Verge, The

The more remote someone feels, the less human they seem. This is the driving force behind large parts of what is wrong with communicating on the Internet, and it often makes talking about politics on the internet a special kind of hell. But virtual reality, theoretically, can make people on opposite sides of the globe feel like they’re talking face-to-face. And this election season, a VR social network called AltspaceVR is testing whether this feeling of connection can bring its users together during a bitterly divided campaign.

The Verge made a Freedom of Information Act request to the Federal Communications Commission for complaints related to the 2016 Olympics. The grievances, 18 of which were shared in the FCC’s response, fall into three buckets: inadequate closed captioning, discrimination of non-cable subscribers, and what else, sexual indecency. The issue of NBC failing to properly handle closed captioning is a serious one, and something we intend to explore further. But the FCC complaints are largely technical, focusing on the specifics of when, where, and how long closed captioning was poorly handled or completely absent from broadcasts.

The silliest, saddest, and most political complaints pertained to the human body, and how much of it should be shown. From a viewer in New York City: "Last night 08/06/16 NBC Olympic coverage included video of naked women which was inappropriate for a the wider audience." From a viewer in Norman (OK): "NBC's coverage of the Olympic opening ceremony displayed numerous examples of people's buttocks for the viewing pleasure on my children 9 and 5. This seems highly inappropriate for a recorded program meant to be watched by a general audience."

AT&T is getting into the messy business of zero-rating, offering wireless data subscribers the opportunity to stream video from the DirecTV mobile app with no data costs at all. According to update notes from the latest version of the app, users can "stream DirecTV on your devices, anywhere — without using your data."

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket explosion will be a major setback for Internet.org’s ambitions in sub-saharan Africa. The satellite destroyed this week, called Amos 6, was set to be used in an entirely different project. Amos 6 would have provided backhaul for Internet.org’s Express Wi-Fi system, which connects rural internet providers to the broader internet. Anyone connecting to an Express Wi-Fi provider will experience the same, full internet as anyone else, with no limitations or favored apps. As a result, it’s been able to operate even in countries that rejected Free Basics, including India. Free Basics typically focuses on areas where internet infrastructure is available, but access is too expensive for much of the population. By restricting access, Free Basics can provide more people with access to basic services, even as it runs the risk of creating a multi-tiered internet. Express Wi-Fi tackles a different problem. Instead of focusing on areas that are already connected, Express Wi-Fi looks to build out back-end infrastructure to areas too poor and remote for a conventional telecom to justify the investment. Once the backhaul connectivity is available, local entrepreneurs take on the work of bringing it to the average consumer — but it’s only possible because of the infrastructure provided by Internet.org.

[Commentary] Here are two lines from T-Mobile’s latest "Uncarrier" missive, in which the company proclaims that it has "listened to customers" and is changing its new T-Mobile One plans less than two weeks after announcing them. The first line: "Everyone gets unlimited talk, unlimited text and unlimited high-speed 4G LTE smartphone data on the fastest LTE network in America." The second line: "With T-Mobile ONE, even video is unlimited at standard definition so you can stream all you want." At this point it appears that T-Mobile is operating with definitions of "unlimited" and "data" that are are only tangentially related to reality. For example, most people understand the word "unlimited" to mean "without any limits or restrictions," but T-Mobile’s definition clearly means "without any limits except for a hard restriction on HD video that can only be lifted for $3 a day or $25 a month."*

The nonprofit group Campaign for Accountability recently launched a project to compile documents about Google's lobbying practices, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

The group says the repository of documents will be a resource for monitoring how Google interacts with the government. The first installment, which the group obtained through an independent researcher, features more than 1,500 pages of emails between the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Google employees. In the email exchanges, Google employees coordinate their messaging with the White House, occasionally steering around divisions within the administration. Nothing in the documents suggests improper behavior; they are a window into Google's high-level work on policy matters, and provide a case study on how deep the company's lobbying efforts go.

WikiLeaks and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey have had harsh words over Twitter’s recent decision to ban noted Breitbart editor and troll Milo Yiannopoulos. WikiLeaks’ Twitter account declared the ban an example of "cyber feudalism," saying that Twitter had "banned conservative gay libertarian [Yiannopoulos] for speaking the 'wrong' way" to Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones.

According to an earlier Twitter statement, Yiannopoulos was banned for "inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others" after Jones began posting examples of racist and misogynist abuse she had received on the platform. Dorsey soon replied to WikiLeaks, echoing this language. "We don't ban people for expressing their thoughts," he wrote. "Targeted abuse & inciting abuse against people however, that's not allowed." The ideal version of Twitter would in fact do what WikiLeaks suggests: build tools to let people pick who they want to communicate with, then facilitate that as openly as possible.

A Q&A with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

By nearly any measure, Facebook has had a remarkable year. More than 1.65 billion people use the service every month, making it the world’s largest social network by a considerable margin. Its advertising business has grown significantly faster than analyst expectations, powered by sophisticated targeting capabilities that rivals struggle to match. And in April, CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out an ambitious 10-year vision that places the company at the frontier of computer science, making aggressive moves in bringing artificial intelligence and virtual reality to the mainstream. And yet what Zuckerberg talks about most these days, in meetings with world leaders or at his live Town Hall Q&A sessions, is basic Internet connectivity. In August 2013, Facebook announced the creation of internet.org, the company’s sometimes controversial initiative to bring online services to underserved areas. Since then, Facebook’s connectivity efforts have expanded greatly. It released open-source blueprints for telecommunications infrastructure in an effort to drive down data costs. It’s testing Terragraph, which augments terrestrial cellular networks with new millimeter-wave technology that delivers data 10 times faster than existing Wi-Fi networks. And it continues to expand its Free Basics program despite setbacks. (In India, regulators banned the program, arguing that because Facebook has the final say over which services can be part of Free Basics, it violates net neutrality principles.)

In an interview published by the New York Times, Donald Trump gave a winding response to a question about cyberattacks. Trump says he's all for "cyber," although it's unclear from the conversation what exactly that means. From the Times:
[DAVID E.] SANGER: You've seen several [NATO members in the Baltics] come under cyberattack, things that are short of war, clearly appear to be coming from Russia.
TRUMP: Well, we're under cyberattack.
SANGER: We're under regular cyberattack. Would you use cyberweapons before you used military force?
TRUMP: Cyber is absolutely a thing of the future and the present. Look, we're under cyberattack, forget about them. And we don't even know where it's coming from.
SANGER: Some days we do, and some days we don't.
TRUMP: Because we're obsolete. Right now, Russia and China in particular and other places.
SANGER: Would you support the United States' not only developing as we are but fielding cyberweapons as an alternative?
TRUMP: Yes. I am a fan of the future, and cyber is the future.

[Commentary] One of the defining trends of tech in recent years has been the colonization of the real by the digital. By that, I mean the tendency for technology to overlay our experience of people, places, and things, with networks that exist primarily online. The classic example of this is the digital map. Maps have always existed separate to the physical space they represent, of course, but the ease of use and ubiquity of apps like Google Maps and Citymapper have created, in many peoples’ eyes, a disconnect between our experience of the world, and the geographies that exist solely on our smartphones. But this is just one example, and the colonization of the real is only just beginning.