News Blog

The U.S. Department of Justice has launched a civil investigation into the proposed Yahoo-Google ad partnership. In Wednesday's edition of the Daily Debrief, I sit down with News.com's Dawn Kawamoto to talk about the nature of this investigation and what we can expect over the coming months.

Kawamoto explains that Yahoo, in particular, has been more than accommodating to ensure a smooth investigation, or a clean bill of health, if you will. The company has a lot to gain financially if everything goes as planned (to the tune of $800 million in its first year). Its competitors, however (ahem, Microsoft), are insisting on careful scrutiny of documents, conversations, and outside relationships to ensure this partnership does not raise any antitrust concerns.

Sen. Barack Obama is taking heat from liberal supporters for changing his position on granting phone companies involved in President Bush's domestic spying program retroactive immunity for breaking federal laws.

According to a New York Times article published Wednesday, more than 7,000 Obama supporters have organized on Obama's own campaign Web site to protest his recent move to support legislation that will grant legal immunity to phone companies involved in the National Security Agency's domestic wiretapping program after the September 11 attacks.

Sen. Barack Obama

(Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET News.com)

Previously, Obama opposed any immunity for the telecom companies. In February, Obama voted on a Senate bill against retroactive immunity. And when asked for CNET News.com's 2008 Technology Voters' Guide whether he supported "giving (phone companies) retroactive immunity for any illicit cooperation with intelligence agencies or law enforcement, " he answered "No."

During the primary, Obama vowed to fight such legislation to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, the Times story said. But now he has switched his position to support a compromise bill that was worked out between the White House and Democratic Congressional leaders.

The bill is expected to be voted on by the Senate on Tuesday after the Fourth of July holiday, the article said.

Disappointed Obama supporters told the Times that they see the shift in the telecom immunity issue as a test of Obama's principles in opposing Bush's surveillance program. The article quotes Markos Moulitsas, a blogger and founder of DailyKos.com, as saying that he has decided to cut back the amount of money he gives to the Obama campaign.

While supporters may be frustrated and angry by Obama's apparent flip-flop on this issue, they won't find any more consistency in Sen. John McCain, Obama's presidential opponent on the Republican side.

My colleague Declan McCullagh pointed out in his blog last month that when news about the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program became public years ago, McCain was critical of it. Initially, he said that the courts should decide whether or not AT&T and others accused of violating laws should be held accountable for their participation in the domestic spying program. He also said publicly that it should be made clear to the phone companies that any immunity granted should explicitly state that this was not a "blessing" of their practices and that there should be oversight hearings on the issue.

But over the course of the campaign, McCain's position has changed. In February, he voted for retroactive immunity--even though there were no explicit statements telling AT&T and other telecommunications companies that this is not a "blessing." And there was no deal providing for "oversight hearings," nor were there "provisions" to ensure this won't happen again.

Too busy to book airline tickets, order takeout food, or call your parents? For $19 per month, virtual personal assistants from AskSunday.com will run 10 such errands for you.

Welcome to the world of online errand outsourcing, where on sites like AskSunday.com and GetFriday.com, ordinary people can get assistance with everyday tasks, for a small amount. SFGate recently ran an Associated Press article on the phenomenon, citing the growing number of Web sites that are making it easier to outsource virtual errands overseas to countries like India, China, and Bangladesh.

Some of the more unusual tasks handled by GetFriday.com include:

• Daily wakeup calls that also deliver the local weather report and instructions to get up, make the bed, and exercise

• Reading bedtime stories to children over the phone

• Buying underwear on behalf of clients (online purchase only, the company points out)

• Talking to mom and dad in a client's stead

Virtual assistants for individuals and small businesses represent a small but growing market. Last year, the estimated revenue for these services was $250 million, according to research firm Evalueserve, which expects the market to grow to $2 billion by 2015.

For more specific tasks, there are sites like Guru.com, a Pittsburgh-based company that helps employers find freelancers helping with Web design, language translation, and photography. Guru.com launched its online job board in 2000 and has a rating system similar to that of eBay, with reviews from earlier customers, as well as hourly rates, yearly earnings, and locations of the freelancers.

Another site where customers can search professionals based on rate, location, earnings, or feedback is Mountain View, Calif.-based Elance.

Elance and Guru.com are not only platforms for low-wage workers in the developing world, but also for Westerners. Will sites like this level the playing field of the global economy?

In addition to an expected increase in sales to the U.S. military, iRobot says it will see growth in its unmanned robot platforms from foreign buyers.

iRobot's Warrior robot can be modified to support chemical sensor devices or functioning weapons.

(Credit: Candace Lombardi/CNET News.com)

The "Unmanned Systems Roadmap 2007-2032," a report put out by the Department of Defense last year, outlined a strategy to increase spending in unmanned technology for the air, sea, and ground.

iRobot, which has already been supplying the U.S. military with unmanned robots for use in ground reconnaissance and combat, has repeatedly said it will benefit from the military's increased need.

But the company now says that as its robots have proven themselves useful in Iraq and Afghanistan, interest from foreign armed forces has also increased.

iRobot has sold robots from its line of unmanned military drones internationally to 13 allied countries, including Australia, Gemany, Israel, and the United Kingdom, since 2006, Joe Dyer, president of iRobot's Government & Industrial Robots division, told reporters in a Web conference Wednesday.

The international market consisted of only a handful of robots sold in 2006, but about 8 percent or 9 percent of iRobot's total revenue for unmanned robots in 2007. This year, iRobot estimates that its foreign market will increase to about 15 percent of its total revenues for its government and industrial division, according to Dyer.

But how do export license approvals work when a company is a supplier of dual-use technology to the U.S. military? Admittedly, iRobot's unmanned platforms are just as suited to benign first-responder search-and-rescue functions as they are to lethal combat. But either way you look at it, iRobot is still selling hardware with high-tech military capability to foreign entities.

"It's on a country-by-country basis. If country X desires to purchase iRobot robots, we take it to (the State Department) for approval. If we receive it, we proceed," Dyer said.

Sinobyte commenters have raised two good questions about Internet freedom during the Olympics, set for August 8 to 28 in Beijing. I'm going to give the best kind of answer available for each: an educated guess.

I had written about "free Wi-Fi," which hasn't yet really started working, but is slated to be available during the games in some key areas of the city.

Commenter DangerousOffender asks: How "free" will the access be? Will users be able to access the entire internet, or will it be censored?
I was referring, of course, to "free of charge," but this is a good question. In recent years, no public internet connection has been completely unfiltered. Censorship works in a few different ways: some Web sites are simply blocked at the IP level, making it impossible to access them without a proxy; certain sensitive terms in pages, if detected by filters, can cause the connection to be disrupted; and sensitive terms that appear as part of a URL can trigger a similar disruption.

In the lead up to the Olympics, many online limitations have been relaxed. Access to BBC News was restored. Blogspot has been unblocked, blocked again, and is presently available from this connection in Beijing. English Wikipedia is available, but Chinese Wikipedia is still blocked. After pressure from the International Olympic Committee, the Beijing committee has promised fewer restrictions, but since some ISPs do the censorship themselves to avoid trouble with authorities, any "opening" may not trickle down to every connection.

Rumor has it, anyway, that top hotels full of foreigners and journalists will have unfettered access. I doubt this will be a citywide phenomenon, let alone a national loosening.

JeffW42 asks: How monitored will it be? Will your e-mails be reviewed for "offensive" material, and username and password stored for later reference?
While we have some guesswork to do on censorship, there's even more to do on surveillance. Let's focus on capability and relevance.

Capability: Chinese authorities are viewed by many around the world in governments and other fields as highly capable in infiltrating computer systems. While the Chinese government denies it every time, U.S. authorities say attacks of various kinds have come from China. What's more important is this: We know the government has access to the gateways between China and the rest of the Internet. It should be assumed that, just as any traffic can be filtered for keywords, any traffic can be more closely monitored.

Relevance: The fact that authorities could capture your traffic does not necessarily mean your passwords could be captured. A properly configured SSL-based password system, standard on most websites, should make password capture very difficult if not impossible. Though I am not a security expert, my sense is that this sort of surveillance would be a very low priority for Chinese authorities.

On the question of reviewing e-mail for content, it seems highly unlikely that e-mail would be blocked. If you're planning a big protest or something, however, expect that you and your buddies are on some kind of list for closer monitoring. Simple measures can make all communication much more smooth and quick during high-filtering periods. Users of Gmail, for instance, found that while a normal HTTP connection was extremely slow during the recent unrest in Tibet, using SSL by typing in https://mail.google.com/ (the added "s" is the key) made the connection faster, and e-mails containing sensitive terms were delivered more consistently.

A little perspective
Much is made of China's Internet restrictions. A few things of note, before one seizes on this as unique. I'm not trying to argue that the restrictions are good, but I think a lot of people take this phenomenon and turn it into an anti-Chinese trope without placing it in a bit of a context.

• A study found that most Chinese approved of government controls over the Internet.
• Several students at elite universities I have met in Beijing had no idea there was any censorship.
• The U.S. government, for example, is not exactly free of programs to monitor its citizens' communications.
• China has a lot of surveillance cameras, but so does Britain.

Now, if you can get a visa to China, come on over and enjoy the games. I hear lots of the hotels are wide open.

And we thought the YouTube and Facebook presidential debates were all that.

The latest in debate 2.0 is a campaign face-off on Twitter sponsored by the Personal Democracy Forum that started Friday and is expected to go on at least through the end of the organization's annual conference on Tuesday night.

With a focus on technology and government, the debate is being moderated by Time magazine blogger Anna Marie Cox. The McCain campaign is represented by Liz Mair, the online communications director of the Republican National Committee. The Obama campaign is represented by Mike Nelson, a Georgetown University professor who served in the Clinton White House under Vice President Gore on tech policy issues.

It's yet another interesting use of technology to engage voters in the campaign, so long as they don't mind sorting through posts that while succinct (Twitter has a 140-character limit for individual Tweets), are already plentiful. And we can only hope that the geek community's beloved Twitter doesn't crash amid the traffic.

The Federal Communications Commission on Friday formalized its plans to auction off a section of wireless spectrum to buyers who promise to provide free Internet service that filters out pornography and other inappropriate content, and offers open access to third-party devices and applications.

The agency is seeking public comment on the plan details, of which are posted here. Winning bidders of the 25 megahertz of spectrum in the 2155MHz band would also be required to provide free wireless coverage to at least half of the United States within four years, and to at least 95 percent of the population by the end of the 10-year license, according to Reuters and the FCC posting.

The plan could face opposition from wireless service providers, who have traditionally opposed any stipulations imposed on wireless spectrum auctions. CTIA, the trade organization representing the industry, has already filed comments with the commission urging it not to put requirements on the spectrum.

Given that free wireless Internet business models have yet to be proven successful, it could prove challenging for the FCC to find bidders willing to take on the above stipulations.

The House of Representatives on Friday voted overwhelmingly in favor of a "compromise" spy law that would shield AT&T and other companies from pending lawsuits accusing them of opening their networks to the government in violation of wiretap laws.

The major sticking point in the contentious rewrite of a 1978 electronic-surveillance law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was whether to grant so-called retroactive legal immunity to telephone companies being sued for their participation in the warrantless surveillance program secretly begun by President George W. Bush after the September 11 attacks.

Touted by Republicans as a "compromise," the bill, passed on a 293-129 vote, would not provide retroactive immunity, per se. It would, however, shift the debate behind closed doors, allowing U.S. district courts to dismiss lawsuits if there was written documentation that the White House asked a company to participate and assured it the surveillance was legal.

While expected to pass in the Senate next week, the White House-backed bill could have a harder time in that chamber, where a small minority is better able to block legislation from proceeding. Time is of the essence, as Congress nears a planned July 4th-week recess.

The transition to digital TV is not going as smoothly as some had hoped, according to some government agencies that testified to Congress earlier this week.

A report issued by the Government Accountability Office showed that nearly half of the households that could lose TV service after the transition to digital broadcasting are still unprepared for the switch.

About 84 percent of consumers were aware of the transition, but many didn't know what they had to make sure their TV service wasn't interrupted, the GAO report said. More than half of those surveyed said they were aware of the government's voucher program to subsidize the cost of converter boxes that are needed to view digital TV on older analog TVs. But about two-thirds of those people didn't know how to get a coupon.

Even consumers who won't be affected by the switch were confused, The Washington Post reported. Roughly 30 percent of those who don't actually need a converter box said they were getting ready for the transition.

The confusion is occurring despite broadcasters and cable operators airing public awareness campaigns on TV.

The vouchers, which cover $40 of the cost of the converter boxes, started being sent in February. But they expire after 90 days. The agency overseeing the program reported that more than 40 percent of the 800,000 vouchers that have already been sent out have not been redeemed. And the agency doesn't have enough money to pay for the postage to resend these vouchers.

In February 2009, TV broadcasters will vacate wireless spectrum used to broadcast analog TV signals. Instead, broadcasters will transmit digital TV signals, which use spectrum more efficiently and provide better picture quality. The transition to digital means that some older TVs, and TVs with analog-only tuners, will have to be retrofitted to tune into digital signals.

Preparation for the switch to digital TV is being closely watched since some older TVs that have not been retrofitted won't work after the analog signals stop broadcasting.

Many of the 70 million or so analog TV sets that rely on over-the-air signals belong to minorities, senior citizens, low-income individuals, and people who live in rural areas. The fear is that these individuals will not be ready for when broadcasters stop transmitting analog TV signals in February 2009.

The NLOS-C howitzer can fire six rounds per minute and has a fully automated armament system, meaning it requires just a two-man crew.

(Credit: BAE Systems)

For components of the Army's $160 billion Future Combat Systems program, two key rites of passage are field trials at a military base in the West and a field trip back East to Capitol Hill.

Next week, the Army will bring prototype 1 of the Non Line of Sight Cannon, or NLOS-C, to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., just in front of the Capitol, for its public debut. The NLOS-C is one of eight different manned vehicles in the still evolving FCS plan. All of them will share a common (if not identical) chassis.

The FCS vehicles are notable in part because they're designed to use a hybrid diesel-electric engine system. An electric motor drives the tracks that propel the vehicle, as well as run all internal systems, drawing power from batteries charged by the diesel engine.

The NLOS-C junket to D.C. on June 11 follows a May demonstration on Capitol Hill of some other FCS components, including unattended ground sensors, that are part of what the Army refers to as "Spin Out 1." Given that the FCS road map spans the better part of two decades, with full operational capacity for the whole shebang planned for the far-off 2017, the Army has begun work to get discrete elements out to the field faster.

Lawmakers in Washington regularly get treated to displays of big-budget projects in development as project backers seek to justify a continuing flow of federal funds. The vastness--and vast expense--of Future Combat Systems has made that program particularly susceptible to criticism and to the threat of cutbacks.

In late May, Gen. George Casey (right) and Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., check out an NLOS-C prototype being assembled by BAE Systems in Minnesota.

(Credit: BAE Systems, via U.S. Army)

"Sustaining support for the program over these next two critical years, I think, is probably our greatest challenge," Gen. George Casey, the Army chief of staff, told Defense News in a story published Monday. "That is why it is important that the real capability is coming out now. It allows us to show that what we have been working on for the last decade is starting to bear fruit."

The Army plans to deliver the first of the NLOS-C prototypes to the Yuma Proving Grounds in Arizona by December, with four more arriving there by early 2009 and then three more (for a total of eight) later in the year. Work at Yuma will include mobility, safety, reliability, and gun-firing tests. The main gun on the system is a 155-mm howitzer that can fire six rounds per minute.

The NLOS-C requires a two-man crew, down from the four soldiers needed for similar existing howitzers, in part because of its fully automated armament system.

The testing of the NLOS-C, which is being assembled by defense contractor BAE Systems, is set to run through 2010 ahead of a critical design review that year and a 2011 date for prototypes of the other FCS manned vehicles to be delivered. The Army expects the NLOS-C to be ready for fielding to combat units in 2014.

Casey told Defense News that it is premature to say whether the FCS manned vehicles could be fielded early, describing the hybrid electric engine technology as "borderline revolutionary." He continued:

The engine is on the side of the vehicle, on the left rear of the vehicle. It is about three-quarters the size of Bradley (armored vehicle) engine. All it does is generate electrical power. One, you don't need as much fuel. Two, it is very quiet. We watched it drive by today and 100 yards away you could not hear it, which is significant. We're still working on storage capacity of this; as a technology, it needs to come up a little bit more, but I think there is huge potential with the hybrid electric drive.

Fielding for the Spin Out 1 components, meanwhile, is set for 2011. Those components include the seismic/acoustic unattended ground sensors; the Non Line of Sight Launch System (NLOS-LS), which holds six to eight rockets; and the "B kit" of the networked and software-based Joint Tactical Radio System Ground Mobile Radio (JTRS GMR). The B kits will be used on existing Humvees, M1 Abrams tanks, and Bradley Fighting Vehicles.

This summer, the Spin Out 1 items will be in the hands of about 1,000 soldiers at Fort Bliss, Texas, for testing.