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The UK Government are proposing to introduce a Digital Economy Bill.  The owners of copyright material will be able to pursue individuals who are sharing their content and take legal recourse.  Persistent offenders can eventually be blocked by their ISP. "Persistent" offenders will have received 50 notices before the Government can request that the ISP block their access to the internet. Sites that host material / content that breaches the bill will be issued with a series of take down notices. This impacts all sites - not just those whose servers are based in the UK.  If the site does not comply with the take down notice it will be possible for the site to be blocked within the UK. 

Wikipedia is one of the most used sites on the site, and a 'go to' for infomation. But what happens when the site is about - or mentions - a real, living person? There are many cases of anpeople suffering damages to their reputation - particularly politicians - due to misleading, false or slanderous Wikipedia entries. This invention hopes to remedy that and show that you can't trust everything you read online. This also helps regulate some of the pitfalls of collaboration, and encourages the less-than-excellent collaborations to improve. Exposure of false collaboration can damage the reputation of the collaborators, and encourage them to improve.

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.  

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?

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.

Unvarnished (www.getunvarnished.com) is a recently launched social networking site wherein anyone can create an online profile for a professional (think LinkedIn), and any user can post reviews (mostly negative) about you, anonymously. The website's founder says that Unvarnished gives an individual the opportunity to disprove any negative claims about him/her. However, I agree with the author of the article in believing that the site actually encourages and empowers users to have a backstabbing spree. It will be interesting to see in the next coming months if Unvarnished actually takes off.

A German court has granted an injunction against torrent site The Pirate Bay (TPB) brought against it by Hollywood film studios. The injunction means that TPB's bandwidth provider cannot connect it to internet servers, meaning it is unavailable. Of course, getting one torrent site shut down is just the tip of the iceberg - there are thousands of torrent sites out there and many may originate in countries where the service providers or site owners can't be prosecuted. TPB originates in Sweden. In 2009, TPB's four founders were sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay a $US3.6million fine.

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Blog post about how Facebook and MySpace handle cyber bullying. Should both sites "unmask" bullies and what would the possible implications be?  At present neither site is required to identify users who bully others or post offensive material unless requested by a subpoena.

The Internet Industry Association is working with Police and Government to try and control safety concerns on social media sites. Currently, they are powerless to step in when sites are hosted overseas.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

The Digital economy Act in all its glory. There was a LOT of debate over this Act. It was introduced by Lord Mandelson of the Labour party, tossed back and forth between houses with amendments that were argued to the minutest detail, then finally spat out for the public to revile. All ISPs are now required to monitor their subscibers use of listed sites and warn them when they enter a site that enables pirating. They must then record every such warning, giving every subscriber a number, then make the list available to the government when they get a warrant to look for excessive downloaders. Only the government like this idea, because it makes their job easier. I wandered onto one of the listed sites recently in my quest to find Dr Who episodes before they aired in Australia. The message was like driving down the highway and suddenly seeing a police car parked on the side of the road. You might know you haven't done anything wrong (yet) but you still get a scare ...

If users are to blame, who should provide media literacy programs?

Guest blog on Jenkins' MIT site about internet filtering in Australia by Mark McLelland from University of Wollongong.

Well here's a good old fashioned police crackdown on online copyright infringement. The largest illegal download site in Greece had its alleged key players arrested in their homes after a complaint was made by a copyright protection agency.

This looks at the new atmosphere of sharing all the mundane details about our lives, facilitated by sites such as Blippy, which broadcasts details about shopping habits, and Foursquare, that uses GPS to alert contacts to your location. A fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union said, "People are not necessarily thinking about how long this information will stick around, or how it could be used and exploited by marketers." Concerns are also raised about potential identity theft and whether accessing every scrap of data left behind by users is actually valuable.