Hitler gets reprieve from YouTube
LOL. A parody downfall video of the downfall of downfall. Electronic Frontier Foundation are the authors of this piece, suggesting that maybe Apple's approach to DRM is... ironically more modern.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Diigo 04/26/2010
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Diigo 04/24/2010
PJF's Pages - Journal - Facebook privacy - Instant personalisation and connections
PJ Fenwick gives the lowdown on facebook's personalisation and what you are sharing with whom. If anyone ever wondered where the money was in the 'free' internet, then follow the moves that facebook and google are making to market all of the personal info that you so lovingly and willingly provide to your 'friends'.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Diigo 04/22/2010
Global 'Human Rights' Network Initiative founded or funded? by ICT companies increasingly at risk of government intervention. Hmm.
So far Microsoft, Yahoo and Google are on the board. It's troublingly necessary to include ICT businesses in this issue, however their role in the interest group makes for a confusing mix of human rights and network rights. Not always the same thing.YouTube video sinks Turnbull minder - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
Not only was Tudehope sacked for publishing satire videos of Liberal Party faction fights but was outed as ghosting Turnbull's twitter. What a job! Interesting to see how Australia's political parties use online media.
YouTube - Hitler Finds Out About iSnack 2.0
The impending downfall of the this satire video (see previous bookmark) inspired me to share it. It's vegemite. It's good.
Satirists bunker down after Downfall clips pulled - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
Constantin films invokes copyright infringement and corporate citizenship to try to pull thousands of Downfall parody videos off the internet. As they admit, it's an impossible task which begs the question of why do it at all!
My favorite was/is the Vegemite iSnack 2.0 clip - which I'm bookmarking for everyone right now. And while I never expected to find the Liberal Party at all interesting, I didn't realise that heads had fallen over a Downfall vid satirising faction fighting, which is pertinent after yesterday's tutorial discussions!
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Diigo 04/21/2010
The increasing use of 'free' webmail services, and indeed full office suites, from online providers by business and governments means an increasing amount of funding for encryption and ad free internets.
This potentially leads to a new digital divide. The corporate or private internet of the wealthy, and the hyper surveilled commercial internet of the many.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Diigo 04/15/2010
What Larry Strickling Meant to Say (and Should have Said) | Center for Democracy & Technology
This article cogently describes the current US govt approach to policy and call for an Internet Policy 3.0. Also clarifies points and describes the issues in regulation and governance that are raised in response.
As per DeNardis, the first question is who is the board, then what are their interests, how are they funded, who do they represent, by what process are decisions made and implemented, are objections public etc.
If, as the press release suggests, this is the first of many more simple and stringent security and safety features, then what are they and who decides?
"The Facebook Safety Advisory Board comprises five leading Internet safety organizations from North America and Europe that serve in a consultative capacity to the company on issues related to online safety. The organizations on the board are Common Sense Media, ConnectSafely, WiredSafety, Childnet International and The Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI). "
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
The Internet Architecture of Gender / Decoding the Layers
The internet, like any new technology, has a disruptive effect on society and governance. As Milton Mueller of the Internet Governance Project says, “For a while, when its effects are new and unanticipated, it empowers in a relative sense some actors at the expense of others. This relative empowerment alters the composition of interest groups, further promoting political change.” (1)
The rise of the internet economy has occurred at a time when the gender gap has actually been increasing in many indicators of highly developed countries, which is somewhat of a surprise to those who believed that the second wave of feminism in the 60s and 70s had born legitimate fruit.
It seems, on reflection, that legislation of equal opportunity and the rhetoric of empowerment has failed to have any effect in some crucial areas, most noticeably computer science, ICTs and engineering, where the numbers of women in higher education and employment have actually declined since the 1970s. (2)
an example of gender division by workplace from The Guardian, UK.
Technology is not gender neutral although much of the rhetoric, like the end to end principle, simplicity and net neutrality, obscures this. Technology is socially shaped. As Hrynyshyn says, ‘values are embedded in a technology through a social process of the interaction of different groups of relevant actors who are involved in the process of design…. Often what is not recognized is that the decision about the development of technology are made by agents with different locations in structures of social power, and the different locations create differences in the extent to which different agents are able to participate successfully in the process of social shaping.’ (3)
I am taking a social shaping of technology approach to this situation (as described by Mackenzie and Wajcman, Williams and Edge), where at every stage in the development of a new technology a decision is made, a fork in the branching logic paths is taken that incrementally changes the direction of development, and of necessity excludes some directions. As Lessig puts it in Code 2.0, 'The ‘nature” of the Internet is not God’s will. Its nature is simply the product of its design. That design could be different.’ (4)
I am using the Layers Principle as adapted by Solum and Chung from Lessig’s work, and endorsed by the WSIS in 2005, for my analytic framework. The six layers that constitute the Internet are:
• The Content Layer—the symbols and images that are communicated.
• The Application Layer—the programs that use the Internet, e.g. the Web.
• The Transport Layer—TCP, which breaks the data into packets.
• The Internet Protocol Layer—IP, handles the flow of data over the network.
• The Link Layer—the interface between users’ computers and the physical layer.
• The Physical Layer—the copper wire, optical cable, satellite links, etc. (5)
These layers were defined for internet governance but also serve as a way of examining how different structures have evolved in seemingly comparative isolation from other layers and how these isolated instances are part of the interrelated whole. How the internet has created a society in which women, in many important areas, are further from equality and self determination than they were in 1960. How we can decode the layers of gender discrimination to see how the architecture of the internet limits our global society.
(The Internet Architecture of Gender / to be continued....)
4. Lessig, L. "Code 2.0. Chapter 4: Architectures of Control" (2006) Available at: http://codev2.cc
5. Solum, Lawrence B. and Chung, Minn, "The Layers Principle: Internet Architecture and the Law" U San Diego Public Law Research Paper No. 55. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=416263
The rise of the internet economy has occurred at a time when the gender gap has actually been increasing in many indicators of highly developed countries, which is somewhat of a surprise to those who believed that the second wave of feminism in the 60s and 70s had born legitimate fruit.
It seems, on reflection, that legislation of equal opportunity and the rhetoric of empowerment has failed to have any effect in some crucial areas, most noticeably computer science, ICTs and engineering, where the numbers of women in higher education and employment have actually declined since the 1970s. (2)
Technology is not gender neutral although much of the rhetoric, like the end to end principle, simplicity and net neutrality, obscures this. Technology is socially shaped. As Hrynyshyn says, ‘values are embedded in a technology through a social process of the interaction of different groups of relevant actors who are involved in the process of design…. Often what is not recognized is that the decision about the development of technology are made by agents with different locations in structures of social power, and the different locations create differences in the extent to which different agents are able to participate successfully in the process of social shaping.’ (3)
I am taking a social shaping of technology approach to this situation (as described by Mackenzie and Wajcman, Williams and Edge), where at every stage in the development of a new technology a decision is made, a fork in the branching logic paths is taken that incrementally changes the direction of development, and of necessity excludes some directions. As Lessig puts it in Code 2.0, 'The ‘nature” of the Internet is not God’s will. Its nature is simply the product of its design. That design could be different.’ (4)
I am using the Layers Principle as adapted by Solum and Chung from Lessig’s work, and endorsed by the WSIS in 2005, for my analytic framework. The six layers that constitute the Internet are:
• The Content Layer—the symbols and images that are communicated.
• The Application Layer—the programs that use the Internet, e.g. the Web.
• The Transport Layer—TCP, which breaks the data into packets.
• The Internet Protocol Layer—IP, handles the flow of data over the network.
• The Link Layer—the interface between users’ computers and the physical layer.
• The Physical Layer—the copper wire, optical cable, satellite links, etc. (5)
These layers were defined for internet governance but also serve as a way of examining how different structures have evolved in seemingly comparative isolation from other layers and how these isolated instances are part of the interrelated whole. How the internet has created a society in which women, in many important areas, are further from equality and self determination than they were in 1960. How we can decode the layers of gender discrimination to see how the architecture of the internet limits our global society.
(The Internet Architecture of Gender / to be continued....)
1. Milton Mueller, "The New Cyber-Conservatism: Goldsmith/Wu and the Premature Triumphalism of the Territorial Nation-State: A review of Goldsmith and Wu's 'Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World'" (June, 2006). Internet Governance Project. Paper IGP06-003. Available at http://internetgovernance.org/pdf/MM-goldsmithWu.pdf
2. Maria Klawe, Telle Whitney, Caroline Simard, "Women in Computing - take 2" (February, 2009). Communications of the ACM. Volume 52, Issue 2. Inspiring Women in Computing. Pages 68-76. ISSN:0001-07682. Available at http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1461947#
3. Hrynyshyn, D, "Globalization, nationality and commodification: the politics of the social construction of the internet" (2008) New Media and Society. Volume 10 (5): 751-770. Available from http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/short/10/5/7514. Lessig, L. "Code 2.0. Chapter 4: Architectures of Control" (2006) Available at: http://codev2.cc
5. Solum, Lawrence B. and Chung, Minn, "The Layers Principle: Internet Architecture and the Law" U San Diego Public Law Research Paper No. 55. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=416263
Diigo 04/14/2010
WHO pandemic probe focuses on media, Internet role
Interesting story about how internet fuelled media changed the global SwineFlu pandemic response. Specifically, persuading people that they probably didn't need to vaccinate, (market mechanisms) causing many countries to now be overstocked with millions of dollars worth of unwanted serums!
""It emerged that the media timescale was far shorter than the political and administrative timescale, which may have complicated national decision making," a French delegate told the panel."PJF's Pages - Journal - Dark Stalking on Facebook
PJFenwick is doing a PhD on facebook privacy and his explorations have shown that even when you lock up your settings, your friends (and friends of) can leak your information all over the place.
"But by far the most interesting part of all of this have been dark users. Like dark matter, these users are not directly observable, usually because they've completely disabled API access. In fact, some of these users are completely dark unless you're a friend. They don't show up in search results. They don't show up on friends' lists. You can't send them messages. If you try to navigate to their user page (assuming you know it exists), you get redirected back to your homepage. These users have their privacy settings turned up real high, and are supposed to be hard to find.
However like dark matter, dark users are observable due to their effects on the rest of the universe. If a dark user comments on a stream entry, I can see that comment. More importantly, I can see their user-ID, and I can generate a URL to a page that will contain their name. I can then watch for their activities elsewhere. Granted, I can't directly search for their activity, but I can observe their effects on my friends. For want of a better term, I've been calling this "dark stalking".
What makes this all rather chilling is that I'm doing all of this via the application API. If your friend has installed an application, then it can access quite a lot of information about you, unless you turn it off. If your friend has granted the application the read_stream privilege, then it can read your status stream. Even if a friend of a friend has done this, and you comment on your friend's status entries, it's possible to infer your existence and retrieve those discussions through dark stalking."Google trio guilty of violating autistic teen's privacy: reasons
Everyone's probably bookmarked this article already! Sentencing senior Google execs on the grounds of profiting from illegal acts is probably also technically correct. Google's defense is the neutrality of the internet, which is questionable as Google do adjust content to suit, for their own profit. Which layer is this issue on? Will increasing controls on content change our internet beyond recognition?
Marcuse says that tolerance can not tolerate hateful speech and acts or it is no longer truly tolerant. That's quite a conundrum!
Monday, April 12, 2010
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Sunday, April 4, 2010
AutoPost 04/04/2010
Somewhere I read that to grasp the technology of the internet, computers and networking, you really only needed to understand: TCP/IP, the end to end principle, object-oriented programming and service based APIs.
This summary of 10 serious networking papers is useful to have and also points to Blumenthal/Clark's key paper on the architecture of the internet:
M. Blumenthal, D. Clark, “Rethinking the Design of the
Internet: the End-to-end Arguments vs. the Brave New
World,” ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, Vol. 1 ,
No. 1 (August 2001) pp. 70-109.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
AutoPost 04/01/2010
Yugoslav Internet Domain Name '.yu' Finally Discontinued - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty © 2010
Yugoslavia disappeared in the 1990s but the domain lingered on.
When DNS goes bad – China’s Firewall goes global.. crossing. « Computer Solutions Blog
How DNS server stuff ups caused China's firewall to go global in places recently - just like when Sweden disappeared for a few hours in 2009.
'Rape simulator' game goes viral amid calls for censorship
Controversial! But the article summarises many of the difficulties of most opinions on this divide... does bad stuff justify bad laws? The second comment - re why do media exacerbate the situation? is also pertinent.
The internet has changed power and social relations causing disequilibrium amongst existing controls and power structures and social norms. This marks a highly contested border dispute.Realising Our Broadband Future
Full proceedings of the Dec 2009 conference. Could anyone who reads/listens to a session circulate a summary? There's so much material in here that it's very daunting!
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)