Hervé Bourlard, from Idiap Research Institute ("an independent, non-profit research foundation specializing in multimedia information management and in multimodal man-machine interaction").
From the late 90s, illegal filesharing gradually brought the music industry to its knees. Exclusive extracts from Stephen Witt’s book pinpoint how music ‘got free’
abt Alan Ellis
a comment: ""Brought the music industry to it's knees"? Bollocks. End of story."
"The grandfather of the Internet" Louis Pouzin backs the alternative DNS movement, with Open Root which wants to break ICANN's monopoly on top level domains
Among the favourite nostrums/memes rampant among those who present themselves as being the surrogates for a non-existent global Internet Governance system is that of the existence of and their being representatives for “the Global Internet Community”. Notably this is seeming now seemingly being promoted to replace “multistakeholderism” as the favourite meme of the day among…
Li-Fi - a wireless technology that transmits high-speed data using visible light communication (VLC) - in the coming months. With scientists achieving speeds of 224 gigabits per second in the lab using Li-Fi earlier this year, the potential for this technology to change everything about the way we use the Internet is huge.
A temporary WhatsApp shutdown is not even close to the craziest thing happening with the Brazilian internet right now. If Brazil’s conservative Congress..
opinion article in NYT by By ANDREW LIH, JUNE 20, 2015
Andrew Lih is an associate professor of journalism at American University and the author of “The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia.”
Paul Mason i Guardian, bygger på Grundrisse. Hans bok: Postcapitalism is published by Allen Lane on 30 July.
"Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all."
"By creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being."
By Romano Prodi, Prime Minister of Italy (1996-1998, 2006-2008) and former President of the European Union Commission (1999-2004), and David Gosset , Director, Academia Sinica Europaea at China Europe International Business School
by Robert Macmillan, If you did a double-take yesterday when Facebook announced that it was spending an astounding $19 billion to buy mobile messaging softw
It is rolling out 376 small cells that will cover 1 million people who are currently without a signal and the roll-out is now underway. The cost of the investment is US$10 million. That’s US$10 million to cover 1 million people. Now Rwanda’s a small country and it would cost more to cover a larger geographic area but the potential is clearly enormous if it works.
TensorFlow™ is an open source software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs. Nodes in the graph represent mathematical operations, while the graph edges represent the multidimensional data arrays (tensors) communicated between them. The flexible architecture allows you to deploy computation to one or more CPUs or GPUs in a desktop, server, or mobile device with a single API. TensorFlow was originally developed by researchers and engineers working on the Google Brain Team within Google's Machine Intelligence research organization for the purposes of conducting machine learning and deep neural networks research, but the system is general enough to be applicable in a wide variety of other domains as well.
"Key provisions of the proposals which are not acceptable from the point of view of important public interests include: a prohibition of requirements to hold data locally; a prohibition of otherwise regulating cross-border data transfers; a prohibition of requiring a local presence for goods/service providers in the country; and a prohibition of requiring open source software in government procurement contracts. It is also proposed that there be no border taxes on digital products.
Furthermore, it is being proposed to effectively give the WTO jurisdiction to adjudicate whether a national technology or data regulation was “reasonable,” “objective,” “transparent,” and “not more burdensome than necessary to ensure the quality of the service.” WTO’s adjudication processes have historically tended to favour commercial interests, and giving them a blanket supervision of technology/ data regulation may go against governments’ obligation to ensure that services are operated in the public interest and respect human rights and freedoms
In addition, discussions in WTO and in so-called free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations are neither transparent nor inclusive, thus resulting in decisions that do not take into account the interests of all concerned parties. The processes are overly influenced by big business interests."
Review of Yasha Levine's book Surveillance Valley. The secret military history of the Internet. " It tells a story about Silicon Valley that really isn’t told enough, and it points out some really unpleasant – but, alas, all too true – aspects of the technology that we have all come to depend on. Google, the “cool” and “progressive” do-good-company, in fact a military contractor that helps American drones kill children in Yemen and Afghanistan? As well as a partner in predictive policing and a collector of surveillance data that the NSA may yet try to use to control enemy populations in a Cybernetics War 2.0? The Tor Project as paid shills of the belligerent US foreign policy? And the Internet itself, that supposedly liberating tool, was originally conceived as a surveillance and control mechanism?"
in a syllabus from June 2017, The Supreme Court of the USA underlines the importance of the internet in relation to the first amendment to the US constitution. The internet's forums are decribed as "what for many are the principal sources for knowing current events, checking ads for employment, speaking and listening in the modern public square, and otherwise exploring the vast realms of human thought and knowledge."
The Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data was opened for signature on 28 January 1981 and is still today the only binding international treaty in this field. It is open to any country, and has the potential to become a global standard. The 47 member states of the Council of Europe and Mauritius, Senegal, Tunisia, Uruguay are Parties to it, while Argentina, Burkina Faso, Cap Verde, Mexico and Morocco have been invited to accede to the Convention.
The treaty establishes a number of principles for states to transpose into their domestic legislation to ensure notably that data are processed through procedures set for by law, for a specific purpose, that data are stored for no longer than is necessary for the intended purpose, and that are not excessive in relation to the purposes for which they are stored.
An additional protocol requires each party to establish an independent authority to ensure compliance with data protection principles, and lays down rules on transborder data flows to non Parties.
2018
Amazon is the leading cloud provider for the United States intelligence community. In 2013, Amazon entered into a $600 million contract with the CIA to build a cloud for use by intelligence agencies working with information classified as Top Secret. Then, in 2017, Amazon announced the AWS Secret Region, which allows storage of data classified up to the Secret level by a broader range of agencies and companies. Amazon also operates a special GovCloud region for US Government agencies hosting unclassified information.
Ethan Zuckerman: My friends at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia have just published a new paper from me on the topic of digital public infrastructures. This is an idea I started talking about in an article for the Columbia Journalism Review late last year, and presented at a terrific conference called “The Tech Giants, Monopoly Power, and Public Discourse”.
(July 6, 2010) On July 1, 2010, all Finnish citizens will have a legal right to access a 1 Mbps (megabit per second) broadband connection, reportedly making Finland the first country to accord such a right. The government has also pledged to make the minimum speed of connection 100 MBPS by 2015. (Finland Makes Broadband […]
The new compromise on the draft data law, seen by EURACTIV, further refines the protection of trade secrets and clarifies the relationship with data protection rules and the application of the cloud-switching provisions.
a book review
Albert-László Barabási explained the processes underpinning such a neofeudalism in his analysis of the structure of complex networks, that is, networks characterized by free choice, growth, and preferential attachment. These are networks where people voluntarily make links or choices. The number of links per site grow over time, and people like things because others like them (the Netflix recommendation system, for instance, relies on this assumption).
This paper presents a critical review of some of the claims made for CoPs. It will address questions such as "Are CoPs really suitable for use in a business setting?" and "Can a CoP ever be truly virtual?"