New York Times

With smartphone theft rampant, apps like Find My iPhone offer a new option for those desperate to recover their devices, allowing victims to act when the police will not.

But the emergence of this kind of do-it-yourself justice -- an unintended result of the proliferation of GPS tracking apps -- has stirred worries among law enforcement officials that people are putting themselves in danger, taking disproportionate risks for the sake of an easily replaced item.

Victims are often desperate to recover their stolen phones, which, as home to their texts, photos and friends’ phone numbers, can feel less like devices than like extensions of their hands.

The California legislative analyst’s office offered what it called “preliminary observations” on the push for expanded film and television subsidies in the state -- and it advices to proceed with a great deal of caution.

To date, California has offered $100 million a year in tax credits to support film production; proposed legislation would expand the program considerably. No dollar amounts have yet been assigned, but backers have talked privately of subsidies matching New York’s program, which is capped at about $420 million a year.

In its report, the analyst’s office acknowledged that larger incentives might help protect what it called a “flagship California industry,” one that has been fleeing to other states (and countries) with more generous subsidies. But the report offered a list of reasons to be wary: film and television production is growing more slowly than the rest of the economy, and may decline even with help; competing with other states could become hugely expensive; any benefits from an expanded credit would be concentrated largely around Los Angeles; and, other industries, some with arguably greater social utility, might well demand subsidies of their own.

The state analyst is expected to issue a full report on California’s film subsidies by the end of 2015.

[Commentary] Proponents of the “sharing economy” say websites like Airbnb that make it easy for people to rent a spare bedroom or an apartment on a short-term basis are a boon to cities like New York and San Francisco because they generate income for residents while giving visitors a cheap place to stay.

But advocates often ignore or casually dismiss big problems with these short-term rentals, including the fact that they are making housing less affordable in big cities by restricting supply. And in some cases the rentals may be illegal, which is one reason the New York state attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, has begun an investigation.

There are good reasons that governments regulate housing. For example, officials use zoning laws to separate hotels and residential development so apartment buildings are not overrun by tourists. Rent control policies exist to help ensure that lower-income tenants have a place to live. Laws against short-term rentals make sure landlords do not operate illegal hotels and reduce the number of apartments available to permanent residents.

Social media’s promise was that people with different views and political ties could mingle in digital bliss. But some social sites are more popular with one political party than another.

According to a new survey by the Harvard Institute of Politics, Democrats love Google Plus and Twitter, while Republicans are more interested in sharing on Pinterest. Some sites showed virtually no differences between the parties.

Democrats and Republicans used Facebook the same amount, 87 percent. With Snapchat, 24 percent of Democrats and 23 percent of Republicans said they actively used the service. Most other sites were predominantly used by Democrats, including Instagram, WhatsApp and Tumblr. While it’s difficult to tell why more Republicans than Democrats have joined Pinterest, this could be because of Mitt Romney, who used Pinterest to share pictures and information during his presidential campaign. His wife, Ann Romney, was also a frequent user of the site.

America’s infrastructure is crumbling, says former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell, the chief executive of the cable industry’s trade association.

Roads are in poor condition, bridges are structurally deficient, drinking water systems are near the end of their useful life and portions of the electric grid suffer regular blackouts. All of which, Powell says, proves that the country’s broadband networks cannot be considered a public utility and left in the hands of government oversight.

“Because the Internet is not regulated as a public utility, it grows and thrives, watered by private capital and a light regulatory touch,” Powell said in Los Angeles at the Cable Show, the annual meeting of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association. “It does not depend on the political process for its growth, or the extended droughts of public funding,” Powell said. “This is why broadband is the fastest deploying technology in world history, reaching nearly every citizen in our expansive country.”

Powell’s remarks were in response to recent calls for the Federal Communications Commission to reclassify high-speed Internet service as a “common carrier,” a public utilitylike network that should be subject to strict regulation.

The terms of service on many websites are so wordy and so legalistic that users may not understand -- or even be aware of -- the intellectual property rights that they cede when they check the “agree” box to set up an account, according to a new study from researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The Georgia Tech study reviewed 30 popular social networking and creative community sites that encourage people to share material, examining the rights to use work that were claimed in the sites’ terms of service agreements. Sites examined in the study included: Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Flickr, IMDB, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Remix64 and Fanfiction. Of course, people who wish to see their creative work published need to permit certain uses -- like authorizing a site to publicly post their content. But users may be surprised to learn about other permission they must grant in order to use a site.

For instance, the study reported that 11 of the sites required users to agree that the sites could license their content to a third party. Yet users are unlikely to understand what they are agreeing to because terms of service agreements tend to be daunting in length and readability. The Georgia Tech researchers calculated that it would take someone nearly eight hours to read the agreements on the 30 sites in the study, at an average adult pace of 250 words per minute.

The California Senate voted down a state measure that would require smarter antitheft security on smartphones.

The bill, introduced by State Senator Mark Leno and sponsored by George Gascón, San Francisco’s district attorney, would have required a so-called kill switch -- which would render a smartphone useless after it was stolen -- on all smartphones sold in California. The proposal needed 21 votes to pass in the 40-member chamber.

After debate at the Capitol, in Sacramento, it fell two votes short of passing, with a final count of 19 to 17 in favor.

One concern raised by some senators who opposed the bill was that businesses might feel that California was being overly strict about regulating technology, which could discourage tech companies from doing business there. The measure could be brought up for reconsideration again before the end of May.

[Commentary] The best way to think about Aereo, the company at the center of this week’s Supreme Court battle over the future of computing, is as an example of legal performance art.

Aereo is based entirely on a legalistic leap of faith: If it’s legal to set up an antenna and record a TV show at your own house, which it is, shouldn’t it also be legal to rent an antenna and server space at a big data center, and then stream the show over the Internet to your computer, tablet or set-top box?

It’s a clever argument, one that highlights the extreme lengths that tech companies go to in order to avoid copyright restrictions. The argument is designed to show off the similarities between Aereo and more traditional cloud services like Dropbox -- services that the Supreme Court would have to strive mightily to separate out of any ruling against Aereo.

But for all its cleverness, Aereo is also a gimmick. Aereo is a for-pay, middleman service whose sole function is to let you stream TV shows that are already freely available over the air. For consumers, the best outcome of this case is for Aereo to win, and then scare broadcasters into streaming their content directly to users, either for free or for a lower price than Aereo charges.

[Commentary] Is America on the cusp of a broadband revolution? You might get that impression from AT&T’s announcement that it is considering providing Internet service of up to 1 gigabit, or 1 billion bits, a second to 21 metropolitan areas including Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The company’s plans sound impressive and ambitious. But if you happen to live in the cities AT&T is talking about, you might want to keep your Champagne on ice. Even if the company were ready to start laying new fiber-optic lines tomorrow, it would take many months of digging before it would be in a position to provide super-fast broadband connections.

A better way to understand what AT&T is doing is to look at it as a salvo in the company’s war of words with Google. Neither company will necessarily get around to expanding in all of the cities they’ve mentioned, however. Meanwhile, cable companies have been trying to consolidate control of the market.

Most Americans currently have few choices for high-capacity Internet service; nearly 60 percent of households buy broadband from their local cable companies, according to the Leichtman Research Group. It would be great if competition between Google Fiber and AT&T ended up providing Americans with more choices. But it would be naïve to believe that a broadband revolution is coming as long as a handful of cable companies dominate this important market.

[Commentary] In every modern society, the people who hold the levers of state power control the deployment of vast riches; every decision about a change in the tax code or the issuance of oil drilling licenses is worth billions to someone.

The potential beneficiaries of those policies have every incentive in the world to try to influence the decisions.

Influence peddling is the mechanism by which those hoping to sway politicians ultimately reward those politicians. Whether it is ethical or unethical, legal or illegal, depends on what particular compromises a given country has come to accept.

China has had a system in which the understanding is that legal authorities will take a don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach to family members of high political officials making vast sums. The prosecution of Zhou’s family is a frontal assault on that understanding of what is official corruption.

In the United States, the basic compact has been this: If you take financial benefits from a private interest that seeks to influence policy while in office, it is probably illegal. It’s the same if a close family member does it.

The influence games are different in Washington and Beijing, of course. And not all corruption is created equal; it matters whether a particular variety of official corruption drags down a country’s economy. At the worst extreme, a country where public officials at all levels demand constant bribes as a matter of course will not be a very hospitable environment for business.

But as the Columbia economist Ray Fisman has argued, so long as corruption is predictable and manageable, it can coexist with speedy economic growth (Indonesia under Suharto and China over the last few decades are prime examples). And China has greater state control over more of the economy, and little transparency around who is profiting from that control and why. That is a breeding ground for potential corruption on a scale unknown in the United States.