"Burying" Data Until Convenient Undermines The UK's Open Data Efforts
BY Jessica McKenzie | Monday, January 27 2014
They don't have to bury it forever, just long enough (Marshall Astor - Food Fetishist/Flickr)
Revelations that the UK government held back crucial information about the effects of alcohol pricing on health, until a policy decision about it had gone by, have left some questioning the United Kingdom's open data program.
Read MoreUber Sued By Parents of Six-Year-Old Killed On New Year's Eve
BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Monday, January 27 2014
A New Year Eve's accident that killed a six-year-old in San Francisco is reviving the debate over ride-sharing and insurance
The parents of the six-year-old girl who was killed on New Year's Eve by a driver who was using UberX to find rides filed suit against the company on Monday. The family's lawyer Christopher Dolan said that this is the first wrongful death lawsuit filed against Uber. The local tragedy registered as a blip on the national radar news screen because it involved the white hot urban transportation provider Uber, which with its $361. 2 million in venture capital funding late last summer, is poised to transform urban transportation as we currently know it. Its flagship service is a mobile on-demand limo service that enables commercially insured town cars to find nearby hails with the app. It also operates UberX, a lower-cost peer-to-peer ride-sharing service in 24 cities and states in the United States. UberX is one of several mobile services that connects drivers with their own cars to people who need to get around town, sets and processes payments, and takes a 20 percent cut of the transactions. The insurance status of this arrangement isn’t as clear-cut, and the New Year’s Eve accident brings back into sharp focus the still fuzzy question of who should be held financially liable when there’s no designated central company entrusted with all the traditional legal and financial obligations of a commercial taxi service. Read More
Participatory Budgeting Working in Brazil, Study Finds
BY Jessica McKenzie | Monday, January 27 2014
Accounting ledger (melstampz/Flickr)
A study released at the end of last year shows that Participatory Budgeting (PB) in Brazil “generate[s] meaningful change” and has a quantifiably positive impact on cities.
Read MoreWhat Swartz, Lessig, Assange & Snowden Have to Teach Us
BY Micah L. Sifry | Monday, January 27 2014
Is the lone hacker-whistleblower model of change working? (flickr: Meet the Media Guru/biatch0r/Robert Douglass/Doc Searls)
The following is the text of the remarks I made yesterday at "As Darkness Falls," an international conference that took place this past weekend in Berlin, which was focused on "Theory and Practice of Self-Empowerment in the Age of Digital Control." (People here are taking the NSA surveillance revelations very seriously.) One of my co-panelists was Jacob Applebaum, an independent hacker and security expert who works on Tor, whom I refer to as Jake at one point in my comments. Video of our full panel should be posted online soon. Read More
Good Faith Efforts To Improve Democracy in Indonesia?
BY Jessica McKenzie | Friday, January 24 2014
Photo: Flickr/KCIvey
Democracy in Indonesia has two things going for it this year—a new organization called Ayo Vote, which hopes to mobilize young people and get them to the polls, and a government sponsored website where voters can peruse the CVs of their potential representation.
Read MoreA Burgeoning Hacker Culture in Haiti
BY Jessica McKenzie | Thursday, January 23 2014
A scene from the 2013 Haiti hackathon (EricGoldhagen/Flickr)
Haiti's first hackathon ever took place only one year ago, in February 2013, but since then students at the Ecole Supérieure d'Infotronique d'Haiti (ESIH) have held two more hacking events and are even now forming a coding club called Enjoy.code. More than 100 students have applied to be a part of the new club. In an interview with techPresident, the Directeur Général of ESIH Patrick Attie talked about the burgeoning hacker culture in his school.
Read MoreWhen It Comes To Internet Censorship, China & Iran Are All In This Together
BY Jessica McKenzie | Wednesday, January 22 2014
Iran's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology just announced that China will be collaborating with them on Iran's "clean Internet" or the National Information Network. Officials from China's Information Council met with Nasrollah Jahangard, Iran's Head of Internet and Communications Technology, earlier this month to iron out the deal.
Read MoreFirst POST: Bitcoin Agonistes
BY Micah L. Sifry | Wednesday, January 22 2014
Is Bitcoin going to change the world? One of the inventors of the web browser thinks so; Edward Snowden denies being a Russian puppet; the Ukrainian government geolocates protesters and sends them a scary SMS; and much, much more. Read More
NYC Tech Group Seizes on de Blasio Agenda with Call for Traffic Accident Data
BY Miranda Neubauer | Wednesday, January 22 2014
(Transportation Alternatives)
For the New York City technology community, it is time for better traffic data to help prevent some of the unintended dangerous traffic problems in New York City. BetaNYC, New York City's Code for America brigade, is embracing the prospect of change under the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio by seizing on his agenda priority to prevent pedestrian fatalities to renew its call for the city and the NYPD to release traffic data in a more usable format. Read More
Hadrian's Firewall: UK's New Internet Filter or Censor?
BY Wendy M. Grossman | Wednesday, January 22 2014
The UK Internet is getting its own Hadrian's Wall, an ancient fortification in Northern England (quisnovus/flickr)
"Hadrian's Firewall," the veteran journalist Guy Kewney called it in 2006, the first time I wrote about plans for UK-wide content blocking. The term is much more valid now: just before Christmas British ISPs turned on a system that requires subscribers to actively choose whether they want filtering that will block material in broad categories such as sex, alcohol, violence, and hate speech. In response, the Open Rights Group is gearing up to collect evidence of whether and how the filters work. Of particular concern to ORG is the problem of over-blocking with little redress available to site owners, as well as the dangers inherent in over-confidence in the technology. Read More