She has a very specific agenda in mind. Along with filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, she’s pushing for immigration reform, and to promote “The Dream is Now,” a documentary about “Dreamers” — young immigrants who live in America and would like to become citizens but can’t.

But Jobs and Guggenheim aren’t relying on TV alone — the documentary itself will run on MSNBC this weekend — to get their message out. At 10 pm ET, when “Rock Center” airs, they plan on releasing a flood of Tweets and Facebook posts promoting their movie, and calling for immigration reform.

To do that, they’re using Thunderclap, a startup designed solely to promote mass social media messaging. It works by getting Twitter and Facebook users to essentially hand over control of their feeds in order to broadcast a single message, at a given time, for a specific campaign.

So far, the “Dream” campaign has signed up more than 700 people to push out its message tonight; Thunderclap says they have a collective “social reach” of 1.2 million people.

Does that sound relatively simple, technically speaking? It is, says Dave Cascino, who launched the company a year ago. But while there are other social media tools that allow people to orchestrate similar mass messaging, as part of a broader set of tools, Thunderclap looks like it’s the only company that focuses solely on the idea.

So far, that seems to be working. Cascino said Thunderclap has been used nearly 2,000 times in the last year. Earlier this week, the White House used the tool to promote gun control legislation. For-profit companies are using it too, like when People Magazine wanted to let people know that Channing Tatum was the Sexiest Man Alive in 2012. (Sorry, Mike Isaac.)

Right now Thunderclap is free, but Cascino said the company plans on rolling out a premium version soon with advanced tools. Thunderclap is owned by De-De, a “product development studio” funded by ad agency Droga5.

If you’re a certain kind of person, with a certain kind of circle of friends, you are completely aware that a whole lot of Facebook users changed their profile picture this week.

That’s the result of a very effective viral push, kicked off by the Human Rights Campaign, to show support for gay marriage as the issue came before the Supreme Court.

But just how effective? Facebook has taken a stab at crunching some numbers, and come to this conclusion: On Tuesday, the day after the campaign started, an extra 2.7 million U.S. Facebook users changed their profile. That’s about 120 percent more than you’d see on an average day.

Other data points, via Facebook researcher Eytan Bakshy:

• Your age influenced how likely you were to change your profile picture, and 30-year-olds were most likely to swap out images — perhaps as many as 3.5 percent of them.
• Women (2.3 percent) were slightly more likely to change their profile pictures then men (2.1 percent).
• Not surprisingly, people in college towns and in many urban areas were more likely to make the switch. But not every big city: Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City showed lower switch rates than San Francisco and Washington D.C.

Here’s a map that gives you a sense of Facebook’s best guess of how this broke down geographically, by county: The brighter the color, the more switchers. (And if you’re wondering about the bright mark in northern Minnesota, that’s likely because St. Louis County is lightly populated except for Duluth, which is both a college town and a city that likes to refer to itself as “the little San Francisco.“)

Click to enlarge:

The talks on a new technology effort come as the Republican National Committee prepares to roll out an overall blueprint Monday for reviving the GOP after last year’s losses. As part of that effort, the RNC, the party’s main campaign arm, is trying to make up ground on the digital front against Democrats, who proved far more tech-savvy during the 2012 campaign.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

So, time for an update. Which is pretty straightforward.

Just like it did in the dial-up era, the FTC would like you not to lie when you sell stuff. If you’re selling $50 pearl earrings, you have to tell people that they’re not really pearl earrings.

Easy enough!

But what about newfangled stuff that didn’t exist back in 2000, like Twitter and Facebook? The FTC is glad you asked, because it has extensive thoughts about how to peddle bogus diet pills on Twitter.*

For instance: If you’re going to peddle bogus diet pills on Twitter, you have to explain that you’re getting paid to do it, and that your claims aren’t true. Right away.

This version, for example, is no good because the disclosure tweet, at the top of the timeline, comes way too long after the initial fraudulent pitch, at the bottom. I even had to break up the screenshot into two parts!

Also: Don’t assume the people you are peddling bogus diet pills to can pick up on nuance. Because while it’s good that this Tweet explains that the pitch is bogus up front …

… it’s still not good enough. You may understand that “#spon” is short for “I am getting paid to peddle these bogus diet pills.” But not everyone is clever enough to pick up on that. “If a significant proportion of reasonable viewers would not, then the ad would be deceptive,” says the FTC.

Okay. So what if you stick “#spon” next to a link in the Tweet that brings you to a site where you sell bogus diet pills?

Nope, says the FTC. “Putting #spon directly after the link might confuse consumers.”

Alrighty, then. What if you just put all the disclosure stuff in the site you link to, where you’ll have more room to go into detail about the nature of the bogus diet pills and your relationship to the company that sells them?

Sorry, dude. That won’t work, because what if people don’t click on the link? “Moreover, if consumers can buy Fat-away in brick and mortar stores, at third-party online retailers, or in any way other than by clicking on the link, consumers who do not click on the link would be misled.” (Mostly excerpted that part because it’s fun to type “Fat-away.”)

Garr. What if you jam the word “disclosure” into the link itself? Would you people understand that there’s a disclosure about the bogus diet pills then?

Nuh-uh. “Consumers … would not necessarily understand what they will find at that website, or why they should click on that link.”

Ugh! This peddling bogus diet pills on Twitter thing is hard! Is there any way to do this with the FTC’s seal of approval?

Yes. Yes, there is. You say “Ad” before you start typing. And then you use the second half of the Tweet to explain that the first half of the Tweet is a lie.

Boom, as the kids say. Now wait for the dollars to start pouring in!**

This next bit isn’t safe for work, and I’ve posted it before, and it’s not 100 percent on topic. But I’m posting it again. You’re welcome!

*Apologies for the image quality on the originals — maybe a sequester thing?
**Disclosure: Dollars may not literally pour in if you use this technique to peddle bogus diet pills on Twitter.

Former Vice President Al Gore took to the stage at the SXSW interactive festival today to tell a packed auditorium at the Austin Convention Center about the future.

No, really, “The Future,” which is the name of his new book, with the heavy-duty subhead “Six Drivers of Global Change.”

Among these drivers are — no surprise for him — severe environmental damage, as well as overpopulation and changes in biology via technology, and all the problems that come with that. Among the other critical issues, Gore also noted money politics, the ever-more-sophisticated antibiotics for livestock, and the reliance on supercomputers for stock market trading.

Gore told AllThingsD editor Walt Mossberg in an interview that some of these global developments were both a “peril and opportunity.”

But, in all, it’s a pretty depressing picture overall that he is painting, despite pointing out that knowing you have a problem is the first step.

“Our country is in very serious trouble,” he said. “But that does not mean I am not optimistic.”

Which is right before Gore started reeling off the problematic pressure that money has put on politics. “Our democracy has been hacked,” he said.

“American democracy has never been perfect, but more often than not, the will of the people did drive policy,” he added. “Congress today is utterly incapable of passing any reform of any significance unless they get permission from special interests.”

For example: “The NRA is a fraud,” about the National Rifle Association and its links to gun manufacturers.

“I wish I could get you to be more outspoken,” joked Mossberg.

“Timidity has always been an issue with me,” joshed Gore back.

Gore, who often likes to talk in full and very extended paragraphs, slowly worked through the rest of the list, before he got to the issue of spider goats.

Indeed, spider goats, which are created using genetics to mix the genes of spiders and goats.

“You can’t farm spiders for a number of reasons, so people are talking the genes from spiders and splicing them into goats,” explained Gore. “They look like goats, then these spider goats secret silk through their udders. ‘Everyone okay with that?’”

Um, no.

Still, Gore added that there are “blessings” that come with genetic engineering, including the elimination of a range of devastating diseases.

Gore soon moved onto the issue for which he is best known — global warming — after his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” gained worldwide attention.

“It’s not me saying it — I’m delivering the message. Every single national academy of science on the planet agrees with this, he said, before moving onto the recent devastation of Hurricane Sandy on the East Coast. “Mother Nature has the most powerful voice in this debate.”

But Mossberg and Gore soon parried over the sale of Gore’s media company, Current, to Al Jazeera.

You sold your network to Al Jazeera, which is owned by a government that’s a big oil producer,” asked Mossberg. “How could you do that?”

While hemming and hawing about that, Gore then came back with a good one: “I don’t ask you why you continue working for Rupert Murdoch.”

This meant war, since this site is owned by News Corp. “Last I checked, he’s not in the oil business,” countered Mossberg.

“He’s also not strictly in the news business, either,” said Gore.

Oh dear, time to get back to global warming, because it’s getting hot in here.

It was then onto a short Q&A, with one question about the Internet — an issue near and dear to Gore’s heart. In truth, despite all the jokes, he was critical when a senator to turning the Internet over to the people, from its origins as a government project.

And in this Gore finally pointed to a bright glimmer of hope. “The future of democracy,” he said, “may well depend on the continued freedom and independence of the Internet.”

RELATED POSTS:

• How One Boring Company Pulled Off the Perfect SXSW Troll
• Attention SXSW Hipsters: Watch This Video and Get Some Much-Needed Help
• WordPress’s Matt Mullenweg Talks About Future of Blogging in a SXSW Pedicab
• Google’s Smack-Talking Shoe of South by Southwest
• Some More Inconvenient Truths (Including Spider Goats): Al Gore Talks About “The Future” at SXSW
• Moon Shot: Earthbound Investor Milner Talks About Origins of the Universe at SXSW
• People of South by Southwest — Please, Free Grumpy Cat
• MakerBot Unveils Desktop Scanner Prototype for Amateur 3-D Printing
• Ready, Set, Collaboratively Design a 3-D Printed Rocket
• This Year at SXSW, the Next Killer App … Maybe Isn’t
• Artificial Intelligence, Al Gore, Modern Blogging and More: Where to Find ATD at SXSW

The California tech mogul — who has been measured in his public embrace of politicians as his company plays an emerging role in politics — will host a fundraiser next month as part of Christie’s first out-of-state campaign trip.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

This just in from the world of news: Mobile matters.

That’s the clear — if not all that surprising — message from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which just announced the winners of a mobile-themed “News Challenge,” awarding $2.4 million to eight media teams.

Most of the winners are little-known up-and-comers, ranging in their focus from political activism to community radio to connecting previously disconnected groups, like farmers in Kenya.

You’ve probably heard of at least one of the winners, though: Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia’s owner, the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, will put $600,000 from the Knight Foundation toward its mobile users in developing countries. Among their plans: Making articles accessible via text, which could be a boon for feature-phone owners.

The other winners:

• Textizen ($350,000), an offshoot of Code for America that wants to conduct local public polling by putting questions in public places and then asking residents to respond via text.
• TKOH ($330,000), which is developing an oral history app to make recording audio and visuals to tell a historical story easier. The app would then let users share those stories with either a small group, like their families, or with the public.
• Witness ($320,000), a human-rights organization making an app that will add metadata to mobile videos. Thus, an app user witnessing a newsworthy event such as a political protest could send an encrypted video of the event to a journalist, with info about where the video was taken automatically baked into the file. Witness program director Sam Gregory said accountability questions have hampered Syrian rebels in the field: “Their material is not trusted by the news media, and is not robust enough to stand up to evidentiary scrutiny,” he said.
• The Cafédirect Producers Foundation ($260,000), which will expand its efforts to enable SMS information sharing among small-scale farmers in Kenya, Peru and Tanzania.
• Digital Democracy ($200,000), a nonprofit seeking to help indigenous Peruvian communities record and share how mining and oil drilling are affecting their lives and environment.
• The Art Center College of Design ($200,000), which wants to develop an open-source way to turn a smartphone into a community radio station. They plan to start their work with a pilot program in Uganda, but Knight Foundation program director John Bracken said he hopes that groups will share what they learn with others in the Knight network over time.
• Abayima ($150,000), which wants to build an open-source application for feature phones that will turn SIM cards into storage devices for news and information sharing. Founder Jon Gosier said this will help political dissidents such as those in Uganda in 2011, whose government kept tabs on its citizens’ SMS activity. “This was explained away as trying to curb messages that might incite violence, but to me, it showcased how vulnerable citizens are when there they only have a single means of communication.”

Then you had to get a new job. So Ashley Arenson moved from Chicago, where she spent a year-plus as Obama for America’s “Director of Integration and Innovation,” to New York, where she’s now general manager at Soho Tech Labs.

Soho Tech Labs is Lerer Ventures’ in-house incubator; the notion is that the investment firm will use it to play with ideas that could become companies at some point, using a limited amount of capital.

So far, Labs has hatched Rebel Mouse, a buzzy publishing system that lets people and brands create a “social front page”; CasaHop, a social travel company that shuttered yesterday; and Emogo, which hasn’t launched yet but has something to do with avatars (that’s Arenson’s Emogo up right).

Arenson says Labs is working on several other projects, and her task is to help would-be entrepreneurs get their projects in shape to ship, and raise a bona fide seed round. And to help connect them with the incubator’s resources, like a board that includes BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti and a tech team that’s scattered around the world.

The role is similar to the one she had at the campaign, she says, where she worked as a conduit between its technologists and veteran politicos. “Day in and day out, the job was to identify challenges, and identify people who could help me solve them,” Arenson says. That’s a nice summary of startup life, too.

And it’s now very close to doing that for American users: The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that would give the video service the go-ahead to facilitate “frictionless sharing” of users’ viewing history with Facebook or other online services.

The House passed the same legislation earlier in the week, which means it now just needs a signature from President Barack Obama.

Facebook has pushing for the legislation, designed to update the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act, for more than a year.

Outside of the U.S., the service has already integrated directly with Facebook; Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is a Facebook board member.

Here’s Netflix PR rep Joris Evers, via email: “We are pleased the Senate has moved quickly to modernize the VPPA, giving consumers more freedom to share with friends when they want. After the President signs the bill, we will introduce social features for our U.S. members in 2013.”

The bad news: Netflix went through the same exercise a year ago, but the bill never made it out of Congress.

So it’s way too early for CEO Reed Hastings and company to celebrate. Still, it shows that the company’s lobbying effort, designed to tweak the 1988 “Bork Law”* that prohibits disclosing movie-rental information, has gotten some traction.

In many countries outside the U.S., Netflix already has an integration with Facebook that lets users tell their pals what they’re watching. Hastings, who is also a Facebook board member, has wanted to do the same thing for American Facebook users for the last couple years.

*The earlier law stemmed from Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s confirmation hearings, in which his video-rental history surfaced. The Senate ultimately blocked Bork’s appointment; he died Wednesday morning.

According to a BBC report, the capital city, Damascus, had Internet service as of Saturday.

Internet monitoring service Renesys also confirmed a number of the country’s Internet service providers are back up and running.

“Renesys confirms a largely complete restoration of the Syrian Internet this morning,” Renesys said in a blog post. “Internet service (is) being provided post-restoration by Telecom Italia, Tata Communications, Turk Telecom, and PCCW.”

However, CloudFlare cautioned the restoration of service doesn’t necessarily mean all is well.

“While the network is back online, it’s impossible to know if filtering or
monitoring technologies were installed during the outage,” CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince said in a statement.

As was the case in Egypt during earlier uprisings, the Syrian outage would seem to be the work of the ruling government aiming to thwart rebel communications.

The outage has again raised concerns for the region and other nations about just how vulnerable they could be to having their key communications cut in a time of political instability.

If you’ve ever found yourself at a panel of academics, you know the drill: Really smart people, differing viewpoints, respectful bickering, free sandwiches, aaaand scene.

That said, at a panel yesterday on the campus of Stanford University’s Law School, the disagreements were actually few and far between.

Three panelists — U.S. Ambassador David Gross, Google policy counsel Patrick Ryan and former Assistant Secretary of Commerce Larry Irving — presented a surprisingly unified argument: An upcoming United Nations conference on Internet regulation is dangerous.

Really, really dangerous. At least for those who like the Internet as-is.

“Is This the End of the Internet?” delved into the World Conference on International Telecommunications, or WCIT, a U.N.-affiliated policy summit starting next week in Dubai. The government representatives in attendance will debate and vote on amendments to a 24-year-old telecom regulations treaty.

Some — but not all — of the proposed amendments could upend the historically laissez-faire regulation of the Internet. This anti-WCIT advocacy video sums up opponents’ nightmare scenario well:

The original 1988 treaty was “a tremendous success for reasons that no one anticipated,” Gross told the Stanford audience. At the time, the focus was still on telephony, which was still state-owned and -run in most countries, although not the U.S.

The liberalizing treaty’s flexibility over commercial relationships, he said, drove international growth and laid the groundwork for today’s widespread global mobile access.

But now, Irving chimed in, “fear is a great driver, and people like to regulate what they fear.” Governments that will be in attendance at the closed-door WCIT summit — including some that currently censor Internet traffic within their own borders — have proposed amendments to the treaty that could make it easier to monitor and control how everyone uses the Web.

In response to this perceived threat, Google launched an anti-regulation campaign online just over a week ago. And it did so under “Take Action,” the same corporate policy banner used to successfully protest the anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA earlier this year.

At first, Google’s Ryan said, he didn’t know why the ITU, the U.N. sub-organization behind WCIT, isn’t more transparent in its efforts. Gross said that past transparency efforts by ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré had been shot down by member governments.

The reason? According to Irving, while Americans generally think of the Internet in positive terms, the people in power in a handful of other countries equate the Web with a loss of control and cultural disruption.

In other words, they see problems like spam and privacy as exempt from public discussion.

Compounding the problem, each country gets one, and only one, vote at WCIT, no matter their differences in Internet usage or how many delegates they send.

For all intents and purposes in the ITU, the U.S. and its 115 delegates (so numbered according to this document obtained by anonymous-leaking Web site WCITleaks) are on a level playing field with China’s 31, Russia’s 45 and Libya’s two.

Nevertheless, Gross said, WCIT 2012 “may be historic,” because it will test the “global political power of the Internet.”

The big question is whether bottom-up efforts from WCIT’s adversaries, both in the crowd online and in the private sector, can put any sort of pressure on the top-down decision-makers.

Average people understand the benefits of the Internet, Irving added, and “regulating the Internet in a stupid way can take a lot of those benefits away, especially for those at the ‘bottom of the pyramid.’”

The danger, Irving added, arises from the fact that so few governments really understand the digital medium. The last time the U.N. looked at the Internet in a major way, at a 2005 summit, most people had never heard of YouTube, Facebook or smartphones, he pointed out.

In other words, it’s safer to avoid regulation of the Internet, because governments will never be able to outpace the speed of evolving technology.

“We’re not regulatory Usain Bolts,” he said.

Via Google’s “Take Action” site, this video goes deeper into what the ITU has done right in the past, and what’s going on now:

Still, here’s some data that shows how commonplace that behavior was, beyond your personal filter bubble: A third of the country followed the returns last week online.

And most of them were “second screeners,” who used both the TV and the Internet to keep up.

That’s via new research from the folks at Pew, who have other stats that make intuitive sense.

For instance: The younger you are, the more likely you were to be online, and/or to use the Web as your only source of news.

Bear in mind that while lots of folks will assume that “online” equals “Facebook and Twitter,” it really just means “online” — ask Nate Silver and the New York Times. Only 8 percent of voters said they followed the returns on social networks. But Obama voters (11 percent) were much more likely to do so than Romney voters (4 percent).

The full report is here; the part you care about is here.

The idea is familiar to anyone who has a message to push in 2012: Instead of relying on middlemen like the press to convey your story, you can go over their heads, and right to your target audience.

But Internet services themselves are still middlemen, with the ability to block content if they want or need to.

Google, for example, has yanked a video posted by the Israeli military yesterday, which apparently recorded a “pinpoint strike” which killed Hamas military leader Ahmed Jabari in his car.

A message on the world’s largest video site says the clip has been removed because its content violated YouTube’s Terms of Service. “Sorry about that.”*

Update: That was a mistake, YouTube now says. Here’s a comment from a company spokeswoman, via email: “With the massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call. When it’s brought to our attention that a video has been removed mistakenly, we act quickly to reinstate it.”

What that means in real world terms, according to someone who knows how YouTube’s takedown system works: At some point yesterday, YouTube users “flagged” the video, which triggered a review process, and at some point early this morning, someone at YouTube made the call to take it down. Later on, someone else decided to put it back up.

I don’t know how long the video was off the site, but it was at least three hours, because that’s how long it took me to get the post up after first noticing the clip was gone.

Earlier:

I’ve asked YouTube executives to elaborate. They usually don’t talk about specific takedowns on the record, but I’m hopeful they will in this case, since assassination videos published by military spokespeople are a new YouTube use case.

The company did go into a bit more detail when it blocked an anti-Islam video in Egypt, Libya and other countries in September.

In the meantime, you can peruse the YouTube TOS yourself, and will likely want to pay attention to the part on “community guidelines,” which ban “graphic or gratuitous violence.”  A “tips” primer goes into a bit more detail:

“Don’t post videos showing bad stuff like animal abuse, drug abuse, under-age drinking and smoking, or bomb making. Graphic or gratuitous violence is not allowed. If your video shows someone being physically hurt, attacked, or humiliated, don’t post it. YouTube is not a shock site. Don’t post gross-out videos of accidents, dead bodies or similar things intended to shock or disgust.”

And if you want to see the aftereffects of Israel’s strike, YouTube is okay with that, via this AP clip:

*Meanwhile, the Twitter messages Israel initially used to promote the video have been altered, and a new video has been inserted in their place. Can’t figure out who made this choice, or what they’re trying to say:

Chinese users of many of Google’s services reported a lack of access late Friday, halting use of everything from Google’s search engine to its Gmail email service to its Google Play mobile-applications store. The Mountain View, Calif., company said that its own statistics showed a sharp decline in traffic from China, and it said that the problem didn’t appear to be within its equipment.

Services returned on Saturday, though users in some parts of the country said use was unpredictable and unreliable over the weekend.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Spoiler: Jon Stewart does not bring up Drunk Nate Silver in this interview, and neither does Nate Silver. It’s still good, though. And Silver does swear here, and Stewart sort of does a Buzzed Nate Silver at the end. So it’s close:

And since we’re all here, let’s use the opportunity to get a teeny bit wiser, by reading Felix Salmon on Nate Silver — it’s not the math, it’s the words.

UPDATE: Silver, or someone who looks very much like him, has been spotted wearing a wizard’s hat at a Chinese* restaurant. Still sober, reportedly.

*”Asian”, technically.

In a blog post on Election Day, the 38-year-old Silicon Valley billionaire decried the fierce partisan battles in Washington and called on Tuesday’s victors to withdraw from their political parties and to govern as independents.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Here, for instance, is an excellent piece by the New Republic’s Marc Tracy, which details the huge spike in traffic the New York Times has seen to Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog.

“A lot of the traffic is coming just for Nate,” executive editor Jill Abramson tells Tracy. Quite an astonishing thing for the paper of record to say about any of its writers, let alone a freelancer.

But Silver is not, as some folks on the Web have announced today, generating 20 percent of the Times’ Web traffic.

Instead, as the Times PR staff told Tracy, 20 percent of visitors to the Times’ Web site are including a trip to Silver’s blog as part of their journey. Small distinction but an important one.

A chart prepared by the Times, based on its internal server numbers, helps put things in perspective: The Times has seen a traffic spike in the runup to the election, and visits to the paper’s “politics” section are naturally ramping up as well. And Silver’s blog, which is a subset of the politics section, are up, too.

I’ve had enough. Over the past month, I’ve systematically chopped all those whose annoying updates have populated my social streams. Asking for Obama’s birth certificate? Unfollow. Just posted a 1,500-word screed on Prop 37? De-friend. Oh, a sepia-framed Instagram of your ballot? Awesome. Delete.

Click. Click. Click. It’s liberating, I tell you.

By no means am I anti free speech. I love how the Web — and specifically platforms like Facebook and Twitter — has democratized the means of communication and activism for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. And I am more than fine with encouraging others to vote, regardless of political affiliation.

However, I draw the line at vitriolic, half-baked arguments for or against either candidate, regardless of my affiliation. Whatever happened to Lolcat pics and smart, biting commentary on the latest awful reality TV series?

I’m curious how many others feel the same, so I’ve put together a quick, informal poll asking how you’re using social media this election season. Feel free to answer in the questionnaire below.

So this season, my fellow Americans, I encourage you to get to the polling booths before they close. Vote for the candidate you believe best for the job. Tell your friends to do the same.

And then please shut up about it.

View This Poll

Even though the results are not in yet, no matter who wins in this most contentious and dead-heat of elections, what happens afterwards is something to start thinking about for the tech sector.

The many issues outstanding in the months and years ahead for Silicon Valley include privacy, immigration, piracy, open Internet, cyber-security, intellectual property and much more. And there’s no question that regulatory issues and tech policy are only going to become more complex.

Thus, I had a little pre-election chitchat with TechCrunch’s Greg Ferenstein, who recently launched a new project called CrunchGov, about it all. According to Ferenstein’s post on the nascent tech policy platform, it “includes a political leaderboard that grades politicians based on how they vote on tech issues, a light legislative database of technology policy, and a public markup utility for crowdsourcing the best ideas on pending legislation.”

And, more to the point, as the site also notes, it’s an “attempt at helping policymakers become better listeners, and technologists to be more effective citizens.”

Would that is were so.

In any case, here’s my video interview of Ferenstein talking about CrunchGov and what’s ahead for tech and politics:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121106/post-election-crunchgovs-ferenstein-talks-about-whats-up-next-for-tech-and-politics/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121106/new-jersey-gives-its-e-voters-and-voting-officials-more-time/ http://allthingsd.com/20121106/new-jersey-gives-its-e-voters-and-voting-officials-more-time/#comments Tue, 06 Nov 2012 21:24:46 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=267254 Voters in New Jersey who have been displaced by Hurricane Sandy now have until 8 pm Friday to return their email and fax ballots under a directive issued by the state’s lieutenant governor.

The order comes as voting offices experienced an enormous crush of requests for ballots that they’ve been unable to process. One county alone has more than 2,000 requests for electronic ballots to process, according to this story from the Bergen Record.

The one deadline voters still have to meet by today is to get their requests in to their local county clerk’s office by 5 pm today local time.

Election officials have until noon on Friday to process all those requests. Filled-out ballots had previously been expected by no later than 8 pm tonight. The extension gives voters an additional 72 hours to get them turned in.

It’s hard to know exactly how many voters have been displaced by Hurricane Sandy, which stormed through the Northeast last Monday, killing more than 100 people, causing severe damage in many coastal communities and knocking out power to millions of households, including much of New York City.

But the extension essentially means that New Jersey’s final vote tally won’t be known until the weekend at the earliest. While the result of the presidential race there is reasonably assured — President Obama is expected to carry the state and its 14 electoral votes — there’s a Senate race and numerous local and state offices being contested as well.

Gov. Chris Christie, who’s turned into a bit of a bipartisan political superhero during the crisis, said that the number of people requesting electronic ballots should actually be small and that most voters should opt instead to show up at the nearest polling place in person. As quoted by the Record: “If you haven’t been displaced by the storm, get your butt up and go vote at your polling place.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121106/new-jersey-gives-its-e-voters-and-voting-officials-more-time/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121106/the-last-place-in-america-thats-not-politically-polarized-wikipedia/ http://allthingsd.com/20121106/the-last-place-in-america-thats-not-politically-polarized-wikipedia/#comments Tue, 06 Nov 2012 21:01:55 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=267205 Though in the lead-up to today’s election news organizations somehow kept unearthing supposedly undecided voters to interview, today’s American political discussion is in fact ridiculously polarized and unfriendly — on TV, on blogs, on Twitter, on Facebook and IRL. But Wikipedia editors, it turns out, can get past their differences and have reasonable discussions across party lines about controversial political topics. That is, according to a study by researchers from USC and the Barcelona Media Foundation, found via the Wikimedia blog.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121106/the-last-place-in-america-thats-not-politically-polarized-wikipedia/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121106/yep-there-have-been-problems-with-email-voting-in-new-jersey/ http://allthingsd.com/20121106/yep-there-have-been-problems-with-email-voting-in-new-jersey/#comments Tue, 06 Nov 2012 19:23:52 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=267166 As might have been expected, that idea to let displaced voters in New Jersey cast their ballots by email isn’t working out so well.

First there are the technical issues. People requesting voting instructions by email are reporting that they’re receiving bounce-backs, and have been complaining about it on Twitter and Facebook. See these tweets I pulled from NJ.com’s Storify page. County offices are being overwhelmed with electronic requests, and can’t keep up with the demand in getting responses back to voters.

So the email ballot option in NJ isn’t working out so well. Emails are bouncing back due to full inboxes :-/ #Vote2012 #NJVote

November 6, 2012 10:00 am via TweetCaster for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite

@EssDot323

Steph Boogs

@BrianLehrer @pollwatchusa #njvote I faxed&emailed vote by fax app 12am mon.No reply from Essex clerk.their inbox is now full&lines r busy

November 6, 2012 10:10 am via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@Jemour

Dr. Jemour Maddux

disenfranchised thanks to Hudson County being 100% unprepared for Christie’s “email voting.” Thanks New Jersey. #NJVote

November 6, 2012 10:39 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@thetrashsalad

Abbey

They’re also going to have a hard time counting the electronic votes that do come in. Despite the state government’s best intentions to make poll access as flexible as possible under the circumstances, the whole thing appears to be suffering from the lack of time to make it all happen, which is about zero.

And already there’s been an emergency appeal by the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey asking a court to intervene. The ACLU is reportedly asking the judge to allow affected voters to cast ballots via the Federal Voting Assistance Program.

For all the anecdotal complaints arising on Twitter and elsewhere, there are examples where it appears to have worked for some people:

#njvote: Someone had her mail-in ballot returned YESTERDAY, thought she couldn’t vote. County said scan, send by 8pm. #NJ making it work!

November 6, 2012 10:23 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@MeganCarolan

Megan Carolan

Now on to the more troubling reports. There has been at least one report of a bit of malware that may be targeting voters in Sandy-struck areas. As GFI Labs notes, one is a file named electioncard1.exe, which is made to look like a regular document file. It is instead an executable file that contains the Rotinom.b Trojan. And that’s just one of them.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121106/yep-there-have-been-problems-with-email-voting-in-new-jersey/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121106/one-last-pre-election-chat-with-pundit-slayer-nate-silver/ http://allthingsd.com/20121106/one-last-pre-election-chat-with-pundit-slayer-nate-silver/#comments Tue, 06 Nov 2012 14:52:41 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=267041 Yes, there’s Obama versus Romney today. But many of you are going to be at least as excited about Nate Silver versus the Commentariat.

Here, via Stephen Colbert, is one last conversation with the Internet’s political man of the moment, before today’s results either enshrine or embarrass him.

Actually, here are two clips. First Colbert does a nice job of setting up the threat the New York Times stats geek poses to the punditocracy. In short, if he’s right, he will have publicly depantsed them, which they are not excited about:

And here’s a five-minute chat with Silver and Colbert, in which Silver comes out as pro-Ebola. Colbert really does a nice job of pushing Silver in a thoughtful way:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121106/one-last-pre-election-chat-with-pundit-slayer-nate-silver/feed/ 0