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• Newly found Android malware infects millions: report [MSNBC.com]
• America abandoning DSL in favor of faster cable [theregister.co.uk]
• Poland's prime minister vows Warsaw won't fully ratify ACTA if in-depth legal studies prove it threatens Internet freedoms [totaltele.com]
• FTC to scrutinize mobile payment technology [networkworld.com]
• The intelligent spectrum harvest [cable360.net]
• TW Cable's New Wideband Gambit [lightreading.computer ]
• How Siri is ruining your cellphone service [washingtonpost.com]
• European smartphone uptake outpaces US [fiercewireless.com]
• U.S. Justice Department May Be Investigating Verizon Wireless over Cable Spectrum Deal [tmcnet.com]
• New RIM CEO vows to 'stop the bleeding,' slams Android OEMs [fiercewireless.com]
• More dark fiber for Indianapolis [cable360.net]
• 802.11ac does more for 802.11n than it does to change the face of wireless networking [networkworld.com]
• Mobile operators are losing their grip on the tablet market [fiercewireless.com]
• Twitter uncloaks a year's worth of DMCA takedown notices, 4,410 in all [arstechnica.com]
• Internet economy set to hit $4.2T in 2016, half of world’s population will be online [venturebeat.com]

Anybody who warns of an unavoidable capacity crisis on wireline or wireless networks is lying in order to sell you something. That may be a blunt assessment to some, but it's the only conclusion you can draw as we see time and time again that claims about a looming network apocalypse (remember the Exaflood?) violently overestimate future traffic loads and underestimate the ingenuity of modern network engineers.

The National Association of Broadcasters is highlighting Time Warner Cable's 44% jump in net profit as an example of how retrans fees aren't hurting the cable operator quite as badly as claimed. 2011 saw broadcasters and cable operators annoy consumers endlessly with blackouts, PR feuds, and higher rates, with cable operators often claiming demanded rate hikes were borderline gluttonous.

Back in April of 2009, Canadian cable operator Cogeco foisted metered billing on the back of their customers, applying caps as low as 10GB per month and overages as high as $2.50 a gigabyte on top of existing tiers. When customers complained, Cogeco insulted customer intelligence by insisting the move wasn't about making money.

"It’s very hard to retire here," a Cablevision installer complained to the New York Times earlier this month. "You get hurt, you can’t work as hard and you disappear." A little more than a week later, despite claims from unions that Cablevision tried heavy-handedly to stop it, 282 technicians and dispatchers in Brooklyn have voted to join the CWA.

We've often talked about how Canada was actually seeing some significant growth in their broadband sector early on, with users seeing faster speeds at fairly reasonable prices. The country also consistently ranked very high in the global broadband penetration rankings -- despite the evil bogeyman known as "geography" -- which many here in the states use to justify the United States' broadband failings.

Yesterday we noted that a new law being proposed in Hawaii would require that ISPs log the subscriber information and websites visited by every user for two years -- with no included provisions to ensure that data be adequately secured. It only took one day of bad press for the bill's primary backer to back away from the law.

• Hawaiian politician backs away from Web dossier law [cnet.com]
• Europe drops Phorm-related UK Internet privacy infringement case [ispreview.co.uk]
• 802.11ac: Don’t Believe Everything You Read [businesscomputingworld.co.uk]
• Consumer 'White Spaces' Gadgets, Chipsets In The Works [forbes.com]
• How WiFi could squeeze wireless carriers [zdnet.com]
• Google takes the staqnd at the UK Leveson Inquiry and says, "We are not the Internet" [thenextweb.com]
• Debate rages as Spotify, MOG, and Rdio kill / save the music industry [theverge.com]
• Symantec: We didn't know 2006 source code was stolen [wired.com]
• Microsoft is ready for game downloads; it's a shame our broadband isn't [electricpig.co.uk]
• Nintendo to include NFC in its next games console [nfcworld.com]

• Hawaii make keep track of all websites visited [cnet.com]
• For the good of the nation, broadband for all [cio.com]
• Cheap internet: The poor's new civil right [nypost.com]
• Google, Bing, other search engines "overwhelmingly" direct users to illegal copies of copyrighted tracks: Coalition of entertainment industry groups [guardian.co.uk]
• MegaUpload Users Plan to Sue the FBI over Lost Files [torrentfreak.com]
• European Parliament Official In Charge Of ACTA Quits, And Denounces The 'Masquerade' Behind ACTA [techdirt.com]
• North Korea threatens to punish mobile-phone users as 'war criminals' [telegraph.co.uk]
• AT&T blames FCC for price hikes [lightreading.com]
• Survey: consumers confused on cellular network generations [telecomengine.com]
• RealNetworks to sell patents, software to Intel for $120m [totaltele.com]
• Take Your Wi-Fi Broadband Router On The Road [cable360.net]
• 1% of all smartphones activated by AT&T in Q4 were iPhone 4S's [thenextweb.com]
• iPhone 4S helps Apple edge Android in US [cnet.com]
• Android tablets finally catching on [networkworld.com]
• Leaked RIM roadmap hints at Paybook 3G+ [technologytell.com]

Both AT&T and Verizon saw continued strong growth in wireless in this week's earnings reports, but took a bit of a beating in terms of DSL subscriber counts in their un-upgraded markets and overall broadband growth. Verizon lost 103,000 DSL lines during the fourth quarter of 2011, while AT&T lost 636,000 DSL lines.

User treichhart directs our attention to the fact that New Hanover County, North Carolina this week became the first county in the United States to deploy a "Super Wi-Fi" network. Also known as white space broadband, the technology makes use of unlicensed wireless spectrum freed from the migration to digital television.

AT&T last week raised rates on all their wireless data plans, users now having the option of a $20, 300 MB plan or a $30, 3GB plan (up from $15, 200MB and $25, 2GB, respectively). Speaking during their earnings call today, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson tried to suggest that the rate hikes were because the government opposed AT&T's planned T-Mobile acquisition.

Here in the United States the press and politicians pay a lot of lip service to caring about privacy, but given that the modern zeitgeist is that all-regulation-is-evil-no-matter-what -- lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have refused to actually implement privacy protections for the modern age. The result has been an avalanche of new barrier-pushing tracking technology with absolutely no consumer protection lines drawn.

A few years ago you might recall that Time Warner Cable executives claimed they wouldn't be able to survive financially if they weren't allowed to start billing users by the byte. Several years after that proposal was shot dead by public outrage, and flat-rate broadband pricing continues to treat the company very well. Time Warner Cable's fourth quarter earnings show a 44% jump in fourth quarter net profit, with double-digit gains in broadband, VoIP and wholesale transport services revenue. Though the company stoically continues to deny the impact of Internet video, they're seeing continued pressure from cord cutting and telcoTV, resulting in a loss of 129,000 video subscribers. Those losses were countered however by the addition of 130,000 broadband subscribers.

As it stands, the often empowering act of jailbreaking your device remains perfectly legal thanks to an exemption embedded in the DMCA. In July of 2010 the government created an exemption, ruling that such tinkering perfectly legal as long as the intent wasn't to bypass copy protection.

As we noted earlier this week, Senator Lamar Smith not only drafted SOPA, but he also is pushing a law that would require that ISPs track the personal online behavior of users for up to 18 months. Smith's pushing the law under the pretense of waging a tougher war against child porn, when in reality it's simply yet another in a long line of expansions of domestic surveillance capabilities.

AT&T released their fourth quarter earnings, posting a fourth quarter net loss of $6.7 billion, or $1.12 a share, on revenue of $32.5 billion Don't feel too badly for AT&T, as $4 billion of that quarterly hit was due to their $4 billion T-Mobile break up fee, which the company admitted was probably only closer to $1.5 billion after tax deductions. AT&T sold a record 9.4 million smartphones on the quarter and added 717,000 new wireless subscribers to bring wireless sub totals to 2.5 million. The company added 208,000 AT&T U-verse TV and 587,000 U-Verse Internet customers, but posted a net loss of 49,000 broadband customers due to users in un-upgraded markets leaving for faster alternatives.

• The human cost built into iPads [nytimes.com]
• RapidShare Attorney: If We're Shut Down Like Megaupload, Then YouTube, Dropbox, Apple's iCloud Are Next [fastcompany.com]
• Should the Fifth Amendment Cover Your Encrypted Data? [time.com]
• Sprint 4G rollout will be very Texas-centric initially [lightreading.com]
• UK ISP's BT and C&W fined for basically ripping up roads where ever and whenever they damn well wanted to [ispreview.co.uk]
• Netflix subs rebound in Q4, regains 600000 of 800000 subs lost in Q3 price hike fiasco [lightreading.com]
• Symantec: Anonymous stole source code, users should disable pcAnywhere [arstechnica.com]
• UK ISP O2 fixes leak that gave personal info to websites [zdnet.co.uk]
• EU warns five member states on telecoms rules; France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Hungary risk court referral unless new rules pass into national law [totaltele.com]
• Company claims new routing will breath life back into SMS, make it more profitable [gomonews.com]
• Sprint vs. Verizon vs. AT&T wireless plans [yahoo.com]
• Microsoft, not Apple, holds the key to smartTV success? [thenextweb.com]
• Is iMessage Starting to Take a Bite Out of Standard Texting? [nytimes.com]

While Netflix still dominates the streaming video market to the tune of 65%, 2011 wasn't a particularly pretty PR year for the company. Netflix instituted a relatively-massive price hike, an announcement of a split off of their DVD and streaming services, a confusing reversal of that plan, and somehow found time to insult everybody in America.