News Briefs

Comcast to Buy Time Warner Cable, Making It Largest Cable Provider in U.S.

Comcast has reached an agreement to acquire Time Warner Cable, according to a tweet from CNBC reporter, Dave Faber. The new company, based on the $44 billion purchase, will be by far the largest cable provider in the U.S. with over 33 million subscribers, and is assumed to face tough review from the Federal Communications Commission. more

Audio Recording from the “Power, Privacy, and the Internet” Conference

On October 30 – 31, 2013, The New York Review of Books held a conference called "Power, Privacy, and the Internet," taking a look at the role of the Internet both as a vehicle of political and cultural dissent and, in the hands of the state, as a weapon of repression and control. The recordings from the event have recently been released where listeners can stream or download the audio. more

Turkish Parliament Approves Internet Bill, Lets Government Block Websites, Seize Personal Data

Turkey's Parliament has passed a bill that includes controversial arrangements concerning the protection of online privacy despite concerns raised by the European Union as well as Turkish NGOs and opposition parties, according to a report today by Turkey's Daily News. more

Asia Pac Digital Marketing & gTLD Strategy Congress to Be Held in Hong Kong on May 14-15

The Asia Pac Digital Marketing & gTLD Strategy Congress for first and prospective second round applicants will be held in Hong Kong and timed to take place in conjunction with the International Trademark Associations' (INTA) 136 Annual Conference at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre (HKCEC) starting on May 10. more

Google Spent $7.3 Billion on Data Centers in 2013, Double Its 2012 Spending

Rich Miller reporting in Data Center Knowledge: "Google continues to pump big bucks into its data center operations, investing a massive $7.35 billion in capital expenditures in its Internet infrastructure during 2013. The spending is driven by a massive expansion of Google's global data center network, which represents perhaps the largest construction effort in the history of the data center industry." According to company's reported capital expenditure, total spending adds up to $7.35 billion - more than double the $3.27 billion in CapEx the company reported in 2012. more

Canadian Government Used Airport Wi-Fi to Track Travellers, According to Leaked Snowden Documents

A top secret document retrieved by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden indicates that Canada's electronic spy agency used information from the free internet service at a major Canadian airport to track the wireless devices of thousands of ordinary airline passengers for days after they left the terminal, according to a report from CBC. After reviewing the document, one of Canada's foremost authorities on cyber-security says the clandestine operation by the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) was almost certainly illegal...  more

CENTR: Internet Governance in 2013 and What’s Coming Up in 2014

Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries (CENTR) has published an Issue Paper entitled "Internet Governance Landscape this year and next." The following is a summary from the paper along with links to download the document in full. more

U.S. Cautiously Encourages IANA Reform

Milton Mueller reporting in IGP: "On January 23 Daniel Sepulveda, the State Department's Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy, gave a notable speech in Washington on Internet governance. This is the first US official statement on the topic since the NSA spying scandal broke and altered the landscape. Entitled 'Internet Governance 2020 - Geopolitics and the Future of the Internet,' the speech signaled the Obama administration's openness to reform as long as it is conducted within a multistakeholder framework..." more

A Research Finds Banking Apps Leaking Info Through Phones

A recent research seems to indicate that financial industries should increase the security standards they use for their mobile home banking solutions. IOActive Labs recently performed a black box and static analysis of worldwide mobile home banking apps. The research used iPhone/iPad devices to test a total of 40 home banking apps from the top 60 most influential banks in the world. more

Network Outages Costing Mobile Operators $15B Annually

Sarah Reedy reporting in LightRading: Mobile operators suffer from an average of five network outages or degradations that impact subscribers each year, costing them around $15 billion annually, according to new Heavy Reading research. Put another way, that's about one outage every other month. More than 80 percent of those outages affect just one or a subset of networks or services. more

Kathryn C. Brown Named Internet Society’s New CEO

The Internet Society announced today the appointment of Kathryn C. Brown as its new Chief Executive Officer effective 1 January 2014. Ms. Brown succeeds Lynn St. Amour, who will be stepping down after 15 years with Internet Society. Ms. Brown most recently served as a Senior Advisor at Albright Stonebridge Group, an international consulting firm, and as Senior Vice President, Public Policy and Corporate Responsibility at Verizon. more

UPDATED3rd Digital Marketing & gTLD Strategy Congress

Momentum has released the following announcement regarding its upcoming 3rd Digital Marketing & gTLD Strategy Congress (March 3-4, 2014, The Dream Downtown, New York). more

Australia Aborting Its Ambitious $44 Billion Broadband Project

Rodney S. Tucker reporting in IEEE Spectrum: "In April 2009, Australia's then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, dropped a bombshell on the press and the global technology community: His social democrat Labor administration was going to deliver broadband Internet to every single resident of Australia... So now, after three years of planning and construction, during which workers connected some 210 000 premises (out of an anticipated 13.2 million), Australia's visionary and trailblazing initiative is at a crossroads. The new government plans to deploy fiber only to the premises of new housing developments." more

“African Women to Watch” - Sophia Bekele on Bloomberg TV

In its TV Special program, Bloomberg TV recently featured Sophia Bekele, Founder and Executive Director of DotConnectAfrica Trust along with Juliana Rotich as "two of Africa's leading ladies in the ICT sector" presenting their stories in their prime TV program ,"African Women to Watch". In the interview, Bekele talks about her ICT career journey and focus on helping bridge the "digital divide" that currently exists between Africa and the developed countries. more

Spam-Friendly Registrar ‘Dynamic Dolphin’ Shuttered by ICANN

Neil Schwartzman writes: Brian Krebs is reporting in KrebsOnSecurity that ICANN last week revoked the charter of Dynamic Dolphin, a registrar that has long been closely associated with spam and cybercrime. "The move came almost five years after this reporter asked the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to investigate whether the man at the helm of this registrar was none other than Scottie Richter, an avowed spammer who has settled multi-million-dollar spam lawsuits with Facebook, Microsoft and MySpace over the past decade..." more