Whitehouse.gov edit wars

• The White House was the target of a hashtag started by conservatives, #ObamaInHistory, after a spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation discovered that the administration has added footnotes to official biographies of former presidents that appear to link their approaches or policies to Obama's. For example, Calvin Coolidge's biography on Whitehouse.gov compares Coolidge's first public radio address to Obama's use of social media, the New York Times reported.

  The White House added the footnotes on Monday in a section titled, “Did You Know?” under the official biographies, which were written by the historian Michael Beschloss and the journalist Hugh Sidey. A White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal operations told The New York Times and other news outlets on Tuesday that no biographies had been altered, and emphasized that the White House was simply adopting a promotion technique widely used on the Web. “We simply added links at the bottom of each page to related whitehouse.gov content, which is a commonly used best practice to encourage people to browse more pages on a site,” the official said. The footnote in the Coolidge biography seems mundane. But others broach more contentious subjects, like one in Mr. Reagan’s biography that mentioned his call for a fairer tax code with Mr. Obama’s push for the Buffett Rule, and another connecting Johnson’s signing of Medicare to Mr. Obama’s health care law.

H1-Please

• Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) has proposed legislation to raise the number of temporary visas for skilled technical workers.

Crop doxing

• Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has been using video platform VYou to connect with constituents. Separately, Reuters reported that Grassley said the government should prevent release of market-moving U.S. crop reports and other agricultural data during the newly lengthened commodity trading day to reduce the risk of price volatility.

Talk about an uncontested primary

• Americans Elect is officially ending its effort to field a third-party candidate this election season, as Paul Krugman, Dana Milbank and Ross Douthat reacted.

  Called it: Here's where Micah Sifry noted from the top that something supposed to drive political engagement from the bottom-up was still top-down, where David Karpf put a fork in their chances, and where Micah called the time of death.

Around the web

• The Obama administration unveiled the website http://www.alzheimers.gov as part of a larger push to research, respond and find a cure for the disease.

  Remember when the White House solution to reducing waste in government included cutting down on the number of government domain names?

• Two Greenpeace activists were arrested after they climbed a giant iPod at Apple headquarters to protest the company's use of "dirty energy" for its data centers, AFP reported.

• Hackers have recently breached the websites of human rights and foreign policy organizations such as Amnesty International and the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism.

• As ICANN seeks to restart its top-level domain application system, it has selected Alain Pellet, a former chairperson of the International Law Commission, to oversee the effort. A group of security experts say they will purchase the .secure domain to create a portion of the web held to the highest security standards.

• LightSquared says it will continue to lobby the Federal Communications Commission to get approval for its satellite venture — in search of a way to provide low-cost wireless Internet access — even as it files for bankruptcy. House Republicans have criticized the FCC for its earlier review of the company.

• Google has released new research data showing the increasing spread of smartphones around the world.

• New York City released a map of tech start-ups across the city.

• A close special New York state senate election, in a district likely to be eliminated, could lead to the first manual recount since New York introduced new electronic voting machines.

• Another study finds very little activity on Google+.

• Twitter now has 10 million active users in Britain, the country with its fourth-largest number of users, as the social network says it is hiring a public policy manager to work with the government and law enforcement officials.

• Rebekah Brooks, former News International executive and editor of the News of the World, has been charged with interfering with the police investigation into Britain's phone hacking scandal, including hiding computers and other electronic equipment from police.

• British schools are banned from collecting students' fingerprints or using face recognition technology unless they have parental permission.

• The BBC says it will stream all Olympics events to PCs, mobile devices and Internet-connected televisions. But of course, due to rights restrictions, BBC video and audio feeds will be restricted to viewers in the United Kingdom.

• The Open Rights Group says that pornography filters on mobile phones censor legitimate content.

• In one isolated Indian village, every adult of the town's 100 families has a cell phone, but residents can only charge their phones in another town, four hours away on foot.

• A press release issued by two legislators from Germany's conservative CDU party who focus on Internet issues say attacks by Anonymous that published personal information of the members of an initiative defending copyright protection are evidence of "anti-democratic thinking."

• Google Street View has launched in Estonia, a country that has gained prominence for its use of the Internet in governance.

• The U.S. consulate in Shanghai has begun posting hourly pollution data on its website and on Twitter, with its data markedly more negative than the official Chinese data.

• Taiwan's president has been fined for campaigning on Facebook on election day.

• A Syrian Islamist militant group says that an online video that claims it is responsible for recent bombings is "fabricated" and "full of errors," according to the BBC.

The summary for First POST has been corrected. It mistakenly referred to Iowa's Chuck Grassley as supporting changes to the H1-B visa program, when in fact John Cornyn, Republican Senator of Texas, was the lawmaker at issue.