Group items tagged

Firts post of my internet governance blog. Open source can be considered a positive externality, impacting on the spread of internet

In the words of one infamous US President, Australia - "you are either with us or against us". Australia's proposed mandatory filtering laws runs contrary to stated US foreign policy championing an open internet. Read US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton's remarks on internet freedom.

A coalition of internet companies are pushing for the US federal regulator responsible for communication industries to reassert control over ISPs by seeking to have internet services re-classified under the same rules as telephone services.

No, I don't agree that Internet Explorer is dead. However, there has been a significant progress in the adoption of alternative browsers, which is a healthy way to avoid a monopoly in browsers, which are the gate to internet for end users.  The decline in the use of IE thanks to the participation of open source browsers is acknowledged here. 

The University of Sydney's IT Alumni Association will next week bring together IT experts in networking, industry, law, child welfare and ethics to discuss the Federal Government's plans to introduce compulsory internet filtering by Internet Service Providers. Forum details When 6.30pm for a 7pm start, Wednesday 28 April 2010 Where Boardroom (Room 124), School of IT Building, 1 Cleveland Street, The University of Sydney How Entry is free and open to the public but online registration by 23 April is essential. For more information http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/alumni/discussion_forum.shtml

I wasn't previously a plan of Craigslist per se, however, as I'm so excited about the possibilities of peer to peer open source social networking (JoinDiaspora.com) it seems the time to reflect on the addition of a social layer of governance to the internet (Lessig in Code2.0 re identity layer), or the reverse, adding internet architectures to governance, which is Alice Goldmann is describing here.

A media rights watchdog has listed Australia in a report on countries that pose a threat of internet censorship.

Why does everyone get so worked up with the word "censorship"? In some cases, like with child porn, if a medium is used to violate a human right or indeed foments a crime, then there should be some sort of control. Why look at it from a b&w perspective when there are so many grey areas?

Is this really where Australia's future in censorships is heading?

How on earth can he guarantee that this will be 100 percent accurate - with no overblocking, and no underblocking!?!?! And in this interview, he advises that this is not a limit on freedom of speech and that the internet should not be considered a special platform.

This article discusses how the Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has dismissed the Internet as a special medium, claiming that it is nothing more than, "just a communication distrbution platform." Which, is quite short sighted, as the notion of open source, crowd sourcing, collective/collecting intelligence, collaborative intelligence is achievable because of the Internet. Conroy also claims that his filter is 100 percent accurate..." which begs to question, according to who? Filtering, content only prevents access, it does not prevent those individuals from crimnimal acts offline, nor does it address how to protect victims from their predators.

Four Corners and Q&A are covering the mandatory ISP filter debate tonight, should be a great double bill. Now its off the agenda till after the election, so the Government clearly misjudged the public reaction. Thanks to widespread media coverage on the inherent flaws of the MISP, coupled with the activism of protest movements such as Electronic Frontiers Australia and the Pirate Party, its fair to say that the general public have moved beyond the Government's black and white positioning of the proposal.

Thanks for the reminder!

This article discusses a report which looks at the possibilities of applying an open source model & culture which has been associated with building and proliferating the Mozilla browser to the Obama administration's initiatives to be "more transparent, participatory and collaborative".  

EFA Board Member, Stephen Collins, spoke yesterday at an event at Parliament House hosted by the Menzies Research Centre in a debate with Tony McLellan of the Australian Christian Lobby. The audience was primarily members of the Australian Liberal Students Federation; young Liberals destined for jobs as political staffers and politicians.

The article talks about "Access Controlled", a new book from the Open Net Initiative that examines the new second and third generation filtering techniques employed by governments such as Russia and Belarus that are far more subtle than China's 'Great Firewall' but can censor unwanted content as effectively.

After the Secretary of State in the US Hillary Clinton's speech on Internet freedom, open source source code repository SourceForge.net blocked access to IP addresses originating in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria. Open source software provides important infrastructure to these oppressed and developing nations. I hope the American government can see what a blow this is to the infrastructure and fledgling industries in these countries.

Scroll down and read the discussion forum paper, "Child Protection and Freedom of Expression Online". The report aims to open discussion and reframe the debate surrounding child protection by bringing together, rather than isolating, advocates of online child protection and those of freedom of expression. It rejects the current moral panics that dominate the debate, particularly in the media, which over-represents the likelihood of harm to children online. It highlights the unproductive nature of framing online protection as a moral panic because it obscures and undermines the work of both freedom of expression and child protection advocates. Rather than keeping these two parties as diametrically opposed the discussion laid the first steps in finding common ground between the two. From here they can work together to advance both of their agendas and therefore achieving a more desirable balance between defending the rights of children and maintaining freedom of expression.

The Dutch Anti-Piracy organisation BREIN has run out of options to try to shut down bit torrent websites and therefore has asked Internet provider Ziggo to block Torrent website ThePirateBay. Ziggo made clear that they are for 'open internet' and do not think they are responsible because they are just an intermediate.

Interview with Jason Lanierm, an apparent "digital guru" who has changed his view of open culture to that which promotes a "digital maoism". He proposes that we need to pay people for the brain work that they do instead of encouraging them to be labourers of sorts. 

A brief review of a letter that 'some' Chinese netizens sent to Google and to the Chinese gov. The 'netizens' confirm that they "support necessary censorship of Internet content and communications", however, they give a few guidelines on how this censorship should be conducted.

The founder and Chief Executive of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, announced at a recent conference that Facebook's Open Graph project will soon enable an even greater degree of personalisation as people surf the net. I think this probably has implications for user experience, in terms of viewing popular sites through the prism of social networking - and it gives sites more authority to store data about individuals. Because Facebook seems to be so pervasive nowadays, it seems like we won't have much say in the matter...

Allison, that's a great point, I've tried to quit using the site but I stop when I realise that I won't know about upcoming social events - unfortunately its the primary means of communication used by some friends!

Yes and I think Facebook take full advantage! A lot of my friends have been posting notes on FB about changing privacy settings now that the new features have come in. So, people are trying to resist but in a more subtle way than dropping out of FB altogether.

Amendments made to the digital economy bill last week, handing courts the power to force internet service providers (ISPs) to block certain websites, threaten freedom of speech and will lead to British websites being blocked without due judicial process, the chief executives of leading technology companies said in an open letter to the Financial Times. The heads of the four largest UK internet service providers as well as Google, Facebook, eBay and Yahoo have all co-signed the letter, along with consumer groups and academics, objecting to amendment. Theoretically the amendment could lead to sites such as YouTube being blocked in the UK.

This article discusses how Michael McConnell (former director of national intelligence), has suggessted that "we need to re-engineer the Internet to make attribution, geo-location, intelligence analysis and impact assessment - who did it, from where, why and what was the result - more manageable." Under the guise of protecting the state, it deems the "netizens," as possible enemies of the state.