Guardian, The

With smartphone use and web penetration soaring, Africa is set for a tech revolution – but only if its infrastructure can support it.

By 2020 there will be more than 700 million smartphone connections in Africa – more than twice the projected number in North America and not far from the total in Europe, according to GSMA, an association of mobile phone operators. In Nigeria alone 16 smartphones are sold every minute, while mobile data traffic across Africa is set to increase 15-fold by 2020. Twenty per cent of the continent already have access to a mobile broadband connection, a figure predicted to triple in the next five years. The mobile industry will account for 8% of GDP by 2020 – double what it will be in the rest of the world. And internet penetration is rising faster than anywhere else as costs of data and devices fall.

[This is the first of a two-week series supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation]

[Commentary] The next American electorate will be more nonwhite, more working-class, and more leftwing. And they’re likely to demand more democracy, not less – not only from the political system, but from the economic system as well. That sets them on a collision course with elites like Peter Thiel. Above all, Thiel is an innovator. He has made his fortune by recognizing the potential of an idea long before his peers. Silicon Valley, along with most of American business, may dislike Trump. But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t someday embrace the kind of politics he represents. A Trumpist state could do much to soothe the crisis of capitalism: it could pour public dollars into discovering the next lucrative technology for the private sector while holding the line against the redistributive clamor of a rising millennial majority. Thiel has a history of making bets that pay off big. With Trump, he may have made another.

A new lawsuit alleges that the US Department of Justice intentionally conducts inadequate searches of its records using a decades-old computer system when queried by citizens looking for records that should be available to the public. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) researcher Ryan Shapiro alleges “failure by design” in the DoJ’s protocols for responding to public requests. The FOIA law states that agencies must “make reasonable efforts to search for the records in electronic form or format”.

In an effort to demonstrate that the DoJ does not comply with this provision, Shapiro requested records of his own requests and ran up against the same roadblocks that stymied his progress in previous inquiries. A judge ruled in January that the FBI had acted in a manner “fundamentally at odds with the statute”. Now, armed with that ruling, Shapiro hopes to change policy across the entire department. Shapiro filed his suit on the 50th anniversary of Foia’s passage in July. FOIA requests to the FBI are processed by searching the Automated Case Support system (ACS), a software program that celebrates its 21st birthday this year. Not only are the records indexed by ACS allegedly inadequate, Shapiro said, but the FBI refuses to search the full text of those records as a matter of policy. When few or no records are returned, Shapiro said, the FBI effectively responds “sorry, we tried” without making use of the much more sophisticated search tools at the disposal of internal requestors.

The Internet is so vast and formless that it’s hard to imagine it being invented. It’s easy to picture Thomas Edison inventing the lightbulb, because a lightbulb is easy to visualize. You can hold it in your hand and examine it from every angle. The Internet is the opposite. It’s everywhere, but we only see it in glimpses. The Internet is like the holy ghost: it makes itself knowable to us by taking possession of the pixels on our screens to manifest sites and apps and e-mail, but its essence is always elsewhere. This feature of the Internet makes it seem extremely complex. Surely something so ubiquitous yet invisible must require deep technical sophistication to understand. But it doesn’t. The Internet is fundamentally simple. And that simplicity is the key to its success.

Google is set to restrict search terms to a link to a Wikipedia article, in the first request under Europe's controversial new "right to be forgotten" legislation to affect the 110 million-page encyclopedia.

The identity of the individual requesting a change to Google's search results has not been disclosed and may never be known, but it is understood the request will be put into effect within days. Google and other search engines can only remove the link -- as with other "right to be forgotten" requests, the web page itself will remain on Wikipedia.

Tor, the Internet anonymizer, received more than $1.8 million in funding from the US government in 2013, even while the National Security Agency was reportedly trying to destroy the network.

The bulk of the US funding came in the form of "pass-through" grants, money which ultimately comes from the US government distributed through some independent third-party. Formerly known as "the onion router", Tor is software which allows its users to browse the Internet anonymously.

The Tor Project also received direct funding from the National Science Foundation and the US Department of State, totaling $100,325 and $256,900 respectively.

One of Australia’s key laws governing surveillance -- the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) (TIA) Act of 1979 -- is desperately in need of an overhaul.

Under the TIA Act there are three ways authorities can gain access to private information.

The first is access to the content and substance of telecommunications in real time, for which they need a warrant. This provides access to the content of emails, text messages, phone calls and Internet use.

Second, there is access to stored telecommunications and their contents, which also requires a warrant. For this, authorities must suspect the person of an offence that carries a minimum three-year sentence.

Then there is access to metadata, the shell details of communications -- calls and emails sent and received, the location of a phone, Internet browsing activity. There is no access to the content of the communication, just how, to or from whom, when and where. A warrant is not required for this, and under the current law organisations other than police or security agencies can get access to it.

Nearly 900 writers have lent their name to a letter objecting to Amazon's tactics as it negotiates over e-books with Hachette, the fourth largest publisher in the US.

Outside Amazon and Hachette, no one fully knows what the dispute is about. But it is understood to be a battle over e-book revenue with Amazon thought to want 50% from every e-book instead of 30%. The stakes are high.

The BBC has been told to tackle a continued “gender imbalance” among its presenters and talent following sustained criticism that it is failing to put enough women on air.

The BBC Trust called on management to come up with a co-ordinated plan to tackle the shortcomings, despite various initiatives announced by director general Tony Hall since he took on the job in 2013. The trust also flagged up an unexplained pay differential at the corporation although moves have been made to reduce the gender pay gap.

Edward Snowden has urged lawyers, journalists, doctors, accountants, priests and others with a duty to protect confidentiality to upgrade security in the wake of the spy surveillance revelations.

Snowden said professionals were failing in their obligations to their clients, sources, patients and parishioners in what he described as a new and challenging world.