Looks like Google and Verizon were, in fact, in talks over Net Neutrality after all, calling it a “thorny” issue, no less. Hm. Both parties announced, a few moments ago, the creation of a codified framework that they will submit to lawmakers in hopes of being enshrined into law. Many of the ideas are fairly benign, such as giving the FCC power to regulate the Internet a little more forcefully. (A recent court case has rendered the FCC’s power somewhat uncertain.) Other ideas, such as the wholesale exclusion of wireless Internet from any sort of Net Neutrality controls, are a little more controversial.

The framework includes seven main points: supporting the FCC’s openness guidelines; steps should be taken to prevent a so-called “tiered” Internet from arising on current Internet infrastructure; ISPs should be upfront to its customers how they handle their data (see Comcast’s constant struggle with BitTorrent traffic); making the FCC the sole arbiter when it comes to regulating the Internet; giving ISPs the power to offer “additional, differentiated online services, in addition to the Internet access and video services (such as Verizon’s FIOS TV) offered today”; the wholesale exemption of wireless broadband from any of these proposals or ideas; and to promote the idea that broadband access for all Americans is in the “national interest.”

Two of the five deserve a closer look: points five and six, those dealing with “additional, differentiated online services” and wireless broadband access.

To me, point five seems like carte blanche for the creation almost of a second Internet. The Internet you know and love, the one that has worked fairly well so far, will remain in palce, but ISPs will be allowed to offer “additional, differentiated online services” as they see fit.

Read the full CrunchGear Article at: Not Neutrality: Did Google & Verizon Just Stab The Internet In The Heart? It is partly worry because of anecdotes…well, and precedents…and the things they say…and they things they don’t say…

For those with iPhones, a practicing lawyer in New Orleans, Jeff Richardson has a site that focuses on the iPhone for professionals—iPhone J. D.

Recommended.

Another Site: InfoWorld’s Business iphone and ipad apps finder:
 The no-junk business iPhone and iPad apps finder – InfoWorld

Read the complete piece with comments at:
The Oily Truth Spills Out
By Jeffrey Hollender
 

We can also find crucial regulatory lessons in the Gulf’s oil-stained waters. Over the course of the last decade, the federal Minerals Management Service, the agency responsible for offshore drilling oversight, was packed with oil industry insiders who weakened existing safety regulations and refused to require key emergency systems that might have prevented the current havoc. These “regulators” were also lax in pursuing rules violations and levied only miniscule fines, which further encouraged industry misbehavior. Clearly, we need to increase regulatory oversight and pass new laws that prevent the foxes from guarding our henhouses.

Then there is the question I can’t help but ask: If British Petroleum (the company that only a few years ago referred to itself as, “beyond petroleum”) was an authentically responsible corporation, would the Gulf be in the mess it’s in now? Perhaps not. An oil company driven by a mission of genuine responsibility would have voluntarily installed the non-required safety gear. It would not have been drilling to depths beyond those permitted, as has been reported, nor would it have outsourced this drilling to begin with. And when mayhem struck, instead of disputing high leak rate figures, transparency would have insisted that it come immediately clean about the extent of the problem—or at least admit that it had no idea how bad things were—so that appropriate resources could be marshaled without delay.

Yes, these things can take money. An automatic switch that closes off blow-outs, for example, runs about $500,000. But compared to the $30 billion drop in market value BP stock has experienced since the spill, not to mention what it might cost to clean up the entire Gulf of Mexico, that’s a drop in the bucket. As I’ve said before, the ROI on responsibility is always a good investment. And that’s the real lesson of the Deepwater Horizon disaster: Whether it’s new energy policies or adopting corporate responsibility, doing the right thing usually costs a little more up front, but it always saves far more in the long run. Let’s hope that wisdom is ultimately all that’s left behind on Louisiana’s shores.

About Jeffrey Hollender

Jeffrey Hollender is co-author of the recently published book, The Responsibility Revolution and Co-Founder and Executive Chair of Seventh Generation, the leader in green household products. He is also the author of Inspired Protagonist , the leading blog on corporate responsibility and a co-founder of the American Sustainable Business Council and the Sustainability Institute.

Talkback Question: Readers, what’s your opinion on the BP oil spill? What could or should have been done differently? What lessons do you draw from the disaster? Share your thoughts with Talkback.

Typically, an iPhone will look for a specific MAC address–the unique identifier for the router–to verify that the wireless network is a device a user agreed to join previously. However, if the iPhone has previously connected to any one of the numerous free AT&T Wi-Fi hot spots (offered at virtually every Starbucks in the U.S., for example) the device will ignore what the MAC address says and simply connect to the network if it has “AT&T Wifi” attached, Kamkar said.

“The iPhone joins the network by name with no other form of authentication,” he said.

Read the entire article on CNET Reports:

On iPhone, beware of that AT&T Wi-Fi hot spot
April 27, 2010 1:33 PM PDT   —    by Elinor Mills

Kamkar said he made this discovery recently when he was at a Starbucks and disconnected from the AT&T Wi-Fi network.

“I went into the settings to disconnect and the prompt was different from normal,” he said. “I went home and had my computer pretend to be an AT&T hot spot just by the name and my iPhone continued to connect to it. I saw one or two other iPhones hop onto the network, too, going through my laptop computer. I could redirect them, steal credentials as they go to Web sites,” among other stealth moves, if he had wanted to.

To prove that a hijack is possible, Kamkar wrote a program that displays messages and can make other modifications when someone is attempting to use the Google Maps program on an iPhone that has been intercepted. He will be releasing his hijacking program via his Twitter account:  http://twitter.com/samykamkar.

Kamkar hasn’t attempted the hijack on an iPod Touch, but plans to determine whether it has the same vulnerability.

iPhone users can protect themselves by disabling their Wi-Fi, or they can turn off the automatic joining of the AT&T Wi-Fi network, but only if the device is within range of an existing AT&T hot spot, Kamkar said.

Asked for comment an Apple spokeswoman said: “iPhone performs properly as a Wi-Fi device to automatically join known networks. Customers can also choose to select to ‘Forget This Network’ after using a hot spot so the iPhone doesn’t join another network of the same name automatically.”

Kamkar, an independent researcher based in Los Angeles, first made a name for himself by launching what was called the “Samy” worm on MySpace in order to see how quickly he could get friends on the social-networking site. The cross-site scripting (XSS) worm displayed the words “Samy is my hero” on a victim’s profile and when others viewed the page they were infected.

He served three years of probation under a plea agreement reached in early 2007 for releasing the worm.

Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service, and the Associated Press. E-mail Elinor.

But despite the generally negative tone of the article, it’s actually a useful one, because it brings out in the open a key bit of information: wind power actually brings electricity prices down!

windmills (…) operators in Europe may have become their own worst enemy, reducing the total price paid for electricity in Germany, Europe’s biggest power market, by as much as 5 billion euros some years

The wind-energy boom in Europe and parts of Texas has begun to reduce bills for consumers.

Spanish power prices fell an annual 26 percent in the first quarter because of the surge in supplies from wind and hydroelectric production

This tidbit of information, which will hopefully begin to contradict the usual lies about the need for hefty subsidies for the wind sector, has been publicised by EWEA, the European Wind Energy Association in a report on the merit order effect (PDF). This is the name for what happens when you inject a lot of capital-intensive, low-marginal-cost supply into a marginalist price-setting market mechanism with low short term demand elasticity – or, in simpler words: when you have more wind, there is less need to pay to burn more gas to provide the requisite additional power at a given moment.

I’ve long argued that this was one of the strongest arguments for wind (see my article on The cost of wind, the price of wind, the value of wind from last year), and I’ve pushed the EWEA people to use it more – so this study (which I was not involved in) is most welcome.

The article (and several excellent comments) continue at:
Wind’s Latest Problem: it … makes power too cheap
In the Eurotrib 

Like many Mac users, I complain about the fan noise and heat and CPU usage of Flash when it seems to take over the computer. Coupled with Adobe’s constant problems with keeping the hackboi crowd away from their software, I always rejoice when I can take a step from using it.

Thus, happy to join the YouTube HTML5 Beta– a tasty little logo comes up to tell you that non-flash is going to play soon.

Adobe claims that they will prove Steve Jobs wrong when Flash version 10.1 is stable and released. With reports that the uninstaller doesn’t remove 10.1 betas, and that it crashes on certain sites, I’m not willing to play victim. Staying up to date isn’t as simple as finding an application and clicking Search for Updates, so we have placed a Flash Version Check in the column of important links on the front page. 

I have messed with ClickToFlash for Safari and Flashblock for Firefox, finding them slightly frustrating to have to load it when a site comes up with something I might want to see…but it is small pain…then I try the next version of Flash until is locks up Safari and spins Firefox into using all my RAM, and hard disk and asks for a USB stick to consume as well.

Your milage may vary, but this foray into the coming HTML5 standard does me fine.

More as it happens, 

C J Flynn

PS—The newest Open Standards coming online with HTML5 are CSS3 and SVG (for web based vector graphics). For an interesting table, see; When Can I Use?

Want to see what SVG can do? SVG Edit

For seeing what HTML5 and CSS3 will mean for the future: The HTML5/CSS3 Cheatsheet

The original September ’09 Scientific American article is here, and important in itself, but not as important as someone holding hands with the non-physicists who want to know more of this topic.

Quantum Entanglement, Photosynthesis and Better Solar Cells: Scientific American

A May ’09 article with more detailed thoughts from Foresight.org is here:
the Foresight Institute » Quantum entanglement in photosynthesis?

A pdf of the original Berkley article:

Quantum entanglement in photosynthetic light harvesting complexes

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The specifications don’t seem to be available to the commons yet. The Blu-ray Association site that I would expect it on is linked. This short article comes from InAVate – Details emerge on Blu-ray 3D specification.

None of the articles mention it specifically, but I understand that HDMI 1.4 is required for Blu-ray 3D…one more upgrade…

MPEG4-MVC compresses both left and right eye views, and can provide full 1080p-resolution as well backwards compatibility with current 2D players. MVC was developed by MPEG to support multiple simultaneous views of a subject.

In general, an MVC encoder receivers N temporarily synchronised video streams and generates a single output bit-stream. The decoder receivers the bit-stream, and decodes and outputs the N video signals.

MVC works by exploiting the similarities between multiple video captures of a scene. By eliminating redundant information across camera views, MVC achieves a reduction in bit rate of around 20-25%.

[Editor: Sifting through the Bluray association buzzword bitstream is torture. If the standard is written like this, it will be a great purgative.]

Further data from Xhitlabs says:

The specification allows every Blu-ray 3D player and movie to deliver full HD 1080p resolution (1920×1080, progressive scan) to each eye, thereby maintaining the industry leading image quality, which further distances Blu-ray from high-definition options provided by Internet-based services.

The specification is display agnostic, meaning that Blu-ray 3D products will deliver the 3D image to any compatible 3D display, regardless of whether that display uses LCD, Plasma or other technology and regardless of what 3D technology the display uses to deliver the image to the viewer’s eyes. The compulsory thing for stereoscopic 3D is that those screens should support 120Hz or higher refresh rate.

The specification supports playback of 2D discs in forthcoming 3D players and can enable 2D playback of Blu-ray 3D discs on the large installed base of Blu-ray Disc players currently in homes around the world.

The Blu-ray 3D specification calls for encoding 3D video using the Multiview Video Coding (MVC) codec, an extension to the ITU-T H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) codec currently supported by all Blu-ray disc players. MPEG4-MVC compresses both left and right eye views with a typical 50% overhead compared to equivalent 2D content, according to BDA; and can provide full 1080p resolution backward compatibility with current 2D Blu-ray disc players. The specification also incorporates enhanced graphic features for 3D. These features provide a new experience for users, enabling navigation using 3D graphic menus and displaying 3D subtitles positioned in 3D video.

What is important, the BDA has not announced any actual stereoscopic 3D-capable BD players. Nevertheless, the BDA stressed that Sony PlayStation 3 is stereo 3D-compatible with a simple update of its firmware.