FCC wants to make carriers report cell outages in disasters

Mobile operators would have to tell the public what percentage of their cell sites were working during and after major disasters if the FCC adopts a rule it is proposing in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

The proposed rule, announced Thursday and expected to be open for comment within days, is intended to give consumers a way to compare wireless performance in emergencies, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission said. The agency also believes it could encourage competition to improve network reliability.

In a press release, the FCC cited Hurricane Sandy, which devastated large areas of the Northeastern U.S. almost a year ago and knocked out cellular service in some areas for days. The storm shut down about 25 percent of all cell sites in the region, and about 50 percent in the worst-hit counties, the agency said.

Not all networks were affected equally, and carriers’ operational choices and practices accounted for much of the difference, according to the FCC. The agency held a series of field hearings on communications services after the storm.

Mobile service is critical during and after emergencies, the agency said, citing information that a majority of emergency 911 calls are now made over cellphones.

Each carrier would have to make daily reports during and after emergencies, for public disclosure, saying what percentage of its cell sites in each county were operational. Operators already submit availability data as part of larger daily reports to the government, but those reports are voluntary and don’t have to be released to the public. Carriers did give daily, general updates to media on their recovery from Sandy, and the FCC used information from operators to provide overall estimates of cell availability.

The new reporting requirements would kick in when the FCC implements its Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS), which is used in very large disasters and not in every case where a federal disaster is declared, according to the FCC.

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Microsoft wants to scan your JavaScript libraries

Microsoft wants to help web application framework developers tackle one of their thorniest problems, that of testing their libraries to ensure they work correctly across today’s dizzying combination of available browsers and operating systems (OSes).

Working with software testing consultancy AppendTo and testing tools provider Sauce Labs, Microsoft has launched a new service that provides free automated unit testing for anyone who loads a JavaScript framework or library into a GitHub.

BrowserSwarm scans the framework and returns a list of ways it could be made to run more efficiently.

“We see a lot of innovation [in web development] related to 3D graphics or animations, but we don’t see a lot of innovation on the testing side, and so that is where we wanted to help,” said Justin Garrett, Microsoft senior product manager for the Internet Explorer team. The idea is that having an automated testing tool would encourage more developers to build useful frameworks for the Web.

BrowserSwarm “helps developers spend less time testing and more time developing,” Garrett said.

Over the past decade, web developers have been increasingly relying on third-party JavaScript frameworks and libraries to easily insert commonly used functionality into their applications.

For instance, Web Technology Surveys found that jQuery, used to script HTML behavior, is used on 56 percent of all websites. JavaScript frameworks are the “building blocks of the Web,” Garrett said.

Thanks to a proliferation of devices and browsers, those who write these frameworks face a daunting task of trying to assure that their libraries work across all the different possible combinations of browsers and OSes.

Typically, that involves the laborious process of running a test of the code on each combination—Chrome on a Windows PC, Firefox on an Android tablet, and so on. Plus, not only do the newest browsers and OSes need to be tested, but so do all of the older versions that are still supported.

Large teams of developers, such as those behind jQuery or modernizer, probably have in-house tools to test across all permutations. “But if you have a little framework or are a startup, you may not have time to take the test passes you need to in order to give developers the confidence to use your framework,” Garrett said.

To use BrowserSwarm, a developer provides a link to his or her code repository through GitHub. “Whenever you commit code to GitHub, we will automate that job” of testing the code, using QUnit, Garrett said. The service runs more than 150 test cases against the code base. Afterward, it generates a detailed report of all the actions taken, as well as a summary of possible issues.

To help people understand its capabilities, Microsoft ran BrowserSwarm against some of the world’s most widely used frameworks, such as Dojo, jQuery and Backbone.js, and provided the reports on the website.

The service is similar to one that Microsoft launched earlier this year called modern.IE, which tests websites for issues such as responsive design, computability issues and adherence to web standards.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for the IDG News Service.
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EPA Wants To Limit Greenhouse Gases From New Coal Power Plants

Mississippi Power's Kemper County energy facility near DeKalb, Miss., seen under construction on Nov. 13, 2012. Carbon dioxide will be captured from this plant and used to stimulate production of oil from existing wells.

Rogelio V. Solis/AP

The Environmental Protection Agency's second stab at a proposal to set the first-ever limits on greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants would make it impossible for companies to build the kind of coal-fired plants that have been the country's biggest source of electricity for decades.

Under the proposal, released Friday, any new plant that runs on coal would only be permitted to emit about half as much carbon dioxide as an average coal plant puts into the air today.

EPA administrator Gina McCarthy tells NPR the steps the EPA is proposing in the rule to address climate change "can actually form the basis for a sound economy, while at the same time we can begin to tackle what is essentially the most significant public health challenge of our time."

The gasifier facility, still under construction at Mississippi Power's Kemper County energy plant on Nov. 13, 2012. Under the EPA's proposed rules, new plants that run on coal would have to find ways to emit less than half the carbon dioxide current coal plants emit.

Rogelio V. Solis/AP The gasifier facility, still under construction at Mississippi Power's Kemper County energy plant on Nov. 13, 2012. Under the EPA's proposed rules, new plants that run on coal would have to find ways to emit less than half the carbon dioxide current coal plants emit.

Rogelio V. Solis/AP

The EPA proposal aims to help The White House meet its plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by attacking the largest single source in the United States: Power plants pump out 40 percent of the nation's greenhouse gases.

The EPA's new proposal sets a limit for future power plants of 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour for large electricity generators that are powered by natural gas. And it sets a slightly higher limit of 1,100 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour for small natural gas generators and for coal-fired generators.

Although the EPA says its rule is legally sound, electric utility companies are already arguing that it goes further than the law allows.

The only technologies that exist to make coal plants clean enough to meet this proposed standard, industry executives say, are far too expensive and haven't been proven at a commercial scale. Making coal plants clean enough, they say, would add hundreds of millions of dollars to the already steep price tag of coal plants.

"Our customers have to agree to foot that bill," says Nick Akins, president and CEO of American Electric Power, one of the country's largest utilities.

Akins says his customers won't go for it.

A few years ago, American Electric Power built a temporary, small-scale project that successfully captured carbon and stored it deep underground at its massive Mountaineer coal-fired power plant in West Virginia. The company proposed building a larger version at the same site and passing the costs on to consumers. But state regulators rejected that project in the end because it would increase electricity costs.

If the EPA's proposal goes forward, Akins says, companies won't build coal plants; natural gas plants are cheaper. But that strategy would make companies and their customers vulnerable to future spikes in natural gas prices, he says.

The revised proposal comes after loud complaints from industry about the first version of the proposed rule, which was released 18 months ago. That initial version proposed one standard for all power plants, regardless of their size, or the type of fuel they use.

Greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity industry already have declined because economic considerations have led utility companies to start turning away from coal. These days, utilities are building natural gas plants and wind farms instead. New technologies for drilling into deep shale deposits have opened up abundant supplies of relatively low-cost natural gas. And subsidies and technological improvements have made wind farms competitive.

Electricity companies fought hard against the EPA's first proposal largely because they see it as as a bad precedent for upcoming regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that already exist.

President Obama has told the EPA to come up with a proposal by June of 2014 to clean up the older plants. (Even though companies are already developing fewer new coal-fired plants, they're likely to rely on many of the existing coal plants for decades to come).

Environmental groups, too, are closely reading Friday's proposal, hunting for clues to how stringent the administration is likely to be when it turns in 2014 to developing new rules for existing plants.

"The sooner we get these protections in place," says Vickie Patton, general counsel of the Environmental Defense Fund, "the clearer the signal [will be] that new power plants must do their fair share in addressing the heavy burden of carbon pollution on human health and the environment."

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Topsy wants to become the Google of Twitter search

Searching through Twitter’s archive of tweets can be frustrating—they are sorted on the site by Twitter’s own algorithms, and older tweets tend to get buried. Google? Forget it. Topsy, an analytics company, wants to do it better.

The San Francisco-based company announced Wednesday that it has indexed Twitter’s complete archive of public tweets dating back to 2006, giving users simple tools to search through it.

President Barack Obama’s first tweet? According to Topsy, it was posted six years ago and read: “Thinking we’re only one signature away from ending the war in Iraq.”

People can use the tools for free at Topsy.com. The site offers more advanced paid tools that can be used, for instance, if marketers want to track the effectiveness of an advertising campaign.

Topsy is not new to this game. The company was founded in 2007, already offering tools for finding and analyzing data from the public social Web across millions of websites. Before Wednesday’s announcement, the site indexed Twitter tweets as far back as 2010.

The company describes its service as a way for marketers, agencies and consumers to extract meaningful signals from the social media noise.

But by indexing Twitter’s complete archive, Topsy is hoping to make it easier for the average person to find social data like tweets, links, photos and videos across the Web.

Known as “social search,” it’s an area that has been difficult for the major players like Facebook and Google to crack.

Facebook’s goal is to “make the world more open and connected,” but searching for content from outside the site is difficult when members use different privacy settings to share things only with certain people. The social network is trying to make a better search tool for users with Graph Search.

Google previously offered a way to search for information from people on Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other sites through its Real-Time Search tool, but the feature was discontinued in 2011.

Microsoft is trying to do more with social search through its Bing search engine. The site incorporates data from outside social networks such as Facebook and Twitter into how it displays search results involving people. But Bing still occupies a much smaller slice of the overall search pie compared to Google.

The Library of Congress is also trying to archive all of America’s tweets.

Some of Topsy’s competitors include DataSift and Gnip.

Being able to easily analyze users’ activity on Twitter is also becoming increasingly important as the site aims to boost revenues with a possible IPO looming. Last month Twitter said it would be tracking users’ tweets to measure marketers’ sales in physical stores.

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Intel wants to help gamers, others overclock their SSDs

Computerworld - Without saying exactly what it will be, Intel plans to make a "big splash" near the end of the year or the beginning of next with a product that can "overclock" solid-state drives (SSDs).

"This is a product we're looking into but we have not released yet. So I'm not able to go into great detail about a future product ... as far as specs and such," said Alan Frost, marketing and communications manager for Intel.

What Frost could say is that the SSD product will allow users to tweak the percentage of the drive that's used for data compression.

Overclocking typically refers to pushing past the recommended processor clockspeed, thereby increasing performance over what is specified by a manufacturer. In the case of SSDs, Intel is using the term "overclocking" to define modifying its specified SSD parameters.

At its Intel Developers Forum next month in San Francisco, Intel has scheduled an information session on overclocking SSDs. Frost said the session will remain at a high level, and it will not reveal specifics about the product.

The conference session, titled "Overclocking Unlocked Intel Core Processors for High Performance Gaming and Content Creation," is aimed at system manufacturers and developers as well as do-it-yourself enthusiasts, such as gamers.

"Anyone interested in the performance tuning and overclocking experience on desktop and mobile platforms," the session description states.

Frost stressed that Intel executives are still talking in back rooms about what markets might benefit from creating an SSD with flexible provisioning properties.

"We've debated how people would use it. I think the cool factor is somewhat high on this, but we don't see it changing the macro-level environment. But, as far as being a trendsetter, it has potential," Frost said.

Michael Yang, a principal analyst with IHS Research, said the product Intel plans to release could be the next evolution of SandForce controller, "user definable and [with the] ability to allocate specified size on the SSD."

"Interesting, but we will have to see how much performance and capacity [it has] over existing solutions," Yang said in an email reply to Computerworld.

Late last year, Intel began using the third-party SandForce (now owned by LSI) controller for the first time in its SSD 520 flash drive.

"The premise of SandForce SSD controllers is compression. By compressing data, less time is required to transfer data from and to the SSD," Yang wrote. "Is Intel talking about its own controller? Or are they simply 'glamorizing' something they already have?"

Data compression would first and foremost increase the capacity of a drive, but it could also lead to greater performance. Frost cautioned that allocating a percentage of an SSD's capacity for compression would come at a cost. That cost could be shorter endurance, according to analysts.

"If you overclock and get faster performance and capacity and sacrifice endurance by doing so, well, then you could still enjoy the benefits if you are in a mostly read-intensive environment," said Joseph Unsworth, Gartner's NAND flash and SSD research vice president. "I suspect DataCenter server IT admins would also be savvy enough (especially at hyperscale level) to exploit this advantage."

Frost made it clear that the SSD overclocking product won't be for the average consumer, whom he still thinks is learning what the term "solid-state drive" means.

"SSD penetration is getting better, but still small overall," Frost said. "The market for this is not big."

This article, Intel wants to help gamers, others overlock their SSDs, was originally published at Computerworld.com.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

See more by Lucas Mearian on Computerworld.com.

Read more about SSD in Computerworld's SSD Topic Center.

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Mozilla 'Plug-n-Hack' project wants browsers to play nice with security software

Mozilla is developing a protocol that aims to let security tools and Web browsers work better together.

Configuring a web browser to work with a security tool involves writing platform and browser-specific extensions, a non-trivial process that discourages people with less experience, wrote Simon Bennetts, a security automation engineer with Mozilla, on Thursday.

The proposed standard, called "Plug-n-Hack," will define how security extensions can work with a browser in a more usable way, Bennetts wrote. PnH will allow the security tool to "declare the functionality that they support which is suitable for invoking directly from the browser."

Under the current arrangement, if a user wants to, for example, intercept HTTPS traffic, a user must configure proxy connections through the tool and browser correctly and import the tool's SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate, Bennetts wrote.

"If any of these steps are carried out incorrectly then the browser will typically fail to connect to any website—debugging such problems can be frustrating and time-consuming," Bennetts wrote.

Users may also have to switch often between the tool and their browser to intercept an HTTPS request.

"PnH allows security tools to declare the functionality that they support which is suitable for invoking directly from the browser," Bennets wrote. "A browser that supports PnH can then allow the user to invoke such functionality without having to switch to and from the tool."

The PnH protocol is being designed to be browser and tool independent. The implementation for Firefox has been released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 and can be incorporated into commercial products for free, Bennetts wrote.

The next phase of the project is being planned, but it is expected it will allow browsers to "advertise their capabilities to security tools," he wrote.

"This will allow the tools to obtain information directly from the browser, and even use the browser as an extension of the tool," Bennetts wrote.

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Mozilla 'Plug-n-Hack' project wants browsers to play nice with security software

Mozilla is developing a protocol that aims to let security tools and Web browsers work better together.

Configuring a web browser to work with a security tool involves writing platform and browser-specific extensions, a non-trivial process that discourages people with less experience, wrote Simon Bennetts, a security automation engineer with Mozilla, on Thursday.

The proposed standard, called "Plug-n-Hack," will define how security extensions can work with a browser in a more usable way, Bennetts wrote. PnH will allow the security tool to "declare the functionality that they support which is suitable for invoking directly from the browser."

Under the current arrangement, if a user wants to, for example, intercept HTTPS traffic, a user must configure proxy connections through the tool and browser correctly and import the tool's SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate, Bennetts wrote.

"If any of these steps are carried out incorrectly then the browser will typically fail to connect to any website—debugging such problems can be frustrating and time-consuming," Bennetts wrote.

Users may also have to switch often between the tool and their browser to intercept an HTTPS request.

"PnH allows security tools to declare the functionality that they support which is suitable for invoking directly from the browser," Bennets wrote. "A browser that supports PnH can then allow the user to invoke such functionality without having to switch to and from the tool."

The PnH protocol is being designed to be browser and tool independent. The implementation for Firefox has been released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 and can be incorporated into commercial products for free, Bennetts wrote.

The next phase of the project is being planned, but it is expected it will allow browsers to "advertise their capabilities to security tools," he wrote.

"This will allow the tools to obtain information directly from the browser, and even use the browser as an extension of the tool," Bennetts wrote.

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