FCC to Take a Stand for Net Neutrality?

I'll believe it when I see it. From CNET:

The Federal Communications Commission is once again trying to soothe consumers nervous over details of its proposed plan to rewrite Net neutrality, after the plan leaked out last week.

Just five days after a similar blog post, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler penned a post Tuesday titled "Finding the Best Path Forward to Protect the Open Internet," in which he pledged to use "every available power" to prevent Internet service providers from degrading service for the benefit of a few.

The commission's proposed plan ignited a frenzy of criticism on the Internet after being spotlighted in news reports. The reports suggested that the FCC had changed its position on certain aspects of its Open Internet rules, including shifting its stance to allow Internet service providers to charge companies for a faster lane of service. In his blog post, Wheeler said the proposal wouldn't be a departure from the core ideal of Net neutrality, which prohibits blocking access or discriminating against Internet traffic traveling over an ISP's connections.

MIT Announces Bitcoin Distribution Project

This fall, Bitcoin is going to get a big boost from a project of the MIT Bitcoin club, which plans to distribute $100 worth of the digital currency to every undergrad at the school.  From MIT:

Two MIT students have raised half a million dollars for a project to distribute $100 in bitcoin to every undergraduate student at MIT this fall. Jeremy Rubin, a sophomore studying computer science at MIT, and Dan Elitzer, founder and President of the MIT Bitcoin Club and a first-year in the MBA program at MIT Sloan, have undertaken an ambitious project aimed at creating an ecosystem for digital currencies at MIT. Plans for the MIT Bitcoin Project involve a range of activities, including working with professors and researchers across the Institute to study how students use the bitcoin they receive, as well as spurring academic and entrepreneurial activity within the university in this burgeoning field.

Through the MIT Bitcoin Project, Rubin and Elitzer aim to help MIT continue its long tradition as the preeminent educational institution at the forefront of emerging technologies, and establish MIT as a global hub where Bitcoin-related research, ideas, and ventures are studied, discussed, and developed. The bulk of funding for the project is being provided by MIT alumni with significant additional support from within the Bitcoin community. The total of over $500,000 already pledged will cover the distribution of bitcoin to all 4,528 undergraduates, as well as infrastructure and informational activities related to the initiative.

Skype Offers Free Group Video Calling

From Skype:

Skype is proud that, since our beginning, we’ve created opportunities for people to communicate freely and easily, no matter where they are; from keeping in touch with remote family members or calling home when traveling to chatting daily with your close circles of friends. While Skype is known for one to one video calling, we know it’s also essential to connect with the groups of people who matter most, whether friends, family or colleagues. For the last few years, we’ve offered group video calling to Premium users on Windows desktop and Mac and more recently Xbox One. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re making group video calling free – for all users on these platforms. And, in the future, we’ll be enabling group video calling for all our users across more platforms – at no cost.

Pirate Box: A Simple LAMP Stack Live Server Build

I first came across the PirateBox DIY project late last year, and thought it would be fun to set one up, but I didn’t really have an idea of where it could be put to good use. And then one day it hit me. I'm in a band and we play shows fairly regularly here in NYC. After shows people often ask if they can download any of our songs online (which, of course, they can), or they want to share pics they took during the set, or they want to get in touch with us and need our contact info, and so on. So I thought, hey, I’ll set up a Pirate Box for the band and run it as a live server during shows, and then people could share pics with us and one another directly, download songs directly from us rather than through an online middleman, get general info about the band, upcoming shows and so on.

I began hunting on Craig’s List for an appropriate router to install the PirateBox ISO, but had no luck. Being the impatient type, I broadened my search criteria and found someone selling an old Mac Mini for $50. Perfect. That weekend, I went to a local flea market and picked up a cheap soho router and some cables for another $10, and set to work.

Because of some apparent incompatibilities between the PirateBox ISO and the Mac Mini hardware, I decided to scratch the idea of installing the PirateBox ISO and instead create my own build from scratch rather than spend endless amounts of time troubleshooting and tweaking to get the hardware and software to play nice with each other.

After a couple weeks of research and tinkering, I managed to put together a nice little LAMP stack running a main portal page, a band Wiki, a chat room, and a song downloads page (see below for full details). I keep the setup in an old laptop case with the Mac Mini and the router inside, plugged into a power cord. I’ve since brought it along to two shows and set it up somewhere inconspicuous on stage. When we’re doing sound check I just plug in the extension cord, turn on the router and the server, and it’s good to go!

I configured the network and server so that once someone has hopped onto the wifi, all they have to do is navigate to serverhostname.local to access the server, and I set the wifi broadcast name and the host name of the server to the name of the band.  Here are some screen caps from the initial setup.  Once someone connects to the wifi and navigates to the correct url (in the present case: utm.local), they are greeted with a success page. 

Clicking the portal link takes them to the site's main navigation page.

From there, users can navigate to the wiki:

Or to the chat room:

 Or to the download page:

Try not to laugh at the download page, this was what it looked like after initial setup, it's since been spiced up a bit.  If you want to see it now, you'll just have to come out to one of our shows!

All in all this was a fun little project.  It took about a month's worth of work (mostly on weekends) to get everything up and running, including preliminary research, installation, configuration and customization, as well as the time spent setting up an initial test on a VirtualBox VM on my laptop. 

There were, however, some frustrating hurdles along the way: finding an Ubuntu Server ISO that worked without problems on the Mac hardware, getting hostname resolution to operate correctly for both iOS and Android devices (avahi-daemon eventually did the trick, though a bug in older generations of the Android OS prevents those devices from being able to resolve the hostname.local URL to the IP address of the server), and, perhaps most ridiculously, uploading the band's logo into the MediaWiki (though drinking a bit less beer during configuration would have probably made that process go a bit more smoothly!).   

There's a lot more that one could go into here: installing Ubunutu Server onto the Mac Mini, installing and configuring the LAMP stack, comparisons of the various open source software packages I decided to include, as well as those that I decided against, potential security issues running an open wifi at bars and clubs in NYC, and so on.  But perhaps those are best left to their own individual posts. So for now, that's all folks!


UTM Live Server Build

Hardware
• Mac Mini, $50 on Craig’s List
• Netgear router, $10 at a local flea market
• Cables, $5 at the same flea market
Total Hardware Cost: $65

Software
• OS: Ubuntu Server
• LAMP Stack:
    • Apache2 Web Server
    • PHP5
    • MYSQL DB
    • PHPMyAdmin
    • OpenSSH
• Web Interface:
    • MediaWiki
    • Blueimp’s AJAX Chat
    • PHP login module for the downloads page (adapted from Harvard’s Building Dynamic Websites online course)
    • Noir HTML5 Template optimized for mobile devices
Total Software Cost: $0

Google+ May Soon Come to an End

Is it over yet? From Tech Crunch:

Today, Google’s Vic Gundotra announced that he would be leaving the company after eight years. The first obvious question is where this leaves Google+, Gundotra’s baby and primary project for the past several of those years.

What we’re hearing from multiple sources is that Google+ will no longer be considered a product, but a platform — essentially ending its competition with other social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

A Google representative has vehemently denied these claims. “Today’s news has no impact on our Google+ strategy — we have an incredibly talented team that will continue to build great user experiences across Google+, Hangouts and Photos.”

According to two sources, Google has apparently been reshuffling the teams that used to form the core of Google+, a group numbering between 1,000 and 1,200 employees. We hear that there’s a new building on campus, so many of those people are getting moved physically, as well — not necessarily due to Gundotra’s departure.

FCC Pushes Internet Discrimination Rules, Goes in for Kill Against Net Neutrality

Once again, the collusion of big government and big business has led to the further erosion of basic notions of freedom and equality in the United States.  From the New York Times:

The principle that all Internet content should be treated equally as it flows through cables and pipes to consumers looks all but dead.

The Federal Communications Commission said on Wednesday that it would propose new rules that allow companies like Disney, Google or Netflix to pay Internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon for special, faster lanes to send video and other content to their customers.

The proposed changes would affect what is known as net neutrality — the idea that no providers of legal Internet content should face discrimination in providing offerings to consumers, and that users should have equal access to see any legal content they choose.

This should come as a surprise to no one, or at least, to no one who has any sense of how US government functions under the Republican-Democrat two-party dictatorship.  Like so many government "regulatory" agencies, the FCC is nothing more than a perch for powerful corporate interests to wield their influence.  From Esquire:

For the past three years, Comcast's Senior VP of Governmental Affairs has been Meredith Baker. Baker's last job was the Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, where she signed off on the controversial NBCUniversal sale to Comcast in 2009.

Now we know that Baker, the former FCC Commissioner and a public official, was around to help make sure net neutrality died so Internet costs could soar, and that Time Warner Cable would be allowed to fold into Comcast, despite claims that the new megacorp might violate antitrust laws.

Perhaps it is unfair to single Baker out. She's no different from the rest of the scum at the  agency.  From Open Secrets:

Baker's transition from FCC leadership to industry isn't unprecedented. Michael Powell, the FCC chairman from 1997 to 2005, made a similar move, heading to the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, an industry group, in 2011 as its CEO. And Jonathan Adelstein, who was an FCC commissioner from 2002 to 2009, became the president and CEO of PCIA: The Wireless Infrastructure Association in 2012.

Four other former FCC employees have followed Baker's path to Comcast. They include Rudy Brioche, who worked as an advisor to former commissioner Adelstein before moving to Comcast as its senior director of external affairs and public policy counsel in 2009. Brioche was so valued by the FCC, in fact, that he was brought in to join the commission's Advisory Committee for Diversity in the Digital Age in 2011.

Other revolving Comcast lobbyists include James Coltharp, who served as a special counsel to commissioner James H. Quello until 1997, and Jordan Goldstein, who worked as a senior legal adviser to commissioner Michael J. Copps. John Morabito, who served a number of roles in the FCC's Common Carrier Bureau, joined Comcast as one of its senior lobbyists in 2004. (He is no longer with the company.)

Meanwhile, secret negotiations on the Trans-Pacific-Partnership continue apace, and will likely lead to further restrict the semblance of freedom on the internet.  

NYPD Social Media PR Stunt Backfires

From the New York Times:

When the New York Police Department asked Twitter users on Tuesday to share their photographs with police officers, they were perhaps expecting a few feel-good neighborhood scenes or tourists with police horses in Times Square. A few posted pictures of themselves with officers, smiling. Most did not.

Almost immediately after the call went out from the department’s official Twitter account, storms of users took the opportunity to instead attach some of the most unfavorable images of New York City officers that could be found on the Internet. And judging by the output on Tuesday, there are quite a few.

The Daily News was more forthright about the nature of those images.  Excerpt:

But instead of happy pictures of cops posing with tourists and helping out locals, Twitter erupted with hundreds of photos of police violence, including Occupy Wall Street arrests and the 84-year-old man who was bloodied for jaywalking on the Upper West Side earlier this year.

Just before midnight, more than 70,000 people had posted comments on Twitter decrying police brutality, slamming the NYPD for the social media disaster and recalling the names of people shot to death by police. It was the top trending hashtag on Twitter by late Tuesday, replacing #HappyEarthDay.

Police officials wouldn’t respond to questions about the negative comments or say who was behind the Twitter outreach. They released a short statement on Tuesday evening, when users were posting more than 10,000 tweets an hour.

Of course, none of this is surprising. After Federal Law Enforcement agencies, local police departments are the most dangerous state-sponsored terrorist organizations in the United States. 

AT&T May Expand Fiber Network

From Ars Technica:

Two months after Google announced that it will try to bring fiber Internet to 34 cities in nine metro areas, AT&T today said it will "expand its ultra-fast fiber network to up to 100 candidate cities and municipalities nationwide, including 21 new major metropolitan areas."

Before anyone gets too excited, AT&T isn't promising that it will actually build in any or all of these cities. "This expanded fiber build is not expected to impact AT&T’s capital investment plans for 2014," the company's announcement said, possibly to assure investors that it isn't wasting money.
But AT&T will consider building in the cities that provide the best options.

Google isn't a telecom or cable provider, so it has to pay more for access.

"AT&T will work with local leaders in these markets to discuss ways to bring the service to their communities," the company said.

Falkvinge: Private Communications or Mass Corporate Surveillance, Pick One

In his most recent column for Torrent Freak, Richard Falkvinge, the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, argues that we have a simple choice before us. We can opt for retaining some semblance of private correspondence and communication that is outside the scope of government and corporate surveillance, or we can acquiesce to the demands of the entertainment industry.  Excerpt:

There is no way to enforce the copyright monopoly without reading all the private communications in transit – mass eavesdropping and mass surveillance. There is no magic way to just wiretap the violations and ignore the rest; the act of finding which communications may violate the copyright monopoly requires that you sort all correspondence into legal and illegal. The act of sorting requires observation; you cannot determine if something is legal or illegal without looking at it. At that point, the postal secret and the privacy of correspondence have been broken . . .

So we’re at a crossroads where we as a society must determine which is more important – the right to communicate in private at all, or the obsolete distribution and manufacturing monopoly of an entertainment industry. These two are completely mutually exclusive and cannot coexist. This is, and has been, the problem since the cassette tape.

Submit: The Failure of Social Media "Activism"

Social media have, without a doubt, already begun to revolutionize the political process world wide, and has been credited with facilitating popular uprisings and even the toppling of governments the world over. However, in many cases, it also serves a more reactionary function: to create an appearance of activity and engagement that masks a more fundamental social and political passivity.  A new study out of UC San Diego shows the superficiality of social media slacktivism.  Excerpt:

“The study is an important counter-balance to unbridled enthusiasm for the powers of social media,” said UC San Diego’s Lewis. “There’s no inherent magic. Social media can activate interpersonal ties but won’t necessarily turn ordinary citizens into hyper-activists.”

In the case of the Save Darfur campaign, the Causes Facebook app appears to have been “more marketing than mobilization,” Lewis said. It seems to have failed to convert the initial act of joining into a more sustained set of behaviors. For the vast majority of the members, he said, “the commitment might have been only as deep as a click.”

Survey: Americans Optimistic on the Future of Tech Breakthroughs

From the Pew Research Internet Project:

The American public anticipates that the coming half-century will be a period of profound scientific change, as inventions that were once confined to the realm of science fiction come into common usage. This is among the main findings of a new national survey by The Pew Research Center, which asked Americans about a wide range of potential scientific developments—from near-term advances like robotics and bioengineering, to more “futuristic” possibilities like teleportation or space colonization. In addition to asking them for their predictions about the long-term future of scientific advancement, we also asked them to share their own feelings and attitudes toward some new developments that might become common features of American life in the relatively near future.

Overall, most Americans anticipate that the technological developments of the coming half-century will have a net positive impact on society. Some 59% are optimistic that coming technological and scientific changes will make life in the future better, while 30% think these changes will lead to a future in which people are worse off than they are today . . .

Reality Mining: Techno-utopian Fantasy or Totalitarian Nightmare?

At the MIT Technology Review, Nicholas Carr reviews the work of Alex Pentland, director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory.  Pentland's work apparently aims to help create a fully programmed social order that would be difficult to distinguish from your worst nightmare of a totalitarian surveillance society.  Excerpt:

Pentland describes a series of experiments that he and his associates have been conducting in the private sector. They go into a business and give each employee an electronic ID card, called a “sociometric badge,” that hangs from the neck and communicates with the badges worn by colleagues. Incorporating microphones, location sensors, and accelerometers, the badges monitor where people go and whom they talk with, taking note of their tone of voice and even their body language. The devices are able to measure not only the chains of communication and influence within an organization but also “personal energy levels” and traits such as “extraversion and empathy.” In one such study of a bank’s call center, the researchers discovered that productivity could be increased simply by tweaking the coffee-break schedule.

Pentland dubs this data-processing technique “reality mining,” and he suggests that similar kinds of information can be collected on a much broader scale by smartphones outfitted with specialized sensors and apps. Fed into statistical modeling programs, the data could reveal “how things such as ideas, decisions, mood, or the seasonal flu are spread in the community.” . . .

What really excites Pentland is the prospect of using digital media and related tools to change people’s behavior, to motivate groups and individuals to act in more productive and responsible ways. If people react predictably to social influences, then governments and businesses can use computers to develop and deliver carefully tailored incentives, such as messages of praise or small cash payments, to “tune” the flows of influence in a group and thereby modify the habits of its members. Beyond improving the efficiency of transit and health-care systems, Pentland suggests, group-based incentive programs can make communities more harmonious and creative.

Call me cynical, but it seems just plain deluded to assume, as Pentland apparently does, that such technology, if adopted widely by governments and businesses, would ultimately fulfill these techno-utopian fantasies, and not result in a dystopian nightmare of surveillance and control.

Google Expands Glass "Explorer" Program

From Yahoo:

Google will make a limited supply of its controversial Internet-linked Glass eyewear available for purchase in the United States beginning — and ending — on April 15.

Anyone in the United States with $1,500 to spend on Glass will be able to join the ranks of “Explorers” who have gotten to test out the devices prior to them hitting the market, the California-based Internet titan said Thursday in a post at Google+ social network . . . 

On April 15, starting at 9 a.m. Eastern, Google will commence what it billed as the biggest expansion of the Explorer program to date by letting anyone in the U.S. buy the eyewear online here, noting that there would be a limited number of units available.

But Glass users, who have not so affectionately become known as "Glassholes", have also become targets of ire and even violence.  But not to fear, Google has a solution . . . contact lens cameras. From CNET:

Google has a patent pending for a contact lens with a micro camera and sensors embedded on the surface controlled by blinking, which would enable you to take hands-free pictures and could help the blind navigate the everyday obstacles of the world.

FBI to Expand Facial Recognition Photo Database

From the EFF:

New documents released by the FBI show that the Bureau is well on its way toward its goal of a fully operational face recognition database by this summer.
EFF received these records in response to our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for information on Next Generation Identification (NGI)—the FBI’s massive biometric database that may hold records on as much as one third of the U.S. population. The facial recognition component of this database poses real threats to privacy for all Americans.

NGI builds on the FBI’s legacy fingerprint database—which already contains well over 100 million individual records—and has been designed to include multiple forms of biometric data, including palm prints and iris scans in addition to fingerprints and face recognition data. NGI combines all these forms of data in each individual’s file, linking them to personal and biographic data like name, home address, ID number, immigration status, age, race, etc. This immense database is shared with other federal agencies and with the approximately 18,000 tribal, state and local law enforcement agencies across the United States.

The records we received show that the face recognition component of NGI may include as many as 52 million face images by 2015. By 2012, NGI already contained 13.6 million images representing between 7 and 8 million individuals, and by the middle of 2013, the size of the database increased to 16 million images. The new records reveal that the database will be capable of processing 55,000 direct photo enrollments daily and of conducting tens of thousands of searches every day . . .

In order to avoid the prying eyes of government pervs, you might want to consider a new look, such as those being developed by Adam Harvey, who is seeking to "create a growing catalog of designs and techniques that can be employed as camouflage against face detection."

Quantum Leap in Quantum Computing?

From Popular Mechanics:

It's a machine that could calculate solutions to problems so impossibly time-consuming that even the most powerful supercomputers could never handle them. And it would do so in an instant. This is the quantum computer, made possible by the bizarre nature of quantum mechanics. And though the idea is still in its infancy, it's no fantasy.

Two research teams, at Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany, have just announced that they have independently forged the building blocks for tomorrow's quantum computers. As they published today in the journal Nature (1, 2), the scientists discovered a way to hook up atoms and particles of light to create a new type of switch and logic-gate‚ quantum versions of the connecting structures that link bits of data in modern computers. 

Amusingly, the author of the article has apparently fielded some questions in the reddit post on the story and provided a rather tight summary:

New computing equipment allows info to be put into a fucking weird quantum state, which can do crazy shit. Like super fast computing. We've made similar things before, but can't build big computers with them. With this we think we can.

See also, this handy infographic:

 

Anti-Surveillance: Police Dismantle Monitoring Gear on their Own Vehicles

It is difficult to find government officials who are against mass surveillance of the American people and the public worldwide. However, these professional hypocrites are much more sensitive when they themselves are on the other side of the camera.  Police are all for mass surveillance, until you turn it on them. From Ars Technica:

The Los Angeles Police Commission is investigating how half of the recording antennas in the Southeast Division went missing, seemingly as a way to evade new self-monitoring procedures that the Los Angeles Police Department imposed last year.

Anon officer: “No one likes it. Who wants to be followed all over the place?” The antennas, which are mounted onto individual patrol cars, receive recorded audio captured from an officer’s belt-worn transmitter. The transmitter is designed to capture an officer’s voice and transmit the recording to the car itself for storage. The voice recorders are part of a video camera system that is mounted in a front-facing camera on the patrol car. Both elements are activated any time the car’s emergency lights and sirens are turned on, but they can also be activated manually. 

According to the Los Angeles Times, an LAPD investigation determined that around half of the 80 patrol cars in one South LA division were missing antennas as of last summer, and an additional 10 antennas were unaccounted for. Citing a police source, the newspaper said that removing the antennas can reduce the range of the voice transmitters by as much as a third of the normal operating distance.

The Police Commission, an independent body that oversees LAPD policy, was only notified of the situation two months ago.

Inflight Wifi Provider Goes Above and Beyond to Compromise Passenger Info Security

From Wired:

Gogo, the inflight Wi-Fi provider, is used by millions of airline passengers each year to stay connected while flying the friendly skies. But if you think the long arm of government surveillance doesn’t have a vertical reach, think again.

Gogo and others that provide Wi-Fi aboard aircraft must follow the same wiretap provisions that require telecoms and terrestrial ISPs to assist U.S. law enforcement and the NSA in tracking users when so ordered. But they may be doing more than the law requires.

According to a letter Gogo submitted to the Federal Communications Commission, the company voluntarily exceeded the requirements of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, by adding capabilities to its service at the request of law enforcement.  The revelation alarms civil liberties groups, which say companies should not be cutting deals with the government that may enhance the ability to monitor or track users.

“CALEA itself is a massive infringement on user’s rights,” says Peter Eckersley of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Having ISP’s [now] that say that CALEA isn’t enough, we’re going to be even more intrusive in what we collect on people is, honestly, scandalous.”

Heartbleed: Critical OpenSSL Bug Exposes Secure Traffic

From Ars Technica:

Lest readers think "catastrophic" is too exaggerated a description for the critical defect affecting an estimated two-thirds of the Internet's Web servers, consider this: at the moment this article was being prepared, the so-called Heartbleed bug was exposing end-user passwords, the contents of confidential e-mails, and other sensitive data belonging to Yahoo Mail and almost certainly countless other services.

The two-year-old bug is the result of a mundane coding error in OpenSSL, the world's most popular code library for implementing HTTPS encryption in websites, e-mail servers, and applications. The result of a missing bounds check in the source code, Heartbleed allows attackers to recover large chunks of private computer memory that handle OpenSSL processes. The leak is the digital equivalent of a grab bag that hackers can blindly reach into over and over simply by sending a series of commands to vulnerable servers. The returned contents could include something as banal as a time stamp, or it could return far more valuable assets such as authentication credentials or even the private key at the heart of a website's entire cryptographic certificate.

Government and Media Incompetence Puts Americans' Data at Risk

In a chilling, but not especially surprising, report at ZDNet, David Gerwitz reveals that incompetence in government has led to a doubling of the number of information security breaches over the last five years, and that incompetence in the media has led to reporting that understates the extent of these breaches by an order of magnitude.  Excerpt:

According to testimony given by Gregory C. Wilshusen, Director of Information Security Issues for the Government Accountability Office to United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs that, and I quote, "most major federal agencies had weaknesses in major categories of information security controls."  In other words, some government agency data security functions more like a sieve than a lockbox. . . .

Some of the data the GAO presented was deeply disturbing. For example, the number of successful breaches doubled since 2009. Doubled. There's also a story inside this story, which I'll discuss later in the article. Almost all of the press reporting on this testimony got the magnitude of the breach wrong. Most reported that government security incidents numbered in the thousands, when, in fact, they numbered in the millions.

USAID Cuban Social Media Front Outed by AP

From The Associated Press:

The U.S. government masterminded the creation of a "Cuban Twitter" — a communications network designed to undermine the communist government in Cuba, built with secret shell companies and financed through foreign banks . . .

USAID and its contractors went to extensive lengths to conceal Washington's ties to the project, according to interviews and documents obtained by the AP. They set up front companies in Spain and the Cayman Islands to hide the money trail, and recruited CEOs without telling them they would be working on a U.S. taxpayer-funded project.

"There will be absolutely no mention of United States government involvement," according to a 2010 memo from Mobile Accord Inc., one of the project's creators. "This is absolutely crucial for the long-term success of the service and to ensure the success of the Mission." . . . 

USAID said in a statement that it is "proud of its work in Cuba to provide basic humanitarian assistance, promote human rights and fundamental freedoms, and to help information flow more freely to the Cuban people," whom it said "have lived under an authoritarian regime" for 50 years. The agency said its work was found to be "consistent with U.S. law."

Interestingly, the initial subscriber base appears to have been put together after the shell corporations illicitly obtained the contact information of thousands of Cubans targeted by the government.

The social media project began development in 2009 after Washington-based Creative Associates International obtained a half-million Cuban cellphone numbers. It was unclear to the AP how the numbers were obtained, although documents indicate they were done so illicitly from a key source inside the country's state-run provider. Project organizers used those numbers to start a subscriber base.

Google to Launch Wireless Companion to Fiber Networks

From The Verge:

Google is reportedly considering running its own wireless network. Sources tell The Information that company executives have been discussing a plan to offer wireless service in areas where it's already installed Google Fiber high-speed internet. Details are vague, but there are hints that it's interested in becoming a mobile virtual network operator or MVNO, buying access to a larger network at wholesale rates and reselling it to customers.

Here in NYC, Google began spoonsring wireless hotspots in various neighborhoods and subway stations two years ago.  From 2012:

Beginning Monday, free Wi-Fi will be available at a number of stations courtesy of Google. Boingo Wireless, the Wi-Fi provider well known for its wireless service for airports, has teamed up with Google Offers, the search company’s service for getting deals, to offer the free Internet. Google is paying for the service from now until Sept. 7.

Last year, Google began offering free wifi in Chelsea in Manhattan.  From CNN:

Google's ambitions to wire the world are expanding. The company announced on Tuesday that it will provide free Wi-Fi service to Chelsea, a New York City neighborhood where Google has its local headquarters.

In a joint press conference with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York Senator Charles Schumer, Google said it hoped to keep the tens of thousands of residents, and millions of tourists, in the area connected at all times when they're outdoors. Google also will be providing indoor coverage for public housing units in the area.

Apple Issues Safari Security Update

Make sure you're up to date.  From ZDNet:

Apple has issued security updates for the Safari browser on Mac OS. All of the vulnerabilities are in the WebKit browser engine in Safari and many other programs.

The update fixes 27 vulnerabilities, 26 of which could lead to remote code execution. The 27th could allow a program running arbitrary code (such as one which exploited one of the first 26 vulnerabilities) to read arbitrary files despite sandbox restrictions.

Illegal Government Search and Surveillance Costs States Millions

From Al Jazeeera America:

The DeVarys were unwitting victims of one of the most widespread cases of data abuse in Minnesota’s history. A state audit found that fully half of the state’s law enforcement employees were likely accessing state databases for questionable reasons. And Hilary DeVary is the 10^th person to file a federal suit over misuse of driver’s license data it in just over a year.

“We have paid out tens of millions in the last five years because representatives of government that have illegally searched data,” said John Lesch, a state representative from the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

But Lesch’s greatest concern is a different form of data that law enforcement has begun collecting across the country that has far more potential for abuse. It’s gathered by license plate readers, or ALPRs.

“This technology allowed law enforcement to do something completely different,” Lesch explained, “which is essentially dragnet the entire population.”