four counts of the interstate communication of threats. Defendant Anthony Elonis' 2010 Facebook rant concerned attacks on an elementary school, his estranged wife, and even law enforcement.

"That's it, I've had about enough/ I'm checking out and making a name for myself/ Enough elementary schools in a ten mile radius/ to initiate the most heinous school shooting ever imagined/ and hell hath no fury like a crazy man in a Kindergarten class/ the only question is … which one?" read one of Elonis' posts.

Whatever a so-called "true threat" is, it's not protected under the First Amendment. Whether online or not, other forms of speech that do not enjoy the backing of the constitution include child pornography and obscenity.

Only one federal appeals court has sided with Elonis' contention that the authorities must prove that the person who made the threat actually meant to carry it out. Eight other circuit courts of appeal, however, have ruled that the standard is whether a "reasonable person" would conclude the threat was real. The Obama Administration has until April 21 to respond to Elonis' petition to the Supreme Court.

[Commentary] Are cyberattacks, security breaches, and mounting distrust between the US and Chinese governments ushering in a new Cold War era?

Given US officials’ rhetoric and actions in recent months, it might appear that such a sustained state of political and military tensions between the two superpowers is a serious threat.

A number of events have likely precipitated Cold War fears. The disclosures by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden of dragnet government surveillance, including a revelation that the US has infiltrated the networks of China-based telecommunications company Huawei, have understandably upset the Chinese. Additionally, the increasing number of cyberattacks and security breaches in both the US and China appear to have strained relations. And considering the “mounting tensions over China’s expanding claims of control over what it argues are exclusive territories in the East and South China Seas, and over a new air defense zone,” diplomatic relations between the two countries appear further strained, according to a report from The New York Times.

While US officials are trying to fend off threats of a new Cold War, Harvard Law School scholar Noah Feldman described his belief that rather than entering a new Cold War period, the US and China are instead enmeshed in what he calls a “cool war.”

“What the US and China have in common is that each is a global superpower in a contest for geopolitical supremacy,” Feldman told Ars. “What makes it 'cool' and not cold is that we still have a strong economic partnership with China. While both sides would like to reduce their dependence on the other, neither side wants escalation.”