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California residents will notice something different at the checkout on Amazon when buying books, toys or electronics starting Sept 15: They’ll be charged sales taxes.
The Internet’s status as a tax-free haven is over this weekend due to a state law Gov. Jerry Brown signed last year — initially fought by giant online retailers like Amazon — that requires state residents to pay sales taxes when ordering goods or services over the Internet. “Better late than never,” said Hut Landon, executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, which has fought for California to pass an online sales tax bill for more than 10 years, to level the playing field between online and storefront merchants. Landon is going to mark the occasion by buying a book on Amazon and turning the receipt into a poster to display at an upcoming trade show. Resistance to online sales tax collection has been great nationwide, as the Internet has come to be regarded as a tax-free zone by shoppers and Congress has tried to keep it that way. But tight state budgets and a struggling economy have raised the stakes and forced the issue so that even Washington is trying to grapple with a legislative fix that can be deployed on a national level.
Internet’s tax-free days are over in California
Local public health officials can use a free new Web-based application, MappyHealth , to track health concerns in real time in their communities using Twitter. MappyHealth is the winning submission of 33 applicants in a developers’ challenge, “Now Trending: #Health in My Community,” sponsored by ASPR.
Health officials can use data they gain through the app to complement other health surveillance systems in identifying emerging health issues and as an early warning of possible public health emergencies in a community. The MappyHealth team met through the ASPR Twitter challenge. In launching the Now Trending challenge, ASPR encouraged interested parties to use the hashtag #nowtrending2012 to ask questions, bounce ideas and seek out team members. Nursing informatics specialist Brian Norris of Indianapolis did so, seeking partners with skills that complemented his own in developing the application. Those tweets led to the creation of the MappyHealth team. Joining Norris was another nursing informatics specialist, Charles Boicey of Orange County, Calif., and management information systems specialist Mark Silverberg of Washington, D.C.
ASPR Twitter challenge sparks innovation in tracking local health trends
Chicago is one of the half-dozen key vertebrae in the nation's digital backbone because it lies at the center of many of the fiber optic cables that stretch between New York and California, the country's major connection points to the rest of the world via cables under the oceans.
Chicago has the third-biggest fiber optic capacity of any metro area in the country, behind New York and Washington. And three of the world's largest data centers are in Chicago or its suburbs. The same combination of geography and economics that elevated Chicago into a national center of infrastructure-dependent industries such as commodity trading, transportation and manufacturing in the 19th and 20th centuries now contributes to its pre-eminence in 21st-century digital infrastructure. The city's digital tubes are tomorrow's waterways, rail lines, highways and airports. "Things go to where things are," says Hunter Newby, CEO of New York-based Allied Fiber, one of two companies laying fiber from the East Coast to Chicago to meet demand from financial services and wireless companies. "Where there is manufacturing and industry, there are power plants and distribution, which cost a lot of money to build." "Chicago is by far the center of railroad tracks in the U.S.," says Chris Gladwin, CEO of Cleversafe Inc., a data storage company based in the West Loop. "If you're hosting a server, Chicago is near the population center in the U.S. It will have the lowest average latency (lag time) to the rest of the U.S." But the region can't take its position for granted.
How Chicago became one of the nation's most digital cities
The E-Government Act of 2002 was enacted to promote the use of the Internet and other technologies to improve citizen access to government information and services, improve government decision making, and enhance accountability and transparency. With the 10th anniversary of the passage of the E-Government Act approaching, GAO was asked to (1) assess Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) and agencies’ efforts to fulfill the act’s requirements to establish leadership and organizational responsibilities and (2) evaluate agencies’ progress in meeting the act’s requirements to enhance public access to government information and services.
GAO found that OMB and other agencies have taken steps to carry out leadership and organizational responsibilities as called for by the E-Government Act. However, while OMB and agencies have reported annually on their compliance with the act as required, OMB did not always require agencies to report on all of the act’s provisions and has not been explicit in communicating to Congress provisions that it is not reporting on and the reasons why. GAO is recommending that OMB identify in its annual report to Congress the provisions of the act that are not included and why, establish a federal research and development repository and website, and issue guidance on agency participation in this site.
[GAO-12-782, September 12]
Electronic Government Act: Agencies Have Implemented Most Provisions, but Key Areas of Attention Remain
Apple’s iPhone 5 got bigger than its predecessor, and some wonder why the company didn’t make room inside for a technology called near-field communications (N.F.C.), which enables devices to exchange information wirelessly over very short distances. This feature could make paying for things with a phone less of a hassle. (You’d swipe the phone over a device at the checkout counter.) It turns out that getting N.F.C. to work right with the new design of the iPhone wasn’t even possible. Why not? Nokia’s new Lumia 920 smartphone supports N.F.C., and some Android smartphones do as well. The explanation is actually quite simple. The iPhone 5’s all-aluminum-and-glass body would block information from being transmitted to a terminal, according to Will Strauss, an analyst of Forward Concepts, a research firm that follows digital signal processing and chips. “N.F.C. employs lower-frequency operation than cellular, requiring a longer antenna,” Strauss said. “That antenna is often wrapped around the battery in some cellphones, but a metal back shields any radio waves from reaching a nearby data terminal. Only plastic, Kevlar or similar backings will allow the radio connection for mobile payments. Clearly, Apple chose beauty over functionality with its aluminum back.”
Why the iPhone 5 Does Not Have NFC — It Can’t
YouTube has been asked by the White House to check whether an anti-Muslim video on its site violates its terms of use. "We reached out to Youtube to call the video to their attention and ask them to review whether it violates their terms of use," White House National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said.
White House asks YouTube to check if anti-Muslim video violates terms of use
Twitter agreed to hand over about three months' worth of tweets to a judge overseeing the criminal trial of an Occupy Wall Street protester, a case that has become a closely watched fight over how much access law enforcement agencies should have to material posted on social networks.
Prosecutors want tweets and user information from Sept. 15 to Dec. 31 that were taken down from the public site. The judge sided with the social network company on one point: It won't turn over some of the tweets because a federal law requires a court-approved search warrant, not just a subpoena issued by prosecutors, for stored electronic communications that are less than 180 days old. The social networking site had been threatened with steep fines if it did not comply with Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr.'s order to turn over the records in the case of Malcolm Harris. "We are disappointed that Twitter is essentially giving up the fight," Harris' attorney Martin Stolar said after the court hearing. The Manhattan district attorney's office said Harris' messages could show whether he was aware of the police orders he's charged with disregarding during a protest at the Brooklyn Bridge. Twitter had said the case could put it in the unwanted position of having to take on legal fights that users could otherwise conduct on their own.
Twitter hands over records in NY Occupy case Twitter hands over protester's tweets to police (The Hill)
Apparently, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski circulated a model of spectrum and incentive auction repacking as an addendum to a draft notice of proposed rulemaking on an auction framework.
The model is described as essentially a "tab A in slot B" description of the process, from reverse auction clock countdowns, to running the winning bids through the FCC's modeling for reconfiguring that spectrum, to the spectrum's re-auction to wireless, soliciting questions all along the way. The model talks about cross-border spectrum arrangements and says there will probably have to be different rules for stations along the shared border with Canada and Mexico, seeking comment on what those should be. The 20-page model, the work of outside consultants rather than FCC staffers, provides flexibility in the broadband plan for the forward auction--the re-auction of reclaimed spectrum presumably to spectrum-hungry wireless broadband players--assuming varying participation in the reverse auction, in which broadcasters will offer up the lowest price they will take for their spectrum, and the border issues. So, each market could wind up slightly different. The goal, said an FCC source, is for a unified band plan, but it recognizes that there could be some markets where there is not enough broadcaster participation or along the border where it won't be as uniform.
FCC Circulates Spectrum Auctions Model
Appearing on C-SPAN’s “The Communicators,” Rep Joe Barton (R-TX) says, "The traditional broadcast market at the local level has probably had a tougher time of it than almost anybody in the telecommunications industry in the last 10 or 15 years."
Rep Barton would not speculate on how successful the Federal Communications Commission's spectrum reclamation auction would be in terms of attracting broadcasters to give up spectrum. "I think that is going to be a purely economic decision on a case-by-case basis. Each local station decides whether it's better to keep it and try to get value out of current of future uses or whether to let it go and monetize that." Rep Barton also said he has asked House Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) to consider moving the kids do-not-track privacy bill that Barton and Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass), his privacy caucus co-chair have introduced.
Rep Barton: Local TV Has Had Tough Time Barton Asks E&C Chair to Move Kids Do-Not-Track Bill (B&C)
How crucial are the swing states in the presidential race? So crucial that President Barack Obama is once again taking the chase for votes to the virtual battlegrounds of the video game world.
Starting Sept 14, the Obama campaign will begin running ads across multiple video game titles from Electronic Arts, including the new Madden NFL 13, in the key Electoral College-tilting states of Ohio, Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire and Virginia. The ads are aimed at encouraging the gaming demographic to take advantage of early voting in these states. Beside console games, Obama is running "get out the vote" virtual ads in casual Web games on EA’s Pogo.com and in mobile games like Battleship, Scrabble and Tetris. Obama has tried this before. According to Dave Madden, EA’s svp of global media solutions, the strategy paid off for team Obama. Based on surveys conducted by EA during the 2008 ad effort, gamers were 120 percent more likely to feel positively about the candidate and 50 percent more likely to consider voting for him after seeing the in-game ads.
Obama Taps Video Games for Early Voting