InfoSecurity reports that even after much of the free world refused to sign the controversial new ITU WCIT-12 treaty in December 2012, U.S. Many argued this would give the UN control of the Internet. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Robert M. McDowell warned, ‘the worst is yet to come.’
“The United States,” he said, “should immediately prepare for an even more treacherous ITU treaty negotiation that will take place in 2014 in Korea. Those talks could expand the ITU’s reach even further.” McDowell seems convinced that the ITU’s desire to control the internet is not a passing fancy, but a long-term intent. He may be right, and it may come before 2014.
Last week the ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré released his draft report for the Fifth World Telecommunication/Information and Communication Technology Policy Forum 2013. “This draft report of the Secretary-General to the WTPF-2013,” it states, “aims to provide a basis for discussion at the Policy Forum, incorporating the contributions of ITU Member States and Sector Members, and serving as the sole working document of the Forum focusing on key issues on which it would be desirable to reach conclusions.”
Suggested themes for discussion include, “Global Principles for the governance and use of the Internet,” and “On the basis of reciprocity, to explore ways for greater collaboration and coördination between ITU and relevant organizations – including, but not limited to, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Society (ISOC) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – involved in the development of IP-based networks and the future internet, through cooperation agreements, as appropriate, to increase the role of ITU in Internet governance to ensure the largest benefits to the global community.”
This is exactly what caused disarray in December’s WCIT in Dubai the commissioner states.
Meanwhile, a ‘de-fund the ITU petition has appeared on the White House ‘We the People’ website. A supporting website gives full details. “Fighting on behalf of the Internet,” it states, The United States government and fifty-four other countries rejected the ITU’s takeover attempt, but this is a single battle in a war that the ITU will continue to fight. The ITU is spending more than $180M/year to oppose the Internet and is drawing from its reserves more heavily each year ($9M in 2010, up from $5.5M in 2009), as progressive countries withdraw their payments from the ITU’s war-chest.
The ten most oppressive countries in the Open Net Initiative’s ranking of online freedom all sided against the internet, and none of them are giving the ITU as much as the U.S. is. If all the countries that stood with the Internet against the ITU’s attack withdraw their funding, it claims, “the ITU’s membership revenue will be reduced by 74%.”
The petition also calls for future U.S. delegations to be reduced “to no more than one USG representative, tasked primarily with communicating a U.S. position that the ITU’s only legitimate area of authority is radio communications.” The long-term danger from such entrenched views on both sides is that the worldwide nature of the internet might fracture into one internet under multi-stakeholder governance in the ‘free’ world, and a series of heavily government-regulated Internets elsewhere.
“Freedom and prosperity are at stake,” warned Commissioner McDowell.
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I have warned about the United Nations’ attempt to take over the Internet since November.
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.
The United Nations (UN) is calling a meeting between the world’s governments starting December 7th, 2012. It could very well decide the future of the Internet through a binding international treaty.
It’s called the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), and it’s being organized by a government-controlled UN agency called the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
If some proposals at WCIT are approved, decisions about the Internet would be made by a top-down, old-school government-centric agency behind closed doors. Some proposals allow for access to be cut off more easily, threaten privacy, legitimize monitoring, and blocking online traffic. Others seek to impose new fees for accessing content, not to mention slowing down connection speeds. If the delicate balance of the internet is upset, it could have grave consequences for businesses and human rights.
Only governments get a vote at WCIT. We need people from all around the world to demand that our leaders keep the internet open.
Log your objections to the UN and the ITU putting control of the Internet behind closed doors at www.whatistheitu.org
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.
Robert Colburn, the research coordinator at the IEEE History Center, recalled the first time a computer, UNIVAC was used to predict a United States Presidential election in 1952. The IEEE historian says the story has been told and retold for decades.
CBS Television News used a UNIVAC computer to predict the 1952 U.S. Presidential election returns and — when the computer accurately predicted the Eisenhower landslide at around 8:30 in the election night broadcast — however, they doubted the prediction, and only hours later did CBS reveal that the prediction had been correct. It has become a classic cautionary tale of the dangers of allowing human preconception to interfere with logic and the evaluation of facts.
There is more to the story according to Mr. Colburn. The exact timeline of when UNIVAC’s made its initial prediction is not certain, but that UNIVAC’s correct prediction of a landslide victory was ostensibly ignored until later in the broadcast because of journalistic prudence and lack of confidence in the accuracy of the results.
The article cites Dr. Ira Chinoy, whose doctoral thesis examines the use of computers in broadcast journalism, estimates that the celebrated initial prediction of the Eisenhower landslide was made closer to 9:15. At 8:30, only slightly more than one million votes had been tallied; it took until at least 9:15 pm for three million votes to be transmitted from CBS to the Remington Rand factory in Philadelphia. CBS was receiving vote tallies from the wire services and teletyping them to Remington Rand’s factory in Philadelphia. Additional time to input the data and run the programs was required.
The 8:30 CBS segment merely gave the television audience a visual tour and introduction to UNIVAC; the second UNIVAC segment of the evening at 9:30 asked for a prediction, but the machine was not yet ready. By that point in the television coverage, the human commentators were already commenting on the surprising Eisenhower strength in the early returns. On the basis of pre-election polls, the race between Eisenhower and Stevenson had seemed to be close (Eisenhower held a slight edge), so the use of a state-of-the-art computer to predict what was expected to be a very close election had generated a lot of popular interest the blog speculates.
At some point relatively early in the evening, UNIVAC predicted an Eisenhower landslide victory. However, the UNIVAC programmers decided that the prediction was too risky to release because it contradicted what the pollsters had been saying about the election about a tight race.
At 10:30, which was the third on-air UNIVAC segment, the computer predicted twenty-eight states for Eisenhower and twenty for Stevenson recalls the historian. This was a softer prediction and was in line with what the CBS commentators had already been telling their television audience. It was the first correct prediction of an overwhelming Eisenhower win that the UNIVAC programmers decided not to release because it contradicted the poll numbers.
The 11:30 UNIVAC on-air prediction caused more drama. It reversed its earlier prediction, calling 24 states each for Eisenhower and Stevenson, and a slim 270 to 261 Electoral College vote margin for Eisenhower. But by 11:45, the prediction was corrected and UNIVAC predicted 100 to 1 odds of an Eisenhower victory.
UNIVAC made its predictions based on the difference between vote tallies and the expected vote in cities and counties, based on a statistical model extrapolated from past elections. By applying this deviation in places that had already voted to those which had not yet voted, an estimate of the present election could be obtained based on past tallies in those places. One of the ironies of the election of 1952 was that the returns from Massachusetts, one of the crucial early reporting states, were incorrectly reported to UNIVAC. That UNIVAC was nonetheless able to make accurate predictions.
The UNIVAC used by CBS was the fifth UNIVAC machine made. In the autumn of 1952, UNIVAC-5 was still in the Philadelphia factory of Remington Rand waiting for its future installation at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. Ironically, the author reports that because UNIVAC itself was too large to be moved conveniently, a dummy control console was set up in the CBS studio in Grand Central Terminal, New York City for visual effect, its lights blinking evocatively thanks to delay switches ordinarily used for making Christmas tree lights flash on and off.
There was some irony that a machine that debuted in the public spotlight of national TV would go on to do classified weapons work. UNIVAC contained mercury delay lines, which allowed it to store 1,000 words (45 bits each) as electric pulses in tubes of mercury. Up to one million characters could be stored and accessed on magnetic tape. It was these tapes, replacing punched cards, which made the UNIVAC revolutionary, and which gave it a tremendous speed advantage because it could access its own data instead of needing to wait for cards to be loaded. It could perform four hundred and sixty-five multiplications per second and had a clock speed of 2.25MHz.
A brief Youtube video of the CBS prediction can be seen here.
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.
For too long in the U.S., Congress has attempted to legislate the Internet in favor of big corporations and heavy-handed law enforcement at the expense of its users’ basic Constitutional rights. The Electronic Frontier Foundation writes that Netizens’ strong desire to keep the Internet open and free has been brushed aside as naïve and inconsequential, in favor of lobbyists and special interest groups. Well, no longer.
The EFF and a broad coalition of civil society groups called on elected officials to sign the new Declaration of Internet Freedom and uphold basic rights in the digital world. The Declaration is simple; it offers five core principles that should guide any policy relating to the Internet: stand up for online free expression, openness, access, innovation, and privacy. Sign it here.
| American Civil Liberties Union | Cheezburger, Inc. | Free Press | |
| Amnesty International | Center for Democracy & Technology | MacUser magazine | Techdirt |
| Boxee | Electronic Frontier Foundation | Mozilla | Tucows |
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.
