Group items tagged

Who's a villain and who's not? "Villain"? That's like a comics term..... Lex Luthor better not have Facebook.... "Bought 300 grams of kyyptonite today..."

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.

A Crikey article on DBCDE's proposal of mandatory filtering and the "Submissions on measures to increase accountability and transparency for Refused Classification material". The Government's courting of mandatory filtering has drawn widespread criticism from such stakeholders as Google, the Internet Industry Association and highly regarded academics such as Professors Catherine Lumby, Lelia Greean and John Hartley. One of the main concerns is that the scope of the filtering is too wide and will have major implications on what content is available online. This article also helpfully provides links to some of the submissions.

A politician, a political analyst and the editor of the Russian edition of Newsweek have been, supposedly, framed by the Kremlin in order to discredit them. Videos of them in compromising positions have been distributed in the Internet: the web as a channel through which public opinion can be molded by totalitarian states. Political campaigns could "learn" a lot from the Kremlin's actions... 

This article introduces another 'body' called auDA the Australian domain name administrator. The article discusses a complaint from the president of the Australian Web Site Developers Association after 500 sites he had set up, and $100K later were just switched off by the auDA bases on their assessment of use. Perhaps the auDA needs its own audit and regulation over policy approval!

The US Federal Communications Commission has been dealt a major blow in asserting its right to regulate net neutrality with a district court ruling the FCC had "failed to demonstrate" its authority to interfer with activity undertaken by internet service provider Commcast. Comcast had been moving to restrict the internet access of customers using peer-to-peer sharing software, which uses large amounts of bandwidth and is a common mode of illegal video and music piracy.

A new paper on Australia's proposed mandatory filtering plan in context of Australia's broader stance on child pornography. It uses the example the consumption of "Japanese Boys Love" manga by people (mainly girls) underage to explore issues around censorship and governance

Listen to Radio National- Australia Talks. Presenter Paul Barclay mediates a discussion about the proposed mandatory internet filtering system. He talks with Minister Stephen Conroy and Colin Jacobs, Vice President of Electronic Frontiers Australia. Together with two experts, Mark Newton a network engineer and Andrew Graydon Chief Operations Office of Netsweeper, who both provide technical analysis on the efficiency of the filtering system.

This article is criticizing the attack lunched by Anonymous. It said, the any protest against the Mandatory ISP filtering plan is encouraged, however, the bring down government website is an illegal way to make political statement, and will render the protest null and avoid. Instead, even the anti-censorship community advocate legal way to protest the Mandatory censorship. In my opinion, this attack is interesting, although it is illegal, it doesn't cause big cost, just threw little troubles to government website, it can be considered as a prank, not a crime. Anyway, no one can be convicted, as it is an anonymous attack by hacker, lol.:)

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). "

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.

This is a blog on Obama's campaign website"www.mybarackobama.com". It is celebrating the passage of the new health-care bill as well as stressing the significant meaning of this new act.

This article discusses how online review sites can be manipulated, and the importance that companies place on 'word of mouth' for reputation. It raises this important issue: online reviews and comments are crucial for the reputation of 'real world' sites, so how can these sites be 'governed'? Or should they be?

How do you govern a site specially designed to encourage bad behaviour? Do you even want or need to? When does 'bad behaviour' go too far?

Due to it's population, I think China will still be the biggest market for the internet despite the censorsip the govornment placed.

DNSSEC was developed to add security to the Domain Name System . The tool works by adding information on the origin of authentication of DNS data, data integrity and authenticated denial of existence. DNSSEC obviously adds more information to queries and therefore increases the size of those query packets. Where older routers exist the additional information included in the larger data packets may not be recognised and therefore the DNS will not be resolved. The end user, in this instance, would not be able to visit the site they requested. The fear campaigns in the community have been around that very point: that the implementation of DNSSEC will not resolve host names. This article provides some light explanation around the rollout of DNSSEC and lays to rest the fear mongering by stating that there, to date, has been minimum negative effect of the DNSSEC that has been rolled out.

The Computer and Communications Industry Association disclosed a report revealing the value of industries dependent on copyright limitations. The report claims that it accounts for US$4.7 trillion and 23% of the US' real economic growth from 2002-2007.

Are we using facebook or is facebook using us?

It will be considered as a technical achievement in the history of the internet: the introduction of non-latin top level domain names. To date United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Russian Federation, and Egypt will now be able to view a complete domain name in arabic script. Western society probably failed to consider, until recently, the limiting effect of the internet's architecture for speakers of non-latin derived languages. In the same way technically disconnected rural communities form part of the digital divide, so to do inhabitants of countries that had no education in latin based languages. How does a browser support arabic script? The brower itself must support both the character sets of the language. Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari all support arabic script.