The Washington Post reports that a recent poll conducted shows that 3 out of 5 Americans are unable or unwilling to use an infection-alerting app developed by Google and Apple. About 1 in 6 adults can't use the app because they don't own a smartphone -- with the lowest ownership levels for those 65 and older. People with smartphones evenly split between those willing versus unwilling to use such an app. more
Huawei is the strong favorite of Canadian network builders, for good products and extraordinary support. It displaced the incumbents at Bell Canada years ago and has a joint "Living Lab" in Vancouver with Telus. Huawei had already won the 5G contracts. It has a thousand researchers and spends a quarter billion dollars on Canadian R&D. It was a government decision. more
A new survey of security and IT leaders by csoonline.com sheds light on how organizations across industries are dealing with the COVID-19 crisis, how prepared they were when the pandemic first hit, how vulnerable they are, and what the long-term impact on companies may be. Unsurprisingly, the survey found there has been an increased number of employees working from home. more
Surveillance capitalism monetizes private data that it collects without consent of the individuals concerned, data to analyze and sell to advertisers and opinion-makers. There was always an intricate relationship between governments and surveillance capitalists. Governments have the duty to protect their citizens from the excesses of surveillance capitalism. On the other hand, governments use that data, and surveillance capitalism's services and techniques. more
Four years ago, progressive intergovernmental organizations like the European Union became increasingly concerned about the proliferation of hate speech on social media. They adopted legal mechanisms for removing Twitter accounts like Donald Trump's. The provisions were directed at Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. In June of 2016, a "deconstruction" of these mechanisms was presented to one of the principal global industry standards bodies with a proposal to develop new protocols to rapidly remove such accounts. more
United States Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass) introduced a bill that would require that the FCC create a new National Broadband Plan by July 2021. This plan would lay out the national goals needed for broadband going forward and also provide an update on how the COVID-19 crisis has impacted Internet access. I am not a big fan of the concept of a national plan for many reasons. more
Over the past three years, Trump and his followers around Washington have begun to erect the equivalent of his Southern Border Wall around the nation's information network infrastructure - especially for 5G. The tactics are similar - keep out foreign invaders who are virtually sneaking across the borders to steal the nation's information resources and controlling our internet things. The tactics and mantras are almost identical. more
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the rapid migration of the world's workforce and consumer services to virtual spaces, has amplified the Internet governance and policy issues including infrastructure, access, exponential instances of fraud and abuse, global cooperation and data privacy, to name but a few. The need for practical, scalable and efficient solutions has risen dramatically. more
It's been clear for years that IoT companies gather a large amount of data from customers. Everything from a smart thermometer to your new car gathers and reports data back to the cloud. California has tried to tackle customer data privacy through the California Consumer Privacy Act that went into effect on January 1. Web companies must provide California consumers the ability to opt-out from having their personal information sold to others. more
It is not surprising that the phase 1 review of domain name rights protection mechanisms is delayed, but it is a bit of a surprise that in responding to a question posed in 2020, business executives and their lawyers replied with answers first offered and rejected five years earlier. In that time before COVID-19, the launch of the Vox Populi Registry and its dotSucks domain names drew quite a lot of attention. more
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