Our choice isnt between a digital world where the agency can eavesdrop and one where it cannot; our choice is between a digital world that is vulnerable to any attacker and one that is secure for all users.
via How the NSA Threatens National Security – Bruce Schneier – The Atlantic.
One of the big topics at the Consumer Electronics Show this week is television — like smart TVs and more high-definition programming. But as more and more of us stream our content, what does the future of television really look like beyond pixels and frame rates? For a look at how television stations might be licensed in the future and how interactive new programming might be, Marketplace Tech turns to Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain.
Compared to the “normal” internet — which is based on a few centralized access points or internet service providers ISPs — mesh networks have many benefits, from architectural to political. Yet they haven’t really taken off, even though they have been around for some time. I believe it’s time to reconsider their potential, and make mesh networking a reality. Not just because of its obvious benefits, but also because it provides an internet-native model for building community and governance.
These reports give us a lot of numbers, but very little information about how hard these companies fight on the behalf of users.
via What Transparency Reports Don’t Tell Us – Ryan Budish – The Atlantic.
Nathaniel writes, “Copyright X — AKA ‘The MOOC the New Yorker actually liked’ — is tooling up for a second run at it, expanding on its unusual, hybrid format. This year, in addition to the real-world classes attended by 100 Harvard Law students and online sections for 500 students — taking the M out of MOOC — the course is adding more ‘satellites’ and integrating them more with the other two course communities. The satellites are, for the most part, meat-space classes in about 10 locales around the world, each taught by an expert in copyright law. Apply here.”
via CopyrightX: Harvard’s ground-breaking MOOC on copyright law – Boing Boing.
Jeff Hermes, director of the Digital Media Law Project and Online Media Legal Network for Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, pointed to gold farming, a practice by which MMO players — often in developing countries — spend hours harvesting in-game virtual currency to sell through a secondary online market to wealthier players who’d rather not spend the time, as an example of such a potentially elicit activity.
via NSA’s virtual waste of time? Spying in ‘World of Warcraft’ is harder than you think – NBC News.com.
Yochai Benkler, Berkman professor for entrepreneurial legal studies at Harvard Law School, spoke on December 4 about the President’s Surveillance Program (PSP, a collection of U.S. secret intelligence activities) and Edward Snowden in a talk entitled “System and Conscience: NSA Bulk Surveillance and the Problem of Freedom.” The venue was the weekly seminar sponsored by Harvard’s Center for Research in Computation and Society (CRCS), which brings computer scientists together with economists, psychologists, legal scholars, ethicists, neuroscientists, and other academic colleagues to address fundamental cross-disciplinary computational problems that face society.
via Balancing Security and Freedom in a Democracy | Harvard Magazine.
Over the last few years teachers at all levels of education across the U.S. have begun experimenting with the approach. Justin Reich, a fellow at HarvardX, the university’s digital teaching and learning initiative, and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, has been studying the flipped classroom. He is optimistic that the model could force schools to rethink how the precious time between teachers and students is being spent on a daily basis.
via How one school turned homework on its head with ‘flipped’ instruction | PBS NewsHour.
Still, Schneier manages to avoid paranoia. When we met at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, where he’s now a research fellow, scribbling away on security, the Internet, and power, Schneier wore a Hawaiian shirt and a ponytail; he had the cool demeanor of a rebellious tenured professor. He insisted that the Snowden bombshells only confirmed things he’d and many others had known for years. “Nothing in the documents is really a surprise,” he said.
via Death and the NSA: Motherboard Meets Bruce Schneier | Motherboard.
An unpublished study conducted by Berkman Center fellow Jerome Hergueux suggests that reciprocity and social image are the most significant social motivations for new volunteers who contribute to public goods, such as Wikipedia.
via Study Explores Motivations for Contributions to Public Goods | News | The Harvard Crimson.