Portside

"The fight for the web is one of the most important causes of our time."

New Report Exposes Facebook Fake News Schemes; Net Neutrality: FCC's Ajit Pai Loses in Court; The End of Amazon HQ2; Digital Pollution; New Tech for Privacy Protection; Automated Propaganda; The Ressa Case; We Interrupt This Emergency Declaration  

Cali Net Neutrality Law; Facebook FUBAR; Hacking the Vote; The New Season; Privacy Law Debate; Taking the Public Pulse

The addition of a citizenship question is far more likely to inhibit the successful trial of VRA cases, by increasing the inaccuracy of the Census, than it is to improve the assessment of VRA claims due to greater precision.

The large and growing volume of data gathered shows that the N.S.A. continues to collect significant amounts of information about Americans’ phone and text messages after changes made by Congress in a 2015 law, the USA Freedom Act.

Urban spaces are often designed as subtly hostile to certain uses. Think about seat partitions on bus terminal benches that make it harder for the homeless to sleep there or decorative leaves on railings in front of office buildings and university campuses that serve to make skateboarding dangerous.

In 2015, the call-blocking app YouMail estimated that close to a billion robo-calls were being placed every month. Two years later, that number has leapt to 2.5 billion. At best, these calls annoy. At worst, they defraud. By far, they constitute the top consumer complaint received by the FTC.

In an interview, whistleblower Edward Snowden discusses his life in Russia, the power of the intelligence apparatuses and how he will continue his battle against all-encompassing surveillance by governments.

In a 50-to-48 vote along party lines, the U.S. Senate decided to kill FCC rules blocking your ISP from selling your browsing history to the advertising industry without permission. ISPs would not only be able to commodify your browser history, but “[hijack] their customers’ search queries and [redirect] them to a place customers hadn’t asked for” and “inject ads into your traffic based on your browsing history.