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Google is rolling out a new search feature on July 18 that aims to help users register to vote ahead of the November presidential election in the US. The company said that queries for the term "register to vote" will now return detailed descriptions on how to register in each US state, including requirements and deadlines. "No matter which state you’re in or how you plan to cast your ballot, you can find the step-by-step information you need to register correctly and on time — right at the top of your Search page and in the Google app," wrote Jacob Schonberg.

Google has also introduced a search tool that delivers information on the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. When users search for either convention in the Google app, the app will display a summary of the event, information about the nominee, and a list of speakers, alongside related social media posts and a YouTube live stream video.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who created the world wide web, is calling on regulators in Europe to protect network neutrality and "save the open internet." Berners-Lee, Stanford law professor Barbara van Schewick, and Harvard law professor Larry Lessig urged European regulators to implement guidelines that would close loopholes in net neutrality legislation that the European Parliament approved in October 2015. They also called on internet users to voice their opposition online, before the public consultation period on the guidelines ends on July 18th.

"Network neutrality for hundreds of millions of Europeans is within our grasp," their letter reads. "Securing this is essential to preserve the open Internet as a driver for economic growth and social progress. But the public needs to tell regulators now to strengthen safeguards, and not cave in to telecommunications carriers’ manipulative tactics." The rules approved by European lawmakers last year contained several loopholes that activists say could be exploited to undermine net neutrality. Among the most troubling, according to Berners-Lee, Lessig, and van Schewick, is a provision that would allow ISPs to create "fast lanes" for "specialized services," and a guideline that would allow for "zero-rating" — a practice whereby select apps and services are exempt from monthly data limits.

The killing of Alton Sterling at the hands of police in Baton Rouge (LA) has sparked national outrage after a video showing the incident was posted online. That video was the result of an organized effort by local activists, who use smartphones to monitor and record violence.

A nonprofit group in Baton Rouge, known as Stop The Killing, tracks crime through police scanner apps. When members of the group hear about an incident, they drive to the scene to document it, recording and producing videos to draw attention to violence in the community. There are seven or eight people in the organization that all regularly listen to the scanners — several different versions of police scanner apps of those that are publicly available — for reports of violent crime. "Sometimes we get to crime scenes before police," says head of the group, Arthur "Silky Slim" Reed. Stop The Killing tries to record a scene three or four times a week, Reed says, and has uploaded some of its footage — much of it showing graphic incidents of crime scenes — to YouTube.

Six legal cases helped to shape the Internet into what it is today.

1. Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union (1997): This case protected online freedom of speech.
2. Zeran v. America Online (1998): This case allowed website owners to host third-party content without having to worry about being prosecuted if someone published something illegal on that website.
3. Zippo Manufacturing Co. v. Zippo Dot Com (1997): The web is "worldwide," right? So which courts get to decide if a certain website has violated the law? This case paved the way toward establishing standards in that regard.
4. ProCD v. Zeidenberg (1996): If you clicked to agree, it’s official: You agreed. This case confirms it.
5. Religious Technology Center v. Netcom (1995): This case established that linking to another site didn’t equal stealing content from that site.
6. Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com: Ever hear of Google Image Search? Of course you have. This case is why it and other similar services are allowed to exist.

Google has been working on a suite of tools that would let kids more easily use its services with permission from their parents, including a child-safe version of YouTube.

Under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, sites that want let kids under 13 sign up need to get permission from their parents. But if companies actually build out products and services that let parents constructively manage how their kids use their sites, it's far more likely parents will actually sign up and give permission upfront.

What is causing the Internet congestion that is degrading service to Netflix consumers? Level 3 -- which helps carry that Netflix traffic to Verizon's network in Los Angeles -- says the problem could be solved in five minutes and for a very small cost, but that Verizon is refusing to make these upgrades, because it wants to extract a fee from Level 3 instead.

Verizon's story matches up pretty well with the one being pushed by Netflix and Level 3. It's saying that Netflix traffic has overwhelmed the points of connection between the ISP and the middlemen who deliver this data for the streaming video giant.

The key difference is that Verizon says Netflix could solve this problem easily by spreading its traffic over multiple transit providers. Level 3 is arguing that the best solution would be to simply upgrade Verizon's network, a process it claims to have offered to pay for.

The New York Department of Financial Services (DFS) has released a copy of proposed "codes, rules, and regulations" for companies that buy and sell bitcoin and other virtual currencies roughly a year after the agency announced an inquiry into regulating bitcoin.

The proposal, which outlines requirements for a special "BitLicense" (truly), will be entered into the record on July 23. The proposed rules apply to businesses that buy, sell, transfer, store, or maintain custody or control of customers' bitcoins, as well as companies that convert fiat currency to virtual currency on behalf of merchants.

Over half a million Americans have shared their feelings on network neutrality with the Federal Communications Commission as the agency ponders new rules that could drastically reshape the Internet.

Earlier, Chairman Tom Wheeler reported that the FCC has so far received around 647,000 comments as the July 15 deadline for initial feedback approaches. The commission will then accept responses to those comments into the month of September.

At best, a final decision on the controversial net neutrality proposal isn't expected until near the end of 2014.

There's a new cybersecurity bill making its way through Congress, sponsored and written by Sen Diane Feinstein (D-CA), and critics are already calling it a new backdoor for surveillance by the National Security Agency.

The Cybersecurity Intelligence Sharing Act of 2014 (CISA) was just approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee, putting it on track for a Senate vote soon. But like its controversial predecessors, the bill is coming under fire as a step backwards in the fight for surveillance reform.

The bill's primary effect would be a new requirement for sharing information on "cyber threat indicators," a vague term that could refer to anything from an ongoing hack to a vulnerability in commercial software. Once a company makes a report to the government with information about a threat indicator, CISA would require broad sharing across federal agencies, including with the NSA, which would be given a more central role in threat management under the new scheme.

Advocacy groups have seized on the reporting requirements as a troubling expansion of NSA access to private networks. The Center for Democracy in Technology says the provision "risks turning the cybersecurity program it creates into a back door wiretap." CDT also notes the bill lacks many crucial privacy protections that were included in previous cybersecurity acts. The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls the bill "fatally flawed," and raised concerns that it would create a new pipeline of data from independent companies to the NSA.

If you're worried about Big Brother and computerized facial recognition, you’ve had plenty of reason to be scared. Law enforcement has been toying with facial recognition for a while, but the FBI is getting set to deploy its own system, called Next Generation Identification (NGI for short), planned to be fully operational soon.

NGI will bring together millions of photos in a central federal database, reaching all 50 states by the end of the year. After years of relative anonymity, it's easy to think 2014 is the year that law enforcement will finally know you by face. B

t here's an inconvenient fact about the FBI's shiny new system: Thanks to extensive work by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we actually know quite a bit about NGI, and the numbers suggest it isn't very good at recognizing faces. Given a suspect's face, NGI returns a ranked list of 50 possibilities, and only promises an 85 percent chance of returning the suspect's name in the list. To put it another way, even when you give NGI 50 guesses, it still lets one in seven suspects off the hook.

Compare that to Facebook's DeepFace system, recently presented at the IEEE Computer Vision conference, and it looks even worse. Give Facebook two pictures, and it can tell you with 97 percent accuracy whether they're the same person, roughly the same accuracy as a human being in the same spot.

To be fair, Facebook has a whole network's worth of data on its side, so it ends up comparing each face to a smaller number of possibilities. It isn’t an exact comparison, but the overall impression is hard to deny: the nation's most powerful law enforcement agency is getting outgunned by a social network.