November 2016

It is often assumed that the Internet would threaten the survival of authoritarian regimes. Accordingly, most country-comparative studies have identified a democracy advantage in Internet diffusion. This paper revisits these technology-centric assumptions by conceptualizing the adoption of the Internet as a dynamic phenomenon with multiple phases that unfold differently depending on the political system.

It is argued theoretically, that initially, the Internet diffuses faster in democracies because of inherent innovation advantages. However, authoritarian regimes adopt the Internet at comparable rates when the economic benefits of the technology outweigh the democratization risks. Yearly cross-sectional regressions for the years 1996–2013 show that the relationship between regime type and Internet diffusion varies temporally as authoritarian regimes have caught up considerably. Since 2013, there are no significant differences between democracies and authoritarian regimes anymore and monarchies even outperform democracies.

In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News, and others, a BuzzFeed News analysis has found.

During these critical months of the campaign, 20 top-performing false election stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook. Within the same time period, the 20 best-performing election stories from 19 major news websites generated a total of 7,367,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook. Up until those last three months of the campaign, the top election content from major outlets had easily outpaced that of fake election news on Facebook. Then, as the election drew closer, engagement for fake content on Facebook skyrocketed and surpassed that of the content from major news outlets.

SpaceX has asked the government for permission to test what could someday be a massive network of satellites that will beam Internet service down to Earth. The application, filed Nov 16 to the Federal Communications Commission, proposes a fleet of what will eventually include more than 4,400 satellites, covering the United States and the rest of the globe. SpaceX needs regulatory approval from the FCC to use the wireless airwaves that would power this network.

Orbiting more than 700 miles up, the satellites could provide speeds as fast as 1 gigabit per second, per user, according to a technical attachment to the filing. That's as much bandwidth as some premium Internet providers offer entire households. SpaceX would start by launching 800 satellites, the filing said. “The system is designed to provide a wide range of broadband and communications services for residential, commercial, institutional, governmental and professional users worldwide,” according to the technical attachment. “Once fully deployed, the SpaceX System will pass over virtually all parts of the Earth’s surface and therefore, in principle, have the ability to provide ubiquitous global service.”

Apple emerged as a guardian of user privacy this year after fighting FBI demands to help crack into San Bernardino (CA) shooter Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone. The company has gone to great lengths to secure customer data in recent years, by implementing better encryption for all phones and refusing to undermine that encryption. But private information still escapes from Apple products under some circumstances.

The latest involves the company’s online syncing service iCloud. Russian digital forensics firm Elcomsoft has found that Apple’s mobile devices automatically send a user’s call history to the company’s servers if iCloud is enabled — but the data gets uploaded in many instances without user choice or notification. “You only need to have iCloud itself enabled” for the data to be sent, said Vladimir Katalov, CEO of Elcomsoft. The logs surreptitiously uploaded to Apple contain a list of all calls made and received on an iOS device, complete with phone numbers, dates and times, and duration. They also include missed and bypassed calls. Elcomsoft said Apple retains the data in a user’s iCloud account for up to four months, providing a boon to law enforcement, who may not be able to obtain the data either from the user’s carrier, who may retain the data for only a short period, or from the user’s device, if it’s encrypted with an unbreakable passcode.