Devices

San Francisco (CA) has offered jail tablets and their content at no cost to incarcerated people, part of a wave of institutions starting to decouple carceral communications from a profit motive. The free tablet program was introduced in May of 2023, a logical follow-up to San Francisco making jail phone calls free in 2020, the first county in the country to do so and the second city after New York. Before 2023, the San Francisco jails had never implemented any tablet program for all inmates.

In 2022, Governor Ned Lamont (D-CT) called on the Connecticut Commission for Educational Technology within the Department of Administrative Services (DAS) to lead the State’s efforts around digital equity. In late 2023, the commission released its draft digital equity plan, Connecticut: Everyone Connected, for public comment.

The Federal Trade Commission proposes to amend the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule, consistent with the requirements of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. The proposed modifications are intended to respond to changes in technology and online practices, and where appropriate, to clarify and streamline the Rule. The proposed modifications, which are based on the FTC’s review of public comments and its enforcement experience, are intended to clarify the scope of the Rule and/or strengthen its protection of personal information collected from children. 

In the largest survey of its kind, we surveyed 2,778 researchers who had published in top-tier artificial intelligence (AI) venues, asking for their predictions on the pace of AI progress and the nature and impacts of advanced AI systems. The aggregate forecasts give at least a 50 percent chance of AI systems achieving several milestones by 2028, including autonomously constructing a payment processing site from scratch, creating a song indistinguishable from a new song by a popular musician, and autonomously downloading and fine-tuning a large language model.

The Texas Broadband Development Office (BDO), under the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, developed the Texas Digital Opportunity Plan to guide non-infrastructure-related digital opportunity investments. Another aim is to position the BDO to receive State Digital Equity Capacity Grant Program funds from the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Infrastructure Administration (NTIA).

The Vermont Community Broadband Board (VCBB) asserts that connectivity has become integral to everyday activities from regular social interactions and access to media to participating in school or pursuing a career, responding to emergencies, improving farming efficiency and agricultural output, and combatting climate change. VCBB  released its draft Digital Equity Plan to ensure all Vermonters can take advantage of the benefits of this connectivity.

The holidays are all about trying to spend time with family—a hard thing to do when a family member is behind bars. And it's even harder if that person is held in a local jail, where there's been a growing trend away from in-person visits. "There's no more eye-to-eye, face-to-face visitation," says Maj. David McFadyen, the head of administrative operations for the sheriff's office in North Carolina's Craven County. Since the pandemic, the county jail has switched to a remote video system for family visits. It's not free; families pay the video service contractor $8 per 20 minutes. But Maj.

There are 8 million people with blindness or low vision in the US. More than 4.23 million of them are working age, but only about half of that working-age population are employed. Employment rates for people with blindness or low vision have historically been much lower than for the general population. An overwhelming majority of jobs across all industries require digital skills.

I’m currently enrolled in one of the first bachelor’s degree programs inside California prisons. The program is offered by California State University, Los Angeles, and the laptop is one of its perks. The students in my cohort—the program’s third, but the first to receive personal laptops—were all incarcerated at very young ages and sentenced to prison terms that reflect football scores. I’ve served 17 years of a 50-year-to-life sentence, and none of us foresaw living past our 18th birthdays, let alone attending university.

Since around 2016, telecommunications companies like ViaPath and Securus (which owns JPay) have issued thousands of tablets in prisons and jails nationwide. These devices are populated with prison-approved content and can’t connect to the internet unless they are hacked and updated with software, a process otherwise known as jailbreaking, or rooting. Jailbreaking a tablet can cost up to $300, and the reasons for doing it vary.