AT&T wants $139 a month, or your privacy, for superfast Internet

[Note:  This item comes from friend Ed DeWath.  DLH]

Date: March 31, 2015 at 10:57:19 EDT
From: Edward DeWath <dewath@prodigy.net>
To: Hendricks Dewayne <wa8dzp@gmail.com>
Subject: AT&T wants $139 a month, or your privacy, for superfast Internet

AT&T wants $139 a month, or your privacy, for superfast Internet
By Benny Evangelista
Mar 30 2015
<http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/AT-T-wants-139-a-month-or-your-privacy-for-6168986.php>

AT&T believes Bay Area customers are ready to pay for faster Internet service — whether it’s with their wallet or their privacy.

On Monday, Cupertino became the first West Coast city to offer AT&T’s GigaPower, which promises Internet speeds so fast customers can download 25 songs in less than a second.

But that speed comes at a price: $139 a month, or $110 for those who allow AT&T to monitor their browsing habits.

With its Internet Preferences program, AT&T hopes to turn customer data into extra revenue. The company plans to compile the information about online activity — what users are Googling, which sites they favor, and what products they click on — to sell higher-priced personalized advertisements.

The pricing strategy is an interesting new twist on advertising that pits AT&T against free Internet services like Google and Facebook, which also serve customized ads based on users online activities.

But AT&T’s model has alarmed privacy-rights advocates because the Internet Preferences program monitors all online activity — not just activity on a search engine or social network.

“The idea that your Internet service provider is going to be spying on the contents of your traffic, even in an automated way, is very disconcerting,” said Jeremy Gillula, staff technologist with the San Francisco digital-rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“What if data about your browsing history gets out?” he said. “What if there’s a data breach?”

GigaPower relies on fiber-optic cables, thin strands of glass that carry data at faster speeds than older copper-wire networks. AT&T is adding this higher level of service to its selection of U-verse Internet, TV and voice services (all three cost $180 a month for those willing to part with their data, and $209 a month for those gun-shy about their browser history).

AT&T hopes to court customers who have a need for speed such as online gamers and those who use video-chat services such as Skype.

AT&T is also racing against fiber-optic competitors such as Google to roll out GigaPower, which is now in six markets in Texas, Missouri and North Carolina, with plans to expand to 10 other markets in the coming months.

The company last week touted that it has invested more than $2.2 billion in the last three years on its network in just the Bay Area.

At a news conference, Cupertino Mayor Rod Sinks said he is proud his city became the first community west of Kansas City to have GigaPower, putting it on par with other high-speed cities like Seoul and Stockholm.

“If you think about remote learning, if you think about tele-medicine, if you think about entertainment, a faster Internet is essential to being competitive in the future,” Sinks said.

Cupertino streamlined its permit process to hasten installation of GigaPower equipment. AT&T installed equipment that could reach thousands of homes in the city, but only began taking orders for the service Monday morning and had yet to sign up any local customers. AT&T executives would not say which area cities are next in line.

With GigaPower, AT&T can monitor traffic to determine what type of specific ads to serve individual customers, and then charge advertisers to reach those customers.

For example, if a customer browses a car dealership site, AT&T would know to pop an auto manufacturer’s ad onto their screens — an arrangement that could prove lucrative for AT&T.

Terry Stenzel, AT&T’s Northern California vice president and general manager, said the company can use those ads to help keep down the price of its service. He also said that all browsing data are kept in-house and that AT&T will not sell customers’ information, including credit card information, to any third-party company.

“I love the fact that if I’m going to go online and use different sites that AT&T knows what I’m doing and can save me money by sending me coupons and making recommendations based on what I have done in the past,” he said.

Dan Marcec, spokesman for online advertising research firm eMarketer, said customers might not have a problem trading their privacy for discounts and coupons.

[snip]

HBO, Showtime reportedly want exemptions from Internet data caps

HBO, Showtime reportedly want exemptions from Internet data caps
Special treatment for streaming video risky because of net neutrality rules.
By Jon Brodkin
Mar 19 2015
<http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/03/hbo-showtime-reportedly-want-exemptions-from-internet-data-caps/>

HBO, Showtime, and Sony reportedly want special treatment from Internet service providers to avoid congestion and data caps for their online streaming services.

The Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous sources, reported today that the companies want their online TV offerings to be treated as “managed” services.

“[I]instead of putting their Web traffic on the public Internet’s main thoroughfare, they want to be in a separate lane that would ensure their content gets special treatment,” the Journal wrote. “In effect, that would move them away from the congestion of the Internet, which they fear will only get worse as more people opt to stream movies and TV shows on the Web. The other benefit: a separate lane would be exempt from monthly data-usage thresholds operators enforce for public Internet traffic, saving customers from the surcharges that can kick in if they binge on too many episodes of ‘Game of Thrones’ or ‘Homeland.'”

The Journal suggested that broadband providers could package online TV services with broadband plans and receive a cut of the online video providers’ subscription revenue.

There are at least two problems: Internet service providers may not want to give this kind of special treatment to online streaming services that could compete against their cable TV offerings. (Comcast has been slow to authenticate HBO Go on certain streaming devices.) Secondly, such special treatment could be prevented by the Federal Communications Commission under its new net neutrality rules, which prevent prioritization in exchange for payment.

The FCC did not issue a specific rule banning data caps or exemptions to data caps, but claims the authority to intervene if data caps are used in a way that harms competitors. Internet service providers who hand out exemptions to some services but not others could be accused of favoring partners in exchange for payment instead of acting as a neutral conduit.

The “separate lane” the providers reportedly want would face a different question under net neutrality. Internet service providers aren’t supposed to favor specific online services in exchange for payment but there is an exception for so-called “Non-Broadband Internet Access Service Data Services,” also known as “specialized” or managed services.

These include services that do not travel over the public Internet, like the Internet providers’ own voice and IP video offerings, or heart monitoring services and energy consumption sensors. The FCC doesn’t specifically endorse or reject what HBO, Showtime, and Sony apparently want, but the commission could be skeptical of the proposed “separate lane.”

“The Commission expressly reserves the authority to take action if a service is, in fact, providing the functional equivalent of broadband Internet access service or is being used to evade the open Internet rules,” the FCC’s order says. “The Commission will vigilantly watch for such abuse, and its actions will be aided by the existing transparency requirement that non-broadband Internet access service data services be disclosed.”

Specialized services that harm over-the-top (i.e. over-the-Internet) services could receive special scrutiny. “[I]f the Commission determines that these types of service offerings are undermining investment, innovation, competition, and end-user benefits, we will similarly take appropriate action,” the FCC wrote. “We are especially concerned that over-the-top services offered over the Internet are not impeded in their ability to compete with other data services.”

[snip]

New tactic in war on net neutrality: Strip FCC of enforcement funding

New tactic in war on net neutrality: Strip FCC of enforcement funding
FCC Republican asks Congress to slash his agency’s budget request.
By Jon Brodkin
Mar 24 2015
<http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/03/new-tactic-in-war-on-net-neutrality-strip-fcc-of-enforcement-funding/>

After losing the battle against net neutrality rules at the Federal Communications Commission, FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai has taken his fight to Congress. Today, Pai asked the House of Representatives to strip the FCC of funding it needs to enforce net neutrality rules.

“Congress should forbid the Commission from using any appropriated funds to implement or enforce the plan the FCC just adopted to regulate the Internet,” Pai said in prepared statements for an FCC budget hearing. “Not only is this plan bad policy; absent outside intervention, the Commission will expend substantial resources implementing and enforcing regulations that are wasteful, unnecessary, and affirmatively detrimental to the American public.”

Pai is one of two Republicans on the FCC. The three-member Democratic majority voted in favor of the net neutrality order. The decision reclassified broadband as a common carrier service and imposed net neutrality rules that prevent Internet service providers from blocking or throttling content or prioritizing content in exchange for payment.

“This is a costly endeavor for the agency, one that will end the permissionless innovation that has spurred the Internet’s explosive growth up until today,” Pai said, going on to call it a “lose-lose proposition for companies and consumers.”

Wheeler, who also testified at the hearing, defended the rules. Responding to claims that net neutrality rules don’t address any actual behavior by ISPs, Wheeler pointed out that Comcast was caught interfering with BitTorrent traffic in 2007 and that Verizon last year planned to throttle its users who have unlimited 4G data plans until Wheeler objected.

The FCC’s budget request is appropriate, Wheeler also said.

“Since 1994, our financial return to the government has equaled 13 times our combined operational costs,” he said. “For every dollar generated by the FCC, our agency uses only eight cents for its operations.”

Wheeler described how the latest spectrum auction raised $41 billion, including $20 billion to reduce the country’s deficit and billions to fund a nationwide public safety communications network.

“To build on this progress, and fulfill our statutory responsibilities, the Commission is requesting $388 million in general spending authority derived from Section 9 regulatory fees for our overall non-auction costs, up from $339.8 million in FY 2015,” Wheeler said. “In addition, we are requesting an auctions cap of $117 million, an $11 million increase from last year, as well as the transfer of $25 million from the Universal Service Fund (USF) to cover our costs for that program. These are well-considered requests that reflect necessary operational demands and the unique circumstances of this budget cycle.”

The fate of the budget request is still up in the air, but Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R-SD) last week said it “raises eyebrows, particularly when American households continue to do more with less in this stagnant economy.”

Hard problems: What can we do with Bitcoin?

Hard problems: What can we do with Bitcoin?
By Pat M. Tomaino
Mar 29 2015
<https://medium.com/@RadioOpenSource/hard-problems-what-can-we-do-with-bitcoin-f9e45f58baee>

On October 31, 2008 — one month after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt — a shadowy avatar called Satoshi Nakamoto uploaded a white paper that read as a response to the financial crisis unfolding around the world. The paper described Bitcoin, the world’s first peer-to-peer digital currency.

For a piece of technical writing, it had a rather lofty vision: You, the user, mint digital money with your computer, then use it to trade and store wealth like a collection of mp3’s. In doing so, help build an alternative to the Federal Reserve, the banking system, and maybe the idea of financial trust itself — in other words, an alternative to the edifice that had just collapsed.

As Barack Obama figured out where to inject the second half of TARP bailout funds in early 2009, Nakamoto released some software and taught the worldhow to mine Bitcoin, deputizing millions of un-central bankers.

If this video’s cartoony cheer served only to taunt your lack of understanding, you’re not alone. Digital currencies can be complicated!

Bitcoin may only seem so complicated, though, because we don’t think much about the way Janet Yellen makes money. The system we have, with centralized currencies zooming around a system of fractional-reserve lending, is another complex affair. It’s also the beast that brought you the Depression, the dot-com crash, the credit crunch, and most of The Way Things Are.

It seems Satoshi Nakamoto was responding to that history and to his or her troubled times. Look at the Genesis Block of code that the founder mined to get the moneyball rolling, and you’ll get an idea of the scope of his or her ambition. Buried in the hexadecimal below is January 3, 2009’s Times of London headline: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”

Clearly, Bitcoin is aiming at some big frustrations and problems in our financial system. My question, though, is: what problems could Bitcoin actually solve?

At its most basic level, Bitcoin is made of problem-solving. Hearty souls armed with server stacks mine the stuff by doing one particularly hard sum billions of times per second.

This week on the radio, we chased the bigger economic and social problems in Nakamoto’s newspaper. Could Bitcoin make life in a global economy easier, fairer, more humane? Or would it be just another financial innovation pushing us farther from the good life and deeper into a culture of money?

[snip]

Access denied: Reporters say federal officials, data increasingly off limits

Access denied: Reporters say federal officials, data increasingly off limits
By Paul Farhi
Mar 30 2015
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/access-denied-reporters-say-federal-officials-data-increasingly-off-limits/2015/03/30/935b4962-c04b-11e4-ad5c-3b8ce89f1b89_story.html>

Stacey Singer, a health reporter for the Palm Beach Post in Florida, was perusing a medical journal in 2012 when she came across something startling: a federal epidemiologist’s report about a tuberculosis outbreak in the Jacksonville area. Singer promptly began pursuing the story.

But when she started seeking official comment about the little-reported outbreak, the doors began closing. County health officials referred her to the state health department. State officials referred her to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even though the CDC’s own expert had written the investigative report, the agency’s press office declined to let Singer speak with him. A spokesman told her it was a local matter and sent her back to the state office in Tallahassee.

Through public records requests, Singer eventually was able to piece together the story of a contagion that had caused 13 deaths and 99 illnesses — the worst the CDC had found in 20 years.

“It’s really expensive to fight this hard” for public information, said Singer, now an editorial writer at the newspaper. She suspects that officials were slow to respond because news of the TB outbreak might have harmed Florida’s tourism industry. “They know that to delay is to deny. . . . They know we have to move on to other stories.”

The stories aren’t always as consequential or as dramatic as a TB outbreak, but Singer’s experience is shared by virtually every journalist on the government beat, from the White House on down. They can recite tales with similar outlines: An agency spokesman — frequently a political appointee — rejects the reporter’s request for interviews, offers partial or nonresponsive replies, or delays responding at all until after the journalist’s deadline has passed.

Interview requests that are granted are closely monitored, reporters say, with a press “minder” sitting in. Some agencies require reporters to pose their questions by e-mail, a tactic that enables officials to carefully craft and vet their replies. 

Tensions between reporters and public information officers — “hacks and flacks” in the vernacular — aren’t new, of course. Reporters have always wanted more information than government officials have been willing or able to give.

But journalists say the lid has grown tighter under the Obama administration, whose chief executive promised in 2009 to bring “an unprecedented level of openness” to the federal government.

The frustrations boiled over last summer in a letter to President Obama signed by 38 organizations representing journalists and press-freedom advocates. The letter decried “politically driven suppression of news and information about federal agencies” by spokesmen. “We consider these restrictions a form of censorship — an attempt to control what the public is allowed to see and hear,” the groups wrote.

They asked for “a clear directive” from Obama “telling federal employees they’re not only free to answer questions from reporters and the public, but actually encouraged to do so.”

Obama hasn’t acted on the suggestion. But his press secretary, Josh Earnest, defended the president’s record, noting in a letter to the groups that, among other things, the administration has processed a record number of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, established more protection for whistleblowers and posted White House visitor logs for the first time.

“While there is more work to do, the White House and federal agencies are far more accessible and accountable than ever before,” Earnest wrote.

In fact, most federal agencies get subpar grades on one measure of openness: their responsiveness to FOIA requests, which enable reporters and ordinary citizens to collect government records. Eight of the 15 agencies that get the most FOIA requests received a D grade for their compliance, according to a review this month by the nonprofit Center for Effective Government.

[snip]

Re: Robert Reich: In Our Horrifying Future, Very Few People Will Have Work or Make Money

[Note:  This comment comes from a reader of Dave Farber’s IP List.  DLH]

From: John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>
Date: Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Subject: Re Robert Reich: In Our Horrifying Future, Very Few People Will Have Work or Make Money
To: dave@farber.net

Reich had to explicitly tell us it’s “Horrifying”, because the
headline “In Our Future, Very Few People Will Have Work or Make Money”
is not actually scary.  It describes a post-scarcity world that
humankind has climbed toward for thousands of years.

Reich’s gloomy science fiction isn’t as much fun to read as Cory
Doctorow’s.  Cory has covered the same topics in multiple novels,
including Makers, where the main characters are rural nerds at the
heart of a new economy of 3d-printable designs, and in Down and Out in
the Magic Kingdom, in which work is extinct, a reputation system
informs social relationships, and clans of hobbyists take
responsibility for major attractions like Disneyland to keep them
running and improving despite nobody getting paid.

Cory is no economist, but economists write a lot of fiction too.

Oh, and Cory’s walking his talk.  He’s making a good living by writing
novels and giving them away for free over the Internet.  Why?
“Because my problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.”  Here’s Makers:

<http://craphound.com/makers/download/>

and here’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom:

<http://craphound.com/down/download/>

You’ll get a brief rant and a CC-licensed, DRM-free, thought-
provoking, AND entertaining ebook in your favorite format.

John Gilmore

PS: I’m not just speaking from fictional experience.  Years ago I
thought about how to make a living in a post-scarcity economy, then
debugged my ideas in real life.  In 1989 I cofounded a company that
wrote free software, gave the software away for free copying under the
GNU General Public License, and sold live human support for it, to the
small fraction of users who wanted support.  What others called
piracy, we called distribution!  We also quipped that we made free
software affordable.  Every big company we cold-called to sell support
to WAS ALREADY USING OUR SOFTWARE.  Many of them depended deeply on it
and were happy to hire us to make it do exactly what they wanted it
to.  We saved Sony a year in developing the PlayStation, for example.
We kept Cisco products coming out ahead of competitors by making sure
they didn’t get slowed down by toolchain bugs.  We were profitable
immediately and stayed that way, since we had no money to lose: we
started it with $15,000 and grew for 6 years before taking outside
investment.  After 10 years, Red Hat bought our company for a billion
dollars’ worth of stock, adopted our business model, and ran with it.
They now have more than $1B in annual sales, net income of $180M, and
a $14B market capitalization.  To make a good living when copying
inventions is cheap and easy, create inventions — not copies.  Or as
Chuck D said, “Anybody can make a copy of my last album.  Only I can
make a copy of my NEXT album.”

Robert Reich: In Our Horrifying Future, Very Few People Will Have Work or Make Money
Think you’re safe because you’re a professional? Think again. 
By Robert Reich
Mar 17 2015
<http://www.alternet.org/robert-reich-our-horrifying-future-very-few-people-will-have-work-or-make-money>

Macquarie pays $15m to settle SEC charges

[Note:  This item comes from friend David Rosenthal.  David’s comment:’Commit fraud, get wrist slapped’.  DLH]

Macquarie pays $15m to settle SEC charges
By Ben McLannahan in New York and Gina Chon in Washington
Mar 27 2015
<http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7ae959fa-d496-11e4-9bfe-00144feab7de.html>

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Macquarie Capital with backing a US share-sale by a Chinese coalminer, even after obtaining a report showing that the miner was an empty shell without any income-producing assets.

The SEC on Friday said that the US arm of the Australian investment bank had agreed to settle the charges by paying $15m, and separately covering the cost of setting up a fund to compensate investors who lost out as shares in Puda Coal plummeted from more than $12 in 2010 to less than one cent.

The collapse came after it emerged that Puda’s chairman, Ming Zhao, had transferred ownership to himself of the company’s only asset, a Shanxi-based coal mine, and then sold it on. As a result, Puda no longer had any sources of revenue.

The SEC found that the transfer had been uncovered by Kroll, a security firm that Macquarie hired to do due diligence on Puda before a secondary offering of shares in 2010. Yet Macquarie went ahead with the offer anyway, endorsing audited statements that claimed Puda had net assets of $84m at the end of 2009.

The underwriter failed in its role as a “critical gatekeeper . . . relied upon by the investing public to ferret out the essential facts and address potential inaccuracies before marketing a public stock offering,” said Andrew Calamari, director of the SEC’s regional office in New York.

Puda Coal was one of many Chinese companies that went public in the US but was forced to delist after accounting irregularities were discovered. Since a wave of such cases began in 2010, the SEC has paid closer attention to due diligence problems in China that could affect investors in US securities.

In February, the Chinese units of the Big Four global auditing firms agreed to pay $2m for failing to produce documents for companies being investigated for accounting fraud, sparing the auditors from a six-month work ban imposed by a US judge.

In a statement on Friday’s settlement with the SEC, Macquarie said that it “takes its compliance and regulatory obligations seriously and has worked with the SEC to provide relevant information”. It noted that it had not admitted nor denied the SEC’s allegations.

[snip]

The Price That You Pay for Rocking the Boat

Note:  This item comes from friend Scott Bradner.  DLH]

The Price That You Pay for Rocking the Boat
By Rep. Alan Grayson
Mar 27 2015
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-alan-grayson/aaron-swartz-killswitch_b_6957576.html>

Last month, I gave this tribute to Aaron Swartz, an internet activist, when I hosted a special Capitol Hill showing of the documentary Killswitch. Aaron was targeted for prosecution for his political views and, facing decades in prison, he killed himself. The documentary not only demonstrates how modern technology threatens our privacy and freedom, but it also recognizes the sacrifices that Aaron Swartz and Edward Snowden made on behalf of those fundamental principles. Aaron used to work for me. So when I introduced the film, I had a few personal things to say:

I’d like to begin by sharing my war experience with you. I remember when I was under fire … Confederate fire. And Oliver Wendell Homes turned to me, and he said to me, “Get down, you fool.”

I’m sorry, no, that wasn’t me; that was actually Abraham Lincoln. I’ll confess: I’m not Abraham Lincoln, nor am I Bill O’Reilly. But the nice thing about living at this point in time, in the early 21st century, is that you can actually check my story, right? You can go on the Internet, and find out whether Oliver Wendell Holmes actually ever said that to me. (By the way, he did say it to Lincoln.) 

We need to do what we can to preserve that freedom, the freedom to find things out. The freedom to have that magical machine that people started to write about in the mid-20th century, that magical computer where you could ask any question you wanted, and out came the answer. 

That’s a magnificent accomplishment for humanity. But there is another even more important, magnificent accomplishment, which is that the Internet lets us find each other. Not just find out facts, not just find out numbers, but find other spirits, other souls who, in some way that matters to us, are like us. Kindred spirits. That’s a space humanity has created for itself now, that never existed before. It lets you connect with somebody in Bombay, or Tokyo, on very deep levels, when just a short time ago, they were not even a part of your imagination. And that’s something that we have to work hard to protect, because it will always be the case that selfish interests — whether it’s multinational corporations, the military-industrial complex, the spying-industrial complex, whoever it might be — they will try to take that freedom away from us. It’s happening right now. That’s what you’re about to see [in this documentary]. 

Now, we’re going to hear about two people. I never met Edward Snowden, but I did know quite a bit about Aaron Swartz. In fact, he worked for me, for a period of time, a few years ago. And he was brilliant, as you’ll see for yourself. I’m sure that whatever this film may say about him, it can barely do justice to what a special human being he was.

There were a couple of things about Aaron that, I have to tell you honestly, I found disconcerting. One was that Aaron would always come up with better assignments than any assignments that I could come up with. I’d tell Aaron, “Would you please do this?” And Aaron would say, “Well, sure, but do you mind if I also do that?” And always, ‘that’ turned out to be much more important than ‘this.’ Every single time. 

Another interesting thing that disturbed me about Aaron was that he really got things done. Now here, in Washington D.C., that’s a lost art. People really don’t know how to do that anymore. Time after time, after time, we wait ’til the very last minute, and we somehow manage, often but not always, to somehow get through it, without actually accomplishing anything, but actually just barely avoiding disaster. Aaron wasn’t like that at all. Aaron would think of this amazing thing — I was stunned by his audacity that he’d even think of it — and then a few weeks later, it’d be done. He was magnificent that way.

And over time I realized that my reluctance that I had, my frustration that I couldn’t give him assignments that were better than what he’d come up himself, it really reflected more on me than on him. So I stopped thinking about it, entirely.

[snip]

How Facebook Will Build the Connected World

How Facebook Will Build the Connected World
Our plan has three parts: planetary connectivity, artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
By Mike Schroepfer
Mar 26 2015
<https://medium.com/backchannel/how-facebook-will-build-the-connected-world-1ffe485d8352>

This is drawn from Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer’s second-day keynote speech for the Facebook F8 Developer’s Conference

Every generation of technology changes the way we connect with people.

A hundred fifty years ago, it took ten days to send a message from New York to California by Pony Express. With the invention of the telegraph, you could send the same message instantly. When the telephone arrived, text gave way to voice. And today, with just your mobile phone, you can video chat with someone on the other side of the world.

Over time, the trend is clear: connecting becomes faster, more efficient, more immersive. And with each invention, technology’s capacity to serve society has taken a giant leap forward. As the world has become more connected, people have gotten access to new information and opportunities.

It’s tempting to see progress as inevitable. But in every era of innovation, scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs had to confront new bottlenecks — solving the technical problems that held us back from connecting in better ways. Today, we’re about to enter a new era in connection, but to get there we need to solve new challenges. At Facebook, we’re focused on three big bottlenecks to the future.

The first is planetary connectivity.

Right now, only a third of the world is connected to the internet. To connect everyone, we have to build infrastructure at planetary scale — and find new ways to bring people online.

Together with hundreds of companies, we’re working on the Open Compute Project to build data center, network, and hardware designs that are scalable, efficient, and sustainable. We’re also developing radical new infrastructure to connect people living in some of the most inaccessible areas on Earth. Today, we announced the first successful test flight of our UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) platform, which engineers at Facebook’s Connectivity Lab will deploy to connect people in remote communities.

It’s our hope that this platform — and others developed by the Connectivity Labteam — will provide new, more cost-effective solutions for our operator partners around the world. As with the Open Compute Project, we want to work with the broader community to accelerate the pace of innovation.

True global connectivity is an incredibly hard engineering challenge, but one we have to solve to make the next generation of technology more inclusive than the last.

Our second focus is building intuitive interfaces and systems that are simple and scalable, with the aid of artificial intelligence.

AI can help people connect with the things that matter to them, but it requires a new kind of machine intelligence that can understand context.

With the help of our world-class research team, we’re building these systems. We recently developed an AI that could identify 487 different categories of sports. We tested it on some obscure video footage and it worked. Who knew that “underwater hockey” is a real thing?

We’ve also developed an exciting new technology called Memory Networks, which adds a kind of short-term memory to the convolutional neural networks that underpin our deep learning systems. This allows them to understand language more deeply than ever before, and answer relatively complex questions about a text that’s never been seen before. Here’s the system being demonstrated.

[snip]

Trans-Pacific Partnership Seen as Door for Foreign Suits Against U.S.

Trans-Pacific Partnership Seen as Door for Foreign Suits Against U.S.
By JONATHAN WEISMAN
Mar 25 2015
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/business/trans-pacific-partnership-seen-as-door-for-foreign-suits-against-us.html>

WASHINGTON — An ambitious 12-nation trade accord pushed by President Obama would allow foreign corporations to sue the United States government for actions that undermine their investment “expectations” and hurt their business, according to a classified document.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership — a cornerstone of Mr. Obama’s remaining economic agenda — would grant broad powers to multinational companies operating in North America, South America and Asia. Under the accord, still under negotiation but nearing completion, companies and investors would be empowered to challenge regulations, rules, government actions and court rulings — federal, state or local — before tribunals organized under the World Bank or the United Nations.

Backers of the emerging trade accord, which is supported by a wide variety of business groups and favored by most Republicans, say that it is in line with previous agreements that contain similar provisions. But critics, including many Democrats in Congress, argue that the planned deal widens the opening for multinationals to sue in the United States and elsewhere, giving greater priority to protecting corporate interests than promoting free trade and competition that benefits consumers.

The chapter in the draft of the trade deal, dated Jan. 20, 2015, and obtained by The New York Times in collaboration with the group WikiLeaks, is certain to kindle opposition from both the political left and the right. The sensitivity of the issue is reflected in the fact that the cover mandates that the chapter not be declassified until four years after the Trans-Pacific Partnership comes into force or trade negotiations end, should the agreement fail.

Conservatives are likely to be incensed that even local policy changes could send the government to a United Nations-sanctioned tribunal. On the left, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, law professors and a host of liberal activists have expressed fears the provisions would infringe on United States sovereignty and impinge on government regulation involving businesses in banking, tobacco, pharmaceuticals and other sectors.

Members of Congress have been reviewing the secret document in secure reading rooms, but this is the first disclosure to the public since an early version leaked in 2012.

“This is really troubling,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the Senate’s No. 3 Democrat. “It seems to indicate that savvy, deep-pocketed foreign conglomerates could challenge a broad range of laws we pass at every level of government, such as made-in-America laws or anti-tobacco laws. I think people on both sides of the aisle will have trouble with this.”

The United States Trade Representative’s Office dismissed such concerns as overblown. Administration officials said opponents were using hypothetical cases to stoke irrational fear when an actual record exists that should soothe worries.

Such “Investor-State Dispute Settlement” accords exist already in more than 3,000 trade agreements across the globe. The United States is party to 51, including the North American Free Trade Agreement. Administration officials say they level the playing field for American companies doing business abroad, protect property from government seizure and ensure access to international justice.

But the limited use of trade tribunals, critics argue, is because companies in those countries do not have the size, legal budgets and market power to come after governments in the United States. The Trans-Pacific Partnership could change all that, they say. The agreement would expand that authority to investors in countries as wealthy as Japan and Australia, with sophisticated companies deeply invested in the United States.

“U.S.T.R. will say the U.S. has never lost a case, but you’re going to see a lot more challenges in the future,” said Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio. “There’s a huge pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for these companies.”

One 1999 case gives ammunition to both sides of the debate. Back then, California banned the chemical MTBE from the state’s gasoline, citing the damage it was doing to its water supply. The Canadian company Methanex Corporation sued for $970 million under Nafta, claiming damages on future profits. The case stretched to 2005, when the tribunal finally dismissed all claims.

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