Fri, 08/27/2021
Welcome to ‘Tech Roundup,’ where we highlight some of the most significant/thought-provoking news items from the world of tech, especially at the nexus of law and technology. We are particularly interested in foregrounding tech news that is happening in Nebraska, and our region more broadly. If you have a news item you would like to see in the Roundup, please email neil.rutledge@unl.edu.
Local/Regional
Hurwitz discusses rural digital divide in RFD-TV interview
Nebraska Today
- Gus Hurwitz, professor of law and director of the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center, discussed the lack of high-speed internet access in some rural households during a live Aug. 17 interview on RFD-TV.
- The COVID-19 pandemic and shift by many to remote work and education highlighted the digital divide and other inequities in rural communities. This is just one of the issues explored at the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center.
- In an effort to better understand the state’s broadband capacity, the Southeast Nebraska Development District (SENDD) is excited to launch a statewide broadband speed mapping initiative.
- Community surveys will help identify the areas lacking high-speed internet. Residents can participate by going to www.sendd.org/broadband and completing the speed test. Participation is encouraged to improve the accuracy of the study.
- Currently the study has collected data from 7,400 unique locations across the state. A detailed map of download speeds is available at the above link.
Institutional repositories help democratize access to older research
Nebraska Today
- Though older scientific literature contains seminal theories, discoveries and methodologies that have shaped the contemporary landscapes of many research fields, that research often becomes less accessible as it ages.
- Those few who can access it — whether by checking it out from a university library collection or purchasing it at discounts from publishers — are often able to do so because of their physical proximity to it. That can skew access toward people living in relatively developed countries, creating and perpetuating a cycle of information inequity.
- Sue Ann Gardner, Paul Royster and Linnea Fredrickson help manage the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Digital Commons, a globally recognized online repository whose 119,000-plus full-text entries have been downloaded more than 74 million times since 2005.
New analysis highlights conservation practices in Nebraska
Nebraska Today
- The majority of Nebraska farms with more than 1,000 acres of cropland utilized at least one of the regenerative cropping practices of planting cover crops, no-till and reduced tillage between 2012 and 2017, according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2017 Census of Agriculture.
- “The environmental and soil quality benefits, coupled with the cost-share programs offered by the Natural Resources Conservation Service, have helped to drive the appeal of cover crops, in particular,” Larry Van Tassell, director of the Center for Agricultural Profitability, said.
Life in the 'Slow Lane': Rural Nebraskans Ask for Better Broadband
Nebraska Public Media
- In rural parts of the state, finding reliable internet can be a problem.
- The residents of these rural towns say broadband is not just a nice thing to have but, rather, a necessity in today’s way of life – even in the most remote parts of the state. It’s places and towns like these in rural Nebraska that could stand to gain the most from reliable internet and programs that make that happen.
Telling Start-up Stories to Customers
Nebraska Tech Collaborative
- Chapman and Company provides many economic development organizations with advice regarding their entrepreneurial ecosystems. The most frequent advice provided is 1) finding your community’s entrepreneurs and 2) telling their stories.
- For example, many Nebraskans may know that there is a startup company called – “Workshop” or “CompanyCam” – but few could accurately download these company’s basic thesis statements to a potential buyer or interested party. And yet, when we discuss how to leverage the community most effectively, startups often ask for help getting their targeted customers to pay attention.
Local Startup Spotlight
- “The ReEnvision Ag Planter system allows farmers to be the best stewards of the environment by reducing tillage and allowing the soil to be healthier.”
- “By adapting farming practices that reduce the use of fossil fuels, store more carbon, and do not pollute water, we are saving money by not wasting fertilizer, lowering our machinery costs, and lowering fuel expenses all while improving the organic matter, water penetrability and fertility of our soils. Creating this win/win brings better food to the table, ensures the future quality of the soil, and keeps farmers productive with lower costs and greater profitability.”
National/International
CEOs Debate Mandatory Cyber Reporting
Bloomberg Law
- Top tech, banking and energy CEOs at this week’s White House cybersecurity meeting debated whether mandating cyber incident reporting was necessary to improve companies’ security hygiene, as a key House committee prepares legislation to do just that.
- More than 20 CEOs—including those from Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and JPMorgan Chase—met Wednesday with President Joe Biden and top cabinet officials to discuss how to strengthen cybersecurity preparedness and response, and whether it’s time to move beyond voluntary standards and frameworks to elevate companies’ cyber protections.
The Economist
- While it can take weeks to put up a conventional bricks-and-mortar dwelling, Palari Homes and Mighty Buildings, the collaborators behind (3D printed houses), are able to erect one in less than 24 hours.
DOJ, FinCEN Partly Resolve Legality of Bitcoin Mixing
Bloomberg Law
- On the same date that BitMEX consented to $100 million in penalties for obvious and intentional violations of U.S. laws and regulations since 2014, another cryptocurrency business pleaded guilty to similar violations during the same period of time. A Bitcoin “mixer” or “tumbler” operating on the darknet, providing the service of moving Bitcoins with their source and owner concealed, was the target of criminal and civil enforcement actions this time.
- Harmon explicitly advertised Helix as a service for concealing transactions from law enforcement. According to the Department of Justice and FinCEN, Helix exchanged more than $311 million worth of Bitcoin, mostly in transactions on darknet markets selling illegal goods and services.
Tech’s Lobbying Push Follows Market Consolidation, Study Shows
Bloomberg Law
- The flood of lobbying dollars spent by tech companies has increased with market concentration, according to a new study that cites similar patterns in the pharmaceutical and oil industries.
- Reed Showalter, an attorney with the anti-monopolist group American Economic Liberties Project who wrote the study, said policy makers and antitrust enforcers should look beyond the impact that mergers have on consumers and consider how market concentration affects the democratic process.
OnlyFans suspends policy change after backlash
BBC
- OnlyFans has announced that it will delay making changes to policy on content creation, following a widespread backlash by its users.
- The content subscription service announced plans last week to block sexually explicit photos and videos from October.
- "So it is short-term good news for sex workers reliant on the platform - and I would like to see this as the start of increased support, celebration and championing of sex-worker rights by OnlyFans," one OnlyFans content creator told BBC News.
BBC News
- It has become almost impossible to buy a PS5 games console. Toyota, Ford and Volvo have had to either slow or temporarily halt production at their factories. Smartphone makers are feeling the pinch too, with Apple warning that the shortage could affect iPhone sales.
- Koray Köse, an analyst at Gartner, says that among the pressures facing the chip industry prior to the pandemic were the rise of 5G, which increased demand, and the decision by the US to prevent the sale of semiconductors and other technology to Huawei. Chip makers outside the US were quickly flooded with orders from the Chinese firm.
- But the cost of moving shipping containers around the world has ballooned because of sudden shifts in demand during the pandemic. It is accompanied by a rise in air freight fees and the lorry driver shortage in Europe. Sending a single 40ft container from Asia to Europe currently costs $17,000 (£12,480), says George Griffiths, editor of global container markets at S&P Global Platts. That's a greater than ten-fold increase compared to a year ago, when it cost around $1,500 (£1,101).
Geoengineering is conspicuously absent from the IPCC’s report
The Economist
- “And what to make of things that didn’t make it to the summary in the first place—such as solar geoengineering, which the ipcc refers to as ‘solar-radiation modification’? In the spm of the previous report, in 2013, this approach to climate change, which involves modifying the atmosphere to boost the amount of sunlight reflected back to space, was deemed to ‘have the potential to substantially offset a global temperature rise’.“
Neil Rutledge, Research Associate at the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center, offered his perspective on new data from the Pew Research Center:
How Call-In Options Affect Address-Based Web Surveys
Pew Research Center
- About 7% of U.S. adults do not use the internet, 16% are not digitally literate, and half cannot read above an eighth-grade level. These attributes can make it difficult for many Americans to participate in a self-administered online survey.
- Moreover, non-internet and less literate (both in terms of reading level and computer savviness) individuals are not randomly distributed throughout the population. Rather, they are disproportionately likely to be older, have less formal education and live in rural areas, on average, than their counterparts. Missing them, in other words, harms the representation of online surveys and can introduce bias.
- Meanwhile, a growing number of surveys, including those conducted on Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), can only be completed online.
- (The study found that) Individuals who respond via IVR are different than those who answer via web and better represent groups (e.g., conservatives, adults with less formal education) that the ATP and other online panels have historically underrepresented.
Rutledge offered this perspective:
Those who follow the growing issues with gathering statistically valid survey data, and the researchers who depend on such metrics, are all too aware of the growing limitations of obtaining responses from individuals that are representative of the full spectrum of society. Attempts to counterbalance for the lack of internet access among certain groups through differential-weighting of responses are useful, but too-often rely on imperfect sets of assumptions about certain segments of society.
While Interactive Voice Response polling has its own limitations (which the authors of the study readily acknowledge), it at least represents a step in the right direction in that it attempts to provide solid data from groups in society (conservatives and adults with less formal education are two groups in particular that the study mentions) whose absence from traditional survey methodologies have provided incomplete datasets and limited our understanding of the full scope of views that exist across societies. As the study mentions, this is the first time the validity of results from inbound IVR was tested, and it seems likely it could evolve to become a useful tool in the toolbox of researchers seeking to compile more robust data.
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