OpenStack 04/29/2014 (p.m.)

• Exclusive: Google mulling Wi-Fi for cities with Google Fiber - Network World

  Tags: Google, ISP, google-fiber, wireless

  • Google is considering deploying Wi-Fi networks in towns and cities covered by its Google Fiber high-speed Internet service.

    The disclosure is made in a document Google is circulating to 34 cities that are the next candidates to receive Google Fiber in 2015.

  • Specific details of the Wi-Fi plan are not included in the document, which was seen by IDG News Service, but Google says it will be "discussing our Wi-Fi plans and related requirements with your city as we move forward with your city during this planning process."

  • Google Fiber is already available in Provo, Utah, and Kansas City, and is promised soon in Austin, Texas. It delivers a "basic speed" service for no charge, a gigabit-per-second service for US$70 per month and a $120 package that includes a bundle of more than 200 TV channels. Installation costs between nothing and $300.

    Google has sent the 34 cities that are next in line for Google Fiber a detailed request for information and they have until May 1 to reply.

  • Google is also asking cities to identify locations it would be able to install utility huts. Each 12-foot-by-30-foot (3.6-meter-by-9.1-meter) windowless hut needs to allow 24-hour access and be on land Google could lease for about 20 years.

    The huts, of which there will be between one and a handful in each city, would house the main networking equipment. From the hut, fiber cables would run along utility poles -- or in underground fiber ducts if they exist -- and terminate at neighborhood boxes, each serving up to 288 or 587 homes.

    The neighborhood boxes are around the same size or smaller than current utility cabinets often found on city streets.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 04/25/2014 (a.m.)

• New White House Petition For Net Neutrality - Slashdot

  Tags: net neutrality, petition, white-house

• [Phoronix] Google Web Designer Is Now Natively Available On Linux

  Tags: WYSIWYG-HTML5-CSS-JS-editor, Google

  • Last year Google unveiled the Google Web Designer as a program to put out clean, human-readable HTML5 code and this WYSIWYG editor can take advantage of the full realm of new HTML5 and JavaScript possibilities. That tool for web developers is now finally available to Linux users.

• Anonymous' Airchat Aims to Allow Communication Without Needing Phone or Internet Access

  Tags: internet-access, radio, Anonymous, Airchat

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 04/24/2014 (p.m.)

• The FCC is about to kill the free Internet | PandoDaily

  Cute. Deliberately not using the authority the court of appeals said it could use to impose net neutrality. So Europe can have net neutrality but not in the U.S.

  Tags: net neutrality, FCC

  • - By Paul Merrell

  • The Federal Communications Commission is poised to ruin the free Internet on a technicality.

    The group is expected to introduce new net neutrality laws that would allow companies to pay for better access to consumers through deals similar to the one struck by Netflix and Comcast earlier this year. The argument is that those deals don’t technically fall under the net neutrality umbrella, so these new rules won’t apply to them even though they directly affect the Internet.

    At least the commission is being upfront about its disinterest in protecting the free Internet.

  • The Verge notes that the proposed rules will offer some protections to consumers:

    The Federal Communication Commission’s proposal for new net neutrality rules will allow internet service providers to charge companies for preferential treatment, effectively undermining the concept of net neutrality, according to The Wall Street Journal. The rules will reportedly allow providers to charge for preferential treatment so long as they offer that treatment to all interested parties on “commercially reasonable” terms, with the FCC will deciding whether the terms are reasonable on a case-by-case basis. Providers will not be able to block individual websites, however.

    The goal of net neutrality rules is to prevent service providers from discriminating between different content, allowing all types of data and all companies’ data to be treated equally. While it appears that outright blocking of individual services won’t be allowed, the Journal reports that some forms of discrimination will be allowed, though that will apparently not include slowing down websites.

  • Re/code summarizes the discontent with these proposed rules:

    Consumer groups have complained about that plan because they’re worried that Wheeler’s rules may not hold up in court either. A federal appeals court rejected two previous versions of net neutrality rules after finding fault in the FCC’s legal reasoning. During the latest smackdown, however, the court suggested that the FCC had some authority to impose net neutrality rules under a section of the law that gives the agency the ability to regulate the deployment of broadband lines.

    Internet activists would prefer that the FCC just re-regulate Internet lines under old rules designed for telephone networks, which they say would give the agency clear authority to police Internet lines. Wheeler has rejected that approach for now. Phone and cable companies, including Comcast, AT&T and Verizon, have vociferously fought that idea over the past few years.

  • The Chicago Tribune reports on the process directing these rules:

    The five-member regulatory commission may vote as soon as May to formally propose the rules and collect public comment on them.

    Virtually all large Internet service providers, such as Verizon Communications Inc. and Time Warner Cable Inc., have pledged to abide by the principles of open Internet reinforced by these rules.

    But critics have raised concerns that, without a formal rule, the voluntary pledges could be pulled back over time and also leave the door open for deals that would give unequal treatment to websites or services.

  • I wrote about the European Union’s attempts to defend the free Internet:

    The legislation is meant to provide access to online services ‘without discrimination, restriction or interference, independent of the sender, receiver, type, content, device, service or application.’ For example, ISPs would be barred from slowing down or ‘throttling’ the speed at which one service’s videos are delivered while allowing other services to stream at normal rates. To bastardize Gertrude Stein: a byte is a byte is a byte.

    Such restrictions would prevent deals like the one Comcast recently made with Netflix, which will allow the service’s videos to reach consumers faster than before. Comcast is also said to be in talks with Apple for a deal that would allow videos from its new streaming video service to reach consumers faster than videos from competitors. The Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality laws don’t apply to those deals, according to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, so they are allowed to continue despite the threat they pose to the free Internet.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 04/23/2014 (p.m.)

• This project aims to make '404 not found' pages a thing of the past

  Tags: HTML, mset-attribute, link rot

  • The Internet is always changing. Sites are rising and falling, content is deleted, and bad URLs can lead to '404 Not Found' errors that are as helpful as a brick wall.

    A new project proposes an do away with dead 404 errors by implementing new HTML code that will help access prior versions of hyperlinked content. With any luck, that means that you’ll never have to run into a dead link again.

    The “404-No-More” project is backed by a formidable coalition including members from organizations like the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Old Dominion University, and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Part of the Knight News Challenge, which seeks to strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation through a variety of initiatives, 404-No-More recently reached the semifinal stage.

    The project aims to cure so-called link rot, the process by which hyperlinks become useless overtime because they point to addresses that are no longer available. If implemented, websites such as Wikipedia and other reference documents would be vastly improved. The new feature would also give Web authors a way provide links that contain both archived copies of content and specific dates of reference, the sort of information that diligent readers have to hunt down on a website like Archive.org.

  • While it may sound trivial, link rot can actually have real ramifications. Nearly 50 percent of the hyperlinks in Supreme Court decisions no longer work, a 2013 study revealed. Losing footnotes and citations in landmark legal decisions can mean losing crucial information and context about the laws that govern us.

    The same study found that 70 percent of URLs within the Harvard Law Review and similar journals didn’t link to the originally cited information, considered a serious loss surrounding the discussion of our laws.

    The project’s proponents have come up with more potential uses as well. Activists fighting censorship will have an easier time combatting government takedowns, for instance. Journalists will be much more capable of researching dynamic Web pages.

    “If every hyperlink was annotated with a publication date, you could automatically view an archived version of the content as the author intended for you to see it,” the project’s authors explain. The ephemeral nature of the Web could no longer be used as a weapon.

    Roger Macdonald, a director at the Internet Archive, called the 404-No-More project “an important contribution to preservation of knowledge.”

  • The new feature would come in the form of introducing the mset attribute to the <a> element in HTML, which would allow users of the code to specify multiple dates and copies of content as an external resource.

    For instance, if both the date of reference and the location of a copy of targeted content is known by an author, the new code would like like this:

    

    The 404-No-More project’s goals are numerous, but the ultimate goal is to have mset become a new HTML standard for hyperlinks.

    “An HTML standard that incorporates archives for hyperlinks will loop in these efforts and make the Web better for everyone,” project leaders wrote, “activists, journalists, and regular ol’ everyday web users.”

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 04/16/2014 (a.m.)

• Google Acquires Titan Aerospace, The Drone Company Pursued By Facebook | TechCrunch

  Tags: Google, Facebook, network-building, drones

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 04/14/2014 (a.m.)

• Dropbox: Condoleeza Rice appointment won't alter privacy pledge - CNET

  The straw that broke this camel's back. On top of having an absolutely horrible security model, Dropbox elects Condi Rice to its board of directors. I just completed transfer of my files to another service (in the E.U. where U.S. court orders don't reach) and deleted my Dropbox account.  

  Tags: war &amp; peace, security state, Condi-Rice, Dropbox

  • - By Paul Merrell

  • Dropbox CEO Drew Houston sought to quell the uproar over the appointment of former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the company's board of directors, saying in a blog post Friday that Rice's appointment won't change its stance on privacy.

    "There's nothing more important to us than keeping your stuff safe and secure. It's why we've been fighting for transparency and government surveillance reform, and why we've been vocal and public with our principles and values," Houston wrote. "We should have been clearer that none of this is going to change with Dr. Rice's appointment to our Board."

    The cloud storage service is trying to grow its international presence -- something Rice should be able to help with. However, after Dropbox announced her appointment earlier this week, a Web site dedicated to the "Drop Dropbox" movement called her selection "deeply disturbing" and said her board role was "problematic on a number of deeper levels, and invites serious concerns" about management's commitment "to freedom, openness, and ethics."

  • The movement said it objected to her role in the US decision to go to war in Iraq, as well as her position on the use of torture against prisoners. What's more, they said Rice supported the George W. Bush administration's "warrantless wiretap program and expansive domestic surveillance program."

    Houston responded in his brief note today, saying that Dropbox "should have been clearer that none of this is going to change" in the aftermath of Rice's appointment.

    "Our commitment to your rights and your privacy is at the heart of every decision we make, and this will continue," he wrote.

  • "We're honored to have Dr. Rice join our board -- she brings an incredible amount of experience and insight into international markets and the dynamics that define them," Houston wrote. "As we continue to expand into new countries, we need that type of insight to help us reach new users and defend their rights. Dr. Rice understands our stance on these issues and fully supports our commitments to our users."

    In her only public comments about Dropbox since being named to the board, Rice didn't get very detailed in speaking with Bloomberg on Wednesday. "As a country, we are having a great national conversation and debate about exactly how to manage privacy concerns," Rice said in the interview. "I look forward to helping Dropbox navigate it."

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 04/13/2014 (a.m.)

• People That Think Social Media Helps Their Work Are Probably Wrong | NeoAcademic

  Tags: social media, office productivity

  • In an upcoming special issue of Social Science Computer Review, Landers and Callan^[1] set out to understand how people actually use social media while at work and how it affects their job performance.  By polling workers across a wide variety of jobs (across at least 17 industries), they identified 8 broad ways that people use social media that they believe help their work, and 9 broad ways that people use social media that they believe harm their work.  Although the harmful social media behaviors were related to decreased job performance, the beneficial social media behaviors were unrelated to job performance.  In short, wasting time on social media hurts you, but trying to use social media to improve your work probably doesn’t actually help.

  • It was in Study 3 that the relationship between the social media behaviors and job performance was determined.  Consistently, negative social media behaviors (e.g., plagiarism, mutlitasking, time theft) were correlated with lower job performance (across task, contextual, counterproductive, and adaptive dimensions).  But in contrast, positive social media behaviors (e.g., crowdsourcing a problem, identifying new customers) were not generally correlated with job performance at all.

    The researcher then make the following practical recommendation:

    These findings suggested that simply granting employee access to social media is unlikely to improve job performance unless a specific plan is in place to take advantage of the capabilities it provides. In fact, permitting employee access to social media broadly may be generally harmful to job performance and cannot be recommended based upon these results.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 04/08/2014 (p.m.)

• U.S. knocks plans for European communication network | Reuters

  High comedy from the office of the U.S. Trade Representative. The USTR's press release is here along with a link to its report. http://www.ustr.gov/about-us/press-office/press-releases/2014/March/USTR-Targets-Telecommunications-Trade-Barriers The USTR is upset because the E.U. is aiming to build a digital communications network that does not route internal digital traffic outside the E.U., to limit the NSA's ability to surveil Europeans' communications. Part of the plan is to build an E.U.-centric cloud that is not susceptible to U.S. court orders. This plan does not, of course, sit well with U.S.-based cloud service providers.  Where the comedy comes in is that the USTR is making threats to go to the World Trade organization to block the E.U. move under the authority of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). But that treaty provides, in article XIV, that:  "Subject to the requirement that such measures are not applied in a manner which would constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination between countries where like conditions prevail, or a disguised restriction on trade in services, nothing in this Agreement shall be construed to prevent the adoption or enforcement by any Member of measures: ... (c)      necessary to secure compliance with laws or regulations which are not inconsistent with the provisions of this Agreement including those relating to:   ... (ii)     the protection of the privacy of individuals in relation to the processing and dissemination of personal data and the protection of confidentiality of individual records and accounts[.]" http://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/26-gats_01_e.htm#articleXIV   The E.U., in its Treaty on Human Rights, has very strong privacy protections for digital communications. The USTR undoubtedly knows all this, and that the WTO Appellate Panel's judges are of the European mold, sticklers for protection of human rights and most likely do not appreciate being subjects of NSA surveillance themselves. So the USTR's cries of discrimination are no more than propaganda to placate the American cloud service providers. "See? We're right on this problem." Not.  But it's really fun to fantasize about the U.S. walking into that meat shredder to face the iron-clad proof that NSA is subject to no legal constraints when it comes to foreign citizens. But it ain't going to happen. 

  Tags: surveillance state, NSA, EU, EU-cloud, USTR, WTO, digital-privacy

  • - By Paul Merrell

  • The United States on Friday criticized proposals to build a European communication network to avoid emails and other data passing through the United States, warning that such rules could breach international trade laws.

    In its annual review of telecommunications trade barriers, the office of the U.S. Trade Representative said impediments to cross-border data flows were a serious and growing concern.

    It was closely watching new laws in Turkey that led to the blocking of websites and restrictions on personal data, as well as calls in Europe for a local communications network following revelations last year about U.S. digital eavesdropping and surveillance.

    "Recent proposals from countries within the European Union to create a Europe-only electronic network (dubbed a 'Schengen cloud' by advocates) or to create national-only electronic networks could potentially lead to effective exclusion or discrimination against foreign service suppliers that are directly offering network services, or dependent on them," the USTR said in the report.

  • Germany and France have been discussing ways to build a European network to keep data secure after the U.S. spying scandal. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel's cell phone was reportedly monitored by American spies.

    The USTR said proposals by Germany's state-backed Deutsche Telekom to bypass the United States were "draconian" and likely aimed at giving European companies an advantage over their U.S. counterparts.

    Deutsche Telekom has suggested laws to stop data traveling within continental Europe being routed via Asia or the United States and scrapping the Safe Harbor agreement that allows U.S. companies with European-level privacy standards access to European data. (www.telekom.com/dataprotection)

    "Any mandatory intra-EU routing may raise questions with respect to compliance with the EU's trade obligations with respect to Internet-enabled services," the USTR said. "Accordingly, USTR will be carefully monitoring the development of any such proposals."

  • U.S. tech companies, the leaders in an e-commerce marketplace estimated to be worth up to $8 trillion a year, have urged the White House to undertake reforms to calm privacy concerns and fend off digital protectionism.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 04/05/2014 (p.m.)

• Wikimedia and Twitter Bots Are Breaking the News | Motherboard

  Tags: reporter-bots

  • We already knew that bots were writing news content, automating narrative stories from data-rich topics like sports scores and financial markets. Now, robo-reporters are starting to get scoops. They're not just writing stories; they're breaking them.

    Thomas Steiner, a Google engineer in Germany, designed an algorithm that covers the news as it's breaking by monitoring activity on Wikipedia (old school journalists everywhere are wincing) and watching for spikes in editing activity.

    The idea is that if something big is happening—especially if it’s a global event—multiple editors around the world will be updating Wikipedia and Wikidata pages at once, in different languages. That spike in activity tips off the bot to the story. According to Steiner, his news bot spotted major stories like the Boston Marathon bombing and the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines MH370.

  • The bare-bones site tracking real-time editing is called Wikipedia Live Monitor. It was first created last year, and now Steiner's has extended his robo-news operation to Twitter. The bot mines the social media site for a particular search term triggered by the Wikipedia activity and pulls out all relevant photos to illustrate the story.
  • You can check out the visual news events on the Twitter bot account @mediagalleries. The earliest are from a case study Steiner did to test out the program during the Olympics in Sochi. More recently, there are galleries illustrating major sports events, and the latest updates to flight MH370 and the conflict in Crimea.
  • You can see, it's still a rudimentary process, hardly about to put the staff of the New York Times out of business. But it says a lot about the direction automating the news is heading in.
  • Still, the Fourth Estate is one of the more disconcerting industries being taken over by robots, and not just because it’s my own livelihood. And it’s more common than you think; Kristian Hammond, cofounder of Narrative Science, a company that's been automating content for several years now, predicted that 90 percent of the news could be written by computers by 2030.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenStack 04/04/2014 (a.m.)

• Guest Post Online

  Tags: Cloud-Computing, Google, HTML5, Microsoft, Sursen, computer, webkit, Openweb, W3C, SharePoint

  • - By mesbah095

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.