January 21st, 2014 | by z | published in Future of the Internet | Comments Off on “The Big Brother Problem” WEF panel
“The Big Brother Problem” is a timely, difficult, and sweeping topic, at WEF ’14, covering digital surveillance by both public and private actors and its implications for human rights. I’ll be moderating the session for it this week, and I thought I’d share my thoughts on both process and substance as I prepare for it. […]
November 20th, 2013 | by z | published in Future of the Internet | Comments Off on New Harvard Law School Library Project Manager Positions for Innovative Projects w/the Berkman Center for Internet & Society
The HLS Library, in conjunction with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, is pleased to announce two new project manager positions. The newly posted Library Technology (LT) Project Manager will be responsible for design, implementation, and management of special and ongoing projects across the HLS Library. The recently posted Academic Technology (AT) Project Manager will […]
November 15th, 2013 | by z | published in Future of the Internet | 2 Comments
I wrote this in April of 2008 for The Times, and don’t think I ever posted it here — Humanizing the Web The Web’s design reflects the open ethos of its early users: it has no central managers, no main menu, and no investment in content – indeed, no business plan whatsoever. Instead, its framers […]
October 29th, 2013 | by shailinthomas | published in Future of the Internet | 5 Comments
The accessibility and flexibility of the Internet is a double-edged sword. A distributed web makes it easy to publish content and link to it, but it also means that this content is by no means permanent: any given server or page can disappear or change at any time. (For example, the U.S. federal government was […]
September 22nd, 2013 | by z | published in Future of the Internet | 23 Comments
Kendra Albert, Larry Lessig and I are finishing up a study of link rot, available at http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2329161. Link rot is the phenomenon by which material we link to on the distributed Web vanishes or changes beyond recognition over time. (Wiki discusses link rot here.) This is a particular problem for academic scholarship, which is increasingly linking […]
August 12th, 2013 | by shailinthomas | published in Future of the Internet | Comments Off on The generativity of programming languages: Why “open source” is about expressive power
[I feature this thoughtful contribution from Leonid Grinberg, who’s been working with me this summer at the Berkman Center.] In his famous dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell conceived “Newspeak,” a language specifically constructed to make it impossible to express any thoughts that are contrary to the interests of the state. One can think of […]
May 31st, 2013 | by Benjamin Sobel | published in Future of the Internet | 2 Comments
In early March, the online retailer Solid Gold Bomb provoked outrage when customers discovered that its Amazon store, which featured apparel bearing dozens of variants on the famed “Keep Calm [and Carry On]” slogan, included a t-shirt that read “Keep Calm and Rape A Lot.” Solid Gold Bomb generated the shirts, and Amazon offered them […]
May 29th, 2013 | by Benjamin Sobel | published in Future of the Internet | Comments Off on Rethinking Online Culpability: The Amazon “Keep Calm” Shirts Controversy (Part 3: (Un)supervised Algorithms)
In early March, the online retailer Solid Gold Bomb provoked outrage when customers discovered that its Amazon store, which featured apparel bearing dozens of variants on the famed “Keep Calm [and Carry On]” slogan, included a t-shirt that read “Keep Calm and Rape A Lot.” Solid Gold Bomb generated the shirts, and Amazon offered them for sale […]
May 27th, 2013 | by Benjamin Sobel | published in Future of the Internet | Comments Off on Rethinking Online Culpability: The Amazon “Keep Calm” Shirts Controversy (Part 2: the Extension of Branding)
In early March, the online retailer Solid Gold Bomb provoked outrage when customers discovered that its Amazon store, which featured apparel bearing dozens of variants on the famed “Keep Calm [and Carry On]” slogan, included a t-shirt that read “Keep Calm and Rape A Lot.” Solid Gold Bomb generated the shirts, and Amazon offered them for sale […]
May 22nd, 2013 | by Benjamin Sobel | published in Future of the Internet | 1 Comment
In early March, the online retailer Solid Gold Bomb provoked outrage when customers discovered that its Amazon store, which featured apparel bearing dozens of variants on the “Keep Calm [and Carry On]” slogan, included a t-shirt that read “Keep Calm and Rape A Lot.” Solid Gold Bomb generated the shirts, and Amazon offered them for […]
