Archive: Category: TechPresident

Upvoted Republican-affiliated campaign "viral videos" are "dominating" YouTube and Facebook, reports Darren Samuelsohn for Politico, though a close reading of his article shows that in a number of cases their so-called "viraiity" is either overstated or based on negative attention. Twitter is suing the US government for the right to tell its users the exact number of national security letters and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court orders it has received, "in a meaningful way, rather than in broad, inexact ranges," its legal VP Ben Lee blogs. Whatever happens with the FCC's pending decision on its "open Internet" rules, there will be lawsuits, Edward Wyatt reports for the New York Times. Airbnb is finally legal in San Francisco, thanks to a vote of the city...

Optimized David Karpf chews on the DCCC's over-the-top email fundraising, salted with SumofUs' new engagement metric and suggest that the Democratic Party could be a lot stronger if it optimized its online campaign not only to raise money but to improve its standing among its own supporters. "Technology in Politics" is the subject of Wednesday's edition of Reinventors.net, with Ben Rattray of Change.org, veteran political consultant Joe Trippi, FEC Vice Chair Ann Ravel, Chris Kelly of Organizer, Jim Greer of CounterPAC, Nancy Scola of the Washington Post and Josh Ginsburg of Zignal Labs. Tune in on Google Plus at 11am PT. Recovery.gov, a key initiative of the Obama administration in its efforts to make government spending information more accessible to the public, just...

Ironies Lawrence Lessig and his fight against political corruption in America is the subject of a long and positive profile by Evan Osnos in The New Yorker. Best lines: Joi Ito, who says, "He's always fighting the most important fights, but he hasn't won many, and the fights are all still continuing." And Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, asked if he could be one of Lessig's 50 billionaires funding an "atomic bomb" to blow up the campaign finance system: "Absolutely, I can see myself involved. Part of the challenge is the collective-action problem. A group of us have to do it at the same time." How LinkedIn has managed to get a foothold in China. As Paul Mozur and Vindu Goel report...

Increasing "Occupy Central, aka the Umbrella Revolution," writes Andrew Lih in Quartz, "may be the most high-tech protest ever, using wireless broadband, multimedia smartphones, drone film making, mobile video projectors, and live streaming video to communicate and to broadcast their cause to the entire world in real time." His piece is a bit breathless about tech's role--it's hardly clear that "whoever dominates the digital domain will control the eventual outcome"; nor do we know in any detail how much local hyper-networking tools are helping the protesters reason together about their actions. How the Hong Kong protesters could win. Clay Shirky, who is teaching at NYU's Shanghai campus this year, reports in from Occupy Hong Kong, focusing on its social geography. Sascha Meinrath explains why local mesh networks...

Unimaginable Meet Joshua Wong, a 17-year-old student activist at the heart of Hong Kong's youth movement for democracy, who when he was 14 started an online group called Scholarism to oppose curriculum changes pushing more "patriotic education" on Hong Kong's students. In the New Yorker, Emily Parker explains how Hong Kong's current protests are different from a prior round of pro-democracy demonstrations in 2003: texting and WhatsApp to self-organize, Twitter to spread the news, and "the sense of being part of a global online community" rather than an isolated local event. At Occupier.hk/Standbyyou, people from around the world are posting messages that are being post on a screen in Hong Kong. Jenni Ryall of Mashable has written an unintentionally revealing post titled "Forget Airbnb:...

Outgassing Hong Kong's democracy protesters are playing cat and mouse with the authorities online, reports Paul Mozur for The New York Times. Our Rebecca Chao explains how Beijing modulates its online censorship to give mainland Chinese a little room to blow off steam, but not enough to organize meaningful political opposition. Julian Assange takes on Google CEO Eric Schmidt in his new book "When Google Met WikiLeaks," and in this interview with Ryan Grim and Sarah Harvard of the Huffington Post, he zeroes in on Schmidt's close relationship with the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton's State Department. Assange also disputes Schmidt's claim that Google is protecting its users data from NSA snooping, arguing that the company isn't encrypting user information that it stores...

Lifestyles According to Google's Eric Schmidt, co-author of the new book "How Google Works" on the company's innovative management methods, women who want to work and get ahead at great companies should take care of the kids and then log on at 11pm to keep doing their day job, too. To wit, as he says in an interview with Brian Bergstein of Technology Review, responding to a question about "work-life balance" and his book's notion that people should be "overworked in a good way": In the book, we mention the women we work with who have a terrible burden, if you will, of working in a startup: it’s intense, but then they also have the majority of the family duties, typically. Somehow,...

Showdown Pro-democracy demonstrators have taken over Hong Kong's main streets, Lily Kuo and heather Thomas report for Quartz, and the police are reportedly cutting off cell phone reception in protest areas. In response, in the last 24 hours, about 100,000 people in Hong Kong have downloaded FireChat, a mobile messaging app that enables users to form local groups via Bluetooth or WiFi, reports Patrick Boehler for the South China Morning Post. Meanwhile, a smartphone app that claims to coordinate the protests in Hong Kong is actually malware designed to spy on protestors, Code4HK, a government transparency group reports. Thousands of Facebook users are turning their profile pictures to a yellow ribbon in support of the Hong Kong movement and emergency solidarity rallies are rapidly...

Dogfood Hope springs eternal: Suddenly, everyone in the early-adopter neo-disrupter community is talking about Ello, and how it could maybe avoid the fate of other online social networks that tap into our all-too-human need for connection and then get taken over by the all-too-corrupting needs of venture capital. Here's Quinn Wilson's fascinating take and Andy Baio's informed skepticism about Ello's chances of avoiding the fate of Facebook and Twitter. Check your privilege: Media technologist Deanna Zandt (another PDM pal) writes that for Ello to be genuinely interesting, people getting on it should actively commit to using their invites to bring on friends who aren't already like them. Anil Dash would concur. FBI Director James Comey isn't happy about Apple and Google's plans for...

Sucks "Being a federal CIO means buying a used car, driving it off the lot, and only then looking under the hood and seeing what engine you've bought," says David Bray, the FCC's CIO. "And I've got a pretty old engine," he adds in a detailed story by the Washington Post's Nancy Scola on how that agency's web comment form collapsed as millions of responses surged in on its "open Internet" rulemaking proposal. Most revealing about her story: how tech-savvy net neutrality activists built work-arounds to make sure the flood of comments would be captured and properly tallied--and how the agency responded. Also this line from Scola is priceless: "Today the FCC is a communications agency that can't communicate, and that...