ARIN6902 Internet Cultures and Governance

Are we using facebook or is facebook using us?

Under IPv4, remains only a 7% of IP addresses to be assigned, which are expected to be depleted by April 2012

A woman who believed her daughter died after being gang-raped by thugs associated with police, was supported in her efforts for justice by internet activists who posted allegedly "slanderous" material on the Internet. Rather than naming those who had allegedly been slandered, the court argued that the slander affected the state. Bloggers reported from the courthouse and spread messages via Twitter in support of the accused.

Back in March, Iranian's took part in the traditional fire festival, held at night time. A trend I've noticed with reporting in mainstream news is the use of a live blog with bloggers taking shifts to report on big events - The Guardian recently did this with the UK election and may do it for the World Cup coming up. To see this level of detail in live reporting in a mainstream news source is great, especially when it's not related to something as boring as sport ;) The reporter has contacts on the ground and also encourages other Iranians who may be reading to send him secure emails with updates from the event. Videos posted on YouTube are also linked to as soon as they're made available.

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.

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.

Ofcom has conducted a survey in the UK on the handling of personal data online. The result: In the light of recent news about privacy issues online (Facebook for example) people have become more weary about Internet privacy. The Scottish are the least worried. Also interesting: "about a quarter of internet users say they 'lack confidence' in installing filerting software or security features."

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, is depicited as an borderline autistic conniver in the up coming black comdedy about Facebook. Just added another drama to Facebook currently facing piracy crisis.

A Brisbane based software company's CEO created a solution to manage his son's internet access which includes time limits and blocks chat and some social network applications. Although it's unlikely to stop the ban, it's great to see people advertising their disdain for the potential legislation and what can be done to protect children in a more efficient way.

Apparently we'll be out of 0-255 IP addresses in approximately 500 days...

MySpace is making updates to users privacy settings in order to simplify the process for controlling how your data is shared/displayed

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.

A phisher from Nigeria was discovered to be responsible for creating 1,100 phishing sites over 15 months. By studying the guy's online activity, it was obvious that he treated it like a 9-5 job. It is estimated that he earns $4 million a year with this scam!

India's government is planning to develop its own OS due to security reasons. They do not want to rely on foreign operating systems as they believe this makes them more susceptible to cyber attacks. 

Google has mistakenly collect private unsecured Wi-Fi payload data from their street view car that was meant to collect mapping data. It may be hard for google to earn back our trust after this event.

Manuel Espino, leader of the PAN, Mexico's conservative party, twitted that Diego Fernandez de Ceballos, the politician who is missing, had been killed. He later said sorry and admited the information was not confirmed/true. But was it? Twitter's immediacy can put politicians in the spotlight even if that is not their intention. 

In what appears to be a direct warning to the Australian founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange had his passport confiscated for a period of time at Melbourne Airport (on the basis that it looked worn) and then had his bags searched, being questioned on about his 1991 criminal record for hacking offences. Wikileaks published the confidential list of sites that would form the blacklist under the Australian government's proposed net filter. Coincidence? I think not.

Further, Assange was interrviewed on Dateline last night and said that Wikileaks was potentially going to be investigated by the Australian Federal Police over the leak. However, the AFP aren't pursuing it since it's out of their scope. http://www.zdnet.com.au/afp-called-to-investigate-wikileaks-339303208.htm

Julian Assange is hassled and detained by customs entering Melbourne airport. Then a Fed pulls him over again in arrivals and questions him on an old hacking charge. Punishment for the leaking the Black List perhaps? Surely not...

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.

Fourth and featured blog post in my series on Protest Movements.