News Stories Collection

Articles on Technology, Media & Education

Week 1: This 17-Year Old Has Become Michigan’s Leading Right to Repair Advocate — Motherboard

9/25/2018 10:53 am

This article profiled Surya Raghavendran, a 17-year-old student from Michigan that is educating students on how to repair broken iPhones and Smartphones. Raghavendran suggests that phone companies like Apple have a monopoly on phone repairs, and charge too much for their services. This article highlights the importance of young people like Raghavendran to educate others about technology and inform us about technological secrets we wouldn’t always know about. With regards to education, this story underscores the importance of taking initiative and the duty for a knowledgeable person to educate others about things that interest them, because they may be more important than we initially believe.

Week 2: Saudis discussed plan to lure Jamal Khashoggi to Saudi Arabia, US intercepts show — CNN

Updated on 10/11/2018 7:04 pm

This article discussed how Saudi officials lured a journalist for the Washington Post to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and into a trap. Journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi native, was critical of the Saudi Government’s history of violence, human rights abuses, and shady politics while living in the U.S and writing for the Post. The CNN article highlights why Khashoggi was such a threat to the Saudi government, and the hoops the Saudi government had to jump through to silence his voice. Furthermore, the article underscores the necessity for freedom of speech in dangerous political climates, the threat of freedom of speech poses to oppressive, tyrannical governments, and the purposes of education in ethics, politics and international relations for everybody.

Week 3: The Rise of Netflix Competitors Has Pushed Consumers Back Towards Piracy — Motherboard

10/12/2018 2:21 pm

This article explores how video streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are losing customers because of the overwhelming amount of original content exclusive to those streaming services. This has lead to an influx of other streaming services pushing out their own content, which has lead consumers to return to pirated content. It is becoming increasingly difficult for people to find the TV shows and movies they actually want to watch. Research by Sandvine has shown that BitTorrent was #1 in Europe and #2 in the Americas for upstream bandwidth consumption. Upstream bandwidth consumption is defined as the amount of data uploaded (sent out) per second from any host to any other host on the Internet. The article also briefly addresses what streaming services should be doing to not lose their customer base, in turn making their services too expensive.

Week 4: Ajit Pai calls California’s Net Neutrality Rules ‘Illegal’ — ARSTechnica

9/17/2018 12:37 pm

This article reports on Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Ajit Pai’s fallacious comments on California’s Net Neutrality laws being illegal. Net Neutrality is defined as the principle that Internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favouring or blocking particular products or websites. Pai and the FCC are not in favour of these Net Neutrality laws, which prevent internet service providers from charging their customers more for access to certain TV channels, websites, and other online content. Pai’s comments are just another attempt by the FCC to frame Net Neutrality as anti-free-market, with his silence speaking even louder. The article makes note that Pai made no comment on Verizon throttling the supposedly ‘unlimited’ broadband connection of a wildfire-fighting crew in California. This meant the Santa Clara fire department had to pay almost twice the amount they were already paying for internet access, which significantly impacted teir ability to provide emergency services.

Week 5: Ivanka Trump used a personal email account to send hundreds of emails about government business last year — The Washington Post

9/19/2018

This article by the Washington Post reports on how the daughter of President Trump, Ivanka Trump, managed some internal communications using a private email account. Ivanka previously sent hundreds of emails White House aides using an account that had virtually no encryption or any sort of privacy protection. The reason this is significant is that former Presidential candidate and First-Lady Hillary Clinton had used a private email during her tenure as Secretary of State for diplomatic reasons. President Trump often used this as a point of criticism against his opponent in the 2016 presidential election and has been abnormally quiet about his daughter’s similar activities. A spokesman for Ivanka Trump’s attorney has stated that none of the emails she had sent out contained any classified information (a defence Clinton had previously used), and that she had not been formally briefed on the rules. This report serves to illustrate the dangers of the internet in the face of a lack of privacy, and the hypocrisy associated with political talking points.