News of Note — After Irene

The hurricane has passed most states with minimal damage to most areas of the major cities, but some rural areas were hit hard. In Virginia, up to 2.5 million people were without power at one point. An overview of the damage can be read here. Any area with power supplied on above-ground cables might have lost power — and that’s mostly rural areas. In some states, such as Vermont and New Jersey, the heavy rainfall caused more damage than the winds, also harming rural areas more than urban areas.

Business

The EFF has updated its report on what it calls the hijacking of search engine traffic by large ISPs. The systems in place use technology from a company called Paxfire. Karl Bode says there should be a law against it.

Usage caps should be the future of the ISP industry. Here’s the latest on this topic from The Economist.

A Washington Post profile of “data center alley” in Ashburn Va. has some interesting data: (h/t datacenterknowledge.com). Loudon county now has “about 40 centers comprising roughly 4 million square feet of space — equivalent to 22 Wal-Mart Supercenters. Another 800,000 square feet are either planned or being built. Loudoun officials said they expect 6.5 million square feet in data centers by 2021.”

The Level 3 blog lists ten causes of fiber cuts.

Which is it? Verizon may be investing all of its copper profits into an unprofitable FiOS service.

Would you allow this? @lieblink recently tweeted, “can i borrow a cup of wifi? my neighbors and i exchanged passwords. my service just went down, so i jumped on their node.”

Dane Jasper of Sonic.net describes five levels of ISP evil (h/t Karl Bode). According to Jasper, the worst crime is “rolling over”.

Technology and security

How to set up a redundant VMWare network.

Wired reveals how RSA got hacked.

Wired published an excerpt of Mitnick’s book. Mitnick was the most famous hacker in the United States for about 20 years.

Politics, regulation, and the law

Jonathan Allen (of Rini Coran, PC) describes the most important of 83 “outdated” rules that were killed off by the FCC.

The FCC released a report on measuring broadband (h/t Brough Turner).

Does the FCC know where its USF money is going? A case from Nebraska (h/t Matt Larsen).

Some commentators are saying that the inauguration of the .xxx domain marks the first time that ICANN has endorsed a filtered internet, and that ICANN is out of control. “ICANN’s current arrangement with the U.S. government that aims for transparency, accountability, and the global public interest amounts to little more than hand-waving given the lack of incentives, legal enforceability or other formal accountability to achieve those objectives.”

Rory Conaway continues his series on the WISP industry by complaining about how the politics of spectrum regulation works.

A lawsuit says that ComScore, the Nielsen of the internet, takes private data from the PCs whose internet usage is being measured.

A communications law blog says, “group that decries hidden interests keeps its true interests well hidden” in a post describing 200 identical letters submitted to the FCC — but the group submitting the letters is pro-transparency organization Free Press.

Did China just admit a role in recent cyberattacks?

Susan Crawford, former special technology advisor to Obama, writes that the U.S. is falling behind in the race for an open government, a key promise of the Obama administration.

UK ISP TalkTalk and its Tiscali UK subsidiary were fined millions of pounds for overcharging customers.

Should democracies shut down social media to thwart protests or riots? That question is being asked in San Francisco and in England.

Could the telcos die as they become a uniculture and because they “invest in lawyers, lobbyists and politicians, instead of plant, people and customer service”?

Copper thieves remain dumb

Karl Bode says that anyone in the business should look up copper + electrocution every few weeks …

Alternate meaning of “WISP”

The word “WISP” can also mean “written information security program” in the financial industry.