Net Neutrality debates continue; A Guide to the Open Internet, DDoS versus human rights organizations etc- a roundup

A Guide to the Open Internet: What You Need to Know About Net Neutrality

You?ve probably been reading/hearing about net neutrality in the recent months. Left and right, people are talking about it ? either trying to push for the concept or trying to take it down. What is net neutrality anyway, and why should you bother about it?

Genachowski Wins on Net Neutrality, Sort of

After a down-to-the-wire push, the Federal Communications Commission this week approved by 3-2 its long-awaited regulatory proposal on net neutrality. We haven?t finished combing through the actual rules document, all 200 pages of which were just released today, but nonetheless the summary documents gave us some important hints about what the rules contain.

DDoS versus human rights organizations

Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet Law and Society has released a new report on the use of Distributed Denial of Service attacks by censors and oppressive governments against human rights organizations. It’s pretty grim. Our research suggests that:

? DDoS attacks against independent media and human rights sites have been common in the past year, even outside of elections, protests, and military operations. With recent highly publicized DDoS attacks on Wikileaks, and “Operation Payback” attacks by “Anonymous” on sites perceived to oppose Wikileaks, we expect these attacks to become more common.

Books in Browsers? Google, Amazon Bring E-Books to the Masses

For authors and publishers already overwhelmed, last week’s news about the Google eBooks store and Amazon’s Kindle for web only added to the waterfall of controversy pouring into an already raging river of e-book and publishing hype. The big takeaway from these two announcements, and a recent “Books in Browsers” event that I attended, is that the web browser is an important player in e-books.

Commerce Department’s Online Privacy Report a Positive Step, But Self-Regulation Isn’t Enough

Online privacy continues to be a hot topic in Washington, D.C. A few weeks ago, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a staff report calling for greater protection of online consumer privacy. A House subcommittee heard testimony on the increasingly popular idea of ?do not track? for the Internet. Soon thereafter, Microsoft announced a new tracking protection mechanism for Internet Explorer 9.

Cultural Contradictions of Net Neutrality

from Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology ? A Group Blog by Adam Fish

Reddit Political Action Committee: We?re Not Happy With the New Net Neutrality Rules

from Mashable! by Maury Litwack

Building a censor-resistant web with distributed hashes

Aaron Swartz’s “A Censorship-Resistant Web,” is a good high-level view on distributed hash-cacheing, a fairly credible system for augmenting the web to make it harder to censor and spoof sensitive information:

How Did Americans Use Their Phones in the 2010 Midterm Election? [STATS]

from Mashable! by Sarah Kessler