Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society announced changes to its pioneering Chilling Effects project, including an expanded mission and a new set of international research partnerships. To better reflect this evolution in scope as well as the changes in the landscape over the 14 years since it was launched, the project has changed its name to “Lumen,” and can be found at www.lumendatabase.org. The name borrows from the unit of measurement for visible light, highlighting the use of data for transparency reporting.

Source: Harvard’s project documenting online content removals changes name to Lumen | Harvard Gazette

Zittrain, who is also a Law School professor and faculty director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, taught Daniel Lewis, the chief executive of Ravel, as a student at Stanford Law. Lewis founded Ravel in 2012, and the inspiration for the digitization project was born out of a conversation between professor and former student, according to Zittrain.

Source: Law School To Make U.S. Case Law Archive Public Online | News | The Harvard Crimson

Susan Crawford, professor at Harvard Law School, and director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, explains why internet freedom is on the decline. What you’ll learn from this segment: What the current trends are when it comes to internet censorship. How the way we view the internet has implications for how it’s policed. How the internet might change as the world continues to move through the 21st century.

Source: Internet Freedom on the Decline – The Takeaway

Under the agreement with Harvard, the entire underlying database, not just limited search results, will be shared with nonprofit organizations and scholars that wish to develop specialized applications. Ravel and Harvard will withhold the database from other commercial groups for eight years. After that, it will be available to anyone for any purpose, said Jonathan L. Zittrain, a Harvard Law professor and director of the law library.

Source: Harvard Law Library Readies Trove of Decisions for Digital Age – The New York Times

“Libraries were founded as an engine for the democratization of knowledge, and the digitization of Harvard Law School’s collection of U.S. case law is a tremendous step forward in making legal information open and easily accessible to the public,” said Jonathan Zittrain, the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School, and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources. “The materials in the library’s collection tell a story that goes back to the founding of America, and we’re proud to preserve and share that story,” said Zittrain, who also holds appointments as Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Source: Harvard Law School Launches “Free the Law” Project with Ravel Law To Digitize US Case Law, Provide Free Access – Harvard Law Today

But security maven Bruce Schneier, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, said data sharing could pay off in the long run. “It might help prevent the next attack,” Schneier said. “It’s all about learning from the present to protect the future.”

Source: Proposed cyberlaw gives feds too much access to our data | BetaBoston

The oddity of the legislation is that it focuses on what many in the cyberworld consider to be a diminishing form of defense: collecting and sharing those “signatures,” which the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. periodically circulate to a select list of major corporations. Most sophisticated cyberattackers have figured that out. “I think the fruits of detecting signatures and patterns of broad attacks are already picked,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor. “The biggest threats,” he said, are far more customized, “with elements of social engineering or betrayal of an employee with access to data or code.”

Source: Senate Approves Cybersecurity Bill Despite Flaws – The New York Times

It is a trend that offers hope of improved access, but the so-called Splinternet will also create challenges for regulators in countries where governments keep a close eye on communications for reasons of security or social standards. One of the pioneers is LibraryBox, an open-source hardware and software project put together by Jason Griffey, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Source: LibraryBox offers users a chunk of the Splinternet | The National

This is rare, as devices from smartphones to televisions upload user data to the cloud for analysis by companies. Digital assistants can find patterns among their users more rapidly if connected with the processing power of cloud servers, though such methods potentially enable companies to better profile their customers. Those concerns may be moot anyway, since tech giants already have numerous ways to collect information about people’s lives, says Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Source: How Google, Apple phones will become robot assistants | Treeangle.co.id

Josephine Wolff is an assistant professor of public policy and computing security at Rochester Institute of Technology and a faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Source: Why Do Top Government Personnel Keep Using Private Email for Official Business? – Defense One