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"The invisible shareholders, who are either money launderers, drug dealers or some people using government money, pick the directors of the banks because of their holdings, but have refused to disclose their identities," he said.

Corporate governance is becoming more and more important, and in considering the growing economies in the Gulf states, there is considerable interest in the region. It will be interesting to see how models of corporate governance may differ in the Gulf countries, especially in relation to board members.

The chairman of Vanguard believes corporate directors are doing a much better job than they get credit for in terms of governance but offers suggestions for improvement. Brennan believes it is crucial to take an active role in governance, to see yourself in a framework and communicate freely. It remains to be seen whether the 'attitudinal shift' that has been observed over the past 2 decades will continue to become a norm, of it is merely keeping up with the Jones's.

In Jamaica, the new Cybercrimes Act makes directors, managers, secretaries or other similar officers of that body corporate liable. As the author writes "Being a director on any or many boards is no longer sexy." Which may be true, especially when million dollar fines and imprisonment may be at stake. It is hoped that all this will encourage workers to take their roles more seriously, but it may take a few hiccups (ie imprisonings) until this is a shared mentality.

A really interesting piece from Matt Yglesias, who points out that a bunch of private corporations are advising on a policy agency, which could possibly be behind the Gizmodo raid. Fascinating to see the way public governance can be shaped by private corporations- and rather scary!

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.

Wow. Read it and weep. Tim O'Reilly is promoting this article. I haven't read anything quite so scarily propagandist since Caberet. What do I mean? (and who is this 'state'?) Courtesy of One Economy Corporation "If e-mail lives in the cloud, who owns that information?" says State Department's Alec Ross. Cloud computing is a double-edged sword in the fight for Internet freedom, a top State Department official said on Wednesday." "During a major policy speech in January, Clinton announced that Internet freedom would become a strategic priority for the United States in 2010. In March, State revived the Global Internet Freedom Task Force, a Bush administration initiative that worked to harmonize policies departmentwide on protecting free speech. The renamed NetFreedom Task Force met on March 4, when 19 telecommunications and information technology companies discussed the corporate sector's role in facilitating Internet freedom."

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!

There is a call for specific cyber bullying laws to be introduced on Australia.  A recent case that led to the suicide of a 17 year old boy led to the sentencing of a man to a community service order. The Government has agreed that more needs to be done to empower and protect victims.

And I thought the 'Fusion Powerplant" in Sim City 2000 being a peak accomplishment of the game was enough of a green message. Choose your industry and try to be a 'good' CEO. It seems like a kind of layman's e-learning on social responsibility for managers, or perhaps is the ideal way to train us MTV-generation managers of the future.

Is this war? It looks trivial, sounds personal but at heart this is 2 key multinational corporations fighting for the domination of markets that may well define us culturally, socially, economically and eventually politically. Google's overt entry into the hardware domain merely underlines the scary power we know they have.

We all know video content is one of the most popular types of content on the web, driving some of the most innovative and popular web based applications (for example Skype, ChatRoulette, YouTube). However, new video-centric applications, which combine real-time, social networking and broadcasting are putting an even more intense spotlight on questions of privacy than ever before. This particular article profiles examples that are surely just web minutes away from the tipping point, giving users the chance to broadcast their lives in ways Twitter can only dream of. Surprisingly, the article only touches on privacy issues, suggesting that we are too willing to post personal information about ourselves. Reader comments rightly point out we are moving into very murky territory where the attitude seems to be that anything posted on the web is fair game and can be used against the person who posted it.

What does it mean for both your privacy and personal reputation if you are putting everything online? If governments/corporations/employers etc can access so much personal information about you, how will this affect your life and the 'control' that such organisations have?

Highly detailed white paper on the underworld of cyber-espionage. Multinational corporation and state sponsored - all explore this backbone of the internet to get an advantage. Note: This gets quite technical at times. Very eye opening considering the recent events with the Australian/China cyber attacks on government and corporate targets.

"The government plans to enroll its officials in a range of courses, from stress-busting to the art of speaking persuasively." It seems that Russia is realising that a such clips as their president falling down due to drunkenness is no longer a quick news byte. Rather it is a viral video that will circulate the web for years to come. As a reaction, it seems Russia is becoming more self-conscious.

Steve Jobs (Apple) is using the architecture of the iPad and Apple's dominance when it comes to software to try maximize profits and crush competition.

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.

Also "Directors of the UK's biggest 350 listed companies should also stand for re-election every year, instead of at least every three years, to increase accountability under recommendations in the revised code." Frequent re-election should keep directors more or their toes, or will it make them spend more time trying to defend their positions instead of doing their jobs? Time will tell.

On Thursday April 1st, the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) - the Canadian equivalent to the SEC, put forth allegations against Agoracom.com an online investor relations forum for seeding fake conversations throughout their investor message board community. The allegations describe a scenario of more than 24,000 fraudulent posts made by 670 different accounts In the amount of time it took to create all these fake posts and different accounts, maybe they could have done something constructive? People don't seem to realise how much their actions are tracked on the internet. Beyond embarrassing, it's also becoming a grounds for legal action

GRI is the organisation that has pioneered the development of a sustainability reporting framework. Its aim is to make the disclosure on economic, environmental and social performance as commonplace and comparable as financial reporting. This seems to be a start towards making an industry standard in digital financial reporting, perhaps towards being compulsory one day. Currently, it's comply or explain, but businesses would be wise to get used to a digital system before it is standardised, and hopefully regulated.