Nextgov

Somebody Is Fixing Twitter's Misinformation Problem

April 30, 2013 Even worse than the pornbots and trolls, one of Twitter's enduring drawbacks is that there's no reliable way to issue corrections with the service. The flaw drew a truckload of attention in the wake of the Boston bombings as self-appointed detectives -- fueled by Reddit -- made all kinds of ...

from govexec

What Gifts Do Foreign Leaders Give The United States?

April 26, 2013 Visiting a friend? It's only polite to bring a little something with you. Heads of state aren't exempt from this unspoken rule, except that every present the White House accepts from other foreign dignitaries must be logged, tagged, and stored in official archives. (For the unfamiliar, there's an excellent "West ...

What an Internet Sales Tax Could Mean for Your Bitcoin Stash

April 26, 2013 If it passes the Senate in the next couple of days, as it’s expected to, a bill that would let states tax your online transactions will be one step closer to becoming law. The proposal’s been subject to an unusual battle that’s united liberals and conservatives while dividing big Internet ...

Why NASA Is Firing Cell Phones Into Space

April 24, 2013 Today, in NASA Is the Best: The space agency this week took a handful of cheap but powerful smartphones, slapped them to a gigantic rocket and blasted them into low-earth orbit to see how they'd fare. The project, called PhoneSat, is one of those wacky experiments that seems at first ...

How CISPA Opponents Were Outspent by Industry Lobbyists, 38 to 1

April 22, 2013 Last week, the House approved CISPA, the House cybersecurity bill that’s long rankled privacy advocates -- not to mention the White House, which issued a presidential veto threat in response to the action. The Obama administration’s warning is a sign that CISPA may already be dead. But for now, at ...

The New House Republican Web Strategy: Just Add BuzzFeed

April 4, 2013 What do cat pictures and GIFs have to do with Republican politics? Not a whole lot, at least right now. But beginning next week, that'll change. Staffers at the National Republican Congressional Committee are finishing up a site redesign that'll likely be rolled out this weekend. The new NRCC.org does ...

This Defense Contractor Is Repeatedly Spear-Phishing 68,000 Innocent People

April 3, 2013 One company with deep Washington connections is running a huge online scam. It involves tens of thousands of victims. And it's completely legal. The business in question is Northrop Grumman, one of the country's biggest defense firms. But before crying foul, know this: What the company's doing is actually a ...

How Copyrights Suppress Innovation

April 2, 2013 U.S. copyright protections don't promote innovation. They stifle it. That was one of the arguments that got intellectual-property reformer Derek Khanna fired from his job last year at the Republican Study Committee, a policy shop for the House GOP. The problem, Khanna said, was that too much copyright protection encourages ...

FCC Race to Replace Obama's Top Tech Wonk Just Got More Interesting

March 28, 2013 The odds of President Obama nominating a woman to head a top federal agency just got much better. Dozens of Senate Democrats have jointly sent a letter to the White House recommending that he choose a current Federal Communications Commission official, Jessica Rosenworcel, to succeed outgoing Julius Genachowski as chairman. ...

Will Businesses Be Forced to Say If They've Been Hacked?

March 26, 2013 The idea is still a long way from reality, but Congress has taken the first step toward requiring companies to admit when their networks have been hacked. The proposed rule on data breaches appears as part of a larger draft bill being circulated in the House Judiciary Committee. On top ...