“Personal information is the currency by which we buy our Internet,” said Schneier, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.In fact, the Internet was designed to promote surveillance, said Schneier and advertising, as some on the event’s Twitter feed quickly added.
via Snowden, NSA face off over privacy at Harvard – Business – The Boston Globe.
“In five years I think education technology will be completely ubiquitous, and it will be integrated into parts of the curriculum that we are just beginning to conceive of,” said Leah Plunkett, a fellow at Berkman Center for Internet and Society, speaking at a session she hosted with colleague Paulina Haduong Thursday at the FETC 2015 convention in Orlando, FL.
via Predictions for the Future of Student Data Privacy — THE Journal.
Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard University professor of law and computer science who will also be on the panel, said he hoped industry professionals could begin to make gradual fixes to the Internet that would make all companies more secure.Small improvements, like software that detected unusual patterns in Internet traffic or suspicious attempts to access data, could help stop hackers before they caused too much damage. Such small, incremental steps could make the web gradually safer for individuals and companies, and less friendly to hackers, Mr. Zittrain said.“This is a moon shot going one step at a time, rather than fling a missile and hoping it hits,” Mr. Zittrain said.
via Executives in Davos Express Worries Over More Disruptive Cyberattacks – NYTimes.com.
Reynol Junco, an associate professor of education, surveyed 1,600 freshmen through senior college students. He asked them about how they use the social networking site, including how much time they spend on Facebook and whether they multitask while surfing.
Junco is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
via ISU professor: Facebook isn’t at fault for lower grades.
Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science, said that the proposals, which Mr Cameron has pledged to implement if he is re-elected as prime minister this year, would have a huge impact on the way that the digital economy worked.
“This is not just about hardware but software. You would have to find a way for a phone not to be able to download any app that could defeat [the breaking of] encryption,” he said. “That would be a referendum on our entire ecosystem.”
via Harvard vs Cameron: Professors defend encryption | The World.
“In America, where these very few ISPs have so much market power that they can extract payments, it’s just like the mob,” says Susan Crawford, who co-directs Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “Just say, ‘you’re not going to reach our subscribers unless you pay us.’”
The Federal Communications Commission is getting more complaints about these deals. And, now, it has to decide what — if anything — to do about them. It’s not sure whether interconnection should be part of net neutrality regulations expected next month, tackled separately later on, or left alone completely.
The footnote problem, though, stands a good chance of being fixed. Last year, a tool called Perma.cc was launched. It was developed by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, and its founding supporters included more than sixty law-school libraries, along with the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Internet Archive, the Legal Information Preservation Alliance, and the Digital Public Library of America. Perma.cc promises “to create citation links that will never break.” It works something like the Wayback Machine’s “Save Page Now.” If you’re writing a scholarly paper and want to use a link in your footnotes, you can create an archived version of the page you’re linking to, a “permalink,” and anyone later reading your footnotes will, when clicking on that link, be brought to the permanently archived version. Perma.cc has already been adopted by law reviews and state courts; it’s only a matter of time before it’s universally adopted as the standard in legal, scientific, and scholarly citation.
Five years ago the majority of local police departments had a negligible presence in social media. They barely posted crime updates or traffic alerts on Facebook or Twitter; many had no social media pages at all.
“Police have always had this trouble: ‘does it tip off the bad guys?'” said Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer of cybersecurity firm Co3 Systems and a fellow for the Berkman Center of Internet and Society. “That’s not just social media but any kind of public relations.”
via Cops harnessing social media’s reach to catch criminals.
“It limits creativity, it inhibits individuality, social change, progress,” added Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “You get conformity and stagnation. These are really big issues.”Heightening that concern, government officials in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere are studying the use of smart video-surveillance systems to spot “abnormal behavior.”
via Will our smart gadgets become trusted or oppressive companions? – San Jose Mercury News.
It’s a policy that speaks to a 2009 statement by Dr David Weinberger of Harvard University’s Berkman Center that “transparency is the new objectivity”. The media can aspire to objectivity, but content will naturally contain biases. Transparency is more achievable than objectivity. It “gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases”.
via Opinion: branded content’s rise is due to the media’s reputation | Media Network | The Guardian.