Soon riders will be able to grade their journeys—and the etiquette of fellow passengers.
Loving your bus driver’s atomic-clock timeliness, but hating that dude next to you eating what smells like a week-old squid sandwich? Public-transit users in San Francisco soon will be able to give cheers and jeers to both, with an official app that lets you rate your journey and the behavior of fellow passengers.
The rating feature will be bundled into an update to MuniMobile, a ticketing app for the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency. “It will help us better understand where and what the main issues are and to adapt accordingly and target messages specifically for these lines,” says Paul Rose, an SFMTA spokesman. Here’s more from the agency:
Rate My Ride will allow you to provide specific feedback about any Muni trip in seconds. With a simple click to the left or right, you can rate your trip time, vehicle conditions and even the etiquette of fellow riders.continued…
first published week of: 06/20/2016
Rule 41 change will let feds search “millions of computers” from just one warrant.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and other like-minded senators have come out forcefully against the pending change to federal judicial rules that would expand judges’ ability to authorize remote access hacking of criminal suspects’ devices.
The proposed amendments to rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which are set forth in the order entered by the Supreme Court of the United States on April 28, 2016, shall not take effect. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)
On Thursday, Wyden submitted a bill that aims to stop the proposed amendments to Rule 41 dead in its tracks. The entire bill is one sentence long: “The proposed amendments to rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which are set forth in the order entered by the Supreme Court of the United States on April 28, 2016, shall not take effect.”
For now, the bill is co-sponsored by two other Democrats, and two Republicans, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.). A companion bill is expected in the House of Representatives. continued…
first published week of: 05/23/2016
ProudCity Co-founder Luke Fretwell reveals a cloud platform officials can use easily to customize and manage websites without technical expertise.
Take a look at city government websites and you’re likely to find a mix of pixelated logos, jumbled hyperlinks and a baffling variety of menus.Too many sites incorporate turn-of-the-century Web design. Some of it even hails back to the '90s.
The poor state of so many city sites prompted Kevin Herman, Jeff Lyon, Alex Schmoe and Luke Fretwell (who is also the founder of the government tech blog GovFresh) to mount what might be called an intervention. In 2014 the four met at a conference in Austin, Texas, to explore what an easy, cloud-based website creation platform would look like for cities.
The idea is already pervasive in the consumer world with services like Weebly and Wix. The group wondered what would happen if governments had access to the same type of service. A year later, the four fashioned a prototype and founded the startup ProudCity.
Today ProudCity advertises itself as an out-of-the-box, enterprise-level website platform to localities — primarily small to medium-sized cities — that want the latest technology, but don’t want the pricing of a large Web design firm. continued…
first published week of: 02/22/2016
Since William Smith’s publication of the first geologic map of England in 1815, geologists have used maps to show the distribution and character of rocks at the Earth’s surface, and display their interpretations of the underlying geology. These maps help guide exploration for natural resources and help users understand natural hazards and ecosystems.
When my colleagues and I began working on a new geologic map of Alaska in the late 1990s, we decided to structure it quite differently from the previous version, published back in 1980. This time around, we’d tap into Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology. Though what we recently released is called “the geologic map of Alaska,” it’s really a database from which many different maps can be created.
The advent of digital methods has revolutionized mapping. Printed maps are limited in how much they can show before the amount of detail obscures meaning. They’re also restricted to a single view of the information. Digital maps can store and display a variety of information, allowing users to focus on the characteristics of interest. Using GIS and digital data, many different maps can be created and displayed, allowing users of our new Alaska database to choose which aspects to display. continued…
first published week of: 03/21/2016
The Supreme Court is setting aside a petition from the Electronic Privacy Information Center that demanded the Department of Homeland Security release the US government's secret plan to shutter mobile phone service during disasters.
The top court, without comment, refused Monday to review a federal appeals court's May ruling that the DHS did not have to divulge the full contents of Standard Operating Procedure 303. That court held that the government could withhold the plan's contents under the Freedom of Information Act if its disclosure would "endanger" public safety.
The privacy group had demanded the document in 2011 following the shuttering of cell service in the San Francisco Bay Area subway system to quell a protest. The DHS refused to divulge the SOP 303 documents, which the appeals court described as a "unified voluntary process for the orderly shut-down and restoration of wireless services during critical emergencies such as the threat of radio-activated improvised explosive devices." continued…
first published week of: 01/18/2016
IT pervades almost every aspect of government, but that doesn’t mean that agencies embrace it all with open arms. Several states, for example, have dug in on certain technologies -- usually those where privacy concerns are significant -- to the point that the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation has nominated them for its annual Luddite Awards.
The technologies causing heartburn for government included:
first published week of: 01/11/2016
Big Idea: The Texas Landscape Project
Earlier, the Conservation History Association of Texas had organized something called The Texas Legacy Project. From 1997 through 2008, the Legacy Project videotaped oral histories with conservationists who'd fought to preserve the state's land, wildlife or public health. Those interviews eventually became a video archive and the book The Texas Legacy Project: Stories of Courage and Conservation.
Its successor, the Landscape Project, aims to be more objective, less idiosyncratic: It's all about visual materials based on data sets. Todd, who has a background in environmental law wrote the text, collected the data, drew the few sketches in the book, and prepared draft maps. Ogren, who has a masters degree in geography and the environment, produced the more than 300 finished maps, charts and composite figures. "We are visual creatures," Ogren notes.
The pair hope that the atlas will give readers a new window into understanding Texas' natural and built world, and will encourage the public to protect the state's land, water, wildlife, air quality, and energy resources. continued…
first published week of: 03/28/2016
Twitter has barred U.S. intelligence agencies from accessing a service that monitors and sorts the entire worldwide volume of tweets in real time.
The move, reported by The Wall Street Journal, is seen as a reflection of increased tensions between Silicon Valley and the government. “If Twitter continues to sell this [data] to the private sector, but denies the government, that’s hypocritical,“ John C. Inglis, a former deputy director of the National Security Agency, told the Journal. “I think it’s a bad sign of a lack of appropriate cooperation between a private–sector organization and the government.””
According to a senior intelligence official, Twitter appeared to be worried about the “optics” of being seen as cooperating too closely with U.S. spy agencies.
The service is run by an outside company called Dataminr. Twitter owns about a 5 percent stake in the firm, the only company it authorizes to mine the entire stream of postings on the platform.
According to the Journal, the company recently told Dataminr that it no longer wanted the firm to offer its services to the U.S. intelligence community. continued…
first published week of: 05/09/2016
U.S. Cyber Command is conducting a full-scale and unprecedented digital assault on the Islamic State group, Defense Secretary Ash Carter and his top general said Feb. 29.
The goal of the hacking campaign, which has intensified in recent weeks, is to cause the militants to "lose confidence in their networks, to overload their networks so that they can't function, and do all of these things that will interrupt their ability to command and control forces," particularly in Syria, Carter told reporters at the Pentagon.
Carter and Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were circumspect in detailing the cyberattacks against Islamic State yet waded further into specificity than they have previously.
Dunford said hacking operations have already begun in Mosul, the group's center of power in Iraq. Carter has said previously that Cyber Command would be targeting communication networks in Raqqa, the terrorist group's de facto capital in Syria.
The United States does not want Islamic State operatives to know the origin of digital disruptions they might now be experiencing, Dunford said. Once deployed, such exploits lose their effectiveness because an adversary can patch the vulnerability.
"This is something that's new in this war, not something you would have seen back in the Gulf War," Carter said. "But it's an important new capability, and it is an important use of our Cyber Command and the reason Cyber Command was established in the first place." continued…
first published week of: 03/07/2016
It remains to be seen whether Senate has the wherewithal to approve House version.
The US House unanimously approved legislation Wednesday requiring authorities to obtain a court warrant to acquire e-mails and data stored in the cloud.
The Email Privacy Act unwinds a President Ronald Reagan-era law that allows authorities to access e-mail and data from service providers without a warrant if the message or data is at least 180 days old. The 1986 e–-mail privacy law, adopted when CompuServe was king, considered cloud-stored e-mail and other documents older than six months to be abandoned and ripe for the taking.
The measure now goes to the Senate, where its chances of passage are unknown. The Senate Judiciary Committee for years has debated and even passed similar legislation, which has gone nowhere. President Obama must also sign the bill, but it's unlikely to reach his desk before his term expires in January.
The legislation approved Wednesday was co-sponsored by more than 300 House members. A provision demanding that the target of the warrant be notified about the warrant was removed from the legislation. Because of varying precedent on whether a warrant is required already, many companies, including Google, already demand one.
The bill spells out that warrants are required for all online documents and other private electronic documents like photos, just like warrants are needed for physical papers and effects. National Security Letters, of which hundreds of thousands have been issued, are not included in the House-passed legislation. continued…
first published week of: 05/02/2016