WIRED– The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.

It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.

This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government, and worry that the company is starting to forget its “don’t be evil” mantra.

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© COPYRIGHT WIRED, 2010

MSNBC– If Internet service providers’ current experiments succeed, subscribers may end up paying for high-speed Internet based on how much material they download. Trials with such metered access, rather than the traditional monthly flat fee for unlimited connection time, offer enough bandwidth that they won’t affect many consumers — yet.

But as more people use the Internet to watch TV and stream movies, they could bump up against the metered rates’ caps, paying expensive over-use fees. Watching a movie may then require paying two fees: one for the movie, another to the cable company.

More and more television programming and movies are available online, through sites including Hulu, Netflix Watch Instantly, YouTube and Amazon.com’s Video on Demand.

“If you wanted to watch TV over the Internet in 2000, you had to be willing to take much less content than cable,” said Bobby Tulsiani, a senior analyst with Forrester Research in New York. “Now you get much, much more. Of course, you’re still watching on your PC, not your TV, so there are tradeoffs, but they are tradeoffs many people are willing to make.”

Most consumers probably don’t realize how much bandwidth their Internet usage consumes, because they’ve never had to care. Time Warner, the nation’s third-largest Internet service provider, in its five experimental markets is offering 5 gigabytes of downloaded Internet content for $29.95 per month. That translates to 15 hours of viewing standard-definition video, or 350,000 e-mails, or 170 hours of online gaming, or some combination of those activities, according to the company. A high-definition movie consumes about 7GB of bandwidth.

In addition to compelling consumers to monitor their Internet usage, metering could have broad societal effects, including disenfranchising the poor, retarding network growth and discouraging innovation, some experts say.

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© COPYRIGHT MSNBC, 2009

PITTSBURGH LIVE– In the midst of a battle with state regulators over the capability of its broadband service, Verizon Communications is now being challenged by a consumer group that says the telecommunications giant owes Pennsylvanians $2.1 billion for promising a faster network than it has delivered.

The accusation by TeleTruth, a New York City-based nonprofit, cites the same 1995 network modernization agreement between the state and Bell Atlantic — now called Verizon since its 2000 merger with GTE — that is currently in dispute between the company and state regulators.

In exchange for Bell Atlantic’s promises to provide broadband service to customers in every corner of its service territory by 2015, state regulators lifted limits on the company’s profits, although they devised a formula to keep the company’s rates tied to the rate of inflation.

TeleTruth’s chairman, Bruce Kushnick, said Verizon pulled off a “bait and switch” when it promised public utility commissioners that it would build a high-speed network requiring fiber-optic or another advanced technology throughout its territory by 2015, then delivered service on “100-year-old copper wires.”

The digital subscriber line, or DSL, service that Verizon offers on its copper-wire network can carry data, audio and video at speeds up to 1.5 megabits per second, or nearly 27 times faster than the fastest available dial-up modems.

But a majority of state regulators, the state’s consumer advocate, and now TeleTruth insist that Verizon in 1995 made an unambiguous commitment to provide broadband access with speeds of 45 megabits per second to customers within five days of requesting it.

Continue reading about Verizon’s False Promises.

© Copyright 2003 Associated Press