Hwang stayed on at the Berkman Center after graduation. He and his friends would sit around and complain about the lack of cool things to do in Boston. So Hwang launched the Awesome Foundation. They each threw in $100 to make a $1,000 grant for the creation of something “awesome.” The first grant went to a Rhode Island School of Design professor who applied to make a 33-foot-long hammock that sat in Boston’s Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway.

via The Busiest Man On The Internet.

It’s a shift that’s changing teaching in the humanities as well. “It’s a project-based model where students learn by actually being engaged in a collaborative, team-based experience of actually creating original scholarship, developing a small piece of a larger mosaic — getting their hands dirty, working with digital media tools, making arguments in video, doing ethnographic work,” said Jeffrey Schnapp, founder and faculty director of metaLAB at Harvard, an arts and humanities research and teaching unit of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

via Education | Harvard Gazette.

In a Tuesday lunchtime talk at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, McCarthy discussed her work with center co-founder and director Jonathan Zittrain and confessed that while her projects deal with larger, dystopian issues, they’re also personal.

via On a date, with everyone | Harvard Gazette.

Malavika Jayaram, a privacy researcher at Harvard University, says Aadhaar makes people who are vulnerable take responsibility for preventing fraud.”You are shifting the burden of responsibility onto the person who is weakest in the chain, expecting the least sophisticated in the system to make sound technical decisions about when to use biometrics,” she says. “It’s insane.”

via Indian election win threatens biggest biometrics bank – tech – 20 May 2014 – New Scientist.

In addition to turning the Internet into a worldwide surveillance platform, the NSA has surreptitiously weakened the products, protocols, and standards we all use to protect ourselves. By doing so, it has destroyed the trust that underlies the Internet. We need that trust back.

via Saving Privacy | Boston Review.

Young, along with David Gobaud ’15 and Lindsay Lin’15, is working on “Developing Big Data Analysis Tools,” aka Big Data, one of five DPSI projects that are bringing together students, researchers, and staff from across Harvard University to focus on the challenges and opportunities posed by technology in educational settings. Housed in the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the initiative is headed by Professor of Practice Urs Gasser LL.M. ’03, and evolved from conversations between Gasser and Dean Martha Minow about the future of education and the role of technology.

via Crossing Boundaries to Enforce Boundaries | Harvard Law Today.

As Professor of Practice Urs Gasser LL.M. ’03 sets up his PowerPoint and students deploy their notebooks and laptops, a riff of music drifts by. The tune soon reveals itself as a jazz version of the Beatles classic “Here, There and Everywhere”—a title that’s evocative of the global subject covered in this seminar, Comparative Online Privacy.

via Privacy TBD: In the online space, what is private may depend on who you are and where you live | Harvard Law Today.

On Tuesday, the EU essentially said that it agreed with that decision, allowing the case to set a precedent for blocking search engine access to public information while leaving the host untouched. “It’s an incredibly big deal,” Jeff Hermes, director of the Digital Media Law Project at Harvard University, said. “Search engines are still important as an index to the Internet. It’s like if you tucked information into a book in the library and then removed the card catalog, to use a very 20th century analogy.”

via Google EU Ruling: ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ Decision Underscores Differences In US, Europe Data Privacy Laws.

Jonathan Zittrain, a law and computer science professor at Harvard, said those who were determined to shape their online personas could in essence have veto power over what they wanted people to know.

via European Court Lets Users Erase Records on Web – NYTimes.com.

But Zittrain says the opinion from the court doesn’t clearly state what would be considered content that should be taken down. For example he says, in this case, the court document mentions the name of the plaintiff and clearly states he wanted the removal of information explaining he sold his house to resolve debt issues.

via Europeans can now request information about themselves be removed from the web | Public Radio International.