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In the last three months, Guatemala has witnessed 356 homicides, 202 armed attacks, 44 illegal drug sales, 11 kidnappings, and six cases of "extortion by cell phone."

These numbers come courtesy not of Guatemalan law-enforcement but of Alertos.org, a new platform that recruits citizens to report crimes. And they've enlisted in the effort, using email, Twitter, Facebook, mobile apps, and text messaging to chronicle thousands of criminal activities since 2013 -- in a country where a hobbled police force is struggling to address the fifth-highest murder rate in the world.

In recent years, police have courted cell phone-toting citizens as crime "censors" everywhere from Washington, D.C. to the tiny Kenyan village of Lanet Umoja. But the practice has gained particular traction in Latin America, which, as the UN reported in April, has the highest rate of criminal violence on the planet (the region accounts for 8 percent of the world's population and a third of its murders).

The criminal syndicates and drug cartels behind this bloodshed have overwhelmed, crippled, and corrupted national police forces, resulting in the highest levels of impunity in the world as well. In these countries, criminals literally get away with murder, again and again. Amateur crime-mapping has emerged as a parallel law-enforcement mechanism -- in part owing to the popularity of cell phones in the region.

Online crime reporting can work remarkably well, harnessing the knowledge and networks of communities and saving money that would otherwise be spent on desk officers taking reports in person or by phone. But that success depends on people believing that police will swiftly take action on their reports, which in turn depends on law-enforcement agencies integrating crime-mapping initiatives into their broader operations in the first place.

[Commentary] The Internet uproar about network neutrality tends to come in waves. Right now we’re riding the crest of one.

In the two weeks since Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposal for new net neutrality rules became public, the Internet has erupted in protest. The legal vacuum created by the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit threatens the Internet that we know and love. It threatens the start-up economy. But simply adopting rules that are network neutrality in name only is not enough. Different rules -- like a ban on access fees versus a ban on discriminatory or exclusive access fees -- will result in vastly different environments for the use of the network and in very different application innovation ecosystems. As we -- the public, policy makers, and regulators -- think through the choice between limited network neutrality regulation under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act and more comprehensive network neutrality rules under Title II of the Communications Act, we need to ask the right questions and ask them in the right order:

1. What kind of rules do we need to protect users and innovators against the threat of blocking and discrimination?
2. How will access fees affect the environment for application innovation and free speech, and how does this affect what kind of rules we need?
3. And, finally, which foundation -- Section 706 or Title II -- will allow us to adopt these rules?

The answers are clear.

• First, we need strong network neutrality rules that prohibit blocking, discrimination against specific applications or classes of applications, and access fees – rules that apply equally to the fixed and mobile Internet.
• Second, we need rules that provide certainty to innovators, investors, and ISPs alike. Innovators and their investors need to know that they won’t be discriminated against and that ISPs cannot create new barriers to innovation by charging access fees.
• Third, start-ups are small and don’t have many resources, let alone a legal team. So we need rules that can be enforced through simple, straightforward legal processes, not rules that tilt the playing field in favor of large, established companies that can pay armies of lawyers and expert witnesses and afford long, costly proceedings at the FCC.
• Fourth, we need rules that give ISPs flexibility to realize their legitimate goals such as network management, price discrimination, or product differentiation, albeit through means that do not distort competition, harm application innovation, or violate user choice.
• Fifth, we need rules that do not overly constrain the evolution of the Internet infrastructure and keep the costs of regulation low.

[van Schewick is a professor at Stanford Law School and the director of the school's Center for Internet and Society]

[Commentary] Is state surveillance a legitimate defense of our freedoms? The question was put to Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, during a debate in Toronto.

Alan Dershowitz joined him to argue the affirmative. Glenn Greenwald and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian argued against the resolution.

"State surveillance is a legitimate defense of our freedoms," Hayden said, restating the resolution. "Well, we all know the answer to that. It depends. And it depends on facts."

In doing so, Hayden unwittingly echoed a core belief of the national security state's critics. He's absolutely right: To judge whether a particular kind of surveillance is legitimate, one must know exactly what's being considered and its purpose.

Just 2 percent of the British Library's massive archive of print newspapers have been digitized. That's going to change. The institution is completing a seven-year effort to upgrade its news archives, a $55 million (£33 million) project that's aimed at expanding the library's definition of "news."

Curator Luke McKernan said that "news" can mean "anything of relevance to a particular community at a particular point in time." Most people by now will acknowledge that news is recorded in newspapers and on Facebook and on Twitter and on blogs, etc., etc., but McKernan said he's also thinking about "diaries, oral history, recordings, maps, posters, letters," and so on.

McKernan wants to establish links between different kinds of resources, a strategy that's becoming increasingly important as institutions like libraries rethink how their resources will fit into a larger network of interconnected data and information online.

Minecraft is one of the most popular games in the United States with over 100 million registered users. But Minecraft is different than other video games because the object is to construct, not to tear down.

It's a video game, but it can also be classified as a building toy.

Parents are faced with difficult choices about technology. The prevailing wisdom is that “screen time” is bad for children. But can Minecraft be lumped in with the rest of the things that kids might do on a computer or phone?

Minecraft offers youth the opportunity to explore an environment that is not rule-based like the rest of their lives. Not only does the open-world nature of Minecraft give children the opportunity to be more creative, it allows them to feel like they have a sense of control over themselves and their environment. It’s an implicit way for them to develop self-regulation skills that then transfer to offline spaces -- through having this freedom to create on Minecraft, they learn how to identify and work towards offline goals like finishing class assignments or graduating from college later in life.

Playing Minecraft teaches kids useful skills. The most clearly visible are visuospatial reasoning skills -- learning how to manipulate objects in space in a way that helps them create dynamic structures.

Educators should take note and realize how they can leverage Minecraft. Some ideas include: letting kids share what they are building in the game and having them describe how they are interacting with their peers; setting up Minecraft hackathons where students who know how to mod can teach others how to do so; and devoting some class or after-school time to allowing kids to work on Minecraft-based assignments.

If a website is designed haphazardly, it doesn’t just look messy; it can be messy for someone who can’t see, too. The problem with much of the web -- and, in particular, its newsier corners -- is that it's designed without consideration for people who aren't navigating by sight.

In many cases, the busier a website looks, the harder it is for people who use tools like audio screen-readers to get where they want to go, or even figure out where to go in the first place. But design for accessibility is getting much better, albeit largely by accident.

It’s a painfully First World problem: Splitting dinner with friends, we do the dance of the seven credit cards. No one, it seems, carries cash anymore, so we blunder through the inconvenience that comes with our dependence on plastic.

When I returned to the United States after living in Nairobi on and off for two years, these antiquated payment ordeals were especially frustrating. As I never tire of explaining to friends, in Kenya I could pay for nearly everything with a few taps on my cellphone.

Every few weeks, I’d pull cash out of my American bank account and hand it to a contemplative young man stationed outside my local greengrocer. I’d show him my ID and type in a PIN, and he’d credit my phone number with an equivalent amount of digital currency.

Through a service called M-Pesa, I could store my mobile money and then, for a small fee, send it to any other phone number in the network, be it my cable company’s, a taxi driver’s, or a friend’s. Payments from other M-Pesa users would be added to my digital balance, which I could later withdraw in cash from my local agent.

For me, M-Pesa was convenient, often simpler than reaching for my credit card or counting out paper bills. But for most Kenyans, the service has been life-changing. Kenya has one ATM for every 18,000 people -- the US, by contrast, has one for every 740 -- and across sub-Saharan Africa, more than 75 percent of the adult population had no bank account as of 2011.

When Safaricom, the major Kenyan telecommunications firm, launched M-Pesa in 2007, pesa -- Swahili for “money”-- moved from mattresses to mobile accounts virtually overnight. Suddenly, payment and collection of debts did not require face-to-face interactions. Daylong queues to pay electric- or water-utility bills disappeared. By 2012, 86 percent of Kenyan cellphone subscribers used mobile money, and by 2013, M-Pesa’s transactions amounted to some $35 million daily. Annualized, that’s more than a quarter of Kenya’s GDP.

Starkey Hearing Technologies recently launched Halo, a hearing device that syncs with iPhones and iPads.

The technology, the company says, doesn't just amplify hearing; it also allows users to listen to music, sync movies, receive phone calls, and chat over Facetime. It allows for geotagging according to specific places -- so, for example, it calibrates itself to the volume of a user's favorite restaurant or coffee shop. It joins devices across wireless networks. It's a medical-tech answer, basically, to the broad aspiration of the connected home.

A Q&A with David Blumenthal, a physician and former Harvard Medical School professor. The health-care system is one of the most technology-dependent parts of the American economy, and one of the most primitive. Every patient knows, and dreads, the first stage of any doctor visit: sitting down with a clipboard and filling out forms by hand.

Blumenthal was from 2009 to 2011 the national coordinator for health information technology, in charge of modernizing the nation’s medical-records systems. He now directs The Commonwealth Fund, a foundation that conducts health-policy research. Here, he talks about why progress has been so slow, and when and how that might change.

“From the patient’s perspective, this is a no-brainer,” he said. “The benefits are substantial. But from the provider’s perspective, there are substantial costs in setting up and using the systems. Until now, providers haven’t recovered those costs, either in payment or in increased satisfaction, or in any other way. Ultimately, there are of course benefits to the professional as well. It’s beyond question that you become a better physician, a better nurse, a better manager when you have the digital data at your fingertips. But the costs are considerable, and they have fallen on people who have no economic incentive to make the transition.”

Asked in the broadest sense, what difference will better information technology make in health, Blumenthal responded: “Fundamentally, every medical record is a tool for collecting information: the information a physician collects when looking at you in a physical examination; the results of lab tests. The constant automatic information collection is going to increase, whether it’s your phone monitoring your heart rate or your scale sending information about your weight to your health provider, or the contact lenses Google wants to market that measure blood glucose levels.”

The United States discreetly supported the creation of a website and SMS service that was, basically, a Cuban version of Twitter, the Associated Press reported. ZunZuneo, as it was called, permitted Cubans to broadcast short text messages to each other.

At its peak, ZunZuneo had 40,000 users. And what government agency made ZunZuneo? It wasn’t the Central Intelligence Agency. No, it was the US Agency for International Development, USAID, working with various private companies, including the DC for-profit contractor Creative Associates and a small, Denver-based startup, Mobile Accord. T

he company’s not in the discreet social network game anymore; now it surveys countries in the developing world by SMS. As I started piecing together Mobile Accord’s past -- and that of the State Department that encouraged and hired them -- I found that a project like ZunZuneo wasn’t out of the ordinary at all. As ludicrous as the phrase ‘fake Cuban Twitter’ might sound, projects like ZunZuneo were meant to be a major focus of US diplomacy. If it sounds like a risible plan, now -- as it does to some commentators and, apparently, at least one Democratic senator -- that only shows how much has changed since the Arab Spring was still blooming.

The story of ZunZuneo foreshadowed, too, developments that would come. Who did ZunZuneo benefit most of all, eventually? Cubacel: The Cuban government’s state-run mobile monopoly which owned the physical infrastructure through which ZunZuneo messages traveled. USAID, in trying to harass the Cuban government, wound up financially supporting it.