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The Obama administration is banning hundreds of thousands of federal employees from calling up the WikiLeaks site on government computers because the leaked material is still formally regarded as classified. The Library of Congress tonight joined the education department, the commerce department and other government agencies in confirming that the ban is in place.

A school district in Delaware recently proposed a rule that would require teachers to unfriend students, a district in Maine is banning all social networking, chat sites, forums, and other sites from state-provided laptops, and now the New York City Department of Education will now monitor teachers' interactions with students on professional social networking services. Teachers were warned not to expect any privacy and that administrators and officials should have access to the professional accounts. This makes me wonder if now workplaces and universities will require employees to loosen their privacy settings on their accounts.

Another step forward in the "open source ecology" type world. Parts are still relatively expensive, but it's heading in the right direction

Google spent $5.03 million on lobbying in the first quarter of the year, almost matching its entire 2010 lobbying budget of $5.2 million. In comparison, Apple spent $500,000 and Microsoft spent $1.79 million during the same quarter. If Google maintains this pace, it will outspend the entire tobacco industry ($17 million) and the combined spending of JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup ($18 million).

Black boxes: not just for airplanes anymore... And these should actually be black.

Netflix CEO gives a brief rant about the Comcast data limit and how it applies (or not) depending on which app you use for your content.

This group is briefly mentioned in the chapter on Pranks in this week's reading. The fired game designer for the SIms helicopter game left and joined this group-- pretty much pranksters of an online nature. While it has little to do with video games, it has everything to do with ethos in an Internet age.

Nye, who argues that "the diffusion of power away from governments is one of this century's great political shifts", looks at the implications of cyber wars on the security budget as well as international relations within the political context.

This is a module that traces the evolution of the Republican candidates' Wikipedia pages during the course of the primaries. Some of the yahoo user comments at the bottom of the page are quite entertaining too

I wanted to add this link to the famous court case of Miller v California that helped define pornography and its protection (or lack thereof) under the first amendment. There is a lot to discuss here regarding offensiveness and "social value" especially in regard to the fact that the case dates back to the 70's. Perhaps the same case would be tried differently today.

Wikileaks leads to art.

After class I was looking to find some background information on Julian Assange, mainly because I know very little about his negative reputation. Here is an interesting blog emphasizing the impact of reputational crisis, which is really interesting, especially considering that this information is even available from this university to the public.

Considering how often we look at TED talks, I thought it might be worth including this fake TED talk used as a clip for the new Ridley Scott movie, Prometheus. I know this probably looks a little like getting off track, but I thought it was interesting that the author claims that humans have become gods through their acts of technological creation (in his case, "cyberkinetic individuals). Science fiction often does a great job extrapolating certain ideas or issues, and I think in some ways we can find links to the issue and use of Wikipedia in which we can freely take place in the act of creation or manipulation of a text and even the meaning behind the entries we change. Obviously this is not necessarily created in our own image the way a cyborg would be, but it is still using McLuhan's idea of the extension of man into the cyber world. The question we're left with here though, is whether or not we deserve the moniker of "creator" if we create anonymously.

This is a google book that discusses some of the same things I mentioned in my post regarding the use of wikipedia and other networks and how that shapes our ideas of freedom.

I apologize for all of the posts about WikiLeaks, but I'm fascinated by Assange's views of his work. One minute I feel like he's a hero and that these leaks really can open the masses' eyes to political corruption and scandal, but the next minutes I feel like he's playing with fire and am fearful of the consequences of uncovering these documents.

Interesting process of Wikipedia's response to really poorly done political commentary on its site.

A smart political article about the relation between communication and capitalism. Useful especially on the way technical networks both present themselves as political and foreclose the political.

Below you'll see a link to Code for America. Here is a related TED talk.

From about page: "We make it easy and attractive for the web generation to give back through our Fellowship, which connects technologists with cities to work together to innovate; our Accelerator, which will support disruptive civic startups; and our Brigade, which helps local, community groups reuse civic software."

Another common topic has seemed to be blogs and blogging, especially following the readings for last week. This seemed like a blog post that might add to the discussion.