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Kevin Martin, the Republican chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, is drawing fire from economic conservatives over his plan to declare that Comcast violated the law when throttling BitTorrent last year.

It’s possible that this last-minute criticism will change Martin’s mind, or he may be spooked at the prospect of damaging his future political viability (at least inside the Republican Party). We’ll know for sure in a few hours.

Dear Chairman Martin,

As press reports indicate, the current case is no different. Difficulties in quickly transferring large files led to the development of cutting edge peer-to-peer technology. When a small minority of subscribers–often using these applications to share pirated music and movies–began clogging the networks to the harm of the large majority of users, broadband providers began taking steps to alleviate the congestion. This, in turn, has prompted peer-to-peer developers to collaborate with broadband providers to find better ways to manage traffic. It is this market-based, self-governing nature of the Internet that is the key to its success. Your heavy handed attempts to inject the FCC into the middle of that process threaten to hijack the evolution of the Internet to everyone’s detriment. It will also deter the very broadband investment we need for the Internet to continue growing to meet the increasing demands being placed upon it.

Adding insult to injury, it appears you are wading into this debate on very shaky procedural and legal grounds. While the FCC has endorsed certain Internet policy principles, it has never adopted regulations through a proper notice and comment rulemaking. Nor should it, for the reasons I outline above. Nonetheless, your continued pursuit of this matter suggests that you are making not only a poor policy judgment, but a poor legal one, as well. I urge you return to a sound market-oriented approach, rather than continue down the path you have chosen. It will surely stifle one of the greatest technological and economic success stories our Nation has seen.

I am dismayed by recent press reports that you intend to interfere with the network management decisions of broadband providers, essentially regulating the Internet. As one of your Republican colleagues at the FCC, Commissioner McDowell, so aptly explained in his July 28 Washington Post editorial, “[t]he Internet has flourished because it has operated under the principle that engineers, not politicians or bureaucrats, should solve engineering problems.” Congress has intentionally refrained from imposing the heavy hand of government, which is precisely why we have seen such rapid growth in the Internet. As the Wall Street Journal editorial board pointed out July 30, “the FCC’s job is not to determine business models in the private sector. The community of Internet service and content providers has proven itself more than able to work out problems on its own as Web use has exploded.”

Adam Thierer, a policy analyst at the free market Progress and Freedom Foundation (which began its days as Newt Gingrich’s favorite think tank), wrote this week that liberal activists “will incessantly petition the FCC to review each and every business model decision and encourage the unelected bureaucrats at the agency to manage the Internet to their heart’s content.”

The Journal also reported in a news article on Friday that the Bush administration itself is irritated. “We’re concerned about the decision,” Meredith Attwell Baker, acting head of the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications & Information Administration, told the paper. “It appears to reverse a decade-old bipartisan policy against regulation of the Internet.”

There’s also House Republican Leader John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, who sent a letter (PDF) to Martin on Thursday warning him of going through with his plan to rule against Comcast, with the help of the five-member FCC’s two Democrats. The text of the letter:

Martin’s intra-party backlash started on Wednesday with an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that started with this uncomplimentary paragraph: “Bad personnel decisions have haunted the Bush Administration, and one of the bigger disappointments is Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin. In his last months as Master of the Media Universe, he seems poised to expand government regulation of the Internet.”

The vote is expected at a FCC meeting (PDF) on Friday morning. It promises to be a landmark one: this would be the first time the commission has ruled on a Net neutrality violation. (An earlier one was settled without a formal ruling.)

Unlike fingerprint scanners or palm-reading biometrics, finger vein biometric devices represent a subset of hand geometry biometrics in that they look for unique vascular patterns in the customer’s finger tip.

Forrester Research predicts that the ID and access management market space will grow from $2.6 billion in 2006 to $12.3 billion in 2014, and Hitachi, long known for its security electronics, wants to be a player in the enterprise security market by offering a complete package.

Vascular pattern recognition (VPR) uses near-infrared light generated from a bank of LEDs projected through the skin. The pattern recorded it then compared with the pattern on file.

Hitachi currently offers advanced IT authentication with its finger vein biometric devices. Finger vein biometric authentication is used in 80 percent of Japanese ATMs using biometric authentication.

With the acquisition, Hitachi now has ID management software to go along with its authentication hardware. Customers include Wells Fargo, Wyeth, Best Buy, Cingular, Wendys, Cisco, Sony, and Pfizer.

Hitachi is hoping to grow the software products it has acquired from M-Tech with joint offerings of its existing biometric, RFID, and smart-card security products.

The technology behind finger vein pattern recognition.

At RSA 2008 on Monday, Hitachi announced its acquisition of M-Tech. Since last Wednesday, the Canadian ID management company has been using its new name, Hitachi ID Systems.

(Credit:
Hitachi)

Two of the nearly 50 files on the breached computer had personal data about more than 45,000 FAA employees and retirees who were on the FAA rolls as of three years ago, the FAA said in a statement released on Monday.

The agency is notifying all affected employees by mail and is investigating the data theft.

The statement did not say when the breach occurred or when the FAA learned of it. An FAA representative did not immediately return a call seeking comment on Tuesday.

The FAA is the latest in a recent string of data breaches that has included Kaiser Permanente and payment processors Heartland Payment Systems and RBS WorldPay.

A server at the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration was illegally accessed online and personal identity information of employees was stolen, the agency said.

The server that was breached was not connected to the air traffic control system or other operational systems, according to the statement.

To go along with this new feature, another update that’s less entertaining, but important, are the new buttons that let you share a video not only by e-mail or embedding, but now with the usual smattering of social bookmarking, news, and networking sites like Facebook, Digg, Delicious, et al. Notably missing are other popular services like Mixx, Twitter, and AOL’s Propeller.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

To get it to work you simply need to go to this page and pick out any of the feeds then dump it into your feed reader. Make sure to click the “add video” box, which will add the playable video to the feed. One major bummer is that you can’t just do this with any video feed (yet), only the nine specialty feeds provided by Hulu. I tried adding the special ending to regular links in my RSS reader, but to no avail.

Want to watch Hulu videos in your favorite RSS reader? Hulu's got you covered with nine feeds that will serve up playable videos for RSS readers.

Hulu's new sharing options now offer eight ways to share a video with others. Previously you were limited to e-mail and URL sharing.

Reading blog posts on Google Reader is cool, but creating a feed full of playable video clips is far more entertaining. Video host Hulu’s latest update to its sharing tools has done just that, letting you tweak several RSS feeds to automatically include embed code that will let a video play in its entirety right in your feed reader. More importantly, this can double as a simple way to get around any domain restrictions put in place by your IT department to keep you from watching Hulu videos while at work.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

It’s interesting, however, that Rose didn’t choose to make his announcement during a talk at the conference, but rather through Twitter and Digg. At its core, WeFollow keeps track of different groups of Twitterers, as defined by tags, such as #tech or #celebrity and displays them in order of popularity.

Second, I know that this release is a very early version of WeFollow, but users should definitely be given the ability to sort using multiple tags, in order to yield more relevant results. If I am looking for tech bloggers, why not let me see people who match the tags #tech and #blogger?

The “Kevin Rose factor” definitely plays a role here, but will it be enough to make WeFollow successful? It helped Pownce for a while, but the site was ultimately bought by Six Apart and shut down, so we’ll have to see.

Users can add themselves to WeFollow simply by tweeting @wefollow, followed by up to three tags that they want to be classified under. For example, my tweet read: “@wefollow #tech #blogger”. It’s very easy to do, and by choosing this method of adding people to the directory, I think it could very easily start to spread virally. Since the tweets to @wefollow are public, people might see one, get interested, take a look, and enter themselves.

The directory has already and will continue to attract a lot of early users, simply due to Rose’s enormous Internet presence. The hope is that Rose’s following will be enough to push WeFollow into being the dominant Twitter directory, which people will use despite Rose’s involvement, as is the current situation with Digg.

Rose dominates the Tech category of WeFollow.

(Credit: Twitter)

(Credit:
WeFollow)

There’s always a lot going down at the annual South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. As you probably remember, SXSW served as the original launchpad for Twitter, so it seems fitting that Kevin Rose’s new Twitter directory, WeFollow, was launched there this year.

Overall, WeFollow appears to be a solid offering, with a clean interface, that’s taking a real stab at organizing the Twitterverse. With Rose’s help, I think we’re going to see it get very popular fairly quickly here. If they can add some better searching and filtering options, WeFollow will really be a killer service.

I’m adding myself to the WeFollow tags for Tech and Blogger.

Although current Twitter directory services already exist (see Twellow and Just Tweet It), WeFollow has the unique advantage of Rose’s star power.

While WeFollow is, so far, a great tool for finding the top users in a given category, I do have a few criticisms. First off, WeFollow makes looking at anyone outside of the top 50 or so in a category a major pain. Unless you want to click through pages and pages of Twitterers, all you will likely see is the top users. Twitter itself suffers from the same tedious clicking through of pages if you want to see who a particular user is following.

• Gates going, but slowly
In June 2006, Microsoft’s co-founder was already planning for a different future for himself.

Well, it’s finally here: Bill Gates’ final, official day at Microsoft as a full-time employee.

• Shifting roles
Here’s a look back at Gates’ career, with highlights from recent speeches.

• Origin of PC clones
At a 2001 event celebrating the 20th anniversary of the personal computer, Gates and Compaq founder Rod Canion reflect on the creation of the modern PC business.

To mark this historic moment–33 years in the making–we’ve been combing through our video archives to find some memorable stuff.

• Hits and misses
Nobody’s perfect, not even Gates.

• Microsoft versus Apple
At CES 2007, Gates talks about how Microsoft would trump Apple in the digital living room.

• Ballmer’s tearful good-bye
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave Gates a teary thank-you as the founder said farewell to company employees at a town hall meeting Friday in Redmond, Wash.

See also:
Special Report: For Bill Gates, the next phase begins

• End of an era, ha ha ha
At CES 2008, Gates and friends debuted a comical look at what life would be like as his last day approaches. U2’s Bono, actor George Clooney, and director Steven Spielberg get some laughs at Gates’ expense.

• On outflanking rivals
Gates talks at CES 2008 about how Microsoft can beat rivals as software moves to the phone, TV, other devices.

•  Control-alt-delete…gulp
At the same 2001 event, IBM engineer Dave Bradley talks about how the keystroke came to be, quipping that, though he invented it, Gates made it famous. The best part of this video is the look on Gates’ face after Bradley’s comment.

• The future of tech
In the coming years, the conference table, the whiteboard…everything will be a computer, Gates says in October 2007.

WebKit's SquirrelFish Extreme is faster than its three-month-old predecessor on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark.

“SquirrelFish Extreme uses more advanced techniques, including fast native code generation, to deliver even more JavaScript performance,” the programmers said.

For details of Squirrelfish’s techniques–bytecode optimization, a polymorphic inline cache, a context-threaded just-in-time compiler, and a regular expression just-in-time compiler–check the WebKit blog.

Just about every browser out there now is trying to grab the crown for fastest performance for running JavaScript, the programming language that powers many increasingly sophisticated Web-based applications. The latest development is from the programmers behind Apple’s
Safari.

Charles Ying also performed SunSpider tests that showed Squirrelfish beating Google’s V8 and Mozilla’s Tracemonkey on a 2.4GHz iMac.

(Credit:
WebKit)

It’s called Squirrelfish Extreme, and the WebKit programmers said Thursday in a blog posting that it’s more than twice as fast as the first-generation Squirrelfish announced in June and more than three times faster than the current WebKit 3.1 version. They based their conclusions on one benchmark, SunSpider.

Mozilla bragged earlier this month about TraceMonkey, a new JavaScript engine due to ship in
Firefox 3.1 near the end of 2008. Next came Google’s Chrome, a leading feature of which is the performance of its V8 JavaScript engine. Now the WebKit programmers, whose open-source code is used in Apple’s Safari browser and the Konqueror browser of the KDE interface software sometimes used on Linux systems, have a new version of their JavaScript technology.

Rumors of a bidding war between Microsoft, Google, and two unidentified media companies began in March, sending some Digg users into a panic about what a new corporate overlord might mean for the site. With a no-go on the Google deal, Digg could either pursue other offers or go after another round of funding and keep chugging along on its own.

The two companies had reportedly been in the final stage of talks to bring Digg into the Google News group for $200 million. Some sources said the trouble was due to technological incompatibilities, while another said it was more about a clash of personalities. Digg was informed of Google’s decision late this week, according to the report.

Neither company responded immediately to a request for comment.

Google has ended negotiations to buy social-news site Digg.com, according to TechCrunch.

Rest assured, I’ll be pushing on my sources even if I am a continent away. Still, the deal could break while I am asleep or something. To make sure my faithful readers are not left in the lurch, I offer my first take on the deal now:

For all its challenges (and they are many), the deal was the single biggest thing Microsoft could do to bulk up ahead of what many see as an epic showdown over the next several years.

Although Yahoo looked long and hard, the company really had no alternative that would allow shareholders to cash out now at anywhere near the price Microsoft was offering.

WHEREVERTHEHECKIAM–As widely expected, Microsoft and Yahoo came to terms on a deal that will see the search pioneer absorbed by the software giant.

Microsoft will have to deal with both significant overlap as well as significant cultural differences. The company has indicated it has some plans under way already in terms of handling both issues, but wisely said it wants many of the decisions to be made by a group made up of leaders from both companies.

If and only if they can get past these hurdles, do Microsoft and Yahoo get to the real hard part–actually combining. Microsoft has a decent track record of absorbing smaller companies, but past deals pale in terms of the size and scope of the Yahoo move.

In many cases, Microsoft is not where it wants to be with its homegrown products, but has built them with its long-term vision in mind. Some of Yahoo’s products, by contrast, have more users today, but are built on vastly different technology, much of it based on open source.

It is how Microsoft handles these issues that will be critical. First and foremost, such decisions are critical to retaining the very talent that Microsoft has said it is looking to acquire. The decisions on which products to keep will be based on a number of factors. One of those factors will be which product is more popular today, but I would not expect that always to be the deciding factor.

Speaking of price, Microsoft did have to hike its bid to seal the bid (or didn’t–you’ll have to read the press release for that one). As the company pointed out during the drawn-out process, every extra dollar per share it paid added about $1.4 billion to the deal’s price tag.

Still, the work is just beginning for the two companies. First of all, they have to secure regulatory approval. Although Microsoft faces a significant rival in Google, they have to convince regulators that they themselves will not be in a position to dominate any markets. In addition to the usual regulatory hurdles in Brussels, Seoul, and Washington, China could also pose a potential threat to the deal.

One of the big risks of heading down to Latin America right now is that something big could blow up–the Microsoft-Yahoo merger.

Ultimately, though, this deal wasn’t really about price for Microsoft. It was about the fact that the company is struggling mightily to compete against Google in the market for advertising-funded content and software.

Trouble for start-ups?

Although regulators and utilities have been saying for years that the electricity grid needs upgrading, there are more questions than answers on how it will eventually take shape, said Jeff Osborne, an energy analyst at Thomas Weisel, who spoke on a panel at the CTSI Clean Tech conference in Boston last month.

“It’s a difficult problem facing all start-ups. It’s not just that utilities are not traditionally IT investors. It’s that, from their point of view, they need to be sold on a business model–and it needs to work for the start-ups, too,” he said.

The computing giant is preparing a technical “framework” to accelerate new technology integration into the creaky electricity distribution grid, said Drew Clark, director of strategy for IBM’s Venture Capital Group, which is charged with aligning start-ups with IBM and its customers.

Not so fast

But for all the activity, there are serious challenges standing in the way of broader adoption, not the least of which is money.

Although people associate smart grids with digital utility meters, the term covers a range of technologies to make the electricity distribution network more flexible and reliable.

IBM has broad
green-tech intentions, branching from energy-efficient data centers to cutting-edge solar cell technology. Next up is a concerted smart-grid effort.

CNET News intern Holly Jackson and Martin LaMonica discuss progress on smart grid technology at the end of the daily podcast on Friday. Listen now:

Download today’s podcast

(Credit:
Lucid Design Group)

A household could, for example, agree to have the air conditioner thermostat raised a few degrees by the utility when the grid is under heavy strain, such as a hot summer day. To do that, homes need devices that communicate information back to the utility, either using broadband over powerlines or wireless networks.

Louis Szablya, executive vice president of smart grid company GridPoint, said that there are difficult questions over how the smart grid gets paid for. But he thinks that consumers are pushing for better services.

“Society is beginning to demand clean and efficient power. The smart grid enables that,” he said.

“It’s probably similar to the challenges in terms of sending information reliably and securely on the Internet but in this case there are some twists,” Clark said. “You have power lines, big ugly transformers in the way, and analog devices–systems that were never set up for this.”

The benefit of a more intelligent infrastructure is that load can be curtailed as needed and problems spotted more quickly. By flattening out spikes in demand, utilities may not need to build new power plants, which are expensive and opposed in some places for environmental and health reasons.

IBM’s Clark said that the technology problems are overshadowed by business and regulatory issues.

Click on the image to see a slide show of in-home energy monitors.

“Selling to utilities is extremely hard,” Osborne said. “People are looking more for a software play than a commoditized hardware play.”

With a more predictable technical infrastructure, start-up companies could have utilities test and adopt their product more quickly. And it would create a platform for a broader range of applications to be developed.

Utilities tend to be conservative when it comes to technology investment and regulations don’t always foster large investments in energy efficiency, say experts. IT-related investments can take a back seat to things like upgrading decades-old transmissions lines.

“The biggest challenge of all this is scale,” Clark said. “If we can find breakthrough technology that enables us to bridge the gap between start-up technologies and utility scale on an industrialized basis where we can rapidly move technologies into place, then that’s the killer application.”

From a business perspective, it’s not clear where there is money to be made, although in the short term software-related businesses, like demand response, look promising, he said.

There are also many smart-grid companies, taking on various aspects of the problem, from the devices, networking, or software utilities need.

As a result, some smart-grid start-ups will struggle, since their venture capital backers can’t expect them to spend 20 years having their technology tested and adopted by utilities.

There are several smart-grid pilot programs going on around the U.S. Most recently, Duke Energy in May launched a five-year initiative to upgrade nearly all of its 800,000 customers with digital meters capable of communicating back to the utility.

IBM is developing a software framework for writing applications that takes advantage of the two-way communication of smart-grid technologies.

With these technical blueprints, based on standards like TCP/IP, new technologies can be plugged into the grid on a large scale, Clark said. What’s happening now is a patchwork of smart-grid trials using differing products, an approach that prevents fast technology change.

It will seek to define what sort of information needs to be communicated between utilities and consumers as well as protocols. Clark said that IBM, which is already involved in a number of smart-grid trials, intends to further detail the initiative later this year.

The technology for digital electric meters and networking, meanwhile, is relatively untested.

For example, a person who charges an electric
car away from home may want to charge a credit card or home electricity bill. Right now, building that application would require a lot of costly custom technical integration.

The idea is to create a common set of communication protocols and data formats that utilities and smart-grid start-ups can adhere to.

For consumers, it can mean having an in-home display or Web site that provides real-time information on energy usage. With the right equipment, they can participate in utilities’ energy-efficiency programs and shave about 10 percent off utility bills, according to results of the GridWise smart grid trail last year.