Category Archives: Link Digest

Turkey backtracks on controversial internet filtering plans
Turkey’s communications regulator has postponed the introduction of mandatory internet filtering until November, reacting to growing public concern about the new regulation.

RIM helps police inquiries into London riots
BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) have stated that they will “co-operate fully” with Home Office and UK police force investigations into the London riots this week, which are rumoured to have been facilitated by the encrypted BlackBerry Messenger service.

Baidu shuts down Twitter-like service
Baidu, China’s dominant search engine company, will close its micro-blogging platform Baidu Talk in August. Despite attracting 1m users in its first three months, the platform faced stiff competition from Sina’s Weibo among other domestic products. Facebook and Twitter are blocked within China.

India: Legal case prompts fears for intermediary liability
The Spicy IP blog reports on a recent decision in the Delhi High Court which held MySpace liable for copyright infringement: “The most significant implication of such a ruling… is that it recognises that the IT Act does not protect intermediaries against copyright infringement claims”.

Dutch journalist fears criminal charges after exposing flawed technology
A Dutch journalist who demonstrated flaws in chip technology used by the Dutch public transport system on national radio and television earlier this year has said that fears he may come under criminal investigation are preventing him from reporting further on security issues. Trans Link Systems, which represents the companies who run the Dutch public transport system, have filed a criminal complaint against the journalist, Brenno de Winter, with the Dutch public prosecutor.

Russia: New legislation against online extremism
The Global Voices RuNet Echo project highlights reports that the Russian Duma is considering new legislation that would punish the online distribution of extremist content with up to five years in prison. The legislation would bring requirements of online distribution channels such as blogs in line with those imposed on the mainstream media.

“Making fun of Wikipedia is so 2007”
This New York Times report from the seventh Wikimania conference held in Haifa, Israel last week highlights a new film about the world’s largest reference work and focusses on the challenges Wikipedia faces, including how its citation policy is blocking its ability to document oral cultures.
Report | Film

The future of the internet updated: interview with Jonathan Zittrain
John Battelle interviews Jonathan Zittrain and asks how his views on the future of the generative internet have changed in the years since he wrote “The Future of the Internet (and How To Stop It)”.

The war on web anonymity
This Der Speigel feature examines the cases for and against anonymity and pseudonymity on the web.

“Anonymous and LulzSec need to focus their chaos”
This extended post for Wired’s Threat Level blog provides a glimpse at the security communities fears about Anonymous and Lulzsec. It reports on a panel of security experts at last week’s DefCon conference who urged hacktivists Lulzsec and Anonymous to concentrate their work on “significant” issues but expressed their fear of reprisals for speaking out against the groups.

Operation Shady RAT: five-year hack attack hit 14 countries
Ars Technica reports on a five-year campaign, revealed this week by researchers at McAfee, to hack computer systems used by organisations across 14 countries, including the governments of the US, Canada and South Korea, as well as the UN, the International Olympic Committee, and 12 US defence contractors: “For all the press that Anonymous and LulzSec have received, McAfee warns that these long-term, targeted attacks are a far more serious threat both to corporations and governments”.
Report | Research

Pakistan banning encryption?
The International Herald Tribune reports on a new legal provision in Pakistan intended to address state surveillance that appears to lay the groundwork for a total ban on encrypted internet traffic.

UK: ISP ordered to block copyright-infringing website using system set up to block child sex abuse imagery
The UK High Court has ruled that UK internet service provider (ISP) BT must use Cleanfeed – a system originally set up to prevent access to child sex abuse images – to deny its subscribers access to a copyright-infringing website called Newzbin. The judgement has serious implications for fundamental laws that govern the internet, as this post for LINX outlines.

US: Federal Appeals Court partially overturns gene patent ruling
A United States federal appeals court has partially overturned a ruling made earlier this year that genes cannot be patented. In this report for the Atlantic, Andrew Cohen examines the nuanced legal opinions, the conflict between the various judges, and the possible future of gene patenting in the United States.

DDoS attacks lead to mass exodus from LiveJournal in Russia
Global Voices reports how Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks against the LiveJournal platform in Russia, thought to be aimed at the blog of anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny, have led other LiveJournal users to move to alternative platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Google and Microsoft launch free science metrics tools
Nature News reports on two new initiatives – Google Scholar Citations and the expanding toolset around Microsoft’s Academic Search – that offer free ways to track and visualise academic citation data: “the systems could be attractive for scientists and institutions that are unable — or unwilling — to pay for existing metrics platforms, such as Thomson Reuters’ Web of Knowledge and Elsevier’s Scopus database.”

German politicians use Norwegian tragedy to demand return of discredited surveillance scheme
Hans Peter-Uhl, a domestic policy spokesperson for Germany’s conservative Christian Democrats, has used the mass shooting and bombing in Norway and the more than 70 deaths which resulted as a platform to call for the reinstatement of data retention laws declared unconstitutional by the German Constitutional Court last year.

Google “effectively excommunicates” Copiepress from the web
In what is described in this report as a “tit-for-tat move”, Google has removed all search results relating to French- and German-language newspapers represented by the umbrella organisation Copiepress, against whom it recently lost a lawsuit for copyright infringement. The case had been focussed solely on results returned by the Google News service.

Uzbekistan switches off mobile internet to stop cheating in exams
The Australian Herald Sun reports that five national mobile operators in Uzbekistan shut down mobile internet and SMS services for the duration of nationwide university entrance exams “in an apparent bid to prevent cheating”.

Researchers expose cunning online tracking service that can’t be dodged
Wired reports on a newly-identified online behavioural tracking service exposed by researchers at UC Berkley that they say uses “practically every known method to circumvent user attempts to protect their privacy”.

Audio special: Patents against prosperity
NPR’s Planet Money podcast examines how the patent system, when it comes to software and the internet, is doing the opposite of what it was intended to do, and reports on a growing arms race between tech giants to amass “defensive” patents to deflect malicious lawsuits from shell companies established purely to exploit the system. The Economist summarise the report, labelling one company specialising in the licensing of defensive patents, Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures, “our age’s authentic villainous robber baron”. Forbes profile Myhrvold and his company.
Planet Money podcast | Economist report | Forbes profile

A Vision of post-clicktivist activism
This strongly-worded piece by Adbusters senior editor Micah White calls out the Silicon Valley clicktivist “colonizers” of digital activism, berating their “budgets bloated by philanthropic grants… ‘asks’ watered down… emails written like bus stop marketing… uninspiring, mundane and frankly counter-revolutionary political agendas”.

Internet is easy prey for governments
Douglas Rushkoff underlines the precarity of activists using the internet as a communications medium: “Old media, such as terrestrial radio and television, were as distributed as the thousands of stations and antennae from which broadcast signals emanated, but all internet traffic must pass through government and corporate-owned choke points”.

The future of budget monitoring
David Sasaki surveys different budget monitoring projects across the globe, and makes the case for new “civic hacking” organisations that focus on open data and data visualisation to work in concert with established budget monitoring NGOs.

Report: Online security in the Middle East and North Africa
The Berkman Center for Internet and Society publish the results of a survey carried out in May 2011 of 98 bloggers in the MENA region, which asked them questions about the risks they thought they faced online and the strategies they employed to mitigate those risks.

Book review: How Google dominates us
“The Information” author James Gleick reviews four new books on Google for the New York Review of Books.

Interview: Wikimedian in Residence on Open Science Daniel Mietchen
The Signpost, the in-house newspaper for Wikipedians, interviews Daniel Mietchen about his new position as Wikipedian-in-Residence on Open Science. The position is being supported by a grant from the OSF Information Program, with the Open Knowledge Foundation acting as institutional host.

Malawi cracks down on media covering protests
The Committee to Protect Journalists reports on a media crackdown in Malawi in response to national anti-government protests in which as many as 18 people are reported to have died. Journalists have been arrested, the signals of private radio broadcasters have been switched off, and independent media websites have been experiencing massive sustained DDoS attacks.

Web surveillance sends chill through parts of Chinese economy
The New York Times reports that: “new regulations that require bars, restaurants, hotels and bookstores to install costly web monitoring software are prompting many businesses to cut internet access and sending a chill through the capital’s game-playing, web-grazing literati who have come to expect free wi-fi with their lattes and green tea”.

Italy blocks proxy servers
LINX reports that Italian ISPs have been forced by Italy’s cybercrime police unit to block access to proxyitalia.com, a legal proxy-server website, after authorities realised it could be used to access websites banned under Italy’s strict copyright enforcement regime.

Special: Online debate and the virtual public sphere
“The age of rage” is an in-depth feature by Tim Adams for the UK’s Observer newspaper which examines the effects anonymity and pack mentality have on online debate. Meanwhile “Tunnel vision”, a short comment piece for the Guardian’s Comment is Free, argues that the internet’s fragmentation of the public sphere can nurture and catalyse extremist viewpoints.
Age of rage | Tunnel vision

The politics of surveillance in Latin America
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Katitza Rodriguez details how communication interception is being used as a political tool to identify, control and stifle dissent in Latin America.

(S)low impact research and the importance of open in maximising re-use
Cameron Neylon of the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council argues that new approaches to publishing and evaluating scientific research could increase the value of basic and low-impact research.

Marshall McLuhan speaks
This month marks the centenary of the birth of Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist who coined the phrases “the global village” and “the medium is the message”. This website celebrates McLuhan’s work, and includes a 20-minute video narrated by Tom Wolfe.

Tool: public domain calculator
The “public domain calculator” is a joint project of the Europeana Connect project and the Austrian National Library designed to be used to discern whether a particular work is in the public domain in a particular jurisdiction, an ostensibly simple task that turns out to be very complicated in practice thanks to disconnected and complex copyright laws across the world.

Visualisation: privacy maps
Nymity create useful maps detailing privacy laws around the world, and have just launched new maps for Asia Pacific and Latin America.

Video: A year in the life of the New York Times Homepage
This bewitching video plays images of the New York Times homepage as it has changed over the past year. Its creator, Phillip Mendonça-Vieira, writes: “Traditionally, the purpose of a newspaper’s front page was to entice the reader into delving further into the publication. As a consequence, they are roughly equivalent with whatever the editors thought were the most relevant news items of the day.”

US: Activist charged for downloading millions of academic articles
Aaron Swartz, a well-known programmer and internet activist, was arrested this week and charged with violating US hacking laws for downloading millions of copyrighted academic articles from JSTOR. The criminal charges are being driven by the United States Attorney’s Office: the New York Times reports that subsequent to Swartz returning hard drives containing the articles to JSTOR and not to disseminate the material, JSTOR will take no further action. In a separate development, GigaOm reports that a user calling himself Greg Maxwell has uploaded a torrent containing over 18,500 scientific articles to filesharing site The Pirate Bay. The move was accompanied by a message confirming it was a reaction to Swartz’s arrest, and arguing that “the liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientific
inquiry”.
New York Times | GigaOm

OSCE declares access to the internet a human right
European Digital Rights (EDRi) highlight a report published by the OSCE earlier this month which expresses concern over the general trend in Europe towards regulation, censorship and control of the internet, and sets out access to the internet as a fundamental human right.

Major website in Turkmenistan hacked
New Eurasia report that chrono-tm.org, a website belonging to the Turkmen Initiative for Human Rights, was taken offline this week. The website was one of few reporting on suspected explosions at an arms depot in Abadan.

Consultation on open access to scientific information launched
The European Commission launched a consultation on open access to scientific information last week. The Commission is seeking the views of scientists, research funders, universities and other interested parties on how best to use modern digital infrastructure to facilitate access, and on how to meet challenges “such as high and rising subscription prices to scientific publications, an ever-growing volume of scientific data, and the need to select, curate and preserve research outputs”. Deadline for responses is 9 September 2011.

Omidyar Network and Indigo Trust to support “co-creation” hub in Nigeria
Omidyar Network and The Indigo Trust have this week announced their joint support for the Co-Creation Hub in Lagos, Nigeria, a non-profit venture that will provide shared work space for people collaborating on technology that addresses social challenges.

Phone hacking, technology and policy
Professor Ross Anderson of the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory links the UK phone hacking scandal with longstanding concerns he and colleagues have been airing around the UK government’s proclivity towards collecting and storing data on its citizens in centralised databases.

The Measured Life
This feature from Technology Review examines how “a rapidly growing movement of fitness buffs, techno-geeks, and patients with chronic conditions who obsessively monitor various personal metrics” are driving the market in consumer-oriented versions of monitoring equipment used in healthcare, medical research and the military. It argues that what might seem like a narcissistic pursuit at first glance could lead to real medical breakthroughs.

Book Review: Don’t be evil
Evgeny Morozov takes on two recent big-name books about Google, “In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives”, by Steven Levy and “The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)” by Siva Vaidhyanathan, in this long-form book review for the New Republic.

Visualisation: Webs of deceit
Alexis Madrigal of the Atlantic points to research by organisational theorist Brandy Aven, who analysed Enron’s internal emails to reveal the contrasting patterns formed by communications pertaining to legal and illicit projects.

Video: Seven ways to ruin a technology revolution
James Boyle, Professor of Law at Duke Law School, warns of the dangers ahead for the open internet, in this engaging Google Tech Talk.

Open Government Partnership launched
US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Brazilian Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota this week announced the launch of an international partnership to promote more open government. The initiative, called the Open Government Partnership, seeks to use innovative technologies to promote government transparency and public engagement. The Transparency and Accountability Initiative, a donor collaborative, welcomed the news, which was met by scepticism in other quarters.
News | Scepticism

Fifty years of Kenyan Parliamentary debates published
The Kenyan National Council for Law Reporting, in partnership with Google Kenya, has published parliamentary records dating back to the 1960s, giving Kenyans free, electronic access to the records for the first time. The project uses the Google Books platform to display the data.

Graduated response-style copyright enforcement comes to the US
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) digests the news that a coalition of internet service providers (ISPs) and rightsholder bodies have announced a collaborative effort to curb copyright infringement on peer-to-peer networks. The scheme involves ISPs alerting their customers based on notifications received from rightsholders that infringing activity is taking place. ISPs will be expected to take mitigating action, such as reducing internet speeds, against persistent offenders.

Turkmenet shines during Abadan explosion
Following the suppression of news about a still-mysterious explosion in the Abadan region of Turkmenistan reported to have resulted in high numbers of deaths, New Eurasia examines “both the struggles and discoveries of the Turkmenet during the crisis”.

EFF urges Microsoft to reconsider censored China service
The EFF publishes a short note condemning Microsoft over recent news that it has struck a deal with Chinese search market leader Baidu to offer its Bing web search results in English.

What’s Wrong with Government 2.0?
Using the profit-seeking privatisation of micro-credit as an analogy, Tom Slee sounds a warning about the limitations and risks around the open government data agenda, in this series of blog posts.
Post 1 | Post 2

The most menacing malware in history
This accomplished and compelling long-form feature from Kim Zetter at Wired charts the rise of the Stuxnet worm, its origins and target, and the security researchers who found themselves caught up in what emerged to be a story of truly international proportions.

Report: Threats in internet freedom in Russia, 2008-2011
The Agora Association have released the first of a new series of reports documenting threats to internet freedom in Russia. Types of threats enumerated in the report range from proposals to regulate the internet to defamation suits and cyber-attacks, as well as harassment, assault and murder of internet activists.

Special Feature: The World Bank and open data
This New York Times feature examines the strategic thinking behind the World Bank’s decision to open up its data.

Video: Enduring Voices
Enduring Voices, a joint project of National Geographic and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, documents endangered languages across the world: “By 2100, more than half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth — many of them not yet recorded — may disappear, taking with them a wealth of knowledge about history, culture, the natural environment, and the human brain.”

Google+ for journalists at risk
Danny O’Brien of the Committee for the Protection of Journalists gives his initial review of new social networking platform Google+ and its utility for at-risk journalists.

Audio: Joi Ito on how to save the internet from its own success
An interview with Joi Ito that hints at some possible coming changes at the MIT Media Lab under his leadership including greater adoption of Creative Commons licences and more participation in Open Courseware.

Civil Society representatives reject OECD internet policy plan
European Digital Rights (EDRi) report on the decision of the Civil Society Information Society Advisory Council to the OECD (CSISAC) not to endorse the OECD’s draft communiquÈ on internet policy: “the implication of much of the text is to abandon the rule of law and hand over both enforcement and policing of cyberspace to online intermediaries”.

Police crack down on Minsk protest using social media
Global Voices reports on a crackdown against a protest in Minsk, Belarus, detailing how authorities used Facebook and Twitter to identify, intimidate and discourage protestors.

EU: No mandatory internet filtering against images of child abuse
The Open Net Initiative reports that, “the European Commission, Council, and Parliament came to an agreement last week regarding controversial plans to mandate internet filtering as a means to fight the circulation of child abuse images”. Thanks to EDRi’s intensive, year-long campaign, internet filtering will now most likely not be mandated by draft legislation being negotiated.

Minimal stakeholder engagement at multilateral IP enforcement treaty negotiations
Krista Cox of Knowledge Ecology International reports from last week’s Vietnam round of negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, a multilateral free trade agreement which contains worrying proposals on intellectual property enforcement that could harm access to knowledge: “overall, civil society and academics were displeased with the limited stakeholder engagement and restricted opportunities to interact with the negotiators”.

FOIA: How to break the bottleneck
The New York Times looks at the future of Freedom of Information law and practice in the US, in light of news that “two and a half years after the president’s call for openness, only 49 of 90 federal agencies have reported making concrete changes to their FOIA procedures”.

Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia reader
This collection of essays, interviews and artworks seeks to provide new insight on the next generation of Wikipedia-related research, examining everything from “radical artistic interventions and the significant role of bots” to “hidden trajectories of encyclopaedic knowledge and the politics of agency and exclusion”. It is supported by, among others, the Centre for Internet and Society – India.

Social media: Good for revolution, bad for democracy?
Dave Power draws on a range of thinkers to make a case that social media’s ability to enact political change stops short of helping constitute new governing structures after a successful popular revolution.

Book: The power of open
Creative Commons (CC) publish a series of case studies into use of their licences, to demonstrate, “the breadth of CC uses across fields and the creativity of the individuals and organizations that have chosen to share their work via Creative Commons.”

ICT Accessibility progress report
This report, released this week by a United Nations accessibility taskforce, finds that despite commitments on paper to protect the rights of people with disabilities to access ICT, many countries are failing to guarantee those rights in practice. The report is based on a survey of 33 of 147 countries which have signed or ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Beyond impact workshop report
Cameron Neylon of York University UK publishes a report of the Beyond Impact workshop, held in London in May 2011 to identify opportunities and barriers in the aggregation, analysis, and measurement of research outputs.

Video: Internet connectivity in Ghana
Russell Southwood interviews a Ghanaian internet service provider about the challenges of providing connectivity in the country.

Brazil introduces OER into federal legislation and adopts local government policy
Creative Commons reports on two new developments in Brazil around open educational resources. Thanks to sustained advocacy from OER-Brazil, legislation is being debated in Brazil that would require government-funded educational resources to be made open. Meanwhile, the municipality of São Paulo’s Department of Education has mandated that all the educational content it funds should be released under a Creative Commons licence.

United States faces legal challenges to domain name seizures
The Open Net Initiative reports that “Puerto 80 Projects, owner of one of Spain’s most popular websites, is suing the United States government for seizing their domains, rojadirecta.com and rojadirecta.org”. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and the Center for Democracy and Technology have filed an amicus brief arguing that the seizures amount to prior restraint on speech.
ONI report | Amicus brief

French government plans to extend internet censorship
La Quadrature du Net reacts to reports of a draft executive order put forward by the French Government which would several of its ministries the power to arbitrarily censor any content or service on the internet.

Turkey continues to push for restraints on internet
Voice of Amwerica summarises developments in the Turkish government’s bid for increased control of the internet.

Knight Foundation announces winners of 2011 News Challenge, plus funding for Center for Civic Media
Sixteen winners of the 2011 Knight News Challenge were annouced this week, including the Open Knowledge Foundation, Ushahidi’s Swiftriver social media parsing web application and UK-based data lab ScraperWiki. In parallel, the foundation has announced over $3m of support for MIT’s Center for Civic Media (formerly the Center for Future Civic Media) over three years. The rebranded Center will be led by Ethan Zuckerman.
News Challenge winners | Interview with Ethan Zuckerman about his new role

Information imperialism?
Adam Fish points at the dark side of US State Department funding for “Internet Freedom” projects in other countries.

Book: The Long History of New Media: Technology, historiography, and contextualizing newness
This new collection of essays takes the long view on “new” media, arguing that “the new in new media must be understood to be historically constructed… with an eye on the future, or more correctly, an eye on what we think the future will be.”

EIFL 2010 annual report
The annual report of the activities of the Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) project in 2010 celebrates the role the organisation played in getting libraries’ copyright concerns on the agenda at the World Intellectual Property Organisation, and in negotiating over $175 million of savings on commercial e-resources for libraries in its network, which stretches over 45 countries.

The state of e-Government in Latin America
The Information Civica blog has published an English translation of Juan Arellano’s comprehensive profile of e-government initiatives in Latin America.

Fair use best practices: the Israeli experience
This paper describes the authors’ experience building a coalition of scholars in Israel to decipher and defend fair use provisions in the context of education and research. The website openeducation.org.il provides a summary of the paper, and a copy of the best practice guidelines the scholars developed for teachers and researchers making use of fair use provisions in Israeli copyright law.
Paper | Summary | Guidelines

Audio: Through a Web Darkly
Participants including Ben Hammersley and Evgeny Morozov discuss how the web spreads ignorance and conspiracy, and examines ways in which an open society can mitigate these effects at this event co-sponsored by OSF.

President of Poland declares support for building open government
Poland looks set to fast track its way to open government, as reports emerged this week that the President of Poland, Bronislaw Komorowski, has declared his support for a policy to open up public sector data at a rapid pace. In May, the Polish Prime Minister announced “all information funded from public sources should be available as public property, free for everyone to use as they wish”. The work of Koalicja Otwartej Edukacji (“Coalition for Open Education”) has been vital in pushing forward this agenda.
Presidential support | Prime Ministerial announcement

WIPO’s leader calls for “positive agenda”
The Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Francis Gurry, has raised concerns among intellectual property reformers by calling for what he dubbed a “positive agenda” for future work at the UN institution, IP Watch reports. Such an agenda could move WIPO away from discussions about mandatory limitations and exceptions to copyright law which, for example, facilitate access to knowledge for disadvantaged groups.

ECLAC launches regional broadband observatory
The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) has launched a regional broadband observatory with the aim of lowering costs and increasing access in the region.

Turkey: 32 suspected “Anonymous” members arrested
The Open Net Initiative reports: “The Turkish government has arrested 32 hackers for their suspected involvement in a series of recent attacks against government sites launched by the online activist group Anonymous”. The attacks were motivated by government plans to implement nationwide filtering of the internet.

WSJ and Al-Jazeera lure whistleblowers with false promises of anonymity
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) present a legal analysis of WikiLeaks “copycats” launched earlier this year by Al Jazeera and the Wall Street Journal, warning users not to fall for “false promises of anonymity offered by these sites”. The detailed analysis follows earlier reports that the sites security measures were technically unsound.

Netherlands first European nation to adopt net neutrality
The Dutch Parliament have voted to adopt a new telecommunications law that mandates net neutrality principles. The Register reports: “The law will force ISPs and telecom operators to ensure access to all types of content, services or applications available on the network”.

EU ministers seek to ban creation of ‘hacking tools’
Computerworld reports on a recent meeting of EU Justice Ministers to discuss proposals put forward by the European Commission to combat cyberattacks, stating that “in addition to approving the Commission’s text, the ministers extended the draft to include ‘the production and making available of tools for committing offenses'”. Where such laws have been enacted in member states – in particular the UK and Germany – they have been met with fierce criticism, centred mainly on the fact most of the tools the laws seek to ban have legitimate and crucial uses in computer security work.

US: Hacking blitz drives cyberinsurance demand
Reuters reports that demand for insurance by US companies seeking to cover the costs of cyberattacks is soaring: “companies [are trying] to protect themselves against civil suits and the potential for fines by governments and regulators, but also [seeking] help paying for mundane costs like ‘sorry letters’ to customers”.

Kenya: Finance Minister uses social media to prepare budget
Global Voices reports on the Kenyan finance minister’s use of Facebook, Scribd and Google Docs to solicit public opinion on what to include in the country’s budget.

Russia: 6 month suspended sentence for forum comment
Global Voices reports on the 6-month suspended sentence handed down to former government employee and blogger Yuri Yegorov for what the court ruled were libellous comments he posted online detailing corruption in the office of the Tatarstan ombudsman: “additionally, the court ruled to destroy Yegorov’s laptop ‘as a weapon of crime'”.

Of goats and headaches
The Economist exposes the workings of the academic journal industry in this short feature.

Working paper: Social media, human rights and political change
This working paper provides a good overview of current critiques of the role of social media in political change, with a focus on the Arab Spring.

Book: The internet of elsewhere
This new book by Cyrus Farivar exposes US readers to internet cultures in Estonia, Iran, South Korea and Senegal, arguing that those who see the ‘net uniquely through a US lens miss crucial developments elsewhere.

Book review: The filter bubble
Evgeny Morozov reviews Eli Pariser’s new book “The Filter Bubble”, which he concludes “deserves praise for drawing attention to the growing power of information intermediaries whose rules, protocols, filters and motivations are not always visible.”

Video: Interview with Rufus Pollock on Open Spending
Breaking Tech interview Open Knowledge Foundation co-founder Rufus Pollock about his work to build a platform to track government spending across the world.

UN rejects copyright enforcement approach in new report on free expression
The UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Frank La Rue, has this week published a report warning governments they should refrain from restricting the flow of information on the internet, and not hold intermediaries such as internet service providers liable for content which travels across their wires. The report singled out measures designed to enforce copyright that would disconnect users from the internet, labelling them a violation of article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Report (via Article 19) | Analysis (via the Center for Democracy and Technology)

Egypt used Western tools to intercept Skype
Memos uncovered following raids of the Egyptian state security agency earlier this year show the agency was intercepting calls made using Skype before the fall of Hosni Mubarak. The wall Street Journal reports that Skype “is the communications tool of choice for dissidents around the world because its powerful encryption technology evades traditional wiretaps”, while going on to highlight “a cottage industry of US and other companies” designing tools to either block or eavesdrop on Skype conversations.

Kazakhstan: Google redirects users away from google.kz
Citing concerns over network efficiency, “but also about user privacy and free expression”, Google announced this week that it will redirect all users of its Kazakh search service google.kz to google.com. The news follows an order issued by the Ministry of Communications and Information in Kazakhstan that requires all .kz domain names to operate on servers located inside Kazakhstan.

Microsoft ready to cooperate with FSB over Skype?
Following its acquisition of the internet telephony company last month, conflicting reports have emerged this week over the extent to which Microsoft intends to cooperate with Russian state security and hand over details about the software’s functionality. This Bloomberg report repeats claims in the Russian business press that Microsoft may disclose Skype’s source code to the FSB, but has no plans to make Skype’s encryption codes available: “The FSB… won’t be able to listen to individual Skype calls with only the source codes, though the data may help it hack the service”.

Nigeria: internet and mobile shutdown during presidential inauguration
The Open Net Initiative reports that: “internet and mobile networks were inaccessible for 12 hours in Abuja during President Goodluck Jonathan’s inauguration on Sunday, May 29”.

YouTube introduces Creative Commons support
YouTube has begun offering its users the option to license their videos using a Creative Commons licence which allows third parties to remix and share their work. In conjunction with the new policy, YouTube has launched a Creative Commons video library containing 10,000 CC-licensed videos from organisations including C-SPAN and Al Jazeera, and a special CC-only search functionality.

A click away from the KGB: internet revolution in Belarus?
Belarus Digest publishes an up-to-date overview of online censorship and surveillance practice in Belarus which explains why, despite levels of internet penetration comparable to Egypt and Tunisia, Belarus is unlikely to experience its own internet revolution soon.

Digital mappers plot the future of “maptivism”
A helpful summary by Nancy Scola on the current and future use of mapping in activism with highlights from Russia, Japan, Haiti, and the Philippines.

When social networks become tools of oppression
In this column for Bloomberg, Jilian York highlights the dangers to cyber-activists in repressive regimes posed by using commercial social networking platforms, and identifies steps both companies and governments can take to mitigate against them.

Report: the case of the Syrian Electronic Army
This new report from the Open Net Initiative studies the rise of pro-government computer hackers the Syrian Electronic Army, who actively target political opposition and Western websites.

Book Review: Information in search of meaning
This multi-book review for the Australian takes in recent books by Evgeny Morozov, James Gleick, Timothy Wu and others to try and make sense of current thinking on the future of technology and society.

Evgeny Morozov guest edits the Browser
Evgeny picks his favourite technology-related articles of the week for The Browser, including insights into industrial espionage, a progress report from the Library of Congress on its project to archive the world’s tweets, and a provocative essay from Dissent magazine that argues the transparency agenda is being undermined by data fetishism.

Video: What the internet is hiding from you
The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal discusses how social media is distorting our consumption of news and culture with Eli Pariser, author of “The Filter Bubble”.

US: Georgia state copyright case puts educational fair use on trial
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on an ongoing legal case between academic publishers and Georgia State University that could define the limits of educational fair use in the digital age.

Egypt fines Mubarak for internet and phone disruption
Ousted president Hosni Mubarak and two other former Egyptian officials have been fined $90m by an Egyptian court for their role in cutting off communications services during the Egyptian uprising earlier this year.

Iran plans its own private internet
The Wall Street Journal reports: “Iran is taking steps toward an aggressive new form of censorship, a so-called national Internet that could, in effect, disconnect Iranian cyberspace from the rest of the world”.

Internet charges in Tanzania still too high despite new submarine cables
Balancing Act Africa reports that charges for internet access are failing to meet user expectations: “Seacom, which was the first submarine cable to arrive at the Dar es Salaam shores in July 2009, says bandwidth wholesale prices have fallen but retailers were still charging relatively high prices to access Internet”

The eG8 inside and out
The New York Times reports from last week’s eG8 forum of technology leaders and policy makers in Paris with the news that a shift is underway in how internet companies submit to regulation from the state. Meanwhile, ReadWriteWeb reports on an impromptu press conference held by concerned civil society actors including la Quadrature du Net’s Jérémie Zimmermann and Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig outside the venue.
Inside the eG8 | Outside the eG8

Crowds not so wise after all
This short piece in the Wall Street Journal reports on a recent Swiss study that investigates whether our increasing connectedness is detrimental to our collective intelligence. In the age of Twitter and Facebook, the study suggests, “it doesn’t take much for the smart group to become a dumb herd”.

Research: Social privacy” in networked publics – teens’ attitudes, practices, and strategies
This working paper by youth and social network expert danah boyd dispels the widespread myth that American teenagers don’t care about privacy.

Book: Peer to peer and the music industry
Matthew David’s new book, “Peer to Peer and the Music Industry: the criminalisation of sharing” takes an interdisciplinary approach to the rise of illicit filesharing, unpacking its economic, sociological and philosophical aspects.

Podcast: Econtalk on BitCoin
This podcast serves as a useful and accessible introduction to the BitCoin distributed digital currency, its likely uses, and its potential impact.

Visualisation: Wikipedia edits on a random day
These maps created by Erik Zachte show the provenance and prevalence of Wikipedia edits across various language editions.