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» Public Spaces, Private Infrastructure – Posted by Ethan on Oct 1st, 2010 in Human Rights, ideas, Media | 4 comments I’m speaking at the Open Video Conference in New York City today on a panel with noted Indian legal activist, Lawrence Liang. The panel is titled “Public Spaces, Private Infrastructure”, and we’re going to talk about the challenges that come from hosting the “networked public sphere” on platforms owned by private, for-profit companies. Here’s what I’m planning on putting forward to open the conversation. Wael Abbas is one of the leading lights of independent media in Egypt. He’s a blogger, journalist and activist whose blog, Al-Waay Al-Masry (“Egyptian Awareness”) logs over a million visits a month. In 2007, he won the Knight International Journalism Award, the first time the International Center for Journalists awarded the prize to a blogger. Much of the focus on Abbas’s work is on exposing police brutality in Egypt.

Needless to say, a lot of Egyptians in power would like Abbas to shut up. Here’s the tension. Amazon, P2P and non-centralised infrastructure. Subscribe to this blog About Author With a focus on open source and digital rights, Simon is a director of the UK's Open Rights Group and president of the Open Source Initiative. He is also managing director of UK consulting firm Meshed Insights Ltd. Contact Author Email Simon Twitter Profile Google+ Profile Linked-in Profile With the shocking realisation that terms-of-service get-out clauses probably mean that service level agreements for most cloud and web services are worthless, one option that needs urgent exploration is the use of non-centralised distributed software for common infrastructure needs.

So is non-centralised infrastructure feasible? One of the supposed strengths of centralised systems is that there is a single entity with which to establish trust. Is this the future of infrastructure networking? Lieberman Praises Companies Helping Him Try To Censor Wikileaks. This should hardly comes as a surprise, but Senator Joe Lieberman has apparently put out a statement, along with Senator Sue Collins, praising companies for following through on their political pressure to try to censor Wikileaks, calling them "good corporate citizens," and saying that people should support those companies for their willingness to bow down to government pressure.

Yeah, okay. Even the press reporting on this seem to think Lieberman is simply making stuff up. Witness this paragraph from Wired: "The WikiLeaks data dump has jeopardized U.S. national interests and the lives of intelligence sources around the world," Lieberman said, though there is no proof or even detailed allegations that the release has endangered any intelligence source. Lieberman apparently wants the world to believe that censorship is okay because "this is no time for business as usual. "

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Hosting infrastructure. Twitter. Wikiterms. WikiLeaks Struggles to Keep a Step Ahead of Hackers. The WikiLeaks site has been under attack since Sunday when it began releasing some of the more than 250,000 confidential State Department documents it has obtained. Someone portraying himself as an American patriot took credit for the first spate of disruptions to the site, a claim that security experts said was credible. Later in the week, the organization faced more widespread attacks from armies of zombie computers in Europe, Russia and Asia that try to overwhelm Web sites with floods of requests. It is unclear who orchestrated these actions, security experts said. WikiLeaks relies on a dispersed network of computer servers to keep its information available but sought extra computing muscle after facing so many attacks.

So it turned to Amazon.com, which provides a variety of Web services to help fend off the hackers. But on Wednesday, Amazon.com kicked WikiLeaks off its systems after inquiries from an aide to Senator , independent of Connecticut.