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Gary Edwards

These 28 Words Explain Why PayPal's Creators Are Funding A Startup To Kill It - Busines... - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/ng-a-startup-to-kill-it-2013-6

PayPal mobile-computing Stripe

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Jun 13
     
    "One of the strangest things about Stripe - or perhaps, one of the strangest things about Paypal - is the list of people who are funding Stripe. Three of its biggest individual backers are people who played a key role in making PayPal a success: cofounders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, along with Elon Musk, who joined PayPal through an acquisition. Why would Thiel, Levchin, and Musk fund a machine built destroy their baby? Probably because, in Silicon Valley, PayPal is viewed as a lost cause. We've heard a lot of complaints about how awful and hard it is to implement. " Stripe isn't the only well-funded startup going after what it views as a decrepit, disrupt-ble incumbent. Jack Dorsey's Square is too, and it's now worth billions of dollars. Another heavily funded startup, Braintree, owns the technology millions of people use to pay for things inside apps like Uber. Finally, some of eBay's bigger rivals such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are gunning for PayPal too.
Paul Merrell

Joint - Dear Colleague Letter: Electronic Book Readers - 0 views

www2.ed.gov/...colleague-20100629.html

ebook readers accessibility law enforcement

shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Jul 10 - Cached
  • U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights
  • Paul Merrell on 01 Jul 10
     
    June 29, 2010 Dear College or University President: We write to express concern on the part of the Department of Justice and the Department of Education that colleges and universities are using electronic book readers that are not accessible to students who are blind or have low vision and to seek your help in ensuring that this emerging technology is used in classroom settings in a manner that is permissible under federal law. A serious problem with some of these devices is that they lack an accessible text-to-speech function. Requiring use of an emerging technology in a classroom environment when the technology is inaccessible to an entire population of individuals with disabilities - individuals with visual disabilities - is discrimination prohibited by the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (Section 504) unless those individuals are provided accommodations or modifications that permit them to receive all the educational benefits provided by the technology in an equally effective and equally integrated manner. ... The Department of Justice recently entered into settlement agreements with colleges and universities that used the Kindle DX, an inaccessible, electronic book reader, in the classroom as part of a pilot study with Amazon.com, Inc. In summary, the universities agreed not to purchase, require, or recommend use of the Kindle DX, or any other dedicated electronic book reader, unless or until the device is fully accessible to individuals who are blind or have low vision, or the universities provide reasonable accommodation or modification so that a student can acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as sighted students with substantially equivalent ease of use. The texts of these agreements may be viewed on the Department of Justice's ADA Web site, www.ada.gov. (To find these settlements on www.ada.gov, search for "Kindle.") Consisten
Paul Merrell

Cloud computing with Amazon Web Services, Part 1: Introduction - 0 views

www.ibm.com/...ar-cloudaws1

amazon elastic compute business models cloud computing

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Aug 08 - Cached
  • Cloud computing is a paradigm shift in how we architect and deliver scalable applications. In the past, successful companies spent precious time and resources building an infrastructure that in turn provided them a competitive advantage. It was frequently a case of "You build it first and they will come." In most cases, this approach: Left large tracts of unused computing capacity that took up space in big data centers. Required someone to babysit the servers. Had associated energy costs. The unused computing power wasted away, with no way to push it out to other companies or users who might be willing to pay for additional compute cycles. With cloud computing, excess computing capacity can be put to use and be profitably sold to consumers. This transformation of computing and IT infrastructure into a utility, which is available to all, somewhat levels the playing field.
  • According to Amazon’s estimates, businesses spend about 70 percent of their time on building and maintaining their infrastructures while using only 30 percent of their precious time actually working on the ideas that power their businesses.
  • anonymous on 03 Oct 13
     
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Paul Merrell

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Not Turtles, AtomPub All the Way Down - 0 views

www.25hoursaday.com/...rtlesAtomPubAllTheWayDown.aspx

atom atompub livemesh livesync sql server

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 May 08 - Cached
  • I don't think the Atom publishing protocol can be considered the universal protocol for talking to remote databases given that cloud storage vendors like Amazon and database vendors like Oracle don't support it yet. That said, this is definitely a positive trend. Back in the RSS vs. Atom days I used to get frustrated that people were spending so much time reinventing the wheel with an RSS clone when the real gaping hole in the infrastructure was a standard editing protocol. It took a little longer than I expected (Sam Ruby started talking about in 2003) but the effort has succeeded way beyond my wildest dreams. All I wanted was a standard editing protocol for blogs and content management systems and we've gotten so much more.
  • Microsoft is using AtomPub as the interface to a wide breadth of services and products as George Moore points out in his post A Unified Standards-Based Protocols and Tooling Platform for Storage from Microsoft 
  • And a few weeks after George's post even more was revealed in posts such as this one about  FeedSync and Live Mesh where we find out Congratulations to the Live Mesh team, who announced their Live Mesh Technology Preview release earlier this evening! Amit Mital gives a detailed overview in this post on http://dev.live.com. You can read all about it in the usual places...so why do I mention it here? FeedSync is one of the core parts of the Live Mesh platform. One of the key values of Live Mesh is that your data flows to all of your devices. And rather than being hidden away in a single service, any properly authenticated user has full bidirectional sync capability. As I discussed in the Introduction to FeedSync, this really makes "your stuff yours". Okay, FeedSync isn't really AtomPub but it does use the Atom syndication format so I count that as a win for Atom+APP as well. As time goes on, I hope we'll see even more products and services that support Atom and AtomPub from Microsoft. Standardization at the protocol layer means we can move innovation up the stack.
  • anonymous on 23 Sep 13
     
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Paul Merrell

Microsoft begins paving path for IT and cloud integration | Cloud Computing - InfoWorld - 1 views

www.infoworld.com/...h-it-and-cloud-integration-674

Microsoft cloud Azure

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Paul Merrell on 24 Nov 09
     
    Microsoft last week launched its first serious effort to build IT into its cloud plans by introducing technologies that help connect existing corporate networks and cloud services to make them look like a single infrastructure. The concept began to come together at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference. The company is attempting to show that it wants to move beyond the first wave of the cloud trend, which is defined by the availability of raw computing power supplied by Microsoft and competitors such as Amazon and Google. Microsoft's goal is to supply tools, middleware, and services so users can run applications that span corporate and cloud networks, especially those built with Microsoft's Azure cloud operating system.
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Dance to the Holy Man: Silencers: Music @ Amazon.com - 3 views

www.amazon.com/...B000008KPB

Recording Industry Music Labels Thievery 37$ for a '91 Record

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 02 May 11 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 02 May 11
     
    - 37$ for a Disc from 1991 is Thievery. Full Stop. Who Is Killing Music....? @ll We Know. [ Silencers | Format: Audio CD 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review) 1 Review 5 star: (1) 4 star: (0) 3 star: (0) 2 star: (0) 1 star: (0) › See the customer review... | Like 1304352585 false -1 0 0 0 (0) Price: $37.60 & this item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. Details ]
Paul Merrell

Court upholds NSA snooping | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...385-court-upholds-nsa-snooping

surveillance state NSA litigation Jewel

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • A district court in California has issued a ruling in favor of the National Security Agency in a long-running case over the spy agency’s collection of Internet records.The challenge against the controversial Upstream program was tossed out because additional defense from the government would have required “impermissible disclosure of state secret information,” Judge Jeffrey White wrote in his decision.ADVERTISEMENTUnder the program — details of which were revealed through leaks from Edward Snowden and others — the NSA taps into the fiber cables that make up the backbone of the Internet and gathers information about people's online and phone communications. The agency then filters out communications of U.S. citizens, whose data is protected with legal defenses not extended to foreigners, and searches for “selectors” tied to a terrorist or other target.In 2008, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the government over the program on behalf of five AT&T customers, who said that the collection violated the constitutional protections to privacy and free speech.
  • But “substantial details” about the program still remain classified, White, an appointee under former President George W. Bush, wrote in his decision. Moving forward with the merits of a trial would risk “exceptionally grave damage to national security,” he added. <A HREF="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?rt=tf_mfw&ServiceVersion=20070822&MarketPlace=US&ID=V20070822%2FUS%2Fthehill07-20%2F8001%2Fdffbe72d-f425-4b83-b07e-357ae9d405f6&Operation=NoScript">Amazon.com Widgets</A> The government has been “persuasive” in using its state secrets privilege, he continued, which allows it to withhold evidence from a case that could severely jeopardize national security.   In addition to saying that the program appeared constitutional, the judge also found that the AT&T customers did not even have the standing to sue the NSA over its data gathering.While they may be AT&T customers, White wrote that the evidence presented to the court was “insufficient to establish that the Upstream collection process operates in the manner” that they say it does, which makes it impossible to tell if their information was indeed collected in the NSA program.  The decision is a stinging rebuke to critics of the NSA, who have seen public interest in their cause slowly fade in the months since Snowden’s revelations.
  • The EFF on Tuesday evening said that it was considering next steps and noted that the court focused on just one program, not the totality of the NSA’s controversial operations.“It would be a travesty of justice if our clients are denied their day in court over the ‘secrecy’ of a program that has been front-page news for nearly a decade,” the group said in a statement.“We will continue to fight to end NSA mass surveillance.”The name of the case is Jewel v. NSA. 
  • Paul Merrell on 12 Feb 15
     
    The article should have mentioned that the decision was on cross-motions for *partial* summary judgment. The Jewel case will proceed on other plaintiff claims. 
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Techdirt Reading List: The Idealist: Aaron Swartz And The Rise Of Free Culture On The I... - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...se-free-culture-internet.shtml

Techdirt reading list rise free culture Free Culture internet

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 22 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 22 Jan 16
     
    "from the free-culture-matters dept We're back again with another in our weekly reading list posts of books we think our community will find interesting and thought provoking. Once again, buying the book via the Amazon links in this story also helps support Techdirt. "
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

monitor switcher at DuckDuckGo - 0 views

duckduckgo.com/?q=monitor+switcher&t=trisquel&ia=products&iai=B00SBB68IShttp%3A%2F%2Fecx.images-amazon.com%2Fimages%2FI%2F41%252BljTMcJBL.jpghttp%3A%2F%2Fecx.images-amazon.com%2Fimages%2FI%2F41%252BljTMcJBL._SL160_.jpg

monitor network switch switcher home LAN cool tech easy images models CHK!!

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 05 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 05 Mar 16
     
    width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1, user-scalable=0
Paul Merrell

Amazon's Face Recognition Falsely Matched 28 Members of Congress With Mugshots | Americ... - 0 views

www.aclu.org/...recognition-falsely-matched-28

facial-recognition Amazon Rekognition ACLU Congress

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • Amazon’s face surveillance technology is the target of growing opposition nationwide, and today, there are 28 more causes for concern. In a test the ACLU recently conducted of the facial recognition tool, called “Rekognition,” the software incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress, identifying them as other people who have been arrested for a crime.  The members of Congress who were falsely matched with the mugshot database we used in the test include Republicans and Democrats, men and women, and legislators of all ages, from all across the country.
  • The false matches were disproportionately of people of color, including six members of the Congressional Black Caucus, among them civil rights legend Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.). These results demonstrate why Congress should join the ACLU in calling for a moratorium on law enforcement use of face surveillance.
Paul Merrell

"In 10 Years, the Surveillance Business Model Will Have Been Made Illegal" - - 1 views

promarket.org/siness-model-will-made-illegal

artificial-intelligence tech-backlash

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 May 18 - No Cached
  • The opening panel of the Stigler Center’s annual antitrust conference discussed the source of digital platforms’ power and what, if anything, can be done to address the numerous challenges their ability to shape opinions and outcomes present. 
  • Google CEO Sundar Pichai caused a worldwide sensation earlier this week when he unveiled Duplex, an AI-driven digital assistant able to mimic human speech patterns (complete with vocal tics) to such a convincing degree that it managed to have real conversations with ordinary people without them realizing they were actually talking to a robot.   While Google presented Duplex as an exciting technological breakthrough, others saw something else: a system able to deceive people into believing they were talking to a human being, an ethical red flag (and a surefire way to get to robocall hell). Following the backlash, Google announced on Thursday that the new service will be designed “with disclosure built-in.” Nevertheless, the episode created the impression that ethical concerns were an “after-the-fact consideration” for Google, despite the fierce public scrutiny it and other tech giants faced over the past two months. “Silicon Valley is ethically lost, rudderless and has not learned a thing,” tweeted Zeynep Tufekci, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a prominent critic of tech firms.   The controversial demonstration was not the only sign that the global outrage has yet to inspire the profound rethinking critics hoped it would bring to Silicon Valley firms. In Pichai’s speech at Google’s annual I/O developer conference, the ethical concerns regarding the company’s data mining, business model, and political influence were briefly addressed with a general, laconic statement: “The path ahead needs to be navigated carefully and deliberately and we feel a deep sense of responsibility to get this right.”
  • Google’s fellow FAANGs also seem eager to put the “techlash” of the past two years behind them. Facebook, its shares now fully recovered from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, is already charging full-steam ahead into new areas like dating and blockchain.   But the techlash likely isn’t going away soon. The rise of digital platforms has had profound political, economic, and social effects, many of which are only now becoming apparent, and their sheer size and power makes it virtually impossible to exist on the Internet without using their services. As Stratechery’s Ben Thompson noted in the opening panel of the Stigler Center’s annual antitrust conference last month, Google and Facebook—already dominating search and social media and enjoying a duopoly in digital advertising—own many of the world’s top mobile apps. Amazon has more than 100 million Prime members, for whom it is usually the first and last stop for shopping online.   Many of the mechanisms that allowed for this growth are opaque and rooted in manipulation. What are those mechanisms, and how should policymakers and antitrust enforcers address them? These questions, and others, were the focus of the Stigler Center panel, which was moderated by the Economist’s New York bureau chief, Patrick Foulis.
Paul Merrell

Explainer: What Google, Facebook could face in U.S. antitrust probe - Reuters - 0 views

uk.reuters.com/...-antitrust-probe-idUKKCN1UJ2Z3

antitrust regulation DoJ Google Facebook Amazon Apple

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating whether big technology companies are engaged in anticompetitive behavior, addressing a rising tide of criticism they have become too powerful to the detriment of consumers.
  • The Justice Department has said it will investigate “whether and how” online platforms in “search, social media, and some retail services online” are engaging in behavior that stifles competition and harms consumers. While the Justice Department did not name any targets in announcing the probe on Tuesday, sources have indicated Alphabet Inc’s Google, social media giant Facebook Inc, online retailer Amazon.com Inc and possibly Apple Inc will likely be reviewed. Here’s what regulators could focus on at the big technology companies:
Paul Merrell

How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler - Glenn Greenwald - 1 views

greenwald.substack.com/...lley-in-a-show-of-monopolistic

antitrust Apple Parler Google Amazon Greenwald

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • As Silicon Valley censorship radically escalated over the past several months — banning pre-election reporting by The New York Post about the Biden family, denouncing and deleting multiple posts from the U.S. President and then terminating his access altogether, mass-removal of right-wing accounts — so many people migrated to Parler that it was catapulted to the number one spot on the list of most-downloaded apps on the Apple Play Store, the sole and exclusive means which iPhone users have to download apps. “Overall, the app was the 10th most downloaded social media app in 2020 with 8.1 million new installs,” reported TechCrunch.It looked as if Parler had proven critics of Silicon Valley monopolistic power wrong. Their success showed that it was possible after all to create a new social media platform to compete with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And they did so by doing exactly what Silicon Valley defenders long insisted should be done: if you don’t like the rules imposed by tech giants, go create your own platform with different rules.
  • But today, if you want to download, sign up for, or use Parler, you will be unable to do so. That is because three Silicon Valley monopolies — Amazon, Google and Apple — abruptly united to remove Parler from the internet, exactly at the moment when it became the most-downloaded app in the country. If one were looking for evidence to demonstrate that these tech behemoths are, in fact, monopolies that engage in anti-competitive behavior in violation of antitrust laws, and will obliterate any attempt to compete with them in the marketplace, it would be difficult to imagine anything more compelling than how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor.
Paul Merrell

Facebook probe by U.S. states expands to 47 attorneys general - Reuters - 0 views

uk.reuters.com/...ttorneys-general-idUKKBN1X11ZW

antitrust litigation Facebook Feds states Google Apple Amazon

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • A New York-led probe into allegations that Facebook Inc put consumer data at risk and pushed up advertising rates has expanded to include attorneys general from 47 U.S. states and territories, New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement on Tuesday.
  • The investigation of Facebook announced in September had included Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee and the District of Columbia. It now includes most U.S. states as well as the U.S. territory of Guam.
  • Some states, particularly New York and Nebraska, have raised concerns that Facebook and other big tech companies engage in anti-competitive practices, expose consumer data to potential data theft and push up advertising prices.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The Facebook investigations are part of a larger landscape of probes of big tech firms. Reuters and others reported in June that the Justice Department and FTC had divided responsibility for the companies being investigated, with the Justice Department taking on Alphabet Inc’s Google and Apple Inc while the FTC looked into Facebook and Amazon.com Inc. The Justice Department later said it was opening a probe of online platforms, which would include Facebook.
Paul Merrell

House Lawmakers Condemn Big Tech's 'Monopoly Power' and Urge Their Breakups - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-big-tech-monopoly-power.html

antitrust report Congress Apple Facebook Google Amazon

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • House lawmakers who spent the last 16 months investigating the practices of the world’s largest technology companies said on Tuesday that Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google had exercised and abused their monopoly power and called for the most sweeping changes to antitrust laws in half a century.In a 449-page report that was presented by the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic leadership, lawmakers said the four companies had turned from “scrappy” start-ups into “the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons.” The lawmakers said the companies had abused their dominant positions, setting and often dictating prices and rules for commerce, search, advertising, social networking and publishing.The House ReportRead the full report here »
  • To amend the inequities, the lawmakers recommended restoring competition by effectively breaking up the companies, emboldening the agencies that police market concentration and throwing up hurdles for the companies to acquire start-ups. They also proposed reforming antitrust laws, in the biggest potential shift since the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act of 1976 created stronger reviews of big mergers.
Paul Merrell

Facebook's Marketplace Faces Antitrust Probes in EU, U.K. - WSJ - 1 views

www.wsj.com/...obes-into-facebook-11622800304

Facebook Google Apple antitrust investigations Europe

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The European Union and the U.K. opened formal antitrust investigations into Facebook Inc.’s FB -0.86% classified-ads service Marketplace, ramping up regulatory scrutiny for the company in Europe. Both the European Commission—the EU’s top antitrust enforcer—and the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority said Friday they are investigating whether Facebook repurposes data it gathers from advertisers who buy ads in order to give illegal advantages to its own services, including its Marketplace online flea market. The U.K. added that it is also investigating whether Facebook uses advertiser data to give similar advantages to its online-dating service. The two competition watchdogs said they would coordinate their investigations.
  • Separately on Friday, Germany’s competition regulator announced that it is opening an investigation into Google’s News Showcase, in which the tech company pays to license certain content from news publishers. That probe, which is based on new powers Germany had granted the regulator, will look among other things at whether Google is imposing unfair conditions on publishers and how it selects participants, the Federal Cartel Office said.
  • The three newly opened cases are part of a new wave of antitrust enforcement in Europe. The European Commission filed formal charges last month against Apple Inc. for allegedly abusing its control over the distribution of music-streaming apps, including Spotify Technology SA . In November, it filed formal charges against Amazon.com Inc. for allegedly using nonpublic data it gathers from third-party sellers to unfairly compete against them. Both companies denied wrongdoing. At the same time, the U.K.’s CMA has opened investigations into Google’s announcement that it will retire third-party cookies, a technology advertisers use to track web users, and whether Apple imposes anticompetitive conditions on some app developers, including the use of Apple’s in-app payment system, which is also the subject of a lawsuit in the U.S. In the EU, the European Commission has been investigating Facebook for more than a year on multiple fronts. Facebook and the Commission have squabbled over access to internal documents as part of those investigations.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • New York State Attorney General Letitia James outlined in December a sweeping antitrust suit against Facebook by the Federal Trade Commission and a bipartisan group of 46 state attorneys general, targeting the company’s tactics against competitors. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images (Video from 12/9/20)
Paul Merrell

Facebook Secretly Wiretapped Competitors: Documents | ZeroHedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...retapped-competitors-documents

Facebook Meta litigation Google Snapchat

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • At the request of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook officials developed a program called In-App Action Panel (IAAP) that they deployed in 2016 and which was in use through mid-2019, according to the documents, which include internal emails.The program utilized cyberattacks to intercept information from Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon. The program then decrypted the information.“Facebook’s IAAP Program used nation-state-level hacking technology developed by the company’s Onavo team, in which Facebook paid contractors (including teens) to designate Facebook a trusted ‘root’ certificate authority on their mobile devices, then generated fake digital certificates to redirect secure Snapchat analytics traffic (and later, analytics from YouTube and Amazon) from Snapchat’s servers to Onavo’s; decrypted these analytics and used them for competitive gain, including to inform Facebook’s product strategy; reencrypted them; and sent them up to Snapchat’s servers as though it came straight from Snapchat’s app, with Facebook’s Social Advertising competitor none the wiser,” lawyers said in one of the documents.The lawyers, representing plaintiffs in a lawsuit that accuses Facebook of anti-competitive behavior, were describing emails they obtained through discovery.
Paul Merrell

The People and Tech Behind the Panama Papers - Features - Source: An OpenNews project - 0 views

source.opennews.org/...-and-tech-behind-panama-papers

Panama-Papers technology open-source

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Then we put the data up, but the problem with Solr was it didn’t have a user interface, so we used Project Blacklight, which is open source software normally used by librarians. We used it for the journalists. It’s simple because it allows you to do faceted search—so, for example, you can facet by the folder structure of the leak, by years, by type of file. There were more complex things—it supports queries in regular expressions, so the more advanced users were able to search for documents with a certain pattern of numbers that, for example, passports use. You could also preview and download the documents. ICIJ open-sourced the code of our document processing chain, created by our web developer Matthew Caruana Galizia. We also developed a batch-searching feature. So say you were looking for politicians in your country—you just run it through the system, and you upload your list to Blacklight and you would get a CSV back saying yes, there are matches for these names—not only exact matches, but also matches based on proximity. So you would say “I want Mar Cabra proximity 2” and that would give you “Mar Cabra,” “Mar whatever Cabra,” “Cabra, Mar,”—so that was good, because very quickly journalists were able to see… I have this list of politicians and they are in the data!
  • Last Sunday, April 3, the first stories emerging from the leaked dataset known as the Panama Papers were published by a global partnership of news organizations working in coordination with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, or ICIJ. As we begin the second week of reporting on the leak, Iceland’s Prime Minister has been forced to resign, Germany has announced plans to end anonymous corporate ownership, governments around the world launched investigations into wealthy citizens’ participation in tax havens, the Russian government announced that the investigation was an anti-Putin propaganda operation, and the Chinese government banned mentions of the leak in Chinese media. As the ICIJ-led consortium prepares for its second major wave of reporting on the Panama Papers, we spoke with Mar Cabra, editor of ICIJ’s Data & Research unit and lead coordinator of the data analysis and infrastructure work behind the leak. In our conversation, Cabra reveals ICIJ’s years-long effort to build a series of secure communication and analysis platforms in support of genuinely global investigative reporting collaborations.
  • For communication, we have the Global I-Hub, which is a platform based on open source software called Oxwall. Oxwall is a social network, like Facebook, which has a wall when you log in with the latest in your network—it has forum topics, links, you can share files, and you can chat with people in real time.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • We had the data in a relational database format in SQL, and thanks to ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) software Talend, we were able to easily transform the data from SQL to Neo4j (the graph-database format we used). Once the data was transformed, it was just a matter of plugging it into Linkurious, and in a couple of minutes, you have it visualized—in a networked way, so anyone can log in from anywhere in the world. That was another reason we really liked Linkurious and Neo4j—they’re very quick when representing graph data, and the visualizations were easy to understand for everybody. The not-very-tech-savvy reporter could expand the docs like magic, and more technically expert reporters and programmers could use the Neo4j query language, Cypher, to do more complex queries, like show me everybody within two degrees of separation of this person, or show me all the connected dots…
  • We believe in open source technology and try to use it as much as possible. We used Apache Solr for the indexing and Apache Tika for document processing, and it’s great because it processes dozens of different formats and it’s very powerful. Tika interacts with Tesseract, so we did the OCRing on Tesseract. To OCR the images, we created an army of 30–40 temporary servers in Amazon that allowed us to process the documents in parallel and do parallel OCR-ing. If it was very slow, we’d increase the number of servers—if it was going fine, we would decrease because of course those servers have a cost.
  • For the visualization of the Mossack Fonseca internal database, we worked with another tool called Linkurious. It’s not open source, it’s licensed software, but we have an agreement with them, and they allowed us to work with it. It allows you to represent data in graphs. We had a version of Linkurious on our servers, so no one else had the data. It was pretty intuitive—journalists had to click on dots that expanded, basically, and could search the names.
Paul Merrell

EFF to Court: Don't Undermine Legal Protections for Online Platforms that Enable Free S... - 0 views

www.eff.org/...e-platforms-enable-free-speech

Communications-Decency-Act litigation news-aggregators EFF

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • EFF filed a brief in federal court arguing that a lower court’s ruling jeopardizes the online platforms that make the Internet a robust platform for users’ free speech. The brief, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, argues that 47 U.S.C. § 230, enacted as part of the Communications Decency Act (known simply as “Section 230”) broadly protects online platforms, including review websites, when they aggregate or otherwise edit users’ posts. Generally, Section 230 provides legal immunity for online intermediaries that host or republish speech by protecting them against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do. Section 230’s immunity directly led to the development of the platforms everyone uses today, allowing people to upload videos to their favorite platforms such as YouTube, as well as leave reviews on Amazon or Yelp. It also incentivizes the creation of new platforms that can host users’ content, leading to more innovation that enables the robust free speech found online. The lower court’s decision in Consumer Cellular v. ConsumerAffairs.com, however, threatens to undermine the broad protections of Section 230, EFF’s brief argues.
  • In the case, Consumer Cellular alleged, among other things, that ConsumerAffairs.com should be held liable for aggregating negative reviews about its business into a star rating. It also alleged that ConsumerAffairs.com edited or otherwise deleted certain reviews of Consumer Cellular in bad faith. Courts and the text of Section 230, however, plainly allow platforms to edit or aggregate user-generated content into summaries or star ratings without incurring legal liability, EFF’s brief argues. It goes on: “And any function protected by Section 230 remains so regardless of the publisher’s intent.” By allowing Consumer Cellular’s claims against ConsumerAffairs.com to proceed, the lower court seriously undercut Section 230’s legal immunity for online platforms. If the decision is allowed to stand, EFF’s brief argues, then platforms may take steps to further censor or otherwise restrict user content out of fear of being held liable. That outcome, EFF warns, could seriously diminish the Internet’s ability to serve as a diverse forum for free speech. The Internet it is constructed of and depends upon intermediaries. The many varied online intermediary platforms, including Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and Instagram, all give a single person, with minimal resources, almost anywhere in the world the ability to communicate with the rest of the world. Without intermediaries, that speaker would need technical skill and money that most people lack to disseminate their message. If our legal system fails to robustly protect intermediaries, it fails to protect free speech online.
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