Though the average Facebook user may not view her profile as art, Harvard Berkman Center fellow Judith Donath places the “data portrait” in an art-historical context in her forthcoming book, The Social Machine.

via Heartbreak and the Quantified Selfie – The Cut.

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 What We Want Most in the Era of Surveillance | Alex Pasternack.

“There’s a lot of conflicting opinions about what it means to have things that react too closely to human life. I’m looking at robots that simulate life-like qualities that we recognize,” said Darling. Currently, Darling, who is also a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, is plotting her next experiment to advance her theory on the connection between humans and robots and scouting out where she can secure funding.

via Kate Darling, MIT Researcher Explores Peoples’ Connection With Robots.

Charles Nesson, Harvard Law School HLS professor and founder and director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, brought Reyes and Goldstein to the Harvard Allston Education Portal to facilitate a discussion on the themes of whistleblowing, secrecy, and justice. Unlike other juries, however, Nesson instructed these jurors to focus on whether Snowden’s actions were immoral, rather than illegal.

via Tuning into the whistleblower | Harvard Gazette.

“We do not have appropriate mechanisms to hold abuse accountable,” MacKinnon said, and to more or lesser degrees, the panelists agreed that oversight is at least too weak. Said Benkler: “The existing systems of oversight and accountability failed repeatedly and predictably in ways that were comprehensible to people inside the system but against which they found themselves unable to resist because of the concerns about terrorism and national security.” Kerrey: “I don’t think we’re even close to having unaccountable surveillance [but] I don’t think it’s good oversight.” I’ll count that as consensus. We then checked off the means of oversight.

via The debate continues on Edward Snowden: hero or traitor | Jeff Jarvis | Comment is free | theguardian.com.

The fair use doctrine has long been wielded to protect musical expression, perhaps most famously in the 1994 Supreme Court decision ruling that 2 Live Crew’s bawdy take on “Pretty Woman” was a legal parody of Roy Orbison’s original. But using a song in an explicitly commercial context, like the GoldieBlox ad, limits its protection from copyright infringement lawsuits. “Whether or not a work is used for a commercial purpose has been part of the fair use analysis for a very long time,” says Andy Sellars, a staff attorney for the Digital Media Law Project housed at Harvard University. “The use of media in advertising has often been a tough place for people to make fair use claims.”

via Beastie Boys Battle GoldieBlox Over ‘Girls’ Video in Lawsuit | TIME.com.

Today, were talking about IP — or internet protocol — addresses. If you have a connection to the internet, you have one. But do you know what IP addresses are, and how they work? Harvard Universitys Jonathan Zittrain answers these questions and more for host Ben Johnson. Click on the audio player above to hear Zittrains techsplanation of IP addresses, and hear why internet providers dont have exclusive content limited to their networks.

via Techsplainer: What the heck is an IP address? | Marketplace.org.

Agencies like the NSA use stronger encryption, said Bruce Schneier, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

via Silicon Valley Nerds Seek Revenge on NSA Spies With Super Coding – Bloomberg.

With criticism of The Affordable Care Act’s website mounting, some want heads to roll for the “debacle” that is the roll-out, others are calling for the site to shut down, and some claim jokes about healthcare.gov‘s failings are amusing. But the focus on the flaws of the system since its October 1 launch ignores an equally crucial fact.

via The Biggest Mistake in the Healthcare Site? Assuming Everyone Knows How to Use the Web | Eszter Hargittai.

“Instagram has blocked searches for certain terms associated with the suspected illegal sale of drugs via its service. The photo-themed social network took the measure after being asked to respond to an investigation by #BBCtrending – a new social media series.” (Including an interview with Berkman faculty director John Palfrey)

BBC News – Instagram blocks some drugs advert tags after BBC probe.