July 2015

The mobile web sucks

[Commentary] The web browsers on phones are terrible. They are an abomination of bad user experience, poor performance, and overall disdain for the open web that kicked off the modern tech revolution. Mobile Safari on my iPhone 6 Plus is a slow, buggy, crashy affair, starved for the phone's paltry 1GB of memory and unable to rotate from portrait to landscape without suffering an emotional crisis. Chrome on my various Android devices feels entirely outclassed at times, a country mouse lost in the big city, waiting to be mugged by the first remnant ad with a redirect loop and something to prove.

Apple totally forbids other companies from developing alternative web rendering engines for the iPhone, so there's no competition for better performance, and no incentive for Apple to invest heavily in Safari development. In many ways, Safari is the new Internet Explorer. Things are mildly more open on Android, but not much -- and Google has Mozilla in some sort of hypnotic foundation-grant-and-search-revenue trance anyway, so it's not clear where the competition would come from. That's a recipe for stagnation, and stagnation is what we have. It's leading powerful players like Apple and Facebook to create ersatz copies of the web inside their walled gardens, when what we really need is a more powerful, more robust web.

Why is Trump surging? Blame the media.

[Commentary] Donald Trump’s surge to the front of the GOP presidential polls has occasioned not a little media attention and endless speculation as to why. You can disregard most of that speculation. The answer is simple: Trump is surging in the polls because the news media has consistently focused on him since he announced his candidacy on June 16.

Trump’s announcement generated a much larger spike in media coverage than these other candidates received. The day before he announced his candidacy, Trump received 4 percent of the media coverage devoted to these candidates. The day after, he received 31 percent. Also, the news media’s attention to Trump hasn’t faded away, as is typical. He has consistently attracted 20-30 percent of the news coverage of these candidates. Only Jeb Bush comes close. In the month since Trump’s announcement, Trump has received 21 percent of the news coverage. Bush has received 20 percent.

[John Sides is an Associate Professor of Political Science at George Washington University]

Rupert Murdoch's Media Empire Split Over Donald Trump

[Commentary] The Wall Street Journal editorial board slammed “conservative media” in July 20th's paper for acting as apologists for real estate developer and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. “[T]oday many on the right seem willing to indulge any populist outburst no matter how divorced from reality or insulting to most Americans,” Journal editors wrote. “If Donald Trump becomes the voice of conservatives, conservatism will implode along with him.” The Journal's blistering editorial echoed the views of owner Rupert Murdoch and suggested a split within the conservative mogul's media empire.

Murdoch's Fox News gave Trump more airtime last month of any Republican candidate, and some of the network's hosts have been more willing to defend, or at least explain, Trump's controversial comments than many in the media. On July 20th's "Fox & Friends," the show's co-hosts repeatedly said that Trump had immediately "corrected" himself after remarking July 18 that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) was not a war hero, and yet the "mainstream media" was ignoring those clarifications. Murdoch, who previously criticized Trump's caustic immigration comments, tweeted that night, "When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?"

National Journal's Fawn Johnson decamps for 'Morning Consult'

Senior National Journal reporter Fawn Johnson is leaving the magazine, a decision she made shortly before the Atlantic Media Co. announced it would shutter the 46-year-old print weekly. Johnson, who has spent 15 years covering Congress for National Journal, The Wall Street Journal and others, will now join "Morning Consult," the politics and polling site founded by pollster Michael Ramlet.

Meghan McCarthy, another National Journal alum, is the site's editor-in-chief; Reid Wilson, formerly of The Washington Post, was hired earlier in 2015 as Congress editor and chief political correspondent. National Journal sources said Johnson decided to leave the magazine before Atlantic Media chairman David Bradley informed staff that he would be shutting down the magazine at the end of 2015. Bradley attributed the decision both to his own failures as a leader and to the changing media environment. He also informed staff that the company would be forced to reduce staff.

Increasing America's broadband reach

A decade ago, an Internet connection capable of streaming a film or transmitting a video call was considered a luxury. Today, for much of the world, it is a necessity. President Barack Obama launched an initiative that he hopes will bring this necessity to more low-income American households. The program, called “ConnectHome”, is a partnership between government, tech companies and non-profit organisations that will provide low-cost broadband Internet, digital literacy programs and other resources to 275,000 public-housing developments in 28 locations across the country.

ConnectHome is the latest White House effort to bridge the so-called “digital divide”, the gap in IT access and know-how between the rich and the poor. America's digital divide has narrowed in recent years but is still large for a rich country. In 2013, for example, approximately 67 percent of households in the Bronx borough of New York City had a broadband internet subscription; 5 percent had an ultrahigh-speed fiber-optic connection. In Manhattan, just across the Harlem River, the figures were 80 percent and 9 percent, respectively. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, once famously tweeted "this is for everyone" of his creation. If ConnectHome proves successful, that sentiment -- for Americans at least -- may be on the way to becoming a reality.

Senators resist the Internet, leave voters in the dark

Former Sen Russ Feingold (D-WI) and California State Attorney General Kamala Harris did something that no other non-incumbent US Senate candidates did: They electronically filed copies of their campaign finance reports with the Federal Election Commission. In a throwback to the age of typewriters and snail mail, Senate candidate must still, by law, submit their official campaign finance reports on paper. A bipartisan bill -- known as the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act -- would force Senate candidates to file digitally, just as presidential candidates, US House candidates and political action committees have done for nearly a generation.

Paper campaign finance records are more difficult to analyze and aren’t readily available to the public for days after being filed. Digital records are publicly accessible and easily searchable from the moment they’re submitted to FEC officials. But until the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act bill (or one like) is adopted, Senate candidates who opt to e-file remain a rarity -- even as campaigns have made digital tools, from social media such as Facebook and Snapchat to complex analytics software, cornerstones of their political efforts. “For the most part, people aren’t going to go above and beyond what they have to do by law,” said Adam Smith, the communications director of the advocacy group Every Voice, which supports e-filing. “It makes absolutely no sense that the Senate doesn’t file electronically.

Pat Butler on Public TV's Prospects

Now deep in his fifth year as president of the Association of Public Television Stations, Patrick Butler is feeling good about the state of public TV these days. The Republican Congress is funding stations at a healthy level and more and more states are contributing significantly, even ones headed by conservative governors that previously had been hostile to public TV. That Butler has been build able to build a rapport with the Republicans holding the purse strings may have something to do with his own political credentials. He was an aide to Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker (R-TN) and a speechwriter for President Ford. President Reagan appointed him to serve on the National Council on the Humanities. During his long and varied Washington-centric career, he also applied his political prowess on behalf of the two commercial media powers-that-were -- Times Mirror, when it owned the Los Angeles Times and a string of TV stations, and The Washington Post Co.

In this interview with TVNewsCheck Editor Harry A. Jessell, Butler talks about the current goodwill toward public television among funders, his problems with the FCC incentive auction and subsequent repacking of the TV band and why free, universal broadcasting -- in the highest possible picture quality -- must remain a cornerstone of public media.

Online food delivery ordering is about to overtake phone ordering in the US

Getting your dinner to your door is now easier than ever, and thanks to the Internet, almost no human interaction is required. While phone orders dominated delivery only five years ago, the balance between meal orders placed over the phone versus those placed online have nearly switched, with Internet orders on track to surpass phone orders any minute now.

In the year ended May 2010, approximately 1.39 billion phone delivery orders were placed in the US, according to market research firm NPD. By May 2015, that number had dropped to about 1.02 billion. In the same period, online orders more than doubled from approximately 403 million to nearly 904 million.

How Advertisers' Cookies Are Helping the NSA's Data-Collection Efforts

[Commentary] It turns out advertisers and the data they rely on are facilitating the government's bulk surveillance. The National Security Agency's XKeyscore program is designed to collect and analyze global Internet traffic. Along with information on the breadth and scale of the NSA's data collection, The Intercept revealed how the NSA relies on unencrypted cookie data to identify users: "The NSA's ability to piggyback off of private companies' tracking of their own users is a vital instrument that allows the agency to trace the data it collects to individual users. It makes no difference if visitors switch to public Wi-Fi networks or connect to VPNs to change their IP addresses: the tracking cookie will follow them around as long as they are using the same web browser and fail to clear their cookies." Advertisers need good information about which ads are and are not working. Often they do this by identifying users via cookies in order to create specific user profiles. But the ability of the NSA to leverage this data is a huge privacy issue. Slides from leaked NSA presentations show agents discussing how to mine these cookies and automatically extract data that uniquely identifies users or their machines. Worse yet, advertisers have not given the public any meaningful way to opt out of tracking, which means users have no way to protect themselves from this NSA piggybacking.

Although initiatives like the Digital Advertising Alliance have guidelines which give users the option to opt out of targeted ads, they don't require advertisers to discontinue user tracking. Instead this data must, according to the DAA's About Ads site, "within a reasonable period of time from collection go through a de-identification process." Unfortunately this does nothing to mitigate the NSA's ability to use the cookies advertisers serve to track netizens. As a result, the advertising industry has become complicit in the NSA's bulk surveillance of the entire Internet. Fortunately, the solution is easy: Advertisers must discontinue all tracking of users who have opted out.

[Noah Swartz is a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation]

Verizon Releases Transparency Report for First Half 2015

Verizon is pleased to release our Transparency Report for the first half of 2015. As in the past, this report describes the different types of demands we receive and the types of data that we disclose in response to those demands. During the first half of 2015, we received almost 150,000 demands for customer information from United States law enforcement. That number is generally comparable to figures we’ve reported in the past.

While we have a legal obligation to provide customer information to law enforcement in response to these lawful demands, protecting our customers’ privacy remains a bedrock commitment at Verizon and we take seriously our duty to provide such information only when authorized by law. To that end, we continue to carefully review each demand we receive and, where appropriate, we require law enforcement agencies to narrow the scope of their demands or correct errors in those demands before we produce some or all of the information sought. Although we continue to receive large numbers of demands, the overall percent of our customers affected remains very small.

Benton

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