Seeds

Speaking at the press conference at the G-7 summit in Germany, President Obama said that cyberattacks on the U.S. government and private sector are “not going to go away—it’s going to accelerate,” Cory Bennett reports for The Hill.

Feminist writer and “internet troll slayer” Lindy West gets lovingly interviewed by Cosmopolitan’s Jill Filipovic. Best line: “People tend to be like, ‘Oh, yeah, the internet, it’s a cesspool, it’s just like that.’ But no, it’s not just like that—we make it. We are currently in the process of building it. It’s still a baby, and we have the opportunity to build it better. That refrain of ‘that’s just how the internet is’ needs to die.”

Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced yesterday that the department would forgive the loans of many students who attended the now-bankrupt for-profit Corinthian Colleges, a seeming victory for the Debt Collective, which organized hundreds of students to go on a debt strike seeking relief. (Co-organizer Astra Taylor described this campaign in her keynote at PDF 2015 on Friday.)

In response to Duncan, the Debt Collective issued a statement criticizing the department for forcing students into a complicated process for discharging their debts instead of immediately and automatically ending them. “Students are entitled to receive full relief under law,” the statement said. “The legal and most painless possible process for students is no process—they deserve an automatic discharge of their debts.” More than 1,200 students have now joined in pledging to strike their own loans unless the department issues a class-wide cancellation of the Corinthian debts.

Three new research papers funded by the World Bank were released by Tiago Peixoto. One shows that online voting increases total turnout in participatory budgeting in Rio Grande do Sol; the second shows that a successful first experience using FixMyStreet.com to report a service request makes that person 54 percent more likely to submit a second request (i.e. government responsiveness has positive civic effects); and the third examines the effectiveness of mobile phone-based surveys in poor countries.

Brave new internet of things: Security researcher Billy Rios says he has found vulnerabilities in hospital drug pump firmware that would allow hackers to remotely alter a patient’s dosage, Kim Zetter reports for Wired.

Mesh networking messaging app Jott, which works on Bluetooth, is blowing up among young teens, in part because it doesn’t require a smartphone, a data plan, or a wifi connection, Sarah Buhr reports for Techcrunch. As David Parry says, you can shut off the public internet but you can’t shut off the internet public.

All the main hall talks from Personal Democracy Forum 2015 can now be watched, speaker by speaker.

More gleanings from conference attendees:

• Writing for CivSource, Bailey McCann observed that “the two-day conference showed a new version of civic tech that has come down to earth and is willing to focus more of its attention on the challenges of governing, as it is on the next new and shiny app.”

• Knight Foundation VP of communications, Andrew Sherry, a regular at PDF, shares some highlights, writing that “PDF15 was about the intersection of technology, human behavior, and society.”

• Keynote speaker Deanna Zandt, whose talk was called “Imagine All the Feelz,” reflects on wrestling with personal “demons” that made her question whether her talk about emotional intimacy in the internet age was too “squishy.” (It wasn’t!)

• PDF attendee Yangbo Du Storified his conference highlights.

• Mozilla PDF Fellow Jerry Hall blogs about his experience, writing that “one of the most important panels held was the #BlackTwitter and #BlackLivesMatter: Turning Pain Into Political Power [panel] moderated by Kimberly Ellis.” He writes: “What I learned from the amazing women on the #BlackLivesMatter panel is how the black community uses Twitter as a tool to communicate, to build and share their common identity, to help each other through instances of obvious racism or interactions with the ignorant, and to be their own un-white-filtered news channel. What I heard loud and clear was a direct ask for help, for all of us white and black, to plant seeds, start and nurture engaging each other. I didn’t hear this as a desperate people’s ask but, that from strong, powerful and engaged fellow-Americans.”