CENIC News

Most of CENIC Today's readership is aware of US copyright laws and the large update to copyright law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA, which was passed in 1998. But fewer of you may be aware that the DMCA requires the Copyright Office to periodically provide exemptions to the prohibition of circumvention of technical measures to control access to copyrighted works. Such exemptions are valid for three years. According to an advisory note from CENIC's external counsel, Davis Wright Tremaine, the Copyright Office has just begun its fifth three-year rulemaking proceeding, soliciting comments on proposed exemptions for the next 3 years.

The current (fourth) rulemaking proceeding became effective on August 6, 2010 and resulted in six exemptions. While these are all of interest to CENIC readership, 3 in particular seem of greatest importance:

• Short clips of motion pictures of DVDs may be used by college professors and students for educational purposes and by others in documentary films and non-commercial video, even if such use requires circumvention of the Content Scrambling System (CSS) designed to prevent copying;
• "Jailbreaking" of cell smartphones to permit running third party applications; and
• Use of cellphones with carriers other than the carrier that provided the cellphone.

These exemptions all expire at the end of three years unless commenters propose to maintain them, and the Copyright Office agrees to do so. Proposals for exemptions are due to the Copyright Office by December 1. Afterward, all proposals will be posted and comments will be accepted on the proposals, followed by hearings in Washington DC and possibly California.

To follow this exemption cycle, readers may find updates on the Copyright Office web site.

California's K-12 system received two circuit upgrades during the month of October: one 10 Gigabit circuit from Contra Costa County Office of Education and the CalREN backbone node at Sunnyvale, and the other a second DS-3 between Bishop Union Elementary School District and Mono County Office of Education.

California's Community Colleges also received a connection this month, a DS-3 from the CalREN backbone node at Oakland to the Yuba Community College District to the Yuba College Clear Lake Campus, a connection which was tested and accepted last month.

The CSU's San Diego State University also received a new circuit this month as their Gigabit connection to the San Diego Supercomputer Center was upgraded to 10 Gigabit.

The Central Valley Independent Network and CENIC are excited to report all the progress the Central Valley Next Generation Broadband Infrastructure Project has made during the first year of this three-year planned endeavor to enable all the citizens of California's agricultural heartland to fully participate in and benefit from the 21st century economy by bringing significant additional broadband capacity and capabilities throughout the Central Valley.

We are pleased to report the CVNGBIP Project has accomplished all the planning and development work that needed to be completed during this first year and is now ready to launch actual construction in all 18 Central Valley counties.

As you may recall, CVIN and CENIC established a strategic relationship to develop and deliver a middle-mile broadband fiber-based infrastructure throughout 18 counties in Central California: Amador, Calaveras, Colusa, El Dorado, Fresno, Kern, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Merced, Nevada, Placer, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Sutter, Tulare, Tuolumne, and Yuba. In August 2010, CVIN, on behalf of the CVIN-CENIC partnership, was awarded a $46.62 million stimulus grant from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) through the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). Subsequently, CVIN also received a $6.66 million grant from the CPUC's California Advanced Services Fund. CVIN's Affiliates committed an additional $13.32 million to complete the funding for this $66.6 million project.

With substantial input and assistance from Central Valley stakeholders and community leaders from all 18 counties including: County and City governments; County Offices of Education, representing K-12 School Districts; California Community Colleges and California State University campuses located in several of the counties; County/Main Libraries, representing all public/branch libraries in the counties; Countywide Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs); and private individuals and stakeholder groups within the counties and State, we have made tremendous progress this past year. We want to thank each person and organization that has contributed to the Project's success to date.

Interested parties are encouraged to visit the CVNGBIP website for more information.

The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) will hold its 16th annual conference, Beyond the Network, March 12-14, 2012, at the Sheraton hotel in Palo Alto, CA.

The website for CENIC 2012: Beyond the Network website is live! Readers of CENIC Today can take a look at the conference website for information on the Call for Proposals, the Call for Award Nominations, how to reserve your hotel room, opening date for registration, sponsorship info, and more! For attendees who are unable to attend in person, the conference will once again be webcast live and archived by Gold Sponsor NCast.

CENIC would also like to thank Titanium Sponsor Cisco Systems for being such a big part of our annual conference and for their support of the California research and education community.

Don't forget that the deadline for the Call for Proposals and award nominations for the 2012 Innovations in Networking awards is coming up fast: November 18.

Registration for the conference will open on November 7, with the same flexibility of payment as in previous years. Attendees will have the option to pay for their registration with check or credit cards, before or at the conference. See you in Palo Alto next March!

Pacific Wave (www.pacificwave.net) is a distributed international peering facility that enables research and education networks to come together and share traffic at any of five locations in three cities along the US West Coast (Los Angeles, Sunnyvale, and Seattle). Over 25 networks participate in Pacific Wave, representing more than 40 countries throughout the Pacific Rim and beyond to Asia, the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East.

And you can learn more in Seattle at Supercomputing 2011, so stop by Booth 6106 and say hello to find out how your institution or network can benefit from the international collaboration empowered by Pacific Wave.

Sign up for the PacWave@SC11 Twitter Feed for play-by-play updates and other announcements from the show floor!

Visitors to the CENIC Network Operations Center online may have seen a change in the way that our Scheduled Maintenance information is presented. Thanks to CENIC's migration of its maintenance calendar to Google calendar, interested parties at CENIC Associate institutions will be able to access even more information about previous and future scheduled maintenance events beyond the previous, current, and upcoming months together with the ability to copy events to their own Google calendars.

Among the most highly network-dependent of the sciences is high-energy physics, with researchers far and wide in need of accessing not only the few large-scale existing accelerator facilities but also the enormous amounts of data that these facilities generate. Among these facilities is the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, founded in 1962 as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

The Center has produced three Nobel Prize winners in high-energy physics but has diversified beyond the study of fundamental physics and begun to investigate the practical applications of particle beams as well. Among the highest profile discoveries that took place thanks to the facility was the revelation of legible writing on the Archimedes Palimpsest in 2005, an ancient copy of mathematical discoveries by the legendary Greek scientist Archimedes that had been rendered unreadable by the medieval practice of reusing costly parchments by razoring off the original writing. The practical research taking place at SLAC extends beyond even this to sustainability and "green" research, materials science and nanoscience, and structural biology as well as the more standard physics-oriented research arenas.

Since 2007, the directorship of SLAC has been held by Stanford University's Persis Drell. Drell has served in positions of increasing responsibility with SLAC since 2002 and was named as the laboratory's fourth director in December 2007. She is widely credited with having made SLAC one of the leading laboratories under the stewardship of the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science. During her tenure as director, SLAC moved from being a laboratory dedicated primarily to research in the area of high-energy physics to one that is now seen as a world leader in advancing discoveries in a number of scientific disciplines including the small sample named above. Before coming to Stanford, she was a professor at Cornell University from 1988-2002. She received a degree in math and physics from Wellesley College in 1977 and went on to obtain her doctorate in atomic physics from UC Berkeley in 1983.

To learn more about the other Star Performers that CENIC has featured, please visit our website at www.cenic.org.

US & World Networking News:

The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, XSEDE, has transitioned its network backbone infrastructure to use the FrameNet service of National LambdaRail. This change, a switch from older technology used by TeraGrid, provides a more flexible infrastructure and saves substantial costs for connecting XSEDE service providers.

Researchers with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute at the University of California, Merced, have received a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to expand on a prototype system that uses a network of wireless sensors to track snowpack depth, water storage in soil, stream flow, and water use by vegetation in the Sierra -- information that is key to efficient water usage.

The US Department of Energy set up a $2 million grant to finance a clean energy entrepreneurship business plan competition that was divided into six regions across the U.S. The California Institute of Technology (Caltech), which is based in Pasadena, California, was the recipient of the Western region's portion of the grant. Caltech will manage the funds, which will be split among an association that includes USC, UCLA, UC San Diego, OnGreen Inc., and Caltech.

The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) and Internet2 have activated transcontinental 100 Gbps links using coherent technology. "This new coast-to-coast capacity represents the first major milestone in completing the nation's most advanced platform for network-based innovation," said Rob Vietzke, Executive Director of Network Services for Internet2.

A new report from the Global Information Industry Center at the University of California, San Diego examines the projected disconnect between U.S. wireless infrastructure capacity and consumer demand. According to "Point of View: Wireless Point of Disconnect," wireless use is growing rapidly and if present trends continue, demand will often outstrip capacity, causing congestion.

To understand how social media, an almost integral part of our current culture, can benefit K-12 schools and districts, we asked eSchool News readers: "Name one way you use social networking in your school/district. Or, if you can't/don't currently use social networking, how would you like to?"

About CENIC and How to Change Your Subscription:

California's education and research communities leverage their networking resources under CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, in order to obtain cost-effective, high-bandwidth networking to support their missions and answer the needs of their faculty, staff, and students. CENIC designs, implements, and operates CalREN, the California Research and Education Network, a high-bandwidth, high-capacity Internet network specially designed to meet the unique requirements of these communities, and to which the vast majority of the state's K-20 educational institutions are connected. In order to facilitate collaboration in education and research, CENIC also provides connectivity to non-California institutions and industry research organizations with which CENIC's Associate researchers and educators are engaged.

CENIC is governed by its member institutions. Representatives from these institutions also donate expertise through their participation in various committees designed to ensure that CENIC is managed effectively and efficiently, and to support the continued evolution of the network as technology advances.

For more information, visit www.cenic.org.

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