A few weeks ago, I spoke with the world wide web’s inventor, MIT’s Tim Berners-Lee, at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Reflecting on Impossible, he said that while the web was not inherently designed to “work better for altruistic things … it gives us a choice for what we build on top. It gives us the chance to start again.”

via Lily Cole: welcome to the gift economy, where the kindness of a stranger rules | Lily Cole | Comment is free | theguardian.com.

Email is still “surprisingly hard” to do securely, said Bruce Schneier, a security expert at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

via Internet privacy: harder than it should be.

The event was hosted by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and included a panel discussion with the creator of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Berkman Fellows Rosemary Leith and Judith Donath, and Berkman Director and Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain. The Berkman’s executive director, Urs Gasser, moderated.

via Help you? Love to | Harvard Gazette.

Cole, who spoke at a panel discussion Wednesday at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said she launched Impossible to change the culture of wish-making.

via British Actress Lily Cole Discusses Social Media Site | News | The Harvard Crimson.

“You don’t want to read the rights so broadly that they affect public discussion,” says Jeff Hermes, director of the Digital Media Law Project at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. It’s widely accepted that the right of posthumous publicity “can’t be used to block a discussion of an individual for news reports,” he says.

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Graeff, Stempeck, and Zuckerman contribute important insights into the networked ecosystem of communication and news. The paper is a direct follow-on to an earlier paper by Internet theorist Yochai Benkler and Co., which suggested new network dynamics at work around the Stop Online Piracy Act SOPA/PIPA and related online activism. Both papers leverage the underappreciated Media Cloud project, which is finally getting its due. Graeff, Stempeck, and Zuckerman basically show a kind of counter-example to the Benkler findings. This scholarly back-and-forth is well worth paying close attention to, as MIT and Harvard’s Berkman Center have more papers in the pipeline along these lines. If we are to answer the ultimate digital media question — “How much has the Internet truly changed communication?” — this research will be a vital resource in providing the data.

via What’s New in Digital and Social Media Research: What happens when robot journalists produce stories that are “good enough” » Nieman Journalism Lab.

Op-ed from Bruce Schneier: “Increasingly, we are watched not by people but by algorithms. Amazon and Netflix track the books we buy and the movies we stream, and suggest other books and movies based on our habits. Google and Facebook watch what we do and what we say, and show us advertisements based on our behaviour. Smartphone navigation apps watch us as we drive. And the National Security Agency, of course, monitors our phone calls, emails and locations, then uses that information to try to identify terrorists.”

via NSA in the bluff as it tries to cover data truth | GulfNews.com.

Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard University, said it’s difficult for people to say no when presented with immediate benefits because any potential problems are vague and years away.“Information seems harmless and trivial at the moment, but can be recorded forever . and can be combined with other data,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve come to terms with that yet.”

via Promise and peril in an ultra-connected world – The Washington Post.

One reason, perhaps, is that these new organizations are able to make decisions in a very different way. The traditional corporation was organized to limit the amount of information that flowed to the hierarchy, a concern that matters much less online, according to David Weinberger, author of Too Big to Know, and senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

via Online Collaboration: Settling the Cyber-Frontier.

The censorship issue presents a quandary for tech companies that often espouse free speech as part of their core ethos. It could also be a financial problem, since abiding by the government’s often vague censorship directives can be expensive. “The existing Chinese microblogging sites have had to invest in huge armies of individuals who spend their time looking through the content and determining what should or shouldn’t be removed,” says Ryan Budish, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “You can’t exactly just move in there and do business. It’s a very different framework.”

via LinedIn in China: Why China Is a Nightmare for U.S. Internet Companies | TIME.com.