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Muckrock – Two terabytes on the 2000-2001 Western Energy Crisis were unpublished by FERC, and not even its custodians know why: “Government investigations into California’s electricity shortage, ultimately determined to be caused by intentional market manipulations and capped retail electricity prices by the now infamous Enron Corporation, resulted in terabytes of information being collected by the …
Computer Business Review: “Seven out of every ten open vulnerabilities observed by customers belongs to just three vendors, Oracle, Microsoft and Adobe. These are the findings of cyber security enterprise Kenna Security in their new report Prioritization to Prediction, which explores how enterprises are dealing with open vulnerabilities. In their report Kenna found that Oracle …
The Intercept: “Most of the data collected by urban planners is messy, complex, and difficult to represent. It looks nothing like the smooth graphs and clean charts of city life in urban simulator games like “SimCity.” A new initiative from Sidewalk Labs, the city-building subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has set out to change …
PCWorld: “Choosing the right virtual private network (VPN) service is no simple task. A VPN should keep your internet usage private and secure, but not every service handles your data in the same way. Just look at the critiques of notable computer security experts and online pundits to understand the challenge. (Want to know more …
Via Axios – PERMISSIONLESS: What It Means, How It Happened, Will it Last: “While the Internet revolution enabled “permissionless” business models in finance, entertainment & politics, such unregulated disruptors are under growing attack. From the tech sector to the White House, many object to the divisions these new actors exacerbate or the externalities they often …
EFF: “The U.S. government sends a lot of emails. Like any large, modern organization, it wants to “optimize” for “user engagement” using “analytics” and “big data.” In practice, that means tracking the people it communicates with—secretly, thoroughly, and often, insecurely. Granicus is a third-party contractor that builds communication tools to help governments engage constituents online. …
Motherboard – The story of the PDF, the file format that’s become one of the internet’s defining information tools. It’ll be with us after we’re long gone. “The Portable Document Format, or PDF, is everywhere. But it’s still a format that causes headaches for the average person. Just take former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, …
First Monday – Volume 24, Number 1 – 7 January 2019 > Gutiérrez. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i1.9554 “The fundamental paradigm shift brought about by datafication alters how people participate as citizens on a daily basis. “Big data” has come to constitute a new terrain of engagement, which brings organized collective action, communicative practices and data infrastructure into a …
Opinion | Our Cellphones Aren’t Safe – The New York Times: “Security flaws threaten our privacy and bank accounts. So why aren’t we fixing them? America’s cellular network is as vital to society as the highway system and power grids. Vulnerabilities in the mobile phone infrastructure threaten not only personal privacy and security, but also …
Consumer Reports – Having too many digital accounts raises your risk of data being misused or stolen. Here’s how to clean house. By Thomas Germain. December 27, 2018 [h/t Pete Weiss] “Deleting online accounts is one of the best ways to protect your data security and privacy. The less data you have stored on corporate databases …
Google Cloud: “For over 100 years, The New York Times has stored its historical news clippings and photographs in an underground archive lovingly named the “morgue.” Most of us keep stacks of pictures in our attic or basement. And media organizations are no different. The New York Times has archived approximately five to seven million …
Brennan Center for Social Justice: How the Government Is Collecting and Using Your Location Data “Cell phones are ubiquitous. As of 2017, there were more cell phones than people in the United States. Nearly 70 percent of those were smartphones, with 94 percent of millennials carrying a smart device. Cell phones go nearly everywhere, and …
