EFF calls against Tunis goverment’s Cyberattacks against Activists…

EFF Calls for Immediate Action to Defend Tunisian Activists Against Government Cyberattacks

Demonstrations and protests over unemployment and poor living conditions have been ongoing in Tunisia since the beginning of December, but last week the Tunisian government turned up the heat on bloggers, activists, and dissidents by launching a JavaScript injection attack that siphoned off the usernames and passwords of Tunsians logging in to Google, Yahoo, and Facebook. The Tunisian government has used these stolen credentials to log in to Tunisians? email and Facebook accounts, presumably downloading their messages, emails, and social graphs for further analysis, and then deleting the accounts entirely.

Algeria: Is Revolt Contagious?

Written by Mohamed Benderouiche · Translated by Lynn Palermo · View original post [fr]

Photo by John Perivolaris on Flickr, licensed through Creative Commons

The Problems Of Web Surveillance: Some Context For My Quote In The New York Times

I was quoted in a cover story in today’s New York Times as saying, essentially, that law enforcement was “just trying to do their job” in pushing for greater subpoena power. This particular remark was an aside, made if anything to soften the impression that I was overly critical of the government. For instance, I lamented that consumers do not understand the state of the electronic privacy law and spoke about the dangers of dragnet or otherwise excessive surveillance. (Presumably I am one of the unnamed “[e]lectronic privacy and civil rights advocates” that worries “because the WikiLeaks court order gained such widespread attention, it could have a chilling effect on people?s speech on the Internet.”)

UK Student Protests: Democratic Participation, Digital Age

The stereotypical characterization of young people as politically apathetic, interested only in using digital media for socializing and gaming, has been punctured by recent events in the UK. University and high school students took to the streets to protest against the tripling of tuition fees for higher education, reductions to grants for 16-18 year olds, and cuts in government university funding. During November and December, students, staff, parents and the wider public marched in London and other UK cities and many universities had buildings occupied, with University of Kent staying in occupation over the Christmas and New Year break. Social media has been crucial in the organization of this protest movement, in reaching out to the wider public and in both engaging with and providing an alternative to mainstream media journalism. It also raises questions about the nature of democratic and civic participation in the digital age

Peacebuilding in the Information Age: Sifting Hype from Reality

The Berkman Center is pleased to join the ICT4Peace Foundation and Georgia Tech in announcing a new collection of essays, Peacebuilding in the Information Age: Sifting Hype from Reality, the first in a series of publications examining information and communication technologies (ICTs) in conflict prevention, peacebuilding, peacekeeping and crisis response.

Brand new major: Twitter Account Coaching

10 Mobile Trends in 2011: Android Boom, Tablets Multiply

2010 was an important year for mobile, especially in media, where the announcement of the iPad and other tablets, along with new smartphones, made mobile and tablet apps especially intriguing to publishers. This year promises greater growth and new opportunities for content producers. Here are some of the top trends to keep an eye on as 2011 unfolds.

Social Media and Subpoenas: A Broken System That Puts Journalistic Sources at Risk

from Mashable! by Vadim Lavrusik

Woz on Network Neutrality

Writing in the Atlantic, Apple co-founder and hardware wizard Steve Wozniak defends Network Neutrality, describing open, neutral networks as a boon to creators, innovators and entrepreneurs:

Net Neutrality explained for writers and other artists

My latest column for Locus magazine is “Net Neutrality for Writers: It’s All About the Leverage,” a piece about the risks to artists of allowing network carriers to demand bribes for “premium carriage” of our content.

HOWTO make a secure, decentralized, human-readable name system

Aaron Swartz has posted a clever proposal for locating things on the Internet (such as web-pages), without having to resort to a centralized authority, while still making the names we give to objects readable by human beings (that is, without assigning them long strings of random crypto-gibberish). This is in answer to Zooko’s widely cited paper arguing that Internet names can only have two out of these three properties: secure, decentralized and human readable.