Category Archives: Link Digest

US Senate Committee approves internet censorship bill
The EFF report that the Senate Judiciary Committee has approved the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA). The draft law proposes giving the government power to use the Domain Name System to boot copyright-infringing websites off the net, and has attracted expert and bi-partisan criticism. Debate on the bill will now move to the Senate at large.

India finalises policy on open standards
The Centre for Internet and Society report that after three years of intense lobbying and debate, India has finalised its policy on Open Standards for e-Governance. The policy represents an important victory for the open source software community, as it excludes patented software that requires royalty payments from being considered an open standard.

Google charges US authorities $25 a head for user surveillance
The results of a Freedom of Information request to the US Drug Enforcement Administration have turned up information about how much different internet companies charge to wiretap their customers. While Microsoft does not charge authorities who make authorised requests for wiretaps, Google charges $25 and Yahoo! $29 per customer wiretapped. The Register report that in 2010 the DEA paid ISPs, telcos, and other communication providers $6.5 million for wiretaps.

Syrian bloggers brace for fresh blow to Middle East press freedom
Media analysts say that parliamentary approval for a draft law in Syria that would require bloggers to register as journalist union members is likely to come soon. The Christian Science Monitor reports: “Online journalists and bloggers in Syria, already subject to harassment and imprisonment, are concerned that the law is designed to crack down on their activities and restrict freedom of expression.”

WIPO to work on library and archive copyright exceptions
EIFL report that the new workplan for WIPO’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR), agreed earlier this month, not only includes proposals to take forward a treaty to guarantee access to reading materials for the visually impaired, but also allocates time for “text-based work on appropriate exceptions and limitations for libraries and archives”. EIFL, who have been working with the SCCR to reach this point for six years, call it an “unprecedented opportunity for libraries and archives”.

Long live the web: a call for continued open standards and neutrality
Tim Berners-Lee makes the case for why the web will flourish in the future only if we protect the medium’s basic principles, in this long essay for Scientific American.

Information technologies & international development
This special collection of essays includes contributions from Amartya Sen, Ethan Zuckerman, Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Liang.

Cyber Con
This long essay by James Harkin for the London Review of Books uses the publication of three new books on technology and geopolitics to launch a critique of the US State Department’s “internet freedom” agenda in the Middle East.

Russia’s Cyrillic cybernauts
This Financial Times feature on the Russian internet examines patterns of ownership among major Russian technology and media companies, their links to the Kremlin and the potential ramifications for privacy and free expression those links might have.

Global science
This Economist feature sums up the findings of a recent UNESCO report into the current status of science around the world. It finds that although emerging economies are increasing the amount of money they spend on R&D, citations originating from these countries remain low.

Blog: Don’t trade our lives away
The Delhi Network of Positive People (DNP+) and Medecin Sans Frontiers have set up a new blog – Don’t Trade Our Lives Away – to share documents, pictures and news on the draft India-EU Free Trade Agreement (FTA). NGOs in India are campaigning against the FTA, and against related international trade arrangements such as ACTA – citing their catastrophic effects on access to medicines.

Final ACTA text officially released
IP Watch report that the US Trade Representative (USTR) have released what they say is the final text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, subject to a legal review that will take place in Sydney, Australia in early December. The text will then go to national governments to “undertake relevant domestic processes”, USTR said.

Number of mobile subscribers in Africa hits 500 million
The African continent is now home to over half a billion mobile subscribers, according to a new poll by Informa Telecoms and Media. The milestone coincides with the 25th anniversary of mobile telephony in Africa.

China Telecom rejects claims it hijacked US web traffic
China Telecom has rejected claims it hijacked a proportion of internet traffic in April 2009. The accusations surfaced in a report published this week by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. The report claimed China Telecom rerouted sensitive US web traffic to China, including traffic destined for the websites of the US Senate, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, NASA and the Commerce Department.

Police put pressure on ISP to close down website in UK
Police in the UK have forced the suspension of a website, FITwatch, that has been engaged in sousveillance of police “Forward Intelligence Teams”, teams of police officers who gather intelligence about political activists at demonstrations and protests through overt surveillance. The suspension follows recent violent protests against rises in student tuition fees, and was initiated via the website’s hosting provider, JustHost.com.

Illegal communications surveillance uncovered in Trinidad and Tobago
Police have raided a “secret snooping agency” within the National Security Ministry of Trinidad and Tobago, bringing to light an extensive list of people whose phone calls, text messages and emails have been monitored over five years. The list includes Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar. Investigations are ongoing.

WIPO Copyright Committee agrees to extra time on visually impaired access
Following negotiations that stretched past midnight on the last day of meetings of WIPO’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR/21), delegates have agreed on a work programme to aid access to reading materials for the visually impaired. The programme stipulates three extra working days to be dedicated to discussions on limitations and exceptions to copyright law. Knowledge Ecology International and the World Blind Union have been the key advocates during negotiations.

Can technology end poverty?
This Boston Review special forum presents contrasting perspectives on the contribution of ICT to development. It includes contributions from Nicholas Negroponte, Evgeny Morozov, Archon Fung and Kentaro Toyama.

Tim Wu: The Master Switch
The New York Times talks to Tim Wu about his new book, “The Master Switch: The rise and fall of information empires”, in which he explores the way the open internet might gradually become enclosed by a few dominant US corporations. “My book is a history of information empires in America and the rise and fall of companies like ABC, NBC, AT&T, and eventually Facebook and Google. It’s largely a story of the American affection for information monopolists and the consequences of that fondness.”

Citizen media and digital activism in Kosovo
This feature includes an interview with the editor of Kosovo 2.0, Besa Luci, about the state of online citizen media in Kosovo in the run up to the republic’s first general elections since it declared independence in 2008.

Video: Machine Learning: A Love Story
Hilary Mason, lead scientist at bit.ly, presents the history of machine learning, covering some of the most significant developments that have taken place the last two decades.

Interview with Robert Cook-Deegan of the Center for Genomics at Duke
This short interview conducted by Creative Commons with the Director of Duke University’s Center for Genomics, Robert Cook-Deegan, highlights some of the information-handling challenges that lie ahead for the study of human genomics. While individuals are rightly worried about issues of privacy and abuse of private data, “most research institutions and private firms are more concerned with mining what’s under their control already, rather than sharing and creating value collectively”.

Video: A perfect dystopian storm
This short presentation by Tom Scott at recent conference Ignite London 2 imagines the story of a flashmob gone wrong.

European Commission announces review of data protection and copyright frameworks
The European Commission officially announced its much-anticipated review of the EU data protection framework this week. The review will be led by justice commissioner Viviane Reding. Also last week, former competition commissioner and now European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes announced the commission’s desire to review the copyright framework, stating “our fragmented copyright system is ill-adapted to the real essence of art”.
Data Protection | Copyright

Attack severs Burmese internet
Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks targeting Burma’s main internet service provider effectively took Burma offline last week. Security specialists Arbor Networks report: “While the motivation for the attack is unknown, Twitter and Blogs have been awash in speculation ranging from blaming the Burma/Myanmar government (preemptively disrupting internet connectivity ahead of the November 7 general elections), to external attackers with still mysterious motives”

New challenges imposed by misguided cybercrime draft bill
A2K Brazil report that a draft Cybercrime Bill, dismissed following public outcry in 2009, has been snuck back onto the legislative agenda in Brazil. The Center for Technology and Society at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro have launched several criticisms of the draft proposals, focussed on the fact that they criminalise ordinary consumer behaviour and threaten citizens’ privacy.

LiveJournal suspends accounts of opposition bloggers in Russia and Kazakhstan
Global Voices report two separate instances of blogging platform LiveJournal suspending the accounts of opposition bloggers last week, in Russia and Kazakhstan. LiveJournal is Russia’s most popular blogging platform and was bought by Russian media company SUP in 2007.
Kazakhstan | Russia

Turkey unblocks, then reblocks YouTube
Turkey has reportedly lifted and then reinstated its blocking of YouTube. According to campaign group European Digital Rights (EDRI), the site was originally blocked because it hosted videos considered insulting to Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. That block was lifted at the beginning of November, once the videos in question had been removed by a user. Now the block is back in place because, according to the Open Net Initiative (ONI), YouTube is hosting a potentially compromising video of former opposition leader Deniz Baykal. The Turkish government’s blocking of YouTube is being challenged in court by Istanbul Bilgi University.
Unblocked | Blocked

Focus: Open textbooks
These two articles detail the progress and potential of open textbooks in the United States education system. The first reports on initiatives to drive down the cost of textbooks using openly-licensed solutions, led in Washington State by Cable Green, Director of eLearning and Open Education at the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges. The second is an interview with Eric Frank, the founder of the for-profit open textbook publisher, Flat World Knowledge.
Report | Interview

Book: SMS Uprising – Mobile activism in Africa
Released at the beginning of 2010, this collection of essays examines the use of mobile devices by activists in Africa. It is published by Fahamu Books and Pambazuka Press, and edited by Sokari Ekine.

Book: Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property
This new collection of essays from MIT Press charts the rise of the access to knowledge movement, mapping the terrain of legal, cultural and technical issues that activists in the movement negotiate every day. The book includes contributions from Yochai Benkler, Peter Drahos, Lawrence Liang and Senior Information Program Manager Vera Franz. It is available for free download.

Opinion: Facing up to the generational privacy divide
Michael Geist uses the recent annual conference of the world’s privacy and data protection regulators as a springboard into a discussion of our shifting attitudes to privacy online. “Bringing offline social activities to the online environment raise a host of issues”, he writes, highlighting the contexts in which we share information about ourselves as the defining aspect of our subsequent expectations of privacy.

Vietnam detains bloggers on eve of visit from US Secretary of State
The Washington Post reports that Vietnamese authorities arrested two bloggers and refused to release a third in the run-up to an official visit from US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton last weekend. In response, the US Embassy in Hanoi issued a “statement of concern”.

Tribal rights charity targeted by DDoS assault
The Register report that development charities including Survival International who hosted footage of Indonesian soldiers torturing native Papuans have been subjected to denial of service attacks on their websites. In a statement, Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said, “This isn’t a couple of geeks in a shed, it’s an expensive and sophisticated attack amounting to cyberterrorism”.

US says genes should not be eligible for patenting
The New York Times report that the US federal government has issued a statement indicating that human and other genes should not be eligible for patenting, potentially reversing a longstanding policy of the US Patents and Trademark Office. The statement was made in a amicus brief filed by the US Department of Justice in the appeal case of ACLU vs Myriad.

Major new technology-for-transparency initiative launched for Africa
The Omidyar Network and Hivos have announced the creation of the Africa Transparency and Technology Initiative, “the first fund in Africa to support the incubation of technology-driven initiatives that give citizens the tools to hold their governments to account”. The Omidyar Network will invest $2million in the initiative in its first two years.

Indian High Level Committee recommends three-strikes policy to curb online infringement
A high profile committee set up last December by the Indian Ministry of Information & Broadcasting to look into ways to reduce illicit copyright infringement of video and audio works have submitted their report. Their recommendations include a potentially draconian “three strikes” policy against alleged online copyright infringers that is similar to measures enacted in France, Korea and the UK.

Specialist data analysis plays role in historic Guatemalan human rights case
This account of the ongoing trial in Guatemala of two policemen accused of abducting labour activist Edgar Fernando García in 1984 highlights the role of data sourced from the Historical Archive of the National Police in the prosecution’s case: “[The Human Rights Data Analysis Group at Benetech] helped define the universe of police records consulted in the investigation into the crime and offered supporting evidence of the involvement of senior police and military structures in the planning, design, orders and oversight of the operation that resulted in García’s abduction.”

How digital technology gets the news out of North Korea
Excellent feature detailing the work of Asia News in getting uncensored reporting out of North Korea and into the wider world: “The material they produce is often startling and documents a side of the country the government doesn’t want the world to see.”

A history of HTML5
A rich and accessible history of the development of the new web standard HTML5, and of its implications for the web: “The central goal of HTML5 is to give websites the chance to expand beyond pages and into programs”.

Internet Censorship and Freedom of Expression in Latin America
David Sasaki concludes a broad and informative three-part series on internet regulation in Latin America.

Webcast: The battle for the internet economy
John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly discuss “points of control” and rent-seeking in digital business.

Google ends secret wifi data gathering as international privacy watchdogs investigate
Google Vice President Alan Eustace has stated that his company is “mortified” that its Streetview cars have been “inadvertently” collecting and storing personal data while scanning wifi networks. The Streetview cars, which travel the world taking photographs to upload to Google’s controversial Streetview service, had also been gathering information about the location of wifi networks to improve the company’s geolocation services, a practice Google say they will now stop. Privacy watchdogs in the UK, Germany, France and Canada are currently investigating the issue.

Mobile operators under pressure in Mozambique
In a move understood to have followed the widespread use of SMS to organise protests during September’s food shortages, the government of Mozambique will require mobile operators to register the SIM cards of all their customers by mid-November. This week, the government announced that a levy imposed on mobile phone subscribers that would contribute to a government-controlled Transport and Communications Development Fund would now be shifted onto operators in order to avoid constitutional issues around introducing new forms of taxation.

Livejournal bloggers expose suspicious government IT contracts in Russia
Global Voices report that Russian bloggers with IT expertise have launched a new campaign to scrutinise government IT tenders, after they noticed that the Ministry of Health was inviting companies to tender for contracts on unfair or suspicious terms. The campaign has already seen at least three tenders cancelled, with one official responsible for a suspicious tender being forced to resign.

Vatican speaks out against unduly aggressive IP protection
In an address to the General Assembly of the World Intellectual Property Organization last month, a Vatican spokesperson has condemned aggressive intellectual property (IP) protection that harms access to medicines in poorer countries. Archbishop Silvano M. Tomasi, Permanent Representative of the Holy See to the United Nations remarked: “on the part of rich countries there is excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property, especially in the field of health care.”

Future internet scenarios
The Internet Society have shared the results of a scenario planning exercise they engaged in to reveal plausible courses of events that could impact the future “health of the Internet”. The results are presented in a compelling way, and represent a useful framework for understanding current issues such as censorship technologies, the rise of web hyper-giants like Facebook and Google, and cyber security concerns.

Judging the cyber war terrorist threat
In this essay for the New Yorker Seymour Hersh gives context and depth to Western governments’ current obsession with cyberwar, tallying the potential cost to civil liberties of an over-reliance on the military to respond to cyberthreats.

Ten theses on Wikileaks
Internet scholars Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemens present ten competing analyses of the status and prospects of the whistleblowing website Wikileaks. This week Wikileaks disclosed hundreds of thousands of US Army reports pertaining to the war in Iraq, which revealed greater civilian casualties than previously reported, and allegations of widespread torture of detainees.

How to examine copyright’s impacts on innovation
This United States National Academy of Sciences has set up a committee to examine and enrich the evidence base informing current copyright practice. In this blog post, Public Knowledge summarise their submission, which urges the committee to re-examine several issues including the length of copyright term and the cost effectiveness of imposing liability for copyright infringement on internet service providers.

How Useful is Humanitarian Crowdsourcing?
Ushahidi critic Paul Currion of humanitarian.info attempts to advance the debate on crowdsoucing and humanitarian response: “My critique of crowdsourcing – shared by other people working at the interface of humanitarian response and technology – is not that it is disruptive to business as usual. My critique is that it doesn’t work.”

High internet, SMS costs slow Rwanda rural project
The Rwandan Development Board is considering inviting competing telecommunications providers to take part in Rwanda’s e-soko project after users of the market price information service complained that SMS and internet costs associated with it were too high. 30,000 farmers, traders and consumers in the country are using the service.

Russian police investigating Wikipedia
Russian police are reported to be investigating claims that the Russian instance of Wikipedia is hosting “extremist” content proscribed by the Russian justice ministry. So far Wikipedia editors have not been told which works are under suspicion. Earlier this year a local Russian court ruled that YouTube should be blocked after complaints about extremist videos, although that decision was later amended to oblige Russian internet service providers to block only certain pages, and not the entire service.

Microsoft expands efforts to protect non-profit groups from piracy crackdowns
The New York Times reports that Microsoft is planning to provide software licences free-of-charge to more than 500,000 advocacy groups and independent media organisations in countries including Russia and China. The move follows on from reports that repressive governments were “using software piracy inquiries as a pretext to suppress dissent”.

Google offers piracy help to Big Media, at a price
CNet reports that Google has written a letter to executives at two music industry trade groups offering to help them track down pirated material online, for a price. The move comes in the context of Google’s ongoing licensing negotiations with the content industry following a recently launched “Google TV” service and a planned digital music service.

‘Scrapers’ Dig Deep for Data on the Web
The Wall Street Journal reports on the growing trend for media research firms, data brokers and other commercial entities to “scrape” websites for personal data and package it on at a price.

Peter Thiel launches new fellowship for young tech entrepreneurs
PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has launched 20 fellowships incorporating cash grants worth up to $100,000 each, for people under 20 years old “to further their innovative scientific and technical ideas”. The fellowships include mentoring from key members of Thiel’s extended network of successful technology entrepreneurs.

Open Access Week
This week is international Open Access Week, a global event to promote Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research. To celebrate, the OSF blog interviewed the Information Program’s Melissa Hagemann about the successes in the open access movement so far, and the challenges it faces in the future.
Open Access Week | Interview

Decrypting the Web
Siva Vaidhyanathan writes a thoughtful and well-informed piece for Dissent magazine, recalling failed attempts in the nineties to regulate everyday use of strong cryptography, and detailing how the US government’s recently reported desire to “wiretap” the encrypted net will meet with the same fate.

Garage biotech: Life hackers
This Nature feature on “bio-hacking” is an excellent introduction to trends in garage microbiology and DIY genomics. It traces parallels between the activities of these hobbyists and the history of early personal computer development and computer hacking.

OER: Interview with Nicole Allen
Creative Commons interview Student Public Interest Research Group Campaign Director Nicole Allen on the topic of open educational resources (OER).

Research report: “Campaign Takedown Troubles”
This new report from the Center for Democracy and Technology documents the extent to which overly aggressive copyright enforcement claims made under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act have inappropriately stifled online political speech during recent US election campaigns.

French police accused of maintaining illegal Roma database
French police are denying accusations that they maintain a secret and illegal database of Roma and other travelling minorities. The Register report that the existence of the database “came to light by chance, when a 48-page powerpoint presentation…turned up on the internet.” Human rights groups are calling for a swift public response to the revelations, and Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP has urged the European Commission to investigate France’s “anti-Roma policies”.

UAE will not ban BlackBerrys
The BBC report that telecommunications regulators in the United Arab Emirates have been satisfied that BlackBerrys are compliant with the country’s security needs, and will not therefore ban the service this week, as had been originally threatened. Research in Motion, makers of the handheld device which routinely encrypts communications data, said it would not reveal the details of their discussions with UAE regulators.

iCow wins Apps 4 Africa competition
Apps4Africa, a competition funded by the US government, has awarded its first $5,000 prize to a voice-based application which uses smart phones to track the fertility of cows. The creator of “iCow” is Charles Kithika from Kenya.

Libya takes hard line on .ly link shortening domains
The co-founder of an “adult friendly” url shortening service that used the Libyan top level domain .ly has warned that the Libyan domain registry service may deregister other .ly domains without warning, after his site was taken off the web.

HTML5 may weaken privacy
The New York Times reports on the next version of Hypertext Markup Language, HTML5, focussing on the new capabilities for online behaviour tracking the website programming language will introduce. Privacy campaigners have called HTML5 a “Pandora’s Box”, but the World Wide Web Consortium, which is overseeing the specification of HTML5 say they are taking questions of user privacy “very seriously”.

Creating a National Digital Library
Director of the Harvard University Library lays out the path toward a US National Digital Library in this excellent post on the New York Review of Books blog.

A civic hacktivism abecedary
Tony Bowden has been working with the OSI Information Program and mySociety for the past year identifying viable and exciting civic hacktivism projects in Central and Eastern Europe. This ABC guide will eventually list the 26 favourite lessons he’s drawn from the experience. Topics so far include “B – Bypass Bureaucracy” and “F – Facebook Will Destroy You”.

Interview with Chiranuch Premchaiporn of Thai Netizen Network
The EFF interview Chiranuch Premchaiporn (known as Jiew), a Director and webmaster of alternative Thai news website Prachatai, and founding member of the Thai Netizen Network. Jiew was recently charged under the Thai Computer Crime Act, and may face a sentence of 82 years. She discusses flaws in the law under which she was charged, and the effect the charges have had on her life.

The Atlantic syllabus series
Starting in August, the Atlantic magazine has been running articles which ask academics teaching courses on ethical, cultural and social issues in technology to share their syllabi. The result is this fascinating series.

Who’s Who in Internet Politics
A concise, US-focused primer for decision makers on the advocates and issues that surround regulation of the internet: “Some might argue that these issues are transitory and will recede in importance as the digital economy matures. But there is good reason to believe otherwise: The debates that pit online consumers against resistant middlemen are likely to continue as new forms of online distribution evolve.”

Video: Public domain calculators
This short video explains the European Public Domain Calculators project, which aims to create an algorithm to establish whether a particular work is in the public domain. In a separate but complementary development, this week Creative Commons have launched a new, machine-readable “public domain mark”, which will help users of the web search for public domain material. Both projects aim to exploit the power of new technology in order to make better use of public domain works.
Public domain calculators | Public domain mark

Infographic: The True size of Africa
Like any good infographic, this image speaks for itself.

US internet censorship bill delayed
Following significant public pressure, including an open letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee from 96 founding internet scientists and engineers, the EFF report that the “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeit Act” will not be considered further until after the US midterm elections in October. It had been feared that the deeply flawed bill, which included proposals to use the internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) to boot suspected copyright infringers off the ‘net, would be rushed through without proper scrutiny in order to appease lobbyists.

India ID project begins in earnest
India’s project to create a unique, biometric-linked identification for each of its 1.2 billion citizens kicked off in earnest this week, amid stiff resistance from civil society groups, who say the project is intrusive, expensive, and possibly illegal.

New media law in Syria to target bloggers?
The New York Times report that a draft law being proposed in Syria would force bloggers and journalists to register as syndicate members and submit their writing for review: “Other Arab countries regularly jail journalists who express dissident views, but Syria may be the most restrictive of all”.

e-Voting dealt double blow
Flawed electronic voting technologies were dealt a double blow this week, with hacker infiltration ending an online voting trial in Washington DC, and the Indian Electoral Commission bowing to mounting pressure to provide a paper trail alongside their electronic systems. e-Voting campaigners are now calling for all charges against Indian security researcher Hari Prasad – who was arrested in August after he revealed flaws in e-voting machines – to be dropped.
US | India

ACTA “Ultra-Lite” emerges from Tokyo negotiations
The Tokyo round of negotiations of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement concluded last week, with mixed messages coming from country delegates, and in particular the US and the EU, about whether a final agreement had been reached. A draft of the consolidated text released this week shows that harmful provisions had been watered down, including those to do with intermediary liability for copyright infringement and the circumvention of digital locks to enable fair use of copyrighted works.

What is the impact of digital activism?
The impact of digital activism has been in the headlines for most of the past week. A New Yorker essay by Malcolm Gladwell kicked off a lively debate which included input from Evgeny Morozov and Howard Rheingold in the New York Times, and Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber.
Essay | NY Times response | Crooked Timber response

A Tour through the Visualization Zoo
A wonderful crib sheet detailing a wide variety of data visualisation techniques.

Free to Learn: Guide to OER for higher education
This booklet from Creative Commons is aimed at higher education governance officials, particularly boards of trustees and senior academic leaders, to help them better understand Open Educational Resources (OER) and their benefits to students, faculty and institutions.

Rise of the Online Autocrats
Evgeny Morozov shows how officials from autocratic regimes are using social media to disseminate pro-government views and undermine their critics. “The decentralized nature of online conversations often makes it easier to manipulate public opinion, both domestically and globally”

Who’s suing who in the mobile business
A handy visualisation of the many intellectual property lawsuits currently being fought by mobile companies against each other.

US wants to make it easier to wiretap the internet
The New York Times report that the Obama administration is seeking to introduce measures that would require all communications providers to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The requirements would apply to those providing encrypted communications services, as well as to social networking sites, and voice-over-IP (VoIP) services.

Stuxnet worm detected at Iranian nuclear plant
Iranian officials have confirmed that a computer worm that exploits a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Windows operating system and which targets computers used widely in the management of critical infrastructure has been detected in systems inside the Natanz nuclear facility. Security experts say that the Stuxnet worm is the first example of attackers targeting the specialised computers that control industrial operations. The origins of the worm are unknown.

Civil society shut out of “final” ACTA negotiations
The Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property report how a last-minute change in the schedule for negotiations of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement will keep most civil society representatives from participating fully in the process. Civil society groups including Knowledge Ecology International and La Quadrature du Net have been advocating for a greater emphasis during negotiations on citizens’ rights to access to knowledge, ever since the treaty was first mooted in 2007.

Burma publication claims cyberattack
The New York Times report that The Irrawaddy, a Thailand-based magazine that is a leading source of news and criticism of the Burmese junta, have fallen victim to a politically-motivated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Editor Aung Zaw told the newspaper “This is a new game, a new frontier…it shows how vulnerable we are.”

Emails of anti-piracy law firm leaked
Private email correspondence of the anti-piracy law firm ACS:Law have been revealed by a glitch in the company’s website. The emails include correspondence with individuals accused by ACS:Law of violating copyright, as well as correspondence with consumer magazine Which?, who have raised doubts about the legitimacy of ACS:Law’s practice of sending such letters, which demand financial settlement in exchange for not taking their allegations to court. The email glitch occurred following a DDoS attack on the website, allegedly perpetrated by members of the forum 4chan.

Wikileaks undergoing internal revolt
Wired’s Threat Level blog reports on schisms inside the Wikileaks organisation.

Blogs and Bullets: new media in contentious politics
This report from the United States Institute for Peace argues that scholars and policymakers should adopt a more nuanced view of new media’s role in democratisation and social change.

Regulatory approaches to net neutrality in Europe and beyond
This paper by Angela Daly sets out the different regulatory responses to the net neutrality issue, with a focus on the EU.

An interview with Jean-François Cazenave
Interview with head of crisis response telecoms specialists Télécoms Sans Frontières on the occasion of their 12th anniversary.

Africa and television white spaces
Steve Song encourages Africans to demand a similar deal on unlicensed spectrum to the one just agreed by the FCC in the US.

“The death of the book has been greatly exaggerated”
Christopher Mims explains why new media pundits are using the iPad and Kindle to inflate a “hype bubble” around the death of the paper book.

Podcast: Little Atoms
British podcast Little Atoms is an excellent independent weekly talk show “based around ideas of the Enlightenment”. This recent episode features an interview with Nicholas Carr, author of “The Shallows: How the internet is making us change the way we think, read and remember.”

[with apologies for late posting]

Mozambique blocked texts during food riots
The BBC report that authorities in Mozambique moved to block text messaging services across Maputo during recent food riots in the capital. Mobile phones had played a key role in organising the protests.

Jailed Iranian blogger may face death penalty
Global Voices report that Tehran’s prosecutor is seeking the death penalty for Hossein Derakhshan (also known as “Hoder”, the author of influential Iranian blog Editor:Myself). Derakhshan has been in prison in Iran for nearly two years: “The reasons for Hoder’s initial arrest upon his return to Iran from Canada in 2008 remain unclear, but many speculated that his two (highly publicised) trips to Israel were the primary reason.” [Read update here]

Internet at Liberty 2010 takes place in Budapest
The Internet at Liberty conference, co-sponsored by Google and the Central European University, took place in Budapest, Hungary this week. The conference was designed to “address the boundaries of online free expression” and panellists included many current and former Information Program grantees. Jillian York live-blogged many of the most interesting sessions.

EPIC sues for details of NSA agreement with Google
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is suing the US National Security Agency (NSA) to disclose details of a reported agreement it has made with Google to work together to respond to cyber attacks. The move follows the NSA’s refusal to grant EPIC access to the information via the Freedom of Information Act.

Google releases “Transparency Report”
Google launched a new service this month which aims to show users disruptions that occur to the free flow of information across its servers, either because of government requests to takedown information, or because of network outages. The site also shows how many requests Google receives from governments across the world to hand over data about its users.

Bill would give US Justice Department power to disrupt piracy sites worldwide
Wired’s Threat Level blog reports that US lawmakers have introduced a bill that could allow court orders to “shut down” piracy websites via the domain registry system: “If passed, the Justice Department could ask a federal court for an injunction that would order a US domain registrar or registry to stop resolving an infringing site’s domain name, so that visitors to PirateBay.org, for example, would get an error message.”

The internet freedom fallacy and Arab digital activism
Global Voices’ Advocacy Director Sami Ben Gharbia airs his concerns about the US State Department’s Internet Freedom policy in this important and thoughtful essay.

Policing content in the quasi-public sphere
The Open Net Initiative release a new bulletin on the way social media and blogging platforms limit speech online through their terms of service and takedown policies.

Citizen journalism, social media and Mexican drug-related violence
David Sasaki’s presentation to the Austin Forum on Organized Crime and Drug Trafficking looks at drug-related violence in Mexico through the prism of citizen journalism and social media.

Technology and education – New York Times special issue
The New York Times magazine devotes an entire issue to technology and education. Includes articles from Jaron Lanier and Kevin Kelly, and a history of technology in the classroom.

Academics rethinking internet architecture
This short feature details some next-generation internet research projects that could lead to fundamental changes in the architecture of the net. Included are projects related to linked data, mobile, and security in the cloud.

Podcast: IEEE Spectrum – This week in technology
Steven Cherry talks to political scientist Stefan Hertog about why a surprisingly disproportionate number of convicted terrorists are engineers in this episode of the excellent podcast series produced by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.