A row about who should pay for extra network costs incurred by the iPlayer has broken out between internet service providers (ISPs) and the BBC.
ISPs say the on-demand TV service is putting strain on their networks, which need to be upgraded to cope.
Ashley Highfield, head of future media and technology at the corporation, has said he believes the cost of network upgrades should be carried by ISPs.
Simon Gunter, from ISP Tiscali, said the BBC should contribute to the cost.
He said the BBC did not understand the issues involved.
‘Bit odd’
The popular iPlayer service lets users download or stream programmes to a PC.
In its first month of launching, the catch-up TV service saw 1m people download more than 3.5m programmes.
According to figures from regulator Ofcom it will cost ISPs in the region of ?830m to pay for the extra capacity needed to allow for services like the iPlayer.
Mr Gunter is leading the call for the BBC to help pay for the rising costs.
“The question is about whether we invest in extra capacity or go to the consumer and ask them to pay a BBC tax,” he said.
Bandwidth problems
Mr Highfield told the BBC’s Today programme such “inflammatory” comments were not helpful.
“The success of the iPlayer should be of benefit to the whole UK broadband industry, increasing those who want to take up broadband,” he said.
“It may be putting extra strain on the network but it would be a bit odd for the BBC to fund such an upgrade,” he said.
In his BBC blog last week Mr Highfield laid out a 19-point plan of action for ISPs, and warned they should not try to charge content providers.
“Content providers, if they find their content being specifically squeezed, shaped, or capped, could start to indicate on their sites which ISPs their content works best on (and which to avoid).”
In response Mr Gunter said it was a “bit rich that a publicly-funded organisation is telling a commercial body how to run its business”.
“Inflammatory comments about blacklisting ISPs do not help. There seems to be a lack of understanding about how networks are built. Either we are not explaining it properly or it is falling on deaf ears,” he added.
So-called traffic throttling has long been controversial and has been used by ISPs to control those users who eat up bandwidth by downloading huge amounts of material from often illegal file-sharing sites.
But the BBC’s iPlayer service has changed the nature of the problem.
“The iPlayer has come along and made downloading a legal and mass market activity,” said Michael Phillips, from broadband comparison service broadbandchoices.co.uk.
He said he believed ISPs were partly to blame for the bandwidth problems they now face.
“They have priced themselves as cheaply as possible on the assumption that people were just going to use e-mail and do a bit of web surfing,” he said.
ISPs needed to stop using the term ‘unlimited’ to describe their services and make it clear that if people wanted to watch hours of downloaded video content they would have to pay a higher tariff, he added.
He said he believed the BBC needed to compromise.
“There has been talk, for instance, of the BBC bringing their servers into the loop as a way of lowering the backhaul costs,” he said.
But Mr Gunter said he was not convinced this would help.
“I have heard that the BBC is working on building a caching infrastructure so that storage devices can go on an ISP’s network but even if it goes ahead it doesn’t save costs on the backhaul network,” he said.
Gridlock warning
Geoff Bennett, director of product marketing at optical equipment maker Infinera, said he believed the government should broker a deal between the BBC and ISPs.
While allowing BBC content to be ‘cached’ by ISPs might be an instant fix to the problem it may not be the answer as more on-demand, bandwidth heavy applications come online, he said.
“There is a broader issue about the downloading of content and this requires an increase in the pipe where the bottleneck is occurring,” he said.
This would mean upgrades in the so-called backhaul or second mile network, he said.
“The industry has talked a lot about upgrading the last mile network with fibre to the home but the question needs to be asked about whether we should upgrade the second mile. The price of this would be ten times less,” he said.
Some reports, including one from US analyst firm Nemertes Research, have warned of net gridlock as early as 2010 as networks struggle to cope with the amount of data being carried on them.
But the BBC believes that the growth is “manageable”, said Mr Highfield.
“We estimate that currently the iPlayer is having between 3-5% impact on the network,” he said.
JAKARTA (Reuters) - At least four Indonesian firms providing Internet services have blocked access to the YouTube Web site for carrying a Dutch lawmaker's film that accuses the Koran of inciting violence, an information ministry official said on Tuesday.
The move follows a government ban on broadcasts of the film by Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch anti-immigration Freedom Party, which alternates images of the September 11, 2001 attacks and other Islamist bombings with quotations from the Koran.
Titled “Fitna,” a Koranic term sometimes translated as “strife,” it also shows an image of the Prophet Mohammad primed to explode and says the rising number of Muslims in Europe threatens democratic values.
Sukemi, the information ministry spokesman, said telecommunication firms PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia (Telkom), PT Telekomunikasi Selular (Telkomsel) and PT Exelcomindo Pratama Tbk, and Internet provider Indonet had blocked access to YouTube.
Telekom had also blocked social networking site MySpace and is still looking for other sites and blogs that have posted the film to block them, Eddy Kurnia, vice-president for public and marketing communication, said in a statement.
Wilders' film urges Muslims to tear out “hate-filled” verses from the Koran and starts and ends with a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad with a bomb under his turban, accompanied by a ticking sound.
The film has sparked protests in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation and a former Dutch colony.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has urged his predominantly Muslim nation not to use violence in protests against the film.
The Dutch government has distanced itself from Wilders' views, and the Dutch upper house of parliament has condemned what it called efforts to denigrate Islam and promote hatred.
(Reporting by Telly Nathalia and Olivia Rondonuwu; Editing by Sugita Katyal and Jerry Norton)
SAN FRANCISCO - Federal cybersecurity officials are trying to develop an early warning system that alerts authorities to incoming computer attacks targeting critical U.S. infrastructure, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Tuesday.
Chertoff’s keynote speech at the RSA security conference, however, was light on details about this and other initiatives, many of which he said were classified. Instead, he focused heavily on his pitch to recruit private-industry security researchers as the government beefs up its cybersecurity staffing.
U.S. officials have acknowledged that hackers have broken into the networks of at least one government research laboratory and even the Pentagon over the past year and are intensifying their attacks. A well-targeted attack could potentially cripple financial institutions or air traffic control systems or expose U.S. secrets to enemies.
Chertoff said there are currently too many openings into government networks for criminals to explore and possibly exploit with viruses or other types of malicious code.
One of the homeland security department’s goals is to winnow down the number of Internet access points into government agencies from the thousands that exist today to about 50, Chertoff said. He gave no timetable or details on how the plan would be implemented.
Chertoff also did not say how the government plans to detect and flag computer threats before they sneak into government networks. But he did acknowledge the technical challenge in developing an early warning system that works reliably across a wide range of IT systems.
“It’s going to be hard. It’s hard technically. It’s hard because to some degree it requires working together,” Chertoff said in response to a question. “The fact that something’s hard doesn’t mean, ‘Let’s not do it because it’s going to be difficult.’ It means, `Let’s roll up our sleeves and get started.’”
Chertoff said such a system would improve upon the government’s current tools for analyzing computer threats, which he said are built on “fundamentally a backward-looking architecture” — that is, they scrutinize threats coming into the networks and work backward to identify the nature and source of the attack.
The system he was referring to is the “Einstein Program” run out of the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, or US-CERT, a partnership between the homeland security department, other public agencies and private companies. The Einstein program is an automated process for collecting and sharing security information.
Chertoff said the government needs to recruit more security professionals from private industry because many critical networks are operated by private companies and they need each others’ expertise.
He did not say how many new cybersecurity jobs the agency is looking to fill with private-industry professionals, but he said the initiative is a high priority because the power of the government alone is “insufficient” to fully combat the threat.
“The federal government cannot promise to protect every system or every home computer from attack,” he said.
San Francisco - Multicore processors, cloud computing, user interfaces, social networks/social software, and Web mashups top a list of 10 “disruptive technologies'' set to reshape the IT landscape between 2008 and 2012, according to Gartner analysts David Cearley and Carl Claunch.
The remaining five are ubiquitous computing, contextual computing, augmented reality, semantics, and virtualization.
The analysts are to present their conclusions during a session on Tuesday at Gartner's Symposium ITxpo in Las Vegas.
Multicore processors are providing new advances, but single-threaded applications won't be able to take advantage of their power, the analysts note in a document related to the presentation: “A single-thread application may drive an eight-core system to only 12.5 percent utilization as it can use only one-eighth of the available cores.”
Enterprises should therefore identify applications “that will need remediation to continue to meet service-level requirements in the multicore era,” they wrote.
The leader of the list's second half — ubiquitous computing — will also gain traction in the next several years, according to the analysts.
“The work of Mark Weiser and other researchers at Xerox's PARC painted a picture 20 years ago of the coming third wave of computing — one where computers surround us, yet are invisibly embedded into our environment,” they write. “The vision of the third wave is the relegation of computers to hidden roles, exposing only enough technology to fit the need. Computers in cars are hidden behind steering wheels and simple buttons; in the future, most computers will be equally transparent.”
This trend will be powered by a combination of means, such as RFID tags, portable and widely accessible data, and accompanying advances in networking technologies, the analysts predict.
The analysts also said:
*
WASHINGTON - Two technology industry groups said on Tuesday they will combine to amplify the call for better Internet security.
The Information Technology Association of America, one of the top tech trade associations, will combine with the smaller Cyber Security Industry Alliance, whose 14 members are primarily CEOs of major computer security companies.
ITAA announced the combination just a week after it formally merged with another tech trade group Government Electronics and Information Technology Association.
Following the mergers, ITAA will have more than 350 members with combined membership revenue of roughly $8.5 million.
The groups have some overlapping agendas, but are largely complementary. ITAA, formed in 1961, works on broader policy issues, such as security, trade and labor. Since its inception four years ago, CSIA has focused primarily on security matters. GEIA, founded in 1952, concentrated on technical standards and government technology market analysis.
Phil Bond, ITAA’s president and chief executive, said negotiations with the CSIA started a few months ago and expects the groups will combine within a matter of days. They share some common members, including CA Inc., Symantec Corp. and International Business Machines Corp.
CSIA last year focused on legislation to curb data breaches and identity theft, improve privacy and bolster security for federal computer systems and critical infrastructures in the United States and Europe. The group has an office in Brussels, Belgium, which will be retained by ITAA.
ITAA’s mergers could signal further consolidation within the tech industry, which is represented by several major trade groups, such as the Information Technology Industry Council, the Consumer Electronics Association, the Business Software Alliance. Other industries, such as oil and pharmaceutical, are considered more effective in influencing the government because they have one or two prominent associations and bigger budgets.
For example, ITAA spent $240,000 to lobby the government last year, while CSIA spent $325,000 in 2007. By comparison, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America spent more than $22 million lobbying last year.
Bond, a former executive at Monster Worldwide Inc. who also served as under secretary for technology at the Commerce Department, said technology companies see the same need for a united voice.
“More consolidation should and will happen,” he said.
Due to incorrect information provided by IBM, the eighth paragraph of the story “IBM updates high-end servers, returns to water-cooling,” which posted to the wire Tuesday, misidentified the IBM research lab that developed its new Hydro-Cluster water-cooling technology. It was IBM's research lab in Poughkeepsie, New York.
The eighth paragraph has been corrected and now reads:
The Power 575 supercomputer uses a new Hydro-Cluster design developed at IBM's research lab in Poughkeepsie, New York. It uses a network of copper pipes that sit just above the processors and carry cold water to them and warm water away.
WASHINGTON - Big Wall Street investment firms averaged $38.1 billion in daily borrowing over the past week from the Fed’s emergency lending program.
NEW YORK - Newspaper readers agree with editors on the basics of what makes good journalism, but they are more apt to want looser rules for online conversations, a new study on news credibility has found.
Newspapers highly discourage anonymous remarks, for instance, and editors are more likely than readers to want that principle applied to reader comments online, according to the Online Journalism Credibility Study released Tuesday by the Associated Press Managing Editors group and the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri.
Some 70 percent of editors surveyed said requiring commenters to disclose their identities would support good journalism, while only 45 percent of the public did. Similarly, 58 percent of editors said letting journalists join online conversations and give personal views would harm journalism, but only 36 percent of the public agreed.
Expressions of personal views seem to help boost readers’ interest and trust in Web sites, said John `Bart” Bartosek, editor of The Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, Fla., and chairman of the credibility committee for the AP managing editors group.
“That’s contrary to most of the traditions we’ve all grown up with, to keep our opinions, viewpoints and personal lives out of our story,” Bartosek said. “There’s some indication that readers are looking for something more online. Whether it’s information about our expertise, our knowledge, our background, I’m not really sure.”
The study was designed to help gauge the priorities and practices newspapers should be establishing as they increasingly blend their print and Web operations. It produced few answers on how editors can meet reader expectations online without compromising credibility. The study’s sponsors said the results should lead to further research and newsroom discussions.
The study did find widespread agreement on basic practices such as the need to ensure accuracy and correct mistakes. Both editors and readers overwhelmingly supported fairness in news coverage and the labeling of commentary.
Editors and readers also agreed on the desirability of depth, such as links to content published elsewhere and databases or other information visitors can explore on their own.
“Many of us have come to recognize that the age of `We report it, and you read it and view it’ is over,” said Howard Finberg, director of interactive learning and NewsU at the Poynter Institute, a Florida think tank on journalism. “The audience has demanded much more.”
But what that “much more” should look like and how newspapers can stimulate conversations in their communities while maintaining the trust they have established remain unclear, Finberg said.
In other findings, both editors and readers said any online news items produced by readers should use the same standards journalists follow when reporting and writing news stories. Editors were more likely to say it is important to include varied viewpoints in news articles and create content to attract a diversity of readers.
The telephone study of 500 members of the public and 1,251 print and online editors from U.S. daily newspapers was conducted Aug. 23 to Oct. 12. The study had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5 percentage points for the readers’ sample and 3 percentage points for the editors.
SEATTLE - Hundreds of coffee-obsessed consumers chimed in moments after Starbucks Corp. launched a Web site asking customers to pitch changes the company should make to revive its struggling U.S. business.
And they’ve kept those thoughts coming, by the thousands: Create a punch-card system with a free drink after so many purchases. Give people a free cup of birthday joe or discounts for using their own mugs. Let customers forgo long lines by ordering their usual with the swipe of a card when they walk in the door.
Skeptics have panned MyStarbucksIdea.com, unveiled at the company’s heavily attended annual meeting in mid-March, as an online suggestion box that’s already grown stale. But the heavy traffic it’s drawn and the message Starbucks is sending — that it’s listening, and listening carefully — have impressed corporate marketing experts.
“Most brands do not put out a welcome mat for feedback,” said Pete Blackshaw, executive vice president of strategic services for the market research firm Nielsen Online. “Generally feedback is viewed as a cost of doing business rather than an opportunity. Starbucks is saying this is an opportunity.”
Before it went live, Chris Bruzzo, Starbucks’ chief information officer, said he was hoping a few hundred ideas would trickle in the first few days.
About 300 suggestions were posted in the first hour after the shareholders meeting, which drew a crowd of 6,000 and was closely watched by Wall Street analysts hungry for details on the company’s turnaround plans.
By the end of the week, more than 100,000 votes had been cast, Bruzzo said. He would not disclose how many people have posted in all.
Starbucks is promoting MyStarbucksIdea on its main corporate home page and with counter cards in stores that say “Have an idea for us?” on one side and the Web address on the back. But the company has long relied for promotion on word-of-mouth and an avid following of devotees and critics who regularly post their opinions on various Starbucks-related sites.
Part corporate blog, MyStarbucksIdea also has the feel of an online social network. Though users can’t link up over e-mail or post profiles of themselves, the comments they post often read like friendly conversations — with people complimenting one another on their ideas or elaborating when comments about their posts make them feel misunderstood.
The site is powered by Salesforce.com, the same San Franciscocustomer relations management firm that powers IdeaStorm.com for Dell Inc. The world’s No. 2 personal computer maker launched IdeaStorm early last year in hopes of repairing its battered customer-service credentials.
Both online communities offer three options for weighing in — sharing an idea, voting on it and discussing it — plus a tab with updates on which ideas the company is putting into action.
An algorithm built into MyStarbucksIdea pushes the most popular ideas to the top by factoring in the number of votes, how recently votes are cast and the volume of comments an idea has generated.
The first promises the company put forth in response to customers’ pitches turned out to be ones it had already made: to offer free wireless Internet access in stores and rewards through its loyalty card.
Other early pitches that caught Starbucks’ attention: offering coffee classes, giving drip coffee drinkers a quicker way to buy their fix, automating orders of customized drinks to speed up service and making seating more comfortable.
Jim Romanesko, a media critic who runs a widely read Starbucks gossip blog on the side, said he hasn’t yet seen many original ideas on MyStarbucksIdea.
“I think that’s going to be one of their problems … and something my readers have noticed: It’s become redundant after three weeks. There are only so many good ideas,” Romanesko said.
About four dozen Starbucks employees monitor MyStarbucksIdea, each about eight hours a week. They’re all specialists in segments of the business such as coffee and espresso drinks, food, ordering, payment and pickup.
Some people have proposed fixes to the site itself, complaining they couldn’t comment on the company’s blog postings. Bruzzo said that feature will be added soon. The site also will break out the most popular ideas to give others a chance to rise to the top, and users will be prompted to search whether an idea has already been posted before they add their own, a move to keep duplicates to a minimum.
IdeaStorm has helped Dell win back customers’ trust, experts said.
“They really are actually responsive on the blog,” said Debbie Weil, a corporate blogging consultant and author of “The Corporate Blogging Book.”
“More significantly,” Weil said of Dell, “they’ve trained a whole department of customer service reps to be constantly trolling blogs and jumping on and saying, ‘I hear you’re having trouble with your machine. Here’s what to do.’”
Weil characterized Starbucks’ site as “corporate blogging 2.0,” calling it “a very interactive, fun, interesting community.”
Few companies have sought online customer feedback as assertively as Dell and Starbucks, but Blackshaw said more of them should.
“The ultimate form of dignity to the consumer is to ask for their opinion,” Blackshaw said.
Online input, offered in real time from legions of customers is beginning to make traditional focus groups seem old-school.
“Is it better to listen to tens of thousands of customers vote on ideas, discuss them and participate with them over a period of a couple months, or get 10 customers in a room, feed them sandwiches and listen to them behind smoked glass?” said Bob Pearson, Dell’s vice president of communities and conversations.
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On the Net:
http://www.MyStarbucksIdea.com
http://www.IdeaStorm.com
DUESSELDORF, Germany - Nokia Corp. said Tuesday that it has agreed with worker representatives on a $314 million plan to soften the blow from its closure of a factory in Germany.
Nokia was heavily criticized by German unions and politicians when it announced in January that it planned to close the plant in Bochum in the industrial Ruhr region at a likely cost of 2,300 jobs.
The Espoo, Finland-based company said the agreement reached Tuesday allows for the plant to close June 30 as planned.
Nokia will set up a “transfer company” to help affected staff for one year.
Gisela Aschenbach, the head of the employee council in Bochum, said that “additional payments will take into account the specific situation of families and severely disabled persons.”
Nokia said the outcome was a “fair and responsible social plan.”
“As we have clear responsibilities to our employees in this kind of difficult situation, it was our special concern from the start to compensate the loss of the jobs in a respectful and fair manner,” executive vice president Veli Sundback said in a statement.
Nokia Chief Executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo has apologized for the decision to close the plant but has said it was necessary, given that the factory makes 6 percent of Nokia’s handsets but accounts for 23 percent of its global labor costs.
The company has said labor costs in Bochum were nearly 10 times those at another plant in Romania — a point that has particularly irked officials in the region, who argue that labor accounts for only a small proportion of overall costs.
The state government in North Rhine-Westphalia has demanded that Nokia return investment subsidies paid in the late 1990s, plus interest — a total of nearly $94 million.
It has claimed that Nokia has failed since 2002 to fulfill conditions under which the subsidies were granted, including creating a minimum number of permanent jobs.
Nokia has rejected the demand and the charge, saying it exceeded requirements.