Vox

Beneath the din of e-mail coverage and the mountains of clichés about populism, the mass-market media has simply failed to convey what’s actually at stake in the election. Regardless of which candidate the policy-light tone of coverage helps at any given moment, it represents a fundamental abdication of responsibility to explain to people what is going on.

The two candidates are running on very different policy agendas, agendas that in some ways contradict the media narratives about downscale “populists” versus cosmopolitan elites. And because House Republicans are both unified on policy and entrenched in safely drawn districts, there is a sharp asymmetry in terms of the direction of change. Donald Trump is nobody’s idea of a policy wonk, but he has signed on to a real agenda, and if he wins he’ll probably implement it. The public should hear about its contents before they decide whether to make him president.

On Facebook, more than a million people checked in to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota on Oct 31, but that didn’t mean that many people were actually at the site. The action was an act of solidarity with indigenous water protectors and activists fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline, inspired by a viral Facebook post that began circulating from an unidentified source.

Social media has become a double-edged sword for activism. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook have become crucial ways for people to participate in and organize contemporary social justice movements. Even though “hashtag activism” has been used to demoralize a new generation of activists, social media tools like hashtags have allowed people to organize and amplify their messages beyond their local physical community and network faster than ever. Social media has also democratized who bears witness to these events and how. Yet while law enforcement have used social media to target criminals, activists have also been monitored on these platforms for their organizing efforts.

The Podesta leak hasn’t just been embarrassing for John Podesta, it has also been embarrassing for many other Hillary Clinton campaign staffers who communicated with him. Also exposed were numerous other people in the progressive movement who either included Podesta in e-mail chains or had their e-mails forwarded to Podesta after the fact. So even if you’re extremely careful with your own online security, your private messages could still be exposed if anyone you correspond with is careless.

Your e-mails could also become public if, say, a former colleague becomes disgruntled and decides to deliberately leak embarrassing private e-mails to the press. Another danger is that your e-mail provider itself could be hacked. In Sept, we learned that hackers broke into Yahoo’s e-mail servers, gaining access to 500 million accounts. So far, it doesn’t appear that the culprits have released any of that information to the public, but whoever was responsible for the leaks likely has a great deal of juicy information they could release in the future. If you’re a prominent person — and especially if you’re a senior adviser to a presidential candidate or world leader — you should take the possibility of getting hacked very seriously. That partly means doing everything you can to lock down your e-mail service — by enabling two-factor authentication and ensuring everyone in your workplace or organization gets thorough training on e-mail security. But it also means you should be careful about what you write in an e-mail. Because there’s a very real risk that anything you write down and send over the Internet will eventually become available to the whole world.

Fox News hasn’t always known how to handle the Trump phenomenon The Fox News audience is old and getting older. Trump TV could grab younger conservatives. When push comes to shove, I’d probably still bet on Fox News in this potential battle. But it’s clear that the network is trying to shed some of its reputation as a news source for older white men — particularly as it continues to boost the profile of Kelly. And at a time when Trump’s campaign is driven so heavily by playing directly to the identity politics of white men, well, there’s probably a market niche in which Trump TV can thrive. Making that demographic appeal to white male identity politics so far looks like it won’t win Trump the White House. But that appeal is one that can work in an ever more divided media landscape. Trump TV probably can’t vanquish Fox News — but it could become Fox News’s younger, “more conservative” alternative, as unlikely as that sounds.

It’s still unclear who is responsible for Oct 21’s massive Internet outages, according to President Barack Obama. The attack was comprised of hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of Internet-connected devices that sent junk traffic to Dyn, a major domain name service provider. The attack took down major sections of the Internet across the United States for hours. Basic security flaws found in webcams and other Internet-connected recording devices were compromised in the attack, according to Chinese device manufacturer Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology, which admitted its products were partially to blame. A recall of Hangzhou Xiongmai products has been initiated. But other IoT device makers were targeted, too. Still, no one seems to know who perpetrated it. And it may take weeks to find out. "We don't have any idea who did that,” said President Obama.

[Commentary] The good news for AT&T/Time Warner is that antitrust enforcement is not, in practice, as politicized as many people seem to think. In the past, regulators have allowed broadly similar mergers to go forward, albeit with conditions attached that undermine their main business rationale. But one reason antitrust enforcement has not been particularly politicized is that it hasn’t been a major point of political emphasis. That’s been changing rather rapidly in 2016. Here’s a look at some of the hurdles ahead:
Conduct remedies are going out of style
Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has made antitrust enforcement a priority
The timing of the deal makes this a key test

[Commentary] There’s growing concern on both the right and the left that major media conglomerates are becoming too concentrated. In particular, there’s a high level of resentment against incumbent telecommunications providers, which are seen as charging high prices and offering poor service. That makes opposing the deal good politics.

Luckily for AT&T, antitrust decisions are supposed to be made based on the law rather than on political considerations. AT&T’s fate will rest in the hands of whoever runs the Justice Department’s antitrust division in the next administration. But in making the case for the deal, the company has a big problem: The most compelling business arguments for the deal — that the new megacompany can boost profits by giving Time Warner content favorable treatment on AT&T’s wired and wireless networks — are also the arguments that are most likely to attract skepticism from regulators. Because of that conundrum, AT&T executives have effectively been forced into telling a somewhat self-contradictory story, talking vaguely about synergies the deal will allow while simultaneously insisting they won’t exploit those synergies so much that it could damage competition.

[Commentary] For months now, pundits and politicians have been waiting for Donald Trump to “pivot,” presumably moving away from his divisive, inflammatory rhetoric of the Republican primary and toward a more inclusive, mild demeanor for the general election. Since the first debate, we have seen a pivot, but not the one we’ve been waiting for: Trump has fully pivoted from presidential candidate to media mogul for a budding political entertainment movement.

This may seem like a strange transition for a presidential candidate to make, but recent events, and Trump’s reactions to them, suggest that his primary goal of building a lucrative audience has finally eclipsed his purported goal of building a winning electorate, with traditional allegiances to political party, fellow candidates, and even a running mate falling by the wayside. Trump’s recent behavior is almost certainly informed by a need to place blame for his looming defeat. But it’s also an amplification of a thread that’s always been present in his campaign, even back when his poll numbers were rising instead of plummeting.

[Jason Mittell is a professor of film and culture and American studies at Middlebury College]

A few dozen cities in America have next-generation broadband networks that offer speeds of 1 gigabit per second — about 50 times faster than a typical connection. These super-fast connections were supposed to revolutionize Americans’ experience of the Internet and rev up the country’s noncompetitive broadband market. When these networks were being built, advocates pointed to a number of potential applications.

Gigabit networks, they promised, would enable users to interact in complex virtual reality environments. They’d make possible good-as-life teleconferencing that could allow seniors to visit doctors from home. But six years after the first super-fast connections went live, even proponents concede no “killer” gigabit application has emerged. Most of their potential, critics say, is simply ignored by users. And building gigabit networks nationwide would be a colossally expensive undertaking. That has caused even some former enthusiasts of these networks to wonder whether the early hype around gigabit networks was misplaced. Perhaps it makes sense to settle for more incremental — and much less expensive — upgrades to the networks we already have.

Even after President Barack Obama released his longform birth certificate in 2011, Donald Trump repeatedly questioned its authenticity and insinuated there was a conspiracy (including murder!) to keep the truth of President Obama’s foreign birth from the public. Then in September 2016, Trump finally acknowledged that he did in fact believe President Obama was born in the US — and said that he’d dropped the issue after the longform birth certificate came out, even going so far as to falsely blame his opponent, Hillary Clinton, for starting the whole thing.

Trump did something — for years — and then denied he’d done it. Is it fair to call him a liar? Common sense says this is a pretty open-and-shut question. But New York Times public editor Liz Spayd — the paper’s independent ombudsperson — is really, really resistant to the idea that it’s ever okay to say, in so many words, that a politician “lied.” Ultimately, she’s okay with it in the case of Trump’s post-birtherist denials — because it was a particularly sustained and particularly racist kind of lie. But she protests that journalists shouldn’t use the word “lie” just because it’s “factually accurate” that a lie has taken place: "That said, I think The Times should use this term rarely. Its power in political warfare has so freighted the word that its mere appearance on news pages, however factually accurate, feels partisan. It feels, as Ryan said, as if you’re playing the referee in frivolous political disputes."