Guardian, The

San Francisco (CA) has voted against a proposal known as the “tech tax” which would have forced the area’s biggest technology firms to fund initiatives to provide affordable housing and tackle the city’s homeless problem. The tax, which would have been on the ballot in the city in November, would have imposed a 1.5% payroll levy on technology companies that generate more than $1 million in revenues a year, including Uber, Google, Twitter and Airbnb. It was proposed in June by supervisors Eric Mar, Aaron Peskin and David Campos. Supporters said the measure would have raised an estimated $140m every year, which would have been used to build affordable housing and shelters for homeless people. But it failed after it was rejected by the budget committee of the board of San Francisco’s supervisors.

“As a city, I don’t think we should subscribe to the politics of Donald Trump and the Republicans that they are saying certain people are not welcome here in San Francisco,” said Mark Farrell, one of two who voted to block the measure in the three-person committee, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Partly because of the technology boom, San Francisco has become one of the most unequal cities in the US, with its share of homes worth more than $1 million growing from 19.6% in 2012 to 57.4% in 2016. That has caused friction between the city’s richest residents and its poorest, as the city which is the locus of America’s most booming industry struggles to cope with the hundreds of people living in tented encampments on its streets.

Facebook has signed up almost half the countries in Africa – a combined population of 635 million – to its free Internet service in a controversial move to corner the market in one of the world’s biggest mobile data growth regions. Facebook’s co-founder and chairman, Mark Zuckerberg, has made it clear that he wants to connect the whole world to the Internet, describing access as a basic human right. His Free Basics initiative, in which mobile users are able to access the site free of data charges, is available in 42 countries, more than half of them in Africa.

But digital campaigners and Internet freedom advocates argue that Facebook’s expansion is a thinly veiled marketing ploy that could end up undermining, rather than enhancing, mass efforts to get millions more people connected. “Even if people are hungry, we shouldn’t be giving them half a loaf,” says Gbenga Sesan, whose organisation Paradigm Initiative Nigeria helps young people living in poverty get online. “It’s difficult for me to argue against free Internet,” he says. But he added that it is problematic to give people only part access to the Internet, especially if they believe what they have is full access.

Facebook must provide refunds for purchases made in apps and games by children should they or their parents request it, a California court has ruled.

The decision means that hundreds of thousands of people across the US could legally claim back money from the social network. It’s the culmination of a class action lawsuit brought against the social network in February 2012 by two children and their parents over purchases of the discontinued virtual currency Facebook Credits, now known as Facebook Payments, made using the parents’ credit cards. The currency was designed as a site-wide form of payment for virtual goods within games like Farmville and Bejeweled.

With smartphone use and web penetration soaring, Africa is set for a tech revolution – but only if its infrastructure can support it.

By 2020 there will be more than 700 million smartphone connections in Africa – more than twice the projected number in North America and not far from the total in Europe, according to GSMA, an association of mobile phone operators. In Nigeria alone 16 smartphones are sold every minute, while mobile data traffic across Africa is set to increase 15-fold by 2020. Twenty per cent of the continent already have access to a mobile broadband connection, a figure predicted to triple in the next five years. The mobile industry will account for 8% of GDP by 2020 – double what it will be in the rest of the world. And internet penetration is rising faster than anywhere else as costs of data and devices fall.

[This is the first of a two-week series supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation]

[Commentary] The next American electorate will be more nonwhite, more working-class, and more leftwing. And they’re likely to demand more democracy, not less – not only from the political system, but from the economic system as well. That sets them on a collision course with elites like Peter Thiel. Above all, Thiel is an innovator. He has made his fortune by recognizing the potential of an idea long before his peers. Silicon Valley, along with most of American business, may dislike Trump. But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t someday embrace the kind of politics he represents. A Trumpist state could do much to soothe the crisis of capitalism: it could pour public dollars into discovering the next lucrative technology for the private sector while holding the line against the redistributive clamor of a rising millennial majority. Thiel has a history of making bets that pay off big. With Trump, he may have made another.

A new lawsuit alleges that the US Department of Justice intentionally conducts inadequate searches of its records using a decades-old computer system when queried by citizens looking for records that should be available to the public. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) researcher Ryan Shapiro alleges “failure by design” in the DoJ’s protocols for responding to public requests. The FOIA law states that agencies must “make reasonable efforts to search for the records in electronic form or format”.

In an effort to demonstrate that the DoJ does not comply with this provision, Shapiro requested records of his own requests and ran up against the same roadblocks that stymied his progress in previous inquiries. A judge ruled in January that the FBI had acted in a manner “fundamentally at odds with the statute”. Now, armed with that ruling, Shapiro hopes to change policy across the entire department. Shapiro filed his suit on the 50th anniversary of Foia’s passage in July. FOIA requests to the FBI are processed by searching the Automated Case Support system (ACS), a software program that celebrates its 21st birthday this year. Not only are the records indexed by ACS allegedly inadequate, Shapiro said, but the FBI refuses to search the full text of those records as a matter of policy. When few or no records are returned, Shapiro said, the FBI effectively responds “sorry, we tried” without making use of the much more sophisticated search tools at the disposal of internal requestors.

The Internet is so vast and formless that it’s hard to imagine it being invented. It’s easy to picture Thomas Edison inventing the lightbulb, because a lightbulb is easy to visualize. You can hold it in your hand and examine it from every angle. The Internet is the opposite. It’s everywhere, but we only see it in glimpses. The Internet is like the holy ghost: it makes itself knowable to us by taking possession of the pixels on our screens to manifest sites and apps and e-mail, but its essence is always elsewhere. This feature of the Internet makes it seem extremely complex. Surely something so ubiquitous yet invisible must require deep technical sophistication to understand. But it doesn’t. The Internet is fundamentally simple. And that simplicity is the key to its success.

Google is set to restrict search terms to a link to a Wikipedia article, in the first request under Europe's controversial new "right to be forgotten" legislation to affect the 110 million-page encyclopedia.

The identity of the individual requesting a change to Google's search results has not been disclosed and may never be known, but it is understood the request will be put into effect within days. Google and other search engines can only remove the link -- as with other "right to be forgotten" requests, the web page itself will remain on Wikipedia.

Tor, the Internet anonymizer, received more than $1.8 million in funding from the US government in 2013, even while the National Security Agency was reportedly trying to destroy the network.

The bulk of the US funding came in the form of "pass-through" grants, money which ultimately comes from the US government distributed through some independent third-party. Formerly known as "the onion router", Tor is software which allows its users to browse the Internet anonymously.

The Tor Project also received direct funding from the National Science Foundation and the US Department of State, totaling $100,325 and $256,900 respectively.

One of Australia’s key laws governing surveillance -- the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) (TIA) Act of 1979 -- is desperately in need of an overhaul.

Under the TIA Act there are three ways authorities can gain access to private information.

The first is access to the content and substance of telecommunications in real time, for which they need a warrant. This provides access to the content of emails, text messages, phone calls and Internet use.

Second, there is access to stored telecommunications and their contents, which also requires a warrant. For this, authorities must suspect the person of an offence that carries a minimum three-year sentence.

Then there is access to metadata, the shell details of communications -- calls and emails sent and received, the location of a phone, Internet browsing activity. There is no access to the content of the communication, just how, to or from whom, when and where. A warrant is not required for this, and under the current law organisations other than police or security agencies can get access to it.