The Barefoot Technologist

US: Obama order sped up wave of cyberattacks against Iran
The New York Times reports revelations about “Operation Olympic Games”, a US-sponsored cyberattack programme initiated under George Bush and accelerated by President Obama, which targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities. The programme included the development of the Stuxnet worm. Separately this week, Google have announced that it will issue a new warning to users of its email service if it suspects state-sponsored attackers are attempting to compromise their data or computers.
“Operation Olympic Games” | Google

Thailand: Court convicts newspaper director on computer crimes charge
Human Rights Watch reports on a court’s decision in Thailand last week to convict Chiranuch Premchaiporn (the director of online newspaper Prachatai) under Thailand’s Computer Crime Act, for publishing ten comments from anonymous readers which insulted the monarchy. Although the one year prison sentence was suspended, the case still “a criminal conviction for an internet intermediary in a lese majeste case marks a new low in Thailand’s intolerance of free speech”.

South Africa: Campaigners unite against secrecy bill
The Guardian reports on a new campaign to stop South Africa’s proposed new law the Protection of State Information Bill. The campaign has support from human rights lawyers, newspaper editors and Nobel prize-winning writers. The proposed law would impose heavy penalties on whistleblowers and journalists who “possess, leak or publish state secrets”.

ITU regulation reforms leaked
A compilation of all the proposals to amend the International Telecommunication Regulations, the international treaty which activists fear will be redrafted at December’s meeting of the International Telecommunications Union in order to grant governments greater control of the internet, has been leaked to the Internet Governance Project blog. Further analysis of the documents is promised by the coalition of academics who make up the project.

European Blind Union launch campaign for accessible reading materials treaty
Ahead of treaty negotiations to establish exceptions to copyright that would facilitate greater access to reading materials for the blind at the World Intellectual Property Organisation, the European Blind Union have launched a campaign encouraging people to contact EU governments and ask them about their position on the issue.

The spy who came in from the code
This feature for Columbia Journalism Review explores how journalists working with dissidents in the Middle East have been slow to react to the growing sophistication of surveillance technology, putting their sources at risk by failing to adopt appropriate information security measures.

On Avaaz
Jillian York outlines why she does not donate to the campaigns group Avaaz, in this detailed post critiquing their position in the human rights and technology community.

The war for India’s internet
Writing for Foreign Policy magazine, Rebecca MacKinnon reports on the growing protests against efforts to censor the internet in India.

What data can and cannot do
A thought-provoking piece by the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Jonathan Gray that attempts to dampen some of the hype surrounding data-driven journalism: “The thought of tethering our reportage, analyses and reflection to chunks of data-given truth is certainly consoling. But the notion that data gives us special direct access to the way things are is – for the most part – a chimera.” The winners of the Global Editors Network and the European Journalism Centre’s Data Journalism Awards, announced last week, provide a glimpse of the state of the art.
Opinion | Awards

Young scientists embrace crowd-funding
A short feature from the New York Times profiling a new crowd-funding platform for scientists and some of the research projects that are emerging from it.

Ten top tools for cause campaigners
A US-focussed list of useful software tools for campaigners.

Video: How do credentials change as education goes online?
A debate between Stanford President John Hennessy and Khan Academy founder Salman Khan about the future of education, filmed at a recent conference in the US.

Video: Witness/Storyful Human Rights Channel
Witness and Storyful have partnered to launch a new human rights video channel on YouTube. The channel features a mix of breaking news, activism videos and under-covered investigations, curated around a selection of human rights stories.

Spying Trojan targets Iranian and Syrian web dissidents
Sophos’s Naked Security blog reports on the discovery, by a researcher at Canada’s Citizen Lab, of a fake version of a popular censorship evasion tool called Simurgh, used by Iranian and Syrian dissidents. The fake version includes malicious spyware that “keeps a log of your username, machine name, every window clicked and keystroke entered [and] attempts to submit these logs to some servers located in the United States, but registered to an entity that appears to be based in Saudi Arabia”.
Naked Security | Citizen Lab

China: Sina Weibo’s unveils new censorship system
The Wall Street Journal reports that the popular Chinese micro-blogging platform Sina Weibo has introduced a new system of warnings and account suspensions enforcing rules preventing the spread of “untrue” and “sensitive” information. The new regulations will also reward users who link their accounts to their official ID numbers or mobile phone numbers, and punish those who publicly expose other people’s private information.

Europe: Important votes pave way for ACTA rejection; negotiation documents leaked; Dutch reject treaty
In the latest developments surrounding the flawed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, La Quadrature du Net reports that three of the four committees of the European Parliament tasked with investigating the treaty have voted to adopt opinions in favour of a “no” vote its ratification in Europe. Earlier, European Digital Rights had published analysis of leaked negotiating documents dating back to 2008 that show that the European Commission have been making false claims while trying to encourage Parliament to vote in favour of ACTA later this Summer. Meanwhile, the Register reports that “the Netherlands Parliament has decided that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement can be interpreted in ways that are inimical to privacy and internet freedom, and that it therefore should not be signed”.
La Quadrature | EDRi | Register

Europe: Commissioner resolves to act on net neutrality
Following a report from EU regulators highlighting the scale of internet service provider interference with internet traffic in Europe, Commissioner Neelie Kroes has announced she will make recommendations to the EU on preserving net neutrality, ZDNet reports. However, digital rights group La Quadrature du Net fear the recommendations will not do enough to truly protect the open internet, and are pushing for legislative intervention.
ZDNet | La Quadrature

Nigeria: Government invests in IXPs
This report for Nigeria’s Punch newspaper details developments in government support for Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), which are “crucial for the development of the internet in any country”.

US: Google releases new copyright enforcement transparency report
The Electronic Frontier Foundation covers a new report released by Google last week detailing the number and nature of requests it has acted upon to block websites that allegedly infringe copyright from featuring in its search results.

Big picture: Flame and Cyberwar
A newly-discovered piece of malware called Flame, detected on hundreds of computers in the Middle East, has made front-page news this week. The virus, which Ars Technica describes as an “engineering marvel to behold”, has the ability to destroy data, monitor conversations through the computer’s internal microphone and even scan the contact lists of nearby Bluetooth-enabled devices like mobile phones. Some in the security community have released skeptical statements, criticising the media for equating the size of the malware with its impact or importance (Naked Security). A commentator for CNN points out that the origins of the Flame discovery – it was revealed by a security firm working for the International Telecommunications Union, a UN body widely believed to be attempting to secure itself a bigger role in internet governance – are significant. Talking Points Memo publishes the views of some experts that claims Flame represents a new level of cyberwar are ill-informed, reflecting general misunderstandings about cyberwar that were explored recently by Evgeny Morozov for Slate.
Ars Technica | Naked Security | CNN | TPM | Slate

“In Praise of ProPublica”
The Atlantic profile the twice Pulitzer prize-winning non-profit operation now in its fifth year.

Can an algorithm be wrong?
In this essay for new open access journal LIMN, Tarleton Gillespie examines the politics of algorithms used by Twitter and other online platforms: “the criteria that animate the Trends algorithm also presume a shape and character to the public they intend to measure, and in doing so, help to construct publics in that image.”

Science blogging in sub-Saharan Africa
Global Voices’ Lova Rakotomalala publishes a round-up of posts from the sub-Saharan blogosphere addressing the continuing desire for more engagement between scientists and citizens in Africa.

An open letter to Hillary Clinton on Internet Freedom
Sunil Abraham of India’s Centre for Internet and Society posts an open letter to the US Secretary of State based on a recent presentation made at the Internet at Liberty conference last week. His message: recognise the value of access to knowledge and privacy, and “protect the plural foundation of our networked society”.

How crowdsourcing is transforming the science of psychology
This short feature for the Economist details how behavioural researchers are using crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in their research. Some classic experiments, once performed only on undergraduates in Western universities, turn out to have startlingly different results when they are run using a global pool of participants. “The ability to run experiments quickly, cheaply and globally promises to transform psychologists’ understanding of human behaviour”.

Electric Archaeology: reflections on losing a website
A “digital humanist” dissects the wreckage of a crowd-sourcing web project “annihilated” by technical failures, in this instructive blog post: “The hardest pill to swallow is when you know it’s your own damned fault”.

“Why TED is a massive, money-soaked orgy of self-congratulatory futurism”
Alex Pareene argues that the Technology, Education, Design conference franchise (TED) is just a “good video podcast with delusions of grandeur”, in this biting op-ed for Alternet.

Pakistan: Twitter goes through weekend of censorship
Global Voices reports on a Twitter blackout in Pakistan last weekend, established by Pakistani Internet Service Providers at the behest of the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority. Twitter service was restored nine hours later, seemingly in response to public outcry.

European Commission urges Google to change search practices
The New York Times reports that the European Commission have warned Google to change its search practices or face possible antitrust proceedings: “In issuing the ultimatum, European regulators sent their strongest signal yet that they believe Google, which has long said its search results are neutral, tips the scales in its favour”.

Facebook users force vote on privacy changes
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) reports that Facebook will be forced to allow its users to vote on a new privacy policy, after more than the required 7,000 users lodged comments on the proposed changes. The vote will only be binding if more than 30% of Facebook’s users participate.

Open Access advocates issue call to action on US research funding policy
Open Access advocates have issued a call to action, asking those who favour public access to publicly funded research in the US to sign a petition calling for President Obama “to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research”. The groups hope to raise 25,000 signatures in under 30 days. The Chronicle of Higher Education provides useful background to the story.
Call to action | Petition | Background

Civil Society groups protest ITU process over internet governance fears
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reports that more than thirty civil society organisations have signed a letter of protest calling on the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a secretive UN agency, to open up the planning process around this December’s World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT). Civil society groups fear the conference, from which they are currently broadly excluded, will be used to re-open negotiations on an international telecommunications treaty in order to allow greater government control of the internet. Global Voices provide background to the story.
EFF | Global Voices

Exporting copyright: Inside the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership
This long report by Ars Technica from the Dallas round of negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), throws the spotlight on the secret new treaty critics fear contains draconian intellectual property enforcement measures, and the organised resistance that has sprung up to face it.

“Exit, stage left some of the Masters of the Universe”
Russel Southwood analyses how telecoms business models are evolving in Africa.

“Private: some search engines make money by not tracking users”
Ars Technica profiles three new search businesses that make a virtue out of protecting their users’ privacy.

“The rise of Europe’s private internet police”
Rebecca MacKinnon puts the spotlight on the increasing role of private internet companies in policing their users’ behaviour, in this feature for Foreign Policy magazine.

Newspapers: building a “print edition” for the web
British designer and programmer Phil Gyford explains in this blog post what inspired him to use the Guardian’s content API to make a “print edition for the web”, and details the design choices he made during the project.

“Universities that offer the elite to all”
The Financial Times profile Coursera, a for-profit online educational resources platform.

Book: Accelerating development using the web
Tim Unwin promotes a new volume edited by George Sadowsky and supported by the Rockerfeller Foundation, the World Wide Web Foundation and the UNDP, which explores “ways through which the Web can be used by some of the world’s poorest and most marginalised people to enhance their lives”.

Video: Howard Rheingold on web literacy
This video from the MIT Media Lab features a lecture by Howard Rheingold on the five essential survival skills he thinks we all need in today’s connected world.

Silence is a Commons
This 1983 address by Ivan Illich argues that “Computers are doing to communication what fences did to pastures and cars did to streets”.

Brazil: Lawmakers approve forensic DNA database regulations
Genewatch UK and The Center for Technology and Society, at Rio de Janeiro’s Fundação Getulio Vargas have written to Brazil’s president asking him to reject a proposed law regulating the collection of forensic DNA, following its approval last week in Congress. They have expressed concerns that the regulations do not mandate the destruction of biological samples, or provide enough clarity about the timescale for retention of innocent people’s records.

US: FBI demand “wiretap-ready” websites
CNET reports on discussions between the FBI and various social network, VoIP and email providers about new proposals that would require them to build security backdoors into their products, in order to provide access to their users’ communications to FBI agents.

UK: Proposed libel reform makes Parliamentary timetable
A long-awaited proposed law to reform the UK’s draconian libel provisions has finally made it onto the Parliamentary timetable. Jonathan Heawood, Director of English PEN, who have led the campaign for reform, welcomed the news: “Over the past three years, the Libel Reform Campaign has shown how our unfair libel laws are causing legitimate books to be pulped and publishers to engage in unnecessary self-censorship”.

Avaaz President answers cyber attack doubters
Last week, online campaigns group Avaaz announced it had been the victim of intense cyber-attacks, and launched a fundraising campaign to beef up its security. The move was greeted with some scepticism by the security community, and requests for more information on the attacks. Ricken Patel, the president of Avaaz, has spoken to Teck Week Europe to answer some of the criticisms levelled at the campaign.

Online education developments roundup
The New York Times reports on two recent developments in online learning in the US. The first is a partnership – edX – between Harvard and MIT, and the second is a major cash investment in an online education startup called Coursera.
edX | Coursera

Spotlight: Facebook
Ahead of their stock market launch in a few weeks’ time, Facebook have released a video showcasing their company and outlining their future ambitions. In his essay “The economics of digital sharecropping”, Nicholas Carr outlines from where most of that value derives: us. And in a long feature for Politico, Michelle Quinn details the concerted political investments Facebook are making in Washington, to make sure privacy regulation doesn’t curb their ambitions for “frictionless sharing” of our personal data.
Video | Carr | Quinn

Everything you know about Anonymous is wrong
In this feature for Al Jazeera, Gabriella Coleman addresses recent essays on Anonymous by Yochai Benkler and Evgeny Morozov (both featured in previous digests) and argues that both the utopian and the dismissive view of the online rabble-rousing group are misguided.
Coleman | Benkler | Morozov

“Why the open data movement is a joke” – follow up
Tom Slee’s blog post criticising the open data movement (featured in the digest last week) drew a lot of attention. This new, more considered, follow-up post, has attracted engagement from top names in the movement, including John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation, and Tim O’Reilly.

Is Stanford too close to Silicon Valley?
This long feature in the New Yorker examines how Stanford University “has established itself as the intellectual nexus of the information economy”, and scrutinises the ethics and consequences of its close ties to Silicon Valley.

Paper: Political Activism 2.0
This paper by Mohammed El-Nawawy and Sahar Khamis compares the role of social media in the 2011 Egyptian revolution and the “Green movement” uprising following the elections in Iran in 2009.

Audio: The digital human
The BBC has begun airing a new series investigating the social effects of digital technology. The latest episode – Control – explores the psychological effects of maintaining separate online and offline lives.

Austria: Thousands stand up against data retention
European Digital Rights (EDRI) reports on a complaint against Austria’s implementation of Europe’s Data Retention Directive that has been filed with the Austrian Constitutional Court and joined by 7,000 Austrian citizens. The Austrian government had resisted implementing the directive until a European Commission infringement procedure was brought against them. The constitutional complaint looks set to be the biggest complaint in Austria’s history.

US: Controversial “cybersecurity” law approved by legislators
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reports on the decision of US legislators to approve the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), “a bill that would allow companies to bypass all existing privacy law to spy on communications and pass sensitive user data to the government”. Their campaign to stop the damaging legislation will now move on to the next stage of the legislative process. President Obama has already indicated that he disapproves of the proposed law.

UK: British ISPs ordered to block the Pirate Bay
Wired Threat Level reports that the UK High Court has ruled that five UK internet service providers (ISPs) must block their users from accessing the Pirate Bay, a popular torrenting site, on the basis that the website assists copyright infringement.

US releases Special 301 report
The office of the United States Trade Representative has released its annual report (known as the “Special 301 report”) naming countries it claims do not meet adequate standards to safeguard intellectual property. As Knowledge Ecology International observes, the choices of countries named “are largely driven by lobbying efforts of right holders, and often bear no real relationship of more objective standards regarding intellectual property policies”. Michael Geist analyses the report, concluding that it does not stand up to even passing scrutiny, and observing “perhaps the most shameful inclusion in this year’s report are a series of countries whose primarily fault is being poor”.
KEI | Geist

Google Wifi data harvesting “was not a rogue act”
The New York Times reports that, according to new details from the full text of a regulatory report, “Google’s harvesting of e-mails, passwords and other sensitive personal information from unsuspecting households… was neither a mistake nor the work of a rogue engineer, as the company long maintained, but a program that supervisors knew about”.

Spotlight: Digital rights in India
The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) uses a recent visit from Privacy International to reflect on growing concerns around online privacy in India. Meanwhile, a report in India’s FirstPost.com details the various laws that mean “there are more ways to ban content online than there are to ban physical books and other forms of media” in the country. Global Voices details grassroots and civil society responses to India’s encroaching online censorship: “Indian Netizens are not sitting idle”.
CIS | FirstPost | Global Voices

“Why the open data movement is a joke”
Tom Slee attacks the Open Data movement for its corporate sensibilities and ability to provide cover for governments that are anything but transparent. Meanwhile, the FierceGovernmentIT blog reports on a recent research paper detailing the usability failings of several government open data portals.
Slee | Research

“Why Hillary Clinton should join Anonymous”
Evgeny Morozov’s thought-provoking column for Slate shows how both the US State Department’s Internet Freedom agenda and the activities of Anonymous may end up significantly reducing our online rights.

The rise of electronic monitoring in criminal justice
This short piece for Counterpunch details how “prison overcrowding and state budget crises have made electronic monitoring an alternative of choice”, observing the complex issues that arise from the fact that “electronic monitoring is not only a policy device, but an industry”.

“I spy, with my big eye”
The Economist detail developments in facial recognition technology, and their application in mass surveillance projects around the world.

The Data Journalism Handbook
Last weekend saw the launch of the Data Journalism Handbook, a joint initiative of the European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF). The handbook includes contributions from dozens of data journalism’s leading advocates and best practitioners, and is available for free download.

The Land Matrix
The Land Matrix is a public database of large-scale land deals worldwide. A joint project of Tactical Tech and the Land Coalition Partnership, it documents over 2,300 large-scale land acquisitions over the past 15 years. There are three different ways to view the information: big picture summaries that give insights in to the content of the database, more in-depth views that pick out major trends, and direct access to the data in map and table format for more in-depth exploration and analysis”.

Data visualisation: Three years of Kickstarter projects
The New York Times charts the history of the Kickstarter crowd-sourced funding platform in numbers.

Audio: The Library of the Future
Matthew Battles and David Weinberger talk about approaches to information management in the 21st century, in this recorded conversation for Radio Berkman.

When Funny Goes Viral
This weekend sees the third instalment of ROFLCon, a conference exploring net culture hosted in Boston, US. This memorable essay from the New York Times about a previous ROFLCon makes the case that some of the weird and offensive aspects of internet culture such as trolling, micro-celebrity and satirical internet memes need to be taken seriously as part of public discourse.

“Internet heavyweights get behind free expression and privacy online”
The Global Network Initiative (GNI) has released its 2012 annual report, which includes “the world’s first independent assessment of technology companies’ policies and procedures for responding to government requests affecting free speech and privacy”. The independent assessment focusses on how Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are implementing the commitment to uphold free expression and privacy they made when they joined this multi-stakeholder initiative as founding members. The Center for Democracy and Technology analyse the report’s findings, while the GNI’s Communications Director David Sullivan writes about the process for the soros.org blog.
Report | CDT | Sullivan

US: Obama issues executive order curbing surveillance exports
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reports on an executive order issued by President Obama this week “targeting people and companies facilitating human-rights abuses with technology”. The order provides for economic and other sanctions against a list of individuals and entities within Iran and Syria who are engaged in or linked to surveillance activities involving technology. The EFF welcomes the move, but indicates further steps that could be taken to protect and promote online freedoms in Iran, Syria and beyond.

Russia: Pro-Putin activists boost hacking attacks
openDemocracy.net investigates the increasing use of hacker networks to suppress online dissent in Russia, noting the widespread use of cyberattacks to silence critics in the recent parliamentary elections.

Thailand: Online newspaper director faces lese majeste conviction
Human Rights Watch reports on the case of Chiranuch Premchaiporn (known as “Jiew”), the director of online newspaper Prachatai who faces a prison sentence of up to twenty years under Thailand’s Computer Crime Act for publishing ten comments allegedly insulting the monarchy from anonymous readers, comments which Prachatai subsequently removed. A verdict on the case is expected next Monday.

US: Harvard University says it can’t afford journal publishers’ prices
The Guardian reports on a memo sent by Harvard Library to its 2,100 teaching and research staff encouraging them to publish in open access journals. The memo was sent in response to price increases imposed by large journal publishers, which bill the library around $3.5m a year.

Consumers International launch IP Watchlist 2012: Israel top, Jordan bottom
Consumers International (CI) released their annual “IP Watchlist” this week. Although rankings of the thirty countries surveyed for the way their IP (intellectual property) laws treat consumers have not changed dramatically since 2012, CI note that “IP is now a political issue like never before”, detailing initiatives that could see substantial, positive changes in the coming years.

Avaaz.org launches Do It Yourself campaign tool
Online campaign group Avaaz.org this week launched a website which helps members of their 14m-strong community launch their own petition-based campaigns, on any issue they choose. The site is currently in beta, experimental, mode.

Spotlight: Open Government Partnership
Last week saw the first major meeting of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) since the international initiative to spread transparency and accountability to governments across the globe was launched last year. The event sparked some lively online debate about the future of open government: David Eaves reflects on the tensions between different types of civil society groups at the meeting; Andrew di Maio points to evidence from the UK that Open Government is not terribly cost efficient; Rob Cronin warns that the hardest work – that of contextualising data to make it relevant to local populations – still lies ahead; and David Sasaki points to just how hard that work is likely to be in the context of fiscal data. Meanwhile, the Journal of Community Informatics have published a special issue on Open Government Data, OpenCorporates have launched a report timed with the conference ranking OGP countries for their performance on corporate transparency, and TechPresident have launched a new initiative called “WeGov”, supported by the Omidyar Network, that will track the successes and failures of Open Government on the ground.
Eaves | di Maio | Cronin | Sasaki | Community Informatics | WeGov | OpenCorporates

“A robot stole my Pulitzer”
Evgeny Morozov muses on the increasing sophistication of automated writing technologies, and makes a plea on behalf of the right to read anonymously in this short feature for Slate.com.

“You are Big Brother (but that isn’t so bad)”
A view of technological and regulatory developments in online behavioural tracking, as seen by Advertising Age.

Updated Africa undersea cable map
Steve Song has updated his Africa undersea cable map to reflect the “gob-stopping” announcement of an initiative to connect the BRICS countries: “I try not to be shocked any more at new announcements of undersea cable projects that are destined for African shores. But it’s no good.”
Map | BRICS cable

Open Net Initiative: Year in review
The Open Net Initiative has published a report listing key events in global online censorship and surveillance in 2011.

Going digital: Lessons from the New York Times
The Monday Note publishes a short analysis by Frédéric Filloux of the latest quarterly figures published by the New York Times, and what lessons they might have for the newspaper business.

Exhibition/video/visualisation – What the internet knows about you
The Ars Electronica Centre in Linz, Austria has launched a new exhibition called “Out of Control: What the internet knows about you”, exploring networked digital technology and the effect it has on our lives. The exhibition, which will run to the end of this year, includes a “Security/Privacy Check”, providing custom advice on ways to improve your online security, as well as Manu Luksch’s acclaimed film “faceless”, shot exclusively on CCTV cameras. Some of the exhibits can also be viewed online.
Exhibition | Video – “Did you know?” | Visualisation – “Twistori”

News special: Hackers and internet freedom
Four stories from the world of hackers and internet freedom this week. The French investigative news platform OWNI.eu has published a detailed story about controversies in the hacker community arising from the decision of Maker Faire, a key annual hackerspace conference, to take sponsorship from the US military research agency DARPA. Meanwhile, TOR developer Jacob Applebaum has published a report on security vulnerabilities in the Ultrasurf censorship circumvention software produced by Ultrareach, a US-government backed company that was founded by Chinese dissidents, allegations to which the company has responded. Applebaum sits on the Advisory Board of a new company profiled by CNet this week, which offers privacy-friendly internet and mobile connectivity and was founded by a man who spent several years fighting a request from the FBI to disclose information about its customers. Finally, the New York Times profiled a young Lebanese man on a visit to New York to meet like-minded hackers to help him improve his encrypted chatroom software, Cryptocat.
Maker Faire controversy | Ultrasurf vulnerabilities report | Ultrareach response | Privacy friendly connectivity | Cryptocat

New research shows South African mobile prices among the highest in Africa
Research ICT Africa released a research report this week ranking countries in Africa according to the affordability of mobile telephones. Several news outlets picked up on the fact that South Africa’s regulatory regime has allowed it to slip to 30th place in the 46 countries studied. In a stirring op-ed reacting to the report, Steve Song condemns the South African government for its failures of vision and leadership in telecommunications policy.
News | Full Report | Op-ed

EU: Key legislator recommends rejection of ACTA
IPWatch.org reports that the rapporteur of the lead European Parliament committee on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), David Martin, has recommended that the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement be rejected, stating that “while the problems ACTA seeks to address are real, the unintended consequences [of the proposals] are too grave”.

US: Concerns mount over proposed cyber-security law
The Obama administration has expressed concern over the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a proposed law currently being discussed by legislators in the US, stating “legislation that would sacrifice the privacy of our citizens in the name of security, will not meet our nation’s urgent needs”. Digital Journal has more details on the bill, including a long interview from Russia Today with the Campaign for Democracy and Technology’s Kendall Burman. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and others declared this week “Stop Cyber-Spying Week”, encouraging their supporters to contact elected representatives with their concerns about CISPA.
News | More details | Stop Cyber-Spying Week

The Economist: “When research is funded by the taxpayer or by charities, the results should be available to all without charge”
The Economist declares itself firmly in the open access camp in this week’s editorial arguing for public access to publicly-funded research.

The coming book wars
In this feature for the Atlantic, independent publisher Peter Osnos takes a snapshot of the various controversies surrounding digital books, including the recent United States Department of Justice anti-trust lawsuit against several major publishers and Apple.

Guardian series: The battle for the internet
All this week the UK Guardian has been publishing in-depth reports on internet issues, including articles on the militarisation of cyberspace, the intellectual property “wars” and the end of privacy. On Wednesday Tim Berners Lee, the godfather of the worldwide web, spoke to the newspaper about his concerns that online surveillance legislation being put forward by the UK government will undermine human rights.
Series | Berners Lee

Reflections on building a Chinese censorship program
Global Voices publishes an English translation of a pseudonymous posting by a Chinese computer programmer about his experiences developing a program for keyword filtering on mobile devices.

Debate: When it comes to politics, is the internet closing our minds?
TechPresident precis a debate hosted by Intelligence Squared in New York this week on whether today’s worldwide web can be blamed for the polarisation of American political debate. Eli Pariser of MoveOn.org, together with Siva Vaidhyanathan, spoke for the motion, with Evgeny Morozov and Slate.com’s Jacob Weisberg speaking against. You can watch the full debate online.
Precis | Full Debate

Colombia: New copyright bill being rushed through
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reports on a copyright reform bill being rushed through the legislative process in Colombia ahead of a planned visit by President Obama later this month. The bill is over-broad and concentrates only on extending the scope of rights and enforcement provisions.

Poland: Authorities abusing access to data
Another EFF report, this time on the work of Poland’s Panoptykon Foundation in uncovering widespread abuse of fast-tracked data retention laws by Polish authorities. Meanwhile Katarzyna Szymielewicz, the Panoptykon Foundation’s director, blogs on soros.org about her country’s surprise role as the hub of European protests against the harmful and secretive Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
Data retention | ACTA

US: April 25 is day of action for access to research
The Right to Research Coalition have announced a national day of action in the US, in order to encourage as much support as possible for the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), a piece of proposed legislation that would require all publicly-funded scientific research to be publicly available. In related news, this week the Wellcome Trust, the UK’s largest medical R&D funder and one of the world’s largest research charities, has announced it will support efforts to move towards open access by launching its own OA journal, eLife.
Day of Action | Wellcome

UK: Godfather of genetics warns of forensics privatisation “catastrophe”
Following the closure of the government-funded Forensic Science Service earlier this month, the Independent reports that Professor Peter Gill – the man who pioneered forensic DNA techniques – has warned that privatisation of forensic services is leading to catastrophic failures and potential miscarriages of justice.

US: Court issues decision on intermediary liability in Viacom v. YouTube
IP-Watch.org reports that a court in the United States has reversed an earlier decision, indicating YouTube should be liable for copyright infringing content appearing on its site. The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) read the decision in a positive light: “While the decision is not a complete win for YouTube… the principal legal rulings appear to represent a ‘win’ for the Internet.”
IPWatch report | CDT analysis

Iran: Plans for national intranet justified using Stuxnet
Ars Technica summarises various recent reports that indicate Iran’s plan to deploy a “national internet” that makes international content and services available only to the nation’s business and political elite “is likely just a political gesture at this point”. It quotes a member of the country’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace alluding to the Stuxnet virus as justification for shutting off its citizens from the global ‘net.

Hacks of Valor
In this long feature for Foreign Affairs magazine, Yochai Benkler highlights recent signs the US government views Anonymous as a terrorist association, and calls for clear-headedness: “Seeing Anonymous primarily as a cybersecurity threat is like analysing the breadth of the antiwar movement and 1960s counterculture by focusing only on the Weathermen”.

What a Facebook response to a user data subpoena looks like
Techcrunch analyse a record, a redacted version of which was recently published by the Boston Phoenix, of a man’s Facebook data that was obtained by police in relation to a local murder investigation: “The Facebook file…intersects with a bunch of people who had nothing to do with this investigation. And the police, in this case, didn’t redact anything from that Facebook file when passing it on to the Phoenix. That leads to questions about who, ultimately, is responsible for this information?”

Africa’s stereoscopic future
Balancing Act Africa draws lessons from a recent debate about Africa’s connected future, musing that “it consists of two stereoscopic images that don’t’ always come into focus: what the developed world is doing and what Africa does differently”.

Research: Blogging may help teens dealing with social distress
The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) analyses new research showing that, contrary to popular beliefs about cyber-bullying, anonymity may actually help teenagers coming to terms with social issues.
Research | CDT Analysis

UK: Government surveillance plans leaked
Government plans to monitor every email, text message, and phone call flowing through the UK were leaked to newspapers last weekend, prompting widespread criticism. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Open Rights Group (ORG) both provide details and context of the proposals. The measures described go far beyond Europe’s controversial Data Retention Directive, which was itself passed partly in response to UK pressure. Government efforts to play down the proposals in reaction to the outcry have been weak. The Financial Times carried an op-ed by Evgeny Morozov strongly opposing the plans: “Instead of granting intelligence services more power, we need to worry about the coming convergence of the data-gathering demands of the state and the business imperatives of internet companies”.
EFF | ORG | Government response | Morozov Op-Ed

US: Legislators approve Global Online Freedom Act
TechPresident reports on the progress of a proposed law that would promote the notion of global “internet freedom” by blocking the export of US online technologies to repressive regimes.

Australia: Huawei blocked from bidding on national broadband plan
Ars Technica reports that the Australian government has moved to block Chinese-owned Huawei from bidding to deliver its multi-billion dollar National Broadband Network project, citing cyber-security concerns.

Swaziland: Lese majeste law planned
Index on Censorship reports on a proposed law in Swaziland that would make it illegal to criticise the King Mswati III on social media networks: “Internet penetration is low in Swaziland, Africa’s last absolute monarchy, but social networks have been used to organise public demonstrations, including a student protest last Monday against funding cuts”.

Polish government assigns $14m to pilot open textbooks program
Creative Commons reports on an announcement that as part of a wider program to raise ICT competencies in Polish schools, $14m has been assigned to develop digital textbooks for primary school pupils, with all material to be released under a Creative Commons licence. Information Program grantees Jaroslaw Lipszyc of the Modern Poland Foundation and Alek Tarkowski of Centrum Cyfrowe helped to draft the Digital School program. The Modern Poland Foundation dubbed the announcement: “a big win for the Open Educational Resources movement, ending several years of hard work”.
Creative Commons | Modern Poland Foundation

Open Knowledge Foundation announces Panton Fellows
The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) announced their first “Panton Fellows” last week – innovative graduate students and career scientists who will receive support in spreading their passion for open science and open data. Sophie Kershaw is based in the Computational Biology group at the University of Oxford’s Department of Computer Science, and Ross Mounce is a PhD student at the University of Bath studying the impact of fossils in phylogenetics.

Research special: The networked public sphere
Two recent papers and one research presentation add to the growing body of scholarship on the so-called networked public sphere. “The Revolutions Were Tweeted” by Gilad Lotan and others examines the “symbiotic relationship between media outlets and individuals” during the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings of 2011 using data gleaned from Twitter. Max Hanska-Ahy and Roxanna Shapour’s “Who’s Reporting the protests” shows how “journalistic literacy” increased among individual citizens reporting on the protests. And Yochai Benkler presents initial findings from research that has been conducted for the past two years at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society on the shape of the public sphere in the digital age.
Lotan et al | Hanska-Ahy/Shapour | Benkler

Profile: Helen Nissenbaum
The Atlantic profile New York University philosopher Helen Nissenbaum and show how her work on contextual privacy is leading to a new approach to the issue by US policymakers.

Feature: After GPS-tracking, warrantless phone tracking
In the context of a recent privacy-friendly court ruling against the use of warrantless GPS tracking, the Wired Threat Level blog and the New York Times both reported in depth last week on the extent that US police forces and other law enforcement agencies are using mobile phone tracking in their investigations.
New York Times | Wired

Book Review: “Our Biometric Future”
Evgeny Morozov reviews Kelly Gates’ history of the development of facial recognition technology, charting the economic and political forces that have shaped this still relatively unproven technology.

Video: Futurescapes
This project, a collaboration involving Sony, the Forum for the Future, the Economist’s Intelligence Unit and Wired magazine, explores the future social and political implications of technology and climate change by presenting video portraits of the world we may be confronted with in 2025.

EU: Parliament will vote on ACTA without delay
The European Parliament has resolved not to refer the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) to the European Court of Justice, but to instead vote on whether to sign the treaty in June as planned. La Quadrature du Net cautiously welcomed the move, which follows a referral to the ECJ from the European Commission: “The Commission’s technocratic manoeuvres have not stopped the Parliament, and the door remains open to a swift rejection of ACTA.”

Pakistan: Will IT ministry shelve plan to install online censorship system?
The International Herald Tribune reports on signs that the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority may withdraw its plans to construct a nationwide website-blocking system. The news comes following a public campaign encouraging global technology corporations to boycott a bidding process to build the system. This week, the BBC ran an informative piece on “Pakistan’s quiet erosion of internet freedom”.
IHT | BBC

US: Supreme Court deals blow to gene patenting
Intellectual Property Watch reports that “The United States Supreme Court yesterday threw out a high-profile case that had allowed a private company’s patents on two human genes associated with cancer”. The Supreme Court is asking the court that ruled in favour of gene patents to reconsider its position in light of another recent judgement on the subject.

Tunisia: Local journalism collectives reclaim media space
Nawaat reports on their joint initiative with the Tunisian Ministry of Youth and Sports to foster six local citizen media collectives in locations around the country: “The goal is to have a national network of alternative and citizen media, using simple blogging platforms, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter accounts as the collectives’ technical support”.

South Korea: Digital textbook rethink
The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss highlights reports from South Korea that indicate the government may be rethinking its plan for digital textbooks to be used in every classroom by 2015, amid fears that young people are becoming “addicted” to the internet.

New version of Stuxnet-related cyber weapon discovered
ABC News details reports of a new version of a computer virus called the Duqu worm “designed to gather intelligence on industrial control systems”.

China: Twitter-Spam war against pro-Tibet activists
The Atlantic reports on a new “weapon of mass distraction” – hundreds of automated Twitter accounts which flood the hashtags #tibet and #freetibet with meaningless, spam tweets.

The NSA, US citizens, and the data centre that is bigger than the Capitol
Wired magazine published an extensive feature last week on the new data centre being built by the US’s National Security Agency in Utah. The piece, authored by one of the world’s leading authorities on the NSA, James Bamford, shows how “for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration, the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens”. This week, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, US Attorney General Eric Holder signed expansive new guidelines allowing the US National Counter Terrorism Center to mirror and mine entire federal databases for information that could help identify terrorists. NSA chief General Keith Alexander was called in front of Congress last week to answer questions prompted by the Wired feature.
Bamford | EFF | NSA before Congress

Forensic genetics: A global human rights challenge
This post on the soros.org blog highlights the human rights challenges posed by the growing deployment of forensic DNA databases and outlines how the Forensic Genetics Policy Initiative, a collaboration between GeneWatch UK, Privacy International and the Council for Responsible Genetics, hopes to have a direct impact on the human rights standards adopted for DNA databases across the world.

Why WikiLeaks’ bid for radical transparency failed
Physorg.com summarise new research published in the International Review of Administrative Sciences that suggests that, far from challenging “increasing authoritarian tendencies in government and the growth of unaccountable corporate power”, WikiLeaks’ activities merely served to highlight the barriers to increasing levels of transparency in the digital age.

Reflections on Fear in a Networked Society
danah boyd shares some nascent ideas on how fear operates in a networked society.

Words by the millions, sorted by software
This short feature for the New York Times outlines one project which hopes to automate some of the work traditionally done by librarians, “teaching computers to sift through the digital pages of books and articles and categorise the contents by subject, even when that subject isn’t stated explicitly”.

The shift from search to social, and web to apps
The Monday Note highlights the fact that many news websites are now getting the majority of their traffic from people clicking through from social networking sites, as opposed to people using search engines. Meanwhile, MSNBC reports on a new study from Pew that suggests that Apps could be overtaking the web, which may not be good news considering Susan’s Crawford’s view that “Apps are like cable channels – closed, proprietary, and cleaned-up experiences”.
Monday Note | MSNBC

Tools: DIY mySociety
UK civic hackers mySociety are releasing short, non-technical guides explaining how they built their key accountability and transparency sites. They’ve already released guides for people hoping to copy their FOI portal WhatDoTheyKnow.com and local problem-reporting website FixMyStreet.com, and expect to publish guides to their Parliamentary monitoring site TheyWorkForYou.com and elected-representative contacting site WriteToThem.com later this year. The guides offer “a deep look at all the conceptual issues you need to think about when building these sorts of sites, no matter what technical platform you use.”

Video: Rufus Pollock on Open Data
Open Knowledge Foundation co-founder Rufus Pollock introduces the LIFT conference to the idea of Open Data, and argues that we need data to be open in order to cope with exploding information complexity.