Archive: Year: 2014

Tracking Users of Whisper, an anonymous sharing app where people post more than 2.5 million messages a day, are being intensively tracked by the company, report The Guardian's Paul Lewis and Dominic Rushe. Among the revelations in their story: Whisper is currently targeted military personnel and people claiming to work on Capitol Hill, and it is sharing data with both the FBI and MI5. Whisper's editor-in-chief, Neetzan Simmerman, tells the Washington Post's Tim Herrera that the Guardian's story was a "pack of vicious lies." Speaking yesterday at the Brookings Institution, FBI director James Comey reiterated his concern about the new wave of strongly encrypted mobile phones, saying that the "post-Snowden pendulum" has "gone too far," report David Sanger and Matt Apuzzo for...

Hosts After studying four years worth of anonymized data covering nearly 500,000 stays in more than 35,000 locations across New York City, NY's Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is charging that nearly 3/4 of Airbnb's rentals are illegal, David Streitfeld reports for The New York Times. He notes that "Airbnb declined to aggressively dispute the numbers in the report." The AG's report appears to confirm many of the charges first raised by Tom Slee a year ago. A bunch of civic tech projects just won $35,000 each in funding from the Knight Foundation's Prototype Fund, including CommunityRED (for a mobile game to teach journalists about online security), How Wrong Are You (a tool for correcting misinformation), Muck Rock (for a mobile app enabling...

Africa Calling Avaaz is mobilizing thousands of volunteers to help fight Ebola's spread. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have pledged $25 million to the Centers for Disease Control Foundation to help fight Ebola, report Marina Koren and Stephanie Stamm for National Journal. That's more, they note, than what China, Canada and France have given, combined, so far, to aid in the crisis. The Gates Foundation has given $50 million to UN agencies fighting Ebola. Here's a useful map and database of Africa's nearly 100 tech hubs, courtesy of the Fab Foundation and Zambia's BongoHive Tech Hub. (h/t Tony Roberts) Obie Fernandez writes up his work with the Andela fellowship program in Nigeria. The program finds and trains software apprentices and...

Burrowing Down-ballot Democratic candidates are using digital tools like targeting online ads based on voters' Web browser cookies, reports Nancy Scola for the Washington Post. She writes, "It's part of what both Democrats and Republicans identify as a powerful digital trend. The left has spent the last 10 years developing campaign technologies, whether it's online advertising, the modeling of voter behavior, or volunteer contact management. This cycle, they say, they have figured out how to get those technologies to play well together -- and in turn make them available to even the smallest campaigns." In addition to DemocraticAds.com, the new service for low-level Democratic candidates seeking a cheap way to target their ads online, Scola also notes the launch of ActionID, "a single log-in...

Attending Laura Poitras' new documentary, Citizen Four, opened Friday in New York and one of its most interesting and humanizing revelations is the news that Lindsay Mills, Edward Snowden's longtime girlfriend, moved to Moscow to live with him starting this past June, reports Glenn Greenwald. More: The movie also confirms that a second leaker from within the national security system is feeding information to Intercept journalists, notes Ewen MacAskill for the Guardian. Timed to CitizenFour's release: a long profile of Poitras by George Packer of The New Yorker. Indians are welcoming the Modi government's introduction of real-time tracking of the movements of more than 50,000 government employees, reports Suhasini Raj of The New York Times. "The new system requires government employees to register their...

Bad Karma Must read: Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly's long essay in the Atlantic about their and others' efforts to combat misogyny online takes you deep into the frustrating and evolving responses of major tech companies like Facebook and Google, and shows how hard it is to scale solutions to the problem that can actually protect women from digital hate speech and violent threats. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella apologizes for telling a women's tech conference that women who were afraid to ask for raises were right to trust the "karma" of their companies' system to compensate them, issuing a memo to his employees insisting that he supports women asking for raises and backs equal pay for equal work, reports Kara Swisher for...

Leaders In Wired, Kevin Poulsen explains why there can't be a "golden key" that would allow the police--and only the police--to decrypt a smartphone, and explains why even when subject to a search warrant, an American isn't obligated to help police search their property. If you want a deeper dive into why strong encryption of your personal data and devices is so important, read this post by Chis Coyne, co-creator of KeyBase. Some titans of tech--including Eric Schmidt of Google and Brad Smith of Microsoft--joined Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) yesterday for an official Senate roundtable in a Silicon Valley gym on the "Impact of Mass Surveillance on the Digital Economy." As Nancy Scola reports for The Washington Post, the session actually focused more...

Upvoted Republican-affiliated campaign "viral videos" are "dominating" YouTube and Facebook, reports Darren Samuelsohn for Politico, though a close reading of his article shows that in a number of cases their so-called "viraiity" is either overstated or based on negative attention. Twitter is suing the US government for the right to tell its users the exact number of national security letters and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court orders it has received, "in a meaningful way, rather than in broad, inexact ranges," its legal VP Ben Lee blogs. Whatever happens with the FCC's pending decision on its "open Internet" rules, there will be lawsuits, Edward Wyatt reports for the New York Times. Airbnb is finally legal in San Francisco, thanks to a vote of the city...

Optimized David Karpf chews on the DCCC's over-the-top email fundraising, salted with SumofUs' new engagement metric and suggest that the Democratic Party could be a lot stronger if it optimized its online campaign not only to raise money but to improve its standing among its own supporters. "Technology in Politics" is the subject of Wednesday's edition of Reinventors.net, with Ben Rattray of Change.org, veteran political consultant Joe Trippi, FEC Vice Chair Ann Ravel, Chris Kelly of Organizer, Jim Greer of CounterPAC, Nancy Scola of the Washington Post and Josh Ginsburg of Zignal Labs. Tune in on Google Plus at 11am PT. Recovery.gov, a key initiative of the Obama administration in its efforts to make government spending information more accessible to the public, just...

Ironies Lawrence Lessig and his fight against political corruption in America is the subject of a long and positive profile by Evan Osnos in The New Yorker. Best lines: Joi Ito, who says, "He's always fighting the most important fights, but he hasn't won many, and the fights are all still continuing." And Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, asked if he could be one of Lessig's 50 billionaires funding an "atomic bomb" to blow up the campaign finance system: "Absolutely, I can see myself involved. Part of the challenge is the collective-action problem. A group of us have to do it at the same time." How LinkedIn has managed to get a foothold in China. As Paul Mozur and Vindu Goel report...