DOJ Rejects Transparency Request by Microsoft, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn

Last week the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the primary federal criminal investigation and enforcement agency in the U.S., rejected a request made by Microsoft, Google, Facebook and LinkedIn to be allowed to share more details on what data the companies are providing to the U.S. government. The rejection was made in the name of national security and filed with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court (FISCA).

The DOJ's petition to FISCA claims:

The companies’ contemplated disclosures risk significant harm to national security by revealing the nature and scope of the government’s intelligence collection on a company-by-company basis throughout the country. 

Such information would be invaluable to our adversaries, who could thereby derive a clear picture of where the government’s surveillance efforts are directed and how its surveillance activities change over time. If our adversaries know which platforms the government does not surveil, they can communicate over those platforms when, for example, planning a terrorist attack or the theft of state secrets.

FISCA now needs to rule on this.

There is more - other tech people (Twitter, Apple, Tumblr, Yahoo, etc) are getting involved with 72 companies and non-profit organizations signing a letter on September 20, 2013 to the U.S. Senate and House Judiciary Committee chairs supporting two surveillance bills (S. 1452 and H.R. 3035) currently moving though the Senate and the House of Representatives. Here's the full titles of those bills:

S.1452 - To permit periodic public reporting by electronic communications providers and remote computer service providers of certain estimates pertaining to requests or demands by Federal agencies under the provisions of certain surveillance laws where disclosure of such estimates is, or may be, otherwise prohibited by law. 

H.R. 3035 - To permit periodic public reporting by electronic communications providers and remote computer service providers of certain estimates pertaining to requests or demands by Federal agencies under the provisions of certain surveillance laws where disclosure of such estimates is, or may be, otherwise prohibited by law.

State of the Internet Industry

Yesterday, at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker gave an incredibly paced presentation on the state of the Internet industry. Here’s some highlights from her presentation compiled by Ben Parr at Mashable:

• 46% of Internet users live in five countries: the USA, Russia, Brazil, China and India.
• There are 670 million 3G subscribers worldwide, 136.6 million in the U.S. and 106.3 million in Japan.
• iOS devices reached 120 million subscribers in 13 quarters, far faster than Netscape, AOL or NTT docomo’s growth rates.
• Nokia and Symbian used to own 62% of the smartphone market (units shipped). Now it’s only 37%, mostly due to Android and iOS.
• The average CPM for social networking sites is at only $0.55. Meeker thinks this will increase and normalize in the next few years. She also believes that inventory on Facebook is one of the most under-monetized assets on the web.
• It took e-commerce 15 years to get to 5% of retail. Morgan Stanley predicts mobile should get to that same level in five years.
• Streaming video is up to 37% of of Internet traffic during traditional “TV hours.” Netflix is the biggest contributor to this, followed by YouTube.
• Seven of the companies that were in the top 15 publicly traded Internet companies in 2004 are not in that list in 2010.
• Interest payments and entitlement spending is projected to exceed government revenue by 2025. In other words, the U.S. government is facing a real financial crisis soon.

Here’s an embed of Mary's presentation:

Internet Trends Presentation -

New Pew Internet Study: Home Broadband 2010

On August 11, as part of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the Pew Research Center published a new study titled Home Broadband 2010. According to the report, findings are based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International between April 29 and May 30, 2010, among a sample of 2,252 adults ages 18 and older, including 744 reached on a cell phone. Interviews were conducted in English.

Here’s some report highlights:

• Two-thirds of American adults (66%) now have a broadband internet connection at home, a figure that is little changed from the 63% with a high-speed home connection at a similar point in 2009.
• Most demographic groups experienced flat-to-modest broadband adoption growth over the last year. The notable exception to this trend came among African-Americans, who experienced 22% year-over-year broadband adoption growth.
• In 2009 65% of whites and 46% of African-Americans were broadband users (a 19-point gap)
• In 2010 67% of whites and 56% of African-Americans are broadband users (an 11-point gap)
• By a 53%-41% margin, Americans say they do not believe that the spread of affordable broadband should be a major government priority.
• Non-internet users are less likely than current users to say the government should place a high priority on the spread of high-speed connections.
• A fifth of American adults (21%) do not use the internet. Many non-users think online content is not relevant to their lives and they are not confident they could use computers and navigate the web on their own.

This Pew report is concise, packed with good information and easy to read. You can download a PDF version here.

ICT - Ten Years After The Dotcom Boom

The March 2010 issue of Wired Magazine has an interesting piece titled 10 Years After: A Look Back at the Dotcom Boom and Bust. Here's some striking numbers comparing today to ten years ago:

Item	Then (2000)	Now (2010)
ECommerce Sales (Annual)	$19.5 Billion	$156 Billion
Hard Drive Storage (per GB)	$44.50	$0.07
Bandwidth for Streaming Video (per GB)	$193	$0.028
Web Storage (monthly, per GB)	$1,250	$0.15
Domain Registration (per year)	$129	$10
Hosting (monthly per MB)	$2.59	$0.0005
24-pack of Red Bull	$57	$38

Note: Numbers have been adjusted for inflation.

This is only a tiny sample of what is in the March issue - it brings back a lot of memories. Things certainly have changed lots!

Massive Internet Traffic Volume During Michael Jackson Memorial Service

Akamai has released some interesting network traffic data today, the day after Michael Jackson's Memorial service. The service started at 1 Eastern yesterday with many watching from there office computers. Here's some of theinformation Akami has reported:

The company delivered more than 2,185,000 live and on-demand streams in Flash and Windows Media formats.

Total traffic on the Akamai network surpassed a rate of more than 2 terabits per second during the memorial service.

Early on in the online streaming of the memorial services, at about 1:00 pm EST, there was a peak on Akamai's Net Usage Index for News at 3,924,370 visitors per minute, with more than 3.3 million visitors per minute coming from North America.
In contrast, on June 25^th, at about 6:30 EST, as word of Jackson’s death began to spread, traffic on the Net Usage Index for News spiked to 4,247,971 global visitors per minute at its peak as compared to average of approximately 2,000,000 visitors per minute globally. Seventy-five percent of visitors were accessing sites from within the United States.

Also as a point of comparison, the largest day on the Akamai network in terms of total traffic on its network was the Obama Inauguration live streaming online in January
2009. During the Inauguration, the Akamai network surpassed a rate of more than 2 terabits per second at approximately 12:15 p.m. ET. Akamai also delivered over 12,000,000 requests per second at the same time

Here's more from the press release:

“When a public figure of global prominence such as Michael Jackson passes away, the public’s desire for up to date information and news is rarely satiated,” said Robert Hughes, executive vice president of Global Sales, Services, and Marketing at Akamai. “Akamai’s network has seen a steady stream of online traffic when news of any sort related to Michael Jackson is updated, and we expected demand from a global online audience around the online streaming of his funeral would be no different. For an event of this scale, Akamai's globally-distributed EdgePlatform is unique in its ability to bypass congestion points on the Internet, and to ensure a reliable, high-quality experience for our customers. While this event was supported without any issues for our broadcast customers, it is also important to point out that Akamai continued to deliver perfect quality of service for the remainder of our 2,800 enterprise customers. This is just the beginning of what is possible when broadcasting live to audiences around the world.”

Akamai, a Massachusetts based company, has created a digital operating environment for the Web. A global platform of thousands of specially-equipped Akamai servers helps the Internet withstand the crush of daily requests for rich, dynamic, and interactive content, transactions, and applications. When delivering on these requests, Akamai detects and avoids Internet problem spots and vulnerabilities, to ensure Websites perform optimally, media and software download flawlessly, and applications perform reliably.

Interesting Web-to-TV Video Streaming Study

In-Stat, a global market research and intelligence business has an interesting new report out titled Web-to-TV Video Streaming Services Will Drive Nearly $3 Billion in Revenue by 2013.

Maybe you've heard the term Web-to-TV and maybe you have not - it's a generic term that involves watching web content on a television. Online video continues to grow from popular sites like YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo , Hulu, Blip.tv, Joost and the old-media standbys like NBC and CNN. Naturally people are not just going to want to watch on their computer screens and television manufacturers have quickly realized this. Companies like Samsung and Sony are building sets that connect directly to the web, allowing viewers to watch Internet video without attaching a PC to their TV.

In addition, Microsoft XBox 360 owners can now purchase Internet videos from Netflix and AppleTV owners can do the same thing using iTunes.

In a press release about the In-Stat report, analyst Keith Nissen is quoted:

Once Web-to-TV video becomes simple and convenient, mass consumer adoption will follow quite rapidly. Our primary research shows that users want a variety of their consumer devices to enable a web-to-TV video experience.

Here's some interesting findings from in the report and listed in the press release:

• Over 40% of young adult US households view Internet video on the TV at least once per month.
• Revenue from Web-to-TV streaming services will grow to $2.9 billion in 2013.
• Within five years, the number of US broadband households viewing Web-to-TV content will grow to 24 million.
• Already, 29% of US 25 to 34 year olds with game consoles use the devices to watch streaming video off the Internet.
• In five years, there will be 7.4 million US broadband households that use media center PCs for streaming Web-to-TV content.
• TV networks and pay TV operators currently view online TV as additive to pay TV services, but Web-to-TV will ultimately force a complete restructuring of today’s video services.
• Video content will be optimized for broadcast or Web-to-TV based on content type.

Easy access, potentially infinite availability and any place, any time or any where - it's not just broadcast video, on-demand and pay-per-view on you television set anymore.

Google Flags Themselves As Malicious!

Yesterday (Saturday, January 31, 2009) between 9:30 and 10:25 a.m. ET, Google search was doing some pretty weird stuff. Every search result was flagged with the message "This site may harm your computer". Google was even flagging their own site! Here's a screen shot my daughter Gabby sent me of a Google search on the word "google" (click on images for a full screen view):


Clicking on any link in your search resulted in this Forbidden message Gabby also captured and sent to me.


What happened? Here's an explanation from the Official Google Blog:

.... Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message "This site may harm your computer" if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.

We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.

Good for a few laughs on a Saturday morning in my house but..... it certainly makes me wonder about how much potential business was lost and really makes me think about the vulnerability of the web.

Thanks for the screen shots Gabby!