Sep 24
China has a rich—and occasionally odd
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Aug 21
Back in June after the first reports based on Edward Snowden’s leaks were published, President Obama boldly defended the NSA spying programs. He even called them "transparent." But boy oh boy have the folks over at the NSA let him down on that count.
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Aug 05
Infamous gadget manufacturer Foxconn is in the news once again after Chinese authorities alleged that the company has been dumping heavy metals into local rivers. Environmental regulator Ding Yudong believes that Foxconn and UniMicron Technology’s facilities in Kunshan may be allowing toxic, cancer-causing substances to pass into the water table. Both companies have already issued firm denials claiming that the black-green fluid, which locals describe as “sudsy,” is compliant with local laws. All we need to do now is find the guy with the heart ring.
Via: TNW
Source: WSJ
Jul 20
You are what you wear. Sometimes, you can send the loudest of messages without saying a single word. You can let your clothes do all the talking instead.
For example, take the Twitter Dress developed by creative agency Deportivo. This isn’t the first dress that displays tweets, although it’s the first one that’s political in nature.
The dress was created to help Sweden’s youth get their voices heard at Almedalen Week, which is an annual political summit where thousands of politicians, celebrities, and PR people will converge to attend seminars, discuss issues, and talk politics. Deportivo worked with youth organization Crossing Borders in the creation of the dress, which you can see in action in the Vine animation below:
Crossing Borders recruited 30 “ambassadors” to wear the dress before the summit began. Their goal was to get the organization’s concerns out there by catching the attention of people who can actually do something about it – in this case, the people in attendance at Almedalen.
After the summit, Deportivo’s Stefan Ronge reported: “The Twitter Dress got a pledge from the minister of equality, Maria Arnholm, on addressing the issue of mandatory education on gender equality for Swedish teachers.”
[via The Daily Dot via C|NET]
Jul 16
Unfortunately for one ambitious, young new resident of the California State Prison System, it seems there actually might be some justice in politics—at least for a 22 year-old caught stuffing a college election ballot box, that is.
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Jun 27
The media is full of geek stereotypes, everywhere from Big Bang Theory to episodes of CSI and NCIS
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Jun 17
Familiar political tools like petitions, fundraisers, mass letter-writing, call-in campaigns now have online equivalents. But what about protest tactics like street marches, picket lines, sit-ins, and occupations? Where is the room on the internet for civil disobedience?
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May 10
Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame launched a lobbying group called FWD.Us, which purports to be for immigration reform and has more than a few big names associated with it, including Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates, who joined a couple weeks after its unveiling. Among those big-name supporters was Elon Musk of Tesla and David Sacks of Yammer, both of whom have abandoned the group, according to sources who are said to be familiar with the matter.
The information comes from the folks at AllThingsD, which received a statement from Elon Musk stating: “I agreed to support Fwd.us because there is a genuine need to reform immigration. However, this should not be done at the expense of other important causes. I have spent a lot of time fighting far larger lobbying organizations in D.C. and believe that the right way to win on a cause is to argue the merits of that cause. This statement may surprise some people, but my experience is that most (not all) politicians and their staffs want to do the right thing and eventually do.”
As it turns out, the political action committee is focused on more than just immigration reform and seeing Congress “focus on policies that maximize the potential of our country’s workforce to contribute to the knowledge economy,” if its actions are of any merit. The group has come under fire for backing conservative politicians’ political commercials that focus on things like endorsing the Alaska pipeline and fighting against the Obama Administration’s healthcare reform efforts.
Not everyone believes such funding is against the purpose of the group, however.
One FWD.Us supported, Jim Breyer of Accel Partners, told the New York Times earlier this month in a statement: “Our advertising decisions are being made by a very smart team of political operatives who know that passing major reform will require some different and innovative tactics. I’m proud to support Fwd.Us as they work to pass comprehensive immigration reform.”
Regardless of whether the purpose of the group truly is immigration reform or whether it has multiple areas of interest, it is not hard to see why Musk would abandon it. Tesla Motors, for which he is the CEO, is a major player in the electric vehicles industry, as well as other environment and green-oriented areas. Financially backing a group that, in part, spends his contributions on supporting politicians seeking to drill oil in Alaska would be damaging on the personal level and contrary to many of his efforts. As for David Sacks, the information is purely the by-product of sources, with no statement or official word being given either way.
SOURCE: AllThingsD
Elon Musk and David Sacks abandon Zuckerberg’s lobbying group FWD.Us is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
May 07
Entire countries can go offline. Syria’s done it before, and now it appears that the troubled nation has dropped its web connection again, according to Google’s Transparency Report and other online sources. The outage appears to have begun just before 3PM ET, according to Google’s report, and has yet to be resolved nearly three hours later. It’s not entirely clear what’s caused the outage, but based on educated speculation surrounding previous incidents, it wouldn’t be out of the question to conclude that the government was behind this latest interruption. For now, the country remains in the dark — we’ll update this post just as soon as that’s resolved.
Filed under: Internet
Via: Google+
Source: Google Transparency Report
May 01
In between watching giraffes fight and people who can’t parallel park, you’ll find a new attraction on YouTube this week: live streams from members of US Congress. Today, the video-sharing website announced that all federal legislators will receive the ability to tap into advanced features on their YouTube channels, and yes, this includes the ability to pop off about the opposition party at a moment’s notice. Naturally, YouTube is no stranger to public service, as it’s served up similar live streams of both the DNC and RNC, the State of the Union address, and most recently, Coachella. It seems that C-SPAN’s turf is safe for the time being, however, as you won’t yet find live daily coverage of congressional sessions. As a consolation, you can hit the break for the giraffes… which is eerily similar to watching Congress.
[John Boehner photo credit: Gage Skidmore / Flickr]
Filed under: Internet
Via: The Next Web
Source: YouTube
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