What's that Prince William is cradling? His son Prince George? Nope—that's a sandbag. Prince William and Prince Harry pitched in to flood defense efforts Valentine's Day ahead of yet another winter storm. The storms have been so bad this season that they have earned their own BBC listicle, beginning with the October storm St Jude, which cost four people their lives, and ending with severe flooding along the Thames last week as it reached at its highest level in 60 years. On Sunday, London's technology community took a different approach to flood relief as they came together for a hackathon dubbed #FloodHack.

After five days of clashes between antigovernment protestors and Venezuelan authorities, opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez submitted to security forces today to face charges of terrorism for allegedly inciting violent protests against President Nicolás Maduro's government. The protests have resulted in four deaths so far, for which each side blames the other.

Webmail services like Yahoo and Google and social networks like Facebook and Twitter are convenient and efficient platforms, as well as easy to use, but they collect massive amounts of user data that can facilitate intelligence spying and other types of snooping. Meanwhile, securer methods of communication are often cumbersome and overly technical for the average user who would like to send an email without having to download and set up various software. Yet after Edward Snowden’s leaks, an increasing demand for securer alternatives has led to the development of anti-surveillance products with an eye towards being user friendly. Read More

They say all's fair in love and war, and this story contains a bit of each. Yesterday The Guardian profiled Ahmad Haidar, a hacker and technologist who uses his skills to battle the Syrian government. After the Syrian Electronic Army offered him a position in the group in 2011, he bailed on them in favor of the rebels. He used to make viruses to infect state-controlled websites, and he named them after—who else—ex-girlfriends. Haidar's newest project is a robot that can rescue sniper victims without putting more lives in danger. He has named it Tena, after a Finnish woman he once sat next to on an airplane.

Faced now with the inevitability of the their failure to reach the MDGs, development experts are again taking stock. In last year’s highly anticipated report, the UN High Level Panel on the post-2015 development framework raised a number of eyebrows by calling for a data revolution to drive development. For multilaterals like the UNDP, this provides a unique opportunity to address dramatically different types of development processes and initiatives within a single program stream. Who doesn’t want to be working on the side of the revolution (as they’re calling it) when everyone agrees that the current regime is broken? Read More

The draconian Internet legislation that was working its way through the Turkish government in January passed February 5. To coincide with the new legislation, the Turkish government launched a disturbing advertising campaign that seems to equate a free and open internet with violence. The accompanying picture is of a woman with a bruised eye.

Recent research by the nonprofit organization Great Fire shows that Bing is censoring English and Chinese search engine results on sensitive topics like the Falun Gong, not only in China but globally. Microsoft—which owns and operates Bing—has issued a statement to Business Insider denying these accusations and blaming the search results on a system error. Great Fire has responded in turn, in short saying that Microsoft is being both dishonest and evasive.

In July 2007, when the venue for the 2014 Winter Olympics was announced, writer-filmmaker Arnold van Bruggen and photographer Rob Hornstra embarked on an ambitious project to shine a light on the then little known Black Sea resort town of Sochi, in what was to become The Sochi Project. Without the help of crowdfunding, the project and the freedom through which filmmakers could create, would not have been possible. In fact, crowdfunding for civic-oriented projects is growing ever more popular in the Caucasus, especially as press freedom stagnates and foreign aid decreases. Read More

Annie Machon, a former British intelligence officer turned whistleblower, was known in the 1990s for disclosing illegal wiretapping, among a number of alleged crimes, by the UK Security Service, MI5. She is now again in the spotlight for creating a fund to help Edward Snowden and protect others like him. Machon talks to techPresident about her new initiative, the Courage Foundation to Protect Journalistic Sources, as well as her thoughts on mass surveillance and its erosion of civil liberties. Read More