Category Archives: Link Digest

US Government shuts down 84,000 websites by mistake
Torrent Freak report that in a second round of domain name seizures aimed at targeting counterfeit goods and child sex abuse images, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement authority wrongly pulled over 84,000 websites from the web. Many of the sites belonged to small businesses and individuals, whose visitors were diverted to a message which implied they trafficked in images of child sex abuse.

EU Civil Liberties Committee rejects mandatory EU-wide internet blocking
European Digital Rights (EDRi) Advocacy Coordinator Joe McNamee reports that this week the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee rejected flawed proposals to mandate blocking of illegal images by internet service providers. The so-called “orientation vote” sets up the negotiations at the Council of Ministers and is a – qualified – success for digital rights campaigners.

Swedish government announces fund for Internet Freedom
[via Google Translate] The Swedish government has announced its intent to use 150 million kronor ($23M) of its annual foreign aid to support for online activism and democratic development.

“Freedom Box” could protect privacy and liberate internet users
Renowned free software lawyer Eben Moglen has proposed a solution to growing concerns around internet freedom at a conference in New York. By encouraging internet users to store personal data on their own, encrypted “Freedom Box”, a low-power plug server running lightweight, free software, the consolidation of the net around platforms like Facebook could be reversed, Moglen argued, and the original, decentralised architecture of the internet restored.
NYTimes report | More details at ZDNet

How cyber-pragmatism brought down Mubarak
This feature in the Nation gives a compelling account of the core of digitally-networked activists that seeded the recent revolution in Egypt: “Oppressive social conditions do stoke a common hunger for change; however, a movement isn’t born until a core group of extraordinarily brave activists take that extra step, translating their outrage into public action”.

Should business fear Tim Wu’s FTC appointment?
This blog post for Forbes explores why the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC)’s recent appointment of net neutrality champion Tim Wu to their office of policy planning has got businesses in the US nervous, and speculates whether the news heralds upcoming anti-trust investigations against Google.

Interview: Siva Vaidhyanathan
Inside Higher Ed interviews digital scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan on the launch of his latest book “The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)”.

Facebook officials keep quiet on its role in revolts
This New York Times feature examines the “countervailing pressures” keeping Facebook quiet on its role in the uprisings in Egypt: “While it has become one of the primary tools for activists to mobilize protests and share information, Facebook does not want to be seen as picking sides for fear that some countries — like Syria, where it just gained a foothold — would impose restrictions on its use or more closely monitor users”.

How the internet gets inside us
Adam Gopnik takes an aerial – and faintly dry – view for the New Yorker of the books written recently about the internet’s likely effects on humanity: “A series of books explaining why books no longer matter is a paradox that Chesterton would have found implausible, yet there they are, and they come in the typical flavors: the eulogistic, the alarmed, the sober, and the gleeful”.

Resources: Wireless best practices
Aspiration Tech’s facilitation wiki offers superbly useful and practical guidelines for planning connectivity at events and conferences.

Audio: Crunching numbers for human rights
Listen to Patrick Ball, vice president of the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group, deliver a lunchtime talk at OSF’s offices in New York, where he uses examples from Guatemala, El Salvador, Kosovo, Colombia, Timor-Leste, and Sierra Leone to highlight the common pitfalls faced by human rights practitioners as they interpret data gathered from the field.

Intermediary liability trial begins in Thailand
The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) report that the trial of the director of online newspaper Prachatai began in Thailand last week. Ms. Chiranuch Premchaiporn (known as Jiew) faces a prison sentence of up to twenty years under Thailand’s Computer Crime Act for publishing ten potentially unlawful comments from anonymous readers, comments which Prachatai subsequently removed. Thai Netizen Network have dubbed the trial “a case study in internet and intermediary liability in Thailand”.
CDT report | Thai Netizen Network statement

Syria lifts Facebook ban
Forward Syria reports that Syrian authorities lifted a five-year ban on Facebook this week. Syrian internet users are reporting that some ISPs have also lifted a five-year block on YouTube. Forward Syria state that “no official announcement is expected to be made on the decision”.

Mass-defacement of websites mentioning Armenian genocide
Security experts are claiming that that cyber-attackers calling themselves “1923 Turkish group” have defaced more than 6,000 websites which mention the Armenian genocide, leaving messages in Turkish and English which say “Do not believe Armenia’s lies, the biggest genocide was committed by you, America”.

Brazilian communications agency moves towards surveillance superpowers
The Brazilian national communications agency Anatel has announced plans to invest in surveillance infrastructure to harvest communications traffic data from private mobile phone carrier networks. Freedom to Tinker reports: “Anatel has invested about $500,000 in building three central switches that connect directly with the private carrier’s networks. The switches are not for eavesdropping, but will provide the agency with direct access to information such as numbers dialed, date, time, amount paid and duration of all phone calls.”

Knight and Mozilla Foundations launch partnership to advance media innovation
The Knight Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation have announced a joint initiative to seed technological innovation in newsrooms. The $2.5million program will recruit 15 Knight-Mozilla fellows to embed in newsrooms including the Boston Globe, the BBC, the Guardian and Zeit Online.

The rise of the access to knowledge movement: an interview with Vera Franz
This interview with Information Program Manager Vera Franz charts the rise of the access to knowledge movement, highlighting the movement’s achievements at the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization, and detailing the challenges that remain for intellectual property reform.

Internet Freedom? there’s no app for that
This blog post from the Center for Democracy and Technology critiques both the US State Department’s Internet Freedom agenda and the mainstream media’s response to it, arguing for a more sophisticated understanding of the limitations of technical “fixes” and a focus on policy advocacy at home and abroad.

How should internet and phone companies respond in Egypt?
This blog post from the Institute for Human Rights and Business outlines steps Vodafone should have considered taking before submitting to pressure from the Egyptian authorities to shut down their mobile network at the beginning of the protests in Egypt.

India and Europe trading away access to medicines
This OSF blog post outlines the worrying implications of the free trade agreement (FTA) currently being negotiated between the EU and India: “If, as reports indicate, EU negotiators succeed in pressuring India to beef up intellectual property protection at the expense of public access rights for life-saving drugs, the FTA would seriously undercut India’s ability to produce generic, low-cost drugs, with detrimental effects on access to medicines for the developing world.”

Report: Mobile services in poor countries
This Economist report provides a useful overview of “more-than-voice” services being taken up by mobile users in the developing world, including applications to fight counterfeit medicines, track agricultural goods or provide financial services to the poor.

Report: Conficker, collaboration and the accelerated pace of cyber threats
This report into the security community’s ad-hoc collaborative effort to neutralise the Conficker computer worm concludes that “the number, scope, and sophistication of cyber threats are increasing more rapidly than the number of people vetted within the cybersecurity community capable of fighting them”.

Five books: The philosophy of technology
Evgeny Morozov picks the defining literature of the philosophy of technology for The Browser’s Five Books series, and argues that “philosophers of technology completely missed the train on the internet”.

US: Internet ‘kill switch’ legislation back in play
Proposals that grant the US president power to “switch off” the internet will be re-introduced into the Senate soon, according to this Wired report. Senator Susan Collins, who is floating the legislation, argues it would not give the US president the same power Hosni Mubarak exercised in Egypt last week in order to quell dissent.

ICE domain name seizures under fire
The US Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division was under fire this week as Senator Ron Wyden questioned its programme to seize the domain names of websites linked to copyright infringement. On Tuesday reports began to emerge that ICE had seized the domain name of Spanish website Rojadirecta.org, effectively booting it from the web despite the fact that the site has twice been declared legal by Spanish courts.

Brazil: Ministry of Culture abandons Creative Commons
This Global Voices post by Diego Casaes analyses the decision of the new Brazilian Minister of Culture, Ana de Hollanda, to remove Creative Commons licences from the Ministry’s website.

Facebook enables HTTPS so you can share without being hijacked
Facebook will soon give its users the option to use the site over secure https connection, the company announced the day after its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, appeared to have had his own account hijacked. Wired report that: “It’s not clear if the option would have prevented the hijacking of Zuckerberg’s account, but it almost certainly would have prevented Tunisia’s snooping on users if they had the protection option turned on”.

OpenLeaks goes live
OpenLeaks, the whistleblowing website set up by former WikiLeaks spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg, went public last week. Although the site is not yet operational, interested parties can now read more about the organisation’s plans and ambitions, and the practices that will set them apart from WikiLeaks. In December, Domscheit-Berg spoke to the BBC about his hopes for the site.
OpenLeaks | BBC interview

New computer program predicts likelihood of violent civil unrest
Talking Points Memo report on a project sponsored by the US Air Force Research Laboratory to devise a statistical model that predicts where civil unrest is most likely to occur around the world.

Google finds it hard to reinvent philanthropy
This New York Times article picks apart the track record of Google.org (“DotOrg”), the search giant’s philanthropic arm: “Although Google intended to tackle major problems like climate change, global poverty and the spread of pandemic diseases, it declared that DotOrg would not be “conventional” — a four-letter word in Google-speak… Nearly five years later, however, the hyperbole looks more like hubris”.

Lost & found: How Refugees United aims to be a Google for refugee search
This Wired feature tells the stories of users of Refugees United, a website for helping displaced people get back in touch with their families and friends.

On science publishing
Creative Commons’ John Wilbanks addresses the future of scientific publishing in Seed Magazine.

Report: The slide from “self-regulation” to corporate censorship
European Digital Rights (EDRi) has published a study which focuses on measures being undertaken in Europe “to outsource policing activities to private companies in the internet environment and [their] significance for fundamental rights, transparency and openness on the internet”.

Who needs textbooks?
This Newsweek feature examines open educational resources through the lens of Washington State’s Open Course Library project.

Egypt severs internet connection amid growing unrest
As anti-government demonstrations continue across Egypt, the BBC report that much of the country’s internet has been cut off from the outside world. Web watchers Renesys report that “the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet”. Such a move would be unprecedented.
BBC | Renesys

Legal experts warn ACTA is not consistent with European law
Intellectual property law experts from the Max Planck Institute, together with scholars and experts from across Europe have signed an open declaration highlighting the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement(ACTA)’s inconsistencies with European law. The signatories are requesting that EU institutions and national legislators withhold consent to the draconian intellectual property enforcement treaty until it has been made compatible with EU law.

Flat World Knowledge secures $15 million in series B funding
Flat World Knowledge, one of the largest commercial publishers of open educational resources in the world, has secured $15 million in series B funding from a group of investors which includes Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments and Bessemer Venture Partners.

UAE aims to create DNA database in 10-year project
Gulf News report that the United Arab Emirates plan to build a comprehensive forensic DNA database covering the country’s entire population over the next ten years.

Iran internet censorship targeting Tor
The Tor project report on new developments in Iranian cyber censorship that are making it harder for people inside Iran to access the Tor anonymisation network: “It appears that one of the five Iranian ISPs is experimenting in blocking censorship circumvention tools such as Tor, Freegate, Ultrasurf, and Hot Spot Shield”.

The inside story of how Facebook responded to the Tunisian hacks
This Atlantic feature provides in-depth detail of the former Tunisian government’s cyber-attacks against its own citizens in the early days of the recent revolution: “After more than ten days of intensive investigation and study, Facebook’s security team realized something very, very bad was going on. The country’s Internet service providers were running a malicious piece of code that was recording users’ login information when they went to sites like Facebook.”

A day in the life of a digital librarian
Dorothea Salo participates in the 6th biannual “Library Day in the Life” project, documenting a typical day’s work for a digital information professional. Anyone with “stale, stereotyped” ideas about librarians will find themselves surprised.

Map: National DNA Databases
The Council for Responsible Genetics have produced a map showing the countries around the world with operational and planned forensic DNA databases, in conjunction with a detailed country-by-country report on the issue published this week. They warn that “resources must be mobilized to establish strong standards and universal safeguards for this most invasive form of surveillance and profiling”.
Map | Report

Open grantmaking in practice, not just in principle
Outgoing director of the White House Open Government Initiative Beth Noveck points out the wider implications of last week’s $500m grant for open educational materials: “Since grants represent half of the federal budget this is important news with potentially powerful implications for changing the culture of grantmaking”.

Open Spectrum for development: policy brief
This policy brief produced by the Association for Progressive Communications details how spectrum use has developed over the past eighty years, examines current issues and management practices and makes the case for open spectrum.

Audio: Studio 360 episode on surveillance
An entertaining, up-to-date and accessible overview of surveillance and data privacy online and off, produced by US public radio show Studio 360. Includes segments on security cameras, social networks, smart phones, cookies and facial recognition technology.

US: New higher education initiative grants $500 million for OER
A new $2 billion initiative jointly announced this week by the United States’ Departments of Labor and Education will set aside $500 million for the creation of open educational resources at community colleges. Under the program, grantees “will be required to license to the public… all work created with the support of the grant … under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License”

Strasbourg rules libel lawsuit “success fees” violate free expression
Lawyers acting for claimants in privacy and libel cases should no longer be allowed to recover a “success fee” from defendants, the European Court of Human Rights ruled this week. NGOs including Index on Censorship and English PEN intervened in the case to express serious concern that the threat of disproportionate and costly libel cases was having a chilling effect on free expression.

Brazil’s new Minister of Culture to reverse reform process?
Concern is mounting among the access to knowledge community in Brazil that the country’s new Culture Minister, Ana de Hollanda, will reverse the direction of a five-year public consultation that could have led to vital copyright reforms. Last year, Consumers International rated Brazil as having one of the most restrictive copyright regimes in the world.

More details emerge about Stuxnet cyberwarfare attack
The New York Times report claims that a secret Israeli nuclear facility was used to test the Stuxnet worm. Stuxnet, a computer virus that targets industrial systems, was detected in 2010 and was speculated to have the Iranian Natanz nuclear facility as its ultimate target: “the operations [in Israel], as well as related efforts in the United States, are among the newest and strongest clues suggesting that the virus was designed as an American-Israeli project to sabotage the Iranian [nuclear] program.”

EU law not tough enough for online piracy, says Brussels
In a report evaluating the success of the EU’s 2004 Directive on Intellectual Property Rights, the European Commission have concluded that current laws are not strong enough to combat online copyright infringement, and that new powers to compel internet service providers to enforce copyright more proactively should now be considered.

Quelle Twitter revolution en Tunisie?
This French-language piece published by the collective Tunisian blog Nawaat.org uses data to examine the significance of Twitter in the revolution in Tunisia, and posits four theories on the role Twitter played in events there.

Middle East: A Closer Look at Tunisia’s Uprising
This Global Voices round up of reactions to the Tunisian revolution from bloggers in the Middle East gives a broad overview of challenges yet to come.

OECD report: Reducing Systemic Cybersecurity Risk
This clear-headed report produced by Ian Brown and Peter Sommer for the OECD concludes that “very few single cyber-related events have the capacity to cause a global shock”. Nevertheless “Governments… need to make detailed preparations to withstand and recover from a wide range of unwanted cyber events, both accidental and deliberate”.

What future does Facebook have?
This blog post by economist J. Bradford DeLong highlights a recent feature in the Financial Times magazine, showing how Facebook’s approach to helping people find the information they want on the web contrasts with that of Google and Wikipedia, and may ultimately lead to a narrowing of the information to which we are routinely exposed online.

Slavoj Žižek: Good manners in the age of WikiLeaks
In this essay for the London Review of Books, Slavoj Žižek deconstructs WikiLeaks’ true challenge to power, via Batman, Robin, and the Joker: “We shouldn’t forget that power comprises not only institutions and their rules, but also legitimate (‘normal’) ways of challenging it (an independent press, NGOs etc).”

Books: “Net Neutrality: Towards a Co-regulatory solution” by Christopher T. Marsden
Despite its rather dry title, this 2010 book remains one of the best out there to address the contentious debate surrounding regulating access to networks in the US and Europe. It is published by Bloomsbury Academic, an experimental commercial publishing venture run by former Information Program sub-Board member Frances Pinter that makes all of its titles available for free download under a Creative Commons licence.

EFF calls for immediate action to defend Tunisian activists against government cyber-attacks
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have pointed Tunisian citizens participating in ongoing demonstrations and protests to several tools intended to protect them from their own government’s attacks on login credentials. They report that Tunisian authorities are siphoning off the usernames and passwords of Tunisians logging in to Google, Yahoo, and Facebook, using a JavaScript-based attack. The EFF further call on the three US companies to take action to protect the privacy of their users “by alerting them of the potential compromise of their accounts”.

UK commits to libel reform
The UK’s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has announced details of proposed reforms to defamation law in the UK. Commenting after his speech, Clegg paid tribute to the Libel Reform Campaign “who have led the debate on this issue for so long”. The UK law has become notorious for enabling “libel tourism”, with well-resourced plaintiffs from countries such as Saudi Arabia and Ukraine suing investigative journalists and organisations like Human Rights Watch and Global Witness.

India to spy on every net user in the country?
The Indian Intelligence Bureau (IB) have asked internet service providers (ISPs) to retain records of their users’ online activity for six months. IB have also asked telecoms operators “to put in place a system that can uniquely identify any person using the internet across the country”.

Icelandic MP fights US demand for Twitter account details
The US Department of Justice has ordered Twitter to hand over account details of several people it believes are connected with Wikileaks. One of them, Birgitta Jonsdottir, is an Icelandic member of Parliament. Twitter fought to make the DoJ subpoenas public. It is widely speculated that other online media services have also been subject to similar orders, but have not publicised them.

State of Washington to offer online materials instead of textbooks
The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges has begun a program to develop shareable, low-cost, online instructional materials for its community and technical colleges. This report in the Chronicle of Higher Education details the thinking behind the new “Open Course Library”, and hints at the efficiency it could eventually bring to higher education in America and across the world.

Experts advise Brussels to call for limited “preferential use” period on digitised public works
Experts in cultural preservation have advised the European Commission to limit to seven years the period of time companies like Google, who digitise works in the public domain, can exclude competing commercial uses of the resulting works: “During a period of preferential use, a public domain book, for instance, that was digitized by Google would be available only through a library’s Web site, through Google’s Web site, or through non-commercial Web sites for that seven-year period.”

“A Walled Wide Web for Nervous Autocrats”
Evgeny Morozov uses Russia’s recent decision to mandate the use of open source software for all its public institutions by 2015 as a platform to speculate on how global competition in software and internet services might clash with issues of national security in the future.

African Human Rights Case Law Analyser
The African Human Rights Case Law Analyser, launched jointly by the Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa and HURIDOCS in November last year, provides easy access to primary case law, text and analysis of the decisions of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The tool is available in English and French.

The Next Net
In light of recent developments around net neutrality and online censorship, Douglas Rushkoff makes the argument for redesigning the network from scratch: “I propose we abandon the Internet, or at least accept the fact that it has been surrendered to corporate control like pretty much everything else in Western society. It was bound to happen, and its flawed, centralized architecture made it ripe for conquest.”

Special Report: Music industry’s lavish lobby campaign
According to analysis from the Center for Responsive Politics, the past decade has seen the music industry spend tens of millions of dollars on lobbying US government officials at home and abroad for more restrictive copyright laws. In this special report, IP Watch detail the spending breakdown, and speculate as to its impact.

Will the real mobile impact please stand up?
Steve Song demands better research into the impact of mobile phones in Africa.

Audio: Amanda Cox on data visualisation
Amanda Cox creates interactive data visualisations for the New York Times. In this interview with CBC’s Spark radio show, she speaks about the challenges and rewards of telling stories through data.

Independent media sites in Belarus reportedly hijacked during election
Hal Roberts of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society details reports that BELPAK, the Belarusian national ISP, redirected visitors trying to access independent media sites to mirrors of those sites with subtly different content during last month’s election. Meanwhile, Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter report on how Swedish firm Ericsson supplies surveillance equipment to Belarusian authorities.
Roberts | Dagens Nyheter

Venezuela passes new law drastically limiting internet freedoms
The Venezuelan National Assembly has approved changes to media and telecommunications law that will place burdens on internet service and digital media providers to restrict access to content and messages that “incite or promote hatred”, “foment citizens’ anxiety or alter public order”, “disrespect authorities”, “encourage assassination”, or “constitute war propaganda”, expanding existing broadcasting regulations to the internet. The Committee to Protect Journalists is calling on President Hugo Chavez to veto the reforms.

FCC approves net neutrality rules for fixed line internet
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has approved new regulation aimed at preserving net neutrality on fixed line internet connections. The controversial rules have been criticised for setting different standards for fixed line and mobile operators.

How Wikileaks killed Spain’s anti-p2p law
Ars Technica report that a new law that would have made it easier for judicial authorities to shut down websites that link to copyright-infringing content has been rejected by the Spanish Parliament. The news comes after US diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks and Spanish national newspaper El Pais revealed significant US pressure on the Spanish government to crack down on copyright infringement in Spain.

Turkmenistan clamps down on mobile and internet users
Amnesty International is calling on Turkmenistan’s telecommunications authority to immediately lift the operating licence suspension it has imposed on MTS, the Russian mobile operator and largest service provider in Turkmenistan. The licence was suspended on 21 December following reports that MTS was coming under pressure from authorities in Turkmenistan to share a greater proportion of its profits. The country’s only alternative provider, Altyn Asyr, is state-owned, and blocks access to independent news sites and the websites of opposition groups.

Hackers demonstrate cheap and easy way to intercept GSM mobile phone calls
Hackers at the 27th annual Chaos Computer Congress have demonstrated a low cost way to intercept phone calls and text messages sent over the majority of the world’s mobile networks. The news follows on from a presentation to the same conference the previous year, which showed how the encryption of the GSM mobile network standard could be cracked. The new hack is understood to be a direct response to GSM industry groups’ lacklustre reactions to the security flaw at that time.

“Internet blackout” protest at new Hungarian media law
La Quadrature du Net and the Pirate Bay are among those who promised to “black out” their websites on 5 January in protest against a new law passed in Hungary at the end of last year which, among other restrictive measures, requires bloggers to register with the government. Websites replaced their homepages with code provided by blackout4hungary.net, transforming them into black screens containing a short, stark protest message.

Report: DDoS attacks against independent media and human rights sites
The Berkman Center for Internet and Society have released a 66-page report of their investigations into distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against independent media and human rights sites. The report includes an introduction to DDoS, a survey of current experiences with DDoS in nine countries including Russia, Kazakhstan, Egypt and Tunisia, and initial recommendations for organisations and funders on how to mitigate against such attacks.

Video: Hackers in the age of Chaos
The keynote lecture at the 27th annual Chaos Computer Congress was delivered by Dutch hacker and activist Rop Gonggrijp. Measured and thoughtful, it plots a way forward for a community which, in the wake of the Wikileaks controversy, has found itself very much in the international spotlight.
Video | Transcript

Civic hackers seek to find their feet in India
This feature article from India’s Centre for Internet and Society maps India’s nascent community of civic hackers, “programmer(s) driven by the urge to create applications that will allow fellow citizens to help themselves and further the democratic process.”

Opening up spectrum can prevent Kenya from running out
The Association for Progressive Communications present alternatives to Kenya’s current strategy for allocating spectrum that they argue could ensure greater access to affordable communications into the future.

Open Access 2010 in Review
Peter Suber presents a thorough and compelling review of open access milestones in 2010 for Open Access News.

Book: The Net Delusion
“The Net Delusion”, a book by Evgeny Morozov published this week, calls on policy-makers to reject cyber-utopianism in their quest to encourage democracy around the world. Reviewing the book, The Economist calls it provocative, enlightening and highly readable, while Adam Theirer accuses Morozov of over-playing his contrarian streak.
Economist | Theirer

Venezuela: Last minute law proposes tight internet controls
The Venezuelan government has introduced a bill to reform existing telecommunications law in order to give authorities greater power to regulate and control the internet. Proposals include the creation of a national Network Access Point to give the government the ability to “manage” all Venezuelan internet traffic, as well as measures to prevent anonymity online. “Watershed” proposals, regulating different types of content at different times of day in order to protect minors, are also said to be included in the bill, which will come before the outgoing National Assembly just weeks before it is replaced in 5th January by newly elected members. Critics have called the proposals arbitrary and unworkable.

Trouble brewing at the UN over internet governance
The United Nations is preparing to renew the mandate of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) for a further five years. IP Watch report that civil society and industry groups are jointly preparing a letter of protest against the UN’s decision to exclude them from processes intended to improve the IGF. Meanwhile, Brazil has called on the UN to establish an international body that would allow governments “to multilaterally address efforts by some to control the internet”, in reaction to recent unilateral action taken by the United States to suppress WikiLeaks.
IGF | Brazil

Hungarian Government ready to give access to communist-era files
Politics.hu report that the Hungarian government is likely to give the go-ahead to publish classified data on communist-era informers. The data was originally stored on magnetic tapes and has been digitised with the oversight of a committee of experts headed by historian Janos Kenedi. Kenedi has previously argued that the files should be made public long before their official declassification date of 2060.

Berkman Center announces digital public library initiative
The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School have announced a new initiative, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to plan a “Digital Public Library of America”. The planning program aims to define the scope, architecture, costs and administration of the library, and will be guided by a steering committee that includes Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, historian Robert Darnton, and freedom of information activist Carl Malamud.

“Cuba opens new online frontline in war of words”
The UK Guardian reports that Cuba has unveiled its own version of Wikipedia – “EcuRed” – this week. The site was developed by Cuba’s Youth Club of Computing and Electronics, an affiliate of the Communist Youth Union. Unlike Wikipedia, the site requires would-be editors to seek authorisation from administrators before they can make changes.

Global Voices: Around the world with WikiLeaks
Global Voices comes into its own with this collection of reactions from countries and regions around the world to the leaked US Embassy cables.
Africa | China | Ecuador | Latin America | Morocco | Singapore | Taiwan | Tunisia

In defence of DDoS
Evgeny Morozov uses the recent campaign of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, launched by internet collective Anonymous against corporations who have denied goods and services to WikiLeaks, to discuss if and when DDoS attacks should be viewed as a valid form of civil disobedience in this article for Slate.com: “While Anonymous’ attacks fall short of Rawls’ high standard for civil disobedience, we should not prejudge all DDoS attacks to be illegitimate.”

How data analysis helped secure conviction in historic human rights case
Benetech founder Jim Fruchterman provides a detailed account of how the work of the Benetech Human Rights Program helped lead to the conviction of two former police officers in Guatemala, for the forced disappearance of student and union leader Edgar Fernando García in 1984: “The García case is the first in Guatemala based primarily on archive documents and paves the way for judges to trust these records – and statistical findings – as evidence in future trials.”

@MedvedevRussia, are you listening?
A review of Russian President Dmitri Medvedev’s first six months on Twitter, as seen through the Russian blogosphere: “Apple should almost be paying him for the publicity”.

Goodbye to the printed newspaper?
John Lanchester examines the state of the newspaper industry, and plots one path towards a viable future, in this long essay for the London Review of Books.

Leaving Facebook
A Diaspora beta tester details her experiences for Technology Review: “The goal isn’t to replace Facebook or any other service as a way to interact online but to eliminate the need to store private data on multiple websites, many of which seem geared to an all-or-nothing sharing of personal information.”

Podcast: Milton Mueller on internet governance
Milton Mueller, Professor and Director of the Telecommunications Network Management Program at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies, tries to bring back some cyber-libertarianism to the internet governance discussion for the podcast series “Surprisingly Free”.

EFF takes stand against internet censorship
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) this week asked its supporters to join it in taking a stand against internet censorship, condemning the extra-judicial censorship of WikiLeaks in the United States: “Like it or not, WikiLeaks has become the emblem for one of the most important battles for our rights that is likely to come along in our lifetimes. We cannot sit this one out.”

Russia drops piracy case
Russian authorities have dropped charges of software piracy against Russian environmental NGO Baikal Environmental Wave after Microsoft indicated it would not support the case. Police raided the group’s offices in Irkutsk in January this year, confiscating 12 computers in what environmentalists say was a politically motivated operation.

Disruption to mobile services in Turkmenistan may be linked to licence negotiations
Reports are appearing on the Russian-language web that telecommunications company MTS is coming under pressure from authorities in Turkmenistan to share a greater proportion of its profits, ahead of negotiations for a new licence to operate in the country. MTS services went dark on 3 December in the capital Ashgabat due, according to a spokesperson, to an “accident…not caused by our company”. Via Google Translate: “Analysts do not rule out that the aspiration of the Turkmen authorities to take control of an extremely lucrative telecommunications business is related to a critical decrease in receipt of money in the coffers [from] the sharp drop in sales of Turkmen gas.”

Phone messages to boost African farmers
The International Finance Corporation and the Soros Economic Development Fund have invested $2.5 million in Esoko, a mobile-driven platform that delivers real-time market data to African farmers. The system is currently being piloted in northern Ghana. “The farmers seem to be getting between 20-40% revenue improvements,” Esoko founder Mark Davies told Reuters.

Venezuelan regulator proposes more controls on Internet content
A memo written by the national telecoms regulator of Venezuela to the country’s Vice President has been published by TV network Globovision. The memo recommends that the regulator, Conatel, be empowered to remove content from the internet and to apply sanctions where necessary, and includes outlandish proposals for “supervising” social networks at key times of day when they are used by minors.

WikiLeaks controversy shines a light on the limits of techno-politics
This blog post by writer Tom Slee outlines the challenge that the unfolding case of WikiLeaks presents to those who have previously eulogised the net for its disintermediating qualities and transformative potential: “The cables prompt some tough questions, but the fault lines those questions reveal run perpendicular to digital attitudes, not parallel…the Internet is a new terrain, but the battles being fought on it are old ones.”

Briefing: routing on the internet
This overview from Security Week provides a fairly accessible introduction to current issues in internet routing and their likely effects on the security of the net.

The mismeasurement of science
Michael Nielsen discusses the difficulties of measuring scientific contributions: “heavy reliance on a small number of metrics is bad for science”.

Russia: Competing models of internet politics
This Global Voices feature characterises the many sides of public debate currently taking place in Russia about the role of the internet in politics: “Despite the government ideologists’ efforts to sell the idea of preserving the hybrid regime by introducing superficial – though hi-tech – innovations, the internet provides a new environment that no one, not even the government, can fully control”.

Video: Tom Steinberg on Open Government Data
Presenting at the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Government Data Camp last month, mySociety’s Tom Steinberg attempts to chart a smooth course for the open data movement now it has the attentions of government. You can watch the talk on video, where Tom is joined by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt, or read a transcript of the talk on Tom’s blog.
Video | Transcript

US shutters 82 sites in crackdown on downloads and counterfeit goods
Following investigations by federal agents, 82 websites accused of supplying counterfeit goods or facilitating music piracy had their domain names “seized” on Monday this week by ICE, the United States’ Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Warrants for the seizures were issued by a District court.

Free media under siege in Egyptian elections
Foreign Policy reports details of a concerted media crackdown in Egypt ahead of last Sunday’s parliamentary elections. Mass text messaging and live television coverage of election-day events are also reported to have been restricted.

Internet blocking: key decisions in the pipeline for Europe
European Digital Rights (EDRI) report that a legislative process to implement internet blocking of images of child sex abuse is about to accelerate. Campaigners fear that the proposals will establish a Europe-wide online censorship infrastructure ready to be extended to more controversial blocking requests, while at the same time doing little to combat the sexual abuse of children. EDRI have prepared a booklet aimed at informing EU officials about the complex issues surrounding the issue, which is available in several European languages.
Report |Booklet

European Commission launches investigation into Google
The European Commission has launched an anti-trust investigation into Google’s business practices, following complaints from three companies, including Microsoft, that the online giant is abusing its dominant position in the web search market to promote its other services. The investigation will be the first of its kind directed at Google and is likely to last several years.

India district bans cell phones for unmarried women
A local council in Uttar Pradesh state, India, has banned unmarried women from carrying mobile phones, following concerns phones were being used by young couples who planned to marry against their parents’ wishes.

Shunned profiling technology on the verge of a comeback
The Wall Street Journal reports that deep packet inspection, “one of the most potentially intrusive technologies for profiling and targeting Internet users with ads”, is about to make a comeback in the United States, thanks to deals being struck by two ad-targeting companies, Phorm Inc and Kindsight Inc. The news comes two years after an outcry by privacy advocates in the US and Britain appeared to kill the technology.

If Amazon has silenced Wikileaks…
Ethan Zuckerman reacts to reports that Amazon has responded to political pressure from the US Senate and booted whistle-blowing website Wikileaks from their cloud-hosted web server service: “If Amazon did respond to pressure… it should open a conversation about the responsibilities of cloud providers towards clients who host political content. If Amazon’s policy is ‘we can terminate you if we’re uncomfortable with what you say’, that cannot be acceptable to anyone who is concerned with freedom of speech online.”

Uganda: ICT boom for economy is a bust for some women
Anecdotal evidence that the rise of mobile phone ownership in Uganda has also seen a rise in “SMS stalking, monitoring and control of partners’ whereabouts”, is backed up by a new study showing that nearly half of mobile phone owners had problems with spouses in relation to their use: “The research shows that communities are having difficulties coming to terms with the power of technology to bring about freedom for women.”

What to watch out for in Free Trade Agreements with the United States
This detailed factsheet, produced by Médecins Sans Frontiers, is aimed at civil society groups operating in countries with whom the United States is negotiating Free Trade Agreements. It explains some of the technical terms associated with new patent and enforcement provisions, and these provisions’ implications for access to medicines.

Africa Portal
The Africa Portal aims to equip users with research and information on Africa’s current policy issues. It includes an open access repository of over 2,500 books journals and digital documents. “A portion of the digital documents housed in the library have been digitized for the first time as an undertaking of the Africa Portal project. Facilitating new digitization projects is a core feature of the Africa Portal, which aims to improve access and visibility for African research.”

Podcast: Radio Berkman
In the latest edition of the excellent Radio Berkman podcast series, David Weinberger interviews Joseph Reagle about his new book, “Good Faith Collaboration”, which examines the evolution of cultures of collaboration in the Wikipedia community.

Data visualisation: Mapping a day in the life of Twitter
This 3-minute video plots 530,000 tweets (the sum of all geo-coded tweets posted to Twitter on one day in November) on a map showing, in accelerated form, a day in the life of Twitter across the world.