The federal government spends money to fix the country’s infrastructure, help senior citizens get affordable access to health care and beef up national security, but did you know that it also pays for stuff like workshops on Star Trek musings? Read More
Saying it seeks to help politicians “become better listeners” and make techies effective citizens, TechCrunch today announced the launch of CrunchGov.
In an introductory post, CrunchGov creator Greg Ferenstein explained that the new site will include a political leaderboard grading politicians on how they vote on tech and a “legislative database of technology policy.” That database will contain bills under congressional review and names of both the politicians who clearly understand the intersection of technology and policy and those who don’t have a clue.
CrunchGov’s tech-related report cards for politicos will rank legislators with “transparent criteria” that merge the political and the technical. Read More
The august and proper BBC News has taken a look at a new and lurking scourge found in thickly settled neighborhoods throughout the world: passive-aggressive wifi names.
Many wifi users stick with something simple, like “Home” or the name of their router (“NETGEAR01″), but wifi networks in some neighborhoods reveal a world of what the BBC aptly terms “bite-sized self-expression.”
The BBC reports that these expressions may be used to embarrass or complain about the neighbors: Read More
Social media has played an increasingly important role in elections over the years–just ask the Obama campaign for confirmation on that. But there’s one frisky feline who’s using the platform to drum up support for a Halixfax mayoral campaign. Meet Tuxedo Stan the cat: He’s running for mayor in Canada, because why the fuck not? Read More
Now, what does this sound like to you?
One recent morning, 14 job candidates filed into his fourth-floor office in Alexandria, Virginia, where a wiffle ball net is stowed in the lobby and a pirate flag hangs in the conference room. How many might he hire? “Fourteen, if we like them all,” he said.
If you guessed “a venture-backed consumer Internet startup,” you are incorrect. (Thanks for playing; better luck next time.) Read More
A famous poet once stated that April is the cruelest month, but he probably didn’t even know that April is “National Child Abuse Prevention Month.” It’s kind of terrible that we as the human species need an entire month to remind each other not to hurt kids. But luckily, the Manhattan D.A. is coming to the rescue.
In order to fight against the proliferation of violent and sexual crimes against children on the Internet, the Department of Justice has assembled a task force that will work to combat these crimes; today, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office announced that it will be joining the thousands of law enforcement officials on the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force Program. Read More
You know that whole Stop Online Privacy Act that threatens to give our government control to basically turn off whatever part of the internet they want? It’s really scary. And cable news networks don’t really care about it enough to cover it. Or they’re simply afraid to poke at their corporate overlords because of it. Or they’re part of a vast conspiracy theory to help it pass. Read More
Viva la hashtag? Read More
SOPA, short for the Stop Online Piracy Act, is a bill making its way through Congress, fueled by Hollywood’s lobbying dollars. Essentially, it would give the American government the opportunity to hit the kill switch on any domain accused of hosting violations of copyright, sight-unseen and without due process. That would be bad. The Internet knows this, Important People On The Internet know this, and they seem to be working very hard to make people aware of it.
Unfortunately, their efforts—at least as far as money is concerned—might not be enough to match the power of Hollywood’s lobbying cash. Read More
DAVID KARP DOESN’T SEEM LIKELY FOR POLITICS. When the Tumblr founder and CEO explains what happened over the weekend, he speaks about it in his typically blazing conversational speed, a full paragraph at a time, with the intensity of someone who’s been sequestered on a coding project for the last three days:
“Basically,” he blasts off, “we had this gathering of the internet in our office, we had seventy people and a bunch of politicians on the phone”—and then pulls back to divest himself of credit—”though we didn’t organize the effort, it was the Demand Progress guys. We just put them up in our office, where we had forty-plus people around. We were in here all day on Saturday. We basically showed up to just say, ‘hey, anything we can develop we’ll help develop, in direct communication with dozens of people,’ and basically all of these founders and people in tech companies are standing by following all this,’” and by ‘this,’ Mr. Karp is referring to a piece of legislation going through Congress—”developing, working to figure out how they can seed it in their communities—propagate it—and get it out there. We literally just finished the copy, we had our team of engineers help build it.”
And yesterday morning, these efforts went live, the center of which was a quirky, live collage of user-submitted photos from those with jobs in the tech/online platform entitled I Work For The Internet that provoked the call to Mr. Karp. That was at the beginning of the day. Read More
