The French Way: “Why You Can?t Say ?Twitter? Or ?Facebook? On French TV” and a massive cyberculture roundup…

Pentagon: Hacking can count as an act of war

The Wall Street Journal broke the news yesterday that the Pentagon has concluded that hacking and other forms of digital sabotage that originate from other countries can be considered an act of war. This means that for the first time, the U.S. is in the position of possibly responding to an online attack with offline “traditional military force.” Guns, troops, drones, bombs.

The Pirate Bay: Five Years After The Raid

Just a few days ago The Pirate Bay upgraded its moderation backend to make it compatible with IPv6 addresses. This move was to ensure that the site is future-proofed and is a clear sign that the site?s current operators have no intention of shutting it down.

NATO fears Anonymous, Wikileaks as “threat to member-states’ security”

by Xeni Jardin

Pentagon: Cyber Attacks Can Qualify as Acts of War

by Lauren Indvik

Pentagon has list of “cyber-weapons” for use in computer warfare

At the Washington Post, Ellen Nakashima has a story this evening about a list of cyber-weapons and tools (for instance, malware with which to attack an enemy state’s infrastructure networks) for computer warfare. The list of capabilities is classified, and has been in use for several months. Other US agencies, including the CIA, have approved it, and the list is now of the Pentagon’s set of weapons or “fires” approved for use against an adversary. Snip:

REPORT: Do Almost All Americans Use Facebook Yet?

from All Facebook by Jackie Cohen

Analyzing the Libya Crisis Map Data in 3D (Video)

I first blogged about GeoTime exactly two years ago in a blog post entitled ?GeoTime: Crisis Mapping in 3D.? The rationale for visualizing geospatial data in 3D very much resonates with me and in my opinion becomes particularly compelling when analyzing crisis mapping data.

Cyberactivism in the Egyptian Revolution: How Civic Engagement and Citizen Journalism Tilted the Balance

Online computing: The crowded cloud

Apple’s iCloud will be greeted with intense scrutiny as managing data on multiple devices grows increasingly arduous 

The Demographic Landscape of Social Networks

by amzini

“The demographic averages for our entire data set tell a familiar story; social networking is dominated by younger generations with no children, and online networking activity picks up in college. Now that I told you what you already know, let?s look at a categorical breakdown and heat-map featuring demographic data separated into Amzini’s 11 main categories.”

Global Digital Activism Data Set: Infographics Omnibus

Note: In the interest of open research, we are sharing infographics of our in-process project, the Global Digital Activism Data Set (GDADS). We hope that this transparency will elicit original perspectives and constructive critique. Previous posts here and here and here interpret these visualizations in detail, but I thought it might also be useful to bring them together in one post. To view them all on the Many Eyes site, click here.

Global Digital Activism Data Set: Our Sources

Note: In the interest of open research, we are sharing infographics of our in-process project, the Global Digital Activism Data Set (GDADS). We hope that this transparency will elicit original perspectives and constructive critique. Previous posts are here and here.

Privacy, super-injunctions and Twitter: what should we do?, David Elstein

Quantified Self ? mood tracking

This post is part of my liveblogged account of a conference. Two disclaimers: Liveblogging is hard, and I often get things wrong. If I did, please feel free to correct me via email or in the comments and I?ll make changes when appropriate. Second, the opinions expressed in these sorts of posts are those of the speakers, rather than mine.

Reflections on the 2011 Quantified Self conference

I spent the past weekend in Mountain View at the Quantified Self conference, a gathering of about 400 pioneers in the space of personal tracking and citizen science. I was one of the few at the conference, along with a handful of venture capitalists and healthcare types, who wasn?t experimenting with personal tracking. I came at the invitation of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, who are fascinated by the movement and invited a handful of thinkers and practitioners to the event, paying our way, in exchange for our reflections on the conference and the field. Once I?d registered, Gary Wolf (one of the co-organizers) was kind enough to invite me to give a short talk on what we might learn from tracking media consumption. But despite these generous efforts at inclusion, I felt like I likely had most in common with the anthropologist who introduced herself in one of the first sessions saying, ?I?m trying to figure out what motivates people to self track.?

Seeking the Trustworthy Tweet: Can ?Tweetsourcing? Ever Fit the Needs of Humanitarian Organizations?

Can microblogged data fit the information needs of humanitarian organizations? This is the question asked by a group of academics at Pennsylvania State University?s College of Information Sciences and Technology. Their study (PDF) is an important contribution to the discourse on humanitarian technology and crisis information. The applied research provides key insights based on a series of interviews with humanitarian professionals. While I largely agree with the majority of the arguments presented in this study, I do have questions regarding the framing of the problem and some of the assertions made.

Identifying Strategic Protest Routes for Civil Resistance: An Analysis of Optimal Approaches to Tahrir Square

My colleague Jessica recently won the Tufts GIS Poster Expo with her excellent poster on civil resistance. She used GIS data to analyze optimal approaches to Tahrir Square in Cairo. According to Jessica, many previous efforts to occupy the square had failed. So Egyptian activists spent two weeks brainstorming the best strategies to approach Tahrir Square.