Filters

This is civic tech: Here’s a great list of 30 mission-driven start-ups, curated by Tradecraft.

Tech and politics: It appears that the Russian hack of the DNC actually encompassed as many as 100 Democratic officials’ accounts as well as several party committees, Eric Lichtblau and Eric Schmidt report for The New York Times.

Building on David Robinson’s work, an analysis of Donald Trump‘s tweets byAndrew McGill for The Atlantic suggests his campaign is reducing his ability to tweet from his own phone.

The nonpartisan voting rights group Democracy North Carolina is predicting “a disastrous train wreck at the polls” if local election boards don’t expand early voting schedules. With turnout in the swing state expected to be high and the end of straight-ticket voting on the state’s long ballot, plus the fact that nearly half the state’s voters live in super-sized precincts, lines on Election Day are likely to be extra-long.

You can now send a note to President Obama “simply by messaging the White House on Facebook,” Jason Goldman announces on Medium.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is digging himself a deeper hole in the fever swamps by putting up a $20,000 bounty for information about the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich, Peter Hermann and Clarence Williams report for The Washington Post.

David Meyer reports for Fortune that Swedish authorities will soon be questioning Assange in his refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London about the rape allegations against him in Sweden.

Brave new world: Wired’s Andy Greenberg reports on a newly revealed vulnerability with millions of Volkswagen cars that allows hackers to easily break into the cars’ key fob system.

Singapore will starting testing a small fleet of self-driving taxis next year, Reuters reports. The cabs will have drivers on board if piloting systems fail but by 2019 or 2020 they hope to be able to remove them from the cars.

In the wake of Snapchat’s release of a racist yellowface filter, and recounting the company founder’s seemingly blasé attitude toward staff diversity, Medium’s Katie Zhu issues a call for users to delete the app.

Snapchat removed the feature, which it said was supposed to be an “anime” filter, but said it didn’t think it was racist, Sarah Emerson reports for Motherboard.

The web we want: Writing for Digital Trends, digital philosopher (and longtime friend of Civic Hall) David Weinberger reports on a new MIT-based project from Tim Berners-Lee, called Solid, that is trying to build a way for “you to own your own data while making it available to the applications that you want to be able to use it.”

Related: Anil Dash (another longtime FoCH) provides a detailed history of all the features that came with the open web, and how our new era of social media and closed gardens leaves out lots of the good stuff.