Last week AT&T posted this sign on Skyline drive announcing a possible site for a new cell tower. I only find it interesting because the New Wave Communications cable office will be directly in the shadow of this tower.
New Wave Office
New Wave and AT&T already have a significant amount of history together. I don’t know what AT&T’s process is for choosing cell sites. It could be entirely independent of New Wave’s presence. I just think it’s funny that New Wave employees will be baking under the warm rays of a GSM transmitter above their heads.
The average energy received over the entire earth is about 250 Watts per square meter over a 24 hour day, ignoring clouds. So, on a day with no clouds, the average electromagnetic energy received from the Sun is 25,000 times that received near a cell phone tower.
Wikipedia is probably right but I still find it amusing and that’s all I got to say.
KEMP AND REGAN SIGNED THE AGREEMENT FOLLOWING THE SPECIAL MEETING WITH ATTORNEY DOUG WILLEN PREPARED TO FILE DISMISSAL PAPERS IN FEDERAL COURT TODAY (TUESDAY). MEANWHILE, NEWWAVE PRESIDENT AND CEO, JIM GLEASON TOLD THE NEWS EDGE HE HAS NOT HAD A CHANCE TO THOROUGHLY INSPECT THE AGREEMENT, BUT HE IS STILL CONFUSED AS TO WHY AT&T REFUSES TO MAKE THE SAME COMMITMENT TO HOPKINSVILLE THAT NEWWAVE MADE. HE ADDED THAT THE COMPANY WILL BE TALKING WITH LEGAL COUNCIL TODAY (TUESDAY) TO DISCUSS ITS PENDING LAWSUIT.
The next day Mr. Gleason was still steamed enough to say that AT&T got a “sweet heart deal”.
I was there Monday night at the product demonstration for AT&T’s U-verse service. I think the Archos 5 performed fairly well to record the meeting. What I have is the full length U-verse demonstration given by Brian Claimer and the question/answer session that happened afterward.
In my opinion, the lawsuits flying between the city/New Wave and AT&T are retrograde in their reasoning. The city seems to be more concerned in protecting New Wave’s interests than the interests of the citizens. Using any decent Internet connection it’s already possible to watch full-length cable network content. The plan that AT&T laid out is not very much different than what other companies have already introduced. The Roku Set top box is meant to deliver video from a variety of Internet sources. Both of these examples are completely unregulated. Would the city council have me believe that watching TV on Syfy.com is now illegal because they haven’t bought a franchise? AT&T should be allowed to offer it’s new video service because technology is advancing to quickly make the dispute irrelevant.
Given that New Wave Communications is now looking to track it’s customers. I’m going to show you how to limit the usefulness of the information they can collect. The specific system used by New Wave relies on browser cookies to identify customers. Since cookies are very necessary for a lot of functionality on the web it is not possible to disable cookies completely. However, it is possible limit the lifetime of cookies to a single browser session. Doing this makes tracking via cookies far less useful since the tracking system won’t know from one session to the next that you’re the same person. One side effect that you should be aware of is that if you use cookies to save any website passwords making all cookies session-only would delete them each time you closed the browser.
In Mozilla Firefox 3 it is far more obvious how to do this than in Internet Explorer. I briefly tried looking through IE’s settings but was not successful. The steps are Edit –> Preferences –> Privacy tab then under Cookies you will see “Keep until: <dropdown menu>”. Click on the dropdown menu and select “I close Firefox”. Note that to the right you can click on Exceptions and allow/disallow cookies on a per site basis. For example, if you wanted to stay logged in on a specific site across browser sessions but delete all other cookies.
For several months I’ve been noticing splash advertising when a page I try to load is redirected elsewhere. The advertising itself was bad enough but now New Wave Communications has announced they will be allowing people to opt-in to be tracked. In exchange, customers will recieve more “customized” advertising and maybe some service discounts provided by New Wave.
Simultaneously, Security Now! is running a series on the Phorm system for ISP-based advertising (SN149 – SN153).
