Microsoft: Talks with US gov't on surveillance transparency break down

Negotiations have broken down between two Internet giants and U.S. government representatives over the companies' requests to publish information on the surveillance requests they receive, a Microsoft executive said Friday.

Microsoft and Google both filed lawsuits in June asking that the companies be allowed to disclose more information about U.S. government surveillance requests they receive. The two companies agreed to extend the government's deadline to respond to the lawsuits during negotiations over recent weeks, but those negotiations have failed, Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith wrote in a blog post.

"We hoped that these discussions would lead to an agreement acceptable to all," Smith wrote. "While we appreciate the good faith and earnest efforts by the capable Government lawyers with whom we negotiated, we are disappointed that these negotiations ended in failure."

The two companies requested that they be allowed to publish data about the number of surveillance requests they receive after former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked information about the agency's widespread surveillance activities.

"We both remain concerned with the Government's continued unwillingness to permit us to publish sufficient data relating to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) orders," Smith wrote. "We believe we have a clear right under the U.S. Constitution to share more information with the public."

U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's announcement Thursday that his office would begin to publish the total number of national security requests each year was a "good start," Smith wrote. "But the public deserves and the Constitution guarantees more than this first step."

Microsoft wants to publish information showing the number of national security demands for user content, such as the text of an email, he said.

Microsoft and Google will move forward with their lawsuits after negotiations have broken down, Smith said. The U.S. Department of Justice has a late Friday deadline to respond to both Google's and Microsoft's lawsuits in the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.


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Break the Bottleneck: Smooth out your business’s voice and video streaming with QoS

If you’ve ever engaged in a voice over IP (VoIP) phone call or conducted a video conference over the Web, you’ve probably experienced choppy audio, pixelated video, and other “hiccups” that make these technologies frustrating to use at best and and an impediment to doing business at worst.

Those annoying interruptions are the result of data struggling to get across your network. It’s important for all of the data to get from Point A to Point B, but some types—like streaming voice and video—simply won’t work if the data can’t travel smoothly. You can solve the problem by spending a lot of money for a bigger, faster Internet connection, but the smart way to address the issue is with QoS: Quality of Service.

QoS manages network traffic, and prioritizes certain types of data over others to ensure consistent network quality. It is generally managed at the network router or switch, to direct network traffic appropriately.

Data traveling across the Internet is a lot like vehicles driving across town. If five cars leave a building to drive to a restaurant, there’s a mesh of roads in all directions, and there are multiple potential paths to take. Each vehicle could take an entirely different route, and the car that left first might arrive at the destination last.

There are also certain vehicles that are given priority treatment. An ambulance transporting a patient to a hospital or a fire truck racing to a house on fire is allowed to bypass standard traffic rules to ensure they reach their destination as quickly as possible because lives are in danger. It’s unlikely anyone’s life hangs in the balance of your streaming voice or video connection, but that same sense of urgency that occurs with emergency vehicles on the road is similar to the high priority treatment your voice and video data require.

When you transfer data from a server on the Web to a PC on your network, you might imagine that the data packets all follow each other in sequence on the same path, but that’s not how it works. Data crossing the Internet has to bounce across multiple routers, and those routers determine the best possible route on a packet-by-packet basis. Like the vehicles driving to the restaurant, the packets of data in a file you download may all take different paths and arrive at your PC out of order. They’re each tagged with sequence information, though, so your PC rearranges them in the proper order as they arrive.

That’s fine for downloading the latest version of Firefox because you can’t actually use the file until all of the packets have arrived. However, it doesn’t work for streaming audio or video. When those packets arrive out of order, it introduces jitter and lag into the stream as your PC struggles to put the packets in order in real-time as the audio or video arrives.

QoS is like designating certain data as the emergency vehicles of your network: It gives higher priority to specified data to ensure it arrives at the destination in order as quickly as possible.

You can use QoS to create “express lanes” on your network for designated applications or computers, but QoS is not simply about getting the data there faster. It employs different techniques and algorithms for streaming media to make sure it arrives smoothly in the proper order to avoid interruptions, or the dreaded “buffering” message.

There are a variety of benefits to using QoS, but it can also get complicated. Small and medium businesses should keep it as simple as possible and set up basic QoS policies for critical services and applications.

For example, if your business relies on Skype for online voice and video chat, you can designate a QoS policy that prioritizes network traffic for that service. If you have a designated PC in a conference room that is used for conducting video conferencing with clients, you can configure a QoS policy to maximize network throughput to that device.

QoS also comes in handy if you host a podcast, video tutorials, or other streaming media content from your own servers, or have files that customers might need to download. You want visitors to your business’s site to have a good experience, so you should set up QoS policies that give your server a higher priority than other data or systems.

Most small and medium businesses rely on consumer-grade equipment and don’t have dedicated IT personnel or router experts on staff to monitor and manage network performance. This presents a couple of problems: First, QoS is an advanced network management feature that doesn’t exist on most consumer-grade routers, and second, proper configuration of QoS requires at least some knowledge of how networks work, and why some traffic might deserve a higher priority than others.

You can get a router or switch with QoS features by doing a little homework. Devices like the Netgear RangeMax WNDR3700 wireless router include an automated form of basic QoS. Essentially, the Netgear router is able to automatically detect audio, video, and gaming traffic, and apply different techniques to improve the quality and stability of the data transfer.

There are also devices like the Linksys E2500 wireless router, which are equipped with basic QoS features. Hidden under Applications & Gaming in the Web-based management console are settings for QoS. You can designate applications, games, or the MAC address of specific servers or PCs to be handled as a higher priority than standard network traffic. You can also use the QoS settings to assign a lower priority to data or systems that aren’t as important to make sure they don’t interfere with other traffic.

Linksys wireless routers include some rudimentary QoS features.
If you’re feeling more adventurous, you can try DD-WRT. DD-WRT is a firmware update that’s available as a free download. It can be installed in place of a manufacturer’s firmware on a wireless router and includes functionality that may be missing—like QoS features.

A word of caution, though: You have to be careful using something like WW-DRT. It’s easy to mess up the configuration and disable the router entirely or make it impossible to log back in and fix it without doing a complete reset. You also won’t be able to rely on the product manual or contact the router manufacturer for technical support, so make sure you know what you’re doing.

Keep in mind that QoS is not a “silver bullet” that will magically make all of your network traffic flow smoothly all the time. When you’re uploading or downloading data over the Internet, that traffic has to traverse a number of networks, routers, and switches to get where it’s going, and you don’t have any control over what happens to the data outside of your own network.

That said, employing QoS at the edge of your network can ensure that the right servers, applications, or services are treated with a higher priority, and help make certain your video conference with an important client isn’t interrupted by a co-worker streaming his Spotify playlist.

Tax Break Can Help With Health Coverage, But There's A Catch

Tax credits may help make health insurance more affordable, but can bite back if your income goes up more than expected.

There are two kinds of financial help for people planning to enroll in the online health insurance marketplaces that will open this fall. One could put people at risk of having to pay some of the money back, while the other won't.

That's one big difference between tax credits and subsidies, both of which are intended to help people with lower incomes pay for health insurance through the new health care law.

People with incomes between 100 and 400 percent of the federal poverty level ($11,490 to $45,960 for individuals in 2013) may be eligible for tax credits to reduce the cost of their monthly health insurance premiums.

In addition, people with incomes between 100 and 250 percent of the poverty level ($11,490 to $28,725) may qualify for cost-sharing subsidies that will bring down their deductibles, copayments and coinsurance. The subsidies also reduce the maximum amount they can be required to pay out of pocket annually for medical care.

Instead of waiting until tax time to claim the credit for the premiums on their return, people can apply to get it in advance, based on their estimated income for 2014. In that case, the state health exchange, or marketplace, will estimate the tax credit and send it directly to the insurer.

But there's a catch. When April 15 rolls around, the Internal Revenue Service will reconcile the amount of the advance payments sent to the insurer with the taxpayer's actual income. If a person's income is higher than the estimate, the taxpayer will have to repay the difference.

But there's some good news, too. If a person's income is lower than estimated, the taxpayer will get a credit.

People who quality for the cost-sharing subsidies won't face the same financial risk. The federal subsidies, which reduce consumers' out-of-pocket costs, will be paid directly to insurers. They could cover thousands of dollars of costs, depending on a person's health care usage.

But with the subsidies, if a person's income changes during the year, he or she won't be responsible for any extra costs.

"It's not a reconcilable tax credit, so consumers aren't on the hook if their income changes," says Christine Monahan, a senior health policy analyst at Georgetown Health Policy Institute's Center on Health Insurance Reforms.

So check out both options for cheaper premiums, but be well aware of the differences.

Senators to corporate interests: Want to keep that tax break? Convince us.

By Tory Newmyer, writer



Corporate tax lobbyists should cancel any vacations they planned to take next month. That's the upshot of a letter the Senate's two leading tax writers sent their colleagues today to put them on notice that their overhaul of the code is starting from scratch. In other words, every corporate carve-out -- for Puetro Rican rum distillers, NASCAR racetrack builders, Hollywood studios, yacht makers, solar panel producers, and dozens of others -- will now need to find a Senate sponsor to justify its existence.

The so-called tax expenditures cost the Treasury more than $1.1 trillion a year, and there is bipartisan agreement on Capitol Hill about sweeping them off the books to finance lower overall rates. Or in principle, at least. The complication is that what looks to one lawmaker like pork is to another a needed protection for a treasured home-state industry. So Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and the panel's top Republican, Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), are putting the burden on their fellow Senators to make the case for any loopholes they want preserved.

MORE: What it means when Justice Scalia loses it

"To make sure that we clear out all the unproductive provisions and simplify in tax reform, we plan to operate from an assumption that all special provisions are out unless there is clear evidence that they: (1) help grow the economy, (2) make the tax code fairer, or (3) effectively promote other important policy objectives," they write, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Fortune. "Today, we write to ask you to formally submit legislative language or detailed proposals for what tax expenditures meet these tests and should be included in a reformed tax code, as well as other provisions that should be added, repealed, or reformed as part of tax reform."

The deadline for submissions is July 26, which means K Street needs to get cracking, now. There is a certain amount of theater behind the move, and the lead tax-writers are doing what they can to generate momentum for a reform push facing long odds in this Congress. But that doesn't mean corporate interests looking to protect favored treatment in the code should take this summons lightly.

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