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donnamariee

Internet Activism? Let's Look at the Specifics | Rebecca MacKinnon | Cato Unbound - 0 views

  • Internet Activism? Let’s Look at the Specifics
  • Internet brings new dimensions and power to activism, we must not be naïve about the power of networked technologies. It is important to unpack the factors behind successful—and unsuccessful—online activism.
  • widespread social media adoption do not on their own guarantee activism’s success. The Internet is not some sort of automatic "freedom juice."
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  • Success or failure of digital activism in authoritarian states also depends on the regime’s technological capacity, skill, foresight, and planning
  • Internet itself—its technical architecture as well as the regulatory constraints shaping what people in different places can and cannot do with it—is a variable. We cannot treat the Internet as constant—either across geographical space or across time—in our calculations about the success of online activism.
  • often empowers activism, it is also used in many parts of the world as an insidious extension of state power—sometimes with the direct collaboration of companies seeking market access; sometimes much more indirectly due to the fact that Internet and mobile companies are conduits and repositories of vast amounts of citizens’ personal data, and also make commercial decisions that have a profound impact on people’s digital lives and identities
  • Whether the Internet remains conducive to political activism, or with liberal democracy for that matter, is by no means guaranteed. We face a virtuous or vicious cycle depending on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist: Activism is urgently required—nationally and globally—to ensure that the Internet remains compatible with activism.
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    "INTERNET ACTIVISM? LET'S LOOK AT THE SPECIFICS" - essay theme
Jernej Prodnik

Aaron Swartz files reveal how FBI tracked internet activist | Technology | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

  • Aaron Swartz files reveal how FBI tracked internet activist Firedoglake blogger Daniel Wright publishes once-classified FBI documents that show extent of agency's investigation into Swartz
  • Amanda Holpuch guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 19 February 2013 22.42 GMT
  • A blogger has published once-classified FBI files that show how the agency tracked and collected information on internet activist Aaron Swartz. Swartz, who killed himself in January aged 26, had previously requested his files and posted them on his blog, but some new documents and redactions are included in the files published by Firedoglake blogger Daniel Wright.Wright was given 21 of 23 declassified documents, thanks to a rule that declassifies FBI files on the deceased. Wright said that he was told the other two pages of documents were not provided because of freedom of information subsections concerning privacy, "sources and methods," and that can "put someone's life in danger."
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  • The FBI's files concern Swartz's involvement in accessing the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (Pacer) documents. In pursuit of their investigation, the FBI had collected his personal information and was surveilling an Illinois address where he had his IP address registered. Aaron H. Swartz FBI File by Daniel Wright
  • One page reads: "Washington Field Office requests that the North RA attempt to locate Aaron Swartz, his vehicles, drivers license information and picture, and others. Since Swartz is the potential subject of an ongoing investigation, it is requested that Swartz not be approached by agents." The FBI also collected information from his social networking profiles, including Facebook and Linkedin. The latter proved to be a catalog of his many notable accomplishments, which include being a co-founder of Reddit, a founder of a website to improve the government, watchdog.net and as metadata adviser at Creative Commons.
  • Information from a New York Times article about his Pacer hack was also included in the files, though strangely, since the article can still be read online, the name of the article's other subject, Carl Malamud, was blocked out.Hacking collective Anonymous released a State Department database Monday in memory of Swartz. The files included employees' personal information such as addresses, phone number and emails.
donnamariee

Better Policy Through Better Information | John O. McGinnis | Cato Unbound - 0 views

  • Can Internet activism work?
  • is importantly correct that the Internet can help redress the balance between special and more encompassing interests by reducing the cost of accessing information. Such reduction redounds to the advantage of diffuse groups more than concentrated groups because reduced costs can temper the former groups’ larger problems of coordination.
  • earing that more information may enable citizens to better organize to attack their privileges, they have tried to restrict emerging technologies of free communication as long as these technologies have been around.
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  • In a democratic state like ours, the primary interest groups are not authoritarian cliques, but private actors, like public sector unions and trade associations, which have the leverage to pressure politicians to use public power on their behalf. And, like authoritarian leaders, such groups are desperate to avoid transparency to retain their benefits. A case in point is the opposition of teachers' unions to publishing evaluations of schools and teachers on the Internet. And many interest groups have tried to prevent laws requiring Internet disclosure of campaign contributions.
  • Yet the results of policies are contestable. And it is often hard for citizens who are distracted by many enterprises more interesting than politics to find good information about policies' likely outcomes. Most people also have a better intuitive sense of how policies will affect their short-term interests than the long-term interests of society, even if the long-term effects may be of great personal as well as social benefit.
  • The Internet provides an important mechanism of such social discovery. Because of the greater space and interconnections that the Internet makes available, web-based media, like blogs, can be dispersed and specialized and yet connected with the wider world. As a result of this more decentralized and competitive media, the web generates both more innovative policy ideas and better explanations of policy than were available when mainstream media dominated the flow of political discussion.
  • In short, over time the Internet and allied aspects of the computational revolution can create more focused and more accurate knowledge about the consequences of social policies. This knowledge in turn can help more citizens focus more on what they have in common—their shared goals and policies that may achieve them—rather than on the unsupported intuitions or personal circumstances that may divide them. Of course, some citizens will remain ideologues, impervious to updating on the facts. But democracy moves by changing the middle, not the extremes. Like other mechanisms that increase common knowledge, the Internet can give wing to the better angels of our nature.
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Mateja Žnidaršič

British internet users double in six years - Telegraph - 0 views

  • British internet users double in six years
  • The number of British adults using the internet every day has doubled in the last six years, according to new data.
  • In 2012, 33 million adults used the internet daily
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  • The most popular online activity was sending and receiving email
  • followed by researching goods and services and reading the news.
  • Social networking activity is lower among older age groups, with just one in 10 over 65s saying that they use social networks.
donnamariee

Taylor & Francis Online :: The Labors of Internet-Assisted Activism: Overcommunication,... - 0 views

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    " Internet elements in political activism through a close ethnographic case study of a volunteer group involved in the 20" -essayth
Patricija Čelik

Internet pornography: safety plans do not go far enough - charities - Telegraph - 0 views

  • The Government yesterday launched a consultation on a possible change in the law to give parents more control over the material their children are viewing online.
  • Internet service providers have been in talks with the Government about ways of enabling parents to block sites containing sexually or gambling as well as forums glorify suicide and self-harm.
  • a report by MPs who called for a full “opt-in” which would automatically block adult material unless the user chose to deactivate it. Google has argued that an automatic block as a “mistake”, while Virgin Media, BT, TalkTalk and Sky have developed versions of the “active choice” system which makes users chose whether they want parental controls when they sign up, rather than imposing them automatically.
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  • Claire Walker, head of policy, at the charity Family Lives, which this week published a hard hitting report on online dangers, said parents would be more secure with an automatic block.
sintija

BBC News - US internet 'six strikes' anti-piracy campaign begins - 0 views

  • US internet 'six strikes' anti-piracy campaign begins
  • Five of the country's leading internet service providers (ISPs) are taking part in the Copyright Alert System (CAS), which they say is designed to educate rather than punish users.
  • "Over the course of the next several days... our content partners will begin sending notices of alleged peer-to-peer copyright infringement to ISPs, and the ISPs will begin forwarding those notices in the form of copyright alerts to consumers,
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  • Consumers whose accounts have been used to share copyrighted content over P2P networks illegally (or without authority) will receive alerts that are meant to educate rather than punish, and direct them to legal alternatives. And for those consumers who believe they received alerts in error, an easy-to-use process will be in place for them to seek independent review of the alerts they received.
  • Meanwhile the UK has favoured a proposed "three strikes" policy
  • Under telecom regulator Ofcom's draft code, users who receive three warnings within 12 months would have anonymous information about their activities passed to copyright holders which could then seek court orders to discover their identities.
  • The policy had been due to come into effect in March 2014, but has been delayed after a House of Lords committee queried whether the Digital Economy Act - which the code is part of - complied with Treasury rules.
Patricija Čelik

As 'Do Not Track' Effort Seems to Stall, Web Companies Race to Look Privacy-Friendly - ... - 0 views

  • Increasingly, Internet companies are pushing each other to prove to consumers that their data is safe and in their control.
  • In some instances, established companies are trying to gain market advantage by casting themselves as more privacy-friendly than their rivals.
  • “It’s not just privacy advocates and regulators pushing,” Mr. Lynch said. “Increasingly, people are concerned more about privacy as technology intersects their life.”
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  • To some degree, these developments signal that the industry is working hard to stave off government regulation, which is moving at a glacial pace anyway. There seems to be no movement on broad privacy legislation on Capitol Hill, and no consensus has been reached on standards for “Do Not Track,” a browser setting that would let Internet users indicate that they did not want their activity tracked by marketers.
  • Whether Internet users are ready to pay to protect their personal data is unclear, though surveys have repeatedly pointed to consumer anxiety.
nensic

Under the regime of precarity: bring your own device | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • At one and the same time technocracy and financial oligarchies find here an ideal medium to extend their influence and their control of individuals in space and time.
  • At one and the same time technocracy and financial oligarchies find here an ideal medium to extend their influence and their control of individuals in space and time. This explains the fierce struggle going on among key market players.
  • Today large communities use devices like smartphones, tablets, e-readers and ultrabooks to navigate this new ecosystem.
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  • The growing dynamic of mobile internet, today accounting for 12% of all internet traffic,[ii] signals a new ecosystem where living bodies, machines, networks, code, data, territory and time interact.
  • as a way of consolidating their strictly neoliberal economic policy.
  • The hundreds of thousands of apps, available in just a few years, originate from the intersection of two factors:
  • The desire and necessity to have simple, functional and fast devices able to do specific tasks on the go.
  • the operative skills to develop apps for popular mobile platforms such as Iphone Operating System (IOS) or Google Android. 
  • Apps galore
  • Apple likes to play on the ambiguity in a form of propaganda that exalts the “revolutionary” spirit of technological innovation
  • The first iPhone, in 2007, inaugurated the new phase of the cognitive era, just as the PC heralded the decline of the industrial phase. Five years later, Apple no longer has a monopoly: hundreds of millions of smartphones and tablets are sold every year and the total number of these active devices will be soon 2 billion. It took the PC thirty years to reach this level of diffusion.
  • War over the immaterial
  • Often these machines play opposite functions: as a tool to create new forms of horizontal communication and social interaction or as bait for a capillary exploitation.
  • A political analysis of mobile devices
  • The PC became a liberating tool for social cooperation in the workplace of a booming third-sector.
  • In the following phase, the spread of the first mobile devices – cellphones and laptops – provided an initial impulse for a blurring of life and work, imposing with mobile calls, emails or SMS a new type of real-time processing, regulating the rhythms of life
  • In the new biohypermedia environment, the key change lies in the combination of miniaturizing and mobilizing these pieces of equipment, allowing them to always be within the body’s reach in any context.
  • they augment physical reality[ix] with every kind of information – commercial, cultural, ecological – and act more and more as biomedical sets for the control, correction and support of our vital biological functions.
  • The PC has a central function as the medium for linguistic and written processes - its typical uses often tied to the logical concatenation of thought and the priority management of sequences over time.
  • But mobile devices concentrate complex perception of stimuli in terms of spatial organization and intervene in emotional responses. PC work in this way occupies our left hemisphere, while the continual interactions of a smartphone engage the right hemisphere.
  • In contemporary neoliberalism, these devices become an essential means of rent and profit, through a fine capture of what we generate by living with them and using them. At one and the same time technocracy and financial oligarchies find here an ideal medium to extend their influence and their control of individuals in space and time.
  • Marketing and communication campaigns portray these devices as commodity fetishes, characterizing a new phase of capitalism often described as cognitive because based on knowledge.
  • In the sphere of multinational ICT[x] Corporations a war is being waged over the design and deployment of immaterial enclosures
  • Even though all this is based on freeware and open source, they trick us into believing that the iPhone 5, Windows 8 or Jellybean[xi] are miracles that descend from Mount Olympus and for which we should be grateful as to the gods.
  • Unlike automobiles or, to a lesser degree, PCs, the use value of new mobile devices is no longer determined merely by the initial design but can be moulded by the final user.
  • The innumerable websites, blogs and forums in every language globally blooming and growing are a workshop for worldwide exchange where the digital means are developed that could be used to withdraw workers both from precarity and  from total submission to a life of labour.  
  • Microsoft is no less defensive of its monopoly: with Intel and other accomplices, they introduced a new firmware to boot Windows 8 PCs that, substituting the old BIOS,[xv] makes it impossible or very complicated to install Linux or other operating systems on new laptops.
  • Despite hesitations related to “security” problems, today companies allow or even oblige people to use their own devices
  • So, if you were one of those many who found the latest tablet, smartphone or hybrid touch device under the tree this year, be aware that you won’t be the only one pleased: under the regime of precarity, bring your own device if you want to survive. 
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    "Bring your own device (BYOD) is a business policy whereby employees bring personally owned mobile devices to their place of work and use them to access privileged company resources such as email, file servers and databases as well as their personal applications and data."
donnamariee

Who is Social Media Really Working For? | Jason Benlevi | Cato Unbound - 0 views

  • “digital activism” had tremendous impact and leverage for change
  • It’s my opinion that social networking, as an activist tool, is being vastly oversold.
  • Technology always cuts two ways. Although the personal computer provided empowerment and creative liberation for individuals, and the Internet gave us access to information, they came at a cost.
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  • Since centralized power is inherently non-democratic, these monolithic network entities are not inclined to liberate humanity. Therefore utopians better think twice if they are depending on the Net to promulgate democracy and freedom
  • Does social media make any kind of impact in molding opinion? Yes. As with all media types it serves both for good and evil, truth and lies
  • in the belief that cultural and physical realities are the determining factors far more than “friending” a cause. Whether we like it or not, bullets and batons are more potent than bytes. Reality generally trumps virtuality.
  • The efficacy of the network as a tool of activism is best examined in three different contexts: 1. Democratic states 2. Authoritarian states 3. Commercial “states”
  • the social network as it is presently constituted is not a serious tool for substantive social change. It is concentrated, centralized and controlled
  • n the democratic context, it is similarly a way to vent, and perhaps organize, but as of yet not much more. However, if you are selling widgets, the social network looks more promising.
  • Who is Social Media Really Working For?
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    "WHO IS SOCIAL MEDIA REALLY WORKING FOR?" - essay theme
Blaž Ulaga

You Are What You Click: On Microtargeting | The Nation - 0 views

  • Google was recently slapped with two fines
  • They provide false assurances that, in the normal course of things, our privacy is not being invaded on the Internet, that our personal data is safe, and that we are anonymous in our online—and offline—activities.
  • not a single incident, but a slow, unstoppable process of profiling who we are and what we do, to be sold to advertisers and marketing companies
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  • are making it their policy and business to profile us in detai
  • And so we are stalked in the pursuit of marketing optimization.
  • (96 percent of it from advertising
Miha Naprudnik

ACTA error: Democracy not found - RT News - 1 views

  • As European parliaments reject the Anti-Counterfeiting trade Agreement on human rights grounds, some are asking why it was signed in the first place.
  • The question is – why was the agreement signed in the first place, if its chances of being ratified are dropping by the day?
  • The pretext was the protection of intellectual property, and to control Internet resources that could be used by terrorists or to incite riots and other criminal activity.
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  • There's an argument to be made that freedom and security are usually in opposition; the most secured people are in prison, where they hardly have any freedom. Usually, security comes at the price of freedom – and that’s exactly the cost of ACTA.
Kaja Horvat

BBC News - Internet shopping: What makes the online consumer tick? - 0 views

  • Data can be used at every stage of a marketing campaign from planning how it will run, to effective implementation, to measuring how successful the campaign was
  • data also shows us what really influences people online.
  • What does this mean? It means that today's savvy shoppers are taking their time when it comes to making a purchasing decision - often checking out online forums, blogs and social networks such as Facebook before they invest.
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  • In March 2012, UK retail websites received an additional 8.5 million visits through social networks and forums compared to March 2011, representing a 2.3% increase year-on-year.
  • two in every five visits to online retailers now come from a search engine.
  • Recently, we conducted some anonymous research into the way that people engage with brands and social networks - specifically Facebook. We looked at the top 100 online retailers, and benchmarked that against the number of fans those retailers had on their Facebook page. The correlation showed that the more fans a retailer had on Facebook, the more visits the website received, to the extent that for every additional fan acquired a retailer could expect to see an additional 20 visits to their company website from Facebook over a 12-month period.
  • As Facebook has evolved, it has become more than a source of traffic for retail websites; in some cases it has also become the digital shop front.
  • 4% of the UK's Facebook population have purchased a product from a brand's Facebook page
  • social media in particular offers companies a huge opportunity to expand their brand equity and profile, engage with consumers and influence their customers.
  • A recent poll conducted by Experian showed that 5% of consumers have actively sought feedback on a purchase made in store on Facebook or Twitter, while 24% of people would be positively influenced to buy a product after seeing an advert on Facebook.
Blaž Ulaga

Leader: Google is watching you | Comment is free | The Guardian - 0 views

  • technology puts adverts on the web, is against the public interest.
  • It is sad that huge and well-resourced companies are buying up the market share of others instead of building up their own capacity
  • Google holds information about the private activities of its users that the intelligence agencies would die for
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  • Consumers must be allowed to find out what information about them the company can access
Katja Saje

Google Glass: is it a threat to our privacy? | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Google Glass is the most hotly anticipated new arrival in "wearable computing" – which experts predict will become pervasive.
  • The next stage is computers that fit on to your body, and Google's idea is that you need only speak to operate it.
  • (To activate Glass you need to tilt your head, or touch the side, and then say, "OK Glass, record a video" or "OK Glass take a picture".)
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  • Google has become the company which knows where you are and what you're looking for. Now it's going to be able to compute what it is you're looking at."
  • For Google, "privacy" means "what you've agreed to", and that is slightly different from the privacy we've become used to over time. So how comfortable – or uneasy – should we feel about the possibility that what we're doing in a public or semi-public place (or even somewhere private) might get slurped up and assimilated by Google?
  • The first, and most obvious, is the question of privacy. The second is: how will we behave in groups when the distraction of the internet is only an eye movement away?
  • we already live in a world where the boundaries of what's private and what's public are melting.
  • Google doesn't want to discuss these issues. "We are not making any comment," says a company spokesperson. But other sources suggest that Google's chiefs know that this is a live issue, and they're watching it develop.
  • "People will have to work out what the new normal is,"
Urška Cerar

BBC News - Court orders UK ISPs to block more piracy sites - 0 views

  • Opponents have argued that blocking sites in this way was ineffective.
  • Data seen by the BBC suggested that the blocking of The Pirate Bay had only had a short-term effect on the level of pirate activity online
  • there had been a large reduction in the number of users illegally downloading music
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  • Blocking illegal sites helps ensure that the legal digital market can grow and labels can continue to sign and develop new talent.
  • The UK has now handed the power over what we see on the internet to corporate lobbyists
alja polajžer

BBC News - Google cookies 'bypassed Safari privacy protection' - 0 views

  • Google cookies 'bypassed Safari privacy protection'
  • The Wall Street Journal said Google and other companies had worked around privacy settings designed to restrict cookies
  • Cookies are small text files stored by browsers which can record information about online activity, and help some online services work
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  • The Safari browser is produced by Apple, and is the browser used by the iPhone.
  • y default Safari only allows cookies to be stored by the web page a user is visiting, not from third parties such as advertisers
  • esearcher Jonathan Mayer found that advertisers were still able to store cookies on the computers of internet users browsing with Safari.
  • We are aware that some third parties are circumventing Safari's privacy features and we are working to put a stop to it”
  • The Wall Street Journal reported that Google "disabled the code after being contacted by the paper".
  • Online privacy advocates were highly critical of Google's actions.
  • The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote: "It's time for Google to acknowledge that it can do a better job of respecting the privacy of web users."
  • An Apple spokesman said in a statement: "We are aware that some third parties are circumventing Safari's privacy features and we are working to put a stop to it."
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