Archive: Category: TechPresident

Clues Doc Searls and David Weinberger, two of the web's best thinkers, have updated The Cluetrain Manifesto, a seminal book they co-authored in 2000 along with Chris Locke and Rick Levine. Their 121 "New Clues" are well worth studying. A few of my favorites: 2. The devices we use to connect to the Internet are not the Internet. 9. The Internet is no-thing at all. At its base the Internet is a set of agreements, which the geeky among us (long may their names be hallowed) call "protocols," but which we might, in the temper of the day, call "commandments." 12. There has not been a tool with such a general purpose since language. For those of us with longish memories, one thing that is...

Overdue Speaking at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler strongly implied that the agency will be voting to reclassify Internet service providers under Title II of the Communications Act, invoking the common carrier frame to protect net neutrality, Megan Geuss reports for Ars Technica. Susan Crawford explains why "zero-rating" services that give users free data to access a limited portfolio of web services like Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia are pernicious. She writes, "… the cost of such services is the future of the Internet. Those users may never move to “real” Internet access, satisfied with their “free” access to a walled garden of chosen services. And carriers will have no particular incentive to provide them with...

Je Suis Charlie JeSuisCharlie. Reported.ly's coverage of the massacre. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush launched his 2016 presidential exploratory leadership PAC yesterday, posting videos speaking in English and Spanish while walking down a New York street, and raising more than $100,000 online in just the first few hours, Darren Samuelsohn and Tarini Parti report for Politico. Don't miss your chance to go "behind the scenes" with the House Republicans on Capitol Hill via their new Instagram page. No word on whether this will include making their actual legislative work more transparent. (h/t @NewtGingrich) Women make up only one-quarter of commenters on New York Times web pages, researcher Emma Pierson reports in a guest post on Nicholas Kristof's blog page, though their comments tend to get...

Pushbacks After you get past Ev Williams' throat-clearing clarification about why he "doesn't give a shit" if Instagram has more users than Twitter, the company he cofounded, his Medium essay about measuring attention rather than clicks is well worth your (ahem) time. Prediction lists proliferate at the beginning of the year and they're generally not worth much, but from this batch of "consultant predictions" over at Campaigns & Elections, John Rowley's stood out. "Groups of voters are going to push back against politicians having so much data on them," he predicts, and "2015 will be the last cycle major campaigns will worry much about news media relations with print." Sounds about right. (By the way, C&E editors: What's with not linking to...

Catch-ups Politico's Darren Samuelsohn rounds up the latest thinking on voter targeting techniques, with privacy advocates warning that at some point campaigns will go too far. The "invisible primary" for the 2016 presidential campaign starts now, and one requirement to be competitive, according to Nicco Mele of Harvard's Kennedy School, is an email list of at least one million supporters by this March, reports John McCormick for Bloomberg News. Democratic data wonks think they won (despite losing) in 2014 because they figured out how to "scale down" data sciences to state and local races, CNN Peter Hanby reports. Net neutrality update: Some imposition of Title II of the Communications Act seems more likely, reports Brian Fung for the Washington Post, taking the pulse of...

Cheers Bruce Schneier's expert doubts about North Korea's alleged role in the Sony hack make it into David Sanger's New York Times news analysis on "countering cyberattacks without a playbook." Kim Zetter of Wired surveys a bunch of other cybersecurity experts who also continue to have doubts about North Korea having committed the Sony hack. Access Now's Drew Mitnick and Amie Stepanovich offer some smart and sober policy recommendations for how to respond to the Sony hack, starting with not comparing it to an act of war and incentivizing improved digital security by companies and Internet users. The FCC now admits that it lost nearly 680,000 of the more than 4 million public comments submitted in response to its "open Internet" proposal, in a...

Dealing Security expert Bruce Schneier offers some sobering thoughts on the Sony hack, trying to dial down the claims that this is a case of "cyber-warfare." He writes: Remember, the hackers didn't start talking about The Interview until the press did. Maybe the NSA has some secret information pinning this attack on the North Korean government, but unless the agency comes forward with the evidence, we should remain skeptical. We don't know who did this, and we may never find out. I personally think it is a disgruntled ex-employee, but I don't have any more evidence than anyone else does. North Korea's Internet appeared to be under a cyber-attack, following on President Obama's promise of a "proportional response" to the Sony hack, reports...

Civic Hall, our new collaborative community center for civic tech innovators, will be opening in “beta” mode in late January. If you want to get in on Civic Hall's ground floor--well, literally we're on the second floor--send in your application now. How do you know if joining Civic Hall makes sense for you? If you are excited by the potential of technology and social innovation to make a positive difference in the world, and you are a change-maker yourself, you should consider making Civic Hall your home base. Being a member means having a great place to work and network, the opportunity to deepen your connections with peers and strategic partners, and a chance to co-create and participate in world-changing...

Brewing Democratic tech firms are starting to pick favorites in the emerging 2016 presidential field, reports Darren Samuelsohn in Politico. Several top firms, including Blue State Digital, Bully Pulpit Interactive, Catalist, NGP VAN, Precision Strategies, Rising Tide Interactive, Trilogy Interactive and 270 Strategies, are all jockeying to work for the as-yet-undeclared Hillary Clinton campaign, he notes, while others like Revolution Messaging appear to be hoping to help an Elizabeth Warren candidacy. Why hasn't campaigns' use of personal data led to the kind of backlash now surrounding companies like Uber? The Washington Post's Nancy Scola talked to some campaign data nerds, and the reason is contextual. As UNC professor Daniel Kreiss said to her, "what seems to matter in the political space...

MonopSony Speaking to Motherboard's Jason Koebler, cybersecurity expert Peter Singer points out that whatever the Sony hack is, it's not cyber-terrorism or an act of war: "The ability to steal gossipy emails from a not-so-great protected computer network is not the same thing as being able to carry out physical, 9/11-style attacks in 18,000 locations simultaneously." He adds, "I can't believe I'm saying this. I can't believe I have to say this." Taking the opposite point of view, Jonathan Chait argues in New York magazine that "a totalitarian regime has just successfully exerted control over American media" and that to prevent any such leverage the US government should therefore "guarantee Sony's financial liability in the event of an attack, or it should...