Roy Mark

I know this may come as a shock to you, but the nation’s second largest defense contractor has been accused of misusing taxpayer dollars while working on one of the government’s top counterterrorism programs. With a price tag of $500 million, the program — known as Railhead — was intended to upgrade the U.S. terrorist […]

One of the three men charged in 2007 with masterminding an international “hack, pump and dump” scheme to hijack brokerage accounts was sentenced Sept. 8 to two years in prison. Thirugnanam Ramanathan, 35, a native of Chennai, India, and a legal resident of Malaysia, was also ordered to pay a fine of $362,247 and serve […]

Comcast has fired the next shot in its ongoing battle with the Federal Communications Commission over the management of the cable giant’s broadband network, asking a federal court to overturn the FCC’s Aug. 1 decision that Comcast violated the FCC’s network neutrality principles. The FCC ruled that Comcast violated the agency’s Internet policy when it […]

The year began promisingly enough for NebuAd, a Silicon Valley advertising startup promising a new source of revenue for ISPs through the use of deep packet inspection. DPI allows ISPs to track the behavior of Internet users without their consent in order to more accurately target advertising. Charter Communications, the nation’s fourth-largest broadband provider, signed […]

Shure, the country’s dominant wireless microphone maker, said Sept. 4 the Federal Communications Commission’s recent proposal to ban all wireless mics from the 700MHz spectrum band comes as no surprise to the company. “We’ve seen this coming for some time,” said Mark Brunner, Shure’s senior director of public and industry relations. “In fact, we have […]

The U.S. House of Representatives is investigating what it calls the technical failure and mismanagement of one of the government’s top counterterrorism programs. Dubbed “Railhead,” the program was intended to upgrade the U.S. terrorist watch list and improve the integration of U.S. terrorist intelligence from the nation’s 16 separate intelligence agencies. Located at the NCTC […]

So much for the wireless microphone industry’s complaints about possible interference from white spaces devices: the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) is considering kicking all wireless microphones from the 700 MHz spectrum. Turns out, many of the wireless microphones are illegally operating in the spectrum in the first place. Throughout the summer the wireless mic industry, […]

Hurricane Gustav forced Barack Obama to drop his Sept. 1 message to labor groups that he wants to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, a controversial position that Obama pushed early in his campaign for the Democratic nomination but virtually ignored in his Aug. 28 acceptance speech. According to an internal Obama campaign memo […]

As vice president and chief technology officer at Qwest, Pieter Poll faces the challenge of moving the carrier with a 14-state footprint into the competitive fray with much larger rivals such as AT&T and Verizon. A veteran of AT&T’s Bell Labs, where he helped develop the network evolution plans for the AT&T long-distance network, Poll […]

Note to Barack Obama and attendees at the Democratic National Convention this week in Denver: be careful – very careful – what you do in Denver this week. Unlike, say, Las Vegas, what you say and do in Denver will not stay in the Mile High city. More likely, what you say or do will […]