ARIN6902 Internet Cultures and Governance

Great comment by Lawrence Lessig on his speech at the Italian Parliament last week and the discussions that arose afterwards. In this article, he also summarizes the key issues of Italy and the Interent, covering censorship, copyright issues but also Italian's push to get the Nobel Committee to consider the Internet for the Peace Prize.

Surprisingly, a Spanish judge has ruled today in favor of a file-sharing website since P2P networks as a mere transmission of data between Internet users, would not violate, in principle, any right protected by Intellectual Property Law. Furthermore, he decided that "offering an index of links and/or linking to copyright material is not the same as distribution." The decision was based on the notion that the file-sharer doesn't make any direct or indirect profits off the site

Nobel prizewinner Shirin Ebadi accused German engineering giant Siemens and Finnish telecoms firm Nokia of supplying Iran with technology to help it suppress democratic dissent. The European Parliament also supports that arguement and strongly criticised international companies, in particular Nokia Siemens for giving Iranian authorities the tools needed for censorship and surveillance. Both companies argue that they could not be blamed for the misuse but that their technologies "play a significant role in the development of societies and the advancement of democracy"

The "Digital Economy Bill" has been passed by the Lords and is now expected to be rushed through the Commons before the general elections. Despite criticism by the UK's major telecommunication providers and global internet giants like Google, the government said it was still committed to giving courts the power to block websites which are infringing copyright. The bill is mainly aiming to tackle internet privacy. Some of it's paragraphs however could lead to internet censorship.

This article is looking at the release of some details of former President Bush's secret cybersecurity plan. It focuses around the debate as to whether cybersecurity should be extended into infrastructure or scaled back. It will be interesting to see how President Obama will react to this issue especially now that many details have been made public which will spark interest and debate.

Whilst not strictly about reputation, this post discusses tracking what your (your being a person or entity) fans are also fans of. This tells us alot about identity and reputation within different communities, and helps to track coalitions of interest and identity.

Australian defamation law and how it applies to the Internet

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.

This discusses companies such as 'Reputation Hawk' which focus on improving your online reputation - particularly pertaining to your personal identity. It highlights how important your reputation is online - in many ways it is the only social currency that you have.

My first blog post about my topic - "protest movements". I am specifically looking at the Australian protest movement against the Government's proposed ISP filtering legislation.

Google speaks out on censorship and the violation of user privacy in China. Yahoo in the US agrees but its Chinese partner Alibaba Group does not. Are they afraid of a backlash from Beijing and fear for their ungoing business success? Makes me wonder how bad the quagmire in China really is...

my own

The millions of Palestinians who struggle against daily obstacles peacefully, choosing blogging, boycotts, and creating YouTube videos to nonviolently protest, should not be discounted.

In an effort to disrupt communications and head off huge opposition demonstrations planned for Thursday, the Iranian authorities on Wednesday drastically slowed Internet service in Iran and shut down text messaging services, and an official said that Gmail, the Google e-mail service, would be blocked.

Ideas, issues, knowledge, data - visualised. CReator David McCandless is a London-based author, writer and designer who has written for The Guardian, Wired and others. He is interested in "how designed information can help us understand the world, cut through BS and reveal the hidden connections, patterns and stories underneath. Or, failing that, it can just look cool!"

Traditional media get bits of breaking news wrong all the time, but we accept that as part of the game. To vilify Wikipedia for the same errors sets unequal standards and besides, you'll likely never see the same level of transparency in traditional media about where it went wrong.

Cloud computing may be the latest incarnation of an on-demand computing model that has been doing the rounds for a decade but it looks like its time has finally come.

Study into the US Safe Harbor is an agreement between the European Commission and the United States Department of Commerce that enables organisations to join a Safe Harbor List to demonstrate their compliance with the European Union Data Protection Directive.

Discussion of data housing locations and legal/regulatory implications.