Washington Post

What do you do when your social network ends up revealing racism in users' back yards? That's the problem Nextdoor, a site that connects people who live in the same area, is trying to tackle. Think of Nextdoor as Facebook, but for your neighborhood: People sign up with their address and then share local news, reunite lost puppies with their owners and report potential safety or crime issues.

But Nextdoor has faced criticism for posts from some of the site's more than 10 million registered users that have veered into racial profiling -- especially concerning crime and safety alerts. In some cases, neighbors would flag "suspicious behavior" by noting the race of someone doing something like walking a dog or knocking on doors. Community groups like Neighbors for Racial Justice in Oakland (CA) are fighting back by raising awareness about the issue and rallying local leaders.

With the 2016 Summer Olympics now a memory, it's time to look back at how Americans took in all that sports coverage. How we watched the Rio games can tell us a lot about the current state of media and technology and give us insights on trends in mobile device adoption and cord-cutting. Mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, accounted for almost 20 percent of the Aug 10 Olympics stream. An additional 17 percent went to set-top boxes, such as Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV. Of these, Roku boxes were the overwhelming favorite among Olympics viewers, eating up a 10 percent share. In the end, however, PCs took the prize, accounting for more than 60 percent of that night's consumption.

IPhones, Android devices and iPads account for almost one-third of general Internet consumption, a large discrepancy from the Olympic numbers. Analysts say this discrepancy highlights the particular way in which Americans could access their Olympics coverage online. To watch the Internet live stream, viewers needed to log in through their cable subscription. The downside to this meant being chained to a cable provider, but the upside was that once you authenticated you could watch from any device — mobile or otherwise. Add to that the dismal reviews of NBC's mobile streaming app and you have a powerful incentive to watch from a laptop. Although much of our media consumption is increasingly shifting toward mobile devices, live-stream events such as the Olympics may be one area where PCs could remain dominant for some time.

A campaign shake-up and strong, largely disciplined speeches recently led to the usual debate over whether Donald Trump was finally changing his ways and adjusting to the demands of the general election. His new campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who has been getting some credit for the New Trump, even appeared on the Sunday shows and assured viewers that Trump wasn't into name-calling. "He doesn't hurl personal insults,” said Conway, who had said before joining Trump's campaign that she was uncomfortable with such name-calling and questions about people's mental capacity.

In that case, Aug 21 and 22 must have been particularly uncomfortable. Trump, as he often does, reacted to what he was seeing on cable news with a mix of personal insults and rumor-mongering. First, he called MSNBC's Donny Deutsch "little," "a failure" and "irrelevant." Then he turned to Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.

Hillary Clinton’s increasingly confident campaign has begun crafting a detailed agenda for her possible presidency, with plans to focus on measures aimed at creating jobs, boosting infrastructure spending and enacting immigration reform if current polling holds and she is easily elected to the White House in November.

Clinton has started ramping up for a presidency defined by marquee legislation she has promised to seek immediately. The pace and scale of the planning reflect growing expectations among Democrats that she will win and take office in January alongside a new Democratic majority in the Senate. While careful not to sound as if she is measuring the draperies quite yet, Clinton now describes what she calls improved odds for passage of an overhaul of immigration laws — the first legislative priority she outlined in detail last year — and what could be a bipartisan effort to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges, airports, rail system and ports. She also could be immediately confronted with a choice about a Supreme Court vacancy that could set the tone for her relationship with Congress, and she plans to immediately champion new measures on campaign-finance reform and ending legal immunity for gun manufacturers. Her campaign’s to-do list includes assembling a Cabinet that has women in roughly equal numbers to men and that otherwise reflects American diversity, and lobbying has intensified for those and scores of other jobs that Clinton would fill in her administration.

To penetrate the computers of foreign targets, the National Security Agency relies on software flaws that have gone undetected in the pipes of the Internet. For years, security experts have pressed the agency to disclose these bugs so they can be fixed, but the agency hackers have often been reluctant. Now with the mysterious release of a cache of NSA hacking tools over the weekend, the agency has lost an offensive advantage, experts say, and potentially placed at risk the security of countless large companies and government agencies worldwide. Several of the tools exploited flaws in commercial firewalls that remain unpatched, and they are out on the Internet for all to see. Anyone from a basement hacker to a sophisticated foreign spy agency has access to them now, and until the flaws are fixed, many computer systems may be in jeopardy.

Several civil liberties organizations filed a complaint asking the Federal Communications Commission to investigate the use of cellphone tracking devices by the Baltimore Police Department.

The complaint alleges that the Baltimore police, like many other police agencies across the country, are using devices that mimic cellphone towers to track suspects through their cellphone locations, in violation of federal law that requires a license. The groups are also alleging that the use of the disruptive surveillance technology overwhelmingly affects black residents — and does so without appropriate transparency and oversight. “There’s a pattern of law enforcement agencies around the country engaging in racially discriminatory policing, and that extends to surveillance technology,” said Laura Moy, director of Georgetown University’s Institute for Public Representation, who filed the complaint on behalf of the groups. The Communications Act, the groups say, requires a license to operate the devices on frequencies reserved for wireless carriers. But an FCC official said that local police agencies do not need a license under the law. She said at one point that the devices did not transmit on the wireless spectrum — which experts dispute. At another point, she suggested that local law enforcement is exempt from the requirement. In general, she could not give a clear explanation of why a license was not needed.

One of the things that makes Google so powerful is that the sheer amount of data it gathers makes it possible to understand what the people as a whole are interested in. Now, the company is using all that data to make it easier for Americans to vote.

Google says it will now provide what it calls an "in-depth" search result when users look for information on how to cast a ballot — a search that's seen triple-digit growth in contested states like Arizona since the last presidential election. Basically, this means telling you exactly what you need to bring to the polls and when the registration deadlines are. The information, which is tailored to the exact state you're in, will also tell you precisely how to register. In-depth results are what Google gives you when it has the exact answer to a question, such as what today's date is. The company has increasingly been using these to supply information directly, as opposed to presenting users with links to sources that may have the right information. What will be the practical outcome of all this information?

With an eye toward what happens after November, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, announced new members of a leadership team to start preparing for a potential administration. The move comes two weeks after paperwork was filed to formally establish the Clinton-Kaine Transition Project, a nonprofit group that will oversee the effort to create a Democratic administration headed by Clinton and her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA).

Podesta, who is also serving as president of the transition project, said that Ken Salazar, the former Secretary of the Interior and former senator from Colorado, will serve as chairman of the new entity. He will be joined by four co-chairs: Tom Donilon, a former national security adviser under President Obama; Jennifer Granholm, a former governor of Michigan; Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank; and Maggie Williams, director of the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Williams also served as chief of staff to Clinton when she was first lady. Podesta said that Ed Meier and Ann O'Leary, two top Clinton campaign policy advisers, will shift full-time to the transition project to manage its day-to-day operations. In the previously filed paperwork, Minyon Moore, a senior adviser to Clinton, was named as the project’s secretary.

You touch your phone an average of 2,617 times per day — more, if you’re a heavy user. That’s 18,000 times a week. Nearly one million times a year. Enough that all those swipes, taps, drags, flicks and pinches feel both hard-wired and totally natural. Of course, our interactions with our touch screens are neither of those things: They’re deliberately strategized, user-tested and designed toward specific purposes, by people with self-serving goals. And Ben Grosser, an artist whose work interrogates power and technology, thinks we ought to pay more attention to both. Grosser released the first in a series of three videos that will examine how we interact with our touch screens and how those interactions are represented in modern television and movies.

So, you're on the hunt for a new home-Internet provider. The one you like seems to offer fast, reliable service, but its footprint ends just short of where you happen to live — and there aren't many other options in your area. Too bad: Looks like you'll be sticking with slow speeds and lackluster customer support while your luckiest neighbors get to surf without interruption. For many Americans, this isn't hypothetical. It's reality.

Until now, there weren't many ways around this problem. But thanks to a technology some Internet service providers (ISPs) expect to roll out next year, Americans dreaming of better, faster broadband may actually be able to get it.

To understand how, let's start with key concepts about how Internet service works. Most residential broadband today runs over cables that are laid in the ground or strung on telephone poles, that then branch off and tunnel directly into your house. Laying these cables is costly, which is why many Internet providers expand slowly — or not at all, if they're worried the returns can't justify the outlays.

Cellular Internet is a little different. Cell towers are expensive, too, but they create a one-to-many connection that serves thousands of mobile devices wirelessly — rather than creating a dedicated pipe to a single, fixed destination such as a home or business. The speeds aren't quite as fast on mobile data as what you get with fixed broadband, but for basic Web browsing and video, it's good enough.

Now, imagine if you could take the convenience of cellular data and combine it with the superfast download speeds associated with fixed, wired broadband. What might that look like?