Facebook is launching an initiative to combat cyber bullying in schools.
The pilot program is taking place in Maryland and will give Maryland educators a streamlined process for reporting and removing cyber bullying content on Facebook. If the problem is not addressed in 24 hours, schools can bring concerns directly to Facebook through the site’s “Educator Escalation Channel.”
Not everyone is warming up to the idea of Google Chromebooks, but the education market seems to be.
Chromebooks are used in 22 percent of US K-12 school districts said Google’s Caesar Sengupta, vice president of product management for Chromebooks. The rising adoption makes sense for a number of reasons. For starters, most Chromebooks are lower in price that traditional laptops or computers: You can find a few models for under $200. Compared to Microsoft-powered media sharing tools, Chromebooks are inherently simpler: A Linux kernel and the Chrome browser are the bulk of the software. Should Microsoft be worried? Maybe in the long-term, but Windows isn’t going away from the classroom any time soon.
The Department of Commerce’s Internet Policy Task Force is seeking public comment from all interested stakeholders on the following copyright policy issues critical to economic growth, job creation, and cultural development: The legal framework for the creation of remixes; the relevance and scope of the first sale doctrine in the digital environment; the appropriate calibration of statutory damages in the contexts of individual file sharers and of secondary liability for large-scale infringement; whether and how the government can facilitate the further development of a robust online licensing environment; and establishing a multistakeholder dialogue on improving the operation of the notice and takedown system for removing infringing content from the Internet under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
The Task Force will also hold an initial public meeting on October 30, 2013, to discuss these topics. Comments are due on or before November 13, 2013. Any comments received before October 15, 2013 will be considered in the discussions in the public meeting.
When Ladar Levison, the founder of Lavabit, the secure email service reportedly used by Edward Snowden, abruptly shut down his site earlier this summer, he set off a chain reaction of events.
Levison obliquely referred to both pressure from the government to hand over information, as well as the suppression of his First Amendment rights, and promised he'd fight whatever he was up against in court. It soon became clear that Levison had received a special court order from a government agency, and it likely came with a gag provision. When prosecutors asked for a readable, electronic copy of the user encryption keys, and a judge eventually ordered that Levison be fined $5,000 every day until he complied, Levison shut down the site for good. He's now trying to raise $96,000 for the ensuing battle in court.
Facebook is partnering with a Sacramento-based development company to build a 394-unit housing complex within walking distance of both its Menlo Park HQ and its new West Campus, which is under construction. Aside from 15 low income units required under agreements with local government, the rest of the studios, one-, two-, and three-bedroom apartments are all intended for Facebook employees. Ground will break in October 2013 and the building is expected to be finished in two years.
The long saga of satellite operator LightSquared’s quest to become a cellular carrier may come to an end soon with an auction for the company’s assets scheduled for late November 2013.
The assets, most importantly its spectrum licenses, will be auctioned off Nov 25, according to an order by a New York bankruptcy court. The lead bidder in the auction is L-Band Acquisition, a company linked to satellite TV operator Dish Network that has offered $2.2 billion for the company. It’s unlikely the auction will draw any bidders that will stop Dish from taking over LightSquared, because the company’s spectrum is particularly well matched to Dish’s needs, said TMF Associates analyst Tim Farrar.
The online insurance marketplaces that are at the heart of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul struggled to handle the wave of new consumers on the first day of a six-month open-enrollment period, according to CBS DC. For 21 percent of those who are uninsured, however, the technical difficulties with accessing the online system don't matter, as they do not use the Internet, according to a release posted by the Pew Research Center. The information was discovered as part of Pew's Internet & American Life Project Health Survey, which was conducted between August 7 and September 6 of 2012. An estimated 3,014 randomly selected American adults participated in the survey.
[Commentary] Forget the iPhone 5s. Don’t bother looking at Microsoft’s Surface 2. Ignore software defined networking. They’re all important in one way or another, but to my mind, the biggest, most important development in the tech world right now is the beginning of fiber-based Internet service for home users.
There are three reasons fast Internet changes everything: 1) fast Internet is essential to making today’s cloud services work properly; 2) gigabit Internet will enable innovation on the next generation of services, which history shows will consume exponentially more bandwidth than previous iterations; and 3) the faster the top speeds, the better for everyone, even those who can’t afford it. Competition from fiber to the home will drive down the cost and boost the speed of other Internet connectivity options, improving Net access for everyone.
[Commentary] The introduction of higher-speed fiber-optic networks like Google Fiber and AT&T’s new experiment in Austin may shatter the concrete feet of a cable colossus like Comcast.
In a piece for the Washington Post, Timothy Lee demonstrates how he believes Comcast is reining in access to faster Internet download speeds in order to cash in on customers with few other options. He points out that while Comcast has increased the speed of its most popular broadband offering, the “Performance” tier, from 3Mbps to 20Mbps over the last 10 years, the company is now able to deliver speeds of up to 105Mbps without the customer having to upgrade her in-home equipment. But in order to reach that level of speed, you would need to pay around $115 per month, more than double what most people pay for the Performance tier. Comcast — and they’re not the only who price gauge and price-discriminate their customers by far — would not be able to do so (or would have a more difficult time doing it) if it had any competition whatsoever in the markets it serves.
Back in 2008, Vail (AZ), a 12,000-student district near Tucson, created an in-house wiki to manage its growing assortment of digital curricula and lessons. What began as a modest wiki grew to become Beyond Textbooks, a digital clearinghouse that now contains more than 20,000 resources.
In recent years, educators nationwide have become overwhelmed by the breadth and abundance of digital resources, whether open-source offerings or paid content. Rather than relying on individual educators to sift through endless material, many districts and states are helping to curate and catalog such resources, serving as the librarians of the digital age. But creating a repository of high-quality content which is also aligned to the Common Core State Standards, is no small task. Kevin Carney, the executive director of Beyond Textbooks, estimates around $1 million went into the creation of Beyond Textbooks. Depending on the size of the district (and corresponding number of users), Vail charges an annual fee, which costs from $10,000 to $60,000 a year. Though districts and state-level organizations in 40 states and 10 different countries have approached the district in hopes of forming partnerships, Carney said, he remains concerned, for the time being, with maintaining the quality of the clearinghouse, not expanding its reach beyond state lines.
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