Archive: Category: TechPresident

Monkeying A careful look at the Republican-led net neutrality bill shows it provides net neutrality "in name only," report Stanford law professor Barbara van Schewick and grad student Morgan Weiland in the Stanford Law Review. They write, "the bill is so narrowly written that it fails to adequately protect users, innovators, and speakers against blocking, discrimination, and access fees." See also Hamza Shaban in The Verge on "how the new Republican Congress plans to undercut net neutrality." Heads-up! With the net-neutrality fight cresting at the end of February with the FCC's pending vote on its open internet rules, there will be no better place to be than "F2C: Freedom to Connect 2015" (#F2C15) on March 2-3 at Civic Hall. The long-running conference curated...

Punch List In last night's State of the Union speech, President Obama reiterated his support for "a free and open internet" and promised to "extend its reach to every classroom and every community, and help folks build the fastest networks." On his "Tales of the Sausage Factory" blog, Public Knowledge's Harold Feld explains why "that little paragraph actually packs some good punch in Washington speak." The President also gave strong emphasis to his administration's cyber-security agenda, notes Cory Bennett of The Hill. The full text of Obama's speech was posted online in advance by the White House on Medium, giving the web audience the same access to the text that attendees and reporters have long enjoyed, notes Alan Yuhas for The Guardian. Senator Joni...

Goggles In the New York Times, Jonathan Weisman parses the "shifting politics of net neutrality" as the FCC prepares to vote, noting how some Republicans are now adopting "the language of the net neutrality movement." Ready for Hillary, the pro-Clinton Super PAC, is negotiating to give its Facebook and Twitter assets to Emily's List, reports Liz Kreutz of ABC News, while it will give its 3 million-member email list to Clinton's official campaign once it is set up. "The average life of a web page is about a hundred days," historian Jill Lepore writes in her fascinating New Yorker story on the Internet Archive's efforts to save the web before most of it gets deleted. She covers problems like "link rot," "content drift,"...

Urgency What would MLK say? Eighty people own as much wealth as the poorest half of the world, Mona Chalabi reports for FiveThirtyEight. Since 2009, the wealth of those eighty has doubled in nominal terms, she adds. Republicans on Capitol Hill are dropping their long-standing opposition to net-neutrality rules, reports Kate Tummarello for Politico. Now a bill being developed by Sen. John Thune (R-SD) and Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR) bans "paid prioritization" and extends net neutrality protections to wireless networks. Bloggers are due the same free speech protections as journalists, according to a federal appeals court ruling Friday, Dan Levine reports for Reuters. Congrats to DataKind (a founding organizational member of Civic Hall) for winning a renewed grant of $1.1 million from the Knight...

Inners In the New York Times, David Sanger reports on a new National Academy of Sciences study that claims their is "no effective alternative" to the bulk collection of metadata about all phone calls made in the US if the goal is tracking terrorism suspects. In ArsTechnica, Cyrus Farivar reports on a Swedish Pirate Party activist who created a wifi network called "Open Guest" at a security and defense conference and then logged the activities of the politicians, military officials and journalists who used it, all to protest mass surveillance. (h/t Mark Pesce.) In the Guardian, Ian Black offers a selection of the translated writings of Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, who has been sentenced to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes (delivered...

Competition Referring to state laws pushed by big telcos preventing cities from creating their own public broadband options, President Obama had this to say yesterday: “In too many places across America, some big companies are doing everything they can to keep out competitors. Today I am saying we are going to change that. Enough is enough.” Republicans in Washington "were swift to denounce" Obama's comments, Julian Hattem reports for The Hill, arguing that he was advocating more "big government" programs. The new upgraded version of VAN, the voter engagement platform used by many Democratic and progressive campaigns, looks pretty nifty. CityMart, the open procurement platform, is coming to the US, its founder and CEO Sascha Haselmayer, writes on the Knight Foundation blog. Ford (the car...

Command Lines The White House is unveiling a new report aimed at supporting more community-based broadband. As Amy Schatz reports for Re/code, "in reality, the White House isn't offering much new" beyond reiterating what the FCC has been saying about the topic. Still, with President Obama going to Cedar Rapids today to highlight the issue and the White House planning a June summit on local broadband access, the issue has never gotten more attention in Washington. Sophisticated software aimed at reading the emotion behind human facial expression was good enough to predict someone's voting preference with 73% accuracy, based on watching their reactions to clips of the Obama-Romney debates, Raffa Khatchadourian reports for The New Yorker in the course of a...

Believe it or not, it isn't too soon to start planning to attend Personal Democracy Forum 2015, taking place June 4-­5 at New York University's Skirball and Kimmel Halls. This is our twelfth annual conference! We've already confirmed these amazing speakers, who are all global leaders and innovators at the cutting edge of technology, politics and social change: Sunil Abraham - Executive director, Center for Internet & Society, Bangalore Cory Doctorow - Author and blogger, BoingBoing Harold Feld - Senior vice president, Public Knowledge Tristan Harris - Design ethics and product philosopher, Google Sandy Heierbacher - Executive director, National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation Nanjira Sambuli - Research manager, iHub Nairobi Astra Taylor - Author, "The People's Platform" Zephyr Teachout - Professor, Fordham Law School If past years are...

Turbulence In the wake of the recent terrorist attacks in France, British prime minister David Cameron is calling for making encrypted communications services illegal, reports Andrew Griffin for The Independent. And interior ministers of twelve major European countries are calling for increased censorship of offensive material online, David Meyer reports for GigaOm. In case you need a refresher course in why Cameron's call is stupid and unworkable, just read this from BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow. Apposite: Iceland's visionary MP Birgitta Jonsdottir guest-edited the latest issue of The New Internationalist, and here is her opening essay on "Democracy in the digital era." (The full issue, which is only available to subscribers, includes essays by Jillian York, Dunja Mijatovic, Nick Davies, Sunil Abraham, Eric King,...

Recaps Previewing next week's State of the Union speech, President Obama is visiting Cedar Falls, Iowa this Wednesday to offer "new steps to increase access to affordable, high-speed broadband," the Des Moines Register's Jennifer Jacobs reports. The city is Iowa's only gigabit city, she notes. Obama is also going to "call for better safeguards against identity theft, improved privacy protection, [and] enhanced cybersecurity for the government and private companies," Michael Shear reports for The New York Times. "Both Democrats and Republicans are desperate for any edge at the polls, and they say they’ll be employing 21st-century data mining techniques in search of supporters from this ripe demographic that has little or no track record in politics," reports Darren Samuelsohn for Politico. He writes,...