The Official Sling Broadband Blog
Learn about the latest technology to safeguard your data, your systems, and your business in FL.
Small Plane Goes Down Near Haulover Beach
HAULOVER BEACH- A plane has reportedly gone down near Haulover Beach. Chopper 4 was over the scene at Haulover Cut near 108th Street and Collins Avenue. The Piper single engine plane was seen underwater as authorities were near it. Authorities near plane that went down near Haulover Beach on February 2, 2016. Authorities at scene where plane went down near Haulover Beach on February 2, 2016. Miami-Dade Fire Rescue officials said two people were on board the plane at the time it went down. They say those two were not injured. Rescue crews were seen checking out two people. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a statement on the incident saying in part, “A Piper PA 28 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean 8 miles east of Opalocka, FL today at 11:47 am….. The FAA will investigate and the NTSB will determine the probable cause.” It is still unclear what caused
AT&T Pompano Beach customers without service for up to three weeks
A&T Internet, TV and landline phone customers along a roughly 4-mile stretch of the beachside could be without service for two more weeks as workers rebuild lines accidentally severed by workers of another company. The outage occurred Jan. 5 on the beachside in Pompano Beach, affecting 591 customers in the area from around Northeast 7th Court south to Pine Avenue in Lauderdale by the Sea between the ocean and Intracoastal Waterway, AT&T spokeswoman Kelly Starling said in an email. On Tuesday, 412 customers remained without AT&T wired services, Starling said. “Service for some customers has already been restored and we expect service to be restored for all customers within the next two weeks,” she said. Starling would not identify the company that caused it, acknowledging only that it was an accident. “The other company was digging when it cut our cables,” she said. The repairs will take two more weeks
Urge House to Help Small ISPs
Ahead of a House Communications and Technology Subcommittee hearing Jan. 11, Republican commissioners of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wrote a letter urging Congress to review a decision not to grant small Internet service providers (ISP) a permanent exemption from the “enhanced transparency requirements” of the FCC open Internet order.“By failing to make the exemption permanent, the FCC missed an opportunity to remedy these concerns and take this issue off the table. Instead, providers face prolonged uncertainty and the looming threat of future regulation,” Commissioners Michael O’Rielly and Ajit Pai said. The FCC has granted a temporary exemption until December 15, 2016. O’Rielly and Pai said an FCC proceeding made clear that small providers have fewer resources to devote to enhanced transparency requirements. In addition, the filing requirements could jeopardize the ability of small ISPs to deploy broadband or improve service in their communities, the letter said. At the hearing,
Time Warner Cable Says Up to 320,000 Customers’ Data May Have Been Stolen
Time Warner Cable Inc said on Wednesday up to 320,000 customers may have had their email passwords stolen. The company said email and password details were likely gathered either through malware downloaded during phishing attacks or indirectly through data breaches of other companies that stored Time Warner Cable’s customer information, including email addresses. The company said it has not yet determined how the information was obtained, but there were no indications that Time Warner Cable’s systems were breached. Time Warner Cable spokesman said it was recently notified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that some customers’ email addresses including account passwords “may have been compromised.” The company said it is sending emails and direct mail correspondence to encourage customers to update their email passwords as a precaution.
Report: Holiday lights and gadgets are killing your Wi-Fi
If you want super-fast Wi-Fi in your home, you may want to turn off your Christmas lights. Britain’s communications regulator Ofcom has published a report showing that about 20% of poor Wi-Fi performance is caused by electronic gadgets and lights in the home. While problems with network congestion and infrastructure carry most of the blame for slow broadband, devices such as baby monitors and home phones can interfere with your Wi-Fi because they compete for frequencies, an Ofcom spokesperson said. Still, the good news is that a few simple changes to the location of the router and other devices can lead to a noticeable improvement in performance . Here are some tips to maximize your Wi-Fi speed: 1. Restart your router: It can do a world of good to restart your router when you’re having connectivity troubles. This allows it to search for a new channel that isn’t being used
NSA limits its surveillance program in the US
The US National Security Agency (NSA) has reduced the extent of surveillance programs it runs on the US soil, following outcry from citizens, privacy activists and digital businesses. From Sunday onwards, the agency will no longer collect mobile communication metadata indiscriminately and in bulk. Instead, it will have to target particular individuals and get permission from the courts. The move represents the greatest reduction of US spying capabilities in nearly 15 years, since they expanded dramatically after the September 11 attacks in New York. The Obama administration came under strong criticism after Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the NSA surveillance capabilities in the summer of 2013. The revelations had a strong impact worldwide, with several countries – Russia among them – adopting stronger data residency rules to keep their citizen data out of data centers located in the US. At the same time, American businesses lost some of
Happy Thanksgiving Slingonians!
It is almost that time again. Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and we are all hurrying to get to our families for this special day. Thanksgiving was originated to give thanks for the harvest from the preceding year, and its safe to assume most of us know that. However, we are not the only cultures that give thanks to that which fills our bellies every year. People all around the world celebrate and give thanks at different times for their blessings. As we have progressed in technology over time in the United States, most of us have the honor of filling our bellies without too much thought to who harvests our crops on a daily basis or how fruitful their seasons were. As we have progressed in modern life, we have added many other things that we are grateful for to our conversations during Thanksgiving Day. So in addition to thanking
A New Data Center Opens in Hong Kong
Xerox Legal Services announced on Monday that it has opened a data center in Hong Kong in response to growing demand for eDiscovery services there. Initially, XLS’s data center will provide all aspects of eDiscovery services from data hosting to data processing, but not document or data review. “What we’re looking to do is see how the center grows,” said Elizabeth Fritts, managing director of Xerox Legal Services. “We see the market potential as pretty significant.” Fritts added that Hong Kong data center includes two separate Tier 3 certified facilities, which indicates the infrastructure meets various requirements, including that it is dual-powered and in the event of a power failure, data is still available. The site will be staffed by three personnel who handle client services, sales and data processing. The launch also highlights Hong Kong’s emerging role as a regional hub for companies looking to transfer data out of
India to Become World’s Second-Largest Internet User Base
NEW DELHI—India will overtake the U.S. to have the second-largest population of Internet users after China by December, an Indian trade group said Tuesday. Fueled by a boom in smartphone ownership, the number of Internet users will rise to 402 million in December from 375 million in October, according to the trade group Internet and Mobile Association of India. China has about 650 million Internet users, according to the World Bank. Much of the increase is driven by a boom in mobile-data users, which rose to 276 million in October, an increase from 159 million from a year earlier, the trade group’s report said. Of the 11 million Indians that the report says will access the Internet for the first time in the next year, two-thirds will do so with a cellphone. Falling smartphone prices in India explain most of the rise in Internet adoption. Mobile-data use exploded as the
Broward & Miami-Dade Veteran’s Day Events 2015
A little history about Veterans Day… Veteran’s day is not just a day you might get off of work (that’s if you get to), but a day of honoring past and present veterans that have risked their lives to serve our country. On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, an armistice, or temporary cessation of hostilities, was declared between the Allied nations and Germany in the First World War, then known as “the Great War.” Commemorated as Armistice Day beginning the following year, November 11th became a legal federal holiday in the United States in 1938. In the aftermath of World War II and the Korean War, Armistice Day became Veterans Day, a holiday dedicated to American veterans of all wars. If you would like to celebrate this holiday and honor our veterans with a parade or get together, below is a schedule of some of Broward’s and Miami-Dade’s
Time Warner amplifies fears that viewers are deserting paid TV
LOS ANGELES – Time Warner on Wednesday re-ignited concerns that U.S. consumers are shifting to Internet television faster than expected and creating challenges to major media companies that have thrived with programming on pay TV. Traditional media companies’ shares fell after Time Warner said during its quarterly conference call that it needed to take new steps to address the shakeup in TV viewing. The company’s quarterly results added evidence that “cord-cutting,” or dropping pay TV services, threatens traditional media companies and built on Walt Disney Co.’s admission in August that its ESPN sports powerhouse had lost customers. “What we’ve got is something of a deja vu,” said FBR Capital Markets analyst Barton Crockett. “Investor confidence is rattled.” Time Warner, which owns cable channels TBS, TNT and HBO, said it was evaluating whether to keep rights for its shows longer for on-demand viewing instead of licensing them to services like
Verizon Begins Scanning and Censoring Customer Emails
A news radio station in New York reports that the broadband and telecommunications company Verizon is now scanning customer email. If email contains a hyperlink to a website, the email is rejected and not sent to the recipient, according to 95.1 FM in New York City. After a customer complained about the policy the corporation told him there isn’t a way to op-put of the program. “Verizon scans the digital signatures of all inbound and outbound email messages to reduce the overall volume of spam on our network” and all email containing a hyperlink will be considered spam. “So if a business person needs to get information to a colleague, or a student needs to get research to a fellow student, or if a wife wants to share an interesting recipe with a friend . . . all those emails will be rejected by Verizon!” the radio station website explains.
Government Internet Kill Switches Violate Human Rights, But Telecom Companies Can Fight Back
On October 20th, the government of the Republic of Congo intentionally shut down internet service in order to repress a demonstration taking place in response to a constitutional referendum extending term limits and allowing Denis Sasou N’Guesso to run for an additional term. Police injured seven protesters, five by gunfire and two by tear gas canisters, according to a hospital administrator quoted by ABC News. Six protesters were also injured the weekend prior in Point-Noire. This isn’t the first time that governments have intentionally shut down mobile internet and SMS with the goal of repressing reports of government abuse against peaceful demonstrators. Peter Micek, Senior Policy Counsel at the digital rights organization Access, says that there’s a pattern that some governments have of shutting down internet during politically sensitive times, like the Sudanese government did in 2013 during a protest over fuel subsidies. Turkey has also tried to block access
Satisfaction lies in the effort
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The Digital Divide: Is Internet Access a Human Right?
The Digital Divide continues throughout the world. A 2015 paper from the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings notes that although 3.1 billion people have Internet access, there are still 4.2 billion people on this planet, or 58 percent of the world, that do not. This gap exists due to several factors including (but not limited to) taxes, policies, and operational issues in these countries, making the Internet too expensive for many consumers, and inaccessible to the rest of them. Some of the countries are merely lacking the necessary infrastructure to support Internet. The realization of this inequity in the human experience is almost inconceivable to all of us to whom the Internet seems so common. Since digital connectivity to the benefits of the internet are impossible for many around the world, the current efforts to make the Internet accessible to everyone has focused on proving how the Internet has
The company behind the AP’s ‘robot journalists’ is opening up its technology for everyone
Technology is already being used by companies like the Associated Press and Yahoo to auto-generate data-heavy articles about quarterly earnings, college sports, and even fantasy football recaps. Today, the company is unveiling a public-facing version of its Wordsmith platform for anyone to use. You can sign up for access to the beta, with general availability being planned for sometime in January. The Wordsmith platform is designed to automatically generate natural language reports based on large data sets. Within each project (defined by the data set, uploaded as a CSV file), you can create multiple “narratives,” which are in a sense high-powered Mad Libs. Write the basic structure, swapping key words for the variables available, and then add logic. The key feature of Wordsmith is how it enables you to create branching paths, conditionally adding / modifying certain words, phrases, or entire sections based on the data available. Is a 60-inch
Russia reportedly looking to remove itself from Internet
Russia has reportedly run tests to see if it can remove itself from the World Wide Web to stem the flow of information to and from foreign countries, according to a top industry official. Experts told the UK Daily Telegraph the tests were run to prepare for an information blackout in case of a potential domestic political crisis. The attempt to cut Russia from the Internet has stoked fears about the Kremlin stripping Internet freedoms from its citizens. Andrei Semerikov, general director of Russian Internet provider Er Telecom, told the newspaper it was ordered by the ministry of communications and Russia’s national Internet regulator, Roskomnadzor, to block traffic to foreign communications channels by using DPI, a traffic control system. The goal was to see if Russia’s Internet could continue to function even though it was cut off from the global Internet. Russian officials denied any experiment took place. A spokesman
Imagination encircles the world
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