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First POST: Bad Bet

BY Miranda Neubauer | Tuesday, November 27 2012

Top TechPresident picks

Around the web

  • The Supreme Court rejected a request to review a recent ruling that the First Amendment protects a right to record the actions of police officers as they perform their public duties, Ars Technica reported.

  • The ACLU offers its analysis of demands to block Hamas from Twitter, highlighting a statute criminalizing “material support” for terrorism.

  • David Kappos, the head of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, plans to step down in January. Kappos had recently offered a defense of software patents.

  • Intrade was blocked for Americans yesterday after the Commodities Futures Trading Commission filed a lawsuit against it.

  • Grover Norquist and Laura Murphy, director of the American Civil Liberty Union’s Washington Legislative Office, cowrote an op-ed calling for changes to the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act to take into account new developments like cloud storage.

  • Facebook recently revealed some data from its Facebook voting application. According to a note, over 9 million users said they were voting on Facebook, or 8.6 percent of the U.S. Facebook population. Facebook looked at patterns by political affiliation and fan pages. "It turns out people who liked [Paul] Ryan or Michelle Obama were more likely to use the voting button than people who only liked one of the presidential candidates ... We also looked at non-human entities. As we expected, 'Binders Full Of Women' and 'Big Bird' topped the list. Big Bird's Facebook page got a surge of Facebook likes after Romney's reference to the Sesame Street character when he was describing cuts he'd make to PBS during the first presidential debate."

  • The White House recently added a SoundCloud presence.

  • A Pew study found that even though Obama received less support from young voters, the youth votes he did get likely mattered more.

  • Peter Singer from the Brookings Institution suggests that fears about cyberterror are misguided. "About 31,300. That is roughly the number of magazine and journal articles written so far that discuss the phenomenon of cyber terrorism. Zero. That is the number of people that who been hurt or killed by cyber terrorism at the time this went to press."

  • ICYMI: MySociety's Tom Steinberg wrote about why he works on non-partisan technology.

  • Chris Kemp, founder of OpenStack, wrote for GigaOm about how "government can turbocharge private sector innovation."

  • PEN International issued a declaration on "Digital Freedom."

  • The New York Times reported on the growing start-up community in Midwestern towns.

  • In an op-ed on how to "rebuild America," Rahm Emanuel cites Chicago's investment in increasing access to gigabit-speed broadband.

  • David Segal, Patrick Ruffini and David Moon are raising money on Indiegogo for a book titled "Hacking Politics: How we beat SOPA and saved the Internet."

  • Political and weather sites saw large traffic in October, according to Comscore.

  • The Boston Globe profiled Bluefin Labs and its efforts to analyze social media content related to politicis and commerce.

  • New York City has amassed a large collection of cell phone logs from subpoenas of records from stolen phones, the New York Times reports.

  • The L.A. Times profiled the Cyber Corps program at the University of Tulsa.

International

  • The Washington Post reported on the challenges that arise when countries allied with the U.S. turn to America for cyberwarfare or cybersecurity expertise.

  • The Guardian takes a look at Julian Assange's new book.

  • Immigration and Customs Enforcement and European law enforcement agencies announced that they had seized 132 domain names allegedly involved in selling counterfeit merchandise in "Project Cyber Monday 3" and "Project Transatlantic" operations.

  • Civil rights activists, free speech advocates, lawyers and politicians are increasingly calling into question elements of India's internet laws, such as those that make it a crime to digitally send “any information that is grossly offensive or has menacing character," the New York Times reported.

  • The New York Times reports that some of the new versions of India's Aakash tablet were made in China.

  • The Canadian government is increasingly requesting that content be removed from the web.

  • Anonymous hackers have cost Paypal £3.5m, according to British court testimony.

  • Glenn Greenwald contrasted how Wikileaks has been crippled through financial pressure and cyberattacks possibly U.S. authorities, and the U.S. pursuit of people associated with Anonymous.

  • Google Germany has released a video, "Defend Your Net," advocating against a German government proposal that would require the search engine to pay a license fee for indexing news content. The video shows various searches over the years on Google for news content, how to donate money after the tsunami in Thailand, a search related to a German soccer star, a child typing in a misspelled search query about Knut, the polar bear in Berlin, and various attempts to search for Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull. The video links to a campaign page that encourages users to contact their Bundestag representatives.

  • The AP reported on what the death of an Iranian blogger reveals about the country's online surveillance.

  • With frequent protests underway, the Spanish government is proposing a law that would prohibit citizens from taking photos and video of riot police.

  • The Jewish Agency for Israel and the Israeli Ministry for Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs held a four-day training event for young Russian Jews on how to use social media to promote the country's image.

  • Various smartphone applications are now available to warn Israelis about incoming missile alerts or show them close shelter locations.

  • The Open Government Partnerhip profiled an e-census effort in Bulgaria.

  • A court in Germany has ruled against users of an anonymous and encrypted file-sharing network.

  • The Free Software Foundation Europe welcomes a German government whitepaper endorsing the idea of a "Secure Boot" function.

  • The emergence of new evidence has prompted new efforts to throw out the U.S. case against Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom

  • .

  • The largest online video archive library devoted to the historic, cultural and tourism heritage of the Mediterranean has recently launched, Infodocket reported.

News Briefs

RSS Feed friday >

Chilean Anti-Corruption Resource: A Crowdsourced Database of Social and Political Connections

In countries where a small minority of social circles have a majority of the political and economic power, personal relationships can affect major decision-making, a serious concern of anti-corruption activists. A new web platform stores personal profiles of key players in Chilean business and politics, complete with biographies and personal and professional connections through family, education, social circles, employers and coworkers, to make tracking social relationships and conflict-of-interest easier. Called Poderopedia (from the Spanish word for power), the project sounds kind of like LinkedIn, but the creation and management of profiles is being crowdsourced out to journalists, activists and concerned citizens.

GO

Middle Eastern Telecom Accused of Working With Saudi Arabia to Spy on Citizens

Mobily, an arm of the state-owned Middle Eastern telecom giant Etihad Etisalat, has been accused of working with Saudi Arabia to develop software that would allow the government to bypass protections for social media users. The exposé comes from Moxie Marlinspike (neé Matthew Rosenfield), an expert in a certain type of malicious Internet attack called MITM (man-in-the-middle), whereby attackers intercept and secretly alter private messages exchanged via email and other social media platforms. GO

Saudi Religious Leader Warns Twitter Users of Consequences in the Afterlife

In late March, Saudi Arabia's top religious cleric said Twitter was for clowns and corrupters. Earlier this week, he said anyone using social media, in particular Twitter, “has lost this world and the afterlife.” His comments might be laughable, if they did not come at a time when the Saudi government is looking into monitoring or blocking social media sites and eliminating user anonymity.

GO

thursday >

What The Other Silicon Valley Immigration Group Is Doing This Month

A bipartisan coalition of political advocacy, business and tech groups are moving ahead to launch a social media blitz next week designed to persuade members of the Senate to vote in favor of immigration reform legislation supported in Silicon Valley. "We're going to create a virtual digital storm," said Jeremy Robbins in a Wednesday ... GO

The New Yorker Hopes "Strongbox" Is a Wiretap-Proof Sieve for Leaks

The New Yorker yesterday became the first outlet to implement DeadDrop, a new system for sources to submit information to journalists online in a more secure and anonymous way than, for example, email. GO

Female Organizer of Pakistan's First Hackathon Stresses Collaboration Over Competition

After Pakistan banned Valentine's Day this year, Sabeen Mahmud started an online protest in which people uploaded photos to mock the government ban. In the weeks following she received death threats and menacing phone calls, and early on she had to stay home from work. That did nothing, however, to keep her from further organizing. Last month, the café she started in Karachi hosted Pakistan's first ever hackathon, which tackled problems including sanitation, crime, disaster management, and education. She even invited a government representative to observe the initial conversations, tackling sensitive areas like government inefficiency and elections.

GO

wednesday >

White House Innovation Fellows Project Spins Off Into A Business

Clay Johnson and Adam Becker joined the Presidential Innovation Fellows program to help the White House fix the way government does business. Now they're turning that mission into a business themselves. GO

Fighting Fires With Data, New York City Launches New Safety Inspection System

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today that New York City has implemented city-wide a new risk based inspection system focused on fire safety that is driven by analytics from multiple city agencies. GO

Chinese Netizens Use Digital Initiative to Gain Media Attention for Unsolved Poisoning Case

Last month a medical science student at a Shanghai university died from poisoning, allegedly murdered by his roommate. The specifics of the crime echoed a case from the mid-1990s, in which a 19-year-old student was poisoned with thallium. That case has once again been thrown into the media spotlight, but after 18 years the media has changed and the spotlight means a trending hashtag on Sina Weibo or an online petition to the U.S. President.

GO

PDF France 2013: “Au Code, Citoyens!”

This year PDF France will take place in Paris on June 13, with the theme "Au Code, Citoyens!" ("To Code, Citizens!") The speakers' lineup includes some of the continent's leaders in the digital revolution. GO

tuesday >

Website Imitation is Flattery in New York City Council Race

A New York City Council candidate who had made his name as a technology consultant and spearheaded an open government initiative several years ago found parts of his website copied by another City Council candidate in a different borough, as Politicker first reported. GO

Mike Honda Locks Up Establishment Support, But Challenger Has Ear of the Silicon Valley Elite

Some of Silicon Valley's most influential business people will hold a fundraiser in San Francisco this Thursday for Ro Khanna, the 36-year-old lawyer who's challenging 71-year-old California Democrat Mike Honda for his 17th Congressional District seat. The names at the top of the invite: Ron Conway and Sean Parker. They're apparently forming a committee to help Khanna build his campaign. The other bold-face names who are listed as part of the 'committee in formation' include Salesforce.com's Founder and CEO Marc Benioff, Benchmark Capital General Partners' Matt Cohler and Peter Fenton, tech entrepreneur Shawn Fanning, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, her big data venture investor husband Zach Bogue, and Conway's SV Angel colleague, Founder and Managing Partner David Lee. GO

Tools to Keep Independent Media Online in Hostile Environments

Websites and media outlets in developing countries or countries with corrupt or repressive regimes struggle daily to fend off hacker attacks, some from their own government — like the Malaysian news portal Sarawak Report, which techPresident reported was taken down in April by sustained denial-of-service attacks. The negative attention controversial reporting draws can scare local advertisers away as well, making it difficult for a media company to support itself. Media Frontiers offers two services to websites dealing with either of those problems.

GO

monday >

Ahead of September Elections, German Pirate Party Picks Its Platform

The German Pirate Party held its election year convention over the weekend and approved its party platform, following lengthy debate over the role that online decision-making should have within the party, as German news sources reported and the party outlined on its own web platforms. GO

Peruvians Petition their President to Stick Up for their Digital Rights

Peru’s civil society advocacy groups have started an online petition outlining their ‘non-negotiable’ demands for digital rights and freedom of speech. The campaign was prompted by the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. Lima, Peru, will soon host the 17th round of secretive TPP trade talks, which will take place from May 15 – 24.

GO

Gun Control Advocates Take Aim At LivingSocial for Promoting Guns and Alcohol

A coalition of advocacy groups is launching a new campaign this week against the promotion of American gun culture. The campaign focuses on the daily deals site Living Social, which hasn't stopped promoting social events Hunter S. Thompson would have loved (they promote shooting off guns and letting off steam and drinking.) GO

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