The U.S. Federal Communications Commission's deadline for the public to comment on the agency's proposed net neutrality rules passed Monday with more than 3 million comments filed, by far a record number for an FCC proceeding.
U.S. lawmakers got a report card on Friday: they've been graded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other groups on whether they are effectively reining in the National Security Agency's surveillance programs.
Massive amounts of unstructured data are held in the form of PDF documents, but extracting key figures and words out of PDFs in a programmatic manner can be difficult and costly. This poses a challenge to public-interest groups, journalists and others who are interested in running large-scale analyses on PDF documents in order to uncover valuable insights.
U.S. President Barack Obama has signed an executive order requiring that government data be made available in open, machine-readable formats, expanding open-access requirements from earlier in his administration.
A U.S. government budget for 2011 being considered in Congress would make huge cuts to the budget for President Barack Obama's transparency programs, including websites where residents can track government spending and examine data from federal agencies.