a Quinta 's weblog : un Blog di Stefano Quintarelli

Pare proprio che le tariffe di roaming saranno qui a lungo

Roaming surcharges within the EU should end one day, but we do not know when exactly. For the time being, European citizens will continue to pay roaming surcharges abroad at least until 2020 and even further, despite the fact that European medias have frequently reported, in the last months, about the imminent end of international roaming.

In April 2014 the European Parliament, amending the Single Telecom Market (“STM”) of Commissioner Kroes, proposed to definitively abolish roaming surcharges by end of 2015. The Parliament’s proposal was then submitted to the Council, i.e. the body that within the European Union represents the governments of the Member States, however an agreement was not found until now. A next meeting of the Council is scheduled for November 27, 2014, however most signals indicate that the national governments will just discuss about the progress of the negotiations, while no decision is expected to be taken.

In the meanwhile, there was a leak from the Presidency of the Commission, namely a letter sent by president Junker to all EU commissioners in which each of them was required “to examine all pending proposals in [your] area and to signal those which we should review together, for example because they have no realistic chance of being adopted in the near future, or because the degree of ambition achievable does not match the objectives sought.” Many observers have recognized that such kind of instructions will likely bring to the withdrawal of the STM proposal, including the roaming reform.

via radiobruxelleslibera.wordpress.com

L'ordine dei risultati di Google protetti in USA dal primo emendamento

With the First Amendment behind it, Google is now free to put search results in whatever order it wants, according to a recent ruling by a US court in San Francisco. The company has been fighting to earn this right for years, but it wasn't until last week that a judge in the Bay Area decided to grant the search giant such a thing, citing freedom of speech as the main influencer in the decision.

via www.engadget.com

mi chiedo se questo non abbia implicazioni sulla responsabilità (in USA). che ne pensate ?

AT&T ritarda la fibra e la FCC chiede spiegazioni (da noi Ruggiero la promise nel 2006 entro il 2011)

Two days after AT&T claimed it has to "pause" a 100-city fiber build because of uncertainty over network neutrality rules, the Federal Communications Commission today asked the company to finally detail its vague plans for fiber construction.

Despite making all sorts of bold promises about bringing fiber to customers and claiming its fiber construction is contingent on the government giving it what it wants, AT&T has never detailed its exact fiber plans. For one thing, AT&T never promised to build in all of the 100 cities and towns it named as potential fiber spots. The company would only build in cities and towns where local leaders gave AT&T whatever it wanted. In all likelihood, only a small portion of the 100 municipalities were likely to get fiber, and nobody knows which ones.

Yet this week, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson made it sound as though a full 100 cities and towns would lose a fiber opportunity if the company doesn't like the FCC's final net neutrality proposal. "We can't go out and invest that kind of money deploying fiber to 100 cities not knowing under what rules those investments will be governed," he told investors Wednesday.

AT&T has separately claimed it will bring fiber-to-the-premises Internet service to "2 million additional locations" if it's allowed to buy DirecTV. But since AT&T never said how many locations it would bring fiber to if the merger is rejected, it's not clear what that 2 million number is in addition to. In short, no one outside of AT&T knows how extensive the company's fiber buildouts are planned to be.

Today, the FCC challenged AT&T to finally reveal some facts about its fiber plans in a letter to AT&T Senior VP Robert Quinn. Jamillia Ferris, a former Justice Department antitrust lawyer who joined the FCC to review the AT&T/DirecTV merger, began the letter by describing Stephenson's statement that "the Company would limit its fiber deployment to the '2 million additional homes' that are 'commitments to the DirecTV announcement' and that any other fiber deployment would depend on the outcome of the Commission’s Open Internet Proceeding." Ferris then asked Quinn for:

(a) Data regarding the Company’s current plans for fiber deployment, specifically: (1) the current number of households to which fiber is deployed and the breakdown by technology (i.e., FTTP [fiber-to-the-premises] or FTTN [fiber-to-the-node]) and geographic area of deployment; (2) the total number of households to which the Company planned to deploy fiber prior to the Company’s decision to limit deployment to the 2 million households and the breakdown by technology and geographic area of deployment; and (3) the total number of households to which the Company currently plans to deploy fiber, including the 2 million households, and the breakdown by technology and geographic area of deployment;

(b) A description of (1) whether the AT&T FTTP Investment Model demonstrates that fiber deployment is now unprofitable; and (2) whether the fiber to the 2 million homes following acquisition of DirecTV would be unprofitable; and

(c) All documents relating to the Company’s decision to limit AT&T’s deployment of fiber to 2 million homes following the acquisition of DirecTV.

Ferris asked Quinn for a response by November 21.

via arstechnica.com

 

Ruggiero disse..

...noi dobbiamo superare le 8 mila centrali e arrivare con la fibra ottica molto più avanti fino agli armadi di smistamento (quelli che stanno accanto ai condomini e alle case). Questi sono circa 100 mila in Italia. In pratica, dobbiamo arrivare con la fibra ottica fin sotto casa degli utenti. Da lì all' abitazione poi si va con il doppino di rame che tutti hanno già in casa. In questo modo si possono fornire a tutti oltre i 50 mega di banda». In questo modo dove si andrà? «Noi crediamo che il mercato grazie a questa nuova rete, capace di trasmettere i nuovi servizi, consentirà di raggiungere nel 2011 un mercato complessivo di circa 15-16 milioni di clienti broadband. E questa è una rivoluzione. Una volta che tutto ciò sarà realizzato, l' Italia sarà di fatto quasi tutta collegata e nel migliore dei modi.

via ricerca.repubblica.it

 ma non risulta che gli obiettivi del top magmt di una telco siano correlati ai km di fibra nella rete di accesso, menter certamente di piu' a dividendi e quotazione del titolo.

non è cattiveria, sono le regole del gioco...

Google Glass come Segway ?

Of 16 Glass app makers contacted by Reuters, nine said that they had stopped work on their projects or abandoned them, mostly because of the lack of customers or limitations of the device. Three more have switched to developing for business, leaving behind consumer projects.

...

Several key Google employees instrumental to developing Glass have left the company in the last six months, including lead developer Babak Parviz, electrical engineering chief Adrian Wong, and Ossama Alami, director of developer relations.

And a Glass funding consortium created by Google Ventures and two of Silicon Valley's biggest venture capitalists, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Andreessen Horowitz, quietly deleted its website, routing users to the main Glass site.

via www.reuters.com

L'erba del vicino: Ford, UPS e Visa a favore della Net neutrality

It's not just tech giants (and President Obama) pushing for a tougher approach to net neutrality -- other outlets want reforms, too. A trio of regulatory filings reveal that representatives from Bank of America, Ford, UPS and Visa spoke to FCC commissioners multiple times this year to press for stricter net neutrality under the banner of an advocacy group, the Ad Hoc Telecommunications Users Committee. The companies tell Bloomberg Businessweek that they weren't taking particular stances on the issue, and were only concerned about getting their customers a "fast and reliable connection," as Ford puts it. However, the filings suggest otherwise -- the Ad Hoc members gave the FCC material explicitly asking for the internet to be reclassified as a public utility, as the President wants. So why the he-said-she-said discrepancy?

Simply put, the companies want to avoid the scorn of their telecom partners. Internet outfits like Netflix have nothing to lose by arguing for net neutrality in public, but bank and vehicle makers just might; they'd rather not put a big deal into jeopardy by voicing their opinion. A group like Ad Hoc lets these corporations argue for a neutral internet (which they say protects against internet providers double-dipping on access fees) without officially linking themselves to the cause. You won't see them running pro-neutrality ads or testifying in hearings, then, but it's clear that support for fairer internet regulation extends well beyond Silicon Valley.

via www.engadget.com

capisco per UPS e Visa (logistica e pagamenti ecommerce) che rischiano potenzialmente di essere esclusi da business futuri.

Ma Ford ?

IAB (Internet architecture board) chiede di introdurre cifratura a tutti i livelli dei protocolli TCP/IP

> We recommend that encryption be deployed throughout the protocol stack
> since there is not a single place within the stack where all kinds of
> communication can be protected.
> 
> The IAB urges protocol designers to design for confidential operation by
> default.  We strongly encourage developers to include encryption in their
> implementations, and to make them encrypted by default.  We similarly
> encourage network and service operators to deploy encryption where it is
> not yet deployed, and we urge firewall policy administrators to permit
> encrypted traffic.
> 
> We believe that each of these changes will help restore the trust users
> must have in the Internet.  We acknowledge that this will take time and
> trouble, though we believe recent successes in content delivery networks,
> messaging, and Internet application deployments demonstrate the
> feasibility of this migration.  We also acknowledge that many network
> operations activities today, from traffic management and intrusion
> detection to spam prevention and policy enforcement, assume access to
> cleartext payload.  For many of these activities there are no solutions
> yet, but the IAB will work with those affected to foster development of
> new approaches for these activities which allow us to move to an Internet
> where traffic is confidential by default.

via lists.w3.org

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler Tells Silicon Valley He's Open To Obama Net Neutrality Plan

The Washington Post reported Tuesday night that Wheeler's comments put the chairman "at odds" with Obama. The report said Wheeler was "moving in a different direction" than the one the president was calling for, and quoted the chairman as saying he would need to "split the baby" between competing plans.

But people who were at the meeting told The Huffington Post that Wheeler was driving at a different message with the "baby" metaphor. Rather, they said, Wheeler was saying that he was the man at the center of what is becoming an increasingly tense fight, and that he needed political support to fend off the expected attacks.

HuffPost spoke with six people who were at the meeting, five of whom agreed to be quoted on the record. All of them had the same impression of Wheeler's comments.

Julie Samuels, executive director and board president of Engine, an organization that advocates on issues relevant to startups, was at the meeting. She told HuffPost that she wouldn't describe Wheeler's comments as being defiant towards the president. Instead, her impression was that Wheeler was taking Obama's plan under consideration.

Coming out of the meeting, she said, it was clear that Wheeler had initially been leaning -- before the president's statement -- towards the so-called “hybrid” or compromise approach. But after the statement, “it’s not clear anymore.”

She added, “I think he hasn't made up his mind yet.”

via www.huffingtonpost.com

L'erba del vicino: ISP che modifica(va)no il traffico inibendo l'uso della cifratura

A key portion of the article focuses on how we noticed that ISPs and wireless broadband providers can block encryption technologies if they desire.

We discovered this by studying the service of a particular wireless broadband provider, and discovered it was able to interfere with the ability of one of our engineers to encrypt their email communication.

The article gathered a fair amount of attention and we received questions from the press (including the Washington Post), advocacy groups and our customers. We wanted to share the full story:

A Golden Frog engineer first noticed the issue in September 2013 when he was an AIO Wireless customer. (AIO was a prepaid wireless service provider and subsidiary of AT&T). Being a privacy-focused individual, he set his email client to require using an encrypted connection to his email server using STARTTLS. STARTTLS is an extension to SMTP (the standard email sending protocol) that allows an email server and client to use TLS (Transport Layer Security) to provide private, encrypted, and authenticated communication over insecure Internet connections.

In May 2014, AIO merged with Cricket Wireless so the Golden Frog engineer became a Cricket customer. In June 2014, he brought the issue to the attention of Golden Frog Co-CTO Michael Douglass while the two were working together at a coffee shop. While using his laptop tethered to his phone and connected via Cricket, he was unable to send email securely. He switched to the coffee shop’s Wifi and was able to send encrypted email. They concluded that STARTTLS was being intercepted.

The two investigated further and started running tests. They determined Cricket was intercepting and blocking STARTTLS on port 25 – basically, the STARTTLS command was masked out in server responses, and a command failure response was returned. The engineer was connecting to a personal mail server NOT associated with the wireless provider. The test was repeated by connecting to multiple mail servers including Golden Frog’s corporate mail servers. These were SMTP connections USING the Cricket/AIO network as a network provider to reach a remote, unaffiliated with AIO mail server.

Golden Frog Co-CTO Philip Molter presented the STARTTLS findings in a lightning talk at the Texas LinuxFest in Austin, TX a couple weeks later. We tested again in July 2014 when we filed our comments with the FCC, and found the same results. We included the screenshots of those test results, which are in our FCC filing.

After the TechDirt article came out, we anticipated we’d get some questions so we ran the same testing and found that STARTTLS is not currently being intercepted and blocked. We are unsure what changed.

We also tested on AT&T’s network and found the encryption is not being blocked. Good.

However, this is a clear indication of what wireless ISPs can do under the claim of reasonable network management. Although it has apparently now reversed course, this particular ISP was putting its customers at serious risk by inhibiting their ability to protect online communications. We included it in our filing because as long as the FCC refuses to return to its prior “open access” policies and enable wide competition then it must establish effective rules to prevent both wireless and wireline ISPs from throttling and blocking users’ Internet traffic and preventing them from using encryption to protect their privacy.

via www.goldenfrog.com

Potentially catastrophic bug bites all versions of Windows. Patch now | Ars Technica

Microsoft has disclosed a potentially catastrophic vulnerability in virtually all versions of Windows. People operating Windows systems, particularly those who run websites, should immediately install a patch Microsoft released Tuesday morning.

The vulnerability resides in the Microsoft secure channel (schannel) security component that implements the secure sockets layer and transport layer security (TLS) protocols, according to a Microsoft advisory. A failure to properly filter specially formed packets makes it possible for attackers to execute attack code of their choosing by sending malicious traffic to a Windows-based server.

via arstechnica.com

Metrò o fibra ? fibra tutta la vita.

L’opera, ultimata, potrebbe raggiungere i 4 miliardi di costi e i 25 km di percorso: 160 milioni a chilometro.

via www.lastampa.it

con 1-2 KM di metropolitana si fa il cablaggio FTTB di una città come torino ... non c’è proprio storia