Posts tagged with ‘Internet’
The lessons learned from the French Minitel network in the 1980s are still important as the FCC considers net neutrality today. A philosopher of technology talks about the importance of digital democratic innovation.
One Thursday in May, a State Department staffer suggested a simple idea to get U.S. citizens involved in the government’s relief efforts in Pakistan. The following Tuesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced a simple text donation program. Sending the word “Swat,” the name of a valley in the relief area, to 20222 sends a [...]
It’s not the campaign anymore. Some of the best tools for getting the President’s message out and getting the administration’s work done require special consideration on WhiteHouse.gov. Swire explains the laws that constrain and the rules that advance new media for the government.
Techies who eagerly anticipated the announcement of a “cyberczar” along with the release of a 60-day cybersecurity review this week may have been disappointed today. President Obama outlined the position’s responsibilities but did not name an appointee in his remarks on securing our nation’s cyber infrastructure this morning.
The report, ordered by the President and led [...]
News leaked Friday that Aneesh Chopra, Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia, has been appointed the first federal CTO. President Obama made the official announcement Saturday.
While working in Virginia, Chopra lead a highly successful effort to ramp up broadband deployment around the state, which Nancy Scola chronicled in her feature, “Broadband Done Right.” Creative public-private [...]
Sunlight Labs, the web development shop of the Sunlight Foundation, runs an occasional series on “Redesigning the Government,” in which they offer redesign and information architecture advice for federal agencies. Today, they’ve conceived a website that doesn’t yet exist, but that Whitehouse CIO Vivek Kundra has promised is in the works: Data.gov, the central repository [...]
This week, the Federal Communications Commission will begin designing a plan for improving broadband access and speeds for all Americans. The comment period for how to spend taxpayer funds on the project, which includes $7.2 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, opens Wednesday; the final plan is due next February.
But as Mark Lloyd [...]
Government Technology indicates that two major media outlets,
The New York Times and the BBC, are reporting that President-elect Obama will announce his pick for White House Chief Technology Officer this week. Among the speculative short listers is
Science Progress adviser Vint Cerf.
Speedy access to the Internet for every American is about so much more than expanded broadband access. It’s about all aspects of advanced communications and information technology.
White House CTO is a new job, but the forthcoming
Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President, now in production and due in bookstores in January, devotes a chapter to recommendations for the post in the new administration. Mitchell Kapor, founder of the Lotus Development Corporation and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is the author.
The servers are obviously having a tough time handling the traffic load (I’ve gotten a few errors throughout the day), but President-elect Obama’s transition project has already hit the ground running with a box of web 2.0 tools to organize the next administration at change.gov.
While all eyes are on the presidential election today, the five-member Federal Communications Commission will cast its own momentous vote on whether to open up “white spaces” for general use. White spaces are unused sections of the analog television broadcast spectrum–the space between channels. Once the transition to digital TV is completed in February, the FCC will keep about 49 TV channels of the spectrum active.
Open access publishing is great, but what if you can’t capture your research in words? Over at the Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog, Jeffery Young reports that in order to expand the reach and accessibility of their historical elections mapping project, digital historians at the University of Richmond moved their data from an in-house system to two platforms familiar to many web surfers: Google Maps and Google Earth.
The next transition team must make the most of modern information and communications technology to shape, coordinate, and run the process of moving the next president into office. Here are some suggestions on how that can work.
A new report from the Communication Workers of America provides more data on a problem we already knew about: the past seven years have been bad for broadband policy.
If the Internet is a force for democracy, then is there a moral imperative to bring the World Wide Web to citizens living under repressive regimes?
House Representative Tom Allen (D-ME) today introduced H.R. 5682, the Rural America Communication Expansion (RACE) for the Future Act, a push to bring broadband and its economic and social benefits to rural areas across the country.
Virginia rolls out high-speed Internet programs to boost jobs, health care, education, and commerce. It’s a model that works.
The United States Department of Agriculture Rural Development Agency today announced a $267 million loan to Open Range Communications to bring portable, wireless broadband connectivity to rural areas in 17 states.
Tomorrow’s House Judiciary Committee hearing on net neutrality and free speech on the Internet brings the controversial issue back into congressional crosshairs. To help make sense of the issue, Science Progress and the Center for American Progress have put together this net neutrality 101, a beginner’s guide to understanding the debate that could alter the very future of the Internet.
Good news for large-scale solar power generation arrived yesterday with bad news for photovoltaic technology; we need names for the next administration’s science advisors; and Google launches a pilot program for electronic medical records.
Edward Markey (D-MA) and Chip Pickering (R-MS) introduced the “Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008″ bill last week, the most recent legislative foray into the “net neutrality” debate. A look at the competing interests.
Students and teachers alike must understand how systems of knowledge creation and archivization are changing. Encyclopedias are no longer static collections of facts and figures; they are living entities. Just check the entry on Global Warming.
Scientists working in developed and developing nations will soon have a new organization to integrate their efforts; the New York Academy of Sciences is spearheading the formation of “Scientists Without Borders.”
Rather than pretending there are more broadband links across our country, as the administration does in its latest report, we should instead get down to the business of creating a networked nation.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration issued a report from the alternate reality of the Bush administration yesterday, cheering “the nation’s broadband success story.” Despite President Bush’s suggestion in 2004 that the United States should have “universal, affordable access to broadband technology by the year 2007,” we have nothing resembling this system.
Business and blogs in the Middle East, Asia and, North Africa ground to a halt after damage to two undersea communications cables in the Mediterranean crippled Internet services. The incident could be a “wake-up call” to a region heavily dependent on underground lines without much of a back-up infrastructure.
Yesterday, the Federal Communications Commission began auctioning off licenses to a portion of the 700 MHz band of the radio frequency spectrum. The decisions of companies that win those national licenses will determine the shape of wireless communications in the United States for years to come. Science Progress offers this short guide to the issues involved.
National security and public safety require a coherent national strategy for investing in a range of telecommunications technologies.
India ramps up science and engineering education; the European Commission has more questions for Microsoft; the International Linear Collider may end up in Japan; Supreme Court rules that terminally ill patients do not have a constitutional right to developmental drugs; FCC could have trouble selling all its wireless licenses.
Tracking broadband speeds for the FCC; bioterrorism sensors in NYC; China revises its patent policy.
The Navy must turn off its sonar around whales; Britain readies for new nuclear power plant construction; Illinois will host the first commercial carbon capture and sequestration project; the OPEN Government Act of 2007.
Thirty-seven states, along with the District of Columbia, require businesses and institutions to publicly disclose incidents of data loss in which personal consumer information is compromised. But with tens of millions of records reported compromised each year, and incidents on the rise, the government and businesses need to do more to protect consumer information.
Policymakers need to give consumers the choice to protect their privacy or allow e-commerce companies to profile their web travels.
Vint Cerf leaves his post as Chairman of the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers this Friday. ICANN has drawn criticism in the past for U.S. control of the Internet, but new changes will expand and internationalize possibilities for domain names.
