July 2013

The app business thrives on free games with ample opportunities for in-app transactions. Apparently, that’s something that parents with kids who play a lot of mobile games still haven’t learned.

[Commentary] I write this flying back from the Native Public Media and Native American Journalists Association joint conference in Tempe, AZ. The weekend left me with conflicting conclusions. On the one hand, I saw excitement, entrepreneurship, and a host of innovative approaches to bring telecommunications and media infrastructure to Native lands. I saw clever and information-filled websites, learned about new radio and Internet news outlets, and sensed high hopes that upcoming spectrum auctions would hasten the arrival of wireless and high-speed broadband to Indian Country and other Native areas. On the other hand, high-speed broadband service remains a stranger to most Native Americans—and by “most” I mean 90-95 per cent of them. It has been aptly remarked that the nation’s first Americans are also the least-served Americans when it comes to the availability of communications infrastructure. And get this: only about two-thirds of our sisters and brothers living in Indian Country have even plain old telephone service! No gigabytes for them, no DSL, a paucity of wireless, very little ability to make that 9-1-1 emergency call that can spell the difference between survival and death. Not even a pay phone nearby. Most folks reading this will be, like me, hard-put to even grasp how crippling these gaps are. So today’s reality in Indian Country is not a slowly-shrinking communications gap that is on its way to closure. It is instead a widening communications gap consigning yet another generation of Native Americans to a future bereft of the tools they need to become fully participating citizens in Twenty-first Century life.

The National Security Agency (NSA) is a "supercomputing powerhouse" with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture. But ask the NSA as part of a freedom of information request to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees' e-mail? The agency says it doesn't have the technology. "There's no central method to search an e-mail at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately," said NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker. The system is "a little antiquated and archaic," she added.

The giants of the tech industry are buttressing their campaign for immigration reform with a lobbying blitz inside the Beltway.

Facebook spent just over $1 million on lobbying during the second quarter of 2013, a 10 percent rise over the same period in 2012, public records show. Microsoft, another outspoken advocate for overhauling the immigration system, spent just short of $3 million on lobbying activities, up from the $2.5 million the company spent during the first three months of the year. And Google, an emerging powerhouse in corporate advocacy, spent a hefty $3.3 million on lobbying efforts. Silicon Valley is putting its collective weight behind the push for immigration reform in hopes of securing passage of legislation that would help companies hire more highly skilled foreign workers who earn degrees in the United States. Tech companies have spent millions on ad campaigns and events intended to build pressure on lawmakers to act, and top executives are putting their personal wealth into FWD.us, a lobbying group launched in part by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that has made immigration reform priority No. 1.