FCC Changes Phone Policy

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has approved an overhaul to its Lifeline program, which subsidizes telephone service for economically disadvantaged people. The goals are to save money and allow the subsidy to be applied toward broadband service.

The FCC on Tuesday voted to make several changes to the program, including the launch of a $25 million pilot program to use Lifeline for broadband. The pilot program will solicit proposals from broadband providers starting this year, the FCC said. Under the changes approved by the commission, recipients of Lifeline subsidies could use the money for bundled services, including voice and broadband packages.

In addition, the FCC set a 2012 savings target of $200 million for the program, which costs about $2.1 billion a year, and the commission will create a national Lifeline database to prevent multiple telecom carriers from receiving program support for the same consumer. Critics of the program have complained that there’s significant abuse, with recipients getting subsidies for multiple phone and mobile lines.

The FCC will also create an eligible database, using government data, focused on verifying recipients’ initial and ongoing eligibility for the program. The database should reduce the potential for fraud and cut red tape for both recipients and carriers, the FCC said.

Commissioners set a goal of saving up to $2 billion over the next three years, but Commissioner Robert McDowell, a Republican, said he doubted the FCC can achieve that goal. McDowell questioned the “assumptions and models” FCC staff used to predict the savings.

Nevertheless, McDowell voted to approve the changes. The changes will help Lifeline better fulfill its purpose of helping low-income U.S. residents stay connected, he said.

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Google Defends New Privacy Policy

In a letter sent to eight members of Congress, Google yesterday defended its decision to consolidate its privacy policies and users’ personal information.

The 13-page letter explains Google’s decision to change its privacy policies and answers specific questions from the legislators. In sum, Google contended that its approach to privacy remains the same, that users still have control over how they use the company’s various online services, and that private information stays private.

“Some have expressed concern about whether consumer can opt out of ourupdated privacy policy,” wrote Pablo Chavez, Google’s director of public policy, in the letter.

“We understand the question at the heart of this concern. We believe the relevant issue is whether users have choices about how their data is collected and used. Google’s privacy policy – like that of other companies – is a document that applies to all consumers using our products and services. However, we have built meaningful privacy controls into our products, and we are committed to continue offering those choices in the future,” he added.

Google stirred up something of a privacy firestorm last week when company executives disclosed plans to rewrite privacy policies and to meld user information across its various products and services.

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Nokia Sold 1 Million Lumina Smartphones

Nokia reported a one billion year over year loss for the quarter ended 30 December 2011, only slightly offset by its launch of Lumia Windows Phone smartphones.

The firm shipped 113.5 million mobile phones during the quarter, down eight per cent from the same period in 2010. However, the figures were up from the 106.6 million units shipped in the third quarter of 2011, as the company benefited from its launch of the Lumia 800 smartphone in October, its first Windows Phone handset since it announced its deal with Microsoft.

Nokia shipped 19.6 million smartphones during the final quarter of 2011, down from the 28.6 million it shipped a year earlier, but up 17 percent from the 16.8 million sold in the third quarter of 2011.

The company reported net sales of $10 billion for the quarter, 20 percent down from the same quarter a year earlier. Full year sales were $38.7 billion, a nine percent decline from 2010.

Nokia reported that it sold one million of its Lumia smartphones since they went on sale in October. The firm said it is accelerating investment in its Lumia range of devices running Microsoft Windows Phone, claiming it has sold “well over one million Lumia devices to date”.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said, “Just six months after signing an agreement with Microsoft, we introduced our first two devices based on the Windows Phones platform – the Nokia Lumia 800 and the Nokia Lumia 710. We brought the new devices to market ahead of schedule, demonstrating that we are changing the clock speed of Nokia. To date, we have introduced Lumia to consumers in Europe, Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.

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Xoom Tablets To Get Android 4.0

Motorola Mobility has confirmed the Android Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade to the Xoom Wi-Fi tablet will arrive over-the-air via Wi-Fi to U.S.-based devices on Wednesday.

In addition to faster browser rendering, the free update lets users type via voice and includes a Data Manager tool for monitoring and controlling network data usage, something seen as especially helpful to reviewers of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone running Ice Cream Sandwich, also called Android 4.0.

Motorola called it the first tablet of its kind to receive the upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich, though the update for the Asus Transformer Prime tablet was distributed a week ago, as several bloggers, including Slashgear noticed.

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iPhone Narrows Gap With Android

Apple’s iPhone gained major ground among recent buyers in its battle against smartphones running Google’s Android, but still lagged behind its OS rival, pollster Nielsen said today.

In a December 2011 survey of U.S. consumers who had purchased a smartphone in the previous three months, 44.5% chose an iPhone, a jump of nearly 20 percentage points from the 25.1% that Nielsen measured in October.

That represents a 77% increase in the iPhone’s numbers.

But Android maintained the lead in the recent-buyers game with a 46.9% share, down from October’s 61.6%.

A majority of the new iPhone owners — 57% to be exact — bought an iPhone 4S, the newest model in Apple’s line-up, said Nielsen. The iPhone 4S debuted in the U.S. on Oct. 14, 2011.

Nielsen said the iPhone 4S had an “enormous” impact on Apple’s huge jump in share among new smartphone purchasers.

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Microsoft and Others Enable IPv6

The so-called worldwide launch of IPv6 has been set for 6 June 2012, when companies will permanently enable IPv6 connectivity in their products and services.

Following the relative success of 2011′s IPv6 day, a number of firms including Cisco, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have pledged support for “World IPv6 Launch” day, which has been set as 6 June 2012. On that day the companies have pledged to permanently enable IPv6 connectivity to their associated products and services.

IP address allocation bodies such as ARIN and RIPE have been pushing IPv6 adoption for years but it took last year’s dramatic exhaustion of IPv4 addresses to jolt companies into action. IPv6 day was supported by many of the firms taking part in the IPv6 launch later this year, to drum up awareness and see how much disruption there will be when IPv6 connectivity is enabled.

Daniel Karrenberg, chief scientist at RIPE NCC said, “Operational experience and measurements on World IPv6 Launch will help content providers and ISPs to identify and rectify any potential problems with delivering services over IPv6.”

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Symantec Admits Network Was Hacked

Symantec today reversed course away from earlier statements regarding the theft of source code of some of its flagship security products, now admitting that its own network was breached.

In a statement provided to the Reuters news service, the security software giant acknowledged that hackers had broken into its network when they stole source code of some of the company’s software.

Previously, Symantec had denied that its own network had been breached, and instead pointed fingers at an unnamed “third party entity” as the attack’s victim. Evidence posted by a hacker nicknamed “Yama Tough” — a self-proclaimed member of a gang calling itself “Lords of Dharmaraja” — indicated that the information was obtained from a server operated by the Indian government.

Two weeks ago, Symantec spokesman Cris Paden said that the hacker made off with source code of Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0 and Symantec Antivirus 10.2, enterprise products between five and six years old.

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Cars May Come With nVidia’s Tegra

One of the things that we keep hearing as a big business opportunity for ARM manufacturers is to get their chips in cars. We heard this before, but this time we are not talking about navigation / entertainment systems.

The idea behind the concept is that more and more cars will come with collision detection mechanisms, road tracking that can keep your car stay in the high way lane. It gets better, the car can now lock on the car in front of you and accelerate and decelerate with it, so called adaptive cruise control with some manufacturers.

Fancier cars today come with elaborate stability assistance systems and many other features that might put such processors to good use, for something far more useful than just navigation and playing music.

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Do You Trust Data-recovery Providers?

Data-recovery service providers are tasked with saving important data for you when something goes wrong — a drive crashes or storage device is dropped, and no backup is available. But do you trust them with the important data you let them recover or could they actually be a source for a data breach?

A survey of 769 IT professionals published this week finds those surveyed need to find out more about the third-party data-recovery services their organizations use. For example, according to the survey, 67% felt that encryption they had in place protected their organizations from data loss or theft during the data recovery process. But encryption keys are often handed over to the third-party data recovery service provider as part of the process, according to the study done by Ponemon Institute.

Ponemon’s “Trends in Security of Data Recovery Operations” report says of the 87% of survey respondents who said their organization had at least one data breach in the past two years, “21% say the breach occurred when a drive was in the possession of a third-party data service provider.”

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Ericsson Seeking To Cash In On Patents

As wireless access is added to new types of devices, Ericsson is reorganizing its licensing department in an attempt to generate more revenue from its patents, the company said on Thursday.

The Swedish telecommunication vendor’s CEO Hans Vestberg wants to keep close tabs on the latest developments, and as part of its reorganization Ericsson’s chief intellectual property officer Kasim Alfalahi will now report directly to Vestberg.

The company’s IPR portfolio includes 27,000 granted patents. Today, any vendor that wants to use cellular connectivity in its products needs a license from Ericsson, which is offered under so-called fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.

Licensing patents under those terms should be fairly straightforward. But that isn’t always the case; in the Netherlands Samsung and Apple, as part of their global legal battle, are arguing in court over what fair and reasonable means.

Ericsson has largely stayed out of the telecom legal battles, but announced it had sued ZTE, which then counter-sued, in April last year. The case is still pending, according an Ericsson spokeswoman.

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