EFF Resigns from Global Network Initiative… a Cyberculture roundup…

EFF Resigns from Global Network Initiative

Citing Concerns Over NSA?s Impact on Corporate Members, EFF Leaves Industry Group

San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today withdrew from the Global Network Initiative (GNI), citing a fundamental breakdown in confidence that the group’s corporate members are able to speak freely about their own internal privacy and security systems in the wake of the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance revelations.

Wikipedia fights massive sock-puppet army

Alan sez, “A ‘sock puppet network’ is a set of seemingly independent accounts on Wikipedia that act in concert because they are (or at least strongly appear to be) all controlled by the same entity. The accounts are sock puppets for the true entity, which uses the network toeffect changes it wants on Wikipedia.”

BitTorrent Mastermind Behind Controversial NSA Billboard CampaignBitTorrent Inc, the company behind the successful uTorrent and BitTorrent file-sharing clients, has been making huge efforts in recent times to shed the false image that it is synonymous with mass online piracy.

The company?s tools can of course be put to illegal uses, but so can those of a thousand other companies in thousands of cities worldwide. The company has been relentless in its quest to get this message to the masses, but it?s also taking another approach to boosting its image with its tech-savvy customer base.

‘How Lavabit Melted Down’ There’s an excellent tick-tock of the Lavabit saga in the New Yorker, by Michael Phillips and Matt Buchanan. Lavabit founder Ladar Levison says he believes even if he hadn?t hosted an email account for Edward Snowden, “Lavabit would eventually have found itself in the position that it?s in now because it ‘constitutes a gap’ in the government?s intelligence.” And that should worry all of us. Read: How Lavabit Melted Down : The New Yorker.

The downfall of Silk Road, and with it, the so-called Dark Net From Adrian Chen‘s Gawker long-read about that recent bust of the web’s biggest online illegal drug marketplace:

How The NSA Deploys Malware: An In-Depth Look at the New Revelations

We’ve long suspected that the NSA, the world’s premiere spy agency, was pretty good at breaking into computers. But now, thanks to an article by security expert Bruce Schneier?who is working with the Guardian to go through the Snowden documents?we have a much more detailed view of how the NSA uses exploits in order to infect the computers of targeted users. The template for attacking people with malware used by the NSA is in widespread use by criminals and fraudsters, as well as foreign intelligence agencies, so it’s important to understand and defend against this threat to avoid being a victim to the plethora of attackers out there.

Insight – At Twitter, global growth tests free speech advocacy

Reuters UK

Ozgur Uckan, a communication professor at Istanbul Bilgi University, said authorities may still be able to pressure the company by targeting its local partners. “The authorities may try to force Twitter to comply, using their regulation tools like tax .

We are Turkey?s Amazon, hepsiburada.com chairwoman says

Major Turkish online store hepsiburada.com sells more than 1 million products per month, says Hanzade Doğan Boyner

Algorithm Writes People’s Life Histories Using Twitter

If you tweet about your life, a new algorithm can identify your most significant events and assemble them into an accurate life history, say the computer scientists who built it

The Government Shutdown is Great News For Those Who Don?t Want NSA Accountability

While many federal employees and the American public have been negatively affected bythe US government shutdown, there is one group of people who can probably take solace: those who need to be held to account for the NSA surveillance scandal.

Watch: MIT’s Self-Assembling Robots Offer Whiffs of Optimus Prime

In this clip, we see the real state of the art in self-assembling bots: a bunch of little magnetic cubes scuttling around a tabletop. It’s much cooler than it sounds.

The 10 Countries With the Most Internet Freedom

Iceland has the fewest barriers to Internet freedom, according a recent study ranking countries based on obstacles to access, limits on content and violations of user rights. Iceland scored just six out of a possible 40 points. (The lower number of points, the higher level of Internet freedom.)

Encryption Tech Designed to Look Like an Instagram Filter

Cryptstagram is an online tool that allows users to upload images and encrypt them with secret messages that only the intended recipients can see.

Lavabit Files Opening Brief in Landmark Privacy Case

Secure email provider Lavabit just filed the opening brief in its appeal of a court order demanding it turn over the private SSL keys that protected all web traffic to the site.

EFF’s guide to the NSA’s official malware

Alan sez, “EFF’s Deeplinks blog brings us an update on what we know (so far) about how the NSA has been deploying malware onto servers and peoples’ computers.

Make no mistake: Google?s new shared endorsements are a direct attack against Facebook