On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to adopt Chairman Tom Wheeler's Open Internet proposal. Commissioner Ajut Pai accused those in the majority of turning their back on an open Internet. But an open Internet for whom -- Open for telecommunications companies and service providers to do whatever they want or open for consumers to be protected from abuses that have become all too common?
In my opinion, the FCC's call was the right one. In 2010, approximately one fifth of Internet users supported what has come to be known as Net Neutrality. Despite attempts by some in Congress and most of the telecommunications and service provider industry to paint the subject in political terms, more recent surveys show that Republicans actually support Net Neutrality slightly more than Democrats.
The survey by the University of Delaware's Center for Political Communication shows that 85% of Republicans support an open Internet and that 81% of Democrats also support an open Internet. Where is the controversy here? Verizon, Comcast, and Time Warner keep trying to dress a technical issue in political terms and this time it seems not to be working.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler says that the new policy means that nobody will be able to limit free and open access to the Internet. That includes, in Wheeler's words, both government and corporations. And he says that "the landmark open Internet protections" adopted by the FCC should reassure consumers, businesses, and investors.
The new rules explicitly forbid blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization on the Internet and, for the first time, Wheeler added, "the rules will be fully applicable to mobile."
The policy adopted this week replaces rules that the FCC adopted in 2010. Verizon challenged the rules and the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled last year that the FCC did not have sufficient regulatory power over broadband, in part because of the way broadband is classified. This week's rule making fixed that problem.
Earlier this week, the New York Times recounted a meeting that occurred a year ago near the Flatiron Building in Manhattan. The meeting was attended by some of the better known small information providers -- Tumblr, Etsy, BoingBoing, and Reddit were listed. These relatively small companies worried about what would happen if broadband providers such as Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner decided to block or slow traffic from their sites. They decided that the time had come to fight.
They called on their users to tell the FCC that Net Neutrality should be assured. Between then and now tens of thousands of phone calls and millions of messages, most in support of Net Neutrality, flooded into the FCC. The FCC had been considering the establishment of paid fast lanes.
Surprisingly, it appears that Congress may not react by passing legislation to undo the FCC's rule making. South Dakota Senator John Thune, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee (quoted in the New York Times) said that a legislative response is unlikely. In addition, Congressional Republicans have generally stopped referring to Net Neutrality as "Obamacare for the Internet". Perhaps this is because most Americans, regardless of party affiliation, feel the Net Neutrality is a good idea.
But that doesn't mean the fight is over. Senator Thune sent this tweet on the 24th of February: "Claims that Republicans conceded on #NetNeutrality are a mischaracterization. I am committed to a legislative solution to @FCC power grab."
And even if there is no Congressional challenge, that doesn't mean the fight is over. Net Neutrality won despite the fact that its supporters were wildly outspent by the big Internet service providers and telephone companies. The next challenge will be in court and you can be sure that this case will be decided, eventually, by the Supreme Court.
The FCC will now regulate Internet access as a utility and will forbid tiered structure by which some providers could pay more to have their data delivered faster than the rest of us and it would make it illegal for an Internet service provider to block or slow data from online services that compete with its own services.
Big providers of popular services encouraged their users to express their views to the FCC and users did, in huge numbers. The response was so unrelenting that it caused the FCC's antiquated communications servers to crash several times.
Groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, numerous open-source groups, and the Mozilla Foundation all pushed the Open Internet concept even though most felt that the cause was lost because the cable and telecommunications companies were able to bring enormous amounts of money and well financed lobbyists to the fight.
What I have been unable to wrap my head around is why some people insist on making Net Neutrality a political issue. It's a technology issue. A usability issue. Perhaps knowing that the country is politically divided, the cable and wireless providers simply took advantage of that fact to make it a political issue. So now it's not over until the Supreme Court sings. And maybe Congress, too.
Adobe Photoshop is 25 years old or maybe 27, depending on how you want to look at it. No matter how you look at it, Photoshop is the de facto photo editing application around the world.
In 1987, a PhD student at the University of Michigan started working on a program to display grayscale images on his Macintosh Plus computer. Thomas Knoll called it "Display" and showed it to his brother. John Knoll worked at Industrial Light & Magic -- the company that created special effects for movies. Photoshop's first name was ImagePro, but that ran afoul of the trademark office, so Thomas renamed the program Photoshop.
Adobe purchased a license to distribute the program and by February 1990, Photoshop 1.0 was ready for distribution -- only on Macintosh computers -- where it joined Adobe's flagship application, Illustrator.
It's safe to say that no matter who you are or where you are, you encounter hundreds of images that have been touched by Photoshop every day. And Adobe has developed a website that displays work by 25 of the most creative visual artists under 25 years old who use Photoshop.
Tens of millions of people use Photoshop and images created in the program can be found on websites and print media, of course, but also in motion pictures.
Let's look back a few years to when Adobe's Russell Brown appeared on the Today Show:
Adobe has frequently acquired some applications to incorporate features into existing products or to offer new applications and it has created its own applications to extend its reach into other media.
But to step back 25 years, Thomas Knoll recalls that Adobe thought we'd sell about 500 copies of Photoshop a month. "Not in my wildest dreams did we think creatives would embrace the product in the numbers and ways they have."
Companies with little or no foresight have often made dumb decisions. Western Union, for example, refused to buy rights to telephone patents in 1876. Western Union was huge and the telephone was seen as little more than a fad. As it turns out, Knoll tried to sell several companies on distributing Photoshop. "Quite a few said they were working on similar projects and didn’t want to look at it for competitive reasons. Others said it didn’t fit their lineup," Knoll recalls. "When we did the demo at Adobe, though, it really clicked with them. They understood its potential, and it fit in very well with Adobe’s existing product line."
Here's one minute's worth of fun from Photoshop:
Who wouldn't like faster wireless data services? A company that's been working on a way to make wireless data faster and more reliable says that it expects to make the service available.
Artemis Networks described its plans about a year ago, saying that it would lease spectrum from Dish Network. Initially the service will be available in San Francisco if the Federal Communications Commission approves.
Artemis CEO, Steve Perlman, says he wants to launch the service around the third quarter of 2015. San Francisco already has wireless providers, of course, but Perlman says his new service's selling point would be a new way of dealing with network congestion so that the network will provide better service.
If you've ever been in an area where a big news event is occurring, or if you've tried to use a wireless device at an program that attracts an overflow crowd of techie geeks, you've experienced network congestion. If not, just think of the highways in your town at the end of the workday. The time that we call "rush hour" even though nobody can rush in a freeway jam.
Perlman says the secret is antenna technology that uses "pCell" antennas that carry data to computers that create a "unique" wireless signal for each user. Instead of everyone being forced to share a single communications channel, each individual user effectively has a clear path.
Assuming the process works as expected, the new service will be offered in conjunction with existing wireless carriers as it's rolled out across the country. The leased Dish Network spectrum will be used only for testing.
Perlman says this service could be fast enough that it could be used in place of wired Internet service at homes and businesses.
Undoubtedly you've heard that for several months Lenovo, the world's largest computer manufacturer, placed an application on nearly every computer it sold. "SuperFish" paid Lenovo to install the application on the computers. You paid Lenovo for the computer. Seems like Lenovo should have more allegiance to its customers than to developers of applications.
Lenovo says it was just trying to "help" buyers of its computers. By itself, SuperFish isn't a particularly bad application, but additional changes made to the operating system created a security flaw by allowing other applications to see information that users thought was encrypted.
Writing on the MalwareBytes Security Blog, Jovi Umawing said that some users have found, compiled, and published a list of other apps that also use SSL Decoder or Digestor, the Komodia software development kit (SDK) responsible for granting SuperFish its dangerous HTTPS interception functionality.
"Unfortunately," Umawing writes, "some of the apps mentioned were parental control software, which are used by parents and caretakers to safeguard young teens and kids from potential online threats."
The blog post identified the known applications and cautioned that this may not be a full list. "There might be other similar programs that use the SDK that have yet to be discovered."
The blog urges parents to check computers and mobile devices for presence of the applications and to remove anything that uses the Komodia SDK.
The blog provides instructions for removing malware and cautions that the order of steps is important.
Lenovo installed the software on their G Series, U Series, Y Series, Z Series, S Series, Flex, Miix, Yoga, and E Series. Class action lawsuits have already been filed against lenovo and the developers of SuperFish.
