from Free Press:

Online music is in danger. A recent ruling by an obscure regulatory board threatens to put independent and public radio on the Internet out of business.

The "Copyright Royalty Board" is dramatically increasing the royalties "webcasters" must pay every time they stream a song online. Public Internet radio like NPR is especially at risk.

The rules could shut down nonprofit and smaller commercial Internet radio outlets and force larger webcasters to play the same cookie-cutter music as Clear Channel. So much for new online alternatives.

Rescue Internet Radio—Sign the Petition:
http://action.freepress.net/campaign/internetradio

(more…)

The City of Milwaukee was mentioned in the latest issue of ArcNews [a quarterly publication of ESRI] for its use of GIS and GPS technologies as part of a remedial excavation project at a brownfields property located in Milwaukee.

→ read the article

The Open Geospatial Consortium^® [OGC] recently became a member of the World Wide Web Consortium [W3C], a standards organization that develops interoperable technologies [specifications, guidelines, software, and tools] to lead the Web to its full potential.

The OGC is participating in a W3C incubator activity focusing on semantic geospatial issues. W3C Incubator Activities facilitate rapid development, on a time scale of a year or less, of new Web-related concepts. The semantic geospatial activity or Geospatial XG is sponsored by W3C members OGC, SRI International, University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute [USC ISI], Stanford University and Oracle and is chaired by Traverse Technology's Joshua Lieberman.

As an initial goal the Geospatial XG is working to develop a W3C "Note" based on GeoRSS version 1. This will result in a W3C Web page describing GeoRSS in the context of both W3C standards such as XML, HTML, and OWL; and OGC's relevant work, such as the OGC Abstract Specifications and Geography Markup Language [GML].

The OGC and the W3C seek to collaboratively add geospatial functionality to the emerging Semantic Web in a manner that is consistent with existing and future OGC standards. OGC standards are the product of a successful 12-year open, international, and consensus-driven effort to overcome obstacles to geospatial interoperability.

Interested parties are invited to participate in the Geospatial XG public mailing list. OGC's members are also invited to provide input on W3C issues via the OGC W3C Liaison, Raj Singh.

The OGC is an international industry consortium of more than 335 companies, government agencies and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface specifications. OpenGIS^® Specifications support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. The specifications empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful with all kinds of applications.

the scientists at the labs were totally surprised to see such good news in today's paper, but this temporary victory needs to be made permanent. it's time for the new congress to finish the work of the FCC and make net neutrality permanent under the law.

from the New York Times:

"AT&T offered new concessions to federal regulators late yesterday in the hopes of salvaging its $84 billion proposed acquisition of BellSouth.

"The concessions included a pledge to provide Internet users unobstructed Internet connections, an important gesture meant to win over dissenting commissioners at the Federal Communications Commission."

…

"In addition to the net neutrality pledge, AT&T, which is already the nation's largest phone company, also offered to sell certain wireless spectrum and phone lines, a concession Mr. Copps and Mr. Adelstein have sought as a way to encourage competition and temper the company's dominance. And the company pledged to upgrade its telephone network so that it could provide high-speed Internet service to at least 85 percent of homes in its service area.

"The company said it would also extend favorable terms to rivals that want to rent its lines to provide their own phone and Internet service, an issue that has been the subject of innumerable legal, regulatory and political fights for more than a decade."

…

"If the F.C.C. approves the deal, AT&T said it would live by the commitments for three and a half years."

→ read the entire article
→ tell congress to make net neutrality the law
→ analysis of AT&T's concession by Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu

via the New York Times:

Flaws Are Detected in Microsoft's Vista

"Microsoft is facing an early crisis of confidence in the quality of its Windows Vista operating system as computer security researchers and hackers have begun to find potentially serious flaws in the system that was released to corporate customers late last month."

…

"The browser flaw is particularly troubling because it potentially means that Web users could become infected with malicious software simply by visiting a booby-trapped site. That would make it possible for an attacker to inject rogue software into the Vista-based computer, according to executives at Determina, a company based in Redwood City, Calif., that sells software intended to protect against operating system and other vulnerabilities."

→ read the entire article

originally via MSNBC [no less!]:

Consumers have no idea how reliable their cell phone service will be when they buy a phone and sign a long-term contract. The Federal Communications Commission could offer some guidance, but it won't. The agency refuses to make public a detailed database of cell phone provider outages that it has maintained since 2004.

A federal Freedom of Information Act request for the data, filed in August by MSNBC.com, has been rejected by the agency. The stated reasons: Release of the information could help terrorists plan attacks against the United States, and it would harm the companies involved.

Complaints about cell phone service are near the top of every list of consumer gripes. The Illinois attorney general's office, for example, last year ranked cell phone complaints as the fourth-most-common complaint, trailing only gas prices, credit card firms and home improvement scams.

To find out if a cell phone carrier service will be reliable, consumers are forced to buy a phone, then use it at home and on their normal commuting routes. Callers generally get 30 days at most to return a phone if the service doesn't work well enough.

But that test won't reveal anything about carriers' periodic outages.

The Federal Communications Commission does know something about outages, however. It has collected outage reports from telecommunications firms since the early 1990s. Any time a carrier has an outage that affects 900,000 caller minutes—say a 30-minute outage impacting 30,000 customers—it must report it to the Network Outage Reporting System.

…

Tompkins said the blanket removal of the entire outage report system from public view was symptomatic of a larger trend in the Bush administration.

"Every time we turn around something else is a national security issue," he said.

Furthermore, if some larger pattern of cell phone outages could be gleaned from the reports, he said, companies might "fix it, not bury it."

"I can't think of one problem that has gone away because it's kept a secret," he said.

→ read the entire article

→ get involved

via <nettime> nettime-1 [received 20061217]:

The Free Software Foundation [FSF] today launched BadVista.org, a campaign with a twofold mission of exposing the harms inflicted on computer users by the new Microsoft Windows Vista and promoting free software alternatives that respect users' security and privacy rights.

"Vista is an upsell masquerading as an upgrade. It is an overall regression when you look at the most important aspect of owning and using a computer: your control over what it does. Obviously MS Windows is already proprietary and very restrictive, and well worth rejecting. But the new 'features' in Vista are a Trojan Horse to smuggle in even more restrictions. We'll be focusing attention on detailing how they work, how to resist them, and why people should care," said FSF program administrator John Sullivan.

The campaign will organize supporters into effective and unusual actions drawing attention to this daylight theft of computer users' rights, aggregate news stories cutting through the Vista marketing propaganda, and provide a user-friendly gateway to the adoption of free software operating systems like gNewSense.

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thanks Donna:

Google Map Creator is a freeware application designed to make thematic mapping using Google Maps simpler. The software is part of the GeoVUE Project at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis [CASA].

If you have a shape file [and the associated bits], this free piece of software by Richard Milton of CASA will let you create a Google Map of the data and provide you with a web page which you can then publish.

→ more info
→ get it