First POST: Urgency
BY Micah L. Sifry | Monday, January 19 2015
How Republicans are starting to embrace net neutrality; more predictions of the blockchain's impact on society; new "innovative communities" legislation in Massachusetts seeks to boost civic tech there; and much, much more. Read More
First POST: Precrime
BY Micah L. Sifry | Thursday, July 24 2014
How the US government determines who to put on its "known or suspected terrorist" list, no-fly list and selectee list; Israelis sharing Gaza casualty news over social media; Twitter's diversity report; and much, much more. Read More
First POST: Angry News Feed
BY Micah L. Sifry | Wednesday, July 23 2014
How Facebook's News Feed may be accentuating negative political polarization; new tools for visualizing political corruption; how posting your cat's photo online gives away your location; and much, much more. Read More
As Sandy Approaches the East Coast, Hackers Build Tools to Understand the Storm
BY Nick Judd | Monday, October 29 2012
A group of volunteer hackers concentrated in MIT's Media Lab have built this map of live-streaming webcams in and around Hurricane Sandy's expected path. The page also allows users to add live streams to the list. The live stream map reuses source code originally written to compile a list of live streams for people to follow along with Occupy Wall Street protests, says Charlie deTar, the MIT Media Lab Ph.D student who is hosting the map. Read More
Two Apps Now in Development Hope to Expose the People Behind Political TV Ads
BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Thursday, July 19 2012
Two new projects launching in summer or early fall seek to arm smart-phone-owning voters with new tools to navigate what is expected to be a $9.8 billion assault on their perception of reality. One is a mobile app from developer Bob Lannon and the Sunlight Foundation* called "Ad Hawk." The other, "Super PAC App," is from two graduate school students who came up with the idea in a MIT class that tasks students to come up with apps in a world that assumes that all television will be social — upending the one-way nature of broadcast TV that's contributed to negative political television advertising's success. Read More
Book Review: Consent of the Networked
BY Micah L. Sifry | Friday, February 3 2012
Book cover for Rebecca MacKinnon's "Consent of the Networked"
Last night, a crowd of more than one hundred gathered on the sixth floor of MIT's Media Lab to help Rebecca MacKinnon launch her new book, The Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom. The audience included net luminaries like Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, and Andrew Newman, the director of the Tor Project, and the discussion was at the same level. Herewith, my thoughts on her book salted by some observations from the event. Read More