Thursday 31 January 2013

Book UK release date confirmed: 22 March!

Regulating Code: Good Governance and Better Regulation in the Information Age Information Revolution and Global Politics Series: Amazon.co.uk: Ian Brown, Christopher T. Marsden: Books: "Publication Date: 22 Mar 2013 | ISBN-10: 0262018829 | ISBN-13: 978-0262018821
Internet use has become ubiquitous in the past two decades, but governments, legislators, and their regulatory agencies have struggled to keep up with the rapidly changing Internet technologies and uses. In this groundbreaking collaboration, regulatory lawyer Christopher Marsden and computer scientist Ian Brown analyze the regulatory shaping of "code" -- the technological environment of the Internet -- to achieve more economically efficient and socially just regulation." 'via Blog this'
P.S. $40 in US or £26 in UK

Sunday 27 January 2013

Anonymous takes down US Sentencing Commission website

Anonymous takes down US Sentencing Commission website | Technology | guardian.co.uk: "Hacktivist group Anonymous said Saturday it had hijacked the website of the US Sentencing Commission in a brazen act of cyber-revenge for the death of internet freedom advocate Aaron Swartz. Swartz killed himself just over two weeks ago as he faced trial for hacking an online collection of academic journals linked to MIT with the intent of releasing millions of research papers on to the internet.
The 26-year-old had a history of depression but family, friends and supporters said it was the threat of a prison sentence for an act he saw as a political statement that pushed him to suicide. Since his death, Swartz has become a powerful symbol for hackers and activists fighting internet controls.
The website of the commission, an independent agency of the judicial branch involved in sentencing, was replaced with a message warning that when Swartz killed himself two weeks ago "a line was crossed." In a message posted on the website and in an accompanying YouTube video, the hackers said they had infiltrated several government computer systems and copied secret information they threatened to make public" This is unlikely to end well 'via Blog this'

Saturday 26 January 2013

Fraley v. Facebook, Inc. - $20m settlement for private education/research of social media users

Fraley v. Facebook, Inc.Fraley, et al. v. Facebook, Inc., et al., Case No. CV-11-01726 RS
"Facebook has agreed to: [1] Pay $20 million into a fund that can be used, in part, to pay claims of Class Members (including Minor Subclass Members) who appeared in a Sponsored Story. Each participating Class Member may be eligible to receive up to $10. The amount, if any, paid to each Authorized Claimant depends upon the number of claims made. No one knows in advance how much each Authorized Claimant will receive, or whether any money will be paid directly to Authorized Claimants. If the number of claims made renders it economically infeasible to pay money to persons who make a timely and valid claim, payment will be made to the not-for-profit organizations identified in Section 7 of the Notice. These organizations are involved in educational outreach that teaches adults and children how to use social media technologies safely, or are involved in research of social media, with a focus on critical thinking around advertising and commercialization, and particularly with protecting the interests of children. [2] Revise its terms of service (known as the “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities”) relating to Sponsored Stories. [3] Give users (and minor users’ parents or legal guardians) additional information about and control over the use of their (and their children’s) names and profile pictures in Sponsored Stories."
It notes that the settlement is frankly highly unlikely to produce 2,000,000 claims! So here's where the money goes:
"The not-for-profit entities that might receive payment under the Settlement are involved in educational outreach that teaches adults and children how to use social media technologies safely, or are involved in research of social media, with a focus on critical thinking around advertising and commercialization, and particularly with protecting the interests of children. They are: Center for Democracy and Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Joan Ganz Cooney Center, Berkman Center for Internet and Society (Harvard Law School), Information Law Institute (NYU Law School), Berkeley Center for Law and Technology (Berkeley Law School), Center for Internet and Society (Stanford Law School), High Tech Law Institute (Santa Clara University School of Law), Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood, Consumers Federation of America, Consumer Privacy Rights Fund, ConnectSafely.org, and WiredSafety.org." 'via Blog this'

Friday 25 January 2013

Facebook Is Done Giving Its Precious Social Graph To Competitors

Facebook Is Done Giving Its Precious Social Graph To Competitors | TechCrunch: "No one wants to build an app that relies on Facebook data if it could disappear. Facebook reaffirmed this fear this morning when it enforced its ban on exporting data for use in social networks. Russian search engine Yandex’s new social search mobile app Wonder got all of its API calls blocked just three hours after launch. That’s a lot of programming and product work down the drain.
"Facebook is playing with fire. It could use policy enforcement to cook competitors and shine a light on its dominance of social networking. But if this enforcement scares off developers whose apps might otherwise provide content that could be shown next to ads in the news feed and piped into Graph Search, Facebook could get burned badly." 'via Blog this'

Who built the internet: the corporation or the state?

P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Who built the internet: the corporation or the state?: "“Adam Fish helpfully summarizes libertechian, technoprogressive, Great Man, and peer-to-peer narratives of the creation of the internet.” Adam Fish indeed discusses the issue and an ongoing debate in the U.S. about ‘who’ created the internet. The different theories reflect different political ideologies he concludes." 'via Blog this'

Monday 7 January 2013

Internet Governance Outlook 2013: "Cold Internet War" or "Peaceful Internet Coexistence"?: "At the WSIS Summit in 2005 it was agreed that after ten years a WSIS Review Conference should be organized to evaluate the progress of the Tunis Agenda. WSIS was a very broad-based summit which covered issues like the digital divide, human rights, infrastructure development, cultural diversity, intellectual property, privacy, cybersecurity, e-learning, e-agriculture, e-health, e-commerce, e-transport and e-everything. A total of 16 action lines were adopted. UNESCO, ITU and UNDP got a mandate to oversee the implementation. Internet Governance issues played a key role in Tunis, however the full dimension of the digital revolution was not yet so clear for all UN member states." 'via Blog this'

Friday 4 January 2013

Google wriggles out of FTC search smackdown. Now to Europe!

Google wriggles out of FTC search smackdown. Now to Europe! • The Register: Lobbyists etc. claimed: "The FTC’s decision to close its investigation with only voluntary commitments from Google is disappointing and premature, coming just weeks before the company is expected to make a formal and detailed proposal to resolve the four abuses of dominance identified by the European Commission, first among them biased display of its own properties in search results. The FTC’s settlement is by no means the last word in this case, leaving the FTC without a major role in the final resolution to the investigations of Google’s anti-competitive practices by state attorneys general and the European Commission. The FTC’s inaction on the core question of search bias will only embolden Google to act more aggressively to misuse its monopoly power to harm other innovators." 'via Blog this'

Thursday 3 January 2013

The Laboratorium : Not with a Bang

The Laboratorium : Not with a Bang - James Grimmelmann on the FTC settlement with Google:
"The FTC didn’t start out focused on Google’s use of patents. But as the smartphone industry descended into a post-apocalyptic Hobbesian landscape in which scavengers picked over the shells of burnt-out companies for usable patents and litigators started waving around patent arsenals of fearful destructiveness, the FTC followed the smell of gunpowder to its source. Google acquired Motorola in large part for its patent portfolio." Fabulous! 'via Blog this'

ITU DPI Threat to Freedom of Expression

Herdict Blog » Blog Archive » DPI Threat to Freedom of Expression: "The ITU’s non-public development of a DPI standard is alarming given that the ITU is providing a standard for a technology that can and has been used for extensive fine-grained censorship and surveillance.  Moreover, it is doing so without any accompanying discussion of how to preserve internet freedom.  Perhaps this is unsurprising given how several countries recently tried to use the ITU as a vehicle for increasing filtering and government control of the Internet.  Although these proposals were not implemented, it seems that the ITU may still be a vehicle for standardizing censorship through other means." 'via Blog this'

My bid for tech liberty: how have I done so far? Dan Gillmor

My bid for tech liberty: how have I done so far? | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "I'd grown increasingly worried about the degree to which decentralized technology – where the greatest value was created, without anyone's permission, at the edges of the networks – was being re-centralized in disturbing ways. Meanwhile, tech users seemed to take vast corporate and government surveillance for granted. The trends stemmed from a combination of factors: the natural tendency of governments and businesses toward accretion of power; fundamental economic realities that, especially in the tech sphere, favor monopolies and oligopolies; and the public's understandable, if worrisome, preference for convenience and what is too often the illusion of security." 'via Blog this'