A new study confirms what you might have expected: US customers are getting hosed when it comes to broadband speeds and prices. The annoying trend holds true in both wired and wireless service. In the Cost of Connectivity 2013 report being released today by the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, researchers note that "in larger US cities, we continue to observe higher prices for slower speeds. … In the US for example, the best deal for a 150Mbps home broadband connection from cable and phone companies is $130/month, offered by Verizon FiOS in limited parts of New York City. By contrast, the international cities we surveyed offer comparable speeds for $77 or less per month, with most coming in at about $50/month. When it comes to mobile broadband, the cheapest price for around 2GB of data in the US ($30/month from T-Mobile) is twice as much as what users in London pay ($15/month from T-Mobile). It costs more to purchase 2GB of data in a US city than it does in any of the cities surveyed in Europe." The analysis compares costs across countries by using purchasing power parity exchange rates.
Are US Broadband Customers Bein Gouged?
From Ars Technica:
Firefox Add-on Helps Users Watch the Watchers
From Lightbeam:
Using interactive visualizations, Lightbeam enables you to see the first and third party sites you interact with on the Web. As you browse, Lightbeam reveals the full depth of the Web today, including parts that are not transparent to the average user. Using three distinct interactive graphic representations — Graph, Clock and List — Lightbeam enables you to examine individual third parties over time and space, identify where they connect to your online activity and provides ways for you to engage with this unique view of the Web.
NSA Website Bumped Offline By Alleged DDoS Attack
What goes around comes around. From NBC:
The official website of the National Security Agency, NSA.gov, is offline and has been for several hours. Not only that, but the rumor being jubilantly spread around the net is that it is a deliberate denial-of-service attack. Downtime-tracking service Isitdownrightnow.com reports that the site has been unavailable since about 2 p.m. ET.
Large government webpages don't tend to go down for hours for no reason, but it has not been confirmed yet whether this is an attack or simply a technical problem.
Chrome Auto-Complete May Be Undermining Your Data Security
From Yoast:
Today at Pubcon Matt Cutts of Google once again promoted the use of autocomplete-type, a new property for web forms that works in Chrome (and possibly other browsers, I haven’t checked). Google first introduced it back in January 2012 in this post. I wanted to do this quick post to tell you to turn off autocomplete in your browser.
This test URL will show you why quicker than I can explain it in words. Please try it and come back. If you’re using autocomplete to, for instance, sign up for an email newsletter, you might have just provided that website with your full address and/or (even worse) your credit card details too.
Court Rules that Constitutional Protections Do Not Apply to "Hackers"
Are you keeping up with today's newspeak? From Digitalbond:
The US District Court for the State of Idaho ruled that an ICS product developer’s computer could be seized without him being notified or even heard from in court primarily because he states on his web site “we like hacking things and don’t want to stop”. . . .
Apple to Offer iWork Suite for Free on New Macs
From CNET:
Apple showed off revamped versions of its iLife and iWork apps Tuesday at its event in San Francisco. Both suites of apps, which include Garageband, iPhoto and Pages, are now free with any Mac computer or iOS device purchase. Apple is calling this the biggest update to iWork ever, though some of the changes are subtle. The most notable change, is a brand-new sharing feature that marries iWork on your Mac or iOS devices with the iWork for iCloud beta, Apple's office apps for the Web. You can now start a document or project on one device and pick up where you left off on another. Files that you share via iCloud can be opened by up to 20 people at once and edited in real-time. You can also edit documents from the web, through the iCloud website, which challenge's Google's cloud-based and web-based Google Drive, which offers word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation apps. iWork for iCloud is still in beta and works on Safari, Chrome, and Internet Explorer.
Senate Makes Another Push for Internet Censorship
From Mother Jones:
This summer, when Edward Snowden dropped his bombshell about PRISM, the NSA's vast Internet spying program, the House had recently passed a bill called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). Widely criticized by privacy advocates, CISPA aimed to beef up US cybersecurity by giving tech companies the legal freedom to share even more cyber information with the US government—including the content of Americans' emails, with personal information intact. CISPA supporters, among them big US companies such as Verizon and Comcast, spent 140 times more money on lobbying for the bill than its opponents, according to the Sunlight Foundation. But after Snowden's leaks, public panic over how and why the government uses personal information effectively killed the bill. Now that the dust has settled a bit, NSA director Keith Alexander is publicly asking for the legislation to be re-introduced, and two senators confirmed that they are drafting a new Senate version.
"I am working with Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) on bipartisan legislation to facilitate the sharing of cyber related information among companies and with the government and to provide protection from liability," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told Mother Jones in a statement.With both Democrat and Republican support, we can safely presume this legislation will be doubly bad.
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