Chicago -
By The FBI
Welcome to the Oregon FBI’s Tech Tuesday segment. Today: building a digital defense with your TV.
Yes, I said your TV. Specifically your smart TV . . . the one that is sitting in your living room right now. Or, the one that you plan to buy on super sale on Black Friday.
Posted on November 29, 2019
By Isaac Arnsdorf/ProPublica
Pete Hegseth, the Fox News personality who urged President Donald Trump to pardon service members charged with war crimes, is trying to influence the White House on another military-related cause.
An Army veteran who talks to Trump periodically and has dined with him at the White House, Hegseth traveled to New Orleans in June to address leaders of for-profit colleges at their annual convention.
They are pushing to enroll more veterans, a lucrative class of students – and Hegseth is the face of the colleges’ new campaign to defend a favorable carve-out in federal law.
Posted on November 21, 2019
By Ernesto Falcon/Electronic Frontier Foundation
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has announced his plans to begin freeing up valuable airwaves within the C-Band, a part of the spectrum – the radio frequencies that our cell carriers, television stations, and others use to transmit services – historically used for satellite television. Once freed, the spectrum would be auctioned and used for 5G and other advanced wireless services. The FCC is making the right call here. This announcement puts the public interest ahead of the desires of the few private actors currently occupying the spectrum, who sought to leverage the hype around 5G to enrich themselves at the public’s expense.
Their proposal, known as the C-Band Alliance proposal, attempted to argue that the nation’s 5G coverage would benefit if they engaged in a private sale of public property, because it would be faster than the FCC conducting a public auction. But limited spectrum is not the main bottleneck to 5G deployment right now. What national 5G coverage lacks right now is dense fiber networks across the country to support high-speed wireless.
The FCC’s actions are a crucial first step. Congress should now take the potentially $60 billion the government is about to raise and invest it in an infrastructure that will last for generations, and propel millions of American households into the 21st century of broadband access.
Posted on November 19, 2019
By Mike Conway/The Conversation
When the Berlin Wall was completed in August 1961, East German residents immediately tried to figure out ways to circumvent the barrier and escape into West Berlin.
By the following summer, NBC and CBS were at work on two separate, secret documentaries on tunnels being dug under the Berlin Wall.
The tunnel CBS chose was a disaster that resulted in arrests and court trials. NBC’s tunnel ended up being in one of the most decorated documentaries in American television history.
And yet, in the fall of 1962, NBC was under tremendous pressure from both sides of the Iron Curtain to scrap its documentary altogether.
Posted on November 13, 2019
A Lesson In How It Is And Isn’t Done
The real news is delivered off-air.
Posted on November 9, 2019
By Elliot Harmon/Electronic Frontier Foundation
The news of iconic children’s television show Sesame Street’s new arrangement with the HBO MAX streaming service has sent ripples around the Internet.
Starting this year, episodes of Sesame Street will debut on HBO and on the HBO MAX service, with new episodes being made available to PBS “at some point.”
“HBO is holding hostage underprivileged families” who can no longer afford to watch new Sesame Street episodes, Tim Winter of the Parent Television Council recently told the New York Times.
The move is particularly galling because the show is partially paid for with public funding.
Posted on November 6, 2019
