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

Eligibility for broadband subsidies harder to prove under Senate farm bill requirements

20 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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Trail of tiers.

The version of the federal farm bill passed by the senate has problematic requirements for documenting eligibility for the broadband infrastructure grants and loans it authorises. It sets 4 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload speeds as a minimum. If an area does not have at least one service provider offering that level of service or better, then it’s eligible for construction subsidies, assuming all the other requirements are met.

To prove an area is eligible, though, the lack of service has to be…

(I) certified by the affected community, city, county, or designee; or (II) demonstrated on (aa) the broadband map of the affected State if the map contains address-level data; or ‘‘(bb) the National Broadband Map if address-level data is unavailable.

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It sounds a little different when a city talks about acceptable Internet use

19 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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Unacceptable use.

Opelika, Alabama wants to be the first in the state to add fiber to the home service to its municipal electric utility. It’s set $41 million aside to build an FTTH system and hopes to get to profitability within five years. But it’s also wrestling with a question that often comes up when building municipal broadband projects: to what degree can or should a city control what happens on its network?

The discussion in Opelika centers on an acceptable use policy.… More

Changing partners in the California broadband subsidy dance

18 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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Whose happy ending will it be?

With the California state budget passed by the legislature and sent on to Governor Brown for his expected signature, broadband subsidy bills are starting to move forward again. Senate bill 740 and assembly bill 1299 were approved last month in their original chambers, and have now swapped places.

SB 740 is the bill that will determine the future of the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF). Originally, it would have added $100 million to CASF and made it possible for a wide range of independent Internet service providers and local agencies to apply for broadband infrastructure grants and loans.… More

The only loony thing about Google's Project Loon might be the name

17 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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Driven by computing power, not Newton or newtons.

New Zealand’s Canterbury Plain is hosting Google’s latest idea-that’s-so-goofy-it-might-work, appropriately named Project Loon. Thirty high altitude balloons carrying data relay equipment were released to drift over Christchurch, generally heading east towards the telecoms starved Chatham Islands. The concept Google is testing is to put enough balloons into the air to create a fleet of atmospheric satellites that can talk to each other and to the ground, and relay Internet service to hard to reach places.… More

Federal broadband grants would help level the playing field for California projects

16 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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Big state, big farms.

The version of the federal omnibus farm bill that was approved by the U.S. Senate last week improves the chances of actually building broadband infrastructure in areas of California where no service currently exists. That’s assuming the lack of service can be documented and withstand challenges from competing providers who might claim otherwise, which is a separate can of worms.

The legislation, which still has to be approved by the House, allows the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) to give outright grants to pay for broadband projects, in addition to its existing loan program.… More

Building on a broadband lead

15 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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Blocking strategy.

Akamai, a leading content delivery network provider, publishes periodic performance reports that ranks global Internet service by country. Its latest figures put Korea, Japan and Hong Kong at the top of the chart.

That doesn’t tell the whole story, though. The Akamai numbers show how fast traffic is moving on its network, not how much of it there is. So having, say, super fast connections in gaming centers and clusters of homes with gigabit class connections can skew the rankings.… More