Tag Archives: Russell Brandom

Chicago’s “cloud tax” makes Netflix and other streaming services more expensive

Posted on by Leave a comment

Although the tax is technically levied on consumers, some companies are already preparing to collect it as part of the monthly bill. Netflix says it’s already making arrangements to add the tax to the cost charged to its Chicago customers. “Jurisdictions around the world, including the US, are trying to figure out ways to tax online services,” said a Netflix representative[.] – Russell Brandom, The Verge

Tom Wheeler says FCC will vote on net neutrality on February 26th

Posted on by Leave a comment

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler has announced that his office will vote on an official proposal for net neutrality on February 26th. “We’re going to circulate it to the commissioners on February 5th and vote on it February 26th,” Wheeler told Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) President Gary Shapiro in a public interview at CES. […] The FCC has said over the past few months that it has been exploring a hybrid approach to protecting net neutrality. It’s believed that this approach would use strict, utility-like Title II regulation on the parts of the internet that connect content providers, but the approach wouldn’t apply that regulation to the final stretch of the internet that connects to consumers’ homes. There, a lighter regulation would be used that would still allow prioritized fast lanes to be sold. The FCC initially began exploring that approach at the suggestion of the court that struck down its last net neutrality rules. – Russell Brandom & Jacob Kastrenakes , The Verge
(Full Story: http://ift.tt/1Fp1UBo )

Gogo in-flight Wi-Fi is spoofing its own customers

Posted on by One comment

Known as a man-in-the-middle attack, injecting malware into data from an otherwise innocuous site has become an increasingly common tactic and has led companies across the web to push for HTTPS encryption as the best way to stop the attacks in action. But that only works if users check the HTTPS certificates, and providers like Gogo don’t actively lie to them about who’s issuing the certificate for a given site. It’s a particularly hot topic for Gogo after reports that the company is cooperating with law enforcement far beyond its legal obligations. – Russell Brandom, The Verge
(Full Story: http://ift.tt/1ysG0tp )

The internet is so big that it’s breaking routers

Posted on by Leave a comment

The core of the problem is the routing table, a map of all the paths through the web that routers use to direct traffic. As the internet grows, so does the routing table, including more and more paths from point to point. The table is now reaching a critical mass of 512K routes, which is enough to overflow the allocated memory for many older routers. Because different regions keep slightly different routing tables, the effect is likely to be spread out over the next few weeks, but when it comes, it may take down a lot of the older hardware powering the web. “We’ll see sporadic, distributed instability,” says Renesys‘s Jim Cowie, who wrote the report, “and we may see quite a lot of it.” – Russell Brandom,The Verge

Your Android phone could be leaking your Wi-Fi history

Posted on by Leave a comment

[I]f you’re worried about the leak, it’s easy to fix. Just go to “Advanced Wi-Fi” settings and disable the “Keep Wi-Fi on during sleep” option to stop PNO from checking for networks in sleep mode. (In exchange, you’ll see a slight uptick in data and power usage.) EFF has asked Google to address the data leak at an OS level, but it doesn’t seem likely. […] Devices running iOS 6, 7, or 8 are not affected by the bug, although [Electronic Frontier Foundation] reported some data leakage in iOS 5 devices. Laptops running OS X or Windows 7 are also potentially affected[.] – Russell Brandom, The Verge http://ift.tt/1pLVm8s