Archive for RB

| November 6, 2010
Comments Off on Google Searches for Power on Seabed

Google Searches for Power on Seabed

Google Searches for Power on Seabed Google (GOOG) is investing in an undersea power cable project linking offshore wind farms with energy grids along the Mid-Atlantic region.  Known as the Atlantic Wind Connection backbone, the cable will stretch 350 miles off the Atlantic coast from New Jersey to Virginia. The cable will collect power from multiple offshore wind farms and deliver it via the cables to the on-shore grid. The AWC backbone will be able to tap into 6000 megawatts of offshore generation, enough to serve about 1.9 million homes according to reports.

Atlantic Wind Connection backboneGoogle, will take a 37.5% stake in the project. “We’re willing to take calculated risks on early-stage ideas and projects that can have dramatic impacts while offering attractive returns,” Rick Needham, green business operations director, wrote on the Google official blog.  Other investors in the project include U.S.-based Good Energies which invests in energy projects with a 37.5% equity stake, Japan’s Marubeni Corporation will have a 15% stake. Atlantic Grid Development LLC, a company formed to develop the project whose shareholders include independent transmission company Trans-Elect, will have 10%.

Project cots Google billions

Businessweek says the first phase of the project, which the developers aim to complete by early 2016, would run about 150 miles and cost between $1.7 billion and $1.8 billion. The second phase to complete the 350-mile line could be finished by 2020, Bob Mitchell, chief executive officer of Trans-Elect, told reporters telephone interview. The New York Times reports the project will cost $5 billion total in total. Reports are that Google and Good Energies’ initial investment is about $200 million each for the first phase of the project.

Google logoThe partners believe that the mid-Atlantic region’s shallow waters will make it easier to install turbines 10-15 miles offshore, almost out of sight from land. Without it, offshore wind developers would be forced to build individual radial transmission lines from each offshore wind project to the shore, Needham claimed.  “This system will act as a superhighway for clean energy,” Mr. Needham wrote, adding that the proposed project could remove “a major barrier to scaling up offshore wind“. If successful, the AWC project will help to relieve grid congestion and boost transmission capacity in a key market. Google believes that the move into alternative energy is consistent with the company’s goal of promoting renewable energy.

Spray towers over the 57-foot-tall Ludington Lighthouse in Michigan as a storm packing winds of up to 81 mph howled across the Midwest and South on Tuesday, Oct. 26. Jeff Kiessel, Ludington Daily News

This isn’t the first time Google has dipped its toe in the spreading pool of wind power. The search giant agreed to buy 114 megawatts of clean energy from an Iowa wind farm to power its data centers. Google also invested nearly 40 million in two wind farms.

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Not that I really want to bet against Google, but the IEEE reports that Michigan has an offshore potential of 100 GW, nearly double that of  Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey. Perhaps Google co-founder and East Lansing native Larry Page remembers winters in Michigan and thinks that the moving ice sheets on the lakes could damage a tower.

Michigan Offshore Wind Speeds

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| October 31, 2010
Comments Off on ATT the Leader in Lobbying

ATT the Leader in Lobbying

ATT the Leader in LobbyingWith the political silly season upon us. The good folks over at ars-technica points us to The Open Secrets database. According to them, AT&T (T) easily qualifies as the top all-time donor to political campaigns. From 1990 through 2010, the carrier in its various ownership forms spent over $45,461,879 lobbying politicians, outspending the next two corporate lobbying contenders, the National Association of Realtors ($36,749,493) and Goldman Sachs ($32,660,452).

Open Secrets logoThe money AT&T spends on lobbying politicians comes from every monthly customer bill paid for dial-tone, iPhone, U-Verse, DSL, etc. service.  Ars-technica says that tracking where AT&T spends its money is easy. Figuring out the corporation’s politics is harder. OpenSecrets.org’s list of contributions shows that Republicans and Democrats share equally in AT&T’s gift-giving.  Here are the leading recipients.

  • Reid, Harry (D-NV) $30,000
  • Crist, Charlie (I-FL) $22,100
  • Blunt, Roy (R-MO) $11,500
  • Guthrie, Steven Brett (R-KY) $11,500
  • Jenkins, Lynn (R-KS) $11,500

In Michigan, the same mixed pattern continues. AT&T contributed equal amounts of cash to Democratic and Republican House members:

  • John Dingell (D-MI) $10,000
  • Mark Schauer (D-MI) $10,000
  • Fred Upton (R-MI) $10,000

ATT logoIn 2008, for example, the carrier spent $14,736,518 on lobbying federal and state office-seekers. But the company spread the loot around in a fairly bipartisan manner. although during the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama was clearly the telco’s favorite. Obama (D-IL) received $264,411 from AT&T which surpassed his Republican challenger John McCain (R-AZ) who received $201,438 in AT&T money according to the article from Ars.  Ars also noted that the carrier spent roughly the same amount on solid liberal Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) as it did on no-holds-barred libertarian Ron Paul (R-TX).

Lobbying ensure AT&T always has friends

Democratic Party logoArs technica speculates that Republican Party logoAT&T’s political donation strategy is to spread the money evenly so that no matter what happens, AT&T has friends on Capitol Hill and in the White House. The beneficiaries of the AT&T gift-giving however, tend to be fairly established candidates, mostly incumbents.

Undoubtedly AT&T expects help from the politicians it contributes to. In the second quarter of this year, the company spent over $3,086,786.27 for lobbying activities on Capitol Hill (PDF). Much of their time and energy went to a variety of telecom-related bills pending in the House or Senate. These included:

  • HR 1319—The Informed P2P User Act. The bill would require P2P software providers to offer “clear and conspicuous” notice about the kinds of files the program can share. And no sneaky extra installs please, and the software can’t block consumers from deleting it. The proposed law has passed the House (PDF) and is awaiting committee action in the Senate.
  • HR 3458—Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009. Edward Markey’s (D-MA) legislation would write the FCC’s Open Internet policy statement into the Communications Act, barring ISPs from being allowed to “block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade” access to any lawful content from any lawful application or device. It is currently sitting in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce (PDF), where it will doubtless stay until the Federal Communications Commission gives some sign about what it wants to do with its latest net neutrality proposals.
  • HR 1019—The State Video Tax Fairness Act of 2009 would prohibit states from taxing pay-TV services, including IP video services like AT&T’s U-Verse. AT&T is probably in favor of this one.
  • S 773—The Cybersecurity Act of 2009. The scariest part of this bill would have given the president the power to shut down the Internet in the event of a major cyber attack. That provision has been removed. Now the proposed law focuses on reorganizing the balkanized mess which is the federal government’s cybersecurity defense infrastructure.

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Lobbying by ATT wins the carrier a degree of influence that goes way beyond its social benefitOver the last two decades, AT&T has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on political races, lobbying, and philanthropic giving. And because the telco is careful to spread those resources over a broad political and social landscape, they win the carrier a degree of influence that goes way beyond the numerical figures cited by ars-technica.

Think about that as you vote on Tuesday.

Here is a link from the League of Women Voters to find your local polling place.

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| October 30, 2010
Comments Off on Fiber Through Sewers Coming to US

Fiber Through Sewers Coming to US

Fiber Through Sewers Coming to USi3 America has announced the first U.S. pilot of its Fibrecity open access network in Quincy, IL Light Reading reports. The firm believes the time is right in the U.S. market, based on the Google (GOOG) inspired boom in municipal fiber projects said Brian Foley, VP of sales for i3 America. “We are excited to be working with Quincy on this pilot — the city has been extremely cooperative in moving things forward,” Foley told LightReading.

i3 America logoi3 partners with municipalities and municipally owned utilities to deploy the i3 Fibrecity system in sewer systems. “By working in partnership with the municipality, we will take their information about the existing pipes and put that into our GIS systems,” Alasdair Rettie, technical director of i3 Group Ltd. said in the LightReading article. “We will ask where they have problems, because we don’t want to put fiber in areas where there is already an issue. Before we deploy, we will clean the sewers and do a survey of the sewer lines to pick the routes we want to go, and where it’s needed, we will repair the sewers.”

By using the waste-water pipes to deploy fiber, i3 claims to trim 30 percent to 50 percent off the cost of deploying fiber. Light Reading says the i3 patented technology secures the fiber optic cable to the bottom of a sewer and is actually designed to enable sediment that might normally settle there to move farther downstream.

i3 will build and operate the local loop fiber network for its partners in Illinois on an open access basis, Rettie stated in the article. The parties then either work out a revenue-sharing deal or enable the municipality to use the network for its own purposes, including providing fiber connections to schools, video security monitoring, traffic management, public safety, and/or subsidized connections into homes of low-income residents.

Fibrecity logoAccording to Light Reading, the Fibrecity network is an open-access system, based on FTTH optoelectronics from Ericsson AB (ERIC) and Enablence Technologies Inc. (ENA) which uses i3’s system of running fiber through sewers to a place  near the home, where the fiber is then micro-trenched to an Optical Network Terminal (ONT) that has four Gigabit Ethernet ports. Fibrecity is designed to use a 1-12 split for its passive optical network, versus the 1-32 split commonly used in US fiber deployments, so each household is guaranteed 100 Mbit/s symmetrically, Rettie says, with the ability to burst, possibly with a boost-button paid service.

By taking an open-access approach, i3 can allow multiple service providers offering different services to address each household. “We encourage much more than triple play,” Rettie told Light Reading. “We have service providers today using IP connections to provide home security services; an applications service provider could use this to provide cloud computing; your employer could rent one of the ports to enable work-at-home. It’s all about thinking outside the box.” Open APIs are built into the i3 approach — it has tied into the APIs of Ericsson and Enablence and can offer service providers various service templates, featuring different upstream and downstream speeds, that they can then choose to offer.

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Fibrecity seems like a no-brainer. Besides the flexibility and cost savings a private network presents, other benefits include:

  1. On-going maintenance – Over the last 8 months on our current network, we have had two 24 hour+ outages due to fires, one outage due to gunshots and one from an auger. None of these incidents would have happened if the clients fiber backbone was in the sewer instead of on poles.
  2. Allows owners to bypass the outrageous pole make-ready demands that utilities make to prevent private fiber networks from being built.  I have seen a private utility delay a public project in public right-of-way for over 2 years.
  3. Finally, i3 says it repairs sewers as needed, which is a money savings that any tax-payer will appreciate.

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| October 24, 2010
Comments Off on Facebook Privacy Fail Again

Facebook Privacy Fail Again

Facebook Privacy Fail Again -Updated 11-01-10- Facebook has completed its internal investigation into reports from The Wall Street Journal that Facebook applications were violating its user privacy. The WSJ says FB is sharing unique user IDs with advertising agencies and data collection companies. According to the firm’s blog, some developers were sharing Facebook UIDs with data brokers for a fee, “this violation of our policy is something we take seriously,” Facebook engineer Mike Vernal wrote in the corporate response.

The Social Networker is reportedly taking action against developers who violated the Facebook policies by “instituting a 6-month full moratorium on their access to Facebook communication channels, and we will require these developers to submit their data practices to an audit in the future to confirm that they are in compliance with our policies” according to the corporate blog.

The blog also states that Facebook has struck a deal with Rapleaf (Which I wrote about here), the data-mining firm that has tied Facebook ID information collected by Facebook applications to a database of Internet users it sold. “Rapleaf has agreed to delete all UIDs in its possession, and they have agreed not to conduct any activities on the Facebook Platform (either directly or indirectly) going forward.”

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Last May Facebook was caught using “referrers” to send users’ ID information to advertising agencies every time the users click on ads. In response, the social networker changed some of the code that allowed this and issued a half-hearted apology. Now, the Wall Street Journal has found that third-party applications or “apps” on Facebook have been guilty of the same thing.  The WSJ says the privacy breach affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook’s strictest privacy settings.

Facebook logo“Apps” are pieces of software that let Facebook’s 500 million users play games or share common interests with one another. The company says 70% of users use apps each month. The WSJ found that all the 10 most popular apps on Facebook were transmitting users’ IDs to outside companies including:

  • FarmVille,
  • Phrases,
  • Texas HoldEm,
  • FrontierVille,
  • Causes,
  • Cafe World,
  • Mafia Wars,
  • QUiz Planet,
  • Treasure Isle
  • IHeart.

The WSJ says that Zynga Game Network Inc.’s (ZNGA) FarmVille, with 59 million users has also been transmitting personal information about a user’s friends to outside companies.

The information being transmitted includes the unique “Facebook ID” number assigned to every user on the site. Since a Facebook user ID is a public part of any Facebook profile, anyone can use an ID number to look up a person’s name even if that person has set all of his or her Facebook information to be private. For other users, the Facebook ID reveals information they have set to share with “everyone,” including age, residence, occupation, and photos. The apps reviewed by the WSJ were sending Facebook ID numbers to at least 25 advertising and data firms, several of which build profiles of Internet users by tracking their online activities.

The Journal found that data-gathering firm, RapLeaf Inc., (Which I wrote about earlier) had linked Facebook user ID information obtained from apps to its own database of Internet users, which it sells. RapLeaf also transmitted the Facebook IDs it obtained to a dozen other firms including Google’s Invite Media, the Journal found.  “We didn’t do it on purpose,” said Joel Jewitt, vice president of business development for RapLeaf to the WSJ.

Facebook has again issued a statement that it will look into the matter and correct the code and has in the meantime disabled thousands of applications. According to the WSJ, the applications transmitting Facebook IDs may have breached their own privacy policies. Zynga, for example, says in its privacy policy that it “does not provide any Personally Identifiable Information to third-party advertising companies.” A Zynga spokeswoman told the WSJ, “Zynga has a strict policy of not passing personally identifiable information to any third parties. We look forward to working with Facebook to refine how web technologies work to keep people in control of their information.”

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Mark ZuckerbergOnce again, Facebook has a user privacy breach on its hands. The social networker keeps promising to protect its customers’ personally identifiable information but never seems to get it right.

Perhaps the question Facebook users should be asking is does Facebook really want to protect their user’s privacy?

 

Related articles

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Social Networking | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
| October 22, 2010
Comments Off on Intel to Invest In America

Intel to Invest In America

Intel to Invest In AmericaThis week, Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) announced it will invest In America. Chipzilla will invest between $6 billion and $8 billion in American-based manufacturing facilities. Dailywireless says this investment in America will fund the deployment of Intel’s next-generation 22 nanometers (nm) manufacturing process across several existing U.S. factories and building a new development fabrication plant in Oregon. The Oregon factory should be ready in 2013 and will primarily produce chips for research and development as Intel advances its designs.

In an era when politicians and Wall Street refuse to invest in America, Intel has shown its leadership. “This is probably the largest private investment during this last two or three years in this country,” proclaimed Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski. The projects will support 6,000 to 8,000 construction jobs and result in 800 to 1,000 new permanent high-tech jobs according to media reports.

Highlights

  • Intel will invest in America with $6-8 billion in manufacturing to support future technology advancements in Arizona and Oregon.
  • The investment will create 6,000-8,000 construction jobs and 800-1,000 permanent high-tech jobs, and allows Intel to maintain its current manufacturing employment base in the U.S.
  • The investment will fund a new development fab in Oregon, as well as upgrades to four existing U.S. fabs (Fab 12 and Fab 32 in Arizona and D1C and D1D in Oregon) to manufacture the next-generation 22-nm process technology.
  • Intel’s next-generation, 22 nm microprocessors will enable sleeker device designs, higher performance, and longer battery life at lower costs.

Intel’s upcoming 32-nanometer “Sandy Bridge” Core architecture got much of the attention at the company’s developer show last month. Sandy Bridge chips, built using 32 nm architecture, will be out early in 2011. Ivy Bridge is the codename given to the 22 nm die shrink of Sandy Bridge.

The “tick” (new architecture) of 32 nm Sandy Bridge, available in January 2011, will be followed by the “tock” (22 nm shrink) of Ivy Bridge in January 2012. The new D1X plant may be built with the 15 nm process in mind since that process would likely be mainstreamed just 12 months after D1X begins production.

Moving to 22-nanometer could also help the company produce chips with lower power consumption to better compete in smartphones—where designs from ARM currently dominate. Intel launched the Atom platform two years ago. Now executives are looking to aggressively expand the reach of the Atom chips, into tablets, handheld devices, and phones.

Intel Technology Outlook

Intel is also building its first production facility in China, reports Bloomberg. Intel is vying with Samsung Electronics to be the industry’s biggest spender on plants and equipment in 2010. Intel’s microprocessors run more than 80 percent of the world’s personal computers. Rival Samsung is the biggest maker of memory chips.

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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