Archive: Year: 2015

Losses RIP David Carr. The media web is filled with sorrow for his untimely end; I think Dave Weigel captures best why this is such a personal loss for so many people. Early errors on the technology front by John Ellis (Jeb) Bush have some Democratic techies crowing, reports Darren Samuelsohn for Politico. The Bush tech team has redacted personal details of most of the more than 12,000 individuals whose data was exposed by his release of emails from his days as Governor of Florida, the Guardian reports. #ThanksObama explained, and pwned by the President. The next Knight News Challenge is focused on better informing voters and increasing civic participation around elections. There's $3 million available from Knight, the Democracy Fund, Hewlett Foundation and Rita...

Foundations Yesterday at NetGain, a conference on the intersection of philanthropy and the Internet held at the Ford Foundation, the biggest and boldest idea I heard came from Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive. It's called "Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web." Here's a joint op-ed in the Chronicle of Philanthropy from Alberto Imbarguen of the Knight Foundation, Mark Surman of the Mozilla Foundation and Darren Walker of the Ford Foundation, calling on foundations to "jump-start a digital revolution for the common good." Also at NetGain, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio made a strong plea for increased philanthropic investment in projects that bring affordable high-speed internet access to disadvantaged communities. Related: In Gotham Gazette, Kristen Meriwether explains how...

Oversharing Tuesday saw the "mass exodus" of senior staff and employees from the New Organizing Institute, reports Evan McMorris-Santoro for BuzzFeed, apparently due to conflict with executive director Ethan Roeder, Barack Obama's former campaign data guy. NOI's board of directors refused to fire Roeder at the staff's request, prompting mass resignation. In a post explaining her decision, software developer Shannon Turner wrote, "the NOI I left today is not the NOI I joined." Ethan Czahor, the CTO of John Ellis Bush's (that's "Jeb" to the plebes) new political action committee "Right to Rise" resigned yesterday after reporters like Igor Bobic of the Huffington Post discovered he had started deleting past tweets of his that were sexist and homophobic. Speaking of John Ellis Bush (Jeb), T.C. Sottek reports for The Verge on...

Impacts Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain writes an "open letter" to British PM David Cameron, explaining why the British government's insistence on banning the use of strong encryption so as to be able to eavesdrop on online communications is a "very bad idea." The EFF's Jillian York explains why it is important to develop alternative funding streams for privacy software, noting that much of the field is dependent of money from the US government, with paradoxical results. BuzzFeed is interviewing President Obama Tuesday and its editor-in-chief, Ben Smith, wants your questions. Why the recommendations of Google's advisory panel on the right to be forgotten will probably be forgotten. The Oscar's of Tech? Katie Jacobs Stanton, the VP of global media at Twitter, went to the...

Scenarios How a "ragtag band of activists" won the battle for net neutrality. Brendan Sasso reports on how Marvin Ammori, Stanford's Barbara van Schewick, David Segal of Demand Progress, Fight for the Future (led by Tiffiniy Cheng and Holmes Wilson), Public Knowledge and Free Press, plus a big chunk of the start-up community led by Etsy, Kickstarter and Tumblr, got the FCC to shift its posture on the issue. See also David Dayen's report in The New Republic on the fight. Bloomberg's David Weigel reports on how conservatives opposed to net neutrality are trying to make their own viral campaign take off. Most investigative journalists in America believe the government has probably collected data about their communications, the Pew Research Center reports in...

Cycles Writing for Wired, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler explains his proposed new rules "to preserve the internet as an open platform for innovation and free expression." By classifying internet service under Title II of the Communications Act, he says "enforceable, bright-line rules will ban paid prioritization, and the blocking and throttling of lawful content and services" and these rules will also fully apply to mobile broadband. In the Atlantic, Robinson Meyer charts how activists managed to make Title II reclassification into a politically feasible, even desirable, approach for the FCC to take when a year ago it seemed like a fantasy. In the Hill, Mario Trujillo highlights six key points about the FCC chairman's proposal. A few details we'd like fleshed out: what...

Correlations This is civic tech: In Chicago, open government data tracking the work of city snow plows, scraped and displayed on ClearStreets.org, an app made by the Open City civic hacker group, shows that a relatively quiet dead-end street recently got a lot of attention from snow-removal crews. As Dan Mihalopoulos reports for the Chicago Sun-Times, the street, which was plowed five times during and after last weekend's winter storm is where City Alderman Ed Burke, the council's senior and most powerful member, lives. A few blocks away, streets were still unplowed. Privacy reformers are not very impressed by the changes President Obama is making in the NSA's current surveillance programs, report Dan Roberts and Dominic Rushe for The Guardian. CNN's Chris Moody...

Foreshadowing Confirming weeks of speculation, Steve Lohr of The New York Times reports that FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is going to "propose regulating Internet service like a public utility" as a telecommunications service under Title II of the Communications Act, but they will take a "light-touch approach" to applying that decision. The actual proposal from Wheeler to his fellow commissioners is expected tomorrow. Wheeler also has given the cities of Chattanooga, Tennessee and Wilson, North Carolina a preemption allowing them to ignore state laws preventing them from building their own broadband networks, reports Jason Koebler for Motherboard. In his new budget, President Obama is asking for $105 million to create digital teams in 25 government agencies modeled on the new US Digital Service,...

Info-Kale Internet Says Go: It's taken a long time, but in the fight over net neutrality rules at the FCC, open internet activists appear to have moved from simply blocking bad laws (read: SOPA, PIPA) to constructively supporting better policy (read: reclassifying broadband as a communications service), reports Dominic Rushe for The Guardian. The Open Technology Institute's Danielle Kehl takes to The Hill to stamp down ill-founded concerns that reclassifying broadband as a communications service would somehow lead to the United Nations' takeover of the Internet. Steven Levy reports on how Facebook is continually tweaking News Feed, aiming to make it the central daily experience of its more than 1.3 billion users. The problem, he explains, is that the company's algorithms are taught...

Upgrades Having beaten her, now they want to join her: Obama 2012 digital alums Teddy Goff and Andrew Bleeker are among the many hoping to work on Hillary Clinton's emerging presidential campaign, Darren Samuelsohn reports for Politico. The US government's Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has reiterated its call for President Obama to stop the mass collection of America's phone meta-data, Spencer Ackerman reports for The Guardian. "“It’s now well past time for the administration to have developed alternative procedures and alternative relationships with the telephone companies to stop the daily flow of data to the government,” one member of the board, James Dempsey, said. Newly released documents add further detail to the DEA's planned use of license plate readers to track...