Archive: Year: 2014

Scotched Does Verizon, which sued to stop the FCC's open Internet rule, really love the open Internet, as it's claiming? Jon Brodkin explores that question for ArsTechnica. NPR says Verizon has spent $100 million to lobby Congress on the issue in the last five years. Citing the work of conservative writer James Heaney, techDirt's Michael Masnick explains why net neutrality does not equal a government takeover of the Internet, a theme we're hearing more of lately from some Republicans. Cities with ultra-fast broadband, like Chattanooga, Tennessee, have slightly higher per-capita GDP, a new study by the Analysis Group has found, Brian Fung reports for the Washington Post. Just released: "Civil Rights, Big Data, and Our Algorithmic Future," by David Robinson, Harlan Yu and Aaron...

Resets If there was any doubt that the consumer zeitgeist has shifted in the wake of Edward Snowden's disclosures, this headline for Brian Chen's story on Apple's updated operating system should put that to rest: "Apple Says iOS Update Keeps Data Private, Even From the Police." This letter from Apple CEO Tim Cook, accompanying the iOS8 rollout, about the company's "commitment to your privacy" can and is being interpreted as a direct attack on its competitor Google. He writes: A few years ago, users of Internet services began to realize that when an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product. But at Apple, we believe a great customer experience shouldn’t come at the expense of your privacy. Our business...

Connecting the Dots A new report from Take Back the Tech criticizes major social media companies for their lack of transparency about how they handle complaints of abuse against women on their platforms, reports Caitlin Dewey for the Washington Post. Of the three companies scrutinized, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, only Facebook gets a passing grade for explaining how its reporting process works. On its website, Take Back the Tech is asking users to self-report how each platform handles abuse. Author James Bamford connects the dots between a recent protest from veterans of Israel's elite intelligence Unit 8200 and Edward Snowden's revelation that the NSA shares raw data with that unit and asks, in a New York Times op-ed, if that data is being...

Splits A coalition of major privacy advocates, government whistleblowers and advocacy groups have come out against the Senate version of the USA Freedom Act, reports Andrea Peterson for the Washington Post. Their concerns include ambiguous language in the bill, the absence of provisions more protective of Americans' privacy, and immunity for corporations that help spy on Americans. At the same time, other organizations, including the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, are still backing the bill. "We're not saying that anyone's interpretations are wrong, just that this bill can be interpreted in numerous different ways, which has previously proven to be a major problem. Our issue is not just that the bill fails to stop many kind of abuses, but that it...

Lessig of Two Evils Saturday, Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig sent a long email to his MayDay PAC list titled "Optimism" and seeking to explain to its 60,000+ donors why, despite its modest impact on the just concluded New Hampshire Republican Senate primary, they should still take heart. The email raises more questions than it answers. (Since I can't find it online, I've posted the text here.) On the plus side, Lessig argues that the money MayDay spent in New Hampshire backing longshot Jim Rubens against frontrunner Scott Brown (which Slate reported at a whopping $1.6 million and Re/Code put at a still substantial $600K) had an impact in raising attention to the issue of money in politics. He writes that 37% of...

This is the text of an email that Lawrence Lessig sent to members of MayDay PAC on September 13, 2014. Dear _______ This is a long letter. I am sorry for that, but it needs to be. Our game is chess, not checkers. To see what we’re doing, and why, takes more than a Tweet. And if you can take the 15 minutes it will take to read what follows, you will see why we all should be optimistic and proud of what MAYDAY.US has done. You have helped start an incredible movement. And I am more optimistic than ever about our chances of success. — — — Our second election was hard — but after spending some time studying the data, and...

Data Dumps The Internet Slowdown appears to have generated at least 111,000 new public comments to the FCC on its "Open Internet" proposal, with Fight for the Future--one of its organizers--claiming that actually more than 500,000 were submitted through Battleforthenet.com, reports Alex Howard. During Yahoo's losing fight in 2008 against a secret court order demanding it turn over customer data, the US government threatened to fine it $250,000 a day, newly declassified documents reveal. As Vindu Goel and Charlie Savage report for the New York Times, "The records … provide perhaps the clearest corroboration yet of the Internet companies’ contention that they did not provide the government with direct access to vast amounts of customer data on their computers." Extending the civic tech...

Positive Sums A close analysis of unofficial results from the NYC Board of Elections by DailyKos blogger "brooklynbadboy" finds that Zephyr Teachout won some of the city's wealthiest state assembly districts while Governor Andrew Cuomo won some of its poorest. "This is the inverse of what should happen in a liberal primary challenge," he writes. Tim Wu tells Conor Skelding of Capital NY says he would run again "in a more normal race." Speaking of DailyKos, it's worth noting that the site has been having its best year ever, traffic-wise, according to this recent post by Markos Moulitsas, its founder. In August, it had nearly 8.5 million unique visitors, way more than the 6.8 million the site hit in October 2012. Moulitsas attributes...

Emergence The emergent coalition between open democracy advocates, environmentalists, public school proponents, anti-corruption crusaders, trust-busters and net-heads didn't do badly in yesterday's New York Democratic gubernatorial primary, with Zephyr Teachout and Tim Wu receiving 34.2% and 40.1% of the vote (with 98.3% of precincts reporting), respectively, in their challenges to sitting governor Andrew Cuomo and his hand-picked running mate former Rep. Kathy Hochul. Teachout-Wu were strongest in the counties surrounding the state capital, Albany, and along the Hudson River (including Manhattan). Cuomo-Hochul took the heavily populated outer boors of New York City, the inner suburbs, and the region around Buffalo, the state's other major city. (See Politico's county-by-county breakdown for the Hochul-Wu vote here.) As the New York Times's Thomas Kaplan noted in...

Fusion Politics Zephyr Teachout and Tim Wu yesterday unveiled their tech policy for New York, garnering the endorsement of Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, our Miranda Neubauer reports. Also noted in Miranda's round-up: Google search trends show a substantial spike in interest in Teachout and Wu in New York, especially down-state. But do Googlers = voters? Yesterday, for the first time in the entire primary, NY Governor Andrew Cuomo made an indirect reference to his opponent, telling reporters, "You can be a great college professor. You can be very good at what you do. You need experience in government if you want to run the State of New York." Teachout responded, "My first qualification for being the next governor of the State of...