1 hour, 32 minutes ago

BASKING RIDGE, N.J. - Verizon Wireless said Friday it will use the spectrum it agreed to buy in the government's wireless auction this winter to expand its data services.

The company will pay a total of $9.36 billion for a nationwide spectrum footprint in the consumer-friendly "C-Block" group of licenses, as well as 102 licenses for individual markets around the country.

Verizon Wireless won almost all the "C block" spectrum on offer in the Federal Communications Commission auction, which the company said will allow it to offer the speed and performance "ideal" for connecting consumer electronics such as mobile phones, medical devices and gaming consoles.

The new spectrum will not be clear for use until mid-February 2009, when the companies using it for analog television broadcasts are required to stop and switch to digital broadcasting.

The company plans to launch a new wireless network in 2010 in the 700-MHz spectrum, which is considered especially valuable because it can transmit through walls and help meet the growing demand for faster wireless downloads.

"We now have sufficient spectrum to continue growing our business and data revenues well into — and possibly through — the next decade," Lowell McAdam, the company's president and chief executive, said in a statement.

Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of Verizon Communications Inc., which owns the majority stake, and Britain's Vodafone Group PLC.

This content was originally posted on http://mootblogger.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

By PETER SVENSSON, AP Technology Writer 1 hour, 28 minutes ago

NEW YORK - What's scary, funny and boring at the same time? It could be a bad horror movie. Or it could be the fine print on your Internet service provider's contract.

Those documents you agree to — usually without reading — ostensibly allow your ISP to watch how you use the Internet, read your e-mail or keep you from visiting sites it deems inappropriate. Some reserve the right to block traffic and, for any reason, cut off a service that many users now find essential.

The Associated Press reviewed the "Acceptable Use Policies" and "Terms of Service" of the nation's 10 largest ISPs — in all, 117 pages of contracts that leave few rights for subscribers.

"The network is asserting almost complete control of the users' ability to use their network as a gateway to the Internet," said Marvin Ammori, general counsel of Free Press, a Washington-based consumer advocacy group. "They become gatekeepers rather than gateways."

But the provisions are rarely enforced, except against obvious miscreants like spammers. Consumer outrage would have been the likely result if AT&T Inc. took advantage of its stated right to block any activity that causes the company "to be viewed unfavorably by others."

Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University, said this clause was a "piece of boilerplate that is passed around the corporate lawyers like a Christmas fruitcake.

"The idea that they would ever invoke it and point to it is nuts, especially since their terms of service already say they can cut you off for any reason and give you a refund for the balance of the month," Zittrain said.

AT&T removed the "unfavorably by others" wording in February after The Associated Press asked about the reason behind it. Subscribers, however, wouldn't know that it was gone unless they checked the contract word for word: The document still said it was last updated Oct. 8, 2007.

Most companies reserve the right to change the contracts at any time, without any notice except an update on the Web site. Verizon used to say it would notify subscribers of changes by e-mail, but the current contract just leaves that as an option for the company.

This sort of contract, where the subscriber is considered to agree by signing up for service rather than by active negotiation, is given extra scrutiny by courts, Zittrain said. Any wiggle room or ambiguity is usually resolved in favor of the consumer rather than the company.

Yet the main purpose of ISP contracts isn't to circumscribe the service for all subscribers, but rather to provide legal cover for the company if it cuts off a user who's abusing the system.

"Without the safeguards offered in these policies, customers could suffer from degradation of service and be exposed to a broad variety of malware threats," said David Deliman, spokesman at Cox Communications.

The language does matter: In a case involving a student accused of hacking, a federal appeals court held last year that subscribers should have a lower expectation of privacy if their service provider has a stated policy of monitoring traffic.

But these broadly written contracts still don't provide all the legal cover ISPs want. Comcast Corp. is being investigated by the Federal Communications Commission for interfering with file sharing by its subscribers. The company has pointed to its Acceptable Use Policy, which said, in general terms, that the company had the right to manage traffic. Since the investigation began, it has updated the policy to describe its practices in greater detail, and recently said it would stop targeting file-sharing once it puts a new traffic-management system in place late this year.

The Comcast case is a rare example of the government getting into the nitty-gritty of one of these contracts.

"There really should be an onus on the regulators to see this kind of thing is done correctly," said Bob Williams, who deals with telecom and media issues at Consumers Union.

If there were more competition, market forces might straighten out the contracts, he said. But most Americans have only two choices for broadband: the cable company or the phone company.

Williams himself knows that it's tough to pay attention to the contracts. He recently had Verizon Communications Inc.'s FiOS broadband and TV service installed in his home. Only after the installation was completed did he get the contract in the mail.

He could have read some of the terms earlier, when placing the order online, but he just clicked the "Accept" button.

"I'm a hard-nosed consumer advocate type ... I really should have examined it better than I did," he said. But, he added, he acted like most consumers, because of the lack of alternatives. "You click the 'Accept' button because it's not like you're going somewhere else."

Other common clauses of ISP contracts:

ISPs can read your e-mail

Practically all ISPs reserve the right to read your e-mails and look at the sites you visit, without a wiretap order. This reflects the open nature of the Internet — for privacy purposes, e-mails are more like postcards than letters. It's also prompted by the ISPs' need to identify and stop subscribers who use their connections to send spam e-mails.

Some ISPs, like AT&T Inc., make clear that they do not read their subscriber's traffic as a matter of course, but also that they need little or no excuse to begin doing so. Cablevision, a cable operator in the Northeast, says one of the reasons it might look at what a customer is doing online would be to help operate its service properly.

The federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act protects e-mail and other Internet communications from eavesdropping, but several of its provisions can be waived by agreements between the ISP and the subscriber. Also, the law is mainly aimed at making it difficult for the government, not companies, to snoop.

Wiretapping laws may also apply, but the situation is unclear. A federal appeals court panel in 2004 dismissed charges against a company that provided e-mail services for booksellers and snooped on their Amazon order confirmations. The charges of illegal wiretapping were reinstated by the full appeals court the next year, but the case hasn't been tried.

___

ISPs can block you from Web sites

Or at least they would like to think so. In a clause typical of ISPs, Comcast reserves the right to block or remove traffic it deems "inappropriate, regardless of whether this material or its dissemination is unlawful."

The ISP sees itself as the sole judge of whether something is appropriate.

Broad enforcement of this kind of clause for business purposes other than protecting users is likely to draw attention from regulators like the FCC, as is happening in the Comcast file-sharing case.

___

ISPs can shut you down for using the connection too much

For cable ISPs, up to 500 households may be sharing the capacity on a single line, and a few traffic hogs can slow the whole neighborhood down. But rather than saying publicly how much traffic is too much, some cable companies keep their caps secret, and simply warn offenders individually. If that doesn't work, they're kicked off.

It's difficult to reach these secret bandwidth caps unless users are downloading large amounts of high-quality video from the Internet, but the advent of high-definition Internet video set-top boxes like the Apple TV and the Vudu could make it more common.

Oddly, some ISPs, like Cox, say it's the responsibility of subscribers to ensure that they don't hog the traffic of other subscribers, a determination that's impossible for a home broadband user. Cox, however, does make the monthly download and upload limits public on its Web site.

Time Warner Cable Inc. has said it will test putting public caps on how much new subscribers in Beaumont, Texas, can download per month, and charge them more if they go over.

Digital subscriber line providers like AT&T and Verizon aren't as concerned about bandwidth hogs, because phone lines aren't shared among households.

This content was originally posted on http://mootblogger.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

By PETER SVENSSON, AP Technology Writer 1 hour, 25 minutes ago

NEW YORK - In their subscriber contracts, some Internet providers explicitly absolve themselves of obligations that, it seems, no one would imagine they had in the first place.

For instance, Verizon Communications Inc. makes broadband subscribers agree that the company assumes no responsibility for the accuracy of things they may read on the Internet, or receive in e-mails. So don't complain to the company if that Wikipedia entry on wombats misstates their gestational period.

"Sometimes people think that everything they see online comes from their ISP or is somehow vetted and endorsed by the ISP," said Verizon spokeswoman Bobbi Henson.

Until March 3, Verizon also made subscribers agree that it does not own, operate or manage the Internet. That provision has now been eliminated because it's "generally well understood by most people" that Verizon does not own the Internet, while that may not have been the case in the early days of broadband, Henson said.

Another thing Verizon doesn't do for you, according to the Terms of Service: back up your hard drive.

Other ISPs try to ban nefarious practices like spamming and fraud with clauses so broad that it applies to a lot of legitimate activities.

Charter Communications, a cable company, forbids customers from altering or removing information from e-mail message headers, which sounds like they don't want you to change the subject line of an e-mail before forwarding it. Charter spokeswoman Anita Lamont said the company does not consider the subject line to be part of the header, and the provision is there to prevent people from forging headers to make it appear as if a message is coming from someone else.

AT&T Inc. prohibits users from posting to forums messages that could be expected to provoke complaints. Given that forums can be very touchy places, many messages could fall under this provision.

Windstream Communications bans "Satan" from its network, which sounds weird until you realize that it's referring to hacker software: System Administration Tool for Analyzing Networks, or SATAN.

This content was originally posted on http://mootblogger.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO - While Yahoo staves off a takeover bid from Microsoft - and Microsoft braces for life after Bill Gates - another high-tech pioneer is at a digital crossroads.

As eBay (EBAY) readies for the post-Meg-Whitman era, and new CEO John Donahoe takes over Monday, it faces fierce challenges in a Web 2.0 era defined by armies of agile competitors.

Running eBay could be a daunting task. The former dot-com darling has lost some of its luster and is reinventing itself to reverse years of slowing growth in its auction marketplace, where millions trade online selling to the highest bidder or at a fixed price.

Some sellers are drifting away to take advantage of more options these days at online stops such as Amazon (AMZN) and specialty stores, or to protest another fee increase at eBay.

Lynette Setzkorn reluctantly hopes to be "eBay-free" by June. The 50-year-old Tulsa resident sold $30,000 worth of antique furniture in January, but the latest increase was the "final straw," she says. Setzkorn is shifting sales to antiques dealer Ruby Lane and Amazon.

The wrenching changes at eBay underscore the challenges it and other mature Internet companies face as they enter the second decade of the dot-com era, analysts say. Like its Silicon Valley neighbor, Yahoo, and Microsoft, eBay is confronted by the growing shadow of Google as well as the looming presence of longtime rival Amazon and other e-commerce sites.

"The issue for most of these Web 2.0 businesses is, what are they going to do for Web 3.0?" says Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates. "Google's model is robust and extensible. If you're an auction site, what do you do for the next act?"

So far, the personable Donahoe has dived into his new assignment.

Donahoe has vowed to put greater emphasis on fixed-priced listings - items sold through its eBay's Buy It Nowservice - a seismic shift for eBay buyers that would approximate their experience on Amazon and elsewhere.

If anything, the 47-year-old Donahoe is a pragmatist. Fixed pricing (Buy It Now on the eBay site) accounts for 40% of revenue at eBay Marketplaces, its largest division. Most of the rest is from auction sales, for which eBay is better known.

To offset slackening growth in Marketplaces, eBay has diversified into online ticketing, payment services for merchants, classified listings and advertising. Donahoe and other eBay executives declined to be interviewed before he assumes the CEO job this week. But he has previously said he envisions a way of combining fixed-price listings and auctions, so both results would be displayed on eBay's main website. Eventually, shoppers could parse a search for new or used iPods by model and price, he has said.

In a nod to the growing sway of Google, (GOOG) eBay is developing a comprehensive search engine to evaluate customer feedback, shipping costs, PayPal data and other factors to present the best deals to shoppers. Google has become a factor because consumers increasingly use its search to find inexpensive deals, and Amazon and other eBay rivals have paid for prominent listings as sponsored links.

"My commitment is to build from (eBay's) strengths and make the changes necessary in this competitive environment," Donahoe, a former Bain & Co. consultant, said in a conference call in January. "EBay's best days are ahead."

Yet, three years ago, eBay's revenue and profits were growing at a rate of more than 30% year-over-year. Today, it is in the midteens, says Martin Pyykkonen, an analyst at Global Crown Capital. Revenue in the USA has declined in five of the last six quarters, he says.

Meanwhile, changes Donahoe made to the fees eBay charges its sellers prompted the company to issue lower earnings guidance for its current first fiscal quarter and year ahead. It said 2008 revenue would improve up to 14%, to $8.75 billion - shy of the 17% expected by financial analysts. EBay shares, which touched $40 in October, have tumbled to $30.22. On March 20, eBay said it is cutting 125 jobs in North America and Europe, less than 1% of its 15,500-person workforce.

A time of transition

Donahoe is filling the prodigious shoes of Whitman, 51, one of the most successful female CEOs in the world. Whitman took over eBay before it went public in 1998, when the young company had a rapidly growing user base and powerful network. Her biggest concern then was to manage growth, says Rodrigo Sales, co-founder and CEO of Vendio Services, which provides technology services to online auctioneers.

Donahoe inherits a mature company facing stiffening competition from online auction houses abroad and Amazon, among others, at home.

Donna Klein, 51, of Birmingham, Mich., symbolizes the shifting buying habits of some eBay patrons. Though she "loves eBay," Klein buys books and music CDs on Amazon, where buyers flock to take advantage of inexpensive, fixed prices for items such as CDs and video games. Previously, consumers would look for deals in eBay auctions.

Analysts are convinced the personable Donahoe is up to the challenge.

"He is tremendously open and receptive to Wall Street, shareholders and the eBay community," says Robert Peck, an analyst at Bear Stearns. "His ability to change things quickly, as he did with pricing, bodes well for the company."

For the past three years, he was president of eBay Marketplaces, which accounts for about 70% of eBay's total revenue. During his tenure, Donahoe was well-regarded by sellers for his hands-on management style and accessibility.

Now, he may have to apply his persuasive skills to appease some of eBay's 82 million sellers, who are renowned for their loyalty and for their withering criticism of the online auctioneer.

Since Donahoe's announcement as new CEO in January, he has made seismic changes to the fees eBay charges, and to its feedback system. The cost to list items will be cut 25% to 50% to encourage more listings, but the commission eBay charges for completed sales increased more than 25% for many, favoring sellers of commodity items such as CDs and video games over sellers of unique items. He also tweaked eBay's feedback system to encourage buyers to return to the site. A seller's commission fee for a $20 sale is now about $3.14, compared with about $2 for the same sale a few months ago, says Gary Richardson, 42, of Batesville, Ark., who sells goggles, eyeglasses and sunglasses on eBay.

'Fees are killing me'

The adjustments raised the ire of some eBay sellers, who mounted a week-long boycott in February to "let eBay executives know that we were not happy about the changes they are implementing," says organizer Valerie Lennertof Anaheim, Calif.

"Fees are killing me," says Keith Yockey,57, of Landrum, S.C. He sells $3,000 worth of dog whistles a month on eBay, where he has been a seller since 2004. Since he joined Amazon in July, he averages $4,500 a month. "EBay is my home, and I hate to see it go away," Yockey says. "But if they continue to drive sellers away, so be it."

"I'm paying more to (do business with) eBay, but I have the same size of audience," says Laura Seleman, who averages jewelry sales of $3,000 a month on eBay. The Cleveland resident says higher fees forced her to start selling on her own website, at online auctioneer eBid and at Amazon.

"Amazon represents a huge challenge for eBay," because it is difficult for eBay to take on Amazon in the online retail business, says Kartik Hosanagar, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School who studies Internet commerce.

Nonetheless, he says, "This is eBay's battle to lose."

EBay remains the dominant online auction site - in large part because of booming sales at its PayPal division, says Patti Freeman Evans, senior retail analyst at JupiterResearch.

It commands a dominant slice of the $34 billion online auction market, and its market value is $40.1 billion. By eBay's own estimates, it accounts for 14% of global e-commerce revenue and is the primary source of income for a staggering 1.3 million people.

PayPal's runaway success - it racked up $1.9 billion in 2007 revenue, up 40% from 2006 - has compensated for any erosion in eBay's core business, Evans says.

Even eBay's online telephone service, Skype - which came at the steep price of $2.6 billion in late 2005 - is valuable because it offers eBay members the ability to communicate directly, Evans says.

Though eBay reported a third-quarter loss because of a $1.39 billion charge related to its acquisition of Skype, the division has experienced substantial growth. It reported $382 million in 2007 revenue, more than double from 2006.

In its recently completed fourth quarter, eBay said profit jumped 42% to $611 million, or 45 cents a share, from the same quarter a year earlier. Revenue increased 27% to $2.18 billion, eclipsing the $2.14 billion forecast by Wall Street.

There are trouble spots, to be sure. Not only is eBay's core business cooling off, but it could do better in Asia. It has yet to fully catch on in China despite an investment of about $200 million, says Scott Devitt, managing director of Internet consumer services at investment firm Stifel Nicolaus.

Donahoe must also remake eBay's management ranks. He's done so by taking corporate stars from across the company to invigorate eBay - most notably the move of eBay Marketplaces President Rajiv Dutta, who previously ran PayPal and Skype, back to the parent company.

And Donahoe has assiduously picked the brain of customers to see what they want. Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor,a maker of automation software for eBay sellers, recounts how Donahoe sought him out at a Starbucks in Boston last year and peppered him with questions on how eBay could improve the user experience. Wingo suggested lower listing fees, better search and a crackdown on fraud. "So far, they've done a good job," he says.

Despite several lingering obstacles, analysts such as Pyykkonen see no end to eBay's momentum as it begins the Donahoe Era. There are more challengers to the throne, but this is one tech titan that rolls along, he says.

"Lots of companies would love to be in eBay's position," Pyykkonen says. "But a constantly evolving market makes it a little scary for everyone."

This content was originally posted on http://mootblogger.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

Peter Sayer

San Francisco - Adobe Systems released an early alpha version of its rich Internet application platform AIR for Linux on Monday, and announced that it has joined the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes and standardizes Linux.

AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) allows Internet-enabled applications to run on Windows and Mac OS X desktops. AIR applications use the same technologies as Web applications built to run inside a browser, including HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), and Flash, Adobe's own multimedia programming language.

[ Learnhow Adobe AIR compares to other rich-media and Web apps tools. ]

The AIR runtime framework is already available for Windows and Mac OS X: Adobe's goal is to allow such applications to run on Linux too, although some applications may not work with the version released Monday.

Programmers can use Adobe's Flex software development tools to build applications for AIR. The company also released Adobe Flex Builder Linux alpha 3 on Monday, allowing developers to build Flex applications using Linux.

As a member of the Linux Foundation, Adobe will join companies including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Google, and Nokia. The Foundation formed last year from the merger of the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group.

Although the Linux Foundation hailed Adobe's arrival as "a natural extension of its commitment to open standards and open source," that commitment stops short of publishing source code for the Linux version of AIR. Adobe's end-user license for the code explicitly forbids any attempt to "reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of the software."

This content was originally posted on http://mootblogger.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

By Marius Bosch

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) -
Bloggers mixed wild rumors with
gallows humor on Monday as Zimbabweans waited on tenterhooks
for the result of the most crucial election since independence.

The opposition MDC and ruling ZANU-PF were running
neck-and-neck in first parliamentary results issued by the
electoral commission, 36 hours after polls closed.

Many bloggers shared opposition suspicions that the delay
meant President Robert Mugabe was trying to rig the result to
extend his 28 years in power.

Even in cyberspace the tension of waiting for the results
began to tell.

"It's late and if I watch (MDC secretary general) Tendai
Biti making the same comments on the same report they have been
running since this morning I am going to do grievous bodily
harm to the next person who walks through the door," one
blogger wrote on thisiszimbabwe
http://www.sokwanele/thisiszimbabwe/

Writing on Sunday, poet Samm Farai Monro, better known as
Comrade Fatso, told on his blog http://comradefatso.vox/ of
wild rumors flying around the capital Harare.

"The streets are waiting. We woke today to rumors of Mugabe
fleeing to Malaysia and news of the MDC press conference. We
carried our bababarazi'd (hungover) selves to the conference
after a night of ragga at downtown Harare's Tube Nightclub.
According to the MDC's counting process they are way ahead in
the polls. Victory is on people's lips. But so is rigging."

CRUMBLING ECONOMY

Zimbabwe's crumbling economy was also widely discussed.
Clark described searching for an Easter egg in Harare, where
most shop shelves are bare. Official inflation is more than
100,000 percent and the currency is virtually worthless.

Many blogger comments on the Botswana-based news website
http://zimbabwemetro related to fears that the elections
may be rigged.

"I want to say to Mr Mugabe, this is your perfect time to
say goodbye," said comments by "Snoopy," a Zimbabwean living in
Australia.

"You can leave with a small amount of dignity if you leave
now rather than no dignity at all in the next few weeks when
there will be blood on the streets if you steal this election
and again tell the people you do not care ... Go now Bob."

(Editing by Barry Moody)

This content was originally posted on http://mootblogger.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

Adobe joins Linux Foundation, Previews Air for Linux

Peter Sayer, IDG News Service

Adobe Systems released an early alpha version of its rich Internet application platform AIR for Linux on Monday, and announced that it has joined the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes and standardizes Linux.

Air allows Internet-enabled applications to run on Windows and Mac OS X desktops. Air applications use the same technologies as Web applications built to run inside a browser, including HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Flash, Adobe's own multimedia programming language.

The Air runtime framework is already available for Windows and Mac OS X: Adobe's goal is to allow such applications to run on Linux too, although some applications may not work with the version released Monday.

Programmers can use Adobe's Flex software development tools to build applications for Air. The company also released Adobe Flex Builder Linux alpha 3 on Monday, allowing developers to build Flex applications using Linux.

As a member of the Linux Foundation, Adobe will join companies including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Google and Nokia. The Foundation formed last year from the merger of the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group.

Although the Linux Foundation hailed Adobe's arrival as "a natural extension of its commitment to open standards and open source," that commitment stops short of publishing source code for the Linux version of Air. Adobe's end-user license for the code explicitly forbids any attempt to "reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of the software."

This content was originally posted on http://mootblogger.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog