This week's Technology Observatory will cover the following stories:

• Yahoo plans to debut four original TV series, to compete with Netflix and HBO
• Small cable companies unite to offer LTE connections in homes
• China approves Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia
• WhatsApp becomes a Cellphone Service Provider in Germany, offering a €10 per month plan
• Say goodbye to these 9 Spanish TV channels
• Microsoft says goodbye to Windows XP, but users don't
• Vueling offers in-flight Wi-Fi thanks to Telefónica
• Heartbleed, an extremely serious bug that affects the most common library for secure communication, OpenSSL
• AESA and Development state: civil drones cannot and will not be used for commercial purposes

Yahoo is about to sign for the incorporation of four TV series/shows that would be original and exclusive programming for the service, thus competing with the original series that have only been broadcast on cable networks like HBO or Netflix. According to TheVerge, the shows in questions would be half hour long comedies filmed in 10 episode seasons, created by writers and director with experience in the sector. The initial budget set for filming each episode is roughly 700,000 – 1,000,000 dollars. Marisa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, has yet to give further details in this regard, with the clear objective of showing Yahoo's ability to create and include quality content in their programming. As always, Mayer continues focusing on offering high quality video content – remember that last year she also signed a contract for the rebroadcast Saturday Night Live episodes. The four television shows in question will be broadcast on Yahoo Screen, which, despite the budget invested, makes it difficult for this new programming to directly compete with rebroadcasts of traditional TV series. Even so, we await the premier and potential success. 

ONO, Euskaltel, Telecable, R … are the first cable companies that come to mind, but there are many more. Under Open Cable 47 small cable companies are grouped together, mainly within the municipal scope, which has announced that there will be a jump in their business thanks to a national license for the 3.5 GHz band. The cable companies, which provide service in 211 municipalities from 12 autonomous communities (all except for Asturias and Cantabria) have announced an investment of two million Euros to bring 91 municipalities of Andalusia LTE Internet connections by taking advantage of the aforementioned bandwidth. In addition to allowing high speed browsing from our mobile devices, the expansion of LTE in Spain brings another benefit, the arrival of high speed connections that depending on the Broadband line will have to wait a long time to browse at speeds from this century. In this way, Open Cable will use the 3.5 GHz bandwidth for which they have a license at a national level to offer home Internet connections via LTE. Initially the deployment will be carried out in 91 Andalusian municipalities, which mostly have less than 30,000 residents, communities which comprise 60% of the income of operators associated to Open Cable. There is no information on future expansion plans, although we expect the deployment to reach other communities where these operators are present. The Open Cable movement was preceded by IB-RED, which using the same bandwidth offers connections of up to 40 Mbps download speeds in the Balearic Islands.

 

On: today's date, April 8 of 2014, Windows XP users will no longer receive technical support, unless they form part of one of the companies that signed multi-million dollar contracts with Microsoft to continue receiving support. It is the end of an era, of an operating system that for years was the most common system in the world. The Redmond company announced one year ago: that on today's date maintenance would no longer be provided for devices running on this operating system. Launched in 2001, XP was dethroned in 2012 by Windows 7, and Microsoft then decided that it was no longer practical to pay maintenance and update costs for an operating system that is over ten years old. Microsoft has also stated that the efficiency of employees working with it has been affected. However, some companies and organization have requested that the Redmond company continue taking care of their XP users, including, banks and public institutions such as the British government which, according to The Inquirer, signed a contract valued at 5.5 million pounds (roughly 6.6 million Euros) with Microsoft for them to continue providing, for an additional year, technical support for their devices. Also, there are those who are taking advantage of XP nostalgia, such as the anti-malware firm Malwarebytes, which has announced that they will launch a special subscription for the Windows XP users who do not wish to migrate and who would like to protect their operating system. Data from agencies such as Ovum show that roughly 28% of corporate computers run on Windows XP. Migrating to another operating system, such as Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 8.1, requires a considerable investment of time and money that not all companies or users are willing to undertake. In addition to the economic aspect you need to consider how different Windows 8 is to many users, who take a long time to feel comfortable with its interface. According to a survey performed by The Inquirer of its readers, current XP users would prefer to continue using it or switch to Linux before switching to Windows 8. Some believe that those who use XP after April 8 don't have any reason to use it differently, with or without tech support. Other experts, however, have warned of the risks of staying on an operating system that continues losing technical compatibility and gaining security breaches. The next round will be for the disparaged Windows Vista, which will no longer receive technical support from Microsoft starting in 2017, although it is calculated that its market share does not exceed 1%, thus, its disappearance will more than likely be much less traumatic.

 

Little by little Microsoft and Nokia continue taking steps toward the culmination of an acquisition process that began in the fourth quarter of last year. It has been a long wait, and as we saw before various players need to approve the operation to avoid abusive market situations. They already had approval in the United States, as well as in the European Union and a few other markets. The next market to give the green light has been China, which may seem irrelevant from the media's perspective, but for Redmond it is big news. If we look at Nokia's strategy over the past few months we can see that they are not only providing a wide range of terminal, such as the Nokia 1020, 1520 or the recent 930, but that one of their main focuses is their range for entering and emerging markets. A long line from the Asha family and Nokia X are the main representatives. Receiving China's approval means entering into a market where Nokia has always had a good reputation, although today other companies (many of them local) have taken a bigger slice of the pie using Android as their operating system.  Windows Phone has attempted to enter the market, but its presence is very discreet. This approval means that Nokia will continue distributing smartphones in China with the support of Microsoft. There are still important territories, such as India, but little by little the circle has been closing and the acquisition is crystallizing although it is taking longer than expected. We have yet to see Microsoft and Nokia's strategy in China. A large market where it is very difficult to position yourself. They may do the same as Apple, using a large agreement with one of the main service providers. No matter what happens, we will see if they are capable of recovering the prestige that they had before the smartphone era.

Very interesting movements by WhatsApp that were already mentioned by Jan Koum (CEO) at the Mobile World Congress when he said that soon they would unveil a new method for working with operators: they will become a Cellphone Service Provider in Germany with the support of E-Plus, offering a pre-payment plan of €10 in which all of the data transmitted through the app will not be collected or discounted from the monthly data limit. Considering that WhatsApp is installed on 90% of smartphones in Germany, it is a very attractive area for testing this type of agreement and commercial action. If it works, grows or becomes popular, it could change the game in very important ways and make some service providers very nervous. Why? The weight of the WhatsApp brand in European and Latin American Markets: not only does it offer an affordable way (just 1 dollar per year) to communicate with your friends and family, but now they provide mobile telephone service at a very low cost. This is, in fact, the same strategy that Telefónica is testing in Spain with Tuenti and which has worked well: an affordable Cellphone Service Provider, focused on a younger market that offers a TTO on the social network to allow you to communicate with other people at no additional cost. The WhatsApp plan consists in a monthly payment of €10 (roughly 14 dollars) that offers calls for 9 cents/minute, unlimited SMS and 24 cents per megabyte used, although the data used on WhatsApp will not be collected. For another €10 600 "credits" can be obtained that can then be exchanged for 1 megabyte of data, 1 minute of calls or 1 SMS (each one costs 1 credit). But, even if you don't have credit and you don't recharge it, you can continue using WhatsApp in an unlimited way. It will be interesting to see how this movement will affect the provider market in Spain or Latin America and especially if any of the large telecommunications providers would be willing to join WhatsApp to launch them as a Cellphone Service Provider in certain countries in the region.

At the end of December 2013 a sentence from the Spanish Supreme Court came as a shock to TV viewers and TV stations: the appeal submitted by the private stations was rejected and by extension the distribution of frequencies was annulled, which during the Zapatero government was granted to different providers in order to increase the television offer by taking advantage of the free frequencies from the multiplex. As a result, the high court required the stations to eliminate 9 of the available channels from the Spanish TV Guide (one per multiplex). It has been a few days since the Ministry of Industry, responsible for this matter, has received the proposal from the different providers that lists, both the channels selected for elimination from the guide, and details of the process that should be completed within a few days if the providers want to obey the ruling from the Supreme Court in a timely manner. In total, nine channel will be removed from the TV Guide in Spain before May 6, the date on which the frequencies that are currently occupied should be freed: laSexta3, Nitro and Xplora from grupo Atresmedia; La Siete and La Nueve from Mediaset; AXN and one of the home shopping channels from the Editorial Unit and two home shopping channels from grupo Vocento. Now, the providers will have to hold the government accountable for this decision, two of which have already requested protection under the Constitutional Tribunal to attempt to slow down the term given by the Supreme court through UTECA, the union which groups the associated commercial channels: "Put an end to the broadcasts of nine TV channels which is being forced on us is an unprecedented situation in any democracy, an attack on the rights of citizens, which will reduce their freedom of choice and cause a significant decrease in the channels offered by the transition from analog to digital television, mainly free". One thing is clear, no matter what the end result is, the Spanish citizens will be the losers, on one hand, 9 channels contribute pluralism to the TV guide, and on the other hand, the budgetary amount that the government will have to set aside if they need to compensate the providers for the breach of the distribution during the previous governmental stage; a compensation which is foreseen to be very high.

Telefónica and Vueling have announced an agreement that will offer a 20 Mbps internet connection on the flights of this well-known airline, making it the first airline company to offer high speed Wi-Fi in Europe. All of this is possible thanks to the LiveTV technology and the AIR ACCESS service of Eutelsat, that uses Ka band satellites to offer such transmission speed, thus allowing the passengers to enjoy internet service similar to what they enjoy at home. At this time, the agreement will affect  four A320 Airbus from Vueling during all of 2014, and although it hasn't been specified whether this service will be paid, many of us are worried that we will have to add a few more Euros to our flight budget if we want to enjoy a mid-air internet connection, (unless you are one of the privileged few that always travels in first class of course).

This week Heartbleed was discovered, it is an extremely serious bug that affects the most common library for secure communication, OpenSSL. Web servers, e-mail, messaging... a large part of the servers use HTTPS on the Internet and have been affected by a weakness, that was introduced two years ago. Any attacker may recover content from the server memory (unencrypted user passwords, certificates, private passwords...) without much effort and without leaving a trace. What can we do, as users, against this weakness? In the worst case scenario, all of the HTTPS servers may have been compromised. The bug has been in the library for two years, and we do not know if anyone has discovered it before and has been exploiting it instead of warning the community. The affected servers are changing their security, mainly by revoking SSL certificates and regenerating them. What should we do as users, besides crying in a corner and hoping that nothing happened? The first step will be changing all of our passwords, since these may have been compromised – and since we are, using secure passwords and not reusing any of them-. Now, that change may be counterproductive. Why could it be counterproductive? Because there are still vulnerable services. The most important (Google, Facebook, Amazon...) are no longer affected, but it may be that others still haven't updated their version, or that they still haven't revoked their certificates. If you go to a server that is still vulnerable and you change the password, it may fall into the hands of someone who will use it to attack the server. If you really want to be cautious, the advice is to be very careful with what you do online nowadays, by trying to not log-in to sensitive accounts. Once the storm has passed and we can be sure that the servers have corrected the bug, then it would be best to change our passwords.

 

 

A good part of the main servers on the Internet have been affected by the bug. The statistic that is being passed around that 66% of the servers in the world are vulnerable, however, is not true: that percentage only refers to web pages with Apache or nginx – two servers that use OpenSSL by default – and does not take into account how many of these servers have HTTPS. The correct figure is the one subsequently provided by Netcraft: 17.5% of the sites that use SSL, which equals 500,000 affected websites. These include many well-known sites such as Twitter, Dropbox, Github, DuckDuckGo or Tumblr. Others, such as Facebook, Google, Paypal and Amazon, seem to be unaffected (or at least they have corrected the bug before anyone could test their servers). Hosting providers, such as Heroku or Amazon Web Service (more specifically, their upload balancers) were also vulnerable. Also, Lastpass is another affected site that we can add to the list, although they promise that our passwords couldn't have been compromised. Yahoo deserves a special mention. Numerous investigators, when testing whether Yahoo.com was vulnerable, discovered that their servers spat out the usernames and passwords of their clients, in plain text. It should be expected that other hackers with bad intentions were able to get large lists of usernames and passwords. This shows that Heartbleed is not just theoretical, but a real danger to the users. Now all we can do as users is be attentive to suspicious activities on our accounts and prepare ourselves to change our more sensitive passwords on the sites that are no longer vulnerable.

Each time that a new technology appears that covers some committed scopes, such as security or privacy, public organizations move to create regulations that will serve as a legal framework to avoid misuse. Drones would be included in this category, but the Ministry of Development is clear on this matter. According to the State Air Security Agency (AESA) there is an erroneous belief that civil drones can be freely used within airspace up to 400 meters in altitude. While, both the ministry and this agency have been clear: this cannot be done and could not be done before. The institutions have clarified the current status of the civil drones: these cannot be used for different commercial purposes such as photogrammetry, (analyzing a specific territory through photos), agriculture or inspecting elements of any kind. Of course, flying over urban spaces is also prohibited. One thing should be taken into account: the Law on Air Security does not specifically regulate the use of drones. Even so, these vehicles are considered aircraft and in the future there will be a new regulation that specifically designates limitations on their use. For now we can only wait, but the air space, as has been clarified by AESA, is not from 500 meters in the air, but 500 meters from the ground. The amount of the sanctions have not been mentioned either. There will be sanctions, but at this time the amount of the fines has not been stated. This message does not mean that civil drones cannot be used at all. If used on closed grounds and for specific purposes there would not be any type of infraction. Under 100 feet they can be used without any problem by following model airplane regulations.