Security experts signing the letter included Ronald Rivest, a computer science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Bruce Schneier, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University; and Dan Wallach, a computer science professor at Rice University.
Source: Groups urge Obama to oppose cyberthreat sharing bills | CSO Online
Social media users “are getting to see uncomfortable sides of people they like,” said Judith Donath, author of “The Social Machine” (MIT Press) and a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Source: The anti-social network: Users are ‘detoxing’ from Facebook, Twitter – MarketWatch
A few weeks ago, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society released a report that documents the achievements of Holyoke Gas & Electric (HG&E) Telecom, a municipal electric utility that now provides fiber-optic broadband Internet to local businesses in several western Massachusetts towns.
New York is one of the states in which an individual can secretly record other people – either on the telephone or in person – as long as the person who makes the recording is aware of it, according to the Digital Media Law Project, which is sponsored by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Federal laws on eavesdropping are essentially the same as New York’s statute, the two attorneys said.
Among the groups signing the letter to Obama were the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute. Security experts signing the letter included Ronald Rivest, a computer science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Bruce Schneier, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University; and Dan Wallach, a computer science professor at Rice University.
Source: Groups urge Obama to oppose cyberthreat sharing bills | PCWorld
“What’s interesting about Bitcoin isn’t the currency itself, but rather the underlying technology, the blockchain,” explained Primavera De Filippi, research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, speaking at Nesta’s FutureFest. “It’s the decentralised public ledger that relies on cryptography in order to ensure that every transaction is valid.”
Source: Blockchain: How this Bitcoin technology can change the world – PC & Tech Authority
Twitter also publishes DMCA requests publicly on the website Chilling Effects, though records of this particular claim do not appear to be on the site yet. Twitter declined to comment for this story.
Source: Twitter is deleting stolen jokes on copyright grounds | The Verge
Matthew Battles’s “Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word” is an exploration of the “magisterium of writing,” which is his way of describing writing’s robust and inescapable “influence on human experience.” Rather than a dense, comprehensive history of writing and literacy, Battles, a program fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the author of “Library: An Unquiet History,” offers a meditation on the uses, abuses, and misunderstandings of writing across cultures and centuries, from early pictographic representations to contemporary computing.
Source: Review of “Palimpsest” by Matthew Battles – Books – The Boston Globe
What if we end up living in a world without strict rules on cameras? What if, wherever we go, we know we might be caught on film and the images shared with strangers? It could have the unexpected effect of making our society more tolerant, says Judith Donath at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. If more of us have embarrassing footage floating around on the internet, then perhaps we’ll be forgiving of others who have it too.
Source: The rise of on-body cameras and how they will change how we live – New Scientist
“Of all the things to worry about now in Turkey, to have the country ban a source of information seems both an overreaction and totally misplaced,” says Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and also a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and a specialist on Turkish Internet activism. “Unfortunately, it seems like instead of controlling the situation, there is this emphasis on controlling the flow of information. It doesn’t work, and it doesn’t address the tumultuous situation to begin with.”
Source: Why Turkey’s brief ban of Twitter was dumb and futile | Public Radio International