BusinessWeek isn’t buying the story that Twitter is the essential organizing tool for the protests in Iran over suspicious election results: “I think the idea of a Twitter revolution is very suspect,” says Gaurav Mishra, co-founder of 20:20 WebTech, a company that analyzes the effects of social media. “The amount of people who use these [...]
Amy Schatz of the WSJ reports that a deal has been struck to move the new nominees into the FCC: Work has slowed to a crawl at the Federal Communications Commission, since President Barack Obama’s pick to be chairman, Julius Genachowski, is still awaiting Senate confirmation. But the logjam could be broken soon: Republicans appear [...]
Here’s some news on Boucher’s privacy campaign: It’s not clear how broad a law Boucher has in mind, though it’s likely to be some codification of generally accepted data-privacy practices. Those include telling people when you collect data and why, letting them choose to join in or not, using the data only for the reason [...]
While California was sleeping, I enjoyed a bit of broadband politics in the heart of the beast, testifying at the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet on Communications Networks and Consumer Privacy: Recent Developments The Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet held a hearing titled, “Communications Networks and Consumer Privacy: Recent Developments” [...]
According to National Journal, Susan Crawford is joining the Obama administration in a significant new role: Internet law expert Susan Crawford has joined President Barack Obama’s lineup of tech policy experts at the White House, according to several sources. She will likely hold the title of special assistant to the president for science, technology, and [...]
The majority leaders of both the House and the Senate are attempting to expedite passage of a bill which will likely be the first of several economic stimulus measures. However, a close examination of the bill, titled the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009,” reveals that the sections relating to broadband need some serious [...]
This little gem is from FiveThirtyEight.com So a canvasser goes to a woman’s door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she’s planning to vote for. She isn’t sure, has to ask her husband who she’s voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, “We’re [...]
FiveThirtyEight.com is the most interesting election horse race site. It’s run by Nate Silver, the Baseball Prospectus stats guy, who does the most thorough analysis of polling data, sophisticated in a way that only a Sabermetrician can fully appreciate. Silver rejects the “tightening race” narrative that we’ve started to hear, as he looks at state [...]
Now that the whole world knows that Skype’s Chinese partner, TOM, has been censoring IM’s and building a database of forbidden speakers for the government of China, Skype President Josh Silverman had to respond: In April 2006, Skype publicly disclosed that TOM operated a text filter that blocked certain words in chat messages, and it [...]
Tom Shales saw what I saw in the VP debate, a lot of evasion: Palin basically stated early in the debate that this would be her strategy. She said she wasn’t necessarily going to respond to the questions of the moderator or charges from Biden, but instead, “I’m gonna talk right to the American people.” [...]
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