The web’s first photograph approaches 20 year anniversary
The web’s first ever photograph — a grainy GIF of an all-female, physics-themed parody band — is approaching its 20th birthday, according to a report from Motherboard. The image, shown above, depicts “Les Horribles Cernettes,” a group which regularly performs at CERN’s annual Hadronic Music Festival.
Visit the very first web page from more than 20 years ago
That turned out ok:
“The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.”
FOR IMMEDIATE...
According to a new report from the World Wide Web Foundation, the people and government of Sweden are the best in the world at optimizing the Web.
“Our Internet freedoms are what we make of them. It’s only because so many people have mobilized in their defense of the Web in recent years that the Internet pendulum occasionally swings toward the good.
But every advance for online expression has come with a fight. As the threat of censorship grows, millions more people must join the fight to protect online speech and deter any corporate or government entity that tries to silence us.”
The War Over Obama’s Election Tech
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) wants to keep the technology behind Obama’s impressive web presence a secret.
Obama’s website is a beautiful fundraising machine that is being credited for much of his success during the last election. The social media laden site has given him a reputation of being America’s first truly social president.
For both ethical and developmental reasons the team of tech superstars that built and managed the site are calling for the programming, which was developed off of pre-existing open source software, to be made public.
Should other people be able to build off of the technology that helped Obama get elected or should it be kept under wraps?
[Image by Wikimedia user TonyTheTiger][Posted by M. Cecelia Bittner]
Top US tech companies call for surveillance reform
Eight major U.S. web companies made a joint call on Monday for tighter controls on how governments collect personal data, intensifying the furor over online surveillance.
In an open letter to U.S. President Barack Obama and Congress, the companies, including Apple, Facebook and Google, said recent revelations showed the balance had tipped too far in favor of the state in many countries and away from the individual.
In June,former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden exposed top secret government surveillance programs that tap into communications on cables linking technology companies’ various data centers overseas.
After Snowden’s disclosure, many of the big Internet companies warned that U.S. businesses may lose revenue abroad as wary customers switched to local alternatives.
This latest gesture comes as some of the very signatories to the letter are criticized over their data collection practices, which have led to increasing concerns over privacy. Google, for example, was fined in September for not complying with the French government’s request for specific information on the data it collects from users. The search giant has also faced challenges to its Street View mapping project, acknowledging in March that it had violated people’s privacy. Facebook, with its Graph search feature, has beencriticized for the way it mines user data. Apple too has been scrutinized.
Photo: PAWEL KOPCZYNSKI/Reuters
What Government Can and Should Learn from Hacker Culture
South by Southwest isn’t generally associated with the federal government. But this year, between panels on “10 Things Your Band Can Do To Not Get Sued” and “Austin Breakfast Tacos: The food, people & history,” the festival will host “It’s Not About Tech: Hack the Bureaucracy.” The pitch: “Bringing geeks into government won’t make a difference if they can’t crack the code on bureaucracies.” Steering the panel is veteran government code-cracker Richard Boly, former head of the State Department’s Office of eDiplomacy.*
That the State Department embraces technology should not come as news. The department’s “21st Century Statecraft” initiatives have been well covered in the press, and officials from the secretary down to the interns use social media. But the SXSW panel focuses on a far thornier issue than getting ambassadors on Twitter: how to foster a culture of innovation and openness in a bureaucracy built to resist change.
The term “bureaucracy” has few positive connotations. It’s been called the “death of all sound work,” (Einstein), the “giant power wielded by pygmies” (Balzac), the “slime” left behind when revolutions fade (Kafka), and a “symbol of hell” (C.S. Lewis). Though it isn’t America’s only bureaucracy, the federal government is probably its most infamous one. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press shows only 28 percent of Americans viewed the federal government favorably in 2012, its lowest rating since the poll began in 1997. The study didn’t delve into why, but perhaps part of the answer is the perception of federal agencies as bloated, ineffective bureaucracies that stifle creativity.
But there’s hope government can change this.
Read more. [Image: Edward Dodwell]
Hey Texas!
The Net Neutrality debate is headed your way and we need your help!
FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai is holding an open forum on Net Neutrality at Texas A&M University in College Station on Oct. 21.
Sounds good, right? Wrong! Pai’s not a fan of real Net Neutrality.
That’s why we need you there on Oct. 21.
Breaking news: The D.C. Appeals Court just killed Net Neutrality.
This could be the end of the Internet as we know it. But it doesn’t have to be.
Tell the FCC: We Need Real Net Neutrality NOW: http://bit.ly/2XPBtkt
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