A very rapid government response! We will pay
somebody to write a few report that we might read and then we will
ask the President to promise to come up with a strategy before the
next Ice Age.
Overnight
Tech: House presses Obama to counter ISIS on social media
The House is pressing the Obama administration to
articulate a broad strategy to thwart terrorists' use of social
media.
The lower chamber by voice vote approved the
Combat Terrorist Use of Social Media Act on Wednesday, which would
commission a number of reports on the subject and require Obama to
follow through on a commitment to present a broad strategy.
(Related) Would a Social Media monitoring program
been of any use?
FBI
director: San Bernardino shooters never expressed public support for
jihad on social media
James Comey, the FBI director, said on Wednesday
that there remained no evidence the couple who massacred 14 people in
San Bernardino, California, on December 2 were part of an organized
cell or had any contact with overseas militant groups.
Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 29,
expressed support for "jihad and martyrdom" in private
communications but never did so publicly on social media, Comey said
at a news conference in New York City.
Dirverless cars are legal as long as they have a
driver. Way to go California!
California
Proposes Driverless-Car Rules
… The proposed rules hold motorists
responsible for obeying traffic laws, regardless of whether they are
at the wheel.
… California’s proposed regulations would
require consumers to get a special state-issued driver’s
certificate after receiving training from a car company on how to use
a driverless vehicle.
… Auto makers would only be allowed to lease
driverless cars, as opposed to selling them outright.
Should we consider this “e-contempt?”
Brazil
Court Suspends Facebook’s WhatsApp for 48 Hours
A Brazilian state judge ordered the suspension of
Facebook Inc.’s WhatsApp throughout Brazil for 48 hours early
Thursday, disrupting the lives of tens of millions of Brazilians who
use the messaging service.
A local judge in São Paulo state ordered the
block after WhatsApp refused to cooperate with a criminal
investigation, the court said in a statement. The court said that
the decision was made amid a criminal procedure, but didn't
provide more details, saying the case is under seal.
WhatsApp is hugely popular in Brazil, where
roughly half of the country’s 200 million people use its free text
and voice messaging functions regularly. Many poorer Brazilians
depend exclusively on WhatsApp for their day-to-day communications.
… Local telecoms companies have been
complaining for months that WhatsApp, particularly its free voice
messaging service, is illegal. But the speed with which the block
took place, and the lack of pushback from telecoms companies, came as
a surprise to many here. Similar efforts to block WhatsApp and other
services in the past have been rejected by higher courts before they
could be enforced.
… WhatsApp competitors wasted little time in
taking advantage of their rivals’ outage. Messaging service
Telegram said early Thursday that more than 1.5 million Brazilians
had downloaded its app since WhatsApp went offline.
Free isn't always free. And feedback from
citizens may be drafted by Mark Zuckerberg.
Facebook’s
“Save Free Basics In India” Campaign Provokes Controversy
Facebook is calling on Indian users to send
an email to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI),
asking the government agency to support its Free
Basics program. The campaign, which shows up
when users sign onto the social media platform and includes a
pre-filled form so they don’t even have to write an email, has
already proven controversial, with opponents saying its message
undermines net neutrality in India.
… Free Basics, which became
available throughout India last month, is a
program by Facebook initiative Internet.org
to provide basic Internet services, like search, Wikipedia, health
information, and weather updates, for free to all users. While it
sounds altruistic, Free Basics has the potential to draw reams of
traffic to sites from certain providers (including Facebook) at the
expense of others, which violates
the principles of net neutrality. The TRAI
plans
to hold a hearing on net neutrality next month.
I wonder how many countries they will be willing
to do this for. How big a market will it take?
Microsoft
Unveils Plans for China Joint Venture
Microsoft
Corp.
disclosed new details of a plan to work with a
Chinese partner to accelerate adoption of the Windows 10 operating
system introduced last summer.
The company late Wednesday said it will set up a
jointly owned entity with China Electronics Technology Group Corp.,
or CETC, a state-owned company that provides technology for Chinese
military and civilian use. The venture will extend a relationship
announced with CETC in September, Microsoft said.
That venture, tentatively called C&M
Information Technologies, will be based in Beijing and will license,
deploy, manage and provide technical support for Windows 10 for
government agencies and government-owned institutions, said Yusuf
Mehdi, a corporate vice president in Microsoft’s Window and devices
group, in a blog post released to coincide with a news conference in
Beijing.
While waiting for a ruling, I ran found this.
PROFESSOR
LESSIG FROM HARVARD LAW SCHOOL PROVIDES EXPERT OPINION IN THE KIM
DOTCOM EXTRADITION CASE
In submissions filed on September 16, 2015 by the
Kim Dotcom legal team in District Court in New Zealand, Professor
Lawrence Lessig, from Harvard Law School, provided his expert legal
opinion on the United States Department of Justice's (DOJ) criminal
allegations in the extradition record against Kim Dotcom and the
others. Below are quoted excerpts from Professor Lessig's opinion.
EXCERPTS FROM THE OPINION
Will this make my students reconsider their job
hunting strategy?
A New Kind
of Employee Perk: Student-Loan Repayment
… Earlier this year, the accounting firm
Pricewaterhouse Coopers announced
that the company will offer to help
associate-level employees (who make up 45 percent of PwC’s 46,000
U.S. employees) out with their student-loan debt starting
mid-2016. PwC will contribute about $100 a
month towards an employee’s student-loan principal for up to six
years, for a total payout of $7,200. Since paying off loan principal
will reduce interest, the company estimates that the benefit is
actually worth up to $10,000.
Interesting. Let's hope they can analyze more
areas and a more granular level. (e.g. What works best for
programmers in Centennial vs. Denver.)
Textio, A
Startup That Analyzes Text Performance, Raises $8M
… “We had this premise that word processing
in text hadn’t been disrupted in a while, from command line to
GUI,” CEO Kieran Snyder said
… Textio’s first tool looks at talent
acquisition documents — like job postings — to determine how well
they will perform among candidates. Certain words and layouts
attract more candidates than others, Snyder found, and those
predictive analytics are baked into the service. For example, Textio
shows that job postings with bullet points tend to perform better
than job postings without them.
… Textio recognizes more than 60,000 phrases
with its predictive technology, Snyder said, and that data set is
changing constantly as it continues to operate. It looks at how
words are put together — such as how verb dense a phrase is — and
at other syntax-related properties the document may have. All that
put together results in a score for the document, based on how likely
it is to succeed in whatever the writer set out to do.
More students game than I thought.
Pew Study –
Gaming and Gamers
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Dec 16, 2015
Pew
Research Center Study: “About half of American adults (49%)
“ever play video games on a computer, TV, game console, or portable
device like a cellphone,” and 10% consider themselves to be
“gamers.” A majority of American adults (60%) believe that most
people who play video games are men – a view that is shared by 57%
of women who themselves play video games. But the data illustrates
that in some ways this assumption is wrong: A nearly identical share
of men and women report ever playing video games (50% of men and 48%
of women). However, men are more than twice as likely as women to
call themselves “gamers” (15% vs. 6%). And among those ages 18
to 29, 33% of men say the term “gamer” describes them well, more
than three times the proportion of young women (9%) who say the
same…”
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