Month: March 2016

An Image used by ISIS supporters combines the Twitter logo with the ISIS flag. (credit: Federal Court documents)

Twitter says US law forbids it from being legally liable for what others write on the micro-blogging service, so it is citing the Communications Decency Act in a bid to stamp out a lawsuit accusing the platform of being a "tool for spreading extremist propaganda" that allegedly led to the murder of a US citizen working in Jordan last year. Twitter said:

In enacting Section 230, Congress unequivocally resolved (PDF) the question whether computer service providers may be held liable for harms arising from content created by third parties. Announcing the policy of the United States to preserve the “free market that presently exists for the Internet... unfettered by Federal or State regulation,” 47 U.S.C. § 230(b)(2), Congress broadly immunized entities like Twitter against lawsuits that seek to hold them liable for harmful or unlawful third-party content, including suits alleging that such entities failed to block, remove, or alter such content, id. § 230(c)(1).

The suit concerns a Louisiana woman whose husband, Lloyd "Carl" Fields Jr., was murdered in Jordan last year where he was working as a private contractor. Tamara Fields claims Twitter's platform was a vehicle for terrorists to spew their hatred and plot jihad.

AUSTIN, Texas—In October, the South By Southwest festival canceled plans to host a pair of 2016 SXSW Interactive panels amid worries about threats of violence and disruption. Public outcry soon followed, with critics pointing out the irony of a panel about online threats and abuse being canceled for that very reason. SXSW responded by not only reinstating the panels but by attaching them to an even larger, full-day Online Harassment Summit.

While the resulting event on Saturday proved notable for its variety of speakers and their diverse thoughts on how to both moderate and protect various kinds of online speech, it was nearly overshadowed by a frosty pall. SXSW's Online Harassment Summit is the only event in the festival's 22-year run to include a security checkpoint—which visitors had to pass through every time they re-entered its building—and its panels were introduced with reminders that unattended bags would be "confiscated and destroyed" by guards on site, no questions asked.

Between those issues, an overstuffed panel schedule, and the summit venue's long walk from the SXSW downtown-Austin core, the resulting event was dampened by small and thinly spread crowds. There was nothing meek about the content, however. What the Online Harassment Summit lacked in headline-grabbing conflict, it made up for with compelling voices that saw tech, policy, and academic experts finding common ground on the subject of antagonistic and threatening online speech. At its best, the results included informed analysis, mountains of data, and calls to specific action—all while trying to balance both free and responsible speech with paradigms that looked beyond the United States' model.

(credit: Western Digital)

The Raspberry Pi 3 was released earlier this month with some significantly improved hardware, including a quad-core 64-bit ARM CPU, an upgraded GPU, and embedded wireless—updates that will let people use it for a wider variety of tasks than before. For people whose use cases require a decent amount of storage, Western Digital has just announced a specialized low-profile hard drive called the PiDrive.

The 314GB drive, which will normally cost $45.81 but is currently available for $31.42, is a 7mm-high drive based on the basic Western Digital Blue drives that still ship in many budget and mid-end laptops and PCs. The difference is the interface, which has been changed from SATA to USB and is designed to connect to the Pi directly without drastically increasing the footprint of the device. WD says it has customized the drive in order to "reduce the electrical power load of the hard drive on Raspberry Pi while still maintaining sufficient performance to deliver maximum USB data transfer rate." It's also a cheaper solution than the 1TB PiDrive kit the company already sells for $79.99.

Western Digital says that the 314GB PiDrive will come with the BerryBoot bootloader to make it as easy as possible to install and run multiple operating systems from the same drive. The new PiDrive is compatible with WD's existing PiDrive cables and enclosures and is available for purchase today.

(credit: Chris Young)

Customers who sued AT&T over its practice of throttling unlimited data plans will not be able to pursue a class-action lawsuit against the company. AT&T argued that the customers could only have their complaints heard individually in arbitration, and Judge Edward Chen of US District Court in Northern California has sided with the cellular company.

The customers' contracts with AT&T required them to arbitrate disputes with AT&T on an individual basis. But customers argued that the arbitration cause would violate their First Amendment right to petition a court for a redress of grievances. While the arbitration clause allowed claims to be brought in small claims court, the plaintiffs argued that such a court would not be an adequate forum.

But Chen accepted AT&T's argument, noting that the Supreme Court previously upheld AT&T's arbitration provision in a 2011 decision. In the 2011 case, AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, the Supreme Court found that the Federal Arbitration Act preempted a California state law that limited the power of companies to force customers into arbitration.

Last year set a rather notable record for the warmest global temperatures, as a strong El Niño bumped up a steady trend of greenhouse warming to push the temperatures well above the previous record. Our report on the temperature record, however, noted that it was likely to be short lived. The El Niño that drove it wasn't going to switch off at the end of the calendar year, and additional time would allow the heat it was pushing into the atmosphere to spread more widely across the globe. As a result, some observers were predicting that 2016 would be even hotter.

So far, those predictions seem to be spot on. Over the weekend, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies released its figures for the month of February, which registered as a startling 1.35°C above the baseline period (1951-1980). The previous monthly record had been 1.14°C; last year's annual record was a paltry 0.84°C.

(credit: NASA-GiSS via Gavin Schmidt)

The graph above shows data from a period that contains all of the 15 warmest years in the instrumental record. The February reading, at the far right, provides some indication on how much of a radical departure this warming is.