Cyberculture agenda: “The Pirate Bay Is Back Online! [But it might be a trap…]

The Pirate Bay Is Back Online!  TorrentFreak Early December The Pirate Bay was raided at the Nacka station, a nuclear-proof data center built into a mountain complex near Stockholm.   The Pirate Bay returns from the dead, comes back online  The Next Web by Owen Williams Following a raid on a Swedish data center late last year, … Read more

Cyberculture agenda: reddit’s first transparency report….

  Meet Vivaldi, a new browser from the former CEO of Opera  The Next Web by Owen Williams Hot on the heels of Microsoft announcing its newest browser, Project Spartan, we’ve got another brand new contender in the browser wars: Vivaldi. Twitter Can Predict Heart Disease, Says Study  All Facebook by Shea Bennett A new study has … Read more

Cyberculture agenda: 10 major tech conferences in 2015….. Ethan Zuckerman pieces on Global Voices Summit

  10 tech conferences around the world to attend in 2015 The Next Web by Ashley Hefnawy Ashley Hefnawy is an associate editor for Shutterstock’s blog. This post was originally published on the Shutterstock blog and has been reprinted with permission. Sexual insecurities found in Google search results  FlowingData » Visualization by Nathan Yau Seth Stephens-Davidowitz continues … Read more

Cyberculture agenda: “Data-Driven Web Survival Guide…”2015: The Year of the Learner…

Italy Launches Largest Ever Pirate Site Blockade TorrentFreak   Alongside the United Kingdom, Italy is the most aggressive country in the world when it comes to blocking websites on copyright infringement grounds.   Data-Driven Web Survival Guide The Purple Box by Andy Kahl   If we’re going to make it through what’s sometimes described as a data-collection … Read more

Journalism agenda: For the record, “Barrett Brown sentenced to 5 Years in prison because he copied and pasted a link

Journalist Barrett Brown sentenced to 63 months in federal prison, must pay $890K in restitution Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin The intelligence and security journalist has already served more than two years in prison for charges related to his proximity to sources within the hacktivist entity known as Anonymous. Read the rest Barrett Brown sentenced to 5 Years … Read more

Cyberculture agenda: Moot of 4Chan retires… “Apple’s Swift exploded in popularity in 2014…

Moot Retires From 4chan  Slashdot vivaoporto writes Moot bids his final farewell as the administrator of the (in)famous imageboard. The full resignation letter can be read on the site blog (it’s cool, it’s SFW) but for those who are not brave enough to dwell in the “underbelly of the internet” here are some excerpts: “I founded … Read more

Cyberculture agenda: “Silk Road Trial… “Teens’ use of social media is significantly shaped by race, class, geography, cultural background

Silk Road Trial Becomes Case Study for Law Enforcement Online All Facebook by Kimberlee Morrison The trial of Ross Ulbricht, alleged admin of The Silk Road (a Tor Network marketplace for the sale and trade of illegal goods), is expected to begin in New York today. The public nature of the trial could result in much discussion … Read more

Cyberculture agenda: Web Freedom a Global Issue in 2015…

Web Freedom Is Seen to Be Growing as a Global Issue in 2015 nytimes.com – Vindu Goel – Jan 1 – SAN FRANCISCO — Government censorship of the Internet is a cat-and-mouse game. And despite more aggressive tactics in recent months, the cats have been largely frustrated while the mice wriggle away. But this year, … Read more

Cyberculture agenda: “Algorithmic cruelty”…”Web Encryption Gets Stronger in 2014….

Algorithmic cruelty  Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow With its special end-of-year message, Facebook wants to show you, over and over, what your year “looked like”; in Eric Meyer’s case, the photo was of his daughter, who died this year: “For those of us who lived through the death of loved ones, or spent extended time in … Read more

Journalism roundup: “Social Journalism on the Rise

Social Journalism on the Rise The way we get our news and how news is reported has changed drastically in the past decade, and with social media comes a rise of social journalism that is once again evolving the current state and future impact of journalism. What does it mean to run “product” in a news organization? … Read more

Cyberculture agenda: Peter Sunde says The Pirate Bay Should Stay Down…North Korea and the Sony hack…

President Obama writes his first line of Javascript  Mashable! by Stan Schroeder The U.S. now has a “coder-in-chief:” President Barack Obama has written his first line of code Peter Sunde: The Pirate Bay Should Stay Down TorrentFreak A few weeks ago Peter Sunde was released from prison where he’d been serving a sentence for his involvement in … Read more

Cyberculture agenda: The Pirate Bay down after servers raided by police in Sweden

The Pirate Bay offline after police raid in Sweden Mashable! by Stan Schroeder BitTorrent indexing site The Pirate Bay has been offline since Tuesday morning after police in Sweden raided the site’s server room, seizing servers and other equipment.   The Pirate Bay is offline after Swedish police allegedly seize servers You might have noticed that … Read more

Cyberculture agenda: Ello- hottest SM for finance media… “How the NSA Hacks Cellphone Networks Worldwide…

  Finance media’s hottest club is Ello Nieman Journalism Lab by Caroline O’Donovan By now, you’ve probably heard of Ello, the anti-Facebook social networking site founded by a handful of graphic designers. Though initially meant to be a closed experiment in network building, Ello grew popular due to its anti-advertising, anti-data mining stance. As Kyle Chayka … Read more

Turkish Constitutional Court working on 10 percent election threshold… Turkey’s Science Minister declares Muslims discovered Earth… Dispatches from Turkey…

Turkish Constitutional Court working on 10 percent election threshold Turkey’s Constitutional Court is considering applications that call for lifting the 10 percent threshold in the Turkish election system, according to Constitutional Court head Haşim Kılıç. Muslims discovered Earth is round, Turkey’s Science Minister says After President Erdoğan’s ‘Muslims discovered America’ claim, a Turkish minister raises the ante … Read more

Eurosphere agenda: “EU Parliament takes Google to task… “Finland Becomes an Unlikely Battleground for Same-Sex Marriage Debate

MAIN FOCUS: EU Parliament takes Google to task | 28/11/2014 euro|topics The European Parliament voted on Thursday in a non-binding resolution to separate Internet companies’ search engine business from other commericial activities. This could lead to Google being split up. Some commentators praise the Parliament for countering Google’s abuse of its market dominance. Others call for … Read more