Category: Tech

Categories
News Tech

Dance, dance. Revolution?

It’s a new year. If the past is a guide, the goal of getting into shape tops resolutions, including mine. Yet suddenly, going to a gym seems so yesterday. The latest generation of exercise equipment taps into social networking to allow us to exercise with one another from the comfort of our homes.

There’s Peloton, the maker of high-end stationary bikes and cringeworthy commercials, which lets you join a spin class from your study. There’s a smart mirror that brings live fitness classes to your den. It doubles as a full-length mirror; the company suggests you cap the lens when you’re not exercising. Of course, Fitbit figured out several years ago that fitness can be more fun when you challenge friends to join you.

The billions of dollars invested in these and other companies suggest it’s only a matter of time until we all sweat solo, together. Recently, I read a story by Lillian Ross, in The New Yorker, from February 1965 that got me thinking, of all things, about the next big thing: Might all this smart technology get us dancing in our homes?

I don’t mean a dance fitness class or a video game like Dance Dance Revolution. I mean dancing, dancing. Like the jitterbug or tango.

Fifty-four years ago, the Seeburg Corporation sold a coin-operated jukebox called the Seeburg Discotheque. The company marketed the machines, which each held up to 80 records, to taverns. As part of the kit, Seeburg also sold a dance floor at a cost of $70 a square yard.

“We want to bring dancing back to the local tavern, where everybody used to dance in the thirties,” a Seeburg vice president told Ross. “After the war, people started staying home and looking at television, regardless of what it was. Now the wife or girlfriend wants to go out. We give the corner tavern a night club the working man can afford. Five or six beers with the wife. And the fox trot. Or the Frug.”

The article sent me to Google. I had never seen the Frug, which I learned rhymes with rug. Or the Hully-Gully, another of the dances on offer. Here’s a video of the Hully-Gully.

There also was Bossa Nova, cha-cha, and a dance called The Cat. “The secret is noninterrupted music,” a company promotion manager said.

Imagine someone at home nowadays, dancing with an instructor or a partner via a smart studio. Could the combination of fitness and social networking combine into some force that has us frugging (or what have you) with others in the privacy of our homes? Might homes be sold with dance studios, or barres in the gym?

I mused. And then I read a piece about Bernie Sanders, in Politico, that instantly made the thought of all that dancing so real. In November, the Vermont senator attended a banquet with several hundred union members at a hall near the airport in Manchester, N.H. They ate steak and mashed potatoes.

Here’s what happened next:

Then Sanders, after repeating his call for an ‘unprecedented grassroots movement’ and a wholesale transformation of politics in the United States, began bobbing on the dance floor, laughing, clapping and twirling a procession of partners to the sounds of ‘I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch),’ ‘Dancing Queen’ and ‘The Way You Do the Things You Do.’ Channeling the anarchist and civil rights advocate Emma Goldman, the Vermont senator told the crowd, ‘Our revolution includes dancing.’

Might we become a nation of dancing socialists? Could there be a presidential inaugural ball attended by revelers at home? If so, you read it here first.

Categories
Law Tech

Cable competition comes to my block

On a recent visit to a Spectrum cable TV store in Manhattan, I  experienced an emotion that one does not tend to connect with cable TV and internet service: delight.

The price of my service dropped by $10 a month. Besides alerting me to that happy news, the representative sent me home with the latest modem, which she told me can handle the faster internet speeds that Spectrum now delivers in my neighborhood. And she displayed a willingness to accommodate me whether I decided to change (or even abandon) service.

The experience left me feeling as if I had received an unexpected gift. (To be sure, a gift that costs the recipient about $120 a month. A few days later, the reason for the friendliness revealed itself.

It seems the owner of the apartment complex where I live, as part of a push to offer amenities that might lure prospective tenants, had invited Verizon to offer a competing internet service. Contractors for the company scurry throughout the buildings installing equipment that will carry strands of fiber optic cable to each of our apartments.

The left side of the staircase that serves my unit now holds risers for Verizon. The right side houses coaxial cable that belongs to Spectrum. The services parallel each other en route to every unit.

While Verizon is installing the connections, a representative for Spectrum, dressed in a blue polo shirt, is making the rounds, leaving his card at the doors of apartments that have yet to sign up. “Great offer, call me,” the rep jotted on a business card left on a neighbor’s door.

As both the anecdote and economics suggest, when competition arrives, consumers come out winners.

Such competition is a rarity. Just over a third (36%) of urban census blocks in the U.S. had two or more broadband providers at the end of 2015, according to data compiled by the Federal Communications. (The percentage fell to six percent in rural areas.)

As Jonathan Sallet, a former general counsel of the FCC who represented the agency in court battles over broadband policy has observed:

“[W]hen the FCC looked at the use of municipal broadband… it set out evidence showing that the presence of an additional broadband provider pushes down the prices and increases the quality of both new and incumbent providers.

In other words, such competition is ‘win-win.’ It benefits those consumers who switch and even those that do not but who gain from faster download speeds resulting from the incumbent’s response to competitive pressures.”

Sallet notes that in one city, the incumbent cable company reduced its prices when facing the prospect of a new broadband competitor and increased the top speed of its broadband service to 105 megabytes per second (mbps) from 8 mbps.

Though Verizon has yet to connect its service, the prospect of its arrival has spurred Spectrum to lower prices and up its game.

Categories
Tech

Transparency cannot replace net neutrality

Earlier this month, the chief financial officer of Verizon, one of the nation’s largest internet service providers, discussed the build-out of the company’s broadband fiber network to homes.

The network, which goes by the name FiOS, “continues to be a very good product,” Matt Ellis, the CFO, told investors at a conference sponsored by UBS. According to Ellis, consumers who opt out of cable but who subscribe to so-called over-the-top services such as Netflix “want the best broadband experience you can get, and FiOS is the best broadband experience in the marketplace.”

Therein lies the problem with the action led by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to repeal so-called net neutrality rules, which prevent ISPs from blocking, slowing or impeding content from providers they don’t own. The rules, to borrow Ellis’ phrase, help to assure the best broadband experience you can get regardless who owns the content you consume.

As the Republican majority at the FCC sees it, net neutrality constitutes “heavy-handed, utility-style regulation” that depresses investment and innovation.

Rather than order ISPs to keep their networks open – which, by the way, is the whole point of the internet’s decentralized design – the FCC will require ISPs “to disclose information about their practices to consumers, entrepreneurs, and the Commission, including any blocking, throttling, paid prioritization, or affiliated prioritization.”

According to Pai, the market – backed by laws governing competition and consumer protection – will achieve the ends of net neutrality without the need for rules to achieve it.

The evidence suggests otherwise. Most of us connect to the internet through our ISP. And for most of us, the market for ISPs tends to be a monopoly. In the neighborhood where I live, you can choose Spectrum as your ISP. That’s the choice.

Last February, New York’s attorney general accused Spectrum of misleading consumers with promises of speeds for wired internet that, as it happened, were as much as 70 percent slower than promised. The company allegedly charged customers as much as $109.99 per month for premium plans that could not achieve speeds promised by Spectrum in its slower plans.

Consumers knew they were being ripped off. (You can test the speed of your connection.) But acting alone, there was little they could do to compel Spectrum to honor its promise.

Though a class action may force the company to reimburse consumers for the wrong, a rule that required Spectrum to serve customers at speeds the company promised would have allowed them to receive the service they paid for.

In short, all the transparency in the world won’t help if you’re served by a monopoly.

The internet is the infrastructure of our modern age and, for that matter, the medium of our democracy. It resembles the electric grid more than it does the entertainment, sports and social networks that stream across it.

As most consumers know, ISPs can (and do) charge as much for connections as the market will bear. Net neutrality asks in return that they not privilege one stream of content over another.

Categories
Tech

AT&T disregards the end of net neutrality

The U.S. elections of 2016 marked a shift in spending on political advertising as money for ads moved to cable TV and the internet, which allow campaigns to target with precision the audience for their ads and, in the case of the internet. to collect information from supporters.

Spending last year for political ads that appeared on mobile phones, across social networks and in search results grew 789% from 2012, to $1.4 billion, AdAge reported in January. Candidates and their allies spent roughly the same total on cable TV, where spending rose 52% from four years earlier. Purchases of ads on broadcast TV fell 20%, to $4.4 billion, over the same period.

Candidates “are engaging in more internet communications with each passing election, and citizens and civil society organizations are increasingly able to express their views and organize online,” Facebook told the Federal Election Commission in comments filed in November.

The shift points to more than political activity.

The internet is “the common medium,” as Reed Hundt, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, predicted seven years ago that it would become. Forty-three percent of Americans get their news online, up from 38% a year earlier, the Pew Research Center reported in September. The gap between the share of Americans who get their news online as opposed to via TV shrank to seven points in the past year, down from 19 points in 2016.

Thus, the pushback by AT&T against a lawsuit by the Trump administration to block the company’s proposed purchase of Time Warner stands out.

Whatever you think of the merger and regardless (for the moment) of the administration’s motives for opposing it, the consequences for competition will be intensified by developments elsewhere in Washington, where the FCC is moving to scrap rules that prevent internet services providers from blocking or slowing traffic from companies they don’t own.

AT&T is among the world’s largest carriers  of content. Anyone who aims to reach readers, listeners or viewers relies on AT&T, Verizon and other ISPs. The ISPs set the terms of carriage.

Under a proposal likely to be adopted by the FCC this month, ISPs would need only to post their terms of service for all to see. “Individual consumers, not the government, decide what Internet access service best meets their individualized needs,” the FCC says in its proposed order.

But transparency only counts when consumers have a choice. Forty-six million households are served by just one provider of broadband internet, data from the FCC show. (Another 10.6 million households have no broadband service.)

“It’s an ‘open the champagne bottles’ moment for AT&T,” Tim Wu, a professor of law at Columbia who coined the term net neutrality to describe the principle of equal access to the internet, told the Times. “They can just tell people to pony up.”

Pony up is unlikely to be in the public interest, particularly for the internet, which serves all members of society. “Everybody in the internet community was extremely eager to operate under the delusion that government played no role in the growth of the internet,” noted Hundt, who listed some of the ways that government made the internet the common medium that it has become.

The government allowed computers to use the telephone network to connect to the internet for free, he noted. The government did not tax internet commerce and mandated that a portion of revenue from users be redirected to connect all Americans, including those in classrooms and libraries as well as those who live in tribal lands and rural areas.

A common medium is easy to use, reaches all people, fosters economic growth, provides access to the government, is full of news and – in the U.S. at least – needs to be private, Hundt observed.

AT&T is not Netflix, YouTube, Hulu or Facebook, to name several companies that AT&T cites as evidence of competitors who AT&T says are encroaching on its business. We look to those companies for content, but we count on AT&T and its fellow ISPs for connection.

Categories
Law Tech

DOJ endorses net neutrality

The Trump administration is leading a double life when it comes to competition in the market for content that arrives via the internet.

The Department of Justice on Monday sued AT&T and Time Warner to block a proposed merger between the two that the government charges would lessen competition in violation of federal law.

The lawsuit upends a transaction that the companies announced a year ago, when AT&T agreed to pay about $85 billion for Time Warner, which owns CNN, HBO, Turner Sports and other networks.

Jekyll and Hyde?

DOJ contends that the deal, which is riding on regulatory approval, would set back competition and lead to higher prices for consumers.

A day later, the Federal Communications Commission voted to roll back rules that prevent cable companies and other internet service providers from blocking or slowing websites or social networks that do not pay for priority.

“We have one government, but two separate agencies with opposing views,”  Spencer Kurn, an analyst at New Street Research, told the Times. “You’ve got one agency saying that marrying content and distribution results in too much market power, and another agency saying there’s no problem with a distributor favoring their content over someone else’s.”

Net neutrality, as the rules are known, prevents ISPs from prioritizing content from companies they own. The FCC chairman opposes the rules, saying they slow development of broadband networks by lessening the incentive of the companies that own them to add connections.

But the arguments advanced by DOJ in court seem to validate the concerns that net neutrality reflects. A combination of AT&T and Time Warner (the owner of CNN and HBO, among other networks) would give the combined company the ability to throttle programs that someone else owns, leading to higher prices for consumers, DOJ charges.

“After the merger, the merged company would have the power to make its video distributor rivals less competitive by raising their costs, resulting in even higher monthly bills for American families,” the government told the court.

That sounds like a defense of net neutrality.

The rollback at the FCC is a win for AT&T, which is vowing to fight the move by DOJ to block the company’s deal for Time Warner.

Categories
Tech

Uber tries leading with humility in London

Uber is hoping that humility will help in its push to continue operating in London.

The company told members Parliament on Tuesday that it is acting to address concerns over its conduct cited by Transport for London, the city’s transportation agency, which in September revoked Uber’s license to operate because of safety concerns.

“The company accepts that in lots of places it has had the wrong attitude and needs to change,” Andrew Byrne, Uber’s head of public policy, told the House of Commons’ Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee.

The San Francisco-based company is expected to appeal the revocation by Friday, a filing that will permit Uber to continue to do business in London, where an estimated 3.5 million people use the ride-hailing service.

Nearly 855,000 people have signed a petition that asks Mayor Sadiq Khan to reverse the decision, citing Uber’s ridership in London and the roughly 40,000 drivers who would be out of work were Uber to cease operations there.

Khan said last week that an apology by Uber’s chief executive marked a shift in the company’s stance that suggests the parties can resolve their differences without a court battle.

“I always think that the way to respond to differences is constructively, amicably around the table, rather than through litigation,” the mayor told LBC talk radio.

Categories
Tech

Apple TV 4K shows why net neutrality matters

Apple on Tuesday rolled out the latest generation of its set-top box and all I could think of was connectivity.

The device, dubbed Apple TV 4K, will cost $179 and be able to stream to TVs that offer double the vertical resolution and two times the horizontal resolution of high-definition models. It is said to be twice as fast as the version of Apple TV it succeeds, and features software that produces s0-called High Dynamic Range, which reportedly enhances color and contrast.

So far so good. But Apple TV, like all streaming media players, depends on a connection to the internet that in my neighborhood and many others struggles to support speeds that can allow video to stream smoothly.

I am currently able to download from the internet at about 260 megabits per second via my connection to the cable network. (The Federal Communications Commission defines broadband for so-called fixed wireline services as download speeds of 25 mbps and upload speeds of 3 mbps.)

My connection, through Charter Communications, a cable company, slows during periods of peak demand. Which means news and sports streamed at those times or that demand a lot of data – such as a State of the Union address or a Premier League soccer game – can appear with glitches.

Part of the problem ties to a lack of competition in broadband. About one-third (36%) of households in urban areas had access to at least two providers of broadband, as of the end of 2015, data from the FCC shows. (The percentage falls to only 6% in rural areas.) Absent competition, providers lack incentive to up the speeds they offer.

The neighborhood in New York City where I live has one provider. The city is suing Verizon, a rival, for allegedly failing to keep its promise to provide high-speed internet service to every household in the city.

In the meantime, the lack of a competitor leaves many of us with a choice: subscribe to cable for video or cut the cord and put up with video that starts and stops during telecasts that demand a comparatively fast connection in order to stream smoothly.

All of which starts to show why rules of competition in broadband matter. The FCC is expected to vote as soon as October on a proposal to do away protections for so-called net neutrality, which prevents cable companies and other internet service providers from blocking or choking traffic.

The agency’s current chairman opposes net neutrality, which he says is tantamount to regulating the internet. But as Tom Wheeler, his predecessor has noted, net neutrality sets “ground rules for the people who deliver the internet.” Doing away with the rules leaves consumers at risk of their internet service provider favoring content that benefits its business. To their credit (and to protect their businesses), Apple, Facebook and other tech giants have urged the FCC to keep the safeguards in place.

The latest set-top box from Apple suggests the tech industry will continue to improve the experience of watching video. But the promise of those devices will turn on whether the internet speeds up, not slows down.

Categories
Tech

Cyberattack hits worldwide 

Computers in dozens of countries suffered an attack on Friday that bogged down the United Kingdom’s health service and seized machines worldwide.

The attacks, which reportedly originated with a group that calls itself Shadow Brokers, infected computers with malicious code known as Wanna Decryptor that spreads via email, burrows through an opening in Microsoft Windows and takes files hostage in return for ransom.

The group may have obtained the malware last summer in a hack of the U.S. National Security Agency, which developed the code to infect computers in countries such as China, Russia and Iran. “Whoever it is it looks very much like they are taking advantage of the NSA’s tools,” Becky Pinkard, vice president at Digital Shadows, a cyber intelligence firm, told the Financial Times.

The malware struck computers in at 16 hospitals in the U.K., the National Health Service said in a statement, adding that it had no evidence the intruders had obtained medical records. Still, the attack crashed systems and cut off electronic access to patient records. “We’d like to reassure patients that if they need the NHS and it’s an emergency that they should visit A&E or access emergency services in the same way as they normally would and staff will ensure they get the care they need,” said Dr. Anne Rainsberry, incident director at the NHS.

St Bartholomew’s, a hospital in central London, said the attack forced it to cancel appointments and divert patients. “Everything’s getting delayed,” Asif Munaf, a gastroenterologist at Chesterfield hospital, told the Guardian. “Patients who were supposed to go home this afternoon won’t go home until Monday because they now won’t be seen and get a follow-up plan. It’s quite unfortunate for the patients.”

Shadow Brokers has demanded about $300 per computer in ransom (payable in Bitcoin) to remove the malware, which also infected computers in Russia, Ukraine, India, Taiwan, Portugal, Spain and Romania. Companies hit included Telefonica, the Spanish telecommunications giant, and MegaFon, one of Russia’s largest phone companies. Russia’s Interior Ministry said that its computers had also come under attack.

Despite the damage, law enforcement officials in Britain said they are treating the attack as a crime as opposed to an attack by a foreign power. Though Microsoft issued a patch in March that can secure machines against the malware, the Times reports that some organizations, including many hospitals, had yet to update their systems.

Categories
Life Tech

On not surrendering to our smartphones

A cartoon by Benjamin Schwartz in the latest issue of The New Yorker shows Patrick Henry, smartphone in hand, addressing Virginia’s House of Burgesses in 1775. “Give me liberty, or give me just one sec,” he says.

For me the scene summons an essay that Andrew Sullivan published in New York magazine recently that describes how an addiction to the bombardment of news and images that vie for our attention drove him into digital detox. Sullivan achieved renown as a writer and blogger at The Atlantic.com and The Daily Beast before starting “The Dish,” a blog that went on to garner tens of thousands of paying subscribers. The site achieved success, but by Sullivan’s own admission the work took its toll.

“For a decade and a half, I’d been a web obsessive, publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week, and ultimately corralling a team that curated the web every 20 minutes during peak hours,” he writes. “If the internet killed you, I used to joke, then I would be the first to find out.”

All the social media, images and news produce what Sullivan calls “our enslavement to dopamine,” a diagnosis that may resonate with anyone who has been unable to resist checking their phone. Aside from servitude, prolonged use of smartphones can harm your posture and breathing, mess with your vision, hurt your hands and impair your memory, studies show.

Give me liberty, indeed.

Two years ago, I took a summer off from social media to study for the bar exam. Amid the effort, which required willing all my attention to study for hours on end, I felt the burden of distraction fade. I realized it when, after a while, Twitter and Facebook both sent notifications to remind me that I hadn’t visited. One thing social media seems to dislike is our refusing to socialize.

And it wasn’t an age thing. I studied that summer aside millennials who told me of experiencing a similar relief.

That’s not to deny what Sullivan terms “the pleasures of being connected.” If you are someone who, like I do, welcomes a queue at checkout as an excuse to read the news on his or her phone, or who loves tweets like the one below, you know what enjoyment those in-between moments can be.

My freshman year in college, I subscribed by mail to my hometown newspaper. Every few days, a bundle of the papers arrived in brown wrapper. Going to my mailbox, I could not imagine that one day I might carry a computer in my pocket that would allow me to read the news from anywhere in the world. In real time. And to comment on and share it with anyone or with everyone.

Sullivan writes that he fears for the cost of a life lived online more than off. “But of course, as I had discovered in my blogging years, the family that is eating together while simultaneously on their phones is not actually together,” he notes. “You are where your attention is.”

True. Though it can be convenient to blame technology for behavior. In a memoir published recently, Robert Gottlieb, who led a storied career as an editor at The New Yorker, Simon & Schuster, and Knopf, recalls his bookishness. Dwight Garner, who reviewed the book for the Times, wrote:

How bookish was Mr. Gottlieb? At summer camp, as a child, he arranged to have The New York Times delivered to him daily. His family — they lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — read books rather than converse at the dinner table. “Only later did it occur to me that this was not normal,” he writes in “Avid Reader,” his new memoir, “but a symptom of our particular brand of dysfunction.”

Of course, we choose what and whom to pay attention to. A friend told me this week that he deleted the Twitter and Facebook apps on his phone because they had started to cut into his reading.

Mike Murphy recently wrote for Quartz about his decision to stop wearing an Apple Watch after a series of dizzy spells that sent him to see a doctor. The doctor prescribed a vacation without an internet-connected device.

The worrying came from the watch, which sent news alerts, Facebook alerts “or reminders to check-in somewhere or that there was a Starbucks nearby,” Murphy writes. The notifications sent his heart rate skyward. “The Apple Watch is the most anxiety-inducing piece of technology I’ve ever owned,” he says. “It’s a reminder that a worry is like a notification, which left unchecked, can consume you.”

Categories
Tech

Why GoPro needs Karma to take flight

Aerial photography is having a moment.

This Monday, GoPro, a maker of cameras and accessories that allow people to capture themselves surfing, biking, climbing, driving or participating in all sorts of activities (just Google it), will unveil the company’s first drone.

According to the company, the device, named Karma, can maneuver in spaces as tight as the stacks at a library. Karma reportedly can sync with a clip that users attach to their bodies, allowing the drone to follow along without someone needing to operate a controller, which I imagine can be hard to do if you’re descending through the backcountry on a bike.

It’s also a moment for GoPro. The company, which said in May it has sold about 20 million cameras since it began in 2002, has seen the price of its shares slide from a high of $87 two years ago to about $15 lately as investors question whether GoPro can broaden sales of its gear beyond enthusiasts. As Mike Murphy wrote in Quartz last December, “it’s starting to feel as if everyone who wants to record themselves hurtling down mountains, out of planes, and off cliffs already has a GoPro.”

The company agrees. “Our growth historically has largely been fueled by the adoption of our products by people looking to self-capture images of themselves participating in exciting physical activities,” it wrote in its latest annual report. “We believe that our future growth depends not only on continuing to reach and expand this core demographic, but also broadening our user base to include a more diverse group of consumers seeking to capture their daily lives.”

So GoPro needs the drone to succeed. Whatever happens, we should be in for some terrific videos.