Mark Zuckerberg is now wading into that thorniest of political issues: immigration reform. In an op-ed for the Washington Post last week, the Facebook CEO told the story of a young "aspiring entrepreneur" who may not be able to attend college because the boy is residing in the U.S. illegally. 

His family is from Mexico, and they moved here when he was a baby. Many students in my community are in the same situation; they moved to the United States so early in their lives that they have no memories of living anywhere else.

Such students, Zuck says, "are smart and hardworking, and they should be part of our future."

Which is no doubt true. Only Zuckerberg's very attachment to the issue colors the general public's perception of it. Is "our future" — America's future — truly aligned with that of a man whose net worth is approximately $10 billion?

Zuckerberg fails to fully make the case that the reforms he seeks — reforms that will, not surprisingly, directly benefit Facebook — are also good for most of America. This is a missed opportunity. So is Zuck's failure to address underlying fears about Silicon Valley's immigration agenda with concrete action, both at Facebook and his new lobbying outfit.

Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Talented Specialists

Fairly or not, by repeatedly linking the larger immigration issue with "the Internet," as Zuckerberg does in his editorial, he appears less concerned with America's future — or even the future of those children residing in the U.S. illegally — and more with boosting the value of his own Internet concern.

By comparison, note that Apple boasts of all the jobs it has helped create throughout the country — manufacturing, sales, engineering and transportation. "From the engineer who helped invent the iPad to the delivery person who brings it to your door." Everybody wins. 

Even worse, Zuck's editorial likely only serves to exacerbate the general population's fears regarding the corporate takeover of the nation's immigration policies. Consider his calls for more H-1B visas:

Why do we offer so few H-1B visas for talented specialists that the supply runs out within days of becoming available each year, even though we know each of these jobs will create two or three more American jobs in return? 

How does expanding the H-1B program help America and not just the Valley? Zuckerberg fails again to make a strong enough case.

Contrast Zuckerberg's efforts with those of Laurene Powell, Steve Jobs' widow. Powell is a long-time supporter of the Dream Act, which aims to provide a "path to citizenship" for children residing in the U.S. illegally, provided they graduate from college or serve in the military. (Their families, too.)

The majority of these students are not likely to work for Facebook or in the Valley — nor to ever require H-1B support. Powell and the Dream Act group repeatedly focus on both the larger moral issue of offering a path to citizenship and the overall benefit of reform to America's economy.

In politics, especially, perception matters. Already, the New York Times has implied that those with H-1B visas are effectively "indentured.:"

Silicon Valley is battling in Washington to make the immigration process easier for thousands of people... many of them Indian engineers, while also pushing to hire many more guest workers from abroad. [Emphasis mine.]

How many underemployed engineers in the American midwest, for example, read those words and reflexively thought that Silicon Valley is on the hunt for cheap labor and nothing more?

Similarly, Om Malik writes that Zuckerberg's focus on "technology and innovation centric changes doesn’t take into account the harsh reality of post industrial society & its invisible victims."

InfoWorld, however, was blunt: "American tech workers lose out in H-1B lottery."

If Congress answers the tech industry's calls to raise the numbers of visas, it could lead to a hemorrhaging of American tech jobs.

How Zuck Could Really Lead The Way

In conjunction with the editorial, Zuckerberg and a veritable who's who of Silicon Valley have launched FWD.us (pronounced Forward U.S.), a lobbying group whose mission is to promote "comprehensive immigration reforms." 

FWD.us is calling for the following:

1. Comprehensive immigration reform that begins with effective border security, allows a path to citizenship and lets us attract the most talented and hardest-working people, no matter where they were born.
2. Higher standards and accountability in schools, support for good teachers and a much greater focus on learning about science, technology, engineering and math.
3. Investment in breakthrough discoveries in scientific research and assurance that the benefits of the inventions belong to the public and not just to the few.

These are all lofty goals.

But to make their case with both the American people and Washington politicos, Zuck and his compatriots need to reach out to the rest of country and to demonstrate how "what's good for Silicon Valley is good for America." So far, this hasn't been the case.

Perhaps instead of building a massive new Valley headquarters, Facebook should instead first build the world's greatest telecommuting platform. Not everyone capable of helping Valley companies can live in the Valley.

FWD.us could also work aggressively to welcome and then train America's older engineers to code for Facebook and other Valley companies. For instance, it should consider supporting these short-term "coding boot camps" across the country.

The organization can better reveal how their proposed policy changes offer direct benefit outside as well as inside the Valley. Show how "job creation" is not simply defined as a high-paying professional job in the Valley, for example. Rather, detail how such jobs create opportunity that quickly reverberates across the larger economy. 

The issue of immigration reform, for the Valley and for America, is simply too important to allow it to be viewed as nothing more than another corporate lobbying effort.

Image of Mark Zuckerberg courtesy of Flickr. Ellis Island photo courtesy of Wikimedia

Three years after WikiLeaks shook up the international community by leaking more than 250,000 diplomatic cables, the organization is at it again. Yesterday, it unveiled 1.7 million documents from the era of Henry Kissinger in the form of a searchable database called PlusD. It's the biggest leak of previously classified information in human history.

The leak will undoubtedly make for some intriguing historical analyses and anecdotes, some of which pertain to people and organizations that still wield power. But it doesn't say much for the continued relevance of WikiLeaks.

With its leader under house arrest, its biggest source about to stand trial on capital charges and a financial blockade hamstringing its ability to raise money, it's a wonder WikiLeaks can manage to get anything accomplished. With that in mind, the Kissinger cable leak is an impressive feat.

How Far WikiLeaks Hath Fallen

Yet for the most part, the things we'll learn from this new trove of documents are based in the past. Three years ago, WikiLeaks was releasing data that had an immediate impact on things going on around the world. Prior to that, it made headlines by releasing the now-infamous video of a U.S. helicopter killing civilians in Iraq.

Today, they're putting out might be a gold mine for historians and academics, but it probably won't impact the future as much as past data dumps have.

It's a radical departure from the rhetoric and expectations of late 2010. It was then that, emboldened by the impact of Cablegate and the Iraq War Logs, WikiLeaks proudly announced that it was in possession of a Bank of America executive's hard drive, the contents of which would be released to the public. The leak, Assange assured the world, had the potential to "take down a bank or two."

Whatever Happened To That Hard Drive?

And yet it never materialized. At least a portion of that data was allegedly destroyed by a former WikiLeaks collaborator with whom Assange had a falling out.  It's not clear what, if any, data remains. The data, the seizure of which caused Bank of America to launch an internal, preemptive investigation, has yet to see the light of day.

Since those triumphant, headline-grabbing days, WikiLeaks has been considerably quieter, periodically releasing data that might be interesting, but which lacks the impact of earlier dumps. Last year, the organization leaked millions of internal emails from private intelligence firm Statfor. It revealed a few intriguing details, but the emails were mostly, as GigaOm's Matthew Ingram put it, "underwhelming." 

As Ingram pointed out, WikiLeaks was no longer working with the influential media partners it boasted in 2010. Instead of teaming up with journalists from the New York Times, Guardian and Der Spiegel, Assange was relying on the likes of Anonymous, a shadowy collective with an altogether different type of reach than the Grey Lady. 

Losing Partners and Data Sources

Even more so than it needs powerful media partners, an organization like WikiLeaks needs reliable, well-placed sources.  It's worth recalling that Bradley Manning, the Army private accused of handing WikiLeaks the Collateral Murder video and diplomatic cables, is about to stand trial on charges that could result in his execution.

There's a certain deterrent factor at play there. And on a more practical level, WikiLeaks no longer has a source quite as well placed as Manning now that he's in jail. Meanwhile, the hacker who leaked the StratFor emails could face life in prison. Governments have little tolerance for the type of ruckus WikiLeaks has caused, and they're making that clear to would-be collaborators by aggressively prosecuting the sources of past leaks. 

Combine these factors with the financial blockade, Assange's legal woes and infighting within the organization and it's easy to conclude that WikiLeaks has been rather handily marginalized.

Sure, there's still global fallout from past leaks, and the Manning trial, a historical event with huge implications, hasn't even started. But WikiLeaks is clearly less nimble and impactful than it was three years ago. And short of a bombshell such as a Manning acquittal or another explosive leak on the order of the promised BofA disclosure, there's little reason to think things are going to turn around any time soon. 

Lead photo courtesy of Wikipedia

If you tuned into the Presidential debates this past Fall you may have caught the one moderated by CNN personality Candy Crowley. Remarkably, it was the first presidential debate moderated by a female in 20 years. Wonder how that dry spell ended? Because of a petition created at Change.org.

Debate organizers were influenced by three Montclair, N.J. high school students, who, inspired by a civics class, were able to sign up more than 180,000 supporters for their online petition.

30 Million Signatures

One of the biggest challenges of finding innovative new ways of doing things is monetization, and that's where Change.org shines. The company has in effect become a marketing machine for mostly non-profit organizations. It has also boosted its beneficial standing by becoming a certified B Corp.

Change.org is designed to make creating petitions easy, and features selected petitions on its home page.

Future Changes

The way Change.org works is simple. Anyone can start a petition for free, but qualified organizations can send sponsored petitions to specific Change.org members by paying a premium. “Every package is custom built for each sponsor,” Dulski says, adding that “we have people in house who know how to make petitions stronger.”

The future for sponsored Change.org petitioners seems bright. Dulski promises that the company is “going to develop a great analytics platform for sponsors, so we’re able to better reach the kind of people who are passionate about their causes.”

One recent victory had 200,000 Gatorade consumers using Change.org to demand the removal of the controversial ingredient BVO from its product bottles. Gatorade removed the ingredient, scoring a victory for the 15-year-old Mississippi teenager who started the petition.

International Action

While most of its biggest victories have been in the U.S., Change.org has become a global phenomenon. “We have staff in 18 countries,” notes Dulski. A perfect example of that global power was the petition calling for Malala Yyousafzai, the Pakistani girl shot for advocating female education, to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. This petition, posted by Tarek Fatah of Toronto, has gained more than 287,000 supporters.

With influence comes power that translates into more galvanizing events - and that, in turn, attracts even more users. Do you have an innovation that could use the gravy train of a complementary business? Can you leverage the Time Compression Ubertrend to create a service that helps consumers save time? I’m ready to file my petition to help America become more innovative.

When you're looking for a job, success often comes down to who you know. And if you're a company hoping to make government work for you, success may come down to who you pay. Even as the total sum spent on lobbying has declined for the second year in a row, tech vendors – with Google leading by a wide margin – have poured more money into D.C. pockets, largely to fend off government meddling in technology markets.

Good luck with that.

For decades the technology industry largely ignored Washington, D.C., believing itself immune from Federal lawmakers' meddling. At the same time, government mostly ignored technology. United States vs. Microsoft served as a wake-up call to both, however, and ever since the tech industry lobby has grown, even as overall lobbying by other industries has declined, as recent data from OpenSecrets.org highlights.

The biggest spender of all? Google, which more than doubled the donations of second-place Microsoft:

Chart: ReadWrite. Source: OpenSecrets.org. Spending in millions.

Why was Google such a big spender in 2012? Two reasons: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Both bills were big news in 2012, and Google lobbied hard against them.

Indeed, more money has been coming from the Internet firms - Facebook's contributions are up 200% year-over-year - as they seek to carve out breathing room from federal regulators. This makes sense in light of technology's, and particularly the web's, rising impact on GDP, as McKinsey has found:

Old-school technology vendors have had less need to buy a seat at the federal table, and have mostly trimmed their lobbying outlays. When it comes to direct donations to political candidates, however, the legacy technology vendors outpace their Internet peers:

Source: OpenSecrets.org.

What's most interesting in all this is the sides the different technology companies are taking. As Greylock partner and former Mozilla CEO John Lilly argued in the wake of SOPA, we're seeing the technology industry take positions along generational lines:

Existing industries are always oriented towards self-preservation....[T]here’s a funny thing that happens: the most progressive companies of today who become successful and dominant will become reactionary in the future, oriented themselves towards self-preservation....[Y]ou can see it even in the current situation – the companies who are most outspoken are the modern Internet companies: LinkedIn, Mozilla, Zynga, Google, etc etc. Mostly on the sidelines are the most progressive technology companies of the past decades, even including Apple. So this is not, fundamentally, a techie v content type of issue at all, but more of a progressive v conservative technology issue.

Over time, we should expect to see technology vendors spend more on buying government influence, as technology's impact on the economy deepens. There's simply no way that government will take a hands-off approach to such a critical influence on GDP. 

The most fascinating aspect of this spending, as Lilly intimates, will be which technology vendors support which causes. Today Google is lobbying hard to defend Internet freedom and its business model. Tomorrow it may simply be fighting to defend its business model.

Same as it ever was.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Unless you're Tim Cook, you probably don't have a front row seat lined up for President Obama's State of the Union (SOTU) address on Tuesday night. That's okay though, because the ever-more-interactive speech is best experienced online, where it will be accompanied by more context and conversation than in any other medium. 

When it comes to tuning in online, this won't be anything like the Summer Olympics. There will be plenty of free livestreaming options across a variety of devices, as well as any number of social chats, on-camera analyses and interactive features from media outlets, journalists and the White House itself. 

Livestreaming The State Of The Union Address

The White House will not only be live-streaming President Obama's speech Tuesday night, but it will be displaying relevant charts and data in sync with whatever the President happens to be talking about. The White House's "enhanced livestream" begins at 9pm Eastern Time (6pm Pacific Time) and will be followed by a live panel discussion with policy experts. All of this will be available on the White House's website, as well as its official iOS and Android apps. 

If the White House stream freezes up right as your SOTU drinking game is just getting rowdy, you can always jump over to C-SPAN.com, which will be streaming the speech as well. On C-SPAN, you can also compare Obama's fourth State of the Union with archived addresses from the past. The C-SPAN folks have written transcripts dating back to Franklin Delano Roosevelet and archived videos as far back as Ronald Reagan's fourth State of the Union address in 1984. For even more historical analysis, check out Al Jazeera's interactive tool comparing Obama's past State of the Union speeches. 

And if all of those options aren't enough, CNN, Wall Street Journal, YouTube and HuffPost Live will also be live streaming the speech. 

The State Of The Union Is… Interactive

These days, it's pretty much a given that any big news or entertainment event is the "most interactive" instance of that event that's ever happened. That's what progress is all about.

The State of the Union is no exception, and not just because people are increasingly connected and more prone to live-tweet TV events in general. The famously tech-savvy Obama administration has been proactive about baking interactive elements into the speech and encouraging online participation. 

On Twitter, the White House has officially endorsed the #SOTU hashtag and is encouraging users to use #WHChat to submit questions to on-air policy experts after Obama's speech. The administration will also be actively maintaining conversations with citizens on Facebook and Google+. 

Meanwhile, Republicans will be live-critiquing Obama's speech on the official GOP website and encouraging rank-and-file conservatives to do the same over various social channels. 

Media outlets are running their own interactive features during the speech as well. Huffpost Live, for example, will be doing its usual thing, live-streaming the speech and post-speech reactions while inviting viewers to join on-air discussions and live chats. 

Move over PolitiFact, there's a new fact checker in town.

This week, The Washington Post debuted a news app that can fact check speeches, virtually in real time. It's called Truth Teller, and for countless journalists and citizens looking to determine the accuracy and legitimacy of political statements, it's a step towards toward a brighter, more truthful future. 

Cory Haik, The Post's executive producer for digital news describes the app as a "speech-to-text technology to search a database of facts and fact checks. We are effectively taking in video, converting the audio to text (the rough transcript below the video), matching that text to our database, and then displaying, in real time, what’s true and what’s false."  

Released in partnership with the Knight Foundation Prototype Fund, and still in prototype stage, the app is currently focusing on the looming debate over tax reform. But Haik thinks it can one day be applied to streaming video, or even someone "holding up a phone to record a politician in the middle of a field in Iowa."

Yuri Victor, The Post's UX (user experience) Director, and the project lead in design, says the goal is to "hold politicians accountable and squash mistruths from spreading... to push the discussion forward on what's possible with real-time fact checking."

Here's a video of how the app works: 

Washington Post Truth Teller from The Washington Post on Vimeo.

The app works by transcribing videos with Microsoft Audio Video Indexing Service (MAVIS), which uses speech recognition technology that converts audio signals into words. Extracts of audio and video are then saved as a transcript, and the facts in that document are scrutinized for errors. To make it easy to search, the program focuses on patterns instead of specific phrases. This program is called a fuzzy string search algorithm. 

Not Replacing Humans

In today's cash strapped journalism environment, fact checkers have largely gone the way of the dinosaur. While there's still a few dedicated fact checkers here and there, the role has largely merged into the job of the reporter and the editor. Some publications, like The Tampa Bay Times' Pulitzer winning PolitiFact, still do it the old-fashioned way, with human being dedciated to the task.

Does this prototype of an automated fact checker threaten their livelihoods? 

Probably not, says Mark Glaser, the executive editor of PBS Media Shift. 

"I don't think that machines will be able to do all the work on fact-checking yet, but they can be a help and aid to human fact-checkers who might not be able to fact-check everything they hear instantly," Glaser said. "My guess is that this tool will take some time before it can threaten PolitiFact. More likely it will just be another weapon in the arsenal of fact-checkers."

The Post’s national political editor Steven Ginsberg agrees. "I dont think it's going to cost anyone a job. I don't think it replaces anything. I think it expands and broadens what you can do and who you can fact check - and correct a conversation before it gets too far on the wrong path."

Speed Matters

Ginsberg characterizes fact checking as a surprisingly difficult task that only a limited number of people are able to accomplish efficiently. And even for them, the process can take anywhere from an hour to an entire day or more.

And when an error is found, it's difficult to quantify how many people see the corrected fact compared to the number who saw the original mis-statement. When the two are so separated, it can complicate the perception of of what's true and what's not.

The beauty of this innovation, he says, is that it dramatically shortens the time between the falsehood and the truth: "People would get the truth a lot quicker," Ginsberg says. But the real value of the app won't be seen until it's in peoples' hands in town and city halls across the country, where they can use it for themselves to vet the thing that they are told.

"If you're a regular citizen and you want to hear a politician talk and see if he's telling the truth or not, you need something in your hand to go on," Ginsberg said. That's the ultimate goal for the Truth Teller app.

Photo courtesy of TruthTeller.com.

What is the 21st Century equivalent of Franklin Roosevelt's famous radio addresses to the nation known as "Fireside chats?" The White House seems to think Google+ Hangouts is it, as the administration is calling its series of video-chat conferences "Fireside Hangouts." 

The first Fireside Hangout under the new administration, as announced today on an official Google blog post,  will focus on the reduction of gun violence, specifically "the White House policy recommendations." Besides Vice President Joe Biden who is leading the Hangout,  guests include two very big names in different corners of the tech industry: Silicon Valley's favorite entrepreneur and writer Guy Kawasaki and YouTube celebrity and businessman Philip DeFranco. PBS NewsHour's Hari Sreenivasan will moderate.

(See video of Guy Kawasaki in conversation with ReadWrite Editor in Chief Dan Lyons: Guy Kawasaki On Android vs. iPhone and Guy Kawasaki On Self-Publishing In The 21st Century.) 

Conspicuously absent from the Hangout?

Any community leader or organization that deals with reducing gun violence (like the Chicago initiative CeaseFire, for example). It is unclear how Kawasaki and DeFranco have been affected by gun violence, and their inclusion in this hangout - which is bound to attract digital mobs of impassioned people - reads like as a ploy to get press and increase Hangout attendance among the Technorati crowd.     

The Fireside Hangout on reducing gun violence will take place on Thursday, January 24 at 1:45pm Eastern Time, and viewers can tune in via the White House Google+ page or its YouTube channel.   

Biden image courtesy of Jason and Bonnie Grower / Shutterstock.com.

The 57th Presidential Inauguration falls on Monday, January 21st, this year, which coincidentally, also happens to be Martin Luther King Jr. day.

"It's almost like fate and history coming together," U.S. Rep. John Lewis told the Associated Press. Lewis, the representative of Georgia’s 5th Congressional District, is a civil rights leader who worked closely with King in the 1950s and '60s. "If it hadn't been for Martin Luther King Jr., there would be no Barack Obama as president," added Lewis.

Lots Of Performers

Performers at the inauguration include Beyonce and James Taylor, and the inauguration parade includes guests like Bobak Ferdowski, aka NASA’s Mohawk Guy.

MSNBC estimates that up to 800,000 people will attend the inauguration this year, and scalpers are reportedly charging $2,000 for tickets. For those of us wanting to watch at home through our electronic devices, however, the options are entirely free.

Both Apple and Google are offering free apps for their respective devices, with both companies dubbing them the “Inauguration 2013” app. Apple’s iOS app is available on iTunes, naturally, and Google's Android app can be downloaded through Google Play, and both promise you “a front row seat at the ceremonial swearing-in with the app’s built-in live stream.” Both apps have been reviewed favorably.  

Fox News will be streaming on their site, and CNN will be livestreaming via CNN.com as well as through its apps for iPhone, iPad and Android. Yahoo, meanwhile, has partnered with ABC News for its Inauguration Control Room, which promises not just all day interactive coverage, but commentary from a bunch of unusual pundits, including Buzzfeed’s editor-in-chief Ben Smith, former White House executive chef Walter Schieb and Michael Waldman, a former speechwriter for President Clinton.

Or, if you are so inclined, you can watch the same coverage on ABCNews.com, GoodMorningAmerica.com, on the ABC News mobile app, or on the ABC News YouTube Channel.

YouTube Is Reliable

Speaking of YouTube, while the Google-owned video sharing site has yet to announce its plans for the inauguration stream, it is more than likely a live stream will be available through its Election Hub, or through various partners' individual YouTube channels, which include the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The White House has also set up an Inauguration 2013 channel, and will be streaming here.

As someone who has tried both individual news sites' livestreams as well as YouTube’s, the live stream offered directly on YouTube is by far the most reliable. (YouTube did invest heavily in its livestreaming infrastructure to cover the Olympics, after all.)

NASA will also offer a livestream of the inauguration parade, no doubt highlighting the Mars Curiosity Rover replica that will be rolling along with all the high-school bands and other attractions. NASA will broadcast on Ustream, which served it well during the Curiosity landing.

Photo courtesy of Andrew F. Kazmierski / Shutterstock.com.

In a publicity bid this week, German website Populeaks.org announced The NRA Bet, challenging the National Rifle Association - in fractured English - to use its guns to "keep all non-public data a secret till April 30, 2013." If the NRA manages to protect its data, the site promises to provide two unrequested staffers to provide unwanted services – in this case, helping to polish 500 guns at the NRA's next annual meeting.

Source: http://www.g4tv.com/hurl I'm sure Wayne LaPierre is thrilled. "The NRA Bet" may never amount to much. It's not as if Populeaks, which was created only three months ago, can really call down the fury of a mighty hacker horde.

Still, by framing its call to action as a humorous contest, Populeaks staggers across an interesting point. What if instead of threats, hactivism groups tried offering their targets something they wanted in return for complying with their demands (er, requests)? And what if instead of anger and outrage, the conversation included a little humor and satire? Would that kind of lighter approach be more likely to achieve the desired results? Or at least make the hacktivists more likable?

PopuWHO?

First things first: You might be asking "What the hell is Populeaks?" That's an excellent question. According to its About Us page:

• POPULEAKS confronts governments, corporations and non-governmental organizations with the assertions made by our whistleblowers – and demands substantiated replies or information within a time window of ten days. 
• In order to increase people’s readiness to respond, POPULEAKS informs up to 6,000 journalists and bloggers from its custom media mailing list - at the same time it receives an inquiry - and publishes the full text of the inquiry, word-for-word, on www.populeaks.org.

In other words, the site encourages users to spam it with gossip, attempts to force the subjects of the gossip to reply, then turns around and spams "6,000 media contacts" (including us), hoping to get coverage. It's an annoying business model, and it's highly unlikely you'll see the group mentioned here again unless it actually breaks some news. But the tactics employed in this particular case (which actually has nothing to do with PopuLeaks' stated whistleblower mission) are worth a look. 

Taming The Shame Game

Public shaming by the hacktivist community is hardly new. Anonymous has made a fetish of it, following grand pronouncements about unchecked corporate greed and disregard of the common man with threats to tear down Facebook, Egypt and Iran, among others.

Demand => Threat => Resolution. It's a time-tested formula that's been around since the Greek siege of Troy (probably since Gok threatened Gom with a rock if he didn't quit hogging the mastodon leg). The problem is that after a few years of constantly threatening people, you kind of seem like a jerk, particularly if you have to follow through on your threats. Facebook may or may not be evil, but if you're the one keeping the masses from sharing their kitten videos, you're the bad guy.

Groups like Anonymous tread a fine line between Robin Hood and (in the words of BreitBart.com) "terrorist" in the court of public opinion. Mixing it up could help the hactivists' image. Populeaks is an unknown site, and the NRA Bet isn't even particularly witty or creative - or even coherent. Overall, it's pretty low-rent, and offers nothing of value to the NRA.

But if someone with a bit more street cred offered to do something useful, relevant and funny if their target complied with their requests, we might actually see some progress.

Friendly rivalries and side bets with conservative pundits like Bill O'Reilly and Mike Huckabee have earned Jon Stewart and the Daily Show a legitimate place in the political discussion, increased everyone's likability and actually put substantive political discussions back on the air. Maybe injecting some of that into the cyber-rights battlefield wouldn't be such a bad idea. I bet the EFF's leaders would gladly pump gas for a week at a Chevron station if the company would drop its lawsuits and admit it was wrong about Ecuador.

There will always be intractable situations that call for severe responses, but dangling a few carrots couldn't hurt.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

On December 23, the Journal News published an interactive map showing the names and addresses of all pistol-permit holders in two New York counties. Some 43,000 comments later, the battle over the paper's move rages on. Incensed gun owners claimed the article made their homes targets for thieves and drew unwarranted attention to them "like it was some sort of sex offender registry." More than 20,000 people responded by circulating the author's address, phone number on social media in a "How do YOU like it?" strategy.

It didn't end there. On January 3, Putnam County officials refused the paper's request for its pistol permit records, citing the risk of "endangering citizens."

Is it Legal?

The fight will probably go to the courts, and the county will probably lose, because the newspaper is perfectly within its legal rights to publish the information. The information was obtained legally, and everything published was available, for free, to any resident who asked.

According to Mark Rumold, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, the issue is cut-and-dried: "I can say, in no uncertain terms, that publishing the information was legal and squarely protected by the First Amendment. Whether or not publishing the information was the right thing to do, or smart, or in the public interest, is probably a question of journalism ethics that I'm not qualified to answer."

Another criticism – leveled at both the newspaper that published the data and the gun owners who later published the author's address – is that it's a question of "intent." According to that argument, if the intent of the publication was to shame the named parties, the First Amendment doesn't protect that.

Again, Rumold dismisses the argument: "The First Amendment, if it protects anything, certainly protects the publication of truthful, lawfully obtained information about a topic of significant public interest. That protection includes shielding a newspaper from civil liability – for example, for violations of privacy." He adds that the line gets blurry in some "edge cases," such as publicizing a rape victim's name, but, in his opinion, "this case doesn't even approximate that level of privacy intrusion." So until someone comes out and says "Let's all meet at 5pm to steal their guns," Uncle Sam is fine with it.

But Is It Right?

As ReadWrite's Fruzsina Eördögh pointed out in a recent article on minors' privacy rights, having the ability to do something isn't a green light to go ahead and do it. Journalists choose not to print information all the time, if they believe that information could cause harm.

Legal does not equal ethical.

Clearly, the paper published the list to attract readers, and that worked in spades. It's less obvious that it considered the additional ramifications of its actions. Still, all of the permit holders referenced in the article are over 21 and (one would hope) aware of the fact that their permits were open to the public. If they were not made aware of that fact, the fault lies with the permitting system – not the newspaper. Rumold agrees: "In my opinion, for those upset about the publication of the information, I think their grievance is with New York's legislature's for making the information a public record."

What Happens Next?

Governing bodies clearly have failed to anticipate the kind of proactive publication modern technology allows. While publishing a database of public information may be perfectly legal, it could very well cause unintended headaches. Over the next few years, we'll probably see a lot more protections against massive data aggregation pop up in the form of data throttling or outright bans on publication, followed by court challenges to all those moves.

We'll see how that all plays out, but for now, it looks like the press has the advantage.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

After the recent tragedy in Newtown, CT, some commentators and - notably - the National Rifle Association (NRA) remarked that video games played a role in a "culture of violence" and detachment that can ease the path to violent behavior. This, in turn, has given new life to the debate about the role of media violence – particularly, violent video games – on real-world aggression. It's a serious topic, so ReadWrite thought it was important to to recap the latest on the discussion and see where scholarly studies and popular opinion fall.

Understanding The Numbers

We all know the guy who plays Call of Duty eight hours a day, then goes home to a world of puppies and rainbows. We've also heard of the kid who plays a game for an hour or two, then goes on a shooting spree. There are exceptions to any rule, and if we're going to find real answers, we need to look at trends and averages, not statistical outliers.

It's also important to remember that even if there is a link between violent games and aggressive behavior, that does not imply causality. Violent criminals may well choose violent games, but tens of millions of gamers play those games every week, and the vast majority are law-abiding, normal citizens.

At the same time, it might be shortsighted to ignore such links. According to a recent publication by Iowa State University professor Dr. Craig Anderson, "Correlational studies are routinely used in modern science to test theories that are inherently causal. Whole scientific fields are based on correlational data (e.g., astronomy). Well conducted correlational studies provide opportunities for theory falsification. They allow examination of serious acts of aggression that would be unethical to study in experimental contexts. They allow for statistical controls of plausible alternative explanations." In other words, short of placing a subject in a dangerous situation, correlation is often the best evidence available, and it can be useful debunking other theories.

The State Of Research

At the moment, studies are all over the map, largely because just about every study of video game violence uses different definitions of the terms. The Legend of Zelda, Grand Theft Auto and Missile Command are all violent games in their own ways, but they're not at all similar. Likewise, throwing a fake roundhouse kick at your buddy, checking a box describing "elevated feelings of aggression," and setting fire to a building are all extremely different violent expressions. Unfortunately, current studies span both spectrums, so anyone with a vested interest can easily find a study to support their position. Worse, this makes meaningnful meta-analysis across multiple studies is effectively impossible. 80% of studies agreeing with a certain position doesn't mean much if half of those studies were poorly structured and the other half were measuring something completely different.

5 Emerging Truths

With that said, there seem to be five theories gaining traction. Each has its naysayers, of course, but they have real data to back them up:

1. At-Risk Populations Are Vulnerable To Violent Stimuli

One popular theory holds that some people are more vulnerable to the effects of gaming violence than others. This resonates with our gut instincts, and provides a happy, reasonable-sounding middle ground for both sides. In the Review of General Psychology, Drs. Patrick and Charlotte Markey outline the three most predictive traits for vulnerability:

• high neuroticism
• low agreeableness
• low conscientiousness

This doesn't mean that games cause violent behavior. It suggests that violent games are among the many influences that can be linked to violent behaviors. We've seen copycat murders modeled after television newscasts, Mark David Chapman's obsession with The Catcher in the Rye, and thousands of years of killings based on stories from holy works. Violence and rebellion in media have always been lightning rods for the mentally ill, and video games are a popular medium for the young male demographic most likely to commit violent acts.

The upshot? Young people who are emotionally upset, detached or combative, and impulsive should probably not be exposed to violent games. Unfortunately, that describes a fair portion of teenagers, so use discretion applying the rule to your own kids.

2. Video Game violence Is Not A Significant Danger To The General Population

Even the most damning studies don't claim that video games will create violent monsters of your children. They can't. If that were true, we'd have blood running in the streets. For the majority of "normal" gamers, the worst claims seem to be short-term aggression without substantial consequence, and a general lessening of communication and empathy skills – but again, without specific consequences attached.

The majority of research on the subject seems to indicate a fairly tenuous link between in-game and real-world violence. For example, two studies conducted by Texas A&M and the University of Wisconsin - Whitewater, respectively, found no conclusive evidence. "Structural equation modeling suggested that family violence and innate aggression as predictors of violent crime were a better fit to the data than was exposure to video game violence."

In other words, a predisposition to violence or a violent homelife is very likely a predictor of future violent behavior, while video games are not.

3. Fantasy Violence Is Less Dangerous

Killing Falatacot Raiders won't make you murder humans, though we're not sure about Hitman. Some people have pointed to studies showing that even E-rated games can lead to imitation (e.g., children punching or kicking) for a period following play, but it appears that transference of aggression from aliens, orcs, or Pokemon to humans is minimal, at worst.

4. Violent Games Do Increase Simulation

Just like watching action movies or sprinting down a street, violent video games (and other competitive or action games) increase stimulation and adrenaline production, which can produce short-term disruptions and enhanced moods. Some studies claim short-term affects can last long enough to disrupt sleep when played before bedtime, while others saw certain effects lingering up to 24 hours. At the very least, the "amp up" factor is real – it's kind of the point. For parents of children who may be particularly affected by such things (e.g., those with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD), this can be a concern.

5. Content Ratings Matter

People on both sides of the issue agree that content ratings are important. Even absent a long-term impact on violent behavior, graphic scenes of violence, nudity and other adult situations can impact developing minds. Video game access should be restricted like access to any other type of media.

The Easy Answer

Anyone who wants the government to step in and make the call on what to do about video game violence will be sorely disappointed. There simply isn't enough evidence linking video games and violence to even start that discussion, particularly when films and images of far more graphic violence are readily accessible.

The answer to the problem seems to be the same as the answer to concerns about TV rotting your kid's brain in the 1960s: personal responsibility. If you're a parent, pay attention to the ratings, research the content of games online before you buy them, and above all, know your child's sensitivities and limitations. If you're in doubt about the effect of a game or other piece of media, say no.

That won't end the debate, of course. Truly troubled teens often don't have the parental supervision they need to limit their gaming or other media consumption. But it's unclear exactly what the right strategy would be to deal with that issue.

Imagine you were a political analyst who time traveled from 1990s to November 5, 2012. A quick look at the national polls for the presidential election, you would probably have thought that Republican nominee Mitt Romney had a pretty good shot at claiming the presidency. 

Obviously, you - like many of the Republican faithful - would have been dead wrong. 

President Barack Obama and his team, though, likely knew that he would win, and by precisely how much, days before the actual voting even started. 

In the first of a three-part series on how Obama used technology to win the election, MIT Technology Review breaks down how the President’s team used Big Data and sophisticated analytics at an almost unprecedented scale to track voters, and nudge them in the direction that the Obama team wanted them to go.

What the Obama team did was little short of amazing. It essentially created a cohort-analysis system of data to judge every single voter it wanted to get to the polls. Obama’s team took the usual system of analytics and reduced it to the most granular level: the individual voter. 

The analytics campaign, led by chief analytics officer Dan Wagner, was able to assign voters individual scores based on if and how they would vote. In doing this, Wagner’s team could accurately predict human behavior. 

“But underneath all that were scores describing particular voters: a new political currency that predicted the behavior of individual humans. The campaign didn’t just know who you were; it knew exactly how it could turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be,” wrote Technology Review’s guest contributor Sasha Issenberg. 

Florida election results 2012 In contrast, the Romney campaign was still in an earlier mode of data analytics, focused around larger cohorts such as campaign topics (the fall of Obama-backed solar energy provider Solyndra, for instance) and how individual ads affected the voter mindset.

In part two of Issenberg’s series, he notes that the Romney team understood it did not have the depth of ground-level analytics that the Obama team had and was forced to be reactionary to how the Obama campaign deployed its resources. For instance, why did Obama run 68 ads in a small Alabama town that traditionally voted Republican?

Obama was likely targeting voters in Florida with his Alabama media buy, trying to sway voters in key counties like Holmes, Jackson, Walton and Gadsen. The Obama team likely knew that the state of Florida would come down to several thousand votes (which it did) and that eroding Romney’s base there would be important to win the state. Of those counties, Obama won only Gadsen. But winning those counties was not as important to the Obama team as was making sure that people that supported him in 2008 also did so in 2012.

For instance, in Jackson county, Obama received 7,342 (35.1%) votes in 2012 against 7,632 (35%) in 2008. Obama's goal in 2012 was to make sure that everybody that voted for him in 2008 also did so in 2012 while adding new voters as well. Even though he lost those counties, by matching his numbers in those two counties in an election where the Republican base was emotionally invested against him, Obama can count those Florida counties as a win. Considering that Obama beat Romney by only about 73,000 votes in Florida, those votes counted for a lot. 

Predicting Human Behavior Through Data Analysis

By taking an approach to individual voter targeting and setting up the algorithms and databases to do it, Obama’s team put itself on the forefront of a growing field of innovation: predictive analysis of individual human behavior and reaction.

The largest technology companies and a growing number of advertisers are seen as leaders in this field. People like to joke that, “Google knows everything about me.” Well, it probably does. 

In a mobile application, for example, what buttons are the users most likely to push? Are they more or less likely to tap on an advertisement? What can the app publisher do to get users to open the app more often (increasing the likelihood of clicking an ad or buying in-app goods)? The next step is to apply those questions to specific cohorts. Is a woman aged 18-21 years more likely to re-engage with the app than a man of the same age? How many times does a 25-year-old man need to open an app before he makes his first in-app purchase?

Companies like Apsalar, Flurry, Localytics, Sonamine and others are working on this type of cohort data - not just to understand how people use mobile apps, but how they can be influenced to perform particular actions. By analyzing millions of data sets created by touching items within an app, companies can guess with a very high degree of accuracy what you are going to do next. Once a company knows what you are going to do, it can then influence you to perform the actions it desires.

This is almost exactly what the Obama team did, except instead of mobile apps, it was millions upon millions of voters. The Obama team figured out what type of person a voter was and how that person would respond to certain types of stimuli - such as direct mail, person-to-person interviews, social media, advertising, and so on. Obama was then able to deploy his massive volunteer network (some 500,000 people) and other campaign resources as needed.

Ultimately, this approach is what set apart Obama's campaign. It was not just having a smartphone app as a “walk list” (the list that volunteers use to see who has come to the polls) or keeping track of media sentiment through in-depth analytics. It was about having the most granular data possible and then knowing how to act on it.

Some of the biggest tech companies in the world that specialize in behavioral data could not have done quite what the Obama team did by mixing social science (how users react to different stimuli) to structured big data. 

Top image: tree graph of 2012 election results county by county, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Maine Democrat Colleen Lachowicz made gaming history twice this year:

First, when she was attacked by the Republican Party last month for being a computer gamer.

Second, when she won her election on Tuesday, becoming the first Senator whose gaming habits led, in part, to her victory.  

Hear that, negative stereotypes about gamers? Your days are numbered. Gamers can be doctors, lawyers, and now, even state senators. 

Gaming Is Now Mainstream

Luddites take note: Attacking a candidate just because they play video games will not only backfire in the form of bad international press and an outpouring of support from fellow gamers, but the move also paints you as incredibly out of touch with modern society. The backlash will be even worse if that candidate plays World of Warcraft, the planet's most popular massive multiplayer online game - with some 10 million players. 

As Lachowicz pointed out on her site, 65% of American homes now house a gamer, and the average age of a gamer is now 34 years old. Questioning if a candidate is fit for office because she plays video games is the 21st Century version of complaining about someone for liking that loud “rock and roll music.” 

Back in October, Republicans created the attack site Colleen’s World, complete with the tagline “Maine needs a State Senator that lives in the real world, not in Colleen’s fantasy world.” The site collected forum posts Lachowicz made on various sites, including Daily Kos, in an attempt to show how “crude, vicious and violent” she was in her “time-consuming,” “disturbing” and “bizarre double life.” It also criticized Lachowicz’s World of Warcraft character, a level 85 Orc assassin named Santiaga "who stabs things a lot." Maine GOPers took offense to the term “teabag,” too.  

The attacks on Lachowicz and Santiaga led to segments on CNN, coverage in outlets like TIME and Slate, and even internationally on the BBC, where a gaming researcher named Ladan Cockshut weighed in on the controversy and negative stereotype of gamers:   

"In my work, I've spoken with many people who in their regular lives have roles of significant responsibility (as doctors, managers, or educators) but who choose carefully with whom they disclose their gaming activity," said Cockshut to the BBC. "And disclosing their gaming activity is often accompanied by a degree of apology or embarrassment."

Presumably, that's what Maine Republican Party spokesman David Sorensen was going for when he said Lachowicz’s activities “raise questions about Lachowicz’s maturity and her ability to make serious decisions for the people of Senate District 25.”

Smear Campaign = Epic Fail

The smear campaign, however, backfired as it mobilized gamers tired of “gamers = bad” mantra in support of Lachowicz. A fundraising page set up for her on ActBlue raised more than $6,000 for Democrats in Maine before it was shut down by an ethics complaint from Republicans. (As a Clean Election candidate, Lachowicz is forbidden from accepting donations, but the ActBlue page clearly stated as much, and was raising money for the Democratic party in Maine.)

Lachowicz told the Ethics commission she did no more than link to the ActBlue page as she was “overwhelmed” with the public response and it was a way to  get “people to stop calling me, stop messaging" her. (Lachowicz was cleared by the ethics panel on November 1.)

Back in October, during the height of the controversy, Lachowicz told Joystiq in an interview all the press has actually increased her profile in her own district, especially among 18 - 30 year olds. “I knock on the door now and some people recognize me,” said Lachowicz, even a 64-year-old who plays EverQuest.  

“It just really goes to show that I think those of us who do play games are eager for it not to be stereotyped anymore” added Lachowicz, in reference to all the support. Her quote could easily have been about last night’s win, too.

Political pundits, mostly Republican, went into a frenzy when Nate Silver, a New York Times pollster and stats blogger, predicted that Barack Obama would win reelection.

But Silver was right and the pundits were wrong - and the impact of this goes way beyond politics.

Silver won because, um, science. As ReadWrite's own Dan Rowinski noted,  Silver's methodology is all based on data. He "takes deep data sets and applies logical analytical methods" to them. It's all just numbers.

Silver runs a blog called FiveThirtyEight, which is licensed by the Times. In 2008 he called the presidential election with incredible accuracy, getting 49 out of 50 states right. But this year he rolled a perfect score, 50 out of 50, even nailing the margins in many cases. His uncanny accuracy on this year's election represents what Rowinski calls a victory of "logic over punditry."

In fact it's bigger than that. Bear in mind that before turning his attention to politics in 2007 and 2008, Silver was using computer models to make predictions about baseball. What does it mean when some punk kid baseball nerd can just wade into politics and start kicking butt on all these long-time "experts" who have spent their entire lives covering politics?

It means something big is happening.

Man Versus Machine

This is about the triumph of machines and software over gut instinct. 

The age of voodoo is over. The era of talking about something as a "dark art" is done. In a world with big computers and big data, there are no dark arts.

And thank God for that. One by one, computers and the people who know how to use them are knocking off these crazy notions about gut instinct and intuition that humans like to cling to. For far too long we've applied this kind of fuzzy thinking to everything, from silly stuff like sports to important stuff like medicine.

Someday, and I hope it's soon, we will enter the age of intelligent machines, when true artificial intellgence becomes a reality, and when we look back on the late 20th and early 21st century it will seem medieval in its simplicity and reliance on superstition.

What most amazes me is the backlash and freak-out that occurs every time some "dark art" gets knocked over in a particular domain. Watch Moneyball (or read the book) and you'll see the old guard (in that case, baseball scouts) grow furious as they realize that computers can do their job better than they can. (Of course it's not computers; it's people who know how to use computers.)

We saw the same thing when IBM's Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997. We saw it when Watson beat humans at Jeopardy.

It's happening in advertising, which used to be a dark art but is increasingly a computer-driven numbers game. It's also happening in my business, the news media, prompting the same kind of furor as happened with the baseball scouts in Moneyball.

Who wants to believe that machines can tell us which stories to write, or which stories people want to read? Who wants to believe that machines can actually write stories? But they do. Forbes, my former home, started running computer-generated stories earlier this year. 

Backlash

Each time this happens, there's always lots of sputtering and outrage. When you strip away the rhetoric, at the core is always the same fear - that machines will take away jobs from humans. Baseball scouts want to keep working. So do journalists and chess masters.

So do pundits, but after this election it's getting harder to see what role they should play.

Why listen to Joe Scarborough and his crew on MSNBC's Morning Joe show bloviate about who's going to win and why, when Nate Silver and his computers can just give you the correct answer?

Scarborough bet Silver $2,000 on the outcome of the election after accusing Silver of being an "ideologue" who was predicting an Obama win simply because that's what Silver wanted to happen.

Scarborough has lost a lot more than the two grand. He's lost his reason for being, and he has taken a lot of others down with him.

Scarborough, not Siliver, turns out to be the wishful-thinking ideologue. Nate Silver and his computers may not put Scarborough and his ilk out of business - there's loads of airtime to fill, and windbags are still needed for that.

But Silver has exposed those guys for what they are, which is propagandists and entertainers.

And that's fine. We still need entertainers. Computers haven't learned to do that yet.

For now, anyway. 

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock. Nate Silver image by Randy Stewart.

For the first time in history, nearly every citizen of a U.S. state will be given access to participate in their general election today via email and faxing. But this special event is overshadowed by serious doubts as to security of all types of electronic voting, much less relying on email.

The New Jersey Experiment

New Jersey's Christie administration made the announcement for the emergency policy change on November 3, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. The idea is to permit registered voters in the Garden State to vote electronically using a system that Military and Overseas voters already use under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA). Actually, Jersey's emergency plan is even less restrictive than the state's existing procedure, which usually requires absentee voters under UOCAVA to mail in a signed affidavit.

According to the Governor's office, "displaced voters may submit a mail-in ballot application either by email or fax to their county clerk. Once an application is approved, the clerk will electronically send a ballot to the voter by either fax or email in accordance to the voter's preference. Voters must return their electronic ballot – by fax or email – no later than November 6, 2012, at 8 p.m."

New Jersey voters can also vote by provisional ballot in counties other than their original residence if they prefer.

The Garden State's extraordinary efforts come in direct response to Hurricane Sandy, which made landfall in New Jersey a little over a week ago and caused widespread damage to polling places and residents' homes in a critical moment on the electoral calendar.

If such a storm had hit at any other time of the year, or even in an off-election year, it is not clear New Jersey would have taken these dramatic steps. For election watchers, though, New Jersey's move is a grand experiment, a chance to find out how well the process works and what, if any, flaws crop up.

Hacking The Electronic Vote

This is a big deal. Online voting is not something that happens with any regularity in the U.S. Currently, only 28 U.S. states allow email and fax voting - even for for UOCAVA-eligible voters. Another five states allow fax-only ballots for the same demographic. Of these 33 states that have electronic absentee voting in place for Military and Overseas voters, only one - Arizona - also provides a Web portal for qualified voters to use.

In fact, despite promises of convenience, fast tabulation of votes and improved ease-of-use, there are big issues with all kinds of electronic voting (online or at the polling place). The biggest issue: security. 

According to Verified Voting, a non-partisan watchdog site, the best election processes are those that include some sort of paper record of voting activity that can be audited if there is ever a question of fraudulent activity. But most electronic voting options don't leave a paper trail.

Given that many state legislatures seem so concerned about voter fraud that they are enacting voter ID laws, it seems odd that the same groups seem more than happy to use voting systems that could be potentially hacked on a much larger scale - with no way to gather evidence to prove whether it happened or not.

On Monday, Roger Johnston, head of the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory, posted an article on Popular Science outlining how simple it would be to grab some equipment from an electronics store and execute a man-in-the-middle attack on a touchscreen voting machine - for as little as $10 and a Saturday afternoon.

"The attacks require physical access. This is easy for insiders, who program the machines for an election or install them. And we would argue it's typically not that hard for outsiders," Johnston wrote. "A lot of voting machines are sitting around in the church basement, the elementary school gymnasium or hallway, unattended for a week or two before the election."

Decentralization Limits The Damage

Elections in the U.S. are typically handled at the county level, with individual Clerk's offices managing voter registration and the election process in the various counties and parishes. The good news is that would require hackers to break into a multitude of different machine types - a one-attack-fits-all strategy would not work.

The bad news - as mentioned above - is that with the exception of optical scan devices and electronic voting machines capable of printing a record of a voter's choices, there's no paper trail to audit. If these machines were tampered with, there is very little chance for such tampering to be immediately detected, unless the hacker is dumb enough to over-weigh the tampered votes of one candidate over another. Given the relative ease in which Johnston and his team created hacks for voting machines, this kind of tampering is very much a real danger.

A Really Big Target

This, more than any reason, is why the U.S. electorate has not attempted a "pure" online election. With electronic voting machines, at least there's still a physical device you have to hack, which does not scale very well from the attackers' viewpoint. But a truly online election, hitting one central server? That might be too tempting a target for hackers to resist. And a successful hack could change millions of votes.

Take the District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethic's rather daring public challenge in 2010: After setting up an Internet voting pilot to enable overseas voters to cast their ballots, the District invited all comers to try to break into the system and compromise its results.

In just a few hours, a team from The University of Michigan found a vulnerability and had inserted fictitious characters into the mock election's ballot, even gaining control of the cameras watching the election servers to make sure their activity wasn't visually spotted. The winner of the election? Futurama robot Bender.

"Our experience with the D.C. pilot system demonstrates one of the key dangers in many Internet voting designs: one small mistake in the configuration or implementation of the central voting servers or their surrounding network infrastructure can easily undermine the legitimacy of the entire election," concluded the academic paper outlining the attack.

Today's New Jersey experiment is a last-minute attempt to cope by a state battered by Hurricane Sandy. Given the very real security concerns surrounding electronic elections, don't expect it to be the norm anytime soon. Hopefully, at least, it won't be another object lesson in what can go wrong with electronic voting.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

On November 6, 2012, the first post-PC U.S. presidential election will come to a close. Just like the primaries, conventions and debates, tonight's election returns will be obsessively and extensively live streamed and covered online. For those relying on the Internet for their nail-biting date with democracy, there are more choices than anyone could possibly list. 

Pretty much every modern news site in the United States (and many abroad) will be covering the results as they happen. That coverage will consist of a dizzying array of interactive maps, data visualizations, live video feeds, tweets, Instagram photos and good, old fashioned news articles. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are even pulling down their paywalls for the occasion. 

YouTube's Election Hub will be live streaming results, just as it has done with pretty much every other major election-related event this year. The politics-focused channel has become a robust repository for videos related to the presidential campaign, from debate clips and convention speeches to attack ads and professional punditry. While waiting for the electoral results to start rolling in, you can ease your impatience with one last burst of election-related video before the campaign fatigue comes to a merciful end. 

No Shortage Of Video Streams

CNN will offer live video feeds of the election results, along with the usual assortment of maps, interactive tools and social media updates. The live video stream will be available on CNN's mobile apps, but only to cable subscribers. Users of any tablet can check CNN's live results map in the browser and play around with the Facebook Election Insights tool, which is fueled by real-time data from the enormous social network. 

The Wall Street Journal is planning a similarly cross-platform night of political coverage. Alongside standard news stories, it will have a dynamically updated map powered by CartoDB, a New York-based mapping startup. In addition to state-by-state election returns, that map allows users to overlay state-based data points like unemployment, per-capita income and previous election results. The Wall Street Journal will also stream video coverage live on its website and via its WSJ Live app for mobile devices and Internet TV streaming boxes. 

Other sites offering live-streamed video coverage include Politico, Washington Post, CBS News, HuffPost Live and the Chicago Tribune, to name but a few.  If you're at a loss, head over to UStream, where there will be a selection of more than a dozen video streams to chose from. 

Video isn't the only option. If you'd rather listen to the returns and focus your eyes elsewhere, NPR will be broadcasting live on its website and via its mobile apps. Meanwhile, Slacker Radio has partnered with ABC News to provide its own live audio coverage. 

This is really just a sampling of sources for live online election coverage. If you have a favorite news provider, check their website for links to a live stream. If you're not picky, big name sources like CNN or WSJ are always a good default, since they tend to have the technical resources to support heavy-duty live-streaming of major news events. If all else fails, head over to UStream and take your pick.

(Want to see how far we've come? Check out this story on how to watch the 2010 elections online.)

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Sports and politics are remarkably similar. Both have billions of dollars at stake, engender profound emotions and revolve around larger-than-life individuals. And they both share a culture of data devoted to making predicting future results more accurate than ever. Don't just ask Moneyball's Billy Beane - ask statistician Nate Silver, a man who has led the charge in changing both baseball and political forecasting over the last decade. 

I have been following Silver’s work for years - he helped inspire me to write for a living. Silver is now best known for his work at FiveThirtyEight, a political blog owned by The New York Times that uses advanced statistical analysis to predict the outcome of elections. Silver has come under fire within the last week when his model predicted that President Barack Obama was a heavy statistical favorite to be elected in Tuesday's election. Silver bet MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Scarborough $1,000 last week that Obama would be re-elected.

Many people lambasted Silver for the bet and his belief that Obama will win. But if you have read Silver over the years, you know that he is not necessarily betting on Obama. He is betting on the accuracy of his model. 

Lies, Damn Lies, And Statistics

Silver may now be a national name, especially after his bet with Scarborough, but his roots and methods are not based in politics. Before dishing out political insights on “Morning Joe,” Silver was a baseball man.

Silver first foray into the controversial world of predictive analysis came at Baseball Prospectus (BP), a publication devoted to the study of advanced baseball statistics (known as sabermetrics). From 2003 to 2009, Silver was responsible for BP’s prediction engine, known as PECOTA. Named after MLB journeyman Bill Pecota, the full name of the prediction engine is Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm. By 2005, PECOTA was recognized by top baseball minds as one of the most accurate prediction tools in the game. 

From an outsider’s perspective, there is nothing simple about how PECOTA works. But you do not have to be a baseball historian to see how the model functions as a tool for statistical analysis and projection.

PECOTA projects an individual baseball player's career based on his similarities to other baseball players in the past. For instance, PECOTA will project a three-year probability of a player’s performance taking into account his age, handedness, past performance and periphery statistics (such as position and fielding metrics). So if you have a shortstop approaching his age 35-37 seasons with a .249 career batting average, the engine will look for similar players and see how they did at that age. Turns out that approach predicts the shortstop's performance with a fair degree of accuracy - better than other methods. 

The Model Works - Mostly

The important thing here is the way Silver creates his models. Essentially, he is takes data sets and applies logical analytical methods that take his conclusions to deeper understanding. Like any good statistician, he is not looking for a specific outcome, but rather looking for the most finely tuned pattern recognition engine to predict future results. 

To people that understand analysis of complex data sets, Silver’s conclusions make perfect sense given the information he has. The day before the election, Silver’s model gives Obama an 86.3% chance of defeating former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. According to Silver’s numbers, Obama will reap 307.2 electoral college votes to Romney’s 230.8. Silver’s prediction is the result of running his analytical model on poll results from individual states, weighting individual polls in each state based on its past history. 

Essentially, Silver applied Moneyball analysis to politics. But just as traditional baseball types rejected sabermetrics when it told them things they didn't want to hear, much of the political establishment - especially those who disagree with FiveThirtyEight's conclusions - decry him as a fraud.

Silver’s PECOTA days demonstrate that he is not a fraud, but his method is far from foolproof. FiveThirtyEight’s reliance on polling numbers (which are often volatile or biased) creates a margin of error that could make Silver's analysis completely wrong. But Silver has a lot on the line: his reputation, and probably his career, depend on his model accurately predicting the outcome of this election. 

There is a bigger story here. This is the second time Silver has used big data and smart algorithms to drive a movement that turned an entire industry on its head. In both cases, these industries had long and storied traditions and conventional wisdoms ripe for disruption by smarter, more efficient analysis of existing data. That doesn't mean Silver is always right. But it does mean that you can't analyze baseball - and possibly by Wednesday, politics - the same way again.  

Will Silver’s election predictions prove accurate? Will Marco Scutaro ever be an All-Star again? Let us know what you think of Silver's methods in the comments.  

2012 is the year of the political GIF. Not just for Internet forum users, now established journalists and even Presidents are using this venerable image format to convey instant commentary. (The Live GIF off, anyone?)

The GIF’s rise in prominence this election year even prompted PBS Ideas Channel host Mike Rugnetta to ask: How Will The Animated GIF Affect The Presidential Election?

Answer: The animated GIF's impact on this election - given its newness factor as a political tool - is slim or hard to gauge. “You’d probably be exaggerating... a lot” if you said GIFs will turn the tide one way or another, Rugnetta allows. But that’s not the point. The political GIF has already changed the way we talk about politics, how we cover politics, and even how we campaign as politicians. GIFs, like memes, are "The Way We Election Now." 

Critics of the political GIF could point out it further reduces a politicians message to soundbites, one-liners, gaffes and spectacle, but Rugnetta asserts “a GIF is more complete than quotes on paper, because the words are reunited with the actions and attitudes of the person who spoke them.”

“The time where there is an official campaign GIF maker doesn’t feel too far off,” Rugnetta speculates. As Colin Horgan wrote in The Guardian, “perhaps soon, a candidate could succeed or fail not on the strength of their zingers during a debate, but on the gifs they generate afterwards.”

You hear that, political campaign consultants? Animated political GIFs really could decide an election. 

Guest author Tomer Teller is a security evangelist at Check Point Software Technologies.

On November 6, the United States will complete the most digital Presidential election in our history. In the run up to the big day, millions Americans are flocking to the Web to inform their voting and follow campaign trails. With all the excitement, though, comes a sinister reality: Voter, candidate and campaign-related search terms can turn Web citizens into identity-theft targets and their computers into malicious bots.

New SEO Tricks

Today's cyber-criminals are no longer just reliant on spam. Instead, they use a technique as common among legitimate companies as it is in the world of cyber-crime – search engine optimization, or SEO. For years, attackers have taken advantage of popular news events to entice victims to visit malicious sites. But today's black hat SEO schemes have added some new moves to their bag of tricks.

One new trick surfaced in scams taking advantage of interest in the summer Olympics and is now being employed in the lead-up to the November elections.

Attackers looking to beat efforts by search engines and others to determine the reputation of a website by its age have taken to purchasing existing domains that are about to expire. Typically, the scammers change the content of the page only days before the start of the event they are planning to hijack. Scammers may also purchase dropped domains to bolster their own network by using them to link to their own sites, once again improving their search engine rankings.

The attackers do not need their websites to persist for long; in fact, they do not expect them to. Having their site rank high in search engine results for a day or so can be more than long enough for them to compromise enough machines to make money. 

If the goal is to get users to click on a search result, common sense would indicate that the most popular news item of the day would be the juiciest piece of low-hanging fruit. Right now, that's the Presidential election.

The Bad Guys Now Leverage Niches

But today's scammers are also increasingly moving toward leveraging niche news items and people. The idea is that less-popular subjects will have fewer legitimate search results to compete with, increasing the chances Web users will click on a malicious link. Regional ballot issues, local campaign news or write-in candidates are becoming prime targets.

Part of the key to successful search engine optimization is utilizing backlinks. Backlinks are used by search engines to help determine the popularity of a particular site. The more links to a webpage, the higher that page's page rank.

Scammers exploit this system in several ways. One is to build a profile on a high-traffic site like LiveJournal or SoundCloud - and then add a link to the profile signature. Another is to sponsor a WordPress theme. This allows an attacker to add a link to his site to the theme's template – thereby automatically linking any site where the theme is installed back to the malicious website.

Then there's keyword stuffing, filling webpage content or meta tags with keywords. Google warns that loading pages with irrelevant keywords can hurt a site's ranking, but attackers often try to circumvent this through "cloaking," where the Web server presents different content to search engine crawlers than it does to users.

Tried And True Bad Behavior

Of course, when it comes to SEO, anything that works never goes out of style. Traditional methods such as simply inserting links on user forums and in the comment section of various websites are still commonplace. Scammers also continue to make use of doorway pages, or "throwaway pages," which are designed to draw search engine users to another website.

Search engines like Google are doing their part to discourage abuses - threatening to remove sites that use throwaway pages from the search listings, for example. But responsibility for computer security ultimately lies with the user.

Be wary of search engine results with URLs with names that seem strange or out of place. Various security companies offer safety ratings of URLs. And you always need at least a two-way firewall and antivirus software on your computer.

As always, the key to avoiding threats - even election-related ones - is to stay informed and stay alert.

Not so long ago, coming out in favor of gay rights would have been a corporate kamikaze mission. It's almost surreal that now one of the most influential companies in the U.S. not only privately cultivates a climate of acceptance and diversity but publicly advocates for social justice as well. Google might not always live up to its now-retired Don't Be Evil promise, but the company remains a pioneer when it comes to leveraging its high profile status for the kind of visibility that effects social change.

In a new video posted to YouTube, some of Google's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) employees make a moving case for voting in support of marriage equality in four states on the November 6 general election. In Maine, Maryland and Washington state, legislation legalizing same-sex marriage is up for the vote, while in Minnesota, same-sex marriage faces a state-wide ban unless voted down.

Gayglers In Their Element

Google's track record on issues of gay rights and LGBTQ equality is exemplary, even among like-minded progressive corporate peers. Like new Googlers ("Nooglers"), gay Googlers even have their own cutesy company nickname: "Gayglers." In 2008, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page donated $140,000 to combat California's Proposition 8, a contentious piece of legislature that sought to block same sex couples from legal marriage status. In July 2012, the company launched its Legalise Love campaign, a global initiative to cement its non-discrimination policies and "ensure that all of our employees have the same inclusive experience outside of the office as they do at work" - even in countries like Singapore, where consenting sexual acts between same-sex partners remain punishable by law. "At Google, we encourage people to bring their whole selves to work," Google writes on its diversity sub-page. "In our more than 70 offices around the world, we’re committed to cultivating a work environment where Googlers can be themselves and thrive."

The new video isn't the first from the company. Google was quick to release its own installment in Dan Savage's iconic It Gets Better series, a social justice campaign that sprung out of a dark few months in late 2010 when a rash of suicides among gay teens made headlines.

Apple's Stealth Record On LGBTQ Issues

But what about other companies? Apple, true to form, keeps a low profile. The successor to Steve Jobs - and the helm of the world's most valuable company - is gay, but you might not know it, unless you, well, knew. Apple came out swinging against Prop 8 in 2008, but these days CEO Tim Cook doesn't take up the mantle of LGBTQ visibility often. Most of Apple's recent gay imbroglios have revolved around iOS. In 2011, the company yanked a "gay cure" app from its software stable and iOS 6 added "gay" emoji - tiny icons depicting same sex love (your mileage may vary). Apple, along with Facebook and many other big names in tech, released its own It Gets Better video too.

To Microsoft, Social Justice Is Old Hat 

Microsoft may no longer be paving the way in the tech world, but the company's precocious record on LGBTQ equality is historically pretty impressive. According to GLEAM, Microsoft's own organization for its gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employees founded in 1993, the company was among the world's first to extend benefits to same-sex domestic partners and to add a non-discrimination clause for sexuality into its coporate policy. More recently, Microsoft went on record to advocate for marriage equality in its own backyard concerning Washington's marriage equality lesgislation, SB 6239 and HB 2516:

"As other states recognize marriage equality, Washington's employers are at a disadvantage if we cannot offer a similar, inclusive environment to our talented employees, our top recruits and their families. Despite progress made in recent years with domestic partnership rights, same-sex couples in Washington still hold a different status from their neighbors. Marriage equality in Washington would put employers here on an equal footing with employers in the six other states that already recognize the committed relationships of same-sex couples... This in turn will help us continue to compete for talent."

Remarkably, when it comes to the 2012 presidential race, the gay marriage issue has hardly registered. But technology's major players aren't giving it the hot potato treatment. Whether it's to cultivate an ecosystem of diversity or to stay competetive in tech's cutthroat talent headhunt, it's fitting that the companies we rely on to peer deep into the future of innovation have their eyes to the horizon when it comes to social justice too.

Pride flag photo by Shutterstock.