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Submission + - What to Do If the Laptop Ban Goes Global (backchannel.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: The US is reportedly seriously considering a greatly expanded ban on laptops in airplane cabins. If that happens, computing on the road will get a lot more expensive, complicated, and risky—from the risk of device theft to people accessing your sensitive information. At Backchannel, Dan Gillmor offers up a comprehensive guide to staying safe if the laptop ban goes global, writing that "If and when this ban takes effect, my fairly frequent international travel is going to become considerably less convenient, disruptive for my work, and much riskier for my privacy. It’s also likely to become considerably less frequent, and the travel industry is in a well-deserved panic over people who are thinking that way."

Submission + - How Fonts Are Fueling the Culture Wars (backchannel.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: Typography is having a bit of a moment: Suddenly, tons of people who don't work in design have all sorts of opinions about it, and are taking every opportunity to point out poor font choices and smaller design elements. But they're missing the bigger picture. As Medium designer Ben Hersh writes at Backchannel, typography isn't just catchy visuals: It can also be dangerous. As Hersh writes, "Typography can silently influence: It can signify dangerous ideas, normalize dictatorships, and sever broken nations. In some cases it may be a matter of life and death. And it can do this as powerfully as the words it depicts." Don't believe him? He's got ample visual examples to prove it.

Submission + - How One Little Cable Company Exposed Telecom's Achilles' Heel (backchannel.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: Forget net neutrality—the real fight is over controlling price-gouging monopolies. As Susan Crawford writes at Backchannel, a little-known cable company, Cable One, just exposed the telecommunications industry's Achilles' heel: regulation. Cable One has been raising it's data transmission prices quickly, and it's making cable giants very, very nervous. If people begin noticing that there’s no competition, that Americans are paying too much for too little, and that the entire country is suffering as a result, that’s a big problem for Big Cable. As Crawford writes, "don’t fixate on net neutrality...Even though the state of internet access is an issue that touches the bank accounts and opportunities of hundreds of millions of Americans and gazillions of businesses, very few people understand what’s actually going on. Now you are among them. Do something about it."

Submission + - This Computer Language Is Feeding Hacker Values into Young Minds (backchannel.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: It's the 10th anniversary of Scratch, the kids programming language that's become a popular tool for training the next generation of minds in computer science. But as Steven Levy writes at Backchannel, Scratch's real value is how it imparts lessons in sharing, logic, and hackerism: "A product of the MIT Media Lab, Scratch is steeped in a complicated set of traditions—everything from educational philosophy to open source activism and the pursuit of artificial life. The underpinnings of this tool subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, convey a set of values through its use... These values include reverence of logic, an unshakeable belief in the power of collaboration, and a celebration of the psychic and tangible rewards of being a maker."

Submission + - First They Got Sick, Then They Moved Into a Virtual Utopia (backchannel.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: At one point not too long ago, futurists believed that Second Life was the final frontier of social media. Today, the platform is well past its peak—but it continues to host a thriving community of people with disabilities, who are able to live in Second Life in ways they cannot offline. At Backchannel, Kristen French embeds in one such community on "Virtual Ability Island," and offers up a gloriously detailed look at the utopia its residents are creating for themselves. She writes, "For many disabled residents, who may spend 12 hours a day or more in Second Life, the most important moments and relationships of their lives happen inside the virtual world. For them, the fevered fantasies of a decade ago have become reality: Second Life is where they live."

Submission + - In 2017, Your Coworkers Will Live Everywhere (backchannel.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: As companies tighten their purse strings, they’re spreading out their hires—this year, and for years to come. Once a cost-cutting strategy, remote offices are becoming the new normal: from GitHub to Mozilla and Wordpress, more and more companies are eschewing the physical office in favor of systems that allow employees to live out their wanderlust. As workplaces increasingly go remote, they're adopting tools to keep employees connected and socially fulfilled—as Mozilla Chief of Staff David Slater tells Backchannel, “The wiki becomes the water cooler.”

Submission + - The Inside Story of MakerBot and the 3D Printing Revolution That Wasn't (backchannel.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: MakerBot promised to revolutionize society, letting us 3D print anything we needed right from home. That never happened. At Backchannel, Andrew Zaleski has the definitive, investigative account of why the 3D printing revolution hasn't yet come to pass, culled from interviews with industry observers, current MakerBot leadership, and a dozen former MakerBot employees. As he tells it, "In the span of a few years, MakerBot had to pull off two very different coups. It had to introduce millions of people to the wonders of 3D printing, and then convince them to shell out more than $1,000 for a machine. It also had to develop the technology fast enough to keep its customers happy. Those two tasks were too much for the fledgling company."

Submission + - Our Cell Phone Alerts Will Be Hacked (backchannel.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: The wireless emergency alert that went out to New Yorkers' cell phones last week after the Chelsea bombing kicked off a new flurry of conversation about the system—while some, like the NYPD, hailed the system as the future of policing, others, like Chuck Schumer, called for the FCC to modernize the currently retro technology. At Backchannel, Peter Moskowitz looks at the vulnerabilities in the system, and uncovers a chilling truth: as long as these systems have existed, they've been hacked, and it's only a matter of time before our cell phones get pinged with false alarms of tsunamis or zombie attacks. And that has the potential to incite mass panic.

Submission + - Comey Denies Clinton Email 'Reddit' Cover-Up (politico.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The FBI concluded that a computer technician working on Clinton's email was not engaged in an illicit cover-up when he asked on the Reddit website for a tool that could delete a "VIP" email address throughout a large file, FBI Director James Comey said Wednesday. Republican lawmakers have suggested that the July 2014 Reddit post from a user believed to be Platte River Networks specialist Paul Combetta showed an effort to hide Clinton's emails from investigators.
However, at a House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, Comey said FBI agents concluded that all the computer aide was trying to do was replace Clinton's email address so it wouldn't be revealed to the public. "Our team concluded that what he was trying to do was when they produced emails not have the actual address but have some name or placeholder instead of the actual dot-com address in the 'From:' line," Comey said. Comey said he wasn't sure whether the FBI knew about the Reddit posting when prosecutors granted Combetta immunity to get statements from him about what transpired. However, he added that such a deletion wouldn't automatically be considered an effort to destroy evidence. "Not necessarily ... It would depend what his intention was and why he wanted to do it," the FBI director said.

Submission + - Why Your Next Car Should Be 3D Printed (medium.com)

Submitted by kynthelig
kynthelig writes: There are a hundred reasons why 3D printed cars might not work. But that's true of almost any great idea in tech. A few automotive entrepreneurs have developed a vision--along with actual physical cars--that rethinks every assumption around how cars get built. The result has a smaller environmental footprint than either conventional or electric cars, allows for faster innovation, and retools car manufacturing into a local, community-oriented business. The car revolution isn't just in automating them: it's also in how we build them.

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