Comcast will undergo an extensive image overhaul beginning this Friday, when it officially rebrands its Internet and cable services as "XFinity."

The name change will appear this week in 11 of the provider's largest markets, including Boston and Philadelphia, with more to come soon. However, the overarching company will retain the name "Comcast," even as its services, bill statements, service trucks and equipment reflect the new "XFinity" brand, according to its spokeswoman.

Ultimately, the image overhaul arrives amid manifestly increasing criticisms from Comcast subscribers, about everything from the price of its cable and Web packages to the reliability of its services. The name change also occurs as Comcast, the parent company, plans to purchase NBC -- an unprecedented, sizable merge that has earned the scorn of both customers and lawmakers alike.

But Comcast took care this week to emphasize its name change has nothing to do with that merger, which is still pending a congressional review.

Rather, spokeswoman Angelynne Amores suggested to reporters that the re-branding is part of Comcast's larger strategy to appear more digital and innovative, at a time when other companies are doing the same.

"XFinity is part of a new customer experience that will be backed by great customer service," she said. "Our goal is to deliver outstanding products and customer service that our customers can always depend on."

Senate Republican hopeful Carly Fiorina this week said technology can help reduce "out-of-control" government spending.

In an interview with Glenn Beck on Fox News, Fiorina said, "Technology can help. I'm from the technogy industry. Let us put every agency budget up on Internet for every citizen to see. People would be outraged."

This would "give the people the information," Fiorina said, and would cut down on "out-of-control government spending."

However, it is common practice for goverment agencies to post their budgets on the Internet.

Fiorina, former chairman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard, is seeking to defeat Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) this fall. But she will first need to get by California State Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, who has been endorsed by conservative Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.).

Fiorina also told Beck, "Let us put every piece of legislation up on the Internet for everyone to see before they vote on it."

Technical glitches and cost concerns could spell the end of a high-tech "virtual fence" once thought to be the future of law enforcement on the U.S.-Mexican border.

Federal officials once believed a smattering of high-tech, high-resolution cameras, movement sensors and radars would help border patrol agents there catch immigrants as they enter the United States illegally.

But a handful of unresolved kinks, a history of program delays and new doubts of the program's cost effectiveness could spell the end of the so-far $672 million program, which former President George W. Bush piloted in 2005.

President Barack Obama has proposed cutting $189 million from the "virtual fence" program as part of his latest budget, even though he supported the program in name during the 2008 campaign trail.

Some officials now believe parts of the high-tech security system will remain intact, but the federal government's initial, more ambitious plan to cover most of the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border will be dropped.

Chief among the problems plaguing the "virtual fence" are its cameras, which are typically slow to respond. During testing, border patrol agents often found themselves zooming in to get a better look at objects, only to discover the person had moved before the camera could re-orient itself, according to the Associated Press.

The radar system, too, often confused vegetation and humans during inclement weather, the AP also reported.

Modern technology has helped the Obama White House work through the record-breaking snowstorms that shut down the federal government.

“Thanks to modern technology that has not been an issue,” Jen Psaki, a White House spokeswoman, wrote in an e-mail.

Icy roads and heavy snows have left a number of White House staffers unable to get to the West Wing, but they’ve been able to work remotely, according to Psaki.

That’s not the case for the rest of the federal government.

Read more...

The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board announced it would meet its Wednesday deadline to correct stimulus information available on Recovery.gov .

Those forthcoming corrections mark something of an accomplishment for the Recovery Board, which has fielded both lavish praise and harsh criticism for its handling of the federal government's inaugural, open-source data hub.

The new reporting policy arrives response to earlier allegations that Recovery.gov attributed jobs created and dollars spent to congressional districts that did not exist. A similar concern arose in early 2010, when bloggers thought the site was reporting that federal aid had been dispatched to "phantom zip codes."

However, the White House clarified in both cases that the errors were mistakes in transcription by stimulus recipients, not the federal government's overseers. Recovery Board officials later corrected the data and promised to implement a host of new checks to ensure those errors did not plague stimulus data submitted later in the year.

Part of that plan included a new mechanism that would allow recipients to make corrections to their data after it had been submitted -- the policy that will go into effect on Wednesday.

Previously, those who received federal stimulus cash had 20 days to correct their award reports; now, they can make edits on the previous quarter's data regularly. Those edits will be posted every two weeks, Recovery Board officials said.

The complete reports themselves will also be timestamped, Arvidson told The Hill.

While Arvidson could not provide more information about what those changes might be -- or how it would affect the White House's estimates of the recovery act's effects -- she did offer praise to her colleagues for finishing the project in time, despite the snow storm's near-crippling effect on the city.

"We're glad we've been able to get this out at all," she said.

Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) introduced a bill today to update the E-Rate program to help close the digital divide.

Markey authored the original E-Rate bill that, in 1996, allowed schools to link up to the Web. He said 95 percent of public school classrooms now have Internet access, compared to just 14 percent 14 years ago.

"Now, with the expansion of the scope of technology, students need more than just Web access at school, and our E-Rate 2.0 bill is intended to reflect those expanded needs," Markey said in a press release. He wants to increase the range of telecom devices and services accessible to low-income students, like residential broadband services and e-books for classroom lessons.

The bill would allow the current $2.25 billion cap on the E-Rate program to increase with inflation. Read more...

The White House's tech gurus today launched an Open Government Dashboard to track each agency's progress in opening up its data to share with citizens.

Via the White House blog, chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra and chief information officer Vivek Kundra described Version 1.0 of the dashboard, which will simply show what each agency has done so far. (And that's not much.) Read more...

Mega-church pastor Joel Osteen sent a letter yesterday to Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) in support of his bill aiming to add protections to wireless microphone systems from interference from other devices.

Rush's bill directs the FCC to let the operators of wireless microphones (namely, places of worship) to register their wireless frequencies in an online database so new devices would know to avoid those frequencies and prevent signal interference.

Read more...

The European Commission is telling teens to be cautious when posting personal information on social networking sites.

It's Safe Internet Day around the globe and the EU is also telling companies to do more to protect teens' privacy.

The Commission says 50 percent of European teens give out personal information online. It also found that only a third of social networking sites responded to user reports asking for help, and 11 of 22 social networks allow private profiles to be visible through search engines.

"I expect all companies to do more," said Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media. "Minors' profiles need to be set to private by default and questions or abuse reports have to receive quick and appropriate responses. The internet is now vital to our children, and it is the responsibility of all to make it safe."

U.S. online safety advocates are also urging teens to "Think B4 U Post."

The Family Online Safety Institute says young kids and teens should be taught "digital citizenship skills" to help them share information in intelligent ways.

"While there is a recognition that there must be a base-line of safety -- using filters for younger kids and monitoring and privacy settings for the older ones -- the emphasis is now placed on education, media literacy and a new kind of civics," FOSI CEO Stephen Balkam wrote in a Huffington Post op-ed. "It's time for kids of all ages to understand and value the rights of free speech and assembly (ie, connecting through social networking and other means) as well as an expectation of privacy and safety."