July 2016

China has ordered several of the country’s most popular Internet portals to halt much of their original news reporting, in a move that could confine an even larger share of the journalism in the country to Communist-controlled mouthpieces ahead of an important party meeting in 2017. The profit-driven portals, several of which are listed on United States stock exchanges, have in recent years expanded their investigative teams to increase readership among China’s more than 600 million Internet users by scooping the staid state-owned news media on stories about subjects including industrial pollution, tainted milk powder and even police brutality.

But on July 25, several news organizations reported that the Beijing office of China’s Internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, ordered the websites of a number of the companies, including Sina, Sohu, NetEase and Phoenix, to shut down or “clean up” several of their most popular online news features. The announcement came within weeks of the surprise departure of the Cyberspace Administration’s director, Lu Wei, and his replacement by an official who had served under President Xi Jinping in a previous position. Under Mr. Xi, media controls have tightened as the Communist Party has tried to squelch news that might put its governance in an unfavorable light.

Big City is watching you. It will do it with camera-equipped drones that inspect municipal power lines and robotic cars that know where people go. Sensor-laden streetlights will change brightness based on danger levels. Technologists and urban planners are working on a major transformation of urban landscapes over the next few decades. Much of it involves the close monitoring of things and people, thanks to digital technology.

To the extent that this makes people’s lives easier, the planners say, they will probably like it. But troubling and knotty questions of privacy and control remain. A White House report published in February identified advances in transportation, energy and manufacturing, among other developments, that will bring on what it termed “a new era of change.” Much of the change will also come from the private sector, which is moving faster to reach city dwellers, and is more skilled in collecting and responding to data. That is leading cities everywhere to work more closely than ever with private companies, which may have different priorities than the government.

The Illinois State Board of Elections online voter registration has been hacked. Earlier, McLean County Clerk Kathy Michael posted a letter to Facebook she claimed was sent to election authorities from Kyle Thomas, the director of voting and registration systems for the board of elections While the letter says the attackers retrieved voter records, it makes clear attackers were limited in what they accessed. “We have found no evidence that they added, changed, or deleted any information in the database. Their efforts to obtain voter signature images and voter history were unsuccessful,” the letter said. The letter also explains the attacks — or the clean up — had caused outages in online voting for the past week.

The investigation into the breach is ongoing. “We’re in the process of analyzing the tracks left by the attack,” Ken Menzel, general counsel, told the The Southern Illinoisan. The attackers took advantage of a programming flaw in the website’s database. The attack, known as a “SQL injection,” occurs in databases using the SQL programming language. Unless a programmer specifically prevents it, SQL databases can be tricked into running commands entered by any website visitor. It is a very common attack. “We are in the process of determining the exact number of voter records and specific names of all individuals affected,” the letter says.