Houston Problems

#HarveyRelief: Occupy Sandy techie and activist Danny McGlashing is crowd-compiling a list of local shelters, food distribution sites, and volunteer locations on this map. He’s continuing a tradition of using social media to facilitate disaster relief that goes all the way back to the 2004 Katrina PeopleFinder project and Andy Carvin’s Tsunami-info.org project.

GoFundMe has created a central page for people asking for help in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.

And here’s a list of local aid organizations curated by Dan Solomon of The Texas Monthly.

CNN’s Brian Stelter reports on how stranded Texas residents are using social media to get help.

Why is Houston so vulnerable to this storm? This series of tweets from ProPublica recaps the details: “Climate change plays a role. So does Houston’s utter lack of zoning and relentless development in flood-prone areas,” including paving over more than 166,000 acres of mostly former coastal prairie since 2001.

As of this morning, the little Twitler hadn’t seen fit to share information with his 36 million Twitter followers about how to help people affected by Hurricane Harvey, but former President Obama did.

A quarter of the members of a presidential council focused on cybersecurity have resigned, Joseph Marks reports for NextGov. They cited President Trump’s “insufficient attention” to the nation’s cyber vulnerabilities as well as his undermining of the nation’s “moral infrastructure.”

Tech and politics: After ten years online, the white supremacy website Stormfront.org has been taken down by its host Network Solutions, reports Brittany Crocker for the Knoxville News Sentinel. It has also been prohibited from updating, transferring or deleting its content. The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law had been pressing Network Solutions to take this action, citing a clause in its acceptable use policy prohibiting the use of its domains to display bigotry, discrimination or hatred.

As April Glaser reports for Slate, with Stormfront offline, the planning for its annual “Great Smoky Mountain Summit” has also been disrupted. She writes that this could be a mixed blessing: “Long before this latest wave of Nazis and racist ideologues felt emboldened to march down the streets with torches and firearms in tow, they created communities online, where they validated and encouraged each other’s hate speech and actions. Now the tech companies that have long provided the white supremacists a home are starting to take action to shut them out, thus crippling their ability to build a cohesive movement. While that’s probably a good thing, it’s also quite possible that the sudden deluge of hate-group account deletions could serve to strengthen a budding white power movement in the U.S., which is already premised on the idea that they, the white people in America, are under attack.”

53 percent of the women surveyed in a new study on workplace culture in the tech industry say they have experienced harassment on the job, WomeninTech reports. 44 percent of the people of color working in tech report experiencing racial harassment. The full survey results are here.

Life in Facebookistan: Kashmir Hill writes for Gizmodo about being introduced to a long-lost relative via Facebook’s “People You May Know” feature, and being flummoxed—despite some very smart sleuthing—to understand how the company knew the two of them were related.

Former New York Times public editor Liz Spayd has been hired by Facebook to help manage the company’s new “transparency” efforts, Kara Swisher and Kurt Wagner report for Recode.

This is civic tech: Harvard Ash Center Democracy Fellow Hila Mehr offers six sensible guidelines for how and when to use artificial intelligence for delivering government services. She starts with: “AI should not be implemented in government just because it is a new, exciting technology.”

New York City councilman James Vacca has introduced a path-breaking bill requiring the city to make its decision-making algorithms public, Jim Dwyer reports for The New York Times. Algorithms in programs leased from private vendors would be subject to audits.

Your moment of zen: Spotify streams of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” followed an interesting pattern a week ago.