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Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Tech Investor Files Defamation Suit Against Rape Accuser

Michael Arrington, the founder of the TechCrunch news site and now an investor in start-ups, has filed a lawsuit against a former girlfriend who has for several weeks alleged in various online forums that Mr. Arrington raped and threatened to kill her.

Mr. Arrington’s lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in federal court in Seattle, alleges that the former girlfriend, Jennifer Allen, has made repeated defamatory, false statements about Mr. Arrington “to smear the plaintiff’s name on the Internet, to destroy his reputation, and to deter third persons from associating with him.” The lawsuit alleges that Ms. Allen, who lives in San Francisco, was motivated by her frustration over her “intermittent romantic involvement” with Mr. Arrington.

Mr. Arrington’s suit doesn’t specify the amount of damages he is seeking, though it said the figure is over $75,000. A letter that Mr. Arrington’s attorney sent to Ms. Allen last month, in which he threatened to sue her if she did not retract her statements, said that Mr. Arrington has pledged to donate any damages to charity.

Ms. Allen didn’t respond to a message sent to her through Facebook.

Mr. Arrington, who now lives in Washington State, is a well-known figure throughout the technology industry. He founded TechCrunch, a news site that he turned into an influential chronicler of the start-up scene. He sold the site to AOL in 2010 for $30 million. He left the next year amid a controversy over potential conflicts of interest stemming from his plan to start a venture capital fund.

Mr. Arrington’s lawsuit notes that his problems with Ms. Allen began March 29, with a post on her Facebook page in which she said she had known him for more than eight years and that it “hurts when you love someone borderline and they can’t feel anything at all for you, and threaten to murder you if you told anyone about the physical abuse â€" all for keeping his reputation.”

The lawsuit also alleges that Ms. Allen later accused him more explicitly of raping her through posts in the comments section of the Gawker Web site and on her Twitter account. It also alleges that Ms. Allen in various posts on the matter said that the assaults occurred on different dates in March 2012, which she seemed to acknowledge when she referred to the disparity as an “unintentional date mixup.”



Tech Investor Files Defamation Suit Against Rape Accuser

Michael Arrington, the founder of the TechCrunch news site and now an investor in start-ups, has filed a lawsuit against a former girlfriend who has for several weeks alleged in various online forums that Mr. Arrington raped and threatened to kill her.

Mr. Arrington’s lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in federal court in Seattle, alleges that the former girlfriend, Jennifer Allen, has made repeated defamatory, false statements about Mr. Arrington “to smear the plaintiff’s name on the Internet, to destroy his reputation, and to deter third persons from associating with him.” The lawsuit alleges that Ms. Allen, who lives in San Francisco, was motivated by her frustration over her “intermittent romantic involvement” with Mr. Arrington.

Mr. Arrington’s suit doesn’t specify the amount of damages he is seeking, though it said the figure is over $75,000. A letter that Mr. Arrington’s attorney sent to Ms. Allen last month, in which he threatened to sue her if she did not retract her statements, said that Mr. Arrington has pledged to donate any damages to charity.

Ms. Allen didn’t respond to a message sent to her through Facebook.

Mr. Arrington, who now lives in Washington State, is a well-known figure throughout the technology industry. He founded TechCrunch, a news site that he turned into an influential chronicler of the start-up scene. He sold the site to AOL in 2010 for $30 million. He left the next year amid a controversy over potential conflicts of interest stemming from his plan to start a venture capital fund.

Mr. Arrington’s lawsuit notes that his problems with Ms. Allen began March 29, with a post on her Facebook page in which she said she had known him for more than eight years and that it “hurts when you love someone borderline and they can’t feel anything at all for you, and threaten to murder you if you told anyone about the physical abuse â€" all for keeping his reputation.”

The lawsuit also alleges that Ms. Allen later accused him more explicitly of raping her through posts in the comments section of the Gawker Web site and on her Twitter account. It also alleges that Ms. Allen in various posts on the matter said that the assaults occurred on different dates in March 2012, which she seemed to acknowledge when she referred to the disparity as an “unintentional date mixup.”



On Facebook, Cleveland Kidnapping Suspect Hid Secret Under ‘LOL’

Ariel Castro, the kidnapping suspect in Cleveland, opened a Facebook account in February, adding 41 friends in the ensuing months. He “liked” a handful of other Facebook pages, including a tourism page for Virginia Beach, another for the musician Rey Ruiz and a page devoted to Chinese Cresteds, described by the American Kennel Club as a “fine-boned, elegant toy dog that craves human companionship.”

None of the posts or photos on his profile hint at the horrifying secret he kept since 2002 in his dilapidated Cleveland home. Nor do they reveal a disturbed mind. In one of his first posts, he sounds downright cheerful, writing: “This morning i woke up to the sound of a chirping cardinal. Yes! come on spring!”

On Wednesday, Mr. Castro, 52, was charged with four counts of kidnapping and three counts of rape after the dramatic escape on Monday of three women â€" Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michele Knight â€" held captive since they were abducted between 2002 and 2004. His brothers, Pedro and Onil, were taken into custody at the time of Mr. Castro’s arrest but have not been charged in connection with the case. Police said there was no indication at this point that they had known that three women were hidden behind padlocked doors.

As my colleagues have reported, Mr. Castro presented himself to neighbors as a friendly enough man, waving hello and stopping to chat with families on their porches from time to time.

He drove a school bus until last November and played bass in local Latin bands. Neighbors, friends and family members have all expressed shock at the allegations that he was behind the disappearances of the three women.

He created a similar appearance online. On his Facebook page, he presented himself as a highly social user, engaging regularly with people who commented on his posts and frequently adding “lol,” for “laughing out loud.” His updates related mostly to motorcycles, music, family and friends. He shared photos of a guitar he admired and said he had an eye for quality.

On his Facebook page, Ariel Castro often shared photos and posts about music. On his Facebook page, Ariel Castro often shared photos and posts about music.

At 10:53 p.m. on May 1, just a week ago, he posted: “That was a nice rumble that just passed in front of my house, makes me wanna jump and get out and ride! lol.”

A friend commented, “Ride baby ride…lol!!!! hope the weather is nice if u do enjoy.”

He replied, “Like tomorrow… hello?” And then: “I’ll try to enjoy, but the question is which bike should i take out….they all run so good, I think i’ll give the R1 a rest and jump on the Harley….”

He “liked” more than 100 photos. They included a picture of one of the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings in the hospital with the actor Bradley Cooper at his side, and another of Jennifer Lopez. He also “liked” several photos containing Christian messages that do not fit easily with the events said to have unfolded since 2002, or with the more than 200 pieces of evidence taken from his home since Monday.

He “liked” a photo that read: “It’s really nice to wake up in the morning, realizing that God has given me another day to live. Like if you agree!” Another message read, “Like if you need Jesus’ help.”

In a recent post, he congratulated his daughter, Arlene, 22, on the birth of her son, writing: “Wishing you a fast recovery. She gave birth to a wonderful baby boy. That makes me Gramps for the fifth time, (2boys 1girl 2boys. Luv you guys!”

Arlene Castro was a classmate and close friend of Gina DeJesus, one of the three women held captive. They were both 14 when Ms. DeJesus vanished in April 2004. As The Lede has reported, Arlene appeared on America’s Most Wanted in 2005 to talk about the last time she saw Ms. DeJesus, as they walked home from middle school.

Mr. Castro wrote frequently on the Facebook timelines of his grown children, suggesting that their relationships might have improved since he and his former wife, Grimilda Figueroa, who died last year at age 48, divorced in 1996.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that Mr. Castro had physically abused his wife and that he did not have visitation rights with his children after the divorce.

Court records indicate Ariel Castro fought with his former wife, Grimilda Figueroa, over the custody of their children. Figueroa twice suffered a broken nose, as well as broken ribs, a knocked-out tooth, a blood clot on the brain and two dislocated shoulders, according to a 2005 filing in Cuyahoga County Domestic Relations Court. In the filing, her attorney requested that a judge “keep [Castro] from threatening to kill [Figueroa].”

Attorney Robert Ferreri said Figueroa “has full custody with no visitation for [Castro]. Nevertheless, [Castro] frequently abducts daughters and keeps them from their mother.” Figueroa died last year. Ferreri could not be reached. Any record of charges being filed could not be located.

While none of the posts on his Facebook page reveal his views of women, he did share a photo on his timeline that said: “A real women will not use their child as a weapon to hurt the father when the relationship breaks down.”

Mr. Castro added a note: “True that.”

His final post was on May 2, four days before the dramatic escape of the three women and Ms. Berry’s 6-year-old child. It read, “Miracles really do happen, God is good. :)”



Microsoft Names First Female Finance Chief

Microsoft named Amy Hood, an executive at the company, as its chief financial officer, the first woman to hold the top finance job at Microsoft.

Ms. Hood, 41, joined Microsoft in late 2002 and was most recently the chief financial officer of Microsoft’s business division, the unit that oversees its lucrative Office suite of applications. She replaces Peter Klein, Microsoft’s chief financial officer who announced recently that he was resigning to spend more time with his family.

A number of women have risen to Microsoft’s top ranks, but like most technology companies, its senior leadership is still dominated by men. One exception is Lisa Brummel, who, as chief people officer, runs the company’s human resources department. Late last year, Microsoft appointed two women, Julie Larson-Green and Tami Reller, to run the engineering and finance operations of the company’s Windows division, one of its most important units.

As chief financial officer, Ms. Hood will play a bigger role in helping Microsoft adapt to major changes in its business, most notably the shift to mobile devices from PCs and the transformation of traditional software into cloud services. In a sign of these changes, for the last six months, Steve Ballmer, the chief executive officer, has begun talking about Microsoft as a devices and services company.

Ms. Hood will also serve as Microsoft’s ambassador to Wall Street, which has for years looked skeptically at the company’s efforts to enter new businesses like Internet search. After a recent solid earnings report from Microsoft, investors have become more bullish on the company’s prospects. Its shares now trade near their 52-week high.

In an e-mail to Microsoft employees on Wednesday, Mr. Ballmer said Ms. Hood had helped lead the change of Microsoft Office into a cloud service. He said that he worked closely with her on two big acquisitions, that of Skype and Yammer, and that her critical thinking would be an important skill in her new job.

“Amy is a great collaborator with a history of successful cross-group projects, and I am looking forward to having her as a member of my leadership team,” Mr. Ballmer wrote.



A Quantum Computer Aces Its Test

The long-sought quantum computer, a machine potentially far ahead of today’s best supercomputers, is almost as hard to define as it is to build. For at least a few particular uses, however, the unusual computer made by D-Wave Systems now seems to be very fast indeed.

Next week a professor at Amherst College will present her findings about the performance of the D-Wave machine, which its makers say makes use of such unusual properties of quantum physics as a particle’s ability to move in one direction and its opposite at the same time.

The professor, Catherine C. McGeoch, who is the Beitzel professor in technology and society at Amherst, gave the machine a so-called optimization problem and compared the results with those generated by  popular software from I.B.M. running on a high-performance machine.

The D-Wave machine, she said, was 3,600 times as fast as the  conventional system.

“There is no sense in which this is the definitive statement about quantum computing,” Ms. McGeoch said. “I’m more interested in how well it works, not whether or not it is quantum.”

That question matters a great deal to some others in the field. While quantum properties are among the most tested and proven domains of physics, the concepts behind them â€" for example, suggestions that we live in one of many universes, or that objects not in direct contact can affect each other â€" make such properties hard to accept.

Harnessing them for the sake of computation, suggested as a possibility more than two decades ago, has proved difficult.

The optimization problem is typically something like how a traveling salesman would plan a complicated trip most effectively. Ms. McGeoch tested three problems involving optimization. In two of them, the D-Wave computer was slightly faster. In the third, it was markedly faster.

D-Wave, which was the subject of an article in The New York Times in March, has been criticized for making claims about its quantum capabilities that cannot be supported.

Over time, however, D-Wave’s performance has improved, and the skeptics have toned down their criticism. Nonetheless, D-Wave is sensitive about the issue and, even after selling a working machine to Lockheed Martin, eager to rebut the criticism.

Ms. McGeoch, who has spent more than 25 years testing computer speeds, performed the experiments while on sabbatical and was retained by D-Wave to run the tests.

D-Wave solves optimization problems by setting them in the context of energy consumption: the lowest power needed to achieve a stated outcome, which it says is quickly achieved through a quantum process, is the answer. D-Wave thinks that many problems in computing might be restated as optimization problems and that its machine could be coupled with cloud computing systems for particularly hard problems.

Ms. McGeoch said D-Wave’s chips had performed well and might have better outcomes in the future, as its machines become more powerful, and more complex optimization problems are set.

“There could be a tipping point,” she said. “If the problems get big enough, conventional systems break down. In theory, you could solve a large number of optimization problems. People don’t know how to do that conventionally without losing a lot of efficiency.”



The iPhone: Smart, but Sometimes Rude

The Apple iPhone sure is smart. You can talk to it through its fancy Siri interface, or take and organize gorgeous photos based on location and time. But when you’re making a phone call, the iPhone isn’t that bright, and can be incredibly rude.

The problem: there is no way to disable notifications on the iPhone while on the phone.

Owners of an iPhone will know the drill. They’re happily chatting when a text message or e-mail comes through. The phone prods them: Bling! Vibrate! Ouch! Even when the device is placed on mute, it vibrates when a notification comes in, rattling your skull for a never-ending second.

This has been a problem for some time. Apple declined to comment and won’t say if or when it might address it. (Who knows, maybe the company sees it as a “feature” exclusive to Apple. Let’s hope not.)

There are dozens of threads asking for a solution on Apple’s support pages. On one forum, a customer begs for help, saying it is “very annoying to hear the alerts when I am trying to talk to someone.” Another customer says, “it is distracting, exceptionally loud in my ear, and very annoying.”

In the coming months, under the leadership of Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior vice president for industrial design, Apple is expected to update its iOS operating system with a shiny new look. Although it’s likely that it will be prettier and cleaner, it is not clear what new features Apple will sprinkle in.

Let’s hope Mr. Ive can make the iPhone a little more polite.



Syria, and its Hacker Activists, Are Back on the Internet

Syrian Internet and cellphone access resumed Wednesday morning after an Internet failure pulled the company offline Tuesday.

The likely culprit, technologists say, was the Syrian government. But the Syrian government said the failure was because of a technical problem.

Bakr Bakr, the director general of Syria’s General Establishment for Communications, told the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency, or SANA, that the Internet failure was caused by a “malfunction in an optic cable,” but security experts said that such an occurrence would be unlikely.

There are four physical cables that connect Syria to the Internet, three run undersea and one runs over land through Turkey. The only way an outsider could pull off such an outage, security experts say, would be too physically cut all four cables simultaneously.

Evidence suggested that the state-run Syrian Telecommunications Establishment, the exclusive provider of Internet access in Syria, simultaneously withdrew the Border Gateway Protocol, or B.G.P., routes into Syria at roughly 7:45 p.m. E.D.T. on Tuesday, ensuring that any information trying to reach Syria could not find its way, according to Renesys, OpenDNS and Arbor Networks.

The same technique was used to shut down the Internet and mobile phone service last November. Syrian government officials said terrorists, not the government, were responsible for that failure, but evidence also pointed to government involvement.

“The way the routes were withdrawn was systematic and looked as if individual providers were cut off one after another,” said Matthew Prince, the founder of Cloudflare, a San Francisco start-up that distributes large volumes of traffic across the Internet.

Cloudflare discovered Wednesday morning that one small pocket of the Syrian Internet maintained access to the Internet through the failure, though it was not immediately clear who was using it. That, Mr. Prince said, further contradicted claims that a technical malfunction was to blame.

“That again is a strong indication that this was an explicit effort to turn off most (although not all) of the country’s Internet connectivity,” Mr. Prince said in an e-mail. “Had it been a true cable cut across all four of the country’s connections than this selective space wouldn’t have remained online.”

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an antigovernment activist group, said it believed “the reason for the blackout was military operations being carried out by the regime forces in some areas.”

The failure had the least effect on rebel-controlled territories, where the Syrian opposition has successfully built an alternate system of Internet and cellphone connectivity using two-way satellite devices.

But the failure did temporarily silence the usually boisterous Syrian Electronic Army, the collective of pro-government Syrian hackers who have been breaking into the Twitter accounts of an array of news outlets and nonprofits, including E! Online,”The Onion,” Human Rights Watch and the Associated Press in recent weeks.

On Wednesday morning, one hacker affiliated with Syrian Electronic Army, who identified himself only by his hacker handle,Th3 Pr0, said he did not believe the government was to blame for the failure and that the electronic army’s campaign of targeting media outlets would continue.



Opening Up Networking’s Black Box

The Open Compute Project, a Facebook-led effort to remake the computer servers and data storage of the biggest computing centers, is broadening its aims to include networking as well.

“There is really nothing in the data center that should be immune from the positive influence of open source,” said Frank Frankovsky, the vice president for hardware design and supply chain at Facebook and chairman of Open Compute. While there have been other efforts to open source large scale computer networking, he noted, “so far the actual hardware has not been affected.”

Open source generally refers to collaborative technology efforts where engineers and programmers share their work in an effort to reduce costs and improve technology. Linux software is perhaps the best-known example of an open-source effort.

Networking, on the other hand, is one of the most arcane and closed parts of large-scale computing. But in recent years it has been affected by an increase in the number of off-the-shelf components that can be used, as well as by systems that run largely on software, not hardware.

Still, the cheap servers and storage devices in data centers are still hooked up to expensive “black boxes” of networking and that could continue for years. Open Compute will take a small step first with the creation of an open rack switch. That’s a key feature, because other data center equipment plugs into it, but it’s not yet the big management networking devices that power overall activity.

But it’s a start.

“We want to create a bare metal-type switch, that is agnostic about what kind of operating system you are running and works off any storage media,” said Najam Ahmad, who runs the network engineering team at Facebook and is leading the networking project at Open Compute. “The move is there to lead the network to a more software-defined technology.”

Facebook runs an enormous amount of computing infrastructure, so it has an interest in cheaper, better-performing equipment that open source can provide. It also may be interested in creating issues for Google, which has a highly proprietary view of its own network.

Google has long viewed its high-performing data centers as a competitive advantage. By turning to open source, Facebook is enlisting lots of engineers to create products it hopes will perform even better.

The turn to open-source networking also could be a headache for Cisco Systems, long the leader in network gear. However, Cisco isn’t standing by and has lately been part of open source projects like OpenDaylight, which is working on networking software.

OpenDaylight is one of the early groups signed up to participate in Open Compute’s hardware-focused effort. Others include the Open Networking Foundation, Broadcom, Intel, Cumulus Networks, VMware, Netronome and Big Switch Networks, a software-led networking company.

Besides Facebook, Open Compute has on its board representatives from Intel, Rackspace, Arista Networks, and Goldman Sachs. Some 50 other companies and organizations are members of the project, and thousands of people are believed to be contributing.



Data’s Transformation

Someday you’ll tell your grandchildren you remember the old days when data just sat there, like some list of information for people to look at.

Case in point: On Wednesday GoodData, a cloud-based business analytics company, and Box, which provides online storage, announced a product that analyzes how data is used to judge the overall health of the business. Frequent use of some particular marketing collateral, for example, would indicate it is particularly effective. Items shared between different departments could indicate new customer needs.

“Is it taking you a week or six months to really train an employee? What are your most successful salesmen using?” said Roman Stanek, the chief executive of GoodData. “There is so much data generated by every product that it is crazy not to try and capture it.”

That insight is becoming common wisdom. This product announcement follows Tuesday’s move by SAP to turn its HANA in-memory database and analysis software into a cloud-computing product that any customer can access. Last week a business social networking software company called Asana said the latest version of its product would also be useful for management to figure out who is really doing what inside the company.

There are dozens more examples of this kind of thing, with more every day, as companies start to think of every recorded process and product as a means to greater insight.

One interesting upshot of this is that data can no longer be thought of as having a single definition. It used to be that data was mostly stored and forgotten about, or drawn on for some specific purpose, like finding the number of a part, or recalling an airline reservation.

Now data is becoming a much more dynamic. An airline reservation might be saying something about when a person is headed to Denver, or how much business is in Denver, or whether people are flying or driving in trips of 150 miles, or whether a switch to a new travel service makes people book differently. All those purposes could take place within a few minutes of each other, and then recombined with some Twitter feed for yet more attempts at insight.

Before, data was mostly in a single state. Now it’s a kind of potential object, ready at all times to be combined with other data for some new insight. New databases and data frameworks, like Hadoop, have arisen to capture and exploit this. Companies doing fast retrieval of stored data, for real-time analysis, are on fire.

The Good/Box product, called GoodBox Bash, is a relatively modest example of the trend, when put against what the change in data from a static to a dynamic thing means for the tech industry, and possibly society. The companies involved already see themselves doing much more.

“We have a pretty significant roadmap for capturing non-digitized information - the stuff in your head, on paper, things you aren’t yet passing to others in a meaningful way,” said Aaron Levie, the chief executive of Box. “We think there is a massive opportunity in capturing that.”



Yanking Broadband From the Slow Lane

Yanking Broadband From the Slow Lane

Steve Hebert for The New York Times

Jonathan Hiatt of Google talked in 2012 with Nicole Davis about preregistering her Kansas City, Mo., home for Google fiber.

It has been almost two decades since @Home Network offered perhaps the first broadband plan in the country. It was right after the 1996 Telecommunications Act allowed cable companies to get into the business. Milo Medin, one of @Home’s co-founders, still recalls the price of the pioneering service, offered to residents of Fremont, Calif.: $34.95 a month â€" $51.85 in today’s money â€" for a maximum speed of 10 megabits per second. The memory inspires not a little frustration about the Internet’s progress since then: 17 years after @Home plugged in its first customer, the residents of Kansas City pay Time Warner, their local cable company, $46.90 for a 3 Mbps connection and $55.40 for a top speed of 15 Mbps.

“At that time the United States was a leader in broadband,” Mr. Medin recalled. Today, he lamented, “I don’t see anybody arguing that the U.S. is anything but mediocre.”

These days, Mr. Medin leads Google’s effort to deploy superspeedy 1 gigabit-per-second networks â€" 100 times faster than the 10 Mbps plans @Home introduced long ago â€" in several cities around the country, starting in Kansas City last fall.

Most of the nation’s innovation today relies on a broadband connection. Yet broadband seems to be the one area of the information economy that has not followed Moore’s law, named after the proposition by Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore that the power of digital devices would roughly double every couple of years, radically expanding their capability and driving down their cost.

“Internet access is constraining what people can do,” Mr. Medin said. “This puts American companies at a disadvantage. It puts Google in a place where we can’t innovate as well as we could.”

President Obama has made much of this deficit. In 2010 his administration introduced a National Broadband Plan that promised a path of rapid deployment of high-speed networks, offering 100 million households affordable access to connections of 100 Mbps or more.

“We will not succeed by standing still, or even moving at our current pace,” Julius Genachowski, Mr. Obama’s first chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, told Congress at the time. Yet most Americans are still stuck in the Internet slow lane, far from the frontier of our possibilities. And the main roadblock remains much the same as it has been for years: a lack of competition.

Last week, President Obama nominated Tom Wheeler, a veteran lobbyist for the telecommunications industry, to succeed Mr. Genachowski. He has his job cut out for him: achieving fast universal broadband requires figuring out how to shake up the oligopolies that run the nation’s high-speed Internet.

There has been progress lately. The F.C.C. points out that more fiber-optic cable has been laid in the United States than in Europe in the last two years. According to Akamai, the nation’s average broadband download speed is about 7.4 Mbps per second, about twice as fast as it was two years ago. This puts the nation in eighth place in the world, up from 22nd in 2009.

Still, speeds in the United States remain behind those in the world’s most connected countries, like South Korea, Japan and Switzerland. Equally importantly, American broadband, at an average price of $6.14 per Mbps, is more expensive than in most other developed nations.

This has little to do with the actual cost of moving bits. The price of transporting data wholesale across the Internet has fallen to about $1.57 per Mbps, down from $1,200 when Mr. Medin was helping start @Home. And high prices discourage Americans from opting for higher speeds. Though 10 Mbps broadband is available in 90 percent of homes around the country, and four out of five homes have access to 100 Mbps service, last year only 28 percent of homes that had access to broadband at a speed above 6 Mbps actually bought it.

What’s most worrying is that the handful of companies offering high-speed broadband to American consumers may have little incentive to expand their networks, increase their speeds and lower their prices.

According to the F.C.C.’s latest calculation, under one-third of American homes are in areas where at least two wireline companies offer broadband speeds of 10 Mbps or higher. Even including the spottier service offered by wireless providers, which tends to come with strict data caps limiting use, the share is less than half.

That means that in most American neighborhoods, consumers are stuck with a broadband monopoly. And monopolies don’t strive to offer the best, cheapest service. Rather, they use speed as a tool to discriminate by price â€" coaxing consumers who are willing to pay for high-speed broadband into more costly and profitable tiers.

Blair Levin, who headed the F.C.C.’s broadband initiative until three years ago and is now at the Aspen Institute, traces the roots of broadband’s limits to telephone companies’ decision, back in the 1990s, not to match cable’s costly investments in fiber, trusting that their DSL service would be an adequate competitor.

But DSL couldn’t follow cable past 3 Mbps. Verizon did eventually get on the ball â€" investing in its FiOS fiber network, which is expected to reach 17 million homes when it is completed. But that’s the exception.

E-mail: eporter@nytimes.com; Twitter: @portereduardo

A version of this article appeared in print on May 8, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Yanking Broadband From Slow Lane.

A Dream of Trees Aglow at Night

A Dream of Trees Aglow at Night

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Antony Evans, left, and Kyle Taylor show E. coli with jellyfish genes.

Hoping to give new meaning to the term “natural light,” a small group of biotechnology hobbyists and entrepreneurs has started a project to develop plants that glow, potentially leading the way for trees that can replace electric streetlamps and potted flowers luminous enough to read by.

Arabidopsis, the first plant test subject.

Mr. Taylor, left, is lead scientist of the glowing plant project, and Mr. Evans its manager.

The project, which will use a sophisticated form of genetic engineering called synthetic biology, is attracting attention not only for its audacious goal, but for how it is being carried out.

Rather than being the work of a corporation or an academic laboratory, it will be done by a small group of hobbyist scientists in one of the growing number of communal laboratories springing up around the nation as biotechnology becomes cheap enough to give rise to a do-it-yourself movement.

The project is also being financed in a D.I.Y. sort of way: It has attracted more than $250,000 in pledges from about 4,500 donors in about two weeks on the Web site Kickstarter.

The effort is not the first of its kind. A university group created a glowing tobacco plant a few years ago by implanting genes from a marine bacterium that emits light. But the light was so dim that it could be perceived only if one observed the plant for at least five minutes in a dark room.

The new project’s goals, at least initially, are similarly modest. “We hope to have a plant which you can visibly see in the dark (like glow-in-the-dark paint), but don’t expect to replace your light bulbs with version 1.0,” the project’s Kickstarter page says.

But part of the goal is more controversial: to publicize do-it-yourself synthetic biology and to “inspire others to create new living things.” As promising as that might seem to some, critics are alarmed at the idea of tinkerers creating living things in their garages. They fear that malicious organisms may be created, either intentionally or by accident.

Two environmental organizations, Friends of the Earth and the ETC Group, have written to Kickstarter and to the Agriculture Department, which regulates genetically modified crops, in an effort to shut down the glowing plant effort.

The project “will likely result in widespread, random and uncontrolled release of bioengineered seeds and plants produced through the controversial and risky techniques of synthetic biology,” the two groups said in their letter demanding that Kickstarter remove the project from its Web site.

They note that the project has pledged to deliver seeds to many of its 4,000 contributors, making it perhaps the “first-ever intentional environmental release of an avowedly ‘synthetic biology’ organism anywhere in the world.” Kickstarter told the critics to take up their concerns with the project’s organizers. The Agriculture Department has not yet replied.

Antony Evans, the manager of the glowing plant project, said in an interview that the activity would be safe.

“What we are doing is very identical to what has been done in research laboratories and big institutions for 20 years,” he said. Still, he added, “We are very cognizant of the precedent we are setting” with the do-it-yourself project and that some of the money raised would be used to explore public policy issues.

Synthetic biology is a nebulous term and it is difficult to say how, if at all, it differs from genetic engineering.

In its simplest form, genetic engineering involves snipping a gene out of one organism and pasting it into the DNA of another. Synthetic biology typically involves synthesizing the DNA to be inserted, providing the flexibility to go beyond the genes found in nature.

The glowing plant project is the brainchild of Mr. Evans, a technology entrepreneur in San Francisco, and Omri Amirav-Drory, a biochemist. They met at Singularity University, a program that introduces entrepreneurs to futuristic technology.

Dr. Amirav-Drory runs a company called Genome Compiler, which makes a program that can be used to design DNA sequences. When the sequence is done, it is transmitted to a mail-order foundry that synthesizes the DNA.

Kyle Taylor, who received his doctorate in molecular and cell biology at Stanford last year, will be in charge of putting the synthetic DNA into the plant. The research will be done, at least initially, at BioCurious, a communal laboratory in Silicon Valley that describes itself as a “hackerspace for biotech.”

The first plant the group is modifying is Arabidopsis thaliana, part of the mustard family and the laboratory rat of the plant world. The organizers hope to move next to a glowing rose.

Scientists have long made glowing creatures for research purposes, using including one or more monkeys, cats, pigs, dogs and worms. Glowing zebra fish have been sold in some aquarium shops for years.

These creatures typically have the gene for a green fluorescent protein, derived from a jellyfish, spliced into their DNA. But they glow only when ultraviolet light is shined on them.

Others going back to the 1980s have transplanted the gene for luciferase, an enzyme used by fireflies, into plants. But luciferase will not work without another chemical called luciferin. So the plants did not glow unless luciferin was constantly fed to them. In 2010, researchers at Stony Brook University reported in the journal Plos One that they had created a tobacco plant that glowed entirely on its own, however dimly. They spliced into the plant all six genes from a marine bacterium necessary to produce both luciferase and luciferin.

Alexander Krichevsky, who led that research, has started a company, BioGlow, to commercialize glowing plants, starting with ornamental ones, since it is still impractical to replace light bulbs.

“Wouldn’t you like your beautiful flowers to glow in the dark?” he said, invoking the glowing foliage in the movie “Avatar.”

Dr. Krichevsky declined to provide more about the products, timetables or the investors backing his company, which is based in St. Louis.

Whether it will ever be possible to replace light bulbs remains to be seen and depends to some extent on how much of the plant’s energy can be devoted to light production while still allowing the plant to grow. Mr. Evans said his group calculated, albeit with many assumptions, that a tree that covers a ground area of 10 meters (nearly 33 feet) by 10 meters might be able to cast as much light as a street lamp.

While the Agriculture Department regulates genetically modified plants, it does so under a law covering plant pests.

BioGlow has already obtained a letter from the department saying that it will not need approval to release its glowing plants because they are not plant pests, and are not made using plant pests. The hobbyist project hopes to get the same exemption.

Todd Kuiken, senior research associate at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, who has been studying the governance of both synthetic biology and the do-it-yourself movement, said the glowing plant project was an ideal test case.

“It exposes the gaps and holes in the regulatory structure, while it is, I would argue, a safe product in the grand scheme of things,” Dr. Kuiken said. “A serious look needs to be taken at the regulatory system to see if it can handle the questions synthetic biology is going to raise.”

A version of this article appeared in print on May 8, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Dream of Trees Aglow at Night.

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