Is the Federal Communications Commission sharpening its claws? Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, hopes so.

The FCC recently launched a task force [PDF] to advance its role "protecting and empowering" consumers, a move Consumers Union hopes to see coupled with a detachment from industry interests—a relationship that has been described as too chummy.  

In a blog post on the advocacy site HearUsNow.org, CU says:

[W]hile we welcome [FCC chairman Julius] Genachowski’s pledge the agency will be
vigilant watchdog for the consumer, we hope it doesn’t just bark when
industry behaves badly and engages in anti-consumer practices. A truly
effective watchdog not only barks, but it chases the intruder down the
street and bites the offender when necessary.

Our hope is the FCC will increasingly view itself as a Rottweiler when it comes to protecting consumers.

On a related (and promising) note, the FCC on Wednesday voted to close a loophole [PDF] which had allowed some cable companies to restrict their proprietary HD sports content from other TV service providers. In the New York City market, for example, any Knicks or Rangers fans who subscribed to Verizon FiOS were unable to watch games in high definition because a cable company, Cablevision, refused to share its content. The ruling should promote comparable content competition among the cable companies.

(If you're a sports fan looking to upgrade your TV set, be sure to check our advice on buying an LCD vs. a plasma and Jim Willcox's 10 tips for buying a TV for the Super Bowl.)

—Nick K. Mandle

Combing through hundreds of blog posts and news articles daily, Dirk Klingner, our technology-trend watcher, sifts through the noise to bring you the tech news most important to consumers. If you have a tip on a story you want to share, leave a comment below.

Amazon Adds Greener Electronics Ranking (Cnet)

…Amazon has added a green category to its electronics page, using both EnergyStar and the broader EPEAT certification to rank products, the Green Electronics Council said on Wednesday.

Creepy Ways Your Social Media Data Can Be Used (Ecommerce Times)

…Roger Thompson, chief research scientist with AVG, for example, believes his credit card company has incorporated data from his Facebook account into his credit card file. He told of an incident in which he had to verify information about himself for security purposes, and one of the questions was about his daughter-in-law — information that the bank didn't get from him and is only publicly available on Facebook, he wrote in a blog post.

Bam! Bing Now Cooks Up Recipes (TechCrunch)

Bing just launched a nifty new feature for any cooks out there. When you search for a food item, Bing will now show recipe results that involve the item. So if I search for macaroni, I’ll see a tab to the left of results that will show me “Macaroni Recipes.”

Earthquake Survivor Calls iPhone a Life Saver (NBC Miami)

Man said he used health app on his iPhone to treat his injury while stuck under rubble

Understanding the Web to Make Search More Relevant (Official Google Blog)

…We've been making progress, and today the research behind Google Squared is, for the first time, making search better for everyone with a new feature called "answer highlighting." Answer highlighting helps you get to information more quickly by seeking out and bolding the likely answer to your question right in search results. The feature is meant for searches with factual answers, such as [meet john doe director], [john lennon died], or [what was the political party of president ford]. If the pages returned for these queries contain a simple answer, the search snippet will more often include the relevant text and bold it for easy reference.

Lighter Side: People in order from 1 to 100 (Urlesque)

…This short film, part 1 in a four part series aptly titled People In Order, features 100 people, ages one to one-hundred, appearing sequenially from youngest to oldest.

I want to take a few minutes to talk about invisible signals in the air, and in part 2, what QAM looks like. It’s impossible to “see” RF signals with the naked eye, so we rely on test equipment to show us what is going on in the high speed RF spectrum. You may know by now TV stations in the United States use a system called 8-VSB to deliver digital TV to you homes. Each channel can use around 19.4 million bits per second to deliver digital TV to your home. I have some screen captures from my Sencore 1850 MPEG analyzer that shows you what the signal looks like.

This is a representation of the 8-VSB signal. The yellow dots on the black square in the upper right hand corner shows the carriers lined up in 8 columns. Each one of those dots should line up fairly straight, in order for your receiver to decode the signals contained there. The squiggles in the bottom right corner displays the mathematical relationships the  carriers have to each other. If anything gets out of line, the receiver can’t lock onto the signal enough to decode whats contained in it. When the signal bounces off a building, tree, or other object, it will have an affect on this signal, either adding or subtracting to the main signal. The receiver can get confused if any of these carriers get sloppy, and aren’t in a close line with the others. Remember, there’s a lot more data contained in the signal than just video and audio. There’s many tables and error correction bits sent to ensure the receiver has the best opportunity to decode the signal.

Above is  an overall view of the tables that make up an over the air DTV signal.

Here you can see a chart of the actual bitrates on the air. The top bar on the graph is for null packets, These are basically empty packets of data to fill in the full bandwidth allotted. As you can see, I am not wasting very many bits on these things, and have most of my resources allocated to the main streams. The second bar shows how much the data tables take up.

Our HD stream is running at 14.35 million bits per second and is taking up almost 74% of my bandwidth. Universal Sports is running at 3.1 million bits per second, and Weather Plus is only slightly over 1 million since it is mainly still graphics with little motion.

Now this is our reference, or non Olympic bitrates. (You should have known I was going to mention the Olympics eventually)

In years past, we have shut down the Weather Sub Channel and throttled down the second channel to the bare minimum.

This time, Universal Sports will be carrying many live events, so I have to crank up the bitrate for it as high as I can. We just installed a new receiver for Universal Sports, so we able to capture the full bandwidth they are sending on the satellite, which is just under 5 million bits per second. However, to get 2 more megabits, I have to steal it from somewhere else, or one of my other channels. I can get about half a million from the Weather Plus channel, and pull another 1.5 million from the main HD channel.

Naturally, I don’t want to reduce the HD bandwidth any more than I have to. The less bits you have, the more compression you have to do. In a high speed sporting event, that can be less than desirable.

The system uses statistical multiplexing, which means the streams can be shared in a pool, and bits are assigned to the stream that needs it the most. That way, when one channel has  a scene with little motion, the extra bits can be used on the higher motion stream. In other words, the HD will always have top priority, and get all the spare bits required to deliver the best picture from the other channels which may not have a high demand for bits. The other channels get what is left over, which will still render a good picture.

I will be changing the bitrates very close to the Olympics. The Opening Ceremonies are amazing to see and use every amount of detail the cameras can capture. If you’ve never seen the Opening Ceremonies in HD before, you are in for a real treat!