Net Neutrality Vote Coming Next Month

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will finally vote on new net neutrality rules in their February meeting.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler will bring a proposal to a vote during the commission’s Feb. 26 meeting, FCC spokeswoman Kim Hart said Friday, following a report in the Washington Post.

It’s unclear, however, what form those rules will take. Hart declined to comment further on the net neutrality order Wheeler plans to circulate in February.

Many telecom policy experts had expected the FCC to take action on net neutrality early this year after a year-long fight over the issue.

Nearly a year ago, a U.S. appeals court threw out a large portion of net neutrality rules the FCC approved in late 2010. The court ruled that the FCC’s rules came too close to common carrier regulations when the commission didn’t take the step of reclassifying broadband providers as regulated utilities. The court, however, pointed to a couple if sections of the Telecommunications Act that the FCC could use to pass net neutrality regulations.

After launching a net neutrality proceeding in early 2014, the FCC has received nearly 4 million public comments about proposed regulations. Wheeler originally proposed that the FCC adopt rules that would allow broadband providers to engage in “commercially reasonable” traffic management, and in limited cases, charge Web content providers and services for prioritized traffic.

But many people filing comments, and groups like Free Press and Public Knowledge, called on the FCC to pass stronger rules prohibiting traffic prioritization deals. Many advocates of strong net neutrality rules want the FCC to reclassify broadband as a regulated public utility, while exempting them from some common carrier rules, like price regulation.

Recent news reports have suggested Wheeler is leaning toward so-called hybrid net neutrality rules that would classify a part of broadband service as a regulated public utility.

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Adobe Data Found Online

A computer security firm has discovered data it says belongs to some 152 million Adobe Systems Inc user accounts, suggesting that a breach reported a month ago is much larger than Adobe has so far disclosed and is one of the largest on record.

LastPass, a password security firm, said that it has found email addresses, encrypted passwords and password hints stored in clear text from Adobe user accounts on an underground website frequented by cyber criminals.

Adobe said last week that attackers had stolen data on more than 38 million customer accounts, on top of the theft of information on nearly 3 million accounts that it disclosed nearly a month earlier.

The maker of Photoshop and Acrobat software confirmed that LastPass had found records stolen from its data center, but downplayed the significance of the security firm’s findings.

While the new findings from LastPass indicate that the Adobe breach is far bigger than previously known, company spokeswoman Heather Edell said it was not accurate to say 152 million customer accounts had been compromised because the database attacked was a backup system about to be decommissioned.

She said the records include some 25 million records containing invalid email addresses, 18 million with invalid passwords. She added that “a large percentage” of the accounts were fictitious, having been set up for one-time use so that their creators could get free software or other perks.

She also said that the company is continuing to work with law enforcement and outside investigators to determine the cost and scope of the breach, which resulted in the theft of customer data as well as source code to several software titles.

The company has notified some 38 million active Adobe ID users and is now contacting holders of inactive accounts, she said.

Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy for the non-profit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, said information in an inactive database is often useful to criminals.

He said they might use it to engage in “phishing” scams or attempt to figure out passwords using the hints provided for some of the accounts in the database. In some cases, people whose data was exposed might not be aware of it because they have not accessed the out-of-date accounts, he said.

“Potentially it’s the website you’ve forgotten about that poses the greater risk,” he said. “What if somebody set up an account with Adobe ten years ago and forgot about it and they use the same password there that they use on other sites?”

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