April 2015

Russia Shuts Down TV Station Serving Crimean Tatars

Russia pulled the plug on the last independent television station serving Crimean Tatars, continuing what members of the Tatar minority called a pattern of discrimination because of their opposition to Russia’s annexation of the Black Sea peninsula. The station, ATR, had been broadcasting under a Ukrainian license that expired on March 31. Its four applications for a new, Russian license were rejected by Roskomnadzor, Moscow’s media regulator, according to the channel’s managers.

Sanctions may be Obama's best idea yet to battle cyberattacks

[Commentary] Sanctions are a much-needed step to vilify stealing commercial secrets, so that it is seen on par as payment by companies to corrupt officials, something that used to be widespread but is increasingly subject to strong negative norms. Hopefully, the sanctions will include noneconomic penalties such as denying visas to executives who support the theft of commercial secrets, as well as to their spouses and children who want to study in US universities. Such targeted penalties affect those most responsible for the worst excesses without painting China guilty as an entire nation. This new order from President Barack Obama will be seen correctly as a response to China’s commercial spying, however it is meant to help deter other attacks, too.

This new policy on sanctions is the most innovative, and perhaps is the only truly new idea to combat cyberattacks during the entire Obama presidency. It could easily be the most successful, so long as the Chinese (or Brazilians or Europeans) don’t sanction companies known to have helped the National Security Agency spy on them.

[Healey is the director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative of the Atlantic Council]

The Clinton e-mail scandal: a double standard?

[Commentary] Underpinning the coverage of the Hillary Clinton email scandal is a double standard: She is being pilloried for email practices that are widely used throughout government from local school districts up to the federal level, from junior up to senior administrators and from many past as well as current officials.

Compared to my local Maryland public school system, which only retains email for 30 days, these other email retention policies may be paragons of openness. Because Maryland's Public Information Act allows up to 30 days to fulfill an information request, the school system's 30-day retention policy means emails with potentially embarrassing information are effectively exempt from disclosure. No practical penalties appear to exist for deleting emails in response to a Public Information Act request, either. So let's stop pretending that Clinton's email practices are uniquely bad. Public email record keeping laws are riddled with loopholes, which public officials routinely exploit. Then, because hiding information implies having acted adverse to the public interest, they have a strong incentive to deny and otherwise cover up such practices.

A new paradigm for government email public policy is needed. Public officials should be banned from using private email for public business. Period. Doing otherwise should be meaningfully penalized, including with firing. If personal and public emails are commingled, any privacy right over personal emails should be forfeited. And a mechanism should be created for one trusted independent party to archive email records while another verifies claims about the existence and contents of those records.

[Snider is the president of iSolon.org]

Court tosses privacy suit aimed at Hulu

The video streaming service Hulu has prevailed against a legal challenge claiming that it violated its users' privacy by sharing what they watched on Facebook. Magistrate Court Judge Laurel Beeler ruled that the company did not “knowingly” send information to Facebook to pair up with users’ profiles and distribute online. As a result, Judge Beeler tossed out the proposed class action lawsuit, settling a nearly four-year litigation battle that could have broad ripple effects for online privacy.

Hulu users trying to sue the company had taken issue with the fact that their Facebook accounts would update without their knowledge every time they clicked a “Like” button next to a Hulu video. That happened because cookies implanted by Facebook on their Web browsers would link those viewers with their Facebook accounts, so long as they had logged into the social network in the previous four weeks. Judge Beeler acknowledged that it would be natural to assume that information is constantly shared and connected between Internet companies. “But a jury cannot be allowed to pass on liability based on broad hand waves toward what we all know, what we all expect about how our personal information moves around, and how things generally work in the age of the Internet,” she wrote.

Tech Leaders Call for Anti-Discrimination Laws to Protect Gays in all 50 States

Technology leaders are looking beyond an Indiana battle over gay rights that united them, and are calling on all states to enact anti-discrimination protections for lesbians, gay, bisexual and transgender people. More than three dozen chief executives and other senior Silicon Valley leaders issued a joint statement on April 1, asking state legislatures to add sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes to their civil rights laws. Max Levchin, a co-founder of PayPal and the chief executive of Affirm, a payments start-up, organized the statement, which was signed by the chief executives of Twitter, Airbnb, Lyft, Evernote, Salesforce.com, Yelp and other companies.

The Discrimination Double Standard

[Commentary] This week in Silicon Valley, it’s trendy to speak out against discrimination. But last week, many of the same people weren’t quite so forthcoming. Led by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Apple CEO Tim Cook, Silicon Valley is loudly complaining about homophobic laws passed in Indiana and Arkansas in recent days that allow businesses to refuse service to customers based on religious beliefs.

That’s great and even admirable, except that here on the home front, Silicon Valley has its own very obvious discrimination problems. Gender is a big one. Race is another. The numbers are so incredibly skewed for the majority -- the published diversity numbers in technology are something like 70 percent men, 60 percent white -- that the situation is very often unhealthy for people who don’t or can’t fit in. In Silicon Valley, fighting homophobia is an easy issue. Instant alliances can pop up -- as long as the villain is outside of ourselves. But when it comes to the harder topics here at home, and it turns out the enemy is us? That’s a problem that all these genius techies can’t seem to grok quite as easily.

Over 200 black leaders in Silicon Valley gathered in Palo Alto to discuss diversity in tech

On a sunny Sunday morning in Palo Alto (CA), over 200 of the most powerful black leaders in Silicon Valley gathered en masse for the first ever Silicon Valley Diversity Brunch. They had come to discuss how to bring about change in an industry that has managed to keep minorities at an arm’s length for decades. Leaders from nearly every company of consequence, including Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Intel were in attendance. So were prominent venture capitalists, health care executives, and startup CEOs. It was a room full of black men and women who, by all metrics, have "made it" in the tech industry and now want use their positions to make it easier for the next generation of black tech workers to be accepted and succeed in Silicon Valley.

Commerce Department: Tell Us What You Want From Our Data

The Commerce Department is the largest producer of open data in the federal government. Your weather forecasts are brought you to by the good folks at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Census Bureau’s data can paint an almost block-by-block picture of the American populace. But under the leadership of Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, the agency isn’t content with just dropping massive data sets into the abyss of the Internet. The agency, which is composed of 12 bureaus, is “embracing crowdsourcing” on a small scale to improve the quality of the data it releases to the public, said Steve Cooper, the agency’s chief information officer. Whether you call them customers or consumers, Commerce wants their input. Given the wide range of data Commerce and its bureaus collect -- census data, economic information, weather and technical data, among others -- it makes good sense to determine if data could potentially be commingled or delivered differently.

Apple Asks TV Programmers to Supply Their Own Streams for Apple’s TV Service

Apple wants the TV guys to provide their shows for its proposed streaming video service. But that’s not the only thing Apple wants from the TV guys: It wants them to provide the streams, too. Apple is asking TV networks to handle the responsibility and cost of the streaming infrastructure associated with its Web video service, industry executives say. That issue is one of many unresolved questions about the proposed service, which Apple would like to launch next fall but can’t until it lines up programming deals.

Apple’s proposal isn’t necessarily surprising, since video services that stream via Apple apps today -- including some of the networks Apple wants to work with, like Fox, CBS and Disney -- all “stand up” their own streams, by working with content delivery networks like EdgeCast. Streaming video costs aren’t prohibitive: Delivery to your living room runs an average of around five cents per hour per stream, says Tom Morgan, a video industry veteran now running streaming service Net2TV. That said, outside of Netflix, which streams billions of hours of video every three months, most streaming services haven’t experienced significant demand to date. The notion of paying their own freight for a heavily promoted Apple service has given executives pause, sources say.

The Internet’s first gatekeepers are getting older, and the Web is leaving them behind

GoDaddy, the world's biggest provider of domain names and a major cheerleader of risqué TV ads, saw its stock price climb 30 percent on April 1, to about $26 a share, during its first day of public trading. But the initial public offering also brought out its share of detractors for a company loaded with debt, beset by competition and unable to turn a profit.

Amid a slew of stock offerings by major tech upstarts, 18-year-old GoDaddy -- a geezer in Internet years -- seems to be increasingly showing its age. More than half of all American small businesses as of 2013 still did not have a Web site, giving GoDaddy a big opportunity for growth. But small companies also have more ways than ever to get their word out without a Web site, including social media sites like Facebook, rating sites like Yelp and directories like Angie’s List.

In a field of nameless registry services, GoDaddy made its name with the help of time-worn marketing gimmicks, like scantily clad women, Super Bowl ads and celebrity cameos. Race-car driver Danica Patrick, their longtime spokeswoman, helped ring in the bell at the New York Stock Exchange. But to succeed as a company, the firm is pushing to grow beyond its cheeky ad campaigns -- like that depressing spot in 2015 of the puppy being sold online -- and further into the wallets of small mom-and-pop shops looking for an easy way to get online.

Benton

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