While most of the world was watched Barack Obama make history on Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission quietly voted for its own little revolution.

Despite furious lobbying by TV broadcasters, Broadway producers, Dolly Parton and rock band roadies everywhere, the panel approved a plan to open up the so-called “white spaces” between television channels for unlicensed wireless gadgets.

Dolly Parton and other show biz names objected to FCC White Space proposal.

Back in the dawn of television, the government left these little gaps in the TV spectrum because broadcast TV stations were so powerful – and the available technology was so limited – that engineers feared the stations would step on each others’ signals if they were too close together.

That issue became less important as equipment improved over the years, and it will change even more with the switch from analog broadcasting to a more efficient and precise digital system in February. For more about that, read my DTV Transition Q&A page.

A coalition of major industry players, including Google, Intel, Microsoft and Motorola, backed the plan, which they see opening up a whole new market for wireless Internet access. Because these white spaces are smack in the middle of the TV spectrum, signals in can travel considerable distances, opening up the possibility for relatively cheap, high-speed wireless Internet service in rural areas.

But TV broadcasters are still worried about newcomers with faulty equipment or intentions interfering with their frequencies, and the people who produce plays and concerts are furious. That’s because the wireless microphones they use every day use those very same frequencies. After an acrimonious battle and repeated tests by FCC l aboratories and a lobbying appeal by country legend Dolly Parton. She conceded that she knows nothing about the technology, but does know a thing or two about how important wireless mics are for musicians in concert. They’re the reason singers can prance all over the stage without worrying about tripping over a cord, and why Broadway musical stars don’t need penetrating “Broadway” voices any more.

In an attempt to pacify the theater and concert producers, the FCC is requiring manufacturers of equipment to set of databases with locations where wireless microphones are typically used, as well as sensors for wireless microphone transmissions. The theory: with current technology, the new wireless devices can avoid frequencies that are being used and switch to unoccupied channels.

With deep pockets on both sides, this isn’t likely to be the end of the issue. Here are good explanations from USA Today  and the Washington Post.

The National Association of Broadcasters’ Television Board of Directors is supporting legislation that would allow TV stations to continue transmitting emergency alerts and information about the digital TV transition over their analog channels for several weeks after the Feb. 19, 2009 switchover.

This is the first crack in the alliance between broadcasters and the government, which has been telling everyone how wonderfully the transition campaign has been going and resisting attempts to tinker with the deadline. The FCC, with congressional backing, has told broadcasters to turn off their analog transmitters Feb. 19.  Currently, local stations arebroadcasting simultaneously in both formats.

The change will leave millions of analog sets dark unless the owners have hooked up digital converter boxes. TV sets hooked to cable or satellite feeds — and 80 percent of American homes have at least one — will not be affected. Cable companies will continue to provide analog signals to their customers for several years, at least.

Millions who receive broadcasts over-the-air, with antennas, have bought converter boxes, but millions more haven’t gotten around to it yet. And 8 to 10 percent of Americans still aren’t aware of the switchover, according to the latest surveys.

There’s also evidence that even with converter boxes, 15 to 20 percent of over-the-air viewers won’t be able to get all the channels they get now unless they buy a new antenna — an expense that can run into hundreds of dollars.

One problem is that folks who buy converter boxes now won’t know for sure whether they’ll get all their channels until the day of the switchover. That’s because so many channels will be switching frequencies — in addition to using a new digital transmission system.
Because digital signals don’t always behave like analog transmissions, some digital signals that come in fine on the temporary frequencies local broadcasters are currently using may be not be strong enough on their permanent frequencies. Digital signals also suffer from the so-called “cliff” effect: if they’re strong enough, they produce superb images, but if they’re not, you won’t get anything on that channel.

Given these potential problems, it makes sense to give stations the option of continuing to broadcast emergency information and messages alerting viewers about the transition for some time after the official date. Aside from the fact that worried politicians want to squeeze the switchover between the Super Bowl and the NCAA basketball tournament, there’s no reason it has to be done in one day.

Unfortunately, the even if the bills (Senate 3663 and House Resolution 7013) become law, it won’t help all viewers. Stations that have chosen to broadcast digitally on the same frequency they used for analog broadcasts won’t be able to use both transmitters after the change.

“This voluntary commitment would apply only to stations where the continuation of the analog signal is technically feasible,” the NAB board said it a resolution approved on Wednesday, Oct. 15. “The NAB will work closely with the FCC in implementing a reasonable program taking into account local stations’ technology and market specifics.”

The legislation is sponsored by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Rep. Lois Capps (D-Calif.)

As a rule, members of Congress have sided overwhelmingly with the wealthy and powerful music, TV and motion picture industries when it comes to “fair use” of copyrighted material on the Internet. That means both the law and federal enforcement agencies have been backing the army of attack lawyers who have been suing 12-year-olds who post songs on the Web for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Now John McCain’s campaign has complained that YouTube is too aggressive in removing the Republican’s videos from the Web site because they contain copyrighted material. Often it’s not much — a few seconds from a televised campaign debate, or a few bars of a catchy song in the background. But it’s enough to draw complaints and a virtually instantaneous response from YouTube, which has become very gunshy about this kind of thing.

In the old days before the Internet, this type of “infringement” might have been covered under the so-called “fair use” doctrine, which allows at least brief sections of copyrighted works to be used by others for critical, educational or other worthwhile public purposes. One of those purposes is political, inasmuch as political speech has the very highest degree of constitutional protection. Of course, YouTube isn’t a court — it doesn’t have to post any video it doesn’t like, and if somebody complains about copyright infringement, it’s likely to yank the material, even if the poster of that material would prevail if the case ever reached the Supremes.

Here’s a good, concise story on the subject from WiredNews.com.

For months I’ve been getting complaints from readers who say some of their favorite cable TV channels are disappearing. Depending on where they live it may be Discovery, or MSNBC or some other cable-only channel with a dedicated,  if not overwhelmingly large following. The cable company tells customers it has moved the channel to its “digital tier.” If viewers want to  see the channel again, they’ll have to rent a digital cable box for $10 a month.

A lot of victims think this is part of the great DTV Switchover, and they blame the government. But it’s not. It’s a case of cable companies trying to wring a few extra dollars out of their subscribers without raising overall rates and free up more bandwidth for the high-definition broadcasts that their premium customers want. Here’s the story: › Continue reading…

One of the major culprits in the demise of classified newspaper advertising (and the departure of so many of us from the business) is Craigslist.com, the online ad service that lets visitors buy, sell, rent, hire or give away almost anything — at no charge. Now, from The Seattle Times,  yet another sign that Craigslist is the Devil’s Own Tool.

According to a report this week, an enterprising criminal ran an ad on Craigslist that promised respondents $28.50 an hour to show up near a Bank of America branch dressed for work as laborers — in blue shirts, yellow safety vests and protective eye gear. Then the robber — dressed in identical clothing — maced an armored car guard making a pickup, snatched a sack full of money and ran to a nearby creek. There he may have escaped by floating away in an inner tube — or maybe not. But everyone agrees the ad on Cragslist did a great job of recruiting decoys who unwittingly showed up just in time for him to make his getaway.

America is a GREAT country.

Aside from bingo, horse racing was the only legalized form of local gambling open to most Americans for more than a century. In fact, so prized was the government’s interest in horse race betting (or more accurately,  the state’s share of the track’s gambling revenue) that communications devices were virtually probhibited in race tracks, lest they be used to transmit results that illegal bookmakers could use to pay off illicit (meaning untaxed) wagers.

This has changed radically in recent years, and in many traditional strongholds, horse racing has fallen on hard times. One reason is the relatively easy availability of other forms of gambling — first state lotteries, then casino gambling in Atlantic City and other venues far from the flesh pots of Las Vegas, and now online gambling — the easiest bet of all.

The other problem for horse track operators and the states treasuries who feed at their tough: as a sporting event, a day at the races is inherently boring. Think about it. You watch a bunch of horses run around a track for two minutes (for about half of that, they’re almost out of sight in the backstretch), then you wait 20 minutes, and then you watch some more horses run for two minutes, and so on. The total action over a 10 race card that occupies 4 hours of your time is 20 to 25 minutes. So gambling was the only real mass market attraction racing had going for it.

In some states (such as my home state of Maryland) ailing race tracks and state governments have banded together in an unholy alliance to boost revenues with track-based slot machines — possibly the ugliest form of gambling next to dog fighting. But not the great state of Kentucky — home of the eponymous Derby and a breeding industry that employs thousands and attracts crowds of Arab oil sheiks whose Boeing 747s crowd the airport every year as they line up to buy untested yearlings with the millions they’ve collected from us at $4 a gallon. › Continue reading…

No matter how many consecutive elections you’ve voted in, you might just find yourself prohibited from voting this year, thanks to new, centralized voter databases that the federal government has forced states to adopt.

The central databases, designed to avoid fraudulent voting (although there hasn’t been a significant, documented case of organized vote fraud in many years), are the Republicans’ contribution to the “improvements” that Congress mandated after the controversy surrounding the 2000 presidential election.

Basically, the Republican strategy is to make it as hard as possible for people to vote — particularly new registrants, who often tend to be low income and Democrats. These central databases, implemented in the name of preventing fraud —  give them the best opportunity to do so since the poll tax was declared unconstitutional.

The problem is that in preventing “fraud” by matching registered voters’ names with motor vehicle or social security records, many states are finding thousands of names that don’t match. The reason may be simple misspellings, name changes resulting from marriage that haven’t been recorded yet, or other issues that are simply not the voter’s fault. How will these voters be treated?

Moreover, the centralized databases add yet another layer of flaky technology to an electoral process that has already been gummed up by electronic voting machines. In my state of Maryland, the 2006 primary featured a new generation of Diebold ExpressPoll voter registration machines that drove voters and election officials crazy by rebooting so frequently they were virtually useless.

Wired.com has a well-researched piece on this issue. If you’re interested in making sure your vote is counted this year, read it.

Microsoft has always been a tough and nasty competitor in the software market, but now it doesn’t have the will to go for the jugular.  Maybe Bill Gates has become such a major player in humanitarian circles that he no longer has the stomach for the kind of business hardball that got him to the point where he can give billions away and still have more billions than most governments.

Consider the latest Microsoft advertising campaign — the one where Gates and Jerry Seinfeld take turns being jerks in a house full of surburbanites who have spent too much time mainlining loco-weed. Does anybody have any idea what it’s about?

Connecting?

As in connecting who and what and where and when?

This is Microsoft’s lame response to having its image kicked around day after day  by Apple — you know, the TV commercials with the cool skinny kid (Macintosh) who makes endless fun of the fat dork (PC). It’s the centerpiece of Apple czar Steve Jobs’ ongoing campaign to make Mac users believe they’re cooler and hipper and smarter than everybody else. And in particular, cooler than the half billion people who were smart enough to learn how to use Windows PCs every day and don’t need a Mac.

Thankfully, the word is out that Microsoft is killing the Seinfeld/Gates ad campaign. Whether the move was scripted long in advance, as Microsoft claims, or just the result of the confused reaction from a public that can’t understand what’s going on there, some other line of commercials will replace it. Let’s hope, for the sake of entertainment, that MIcrosoft decides to take off the gloves.

Here’s my scenario: The cool kid spends his usual 45 seconds making fun of the Windows dork. Finally, the Windows dork gets tired of it, and the following two lines of dialog ensue:

Windows dork: “That’s enough, kid. You’ve had your fun. Time to get back to work.”

Cool Mac kid: “Okay, boss.”

That’s where the power is in the real world.

There are folks who believe Comcast’s customer relations manual was written by Franz Kafka, and it’s hard disagree. For example, Comcast’s usage cops routinely called up big-time downloaders, told them they were hogging too much bandwidth and threatened to cut off their service.

The downloaders naturally responded, “How much is too much?”

“We won’t tell you,” Comcast said.

“Why not?”

“Because if everyone knew how much they could use, they’d use it.”

Yes, Kafka would have been proud. But when you’re a monopoly, or even a near monopoly, this is the kind of baloney you can can serve.

No more. After the FCC got on its case, Comcast announced that starting Oct. 1, its residential customers would officially be limited to 250 gigabytes of data transfers per month. That includes e-mail, Web browsing, Instant Messaging, uploading and downloading. It was the company’s first public qualification of the “unlimited” Internet use it promised for a set monthly fee. Of course, “unlimited” didn’t really mean “unlimited,” because if you used more bandwidth than Comcast thought you should, the company would start hammering on you to cut back – without being willing to tell you how much to cut back.

With typical circumlocution, Comcast said the 250-gigabyte limit wasn’t really new. That was the bandwidth limit all along– the company just wouldn’t admit it. So there’s really no change, right?

Well, there is a change. Comcast is finally being upfront about what it’s doing. And naturally, there was a chorus of moaning and groaning after Comcast’s announcement — from the people who believe (with considerable justification) that a restaurant advertising an all-you-can-eat buffet should let you eat all the shrimp you want.

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How many discredited denials, restatements, investigations and lawsuits will it take before the people who run our elections admit they’ve spent billions on all-electronic voting machines that have now been exposed as nothing more than a gigantic pile of overpriced electronic junk?

The latest outrage? Two months before the Presidential election, Premier Electronic Solultions announced that its popular electronic voting machines, used in 34 states, may actually lose votes. Worse yet, the bug in the company’s source code has been around for years, but nobody has done anything about it. You’re forgiven if you don’t recognize this sorry outfit – Premier is the name Diebold picked for its voting machine subsidiary last year after its own name was dragged through the mud in state after state because of glitches and security flaws in its voting systems. Thousands of these machines (and electronic systems from other vendors) are gathering dust on election board shelves while officials figure out how to get their money back.

The latest problem was discovered as the result of a lawsuit brought by officials in Ohio, where some critics — with increasing justification — believe the 2004 Presidential election was stolen.

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