Scraping

What “sharing economy”? Remember Tom Slee and Murray Cox’s investigative report that raised questions about Airbnb’s host listing data in New York City? The company has now admitted, in a letter to New York lawmakers, many of whom have been critical of the company’s practices, that it removed selected listings from its sites before a carefully controlled data release back in December, as Kristen Brown reports for Fusion. Thus it has essentially confirming Slee and Cox’s core allegation, that it had cooked its books to reduce the number of multiple listings on the site. Airbnb now says it will keep removing hosts with multiple unit listings from its NYC site. More than one-third of host revenue still comes from such “sharelords.”

There’s a lesson here for journalists covering the “sharing economy”: sometimes the story is hidden in plain view, but you have to track company usage data over time or you’ll never see it. Slee and Cox had been scraping Airbnb public data for months, which is how they were able to spot the company’s own scrubbing of its listings in advance of its “transparency” push.

Opening government: President Obama has nominated Carla Hayden to be the Librarian of Congress, and Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing is thrilled: “Hayden is an actual librarian, she fought the Patriot Act, lobbies for open access, and the RIAA hates her,” he writes.

Crypto-wars, continued: Facing government pressure, Apple is working on new security steps that would make it impossible to break into locked iPhones, Matt Apuzzo, and Katie Benner report for the New York Times.

Lots of people turned out at #DontBreakOurPhone protests in support of Apple organized by Fight for the Future.

Tech and politics: Last Saturday, angered by the conviction of New York City police officer Peter Liang in the shooting death of Akia Gurley, thousands of Chinese-Americans protested in 40 cities across the country, a rapid and unusual convergence that was powered by people using the Chinese social media platform WeChat, Julie Makinen reports for the Los Angeles Times. One of the organizers publicizing the rallies is a mainland Chinese software engineer named Xie Shuisheng, who says his “Civil Rights” WeChat account gained 10,000 followers in the days after Liang’s conviction.

Google Jigsaw (formerly Google Ideas) is opening its “Project Shield” service to small, under-resourced news sites that need protection from DDOS attacks, Andy Greenberg reports for Wired. “We hope that Shield can do for DDOS what Gmail did for spam,” Jigsaw CEO Jared Cohen says.

Life inside Facebookistan: Is the walled garden coming down? Scripting News’ Dave Winer says Facebook’s Instant Articles helps the open web because they can contain markup, links out to the web, and because they’re built on RSS.