Is U.S. stuck in Internet's slow lane?

By PETER SVENSSON, AP Technology Writer 2 hours, 51 minutes ago

NEW YORK - The United States is starting to look like a slowpoke on the Internet. Examples abound of countries that have faster and cheaper broadband connections, and more of their population connected to them.

What's less clear is how badly the country that gave birth to the Internet is doing, and whether the government needs to step in and do something about it. The Bush administration has tried to foster broadband adoption with a hands-off approach. If that's seen as a failure by the next administration, the policy may change.

In a move to get a clearer picture of where the U.S. stands, the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Tuesday approved legislation that would develop an annual inventory of existing broadband services — including the types, advertised speeds and actual number of subscribers — available to households and businesses across the nation.

The bill, introduced by Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., is intended to provide policy makers with improved data so they can better use grants and subsidies to target areas lacking high-speed Internet access. He said in a statement last week that promoting broadband would help spur job growth, access to health care and education and promote innovation among other benefits.

The inventory wouldn't cover other countries, but a cursory look shows the U.S. lagging behind at least some of them. In South Korea, for instance, the average apartment can get an Internet connection that's 15 times faster than a typical U.S. connection. In Paris, a "triple play" of TV, phone and broadband service costs less than half of what it does in the U.S.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development — a 30-member club of nations — compiles the most often cited international comparison. It puts the U.S. at 15th place for broadband lines per person in 2006, down from No. 4 in 2001.

The OECD numbers have been vigorously attacked by anti-regulation think tanks for making the U.S. look exceedingly bad. They point out that the OECD is not very open about how it compiles the data. It doesn't count people who have access to the Internet at work, or students who have access in their dorms.

"We would never base other kinds of policy on that kind of data," said Scott Wallsten, director of communications policy studies at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a think tank that favors deregulation over government intervention.

But the OECD numbers are in line with other international measures. Figures from the British research firm Point-Topic Ltd. put the U.S., with 55 percent of its households connected, in 17th place for adoption rates at the end of June (excluding some very small countries and territories like Macau and Hong Kong).

"We're now in the middle of the pack of developed countries," said Dave Burstein, telecom gadfly and the editor of the DSL Prime newsletter, during a sometimes tense debate at the Columbia Business School's Institute for Tele-Information.

Burstein says the U.S. is lagging because of low levels of investment by the big telecom companies and regulatory failure.

Several of the European countries that are doing well have forced telephone companies to rent their lines to Internet service providers for low fees. The ISPs use them to run broadband Digital Subscriber Lines, or DSL, often at speeds much higher than those available in the U.S.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission went down this regulatory road a few years ago, but legal challenges from the phone companies forced it to back away.

In 2004, President Bush called for nationwide broadband access by 2007, to be nurtured by an absence of taxation and little regulation. The U.S. is very close to Bush's goal, thanks to the availability of satellite broadband across the lower 48 states.

But the Internet by satellite is expensive and slow. Nearly everyone may have access to the Internet, but that doesn't mean they're plugging in.

Part of the problem may be that people don't see fast Internet access as an essential part of modern life, and may need more of a push to get on. The U.S. does have wider income disparities than many of the countries that are outdoing it in broadband, and people in poverty may have other priorities for their money.

Dan Correa, research analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, believes the U.S. needs a more "proactive" broadband policy, and compares the lack of government involvement in the field with the situation in other utilities, which are mostly heavily regulated.

"In the 1930s, we recognized that electricity was essential. We're not quite at that level in broadband," Correa said.

An FCC chairman appointed by a Democratic president in 2009 may agree. Current Democratic Commissioner Michael J. Copps has said broadband availability could be encouraged with tax incentives and loans to rural utilities.

The United States doesn't look set to catch up to South Korea or even Canada (with 65 percent of households connected to broadband, according to Point-Topic) by then, because broadband adoption is slowing down after an initial growth spurt.

In the last few weeks, the U.S.'s three largest Internet service providers reported adding 1.2 million subscribers in the third quarter, down from 1.54 million in the same quarter last year, according to a tally by UBS analyst John Hodulik.

But the U.S. does have a few aces up its sleeve. Apart from satellite broadband it has widespread cable networks, which provide an alternative to DSL. Cable has some technical advantages over phone lines, and a new cable modem technology called Docsis 3.0 could allow U.S. Internet speeds to leapfrog those in countries dominated by DSL in a few years.

On the phone side, the country's second largest telecommunications company, Verizon Communications Inc., is spending $23 billion to connect homes directly with super-fast fiber optics.

"Twenty percent of the U.S. is getting a decent network," Burstein acknowledges. The new network can match or outdo the 100 megabits per second Internet service widely available in Japan and Korea, but Verizon isn't yet selling service at that speed.

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AP Business Writer Dibya Sarkar contributed to this report from Washington, D.C.

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On the Net:

Columbia Institute for Tele-Information: http://www.citi.columbia.edu

Cafe Latte attack steals data from Wi-Fi PCs

Robert McMillan Wed Oct 17, 4:56 PM ET

San Francisco (IDGNS) - If you use a secure wireless network, hackers may be able to steal data from your computer in the time it takes to have a cup of coffee.

At the Toorcon hacking conference in San Diego this coming weekend, security researcher Vivek Ramachandran, will demonstrate a technique he's developed to attack laptops that use the WEP encryption system to log on to secure wireless networks.

Developed in the late 1990s, WEP was the default method of securing Wi-Fi networks. Though the WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) system replaced it, about 41 percent of businesses continue to use WEP. That percentage is even higher among home users, security experts say.

That's unfortunate because WEP has been riddled with security problems. In fact, WEP was blamed for the recent TJX Companies data breach in which thieves were able to access 45 million credit- and debit-card numbers.

To date, however, researchers have tended to focus on exploiting WEP flaws in order to break into wireless networks. That generally meant that the attacker would roll up near the WEP-encrypted router, crack the WEP key used to encrypt network traffic, and then log on to the network.

Ramachandran, a senior wireless security researcher with AirTight Networks, has taken a look at the client side of things and developed a way of tricking a WEP-enabled client into thinking that it is logging on to a network that it already knows.

His technique, which he calls the Cafe Latte attack, allows an attacker to circumvent firewall protection and attack the laptop or to set up a "man in the middle" attack and snoop on the victim's online activity. "Until now, the conventional belief was that in order to crack WEP, the attacker had to show up at the parking lot," he said. "With the discovery of our attack, every employee of an organization is the target of an attack."

There are several steps to Cafe Latte, all of which exploit known flaws in the WEP architecture. First, the attacker programs a laptop computer to act like a malicious wireless network, setting up shop in an Internet cafe or an airport. The malicious PC then begins communicating with other Wi-Fi laptops in range, figuring out the name of the WEP-enabled routers that these laptops are programmed to look for and then cracks the keystream encryption code required to send messages to the victim's laptop.

Knowing the keystream only gets the attacker halfway. To truly crack the WEP encryption key and read messages coming from the victim, the attacker must somehow trick the victim into sending a large amount of information -- about 70,000 messages, actually -- to the malicious network. Those messages could then be analyzed and cracked using WEP-cracking tools.

Cafe Latte does this by taking advantage of the way the Internet's ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) ensures that two computers do not share the same IP address. ARP is used when a new computer joins a LAN to announce the IP address it will be using and to ensure that no other machine shares that address. These network messages are ignored by the victim's PC unless it shares that address. Then it sends a message back to the attacker's PC saying that the IP address in question is already being used.

Once the attacker gets a response from the victim's PC, he knows he has guessed the correct IP address and he can bombard the victim's PC with the same message, essentially saying over and over again "I'm joining the network and I'd like to use this IP address. Are you already using it?"

As the victim's laptop continues to reply, "Yes, I am," the attacker eventually stores up enough samples of encrypted messages to be able to figure out the WEP key. Now messages from the victim can be read by the attacker.

"It's definitely a novel attack," said Jon Ellch, a Wi-Fi security researcher who also goes by the name johnny cache. While an attacker could use this WEP key to log on to the victim's WEP network, the real danger here is from the man-in-the-middle attack, which would let the attacker see everything the victim is doing on the Internet, he added.

Still, a victim might notice that something was up during the estimated 30 minutes that Cafe Latte requires in order to crack the WEP key, Ellch said. The attack would have a better chance of succeeding if the laptop were simply turned on and trying to connect to the Wi-Fi network in the background, he said. "If they're trying to do something with the Internet, obviously it's not going to pan out so well."

Toorcon runs from Friday to Sunday.

You might wear computing's next wave

By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, AP Technology Writer Fri Oct 12, 4:01 PM ET

BOSTON - From clothes riddled with sensors to name tags that detect our moods, computing's next wave could unleash small devices that increasingly augment everyday activities with digital intelligence.

That was the predominant vision at a conference on "wearable computing" held this week in Boston, where researchers showed off prototypes and discussed ideas.

Some attendees took wearable computing to its extreme, donning cyborg-like miniaturized displays attached to eyepieces. But most of what was on exhibit seemed much closer to jumping into a mainstream commercial product.

For example, researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (known as ETH Zurich) showed off stretchable, threadlike sensors that can be woven into shirts to detect their wearers' posture. People with back pain or injuries could be prompted on a PC or a mobile device to straighten up, pronto.

Stephane Beauregard of Germany's University of Bremen displayed a shoe-borne sensor whose tiny accelerometers perform electronic dead reckoning — providing real-time location tracking in places satellite navigation systems either can't reach or can't describe with precision. For now the sensor has to be held in place by the shoelaces, but Beauregard expects a version that can fit inside a boot heel could be a year away. His first intended market is firefighters and other emergency responders.

Graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab had black plastic badges around their necks that analyze multiple factors — including motion and speech patterns — to detect the level of engagement two people are exhibiting in a conversation.

Information gathered from the badges, which weigh just a few ounces and are a bit smaller than a deck of cards, can be sent wirelessly to a computer or a phone to give their wearers helpful tips. Sales reps could be advised that a customer's interest seems to be waning. A doctor could be alerted to indications of depression in a patient being monitored remotely.

The badges might find their first use in gathering reams of data for social network analysis, the study of how groups form and interact. There's big money in applying such research in corporations, which want to ensure that important knowledge doesn't stay trapped in organizational silos. But a lot of data for social network analysis is gathered from e-mail traffic, which only says so much about how people connect with each other.

MIT graduate student Daniel Olguin Olguin said the devices were tested on 25 employees at a German bank and produced surprising insights about alternative ways the office might be laid out. Now Hitachi Ltd. is interested in making the badges for corporate consultants to use with their clients, he said.

Each badge could probably be made for under $100, "and in the future, of course, all of this will be smaller and integrated into your name card," Olguin said.

A prototype shown off by Carsten Mehring of the Colorado School of Mines was far more about convenience. He has embedded sensors into gloves so that snowboarders or motorists could control portable music devices with the faintest squeeze of their fingers — and nary a glance away from a snowy slope or the road.

"The idea," he said, "is to wear your remote, not to carry it."

50 years ago, Sputnik changed technology

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Wed Oct 3, 3:46 PM ET

WASHINGTON - With a series of small beeps from a spiky globe 50 years ago Thursday, the world shrank and humanity's view of Earth and the cosmos expanded.

Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, was launched by the Soviets and circled the globe Oct. 4, 1957. The Space Age was born. And what followed were changes to everyday life that people now take for granted.

What we see on television, how we communicate with each other, and how we pay for what we buy have all changed with the birth of satellites.

Communications satellites helped bring wars and celebrations from thousands of miles away into our living rooms. When we go outside, weather satellites show us whether we need to carry an umbrella or flee a hurricane. And global positioning system satellites even keep us from getting lost on unfamiliar streets.

Sputnik gave birth to more than mere technology. The threat of a Soviet-dominated space spurred the U.S. government to increase tenfold money spent on science, education and research. Satellite pictures of Earth inspired an embryonic environmental movement.

Spy and communications satellites also kept the world at relative peace, experts say. Just last week, scientists used commercial satellite images to document human rights violations in Myanmar.

When Sputnik was launched, the public thought a space future would consist of gigantic space stations and colonies on the moon and other planets. The fear was warfare in space raining down on Earth.

"The reality is that the things we expected did not come to pass, and the things that we did not fathom changed our lives in so many ways that we cannot even envision a life that's different at this point," said Roger Launius, senior curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum.

America got a taste of that in May 1998. Just one communications satellite malfunctioned. More than 30 million pagers went silent. Credit card payment approvals didn't work. National Public Radio and CNN's Airport Television Network went off the air in some places.

"The civilization we live in today is as different from the one that we lived in the mid-1950s as the mid-1950s were from the American revolution," said Howard McCurdy, an American University public policy professor. "It's hard to imagine these things happening without space. I guess I could have a computer, but I wouldn't be able to get on the Internet."

All thanks to an 184-pound metal ball with spikes shot into space by a country that doesn't exist anymore.

Because Sputnik was launched by a centralized communist government, people feared that space would help totalitarianism, said Georgia Tech University history professor Steve Usselman.

However, satellites "clearly undermined state authority, particularly national authority," Usselman said. "It's taken us in exactly the opposite direction."

As satellites went commercial, they spurred on financial markets, opened up information to people across the globe — which is not what centralized governments want, Usselman said.

Spy satellites also enabled countries to keep an eye on their enemies.

"Except for crazy guys in airplanes, nobody can pull off a sneak attack," McCurdy said. "I think it made the world much less dangerous than it was in 1956."

President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967 said that it was thanks to satellites that "we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn't need to do. We were building things we didn't need to build. We were harboring fears we didn't need to harbor."

Weather satellites now give people an accurate view of threats from nature, as well as vastly improved everyday forecasts, said Keith Seitter of the American Meteorological Society. They save lives when hurricanes approach, giving days of notice instead of hours.

"It's very hard to be surprised these days with the kind of data we have available with satellites," Seitter said. "Certainly 50 years ago that wasn't the case."

In television, satellite communications let upstart networks like HBO, CNN and ESPN develop and feed cable systems via satellite. That brought world events live to people around the globe. But it also allowed people to isolate themselves with niche channels, Usselman said.

Henry Lambright, a professor at Syracuse University, said satellites have had practical benefits, but "the more important benefits are looking at Earth as a whole and looking outward at Earth in the cosmos."

Initial pictures of Earth from space, especially Apollo images from the moon, were embraced by an environmental movement to show how fragile the planet is.

The orbiting Hubble Space Telescope and others have given people views of the universe that not only go trillions of miles away, but billions of years back in time.

"The launch of Sputnik actually triggered heightened interest among the American people, not only in space, but in science, mathematics and education," said White House science adviser John Marburger. "It also opened up people's eyes to the possibility that space could actually be used for something."