Vulnerabilities

With Charleston’s church massacre in the background, BuzzFeed’s Joseph Bernstein takes a close look at Stormfront, the website that apparently had a big influence on the shooter. Bernstein writes, Stormfront was founded by a former grand wizard of the American Ku Klux Klan but functions as “not just a hangout for American white supremacists, it is a hub that brings together white nationalists from around the world.” Foreign visitors make up about half of the site’s traffic, Bernstein reports, and its thriving sub-forums connect racist hotbeds in Britain, the Netherlands, Australia, Canada, Serbia, Croatia, and several other countries.

Emperor, meet clothes: The massive breach of the Office of Personnel Management ought to teach us that “the U.S. government has no idea what it is doing when it comes to cybersecurity,” writes Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Trevor Timm in The Guardian. Worse, he notes, “the government’s main ‘solutions’ may leave all our data even more vulnerable to privacy violations and security catastrophes.”

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee had a genuine townhall forum on Facebook Monday—genuine in the sense that his staff apparently didn’t filter questions in advance—and the results, predictably, are all over the place, Caitlin Macneal reports for TalkingPointsMemo.

Libertarian-leaning Lincoln Labs has put out the call for its second annual Reboot Conference July 17-18 in San Francisco, and while we wish them well, we also wish they had a better ratio than 42 men and 9 women speaking. Are these really the “best and the brightest from the tech and political worlds”?

Netroots Nation, the annual gathering of progressive activists that grew out of the DailyKos.com blogging community, has announced that Democratic presidential candidates Gov. Martin O’Malley and Sen. Bernie Sanders will be participating in a special town hall event during the conference, which is taking place in Phoenix, July 16-19. No word yet on whether front-runner Hillary Clinton will join in.

Nick Gillespie, the editor of Reason.com, explains what happened when a federal prosecutor subpoenaed him for information on some commenters who had made threatening remarks on a story he wrote, and then imposed a gag order on him preventing him from talking about it.

This is civic tech: San Francisco’s Anti-Eviction Mapping Project has released a new oral history map that brings to life the stories of people on the bottom side of the city’s tech boom. This is a great example of how to mesh data with story-telling. (Click on the blue dots in the map.)

Over the last several years, Sean Parker has donated more than $600 million to his eponymous Sean N. Parker Foundation, the billionaire announced yesterday, making the news official now that he has established a formal foundation structure, Sarah Buhr reports for TechCrunch. He plans to put the money to work on behalf of civic engagement, public health, and bio tech.

Our Jessica McKenzie covers the launch of Rhinobird.tv, a livestreaming app that, unlike Periscope or Meerkat, allows users to build a channel using a common hashtag in real-time. Its CEO, Felipe Heusser, is a member of Civic Hall.