communicate

As the Federal Communications Commission establishes the rules for its upcoming incentive spectrum auction, competitive carriers say they do not want to see a repeat of what happened with the 700MHz spectrum auction in 2008.

"The 700MHz auction was a disaster," Patrick Riordan, CEO of the rural Wisconsin carrier Cellcom, said at the Competitive Carrier Association's annual conference this week. "The FCC needs to get this one right. We all need spectrum too much. It has to be a level playing field."

On Friday the FCC will open comment on a proposal for how the … Read more

Federal police are increasingly gaining real-time access to Americans' social-network accounts -- such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter -- without obtaining search warrants, newly released documents show.

The numbers are dramatic: live interception requests made by the U.S. Department of Justice to social-networking sites and e-mail providers jumped 80 percent from 2010 to 2011.

Documents the ACLU released today show police are using a 1986 law intended to tell police what phone numbers were dialed for far more invasive surveillance: monitoring of whom specific social-network users communicate with, what Internet addresses they're connecting from, and perhaps even "… Read more

LAS VEGAS -- Competitive wireless carriers say a AT&T-Verizon Wireless "duopoly" is threatening mobile competition in the U.S., and they want regulators in Washington, D.C., to "level the playing field."

At a conference here Tuesday hosted by the newly branded Competitive Carrier Association, nationwide carriers T-Mobile USA, Sprint, and Clearwire joined forces with more than 100 smaller rural carriers that formerly made up the Rural Carrier Association to sharpen their talking points and organize their lobbying efforts to promote policies that will encourage and safeguard competition in the wireless market.

The message … Read more

Police must get warrants to access Americans' e-mail and track their cell phones, according to new privacy legislation that promises to spark a political spat between high-tech firms and law enforcement.

The bill, introduced today by Rep. Zoe Lofgren -- a Democrat who represents the heart of Silicon Valley, including the home turf of Apple, Google, and Intel -- would generally require law enforcement officials to obtain a search warrant signed by a judge before they can access cloud data or location information.

It's backed by a phalanx of companies, including Amazon.com, Apple, AT&T, eBay, Google, … Read more

Facebook has successfully fought a subpoena trying to seek access to the account of a beauty queen who died after falling from the 12th floor of her ex-lover's apartment, CNET has learned.

A federal judge in California yesterday rejected a attempt from representatives of the estate of Sahar Daftary to gain access to her Facebook account.

Her mother is hoping to show a Manchester, U.K., coroner's inquest that Daftary, a onetime Face of Asia beauty contest winner, did not commit suicide when falling from the apartment of property developer Rashid Jamil in 2008.

But U.S. Magistrate … Read more

In 1988, when President Reagan signed a video privacy bill into law, computer users were sipping bandwidth through the tiny straws of 2400 bps modems, IBM was selling mainframe databases for over $200,000, and musician Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" was topping the charts.

Well, it turns out that politicians are no better at prognostication than the rest of us are. The clutch of lawyers and their aides on Capitol Hill failed to anticipate the rise of Netflix and Facebook, and their well-intentioned but brittle video privacy law is now at odds with modern … Read more

After more than 25 years since the passage of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), Sen. Patrick Leahy is hoping to get the out-of-date privacy law up to speed by introducing a new bill in the Senate Judiciary Committee today, according to Ars Technica.

The key component of this new bill is that law enforcement officials would no longer have the ease of freely being able to read people's personal e-mail and online communication -- they'd need a warrant first. As the law now stands, police are allowed to get individual's private correspondence by simply asking e-mail … Read more

You might know HP's Spectre product best as a home for the company's high-end, high-concept laptops. With the SpectreOne, announced today, HP brings an all-in-one PC into that fold. The question is whether its features match its high-price.

HP says the SpectreOne will begin at $1,299 when it launches in the U.S. in November. In addition to the stylized design, the SpectreOne includes a non-touch, 23.6-inch, 1,920x1,080-pixel display, a touch pad, and near-field communication (NFC) technology, dubbed HP TouchZone. It also has no built-in optical drive.

The touch pad makes HP the second … Read more

Though it's increasingly less certain that near field communication (NFC) will appear in the iPhone 5, it's a technology that's built into a lot of high-profile products already. So, what is it exactly? And how relevant is it today?

What is NFC? NFC is a short-range wireless connectivity technology that uses magnetic-field induction to enable communication between electronic devices in close proximity. (Faraday's law: any change in the magnetic environment of a coil of wire will cause a voltage to be induced in the coil.)

NFC can operate in three modes, according to an NFC whitepaper: … Read more