The New York Times posted this editorial on “Access and the Internet” and started the piece with the premise: “On the Internet today, a Web site run by a solo blogger can load as quickly as any corporate home page. Internet service providers, including leading cable and phone companies, want to be able to change [...]

After posting this article on American broadband caps in perspective, it seems we’ve attracted a few angry responses.  Advocacy group Stop the Cap’s Phillip Dampier pulled out all the stops to denounce me and our executive director Jon Henke that we’re essentially selling broadband consumers out.  So what’s the reason for Dampier attacks?  It turns [...]

Update: We need to be reasonable about broadband usage caps Recently, Chiehyu Li and James Losey of the New America Foundation put out this comparison of Internet usage caps between the U.S. and Japan which paints a dire picture of how screwed up broadband in America is.  While there’s little doubt that Japan is way [...]

This debate over the use of cookies on government websites is important, but it strikes me as an easily resolvable matter. The OSTP blog outlines the administration’s interest in updating the rules surrounding cookies…

Our main goal in revisiting the ban on using persistent cookies on Federal websites is to bring the federal government into the 21st century. Consistent with this Administration’s commitment to making government more open and participatory, we want federal agencies to be able to provide the same user- friendly, dynamic, and citizen-centric websites that people…

Yesterday’s FCC wireless technology workshop was filled with some very misguided testimony from Sascha Meinrath, Director of the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation. Since no one challenged Mr. Meinrath at the hearings yesterday, I felt compelled to set the record straight. Ethernet and wireless network standards pioneer Richard Bennett who was also listening in on the video stream gave a similar assessment of Meinrath’s testimony saying:

“His comments at the mobile wireless session on European hobbyist networks were quite entertaining, although not particularly serious. Claiming that “hub-and-spoke” networks are less scalable and efficient than wireless meshes is not credible”

We’re doing an all day conference today on the FCC Broadband Deployment Workshop live blog today.

There is a serious exploit against WordPress out in the wild that allows an attacker to reset your password. There’s no official fix for this exploit yet, but there is a simple temporary fix available.

Last Friday, a new version of Adobe Flash came out which patched the most recent critical flaws in Flash Player. Yet because the update process isn’t automatic, most of you have not updated your Flash Player in your web browser. The fact that Adobe makes the manual update process a pain to use and forces you to install yet another download manager and tries to get you to install yet another browser toolbar doesn’t help. The end result is that most of your computers are vulnerable to websites that display malicious flash content.

Mozilla has patched a very critical flaw in Firefox that allows attackers to pose as a legitimate Firefox update server and implant harmful code into a victim’s computer. Firefox 3.0.13 and 3.5.2 are no longer vulnerable to this attack and the update should automatically run. It would be prudent to check it manually under the Firefox “Help” menu and open the “About” window.

If the bad news about all the new critical iPhone and Mac OS X vulnerabilities announced at BlackHat 2009 weren’t bad enough, there now appears to be a new vulnerability in Apple’s hardware. This type of a hack however isn’t something where you can go into an Apple store and have an Apple “genius” exorcise because once the Apple keyboard is infected and locked; there is no practical way of undoing the damage.