Group items tagged

Howard Schdmit, The Whitehouse's Cybersecurity coordinator has revealed the US Government's plans for tackling attacks on it's networks. He has promised transparency. The official announcement (this bookmark) is very vague in it's initiatives. It will be interesting to see whether their can really separate US government networks from other parts of the Internet.  Cyber attacks are definitely increasing and play a major part in conflicts between countries. China amongst others is said to have attacked & attempted to hack and launch DoS attacks on US government networks and Russia shut down the Georgian communications infrastructure during the last week between the two countries et. )

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.

An article on how the increasing flow of internet traffic could potentially lead to a form of 'gatekeeping' of users by providers. It has always been perceived that there was network neutrality as providers charged a flat rate for unlimited internet access. However, the article argues that this is not the case as there has aways been some form of management of traffic so that an acceptable level of service is maintained. An extreme example is the court case between BitTorrent users and the provider Comcast. Comcast blocked this service as it was effecting service. This was challenged by users who initially won. However in a challenge by Comcast, Washington found in their favour as it found that the Federal Communications Commission could not decide how Comcast should manage its network. Another interesting point made is the potential for service providers to charge content providers who attract a large amount of traffic.This way good service is guarenteed, through essentially sharing the burden of cost. Obviously this is fiercely opposed by businesses. Clearly this all has the potential to change the relationship between users, content providers and service providers.

A really interesting article on the use of social networking platforms during and after protests in Kyrgyzstan. Twitter, Facebook and local forum, Diesel are important sites for citizens to report, share information and discuss issues in a relatively impartial environment as the media has increasingly come under the power of the President. In April protests took place in the captial Bishkek against President Bakiyev. The social networking sites allowed poeple to hear what was going on. It also facilitated groups forming to attempt curbing the violence that was taking place. The downside to this form of communication in this situation was the inflammatory comments that was essentially fear - mongering were posted. Some were found to be untrue, and some believe that it was the Russians attempting to influence the situation in Kyrgyzstan.

Social networks become the prime target for cybercrime, according to a Cisco report. Malicious code is masked as an online game on a social networking site, that once clicked, infects the user's computer without them knowing

In the aftermath of the recent death of 18-year-old Nona Belomesoff, following a "Facebook meeting" comes an outcry from parent and teacher groups to prevent teens from accessing Facebook at school. According to Laurel Papworth, banning access is not the answer. Education is.

This article discusses how banning Facebook is not the answer for prevention of tragedies of deaths like Sydney teen who had met a "friend" on Facebook. Though it may seem commonly obvious, I do not believe simply warning and educating children/teenagers about the potential dangers of social networking and strangers is enough; but perhaps going a step further and accepting that meeting "friends" through social networks has become a social norm. Therefore conversations amongst children/teenagers/friends/parents alike must be initiated so that there is some sort of support system to ensure safety. As the online social networks expand the definition of "friends", one must consider the social construction of how people now view the world based on these norms.

Rather than suggesting that social networking sites should be "banned" to protect the safety of children, people should ensure they understand how to be safe online.  This also includes understanding the changes to a sites privacy policies and the impacts these changes can have to your privacy settings.

There has been some controversy about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's comments in an online chat from 2006 that surfaced recently. He told a friend that Facebook users were dumb for trusting him and submitting private, personal information on his then-fledgling website. An initiative by four young programmers to counteract the negative effects that Facebook has had on privacy and the ability of users to control the data they put online is Diaspora. It is a decentralised, open source social network that wants to compete with centralised social networks that allow "spying for free". It will be interesting to see whether the initiative really takes off as a viable alternative to Facebook.

The initial announcement last year about the federal government's proposal of a National Broadband Network was met with a lot of scepticism. I think that despite its flaws, the network seems quite necessary considering the inequality of access experienced by thousands of Australians due to the broad geographical scope of the country.

It's a well-known fact that small businesses are more susceptible to cyber-crime than many of their larger counterparts. A lack of funding and resources means that few small to medium-sized businesses can afford to pay for vulnerability assessments or penetration testing of their network security.

Short blog post about the loss of privacy that social networks entail. It especially looks at the emergence of foursquare and the foursquare/twitter mashup pleaserobme.com 

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.

Very timely for our forthcoming privacy class. Google has been wardriving. Which makes perfect sense. Useful for business and so easy to do when they're driving by. Who owns info that we put out on the street?

Google Australia will today be sent a "please explain" letter from two local privacy organisations demanding to know why the company has been collecting personal Wi-Fi network data from Australian homes alongside the images it takes with its Street View cameras. Google has taken some heat lately about its commitment to privacy after officials from 10 governments - including New Zealand, Canada and France - wrote a letter to chief executive Eric Schmidt to express their concern over data collection for Street View and the implementation of its Buzz social networking tool.

The research found that posting material about political or social issues on the Web and using social networking sites politically are forms of online engagement that are dominated by the young-especially the youngest adults.

BT is expected to announce this week that it is hugely expanding its super-fast broadband network. But it will also reportedly reveal it has cut 35,000 jobs in the last two years...

Looks at a new social networking site for children aged 6-10. It's heavily monitored and controlled by parents for the sake of online safety, but the concern is that young children can just as easily sign up to other social networking sites that aren't so restrictive.

Interesting research: Eight out of 10 employees claim that being trusted to manage their own time and the internet as they wish is more important than pay.

"The technology of network society is relatively freely available. What determines its impact is the degree to which networked people can be held in check by institutional authority."

- 30% of smartphone users accessed social networks via mobile browsers - this was up from 22.5% in 2009. - Total social networking access via mobile browsers on all mobile phones rose to 11.1% - this was up from 6.5% in 2009. Most of this growth was in the uptick in smartphone usage. Big numbers. But how can content creators make money off it? Where's the profit? Are these sustainable media?

Article from Fibreculture journal.

Teachers are very much aware and very much worried on how social networking sites, particularly Facebook, are being used by students to "bully" and spread false allegations about them. Not only professional reputations are at stake in acts like these, but hate sites will surely affect the personal lives of teachers as well.