An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has proposed denying China Mobile USA's application to offer telecom services in the U.S., saying the Chinese government-owned company poses a security risk. The FCC is scheduled to vote on an order to deny the application at its open meeting on May 9, and Pai yesterday announced his opposition to China Mobile entering the U.S. market. "After reviewing the evidence in this proceeding, including the input provided by other federal agencies, it is clear that China Mobile's application to provide telecommunications services in our country raises substantial and serious national security and law enforcement risks," Pai said. "Therefore, I do not believe that approving it would be in the public interest. I hope that my colleagues will join me in voting to reject China Mobile's application."

China Mobile filed its application in 2011, and has repeatedly complained about the government's lengthy review process. According to Pai's announcement, China Mobile's application sought authority "to provide international facilities-based and resale telecommunications services between the U.S. and foreign destinations." In simpler terms, the company was seeking "a license to connect calls between the United States and other nations" and "was not seeking to provide domestic cell service and compete in the country with businesses like AT&T and Verizon," The New York Times wrote yesterday. An FCC official told reporters that such calls "could be intercepted for surveillance and make the domestic network vulnerable to hacking and other risks," the Times wrote.

pgmrdlm shares a report: Calls between T-Mobile users and Comcast's Xfinity Voice home subscribers will now be "verified," the latest move in the ongoing fight against robocalls. The two companies announced Wednesday that they have launched cross-network verification, allowing users to know that the calls they are receiving is from an actual person and not a spammer or robocaller.

They use a handoff system recommended by the FCC where the caller's network verifies that a legitimate call is being made with a "digital signature." The recipient's network then confirms the signature on its side. A number of major wireless and traditional home voice providers have pledged support for the verification method, including Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, Charter, Cox and Vonage, with several announcing plans to roll out or test the feature in 2019.

House lawmakers on Wednesday approved a Democrat-backed bill (alternative source) that would restore rules requiring AT&T, Verizon and other Internet providers to treat all Web traffic equally, marking an early step toward reversing one of the most significant deregulatory moves of the Trump era. From a report: But the net neutrality measure is likely to stall from here, given strong Republican opposition in the GOP-controlled Senate and the White House, where aides to President Trump this week recommended that he veto the legislation if it ever reaches his desk. The House's proposal, which passed by a vote of 232-190, would reinstate federal regulations that had banned AT&T, Verizon and other broadband providers from blocking or slowing down customers' access to websites. Adopted in 2015 during the Obama administration, these net neutrality protections had the backing of tech giants and startups as well as consumer advocacy groups, which together argued that strong federal open Internet protections were necessary to preserve competition and allow consumers unfettered access to movies, music and other content of their choice.

Verizon is sending out an update for millions of its routers after security researchers discovered vulnerabilities that could allow potential attackers to take over the devices. From a report: Researchers from Tenable, a security company, detailed three vulnerabilities with Verizon's Fios Quantum Gateway router on Tuesday. The company said it disclosed these security flaws to Verizon last December, and that the company issued a fix on March 13. Verizon said that a small percentage of its customers did not get the update automatically, and will still need a patch to protect against this security flaw. "We were recently made aware of three vulnerabilities related to login and password information on the Broadband Home Router Fios-G1100," a Verizon spokesman said in a statement.

"As soon as we were made aware of these vulnerabilities, we took immediate action to remediate them and are issuing patches." The company said that several customers with a particular type of router did not get the update, but said that people affected will not need to take any action. If your router's firmware is running version 02.02.00.13, you're up to date and safe from the vulnerabilities.

Verizon announced today that it has turned on its 5G wireless network in Chicago and Minneapolis -- two of the first markets in the world to receive this next-gen network. Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg told CNBC that the company will activate 30 additional markets this year. From a report: Vestberg added that Verizon is unlikely to see any impact on revenue from people who upgrade to new 5G phones until around 2021. This network complements Verizon's existing "5G Home" service which launched in October in select areas and is a wireless alternative to a traditional cable-based home internet connection, but does not work far beyond the walls of your home.

Verizon said the wireless network will give customers access to peak speeds up to 1 Gbps. That's about 10 times faster than you might traditionally find on the LTE connection you have now. Put plainly: You'll be able to download movies in seconds instead of minutes. Only a select number of phones will support the network at first. Samsung will launch a Galaxy S10 5G model later this quarter that will be exclusive to Verizon to start. AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint will begin to sell it in the second half of the year. That leaves the Motorola Z3 as the only phone that supports Verizon's new 5G network right now, and it requires a separate accessory to work on it.

Friday CNN reported on "what you can do right now to stop robocalls."

"Short of throwing your phone in the garbage, there's no way to avoid them altogether. But wireless providers and smartphone developers offer tools to filter out at least some unwanted calls." - Verizon's Call Filter app is free to download on iPhones and Android devices. The company announced Thursday the app will offer some free features -- including auto-blocking calls from known fraudsters, showing warning banners for suspicious calls, and a spam reporting tool. For $2.99 a month per line, the Call Filter app can use a phonebook feature to look up the names of unknown callers, and it can show a "risk meter" for spam calls.

- AT&T's Call Protect has similar free features and add-ons with a $3.99 per month subscription. (iOS and Android)

- T-Mobile phones come loaded with Scam ID, which warns customers about suspicious phone numbers. It's also free to activate Scam Block, which automatically rejects calls from those numbers. An additional app called Name ID offers premium caller identification for $4 per line monthly. (iOS and Android)

- Sprint's Premium Caller ID , which comes pre-installed, looks up unknown numbers and filters and blocks robocalls for $2.99 per line.

- Google's Pixel phones also give you the option to have your voice assistant answer suspicious calls for you. The phone can transcribe the conversation and lets you decide whether to answer.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The Federal Trade Commission, in what could be considered a prelude to new regulatory action, has issued an order to several major internet service providers requiring them to share every detail of their data collection practices. The information could expose patterns of abuse or otherwise troubling data use against which the FTC -- or states -- may want to take action. The letters requesting info went to Comcast, Google, T-Mobile, and both the fixed and wireless sub-companies of Verizon and AT&T. These "represent a range of large and small ISPs, as well as fixed and mobile Internet providers," an FTC spokesperson said. I'm not sure which is mean to be the small one, but welcome any information the agency can extract from any of them.

To be clear, the FTC already has consumer protection rules in place and could already go after an internet provider if it were found to be abusing the privacy of its users -- you know, selling their location to anyone who asks or the like. (Still no action there, by the way.) But the evolving media and telecom landscape, in which we see enormous companies devouring one another to best provide as many complementary services as possible, requires constant reevaluation. As the agency writes in a press release: "The FTC is initiating this study to better understand Internet service providers' privacy practices in light of the evolution of telecommunications companies into vertically integrated platforms that also provide advertising-supported content." The report provides this example as to the kind of situation the FTC is concerned about: "If Verizon wants to offer not just the connection you get on your phone, but the media you request, the ads you are served, and the tracking you never heard of, it needs to show that these businesses are not somehow shirking rules behind the scenes."

"For instance, if Verizon Wireless says it doesn't collect or share information about what sites you visit, but the mysterious VZ Snooping Co (fictitious, I should add) scoops all that up and then sells it for peanuts to its sister company, that could amount to a deceptive practice," TechCrunch adds. "Of course it's rarely that simple (though don't rule it out), but the only way to be sure is to comprehensively question everyone involved and carefully compare the answers with real-world practices."

"The fight against robocalls can even bring telecom rivals together," reports USA Today: AT&T and Comcast said Wednesday that they can authenticate calls made between the two different phone providers' networks, a potential industry first and the latest in the long-running battle against spam calls... The system, which uses a method developed in recent years, verifies that a legitimate call is being made instead of one that has been spoofed by spammers, scammers or robocallers with a "digital signature." The recipient network then confirms the signature on its side. The companies said consumers will get a notification that a call is verified, but exactly what that will look like is not yet known.

Both AT&T and Comcast will roll out the system to home phone users later this year at no extra charge. AT&T also said it will introduce the feature to its mobile users this year... Other major wireless and traditional home voice providers have pledged support for the verification method, including Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, Charter, Cox and Vonage, with several announcing plans to roll out or test the feature in 2019.
The day Comcast and AT&T made their announcement, AT&T's CEO was giving a live interview that was interrupted by a robocall.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a new report calling for a "fiber for all" plan to combat the broadband access crisis in the United States. Government data and independent analysis show we are falling behind the rest of the developed world in this area, and "the U.S. is the only country that believes having no plan will solve this issue," writes Ernesto Falcon from the EFF. "We are the only country to completely abandon federal oversight of an uncompetitive, highly concentrated market that sells critical services to all people, yet we expect widely available, affordable, ultra-fast services. But if you live in a low-income neighborhood or in a rural market today, you know very well this is not working and the status quo is going to cement in your local broadband options to either one choice or no choice." From the report: Very small ISPs and local governments with limited budgets are at the frontline of deploying fiber to the home to fix these problems, but policymakers from the federal, state, and local level need to step up and lead. At least 19 states still have laws that prohibit local governments from deploying community broadband projects. Worst yet, both AT&T and Verizon are actively asking the FCC to make it even harder for small private ISPs to deploy fiber, so that the big incumbents can raise prices and suppress competition, a proposal EFF has urged the FCC to reject.

This is why we need to push our elected officials and regulators for a fiber-for-all-people plan to ensure everyone can obtain the next generation of broadband access. Otherwise, the next generation of applications and services won't be usable in most of the United States. They will be built instead for markets with better, faster, cheaper, and more accessible broadband. This dire outcome was the central thesis to a recently published book by Professor Susan Crawford (appropriately named Fiber) and EFF agrees with its findings. If American policymakers do not remedy the failings in the US market and actively pursue ways to drive fiber deployment with the goal of universal coverage, then a staggering number of Americans will miss out on the latest innovations that will occur on the Internet because it will be inaccessible or too expensive. As a result, we will see a worsening of the digital divide as advances in virtual reality, cloud computing, gaming, education, and things we have not invented yet are going to carry a monopoly price tag for a majority of us -- or just not be accessible here. This does not have to be so, but it requires federal, state, and local governments to get to work on policies that promote fiber infrastructure to all people. Most of the talk lately has been about 5G networks, but the less-spoken truth about these networks is that they need dense fiber networks to make them work. "One estimate on the amount of fiber investment that needs to occur is as much as $150 billion -- including fiber to the home deployments -- in the near future, and we are far below that level of commitment to fiber," the report says.

AT&T's "5G Evolution" cellular service isn't just controversial and arguably misleading, it's also slower than the 4G speeds offered by rivals T-Mobile and Verizon, according to a new report today from OpenSignal. From a report: Over a one-month period spanning January 28 through February 26, OpenSignal compared the average performance of "5G E capable" phones and "all others" on AT&T's network with similarly equipped devices on T-Mobile's, Verizon's, and Sprint's networks -- a fair test in that all four of the major U.S. carriers have deployed pre-5G, late-stage 4G technologies across the country. Only Sprint's network fell behind AT&T's performance, though that's no surprise, as the fourth-place carrier's network has lagged behind its rivals in performance for years.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: How to fund ethical journalism in the Facebook era is the multi-billion dollar question of the hour, and a technology-focused consumer group by the name of Free Press believes it has a solution. The group has unveiled a new proposal that suggests taxing all online targeted advertising, then using that money to fund the nation's struggling news empires, big and small. The program would apply a 2 percent tax on companies generating more than $200 million in annual targeted-ad revenues, then use that money to create a "Public Interest Media Endowment." The $2 billion collected annually would then be managed by the government itself, or an outside, existing institution such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Such a tax would most obviously apply to both social media giants, but also the giant telecom monopolies increasingly trying to elbow their way into the online ad space. This endowment, in turn, would help fund local journalism, investigative reporting, media literacy, noncommercial social networks, civic-technology projects, and "news and information for underserved communities," suggests the group. "The problem for journalism is that Facebook and Google control nearly 70 percent of this marketplace," Free Press Director Tim Karr told Motherboard via email. "And neither are news organizations. In fact, only one of the top ten digital advertisers in the U.S. (Verizon Media Group/Oath) is in the news business (HuffPost, Techcrunch), and then only partially so."

Tumblr's ban on pornography and adult content has led to an estimated fifth of its users deserting the platform. From a report: Tumblr's ban on pornography and adult content has led to a fifth of its users deserting the platform, figures reveal. The ban, which came into effect on 17 December, provoked a backlash from users who claimed it would penalise sex-positive, LGBT and NSFW art communities. Visits to the Tumblr website fell from 521 million in December to 437 million in January and 370 million in February, according to data from web analytics firm SimilarWeb. Tumblr's decision to update its content policy came after the discovery of child sexual abuse imagery on its blogs.

Verizon said on Tuesday that it will charge an additional $10 a month per smartphone for subscribers who want to add 5G speeds to their devices, the first major U.S. carrier to disclose pricing for the faster cellular service. From a report: Verizon says it'll flip the switch next month on a much-hyped, next-generation "5G" phone network. Service will start in parts of Chicago and Minneapolis. Verizon expects to have 5G in 30 cities this year. For now, few people will sign on. The offer is available only on unlimited plans, which currently start at $75 for one person or $160 for a family of four without 5G. On family plans, each 5G line would cost $10 extra. And network access will initially work with just one phone, Motorola's Moto Z3, with a special 5G attachment. Verizon will offer some promotions at first, including discounts on the phone and attachment and the first three months of 5G service free.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A bad security decision by Comcast on the company's mobile phone service made it easier for attackers to port victims' cell phone numbers to different carriers. Comcast in 2017 launched Xfinity Mobile, a cellular service that uses the Verizon Wireless network and Comcast Wi-Fi hotspots. Comcast has signed up 1.2 million mobile subscribers but took a shortcut in the system that lets users switch from Comcast to other carriers. To port a phone line from Comcast to another wireless carrier, a customer needs to know his or her Comcast mobile account number. Carriers generally use PINs to verify that a customer seeking to port a number actually owns the number. But Comcast reportedly set the PIN to 0000 for all its customers, and there was apparently no way for customers to change it. That means that an attacker who acquired a victim's Comcast account number could easily port the victim's phone number to another carrier. Comcast told Ars that "less than 30" customers were affected by the problem, that it has implemented a fix, and that the company will eventually roll out a real PIN-based system to further protect customers. But Comcast declined to describe the recent fix in any way, saying that information could help attackers. Comcast also did not say when its new PIN-based system will be ready. Here's what Comcast had to say about the changes it's made and will make: "We have also implemented a solution that provides additional safeguards around our porting process, and we're working aggressively towards a PIN-based solution. We are reaching out to impacted customers to apologize and work with them to address the issue. We take this very seriously, and our fraud detection and prevention methods, policies and procedures are continually being reviewed, tested and refined."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A group of academics have found three new security flaws in 4G and 5G, which they say can be used to intercept phone calls and track the locations of cell phone users. The findings are said to be the first time vulnerabilities have affected both 4G and the incoming 5G standard, which promises faster speeds and better security, particularly against law enforcement use of cell site simulators, known as "stingrays." But the researchers say that their new attacks can defeat newer protections that were believed to make it more difficult to snoop on phone users. [Rafiul Hussain, one of the co-authors of the paper, along with Ninghui Li and Elisa Bertino at Purdue University, and Mitziu Echeverria and Omar Chowdhury at the University of Iowa are set to reveal their findings at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium in San Diego on Tuesday.

The paper, seen by TechCrunch prior to the talk, details the attacks: the first is Torpedo, which exploits a weakness in the paging protocol that carriers use to notify a phone before a call or text message comes through. The researchers found that several phone calls placed and cancelled in a short period can trigger a paging message without alerting the target device to an incoming call, which an attacker can use to track a victim's location. Knowing the victim's paging occasion also lets an attacker hijack the paging channel and inject or deny paging messages, by spoofing messages like Amber alerts or blocking messages altogether, the researchers say. Torpedo opens the door to two other attacks: Piercer, which the researchers say allows an attacker to determine an international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) on the 4G network; and the aptly named IMSI-Cracking attack, which can brute force an IMSI number in both 4G and 5G networks, where IMSI numbers are encrypted. AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile are all affected by Torpedo, "and the attacks can be carried out with radio equipment costing as little as $200," the report adds. One U.S. network is reportedly vulnerable to the Piercer attack, but the researcher wouldn't name which one.

Verizon is asking the FCC to let it keep new smartphones locked to its network for 60 days, as part of an initiative to prevent identify theft and fraud. "After the 60-day period, the phones would unlock automatically, the telecom says in a note published to its website and authored by Ronan Dunne, Verizon's executive vice president," reports The Verge. "Verizon says it should have the authority to do this under the so-called 'C-block rules' put in place following the FCC's 2008 wireless spectrum auction." From the report: "We believe this temporary lock on new phones will protect our customers by limiting the incentive for identity theft. At the same time, a temporary lock will have virtually no impact on our legitimate customers' ability to use their devices," Dunne writes. "Almost none of our customers switch to another carrier within the first 60 days. Even with this limited fraud safety check, Verizon will still have the most consumer-friendly unlocking policy in the industry. All of our main competitors lock their customers' new devices for a period of time and require that they are fully paid off before unlocking."

Verizon is just putting itself in line with the rest of the industry here. AT&T already requires your phone be activated for 60 days for you to unlock it, and the company even requires you to wait two weeks to unlock your old phone if you're upgrading to a new one. T-Mobile requires you wait 40 days, and also limits users to two unlocks per year per line. Sprint has a 50-day limit, and only unlocks devices from the onset if the phones are prepaid.

Verizon has announced plans to turn on its 5G mobile network in 30 U.S. cities this year. "It revealed the plan during an investor meeting Thursday, though didn't disclose the list of cities," reports Engadget. From the report: Verizon already offers home broadband service via 5G in Los Angeles, Houston, Indianapolis and Sacramento. This month, it hinted at upcoming rollouts in New York City and Atlanta, as well as Medford, Massachusetts, suggesting Verizon will bring 5G to nearby Boston too. The provider plans to flip the switch on its mobile 5G network in the first half of this year, and it will expand its home 5G service to more markets later in 2019. One of the first phones to support Verizon's nascent 5G network will be the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G, which was unveiled yesterday at Samsung's Unpacked event. The device has a larger screen and battery than the S10 Plus, and will temporarily be a Verizon exclusive before expanding to other carriers in the weeks after launch. It's slated to go on sale sometime "in the first half of 2019."

Next-generation 5G networks are very much in their infancy right now, but that's not stopping smartphone manufacturers from teasing new 5G phones. At Samsung's Galaxy S10 launch event today, Samsung teased the Galaxy S10 5G, a top-tier model of the Galaxy S10 that offers 5G mobile data connectivity. "The device, which has a larger screen and battery than the S10 Plus, will temporarily be a Verizon Wireless exclusive before expanding to other carriers in the weeks after launch," reports The Verge. "It will go on sale sometime 'in the first half of 2019."

Late last year, LG confirmed that its first U.S. 5G phone would debut on Sprint "in the first half of 2019," just as Sprint launches its 5G network. At around the same time, Lenovo unveiled the Moto Z3, a phone that only connects to 5G with a MotoMod modular accessory. It too is expected to arrive early this year -- but there's no mention of how much it'll cost. OnePlus, Nokia, and Huawei are also working on 5G phones expected to arrive sometime this year. The question is: are we ready for 5G phones? Three of the four largest carriers in the U.S. have only just started offering 5G service in select cities. Sprint, the fourth largest U.S. telecommunications company, hasn't even reached this step. Just like the first 4G phones to hit the market, these first-of-their-kind 5G devices look to merely symbolize what the next decade of mobile computing has in store.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Disney is said to have pulled its advertising spending from YouTube, joining other companies including Nestle, after a blogger detailed how comments on Google's video site were being used to facilitate a "soft-core pedophilia ring." Some of the videos involved ran next to ads placed by Disney and Nestle. All Nestle companies in the U.S. have paused advertising on YouTube, a spokeswoman for the company said Wednesday in an email. Video game maker Epic Games and German packaged food giant Dr. August Oetker KG also said they had postponed YouTube spending after their ads were shown to play before the videos. Disney has also withheld its spending.

On Sunday, Matt Watson, a video blogger, posted a 20-minute clip detailing how comments on YouTube were used to identify certain videos in which young girls were in activities that could be construed as sexually suggestive, such as posing in front of a mirror and doing gymnastics. Watson's video demonstrated how, if users clicked on one of the videos, YouTube's algorithms recommended similar ones. By Wednesday, Watson's video had been viewed more than 1.7 million times. Total ad spending on the videos mentioned was less than $8,000 within the last 60 days, and YouTube plans refunds, the spokeswoman said. Two years ago, Verizon, AT&T, Johnson & Johnson and other major companies pulled their ads from YouTube after learning that some of their ads surfaced next to extremist and violent content. Yesterday, YouTube released an updated policy about how it will handle content that "crosses the line" of appropriateness.

"Any content -- including comments -- that endangers minors is abhorrent and we have clear policies prohibiting this on YouTube. We took immediate action by deleting accounts and channels, reporting illegal activity to authorities and disabling violative comments," a spokeswoman for YouTube said in an email.

The Federal Communications Commission will consider "regulatory intervention" if the major telecommunications carriers don't set up a system this year to stop spoofed robocalls, FCC chairman Ajit Pai said Wednesday. "It's time for carriers to implement robust caller ID authentication," Pai said in a statement, noting that some companies have already committed to carrying out protocols, known as the SHAKEN/STIR framework, in 2019. A report adds: Pai sent letters to major wireless carriers in November demanding that they adopt industry-wide frameworks to crackdown on the practice of "spoofing," where robocallers mask a call's origin with a fraudulent number on their caller ID. On Wednesday, the FCC chair followed up with another demand that they implement caller authentication systems this year and a threat over the repercussions if they don't comply. You can read responses from carriers FCC's website.