Digital Content

Cox, the third largest US cable company, started charging overage fees to customers in four more states.

Cox, which operates in 18 states with about six million residential and business customers, brought overage fees to Arizona, Louisiana, Nevada, and Oklahoma. Cox was already enforcing data caps and overage fees in Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Ohio. California, Rhode Island, and Virginia technically have monthly caps but no enforcement of overage fees, according to Cox's list of data caps by location. Massachusetts and North Carolina seem to be exempt from the Cox data caps altogether. CenturyLink recently ended an experiment with data caps and is giving bill credits to customers in the state of Washington who were charged overage fees during the yearlong trial.

On the surface, the investigation was routine. Federal agents persuaded a judge to issue a warrant for a Microsoft e-mail account they suspected was used for drug trafficking. But US-based Microsoft kept the e-mails on a server in Ireland. Microsoft said that meant the e-mails were beyond the warrant’s reach. A federal appeals court agreed. Late in June, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene. The case is among several legal clashes that Redmond (WA)-based Microsoft and other technology companies have had with the government over questions of digital privacy and authorities’ need for information to combat crime and extremism.

Privacy law experts say the companies have been more willing to push back against the government since the leak of classified information detailing America’s surveillance programs. Another issue highlighted in the appeal is the difficulty that judges face in trying to square decades-old laws with new technological developments. In the latest case, a suspected drug trafficker used Microsoft’s email service. In 2013, federal investigators obtained a warrant under a 1986 law for the e-mails themselves as well as identifying information about the user of the e-mail account. Microsoft turned over the information, but went to court to defend its decision not to hand over the e-mails from Ireland.

Every time I look at social media, it seems, I see someone proclaiming the dangers of social media. The media narrative about the internet appears to have come full circle, with one oversimplified take replaced by another. Where we once saw the internet as the catalyst to overthrowing dictators, now it’s seen as a tool of autocrats. Social media used to connect humanity, now it drives us apart. The onetime platform for courageous dissidents is now a breeding ground for terrorists, racists, and misogynists. The bottom line is that the internet isn’t inherently liberating or repressive. If we went a little overboard with our techno-exuberance, now the pendulum may be swinging too far in the other direction. Let’s not make that mistake again.

The European Union leveled a $2.7 billion fine against Google for allegedly illegally disadvantaging several European e-commerce sites by algorithmically favoring Google Shopping results over their own. The reasons for the fine are fairly tedious, even by the usual standards of EU bureaucratic action. The specific Google product at issue isn’t well-known or widely used and the specific companies involved aren’t well-known either. And while the cash stakes are nothing to sneer at, the amount of money involved is fairly trivial relative to Google’s overall scale.

Yet for all that, the ruling is arguably the most important development in business regulation on either side of the continent in this decade. The details of the case aren’t important, but the high-level view is. Europe has ruled that Google has monopoly power in the web search market and should be regulated as such. That’s a game-changer. The United States, so far, disagrees.

Whether by whim or design, President Donald Trump keeps adding fuel to his incendiary Twitter battle against the media. The press is an easy target for the Republican president, and one his supporters love to hate. But the escalating conflict has diverted attention not just from Trump's failures but his claimed successes as well.

President Trump tweeted July 3 that "at some point the Fake News will be forced to discuss our great jobs numbers, strong economy, success with ISIS, the border & so much else!" It's his own campaign against the press, though, that keeps changing the subject from that more substantive policy debate Trump claims to crave. And it has hindered Trump's ability to push his agenda through Congress, where Republicans complain about the president's lack of focus as his health-care plan is struggling, work on next year's budget is stuck and talk of a big infrastructure deal is fading.

The minds behind LinkedIn and Zynga have a new target for disruption: American politics. Co-founders Mark Pincus and Reid Hoffman unveiled Win the Future — also known as WTF — a political network aimed at helping "Americans organize around a common platform," according to the project's website. "We need a modern people’s lobby that empowers all of us to choose our leaders and set our agenda," wrote Pincus in a post explaining WTF's philosophy. "Imagine voting for a President we're truly excited about. Imagine a government that promotes capitalism and civil rights." Other founders in WTF include former Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg and venture capitalist Fred Wilson. The pair have contributed $500,000 to the project. Pincus says he views WTF as a "new movement and force within the Democratic Party, which can act like its own virtual party."

A US judge has dismissed nationwide litigation accusing Facebook of tracking users' internet activity even after they logged out of the social media website. In a decision late on June 30, US District Judge Edward Davila in San Jose (CA) said the plaintiffs failed to show they had a reasonable expectation of privacy, or that they suffered any "realistic" economic harm or loss.

The plaintiffs claimed that Facebook violated federal and California privacy and wiretapping laws by storing cookies on their browsers that tracked when they visited outside websites containing Facebook "like" buttons. But the judge said the plaintiffs could have taken steps to keep their browsing histories private, and failed to show that Facebook illegally "intercepted" or eavesdropped on their communications. "The fact that a user's web browser automatically sends the same information to both parties," meaning Facebook and an outside website, "does not establish that one party intercepted the user's communication with the other," Davila wrote.

A Q &A with UC Santa Cruz sociology professor Lindsey Dillon.

Ars editors Annalee Newitz and Joe Mullin talked to UC Santa Cruz sociology professor Lindsey Dillon about how the Trump administration has been removing scientific and environmental data from the Web. Lindsey is part of a group called Environmental Data Governance Initiative (EDGI), which is working on ways to rescue that data and make it available to the public. Lindsey told us how EDGI got started in November 2016, within days of the presidential election. Its founders are scientists and academics whose main goal was to make sure that researchers and citizens would continue to have access to data about the environment. They organized data rescue events around the country, where volunteers identified vulnerable climate information on websites for several government agencies, including the EPA, DOE, and even NASA. The Internet Archive helped by creating digital records of all the at-risk pages.

Social media used to be a place where people could go to post photos of cute animals, link to weird articles, and share mundane status updates with friends and relatives. But as events such as the 2016 US presidential election have shown, social media has tipped into feeling primarily like a breeding ground for messages of hate and a forum for bullying.

In response to the onslaught of crushingly negative content, a trend among younger users has emerged—highlighting and sharing only messages that are dripping with positivity. Suddenly, for almost every gloomy trend that has percolated on the internet, there now exists a positivity-promoting counter meme. WholesomeMemes, which has an Instagram account with over 22,000 followers, was among the first of these jolly promoters. They often feature animals, babies, and cartoons. The comment thread beneath them is filled with people tagging their friends and phrases like “reminds me of you” or just “us.”

A day after defending his use of social media as befitting a “modern day” president, President Donald Trump appeared to promote violence against CNN in a tweet. President Trump, who is on vacation at his Bedminster (NJ) golf resort, posted on Twitter an old video clip of him performing in a WWE professional wrestling match, but with a CNN logo superimposed on the head of his opponent. In the clip, Trump is shown slamming the CNN avatar to the ground and pounding him with simulated punches and elbows to the head. Trump added the hashtags #FraudNewsCNN and #FNN, for “fraud news network.” The video clip apparently had been posted days earlier on Reddit, a popular social media message board. The president's tweet was the latest escalation in his beef with CNN over its coverage of him and his administration.