Technology

Electrified Rail One Of Best Clean Transport Options

February 18, 2015 Patrick Mazza, www.cascadiaplanet.blogspot.com Create! Environment, Technology, Transportation

Electrified Rail offers one of the best options to provide transportation powered by renewable energy. This meets one of the largest challenges to transitioning from fossil fuels, clean mobility. Following is an excerpt from an upcoming paper on Solutionary Rail, a Backbone Campaign effort to promote renewable-powered electrified rail for freight and passengers. This excerpt explores the tremendous carbon pollution reductions offered by shifting freight from trucks to trains. Solutionary Rail will be focused in several upcoming events, a teach-in this coming Saturday, Feb. 21 in Seattle, and two Future of Rail conferences cosponsored by Backbone and Railroad Workers United In Olympia, Washington and Richmond, California.

Cameras Monitoring NYPD Precincts Don’t Work

February 18, 2015 Prachi Gupta, www.animalnewyork.com Educate! NYPD, police brutality, Technology

For an organization that has been so adamant on increasing its public surveillance, it is surprising and troubling that several NYPD precincts don’t have working security cameras. A new report by DNA info claims that “cameras outside police precinct station houses” are “not working in a number of cases, according to an NYPD source.” According to the source, the reason many precincts keep cameras off is to “protect the identity of victims who are coming and going from the building” and in its place, many precincts have officers patrolling the exterior of the building. Nelson’s case, however, has brought the issue to the attention of city Councilwoman Vanessa L. Gibson, who oversees the Committee on Public Safety. “The tragic death of Laquan Nelson has illuminated a blind spot in the safety of all cops and civilians coming in and out of these buildings,” she said, adding, “I would support the addition of security cameras to entrances of NYPD precincts as I believe they would protect both police officers and civilians alike.”

NSA Has Ability To Hide Spying Software Deep Within Hard Drives

February 18, 2015 Joseph Menn, www.reuters.com Educate! NSA, Privacy, Surveillance, Technology

The U.S. National Security Agency has figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and other top manufacturers, giving the agency the means to eavesdrop on the majority of the world's computers, according to cyber researchers and former operatives. That long-sought and closely guarded ability was part of a cluster of spying programs discovered by Kaspersky Lab, the Moscow-based security software maker that has exposed a series of Western cyberespionage operations. Kaspersky said it found personal computers in 30 countries infected with one or more of the spying programs, with the most infections seen in Iran, followed by Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yemen and Algeria.

GOP, Tech Industry Mostly Out Of Step Over Net Neutrality

February 14, 2015 Noah Bierman and Evan Halper www.latimes.com Educate! FCC, Net Neutrality, Republican Party, Technology

The intensifying debate over how to keep the Internet open and ripe for innovation has heightened tensions between Republican congressional leaders and tech entrepreneurs they have been trying to woo. As tech firms and cable companies prepare for a fight that each says will shape the future of the Internet, Silicon Valley executives and activists are growing increasingly irritated by the feeling that the GOP is not on their side. Republican leaders have struggled to explain to their nascent allies in the Bay Area why they are working so hard to undermine a plan endorsed by the Obama administration to keep a level playing field in Internet innovation, enforcing what the administration and its allies call "net neutrality."

App Promises Mobile Justice When Law Enforcement Violates Law

February 7, 2015 Matt Carter, www.occupy.com Educate! Police, Protest, Technology

This time, however, those protesters in some regions are equipped with a tool designed to hold police accountable – and it's one that can be traced back to the early days of the Occupy movement. The Mobile Justice app was designed by visual artist Jason Van Anden and was first called “I’m Getting Arrested.” It let Occupy protesters alert each other when they were being physically detained by the police; by allowing users of the app to gather at the first sign of wrongful arrest or abuse of liberties, more eyes would be present to expose police brutality with video evidence. It’s no surprise, now that protest culture has made social media and smartphones vehicles for political change, that the federal government is attempting to regulate those forms of communication.

How The CIA Made Google

January 28, 2015 Nafeez Ahmed, www.mintpressnews.com Educate! CIA, Google, NSA, Surveillance, Technology

The project report, authored by Brin’s supervisor Prof. Ullman, goes on to say under the section ‘Indications of Success’ that “there are some new stories of startups based on NSF-supported research.” Under ‘Project Impact,’ the report remarks: “Finally, the google project has also gone commercial as Google.com.” Thuraisingham’s account therefore demonstrates that the CIA-NSA-MDDS program was not only funding Brin throughout his work with Larry Page developing Google, but that senior US intelligence representatives including a CIA official oversaw the evolution of Google in this pre-launch phase, all the way until the company was ready to be officially founded. Google, then, had been enabled with a “significant” amount of seed-funding and oversight from the Pentagon: namely, the CIA, NSA, and DARPA.

States Ditch Electronic Voting Machines

November 5, 2014 Cory Bennett, www.thehill.com Educate! Elections, Fraud, Technology, Voting

States have abandoned electronic voting machines in droves, ensuring that most voters will be casting their ballots by hand on Election Day. With many electronic voting machines more than a decade old, and states lacking the funding to repair or replace them, officials have opted to return to the pencil-and-paper voting that the new technology was supposed to replace. Nearly 70 percent of voters will be casting ballots by hand on Tuesday, according to Pamela Smith, president of election watchdog Verified Voting. "Paper, even though it sounds kind of old school, it actually has properties that serve the elections really well," Smith said. It’s an outcome few would have predicted after the 2000 election, when the battle over “hanging chads” in the Florida recount spurred a massive, $3 billion federal investment in electronic voting machines.

FCC Used Title II To Fine AT&T & World Didn’t End

October 22, 2014 Mike Masnick, www.techdirt.com Educate! Law, Net Neutrality, Technology

You may have heard the story a few weeks ago about how the FCC and FTC teamed up to fine AT&T $105 million for mobile cramming (allowing unauthorized mobile charges for premium -- costly -- SMS, of which AT&T kept 35% of all money made). This was the largest fine the FCC has ever given out. Some, quite reasonably, pointed out that it took the FCC (and the FTC) quite a long time to catch up on this, as such practices had been called out for years and years. However, there was a much more interesting element to this fine, as it relates to the current net neutrality "Title II" fight. Remember, the telcos (including AT&T) are pretty adamant that if broadband is classified under Title II it will be the death of all good things. It will be a huge regulatory burden and companies like AT&T are likely to cease all investment and such. Similarly, AT&T and others insist that there's enough competition in the market to prevent anti-consumer practices, and that Title II simply isn't necessary in such a "competitive" market.

Meet The Man Who’s Building Robots For Political Resistance

October 22, 2014 George Dvorsky, www.io9.com Create! Drones, Technology, Wars and Militarism

The remarkable story of Chris Csikszentmihalyi was recently chronicled by tech journalist Luke Yoquinto in an article that now appears at the longform journalism startup The Big Roundtable. In it, Yoquinto describes how Csikszentmihalyi became a professor at the MIT Media Lab back in 2001, and how last decade, as he observed drones take over warfare and military interests dominate robotics research, he decided to fight back. But rather than take the Luddite route, he used technology to his advantage; he started to build robots to empower the powerless. To that end, he developed a fabric-wing UAV built of household products (the idea was that it would be devoid of military DNA), a four-wheeled telepresence robot designed to observe wars being fought, and a robotic kayak designed to protest at Guantanamo.

Apple Could Lead If It Had An iConscience

September 11, 2014 HeartBeat Earth, www.heartbeatearth.wordpress.com Create! Apple, Gentrification, Human Rights, Labor, Technology

Tim Cook says he wants Apple to be about more than just profit . Among other things the quote “We believe that workers everywhere have the right to a safe and fair work environment,” stood out to me. I applaud the sentiment, and when Apple takes positive action and when they make changes after I’m encouraged, but I can’t be silent while this amounts mostly empty rhetoric. I’m looking forward to future Apple where it takes the initiative to better the world. Today I was at the Apple launch event at De Anza College. Rather I was outside. Protesting. Speaking out about Apple’s poor record on human rights. From the small box the De Anza police had designated as our protest zone. Mind you this is MY campus and the building just across the little access road is where we hold our weekly club meetings. Yesterday we weren’t allowed to have our meeting there because of Apples invasion of our campus. For almost a month the corporate bully Apple has intimidated admin, faculty and staff into being silent or scared. What happened to Tim Cook’s recognizing ¨workers everywhere have the right to a safe and fair work environment.¨ Far from safe and fair, palpable fear was evident when we the students asked to speak or even speculate about what this monstrous mystery cube that was dominating campus was about. Today the police said if we crossed the few feet over to where we normally meet we might be arrested. What a crazy situation our corporate overlords have driven this species into. It has to stop. Now. The full list of Apple (among the world’s leading ¨Super Evil Mega Corps¨ human rights violations is lengthy but here’s the summary:

Occupy Rogers! Occupy Bell! Let’s Make Telecom Public

September 3, 2014 Gerry Caplan, www.rabble.ca Create! Public ownership, Technology, Telecom

The British Labour Party has begun to make the case that market fundamentalism, or neoliberalism, is not necessarily the best way for society to operate. Specifically, it's been trying to show that private enterprise is not always superior to public enterprise. Beginning with Margaret Thatcher, British governments have denuded the U.K. of almost all public enterprises, from British Airways to the Royal Mail. The Labour Party Opposition wants to remind Brits that some entities actually make more sense under public auspices. Fortunately for them, I am in a position to offer my Labour comrades foolproof evidence for their gambit. Two words: Rogers and Bell. The best case for public enterprises, bar none, is interacting with these vast operations, in so many ways the quintessence of modern corporate capitalism. One deals with them, of course, only in life-and-death circumstances, when there is absolutely no alternative. Like when you lose your cellphone, as I foolishly did. I'm still shaken from the experience. About four years ago, Bell was driving our family so crazy that we switched all our home devices to Rogers. Of course that made no sense either since Rogers also drove us up the wall with its cable service, as we were handing over a small fortune to both telecom giants without a clue what we were actually paying for.

FCC Names Network Neutrality Expert As CTO

August 29, 2014 Brian Santo, www.cedmagazine.com Educate! FCC, Internet Freedom, Net Neutrality, Technology

Scott Jordan, a professor at University of California at Irvine with a strong history working on network neutrality issues, was named the new chief technology officer (CTO) of the FCC. For those who try to read tea leaves, Jordan’s appointment might be a signal that FCC chairman Tom Wheeler is serious about exploring the possibility of reclassifying broadband as a telecommunications service, even as the Republican contingent among his fellow Commissioners have been vehemently dismissing the idea. Jordan succeeds Henning Schulzrinne, who will return to Columbia University and continue to serve the Commission in a part-time capacity as a technology advisor. Jordan is a professor of computer science at UC Irvine. His research interests include communications policy, pricing and differentiated services in the Internet, and resource allocation in wireless multimedia networks, the FCC said. Jordan has also developed specific expertise in network neutrality issues, developing what one bio calls “moderate” network neutrality policies. That includes proposals for policy founded on network architectures that encourage development of network management for multimedia applications while prohibiting anti-competitive behavior or, as one of his papers puts it, the extraction of oligopoly rents. In other words, he’s been attempting to help formulate policy that would have strong consumer protections but which would not interfere with network operations or management.

How To Use Your Smartphone In A Protest

August 27, 2014 Erin Kennedy, www.thedialoguechronicle.com Strategize! Police, Protests, Technology

Consider this scenario: Hundreds of people gathering at town square in the morning have become thousands by the afternoon. The chanting from the protesters is only drowned out by the growl of police tanks rolling up a residential street. No Justice! No Peace! No Justice! No Peace! The police begin setting up barricades, pushing the crowd back with riot shields. To your left, a teenager picks up a baseball sized rock. He rears back for a pitch as if he was on a dusty mound in the ninth inning of a game too close to call. As you watch it leave his fingertips and tumble into the air, two smoke bombs land ten feet behind you. In the haze, the crowd lurches forward, pushing the barricade in a cacophony of coughs and cries. A woman in front of you loses her balance and falls against a police officer, who cracks her jaw with his baton in the chaos of his own fear and frustration. Most of us participate in social activism with the best intentions. We want change for the better. But far too often the tension caused by the inevitable tragedies that precursor uprising overflows into violence. What then, comrades? How can we hope for the best, while preparing for the worst? Your smartphone is a Swiss army knife of protest enabling applications. Here’s a few tools to have on hand before you head to the streets:

California “Kill Switch” Bill Could Be Used To Disrupt Protests

August 19, 2014 Jake Laperruque, www.cdt.org Educate! Privacy, Protest, Surveillance, Technology

This week the California legislature passed a bill that requires all smartphones to include a “kill switch” that can remotely render the device inoperable. Although created to deter smartphone theft, this kill switch mandate could actually become a nefarious tool co-opted by government to suppress protests. Kill switch mandates suffer a variety of flaws that CDT has discussed previously. However, the California bill is especially troubling on the issue of police using the feature to shut down phones. The legislation states that government agents may use the kill switch so long as their activities comply with Section 7908 of the Public Utilities Code. This law allows governments to disrupt communications under certain guidelines with judicial authorization, but also includes an “emergency” exception that requires no independent approval. Police could use the kill switch to shut down all phones in a situation they unilaterally perceive as presenting an imminent risk of danger. This means that police could use the kill switch to shut down all phones in a situation they unilaterally perceive as presenting an imminent risk of danger. It’s not hard to imagine law enforcement putting such a label on a protest: Managers of the BART subway system shut down cell service in four stations just prior to planned anti-police demonstrations in 2011, claiming the disruptive measure was justified by public safety concerns.

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