Archive: Year: 2014

Increasing "Occupy Central, aka the Umbrella Revolution," writes Andrew Lih in Quartz, "may be the most high-tech protest ever, using wireless broadband, multimedia smartphones, drone film making, mobile video projectors, and live streaming video to communicate and to broadcast their cause to the entire world in real time." His piece is a bit breathless about tech's role--it's hardly clear that "whoever dominates the digital domain will control the eventual outcome"; nor do we know in any detail how much local hyper-networking tools are helping the protesters reason together about their actions. How the Hong Kong protesters could win. Clay Shirky, who is teaching at NYU's Shanghai campus this year, reports in from Occupy Hong Kong, focusing on its social geography. Sascha Meinrath explains why local mesh networks...

Unimaginable Meet Joshua Wong, a 17-year-old student activist at the heart of Hong Kong's youth movement for democracy, who when he was 14 started an online group called Scholarism to oppose curriculum changes pushing more "patriotic education" on Hong Kong's students. In the New Yorker, Emily Parker explains how Hong Kong's current protests are different from a prior round of pro-democracy demonstrations in 2003: texting and WhatsApp to self-organize, Twitter to spread the news, and "the sense of being part of a global online community" rather than an isolated local event. At Occupier.hk/Standbyyou, people from around the world are posting messages that are being post on a screen in Hong Kong. Jenni Ryall of Mashable has written an unintentionally revealing post titled "Forget Airbnb:...

Outgassing Hong Kong's democracy protesters are playing cat and mouse with the authorities online, reports Paul Mozur for The New York Times. Our Rebecca Chao explains how Beijing modulates its online censorship to give mainland Chinese a little room to blow off steam, but not enough to organize meaningful political opposition. Julian Assange takes on Google CEO Eric Schmidt in his new book "When Google Met WikiLeaks," and in this interview with Ryan Grim and Sarah Harvard of the Huffington Post, he zeroes in on Schmidt's close relationship with the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton's State Department. Assange also disputes Schmidt's claim that Google is protecting its users data from NSA snooping, arguing that the company isn't encrypting user information that it stores...

Lifestyles According to Google's Eric Schmidt, co-author of the new book "How Google Works" on the company's innovative management methods, women who want to work and get ahead at great companies should take care of the kids and then log on at 11pm to keep doing their day job, too. To wit, as he says in an interview with Brian Bergstein of Technology Review, responding to a question about "work-life balance" and his book's notion that people should be "overworked in a good way": In the book, we mention the women we work with who have a terrible burden, if you will, of working in a startup: it’s intense, but then they also have the majority of the family duties, typically. Somehow,...

Showdown Pro-democracy demonstrators have taken over Hong Kong's main streets, Lily Kuo and heather Thomas report for Quartz, and the police are reportedly cutting off cell phone reception in protest areas. In response, in the last 24 hours, about 100,000 people in Hong Kong have downloaded FireChat, a mobile messaging app that enables users to form local groups via Bluetooth or WiFi, reports Patrick Boehler for the South China Morning Post. Meanwhile, a smartphone app that claims to coordinate the protests in Hong Kong is actually malware designed to spy on protestors, Code4HK, a government transparency group reports. Thousands of Facebook users are turning their profile pictures to a yellow ribbon in support of the Hong Kong movement and emergency solidarity rallies are rapidly...

Dogfood Hope springs eternal: Suddenly, everyone in the early-adopter neo-disrupter community is talking about Ello, and how it could maybe avoid the fate of other online social networks that tap into our all-too-human need for connection and then get taken over by the all-too-corrupting needs of venture capital. Here's Quinn Wilson's fascinating take and Andy Baio's informed skepticism about Ello's chances of avoiding the fate of Facebook and Twitter. Check your privilege: Media technologist Deanna Zandt (another PDM pal) writes that for Ello to be genuinely interesting, people getting on it should actively commit to using their invites to bring on friends who aren't already like them. Anil Dash would concur. FBI Director James Comey isn't happy about Apple and Google's plans for...

Sucks "Being a federal CIO means buying a used car, driving it off the lot, and only then looking under the hood and seeing what engine you've bought," says David Bray, the FCC's CIO. "And I've got a pretty old engine," he adds in a detailed story by the Washington Post's Nancy Scola on how that agency's web comment form collapsed as millions of responses surged in on its "open Internet" rulemaking proposal. Most revealing about her story: how tech-savvy net neutrality activists built work-arounds to make sure the flood of comments would be captured and properly tallied--and how the agency responded. Also this line from Scola is priceless: "Today the FCC is a communications agency that can't communicate, and that...

Wartime A website claiming that it was about to leak nude photos of actress Emma Watson in retaliation for a powerful feminist speech she gave last week at the United Nations now turns out to have been a marketing stunt by a PR firm, reports Brian Koerber for Mashable. Worse yet, the firm, Rantic Marketing, claims its real purpose was to push for the censorship and shutdown of free-for-all site 4chan. Watson's HeForShe gender solidarity campaign now has more than 100,000 backers worldwide. Josh Stearns, the director of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation's journalism sustainability program, is calling out media organizations for not telling readers how much data about them they may be collecting and how that data is being used. Amen...

Climate Changes Google is going to end its relationship with the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council, finally giving in to the #DontFundEvil campaign led by Forecast the Facts. Speaking on the Diane Rehm radio show in Washington, DC, Google's chairman Eric Schmidt said, ""Well, the company has a very strong view that we should make decisions in politics based on facts—what a shock. And the facts of climate change are not in question anymore. Everyone understands climate change is occurring, and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place. And so we should not be aligned with such people—they're just, they're just literally lying." Related? Apple CEO Tim Cook...

Packed The 300,000 to 400,000 climate activists that packed New York City's streets yesterday are "louder and rowdier than the old-school greens who dominated the movement when Barack obama entered the White House," writes Elana Schor for Politico. She also compares them to the Tea Party, adding: The new breed reigns supreme on social media: 350 has 201,000 Twitter followers, more than the Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, the NRDC or EDF. When [350.org co-founder Bill] McKibben launched a live climate tour in 2012, an estimated 24,000 people helped sell out 22 shows, and his group has volunteers in 188 countries. Its lobbying budget is tiny, though — because it tends to disdains all that. One way the march was emphatically not...