Last chance to speak your mind on changes to California broadband subsidies

30 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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Expect a united front from industry lobbyists.

Monday and Tuesday will likely be the final opportunity for public comments on new money and rules for the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF). Two proposals – senate bill 740 and assembly bill 1299 – are set for committee hearings. If approved, the bills head back into the machinery of the legislative process, which operates behind closed doors for the most part.

SB 740 is first up. It’s considered by the assembly utilities and commerce committee on Monday afternoon.… More

Boldly spend with PayPal Galactic

29 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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What fun would moon golf be without a friendly wager?

There’s more than a whiff of publicity stunt about it, but even so, the launch by PayPal and the SETI Institute of a project to create a payment system that can be used in outer space is a fascinating idea. The initial problem they want to address is creating a medium of exchange for the space tourism industry.

Elon Musk, one of PayPal’s founders, is also behind SpaceX, which makes real rockets that are already sending cargo into orbit and should soon be capable of transporting people too.… More

Fossils don't fit in the new mobile world

28 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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Blackberry and Windows are the bedrock of the mobile world.

A year from now, this past week will be looked upon as the point when we shifted from one mobile operating system epoch to another. Two dinosaurs – Blackberry and Windows – appear irrecoverably stuck in a tar pit of tumbling market share and industry confidence, while two warm-blooded open source upstarts – Ubuntu Linux and Firefox – are walking tall.

Blackberry’s latest results show widening financial and subscriber losses.… More

Funding and eligibility for California broadband subsidies back on track in Sacramento

27 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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Open for business again.

The authors of legislation to top up the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) and make more broadband construction projects eligible for grants and loans have put money back in and removed unworkable restrictions pushed by industry lobbyists.

The primary proposal, senate bill 740, was originally written by senator Alex Padilla (D – Los Angeles) to add money to CASF, because current grant requests would, if approved, zero out the fund.… More

Supreme Court considering whether it's a good idea to open up a new feeding ground for patent trolls

26 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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Looks like one of those divided infringements. Let’s eat it.

The U.S. Supreme Court finished its current session this week with a flurry of action, momentous and otherwise. Lost in the fireworks generated by rulings on gay rights, racial preferences and voting rules though, was its decision to take a look at an intellectual property case that, depending on where it eventually goes, could create a vast new opportunity for patent trolls and trial lawyers to line their pockets.… More

Gigabit Seattle raising FTTH attention but not cash


Adding lift to a trial balloon.

The Gigabit Seattle team is trying to tap into Google Fiber’s buzz by releasing a fiber-to-the-home pricing plan that sounds a lot like what’s on offer in Kansas City, albeit for a few dollars more and with a little less freebie time. Otherwise, there’s been precious little in the way of specific information about the project since it was announced six months ago.

What I wrote then is true today: Gigabit Seattle’s financial vehicle is still a concept car.… More

Santa Cruz's innovative Open Counter platform going national with Knight grant


Cowell’s Beach is a great place to start.

Santa Cruz is proving itself to be a leading center for twenty-first century e-government. The latest endorsement came from the Knight Foundation today, which announced it was giving a $450,000 award to the Open Counter project. It was one of only eight winners, out of 860 applicants, of the Knight News Challenge on Open Gov.

Led by Peter Koht, an economic development staffer with the City of Santa Cruz, the Open Counter initiative was originally backed by Code for America, a private foundation that bills itself as a Peace Corps for geeks.… More

If you've fudged on Facebook, you've committed a federal crime

23 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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Aaron’s Law wouldn’t have kept Aaron out of prison.

A Silicon Valley congresswoman and an Oregon senator, both democrats, are introducing parallel bills that would tighten up the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Zoe Lofgren and Ron Wyden are titling it Aaron’s Law, in honor of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide after being charged with a tall stack of felonies for downloading a library’s worth of pay-walled academic journal articles at MIT.… More

Blueseed and Bitcoin converge on peer-to-peer sovereignty and currency

22 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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Free-floating money gets a ride on a free and floating colony.

Two hardcore libertarian projects have joined forces in what might be the start of a new economy that’s outside the normal reach of national governments. Or it could just be the sharp poke in the eye that provokes a potentially fatal response from authorities.

BitAngels, a startup fund fueled by Bitcoins, is putting the equivalent of $100,000 into Blueseed, which proposes to moor a cruise ship twelve miles off the Northern California coast, just outside of U.S.… More

Telegrams are not completely tapped out

21 June 2013 by Steve Blum

Key to a sustainable telecoms platform.

The telegram, the original electronic messaging medium, is 175 years old and still carrying traffic, at least in some parts of the world. But the end might finally be in sight. India’s state owned telecoms company, BSNL, is shutting down telegram service next month, citing smartphones and text messaging as the cause.

The one thing that telegrams do as a matter of course, and competing media do not, is provide third-party authentication of an electronic message.… More