2014 The national movement to provide fast, reliable and affordable high-speed Internet comes as Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon and AT&T continue to prohibit municipal freedoms for online access.
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."
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."
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.
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
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…
A temporary WhatsApp shutdown is not even close to the craziest thing happening with the Brazilian internet right now. If Brazil’s conservative Congress..
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
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
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”.
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).
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.