On Wednesday February 25 2015 Silicon Harlem held their 2 Year Anniversary Meetup at MIST in Harlem. Hosts were co-founders Clayton Banks and Bruce Lincoln. Guest speakers for the Tech Talk segment were Brandon Kessler – Founder, ChallengePost and Scott Salyers, Supervising Producer of Casting, Shark Tank. The event was webcast live by ISOC-NY. Video is below.
Today Thursday February 26 2015 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will hold an Open Commission Meeting. Topics under consideration are Community Broadband – the Commission will “consider a Memorandum Opinion and Order addressing petitions filed by two municipal broadband providers asking that the Commission preempt provisions of state laws in North Carolina and Tennessee that restrict the abilities of communities to provide broadband service”: and Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet – the Commission will “consider a Report and Order on Remand, Declaratory Ruling, and Order that responds to the Verizon court remand and adopts strong open Internet rules, grounded in multiple sources of the Commission’s legal authority, to ensure that Americans reap the economic, social, and civic benefits of an open Internet today and into the future”. The meeting will be webcast live.
Today Wednesday February 25 2015 the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation will convene a hearing – Preserving the Multistakeholder Model of Internet Governance – in Washington DC. As the U.S. government considers relinquishing control over certain aspects of Internet governance to the private sector, concerns remain that the loss of U.S. involvement over the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) could empower foreign powers – acting through intergovernmental institutions or other surrogates – to gain increased control over critical Internet functions. Featuring testimony from the U.S. government official assessing the threat to the Internet and the CEO of ICANN, the hearing will examine the potential benefits and preparedness of non-governmental actors to protect Internet governance functions from attempted interference by foreign governments. Witnesses: Fadi Chehadé, CEO, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN); Ambassador David Gross, Partner, Wiley Rein LLP, and former U.S. Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy, U.S. Department of State; and Lawrence Strickling, Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information and Administrator, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), U.S. Department of Commerce. Audio/video is below (beginning missing)
Today Tuesday 24 February 2015 Goodnik will present its Winter Demo Day at New Work City in NYC. Goodniks in Residence and other members of the Goodnik community will show off their latest projects! Presenters: Brett DiDonato, Software Architect; Robert Tolmach, Co-Founder, Classwish; Ron Suarez, IoT4Climate.Solutions; Michal Alter, Visit.org; Patrick O’Neil, AmpYourGood; and Wendy Brawer, Green Map. The event will start at 6:30, with presentations from 6:45 to 7:30pm. Q&A will be from 7:30 to 8pm. It will be webcast live via the Internet Society Chapters YouTube Channel.
Today Tuesday February 24 2015 the Georgetown University McDonough School of Business presents Rewriting the Communications Act: An Introductory Event. After more than a year of preparation, all eyes are on Capitol Hill in 2015 as Congress prepares to undertake one of its most important tasks affecting a significant part of the digital economy: rewriting the Communications Act of 1934. In keeping with the Center’s staying ahead of the issues at the nexus of business and public policy, the Center’s Evolution of Regulation and Innovation Project is pleased to announce the first of a series of convenings focused on eliciting the best ideas for how a new regime for the tech, media and broadband sectors should look. A panel of experts will address the technology, economic, political, and policy contexts of the current Congressional efforts, offer different perspectives that will identify common ground among parties that will be affected by a rewrite, explore areas of significant uncertainty, and elucidate the policy drivers that will shape the work ahead. Keynote address: David Farber, Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science and Public Policy, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. Panel: Larry Downes, Project Director, Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy Project on the Evolution of Regulation and Innovation; Peter Rysavy, President and Founder, Rysavy Research; Glenn Woroch, Adjunct Professor, University of California, Berkeley and Senior Policy Scholar, Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy; John W. Mayo, Professor of Business, Economics and Public Policy, Georgetown University and Executive Director, Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy;
Moderator: Carolyn Brandon, Senior Industry and Innovation Fellow, Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. The event will be webcast live.
On 23 February 2015 the Elliott School of International Affairs presented Overhead and Online: Technological Change and Gaps in Global Governance. Esther Brimmer, former assistant secretary for international organization affairs at the U.S. Department of State, discussed ways in which new technologies interact with global governance. Innovation and technological change are hallmarks of modern life. Aviation and telecommunications enable people and ideas to cross borders rapidly. Over the course of the last century, governments and other stakeholders developed procedures to manage the flow of these international contacts. Now innovations in aviation and in the reach of the Internet expose gaps in two very different long-standing international arrangements. This year policymakers and shapers will make important choices in these areas. In the 2015 Shapiro Lecture, Professor Brimmer highlighted ways in which new technologies stretch two global governance regimes and suggested steps to bridge the gaps. The event was webcast live on the Internet Society Livestream channel.
Taking place this weekend Feb 21-22 2015 at Civic Hall in Manhattan, CodeAcross NYC is a two day festival of, or related to, civic technology and government data. Organized by civic tech group BetaNYC the goal is to teach data, make data, create tools, and make civic technology that brings together government, community based organizations, innovators, academics, and individuals to create effective uses of NYC’s data. ISOC-NY will be webcasting some presentations / chats including the kickoff event with New York City’s Chief Analytics Officer, Dr. Amen Ra Mashariki at Microsoft Civic on Friday night Feb 20 2015, plus sessions with Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, Council Member Ben Kallos, and IQuantNY’s Ben Wellington during the event.
On February 28 2015 NYU’s Information Law Institute & Department of Media, Culture & Communication will host the Algorithms and Accountability Conference. Following up on the May 2013 Governing Algorithmsevent, scholars, stakeholders, and policymakers will address legal, policy and ethical challenges related to algorithmic power in three specific contexts: media production and consumption, commerce, and education. The event is already fully subscribed. There is no notice of a live webcast but one can sign up to be notified of recordings, which will likely show up at https://vimeo.com/mccnyu
On Tuesday February 17 2015 the WordPressNYC meetup hosted George Staphanis, team lead for the Jetpackdevelopment team, for an overview of the popular WordPress plugin package – Come Fly With Me: Jetpack and the WordPress.com Cloud. George ran through functionality Jetpack makes available and how it can help you grow and retain your audience, improve page load times, and simplify site administration — while also making it more secure and reliable. including some relatively little known features such as Photon – a free service that caches images in wordpress.com’s CDN. Video is below.
The IETF HTTP Working Group has officially approved the HTTP/2 specification, bringing the biggest change to the web since the launch of HTTP/1.1 back in 1999.
The HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP) underpins the web, but has been relatively stagnant since 1999 when the publication of RFC2616 formalised the current version 1.1 of the standard. While HTTP/1.1 has served the web well over the years, it has failed to keep up with the increasing power of modern computing. Traffic is restricted to a set number of connections which fail to make use of modern high-bandwidth connectivity and massively-concurrent processing capabilities. Alternative protocols, like Google’s SPDY, show that there is definite room for improvement with up to 64 per cent performance boosts available with purely software changes.
The need for an alternative to HTTP has been obviated with the Internet Engineering Task Force’s announcement that HTTP/2 has now been approved as a formal standard. Google itself pledged its support for the fledgling standard earlier this month when it announced the retirement of SPDY, its own protocol for speeding up web traffic. ‘Since most of the benefits [of SPDY] are present in HTTP/2, it’s time to say goodbye,’ developer Chris Bentzel wrote at the time.
HTTP/2’s improvements include a reduction in blocking connections, SPDY-like connection multiplexing to decrease the number of individual connections while increasing the number of page items that can be loaded at any one time, header compression, and ‘cache pushing,’ all of which combine to offer considerable improvements in performance both at server and client sides. While it uses the same application programming interface (API) calls as HTTP/1.1, it is a binary rather than text standard – which makes it unsuitable for selected edge-case scenarios such as manual connection debugging.
While companies like Google are already working on support for HTTP/2, the technology won’t see active use in the wild until it’s an official standard. The IETF’s Internet Engineering Steering Group’s approval of the protocol is the first step. ‘The IESG has formally approved the HTTP/2 and HPACK specifications, and they’re on their way to the RFC Editor, where they’ll soon be assigned RFC numbers, go through some editorial processes, and be published,‘ wrote IETF HTTP Working Group chair Mark Nottingham in a blog post on the matter. Nottingham also deflected criticism over Google’s involvement in the process, stating that ‘while a few have painted Google as forcing the [SPDY] protocol upon us, anyone who actually interacted with [Google’s] Mike [Belshe] and Roberto [Peon] in the group knows that they came with the best of intent, patiently explaining the reasoning behind their design, taking in criticism, and working with everyone to evolve the protocol.‘
The formal HTTP/2 RFC is expected to be published within weeks, rather than months, at which point browser and server developers will begin rolling out support for the standard.
On Wednesday February 25 2015 Silicon Harlem held their 2 Year Anniversary Meetup at MIST in Harlem. Hosts were co-founders Clayton Banks and Bruce Lincoln. Guest speakers for the Tech Talk segment were Brandon Kessler – Founder, ChallengePost and Scott Salyers, Supervising Producer of Casting, Shark Tank. The event was webcast live by ISOC-NY. Video is below.
[By Gareth Halfacree – Republished from
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