There are 45,000 households in Charlotte (NC) without a subscription to broadband Internet. Unlike rural swaths of the state, the city is rich in infrastructure and competition from service providers. Across North Carolina, about 20% of homes have no Internet subscription, but in certain urban neighborhoods, that number is more than doubled.
A group of veteran journalists for the Voice of America delivered a letter of protest Aug 31 denouncing their parent agency's new CEO, Michael Pack, and alleging Pack's remarks in a recent interview prove he has a damaging agenda for the international broadcasters he oversees. Pack's comments and decisions "endanger the personal security of VOA reporters at home and abroad, as well as threatening to harm U.S. national security objectives," the letter to VOA Acting Director Elez Biberaj read.
Widespread internet outages knocked down Cloudflare, the PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, Amazon, Hulu, and a slew of other sites on the morning of Aug 30, and it’s apparently all because of a single internet service provider: CenturyLink. Given that Cloudflare’s online security services are designed to keep websites up and running, when it went down, so did dozens of the popular sites and services that rely on it, including Discord, Feedly, and League of Legends. Cloudflare began seeing “an increased level of HTTP 5xx class errors” early Aug 30 morning.
Low-income Americans; Black, Hispanic and Native Americans; the elderly; Americans with a high school education or less; and rural Americans are much more likely to be on the wrong side of the digital divide.
Providing more people with the means to stay home instead of going to their workplaces in person
Too many view protective measures as all or nothing: Either we do everything, or we might as well do none. That’s wrong. Instead, we need to see that all our behavior adds up. Each decision we make to reduce risk helps. Each time we wear a mask, we’re throwing some safety on the pile. Each time we socialize outside instead of inside, we’re throwing some safety on the pile. Each time we stay six feet away instead of sitting closer together, we’re throwing some safety on the pile.
On Sept 2, the Federal Communications Commission will take comments on NTIA’s petition on reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a provision enacted in 1996 to address a narrow set of concerns involving nascent internet platforms that then played only a marginal role in American life. The purpose of the provision made sense at that moment in internet history: Section 230 sought to insulate the newly emerging tech
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