Wikileaks, The Pirate Party, And The Future Of The Internet How to save Julian Assange's movement from itself. American diplomacy seems to have survived Wikileaks’s “attack on the international community,” as Hillary Clinton so dramatically characterized it, unscathed. Save for a few diplomatic reshuffles, Foggy Bottom doesn’t seem to be deeply affected by what happened. Indeed, it’s not in the realms of diplomacy or even government secrecy where Wikileaks could have its biggest impact. Regardless of what happens to Assange, Wikileaks has the potential to catalyze a worldwide campaign that could do for the Internet what the Greens did for the environment in the 1970s: start a much-needed conversation about the potentially corrosive impact of corporate interests on the public good, a conversation that may eventually coalesce into a broader political movement. That the Internet is heavily dominated by for-profit companies, and therefore subject to influence from governments, is not a ground-breaking discovery.
SXSW 2011: Al Franken warns of 'outright disaster' over net neutrality | Technology Democratic senator Al Franken has has issued a rallying cry to "innovators and entrepreneurs" at SXSW to fight back against Comcast and other companies lobbying to pave the way for a two-speed internet. The principle of net neutrality, under which all content is delivered equally to internet users' homes, is "in big trouble", Franken warned in a passionate rallying cry at the conference on Monday. Franken's address was always going to be a preach to the converted – SXSW is the spiritual home for small, independent media and technology firms – but he warned that unless the 200,000 attendees "use the internet to save the internet", then big telecoms firms will muscle through plans for a two-tier net. "The one thing that big corporations have that we don't is the ability to purchase favourable political outcomes," he said. "Big corporations like the telecoms firms have lots of lobbyists – and good ones too. He added: "Today SXSW is a hotbed of creative entrepreneurship and innovation.
Listorious: Twitter people search and lists directory The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation | Timothy B. Lee | Cato Institute: Policy Analysis An important reason for the Internet’s remarkable growth over the last quarter century is the “end-to-end” principle that networks should confine themselves to transmitting generic packets without worrying about their contents. Not only has this made deployment of internet infrastructure cheap and efficient, but it has created fertile ground for entrepreneurship. On a network that respects the end-to-end principle, prior approval from network owners is not needed to launch new applications, services, or content. In recent years, self-styled “network neutrality” activists have pushed for legislation to prevent network owners from undermining the end-to end principle. New regulations inevitably come with unintended consequences.
Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World (9780195152661): Jack Goldsmith, Tim Wu Vaizey's net neutrality knock-out The FT World Telecoms Conference is an annual gathering of top management from telecoms carriers throughout the world. It isn’t a high profile event for the general public, yet this is the platform where minister Ed Vaizey announced the future of the internet in the UK. Mr Vaizey praised the UK’s grossly inadequate current investment in internet infrastructure - however, the key point in his speech was about the abandonment of net neutrality in the UK. What does net neutrality actually mean? Net neutrality can be hard to define because of technical issues involved. According to Wikipedia, the principle also states that if a given user pays for a certain level of internet access, and another user pays for the same level of access, then the two users should be able to connect to each other at the subscribed level of access. Do we have net neutrality today? In some ways we don’t. Paid-for access A lack of transparency Internet content mercantilism Not a slam dunk for paying media companies
RSS is Dead, Long Live RSS RSS is a wonderful technology that allows us to keep track of hundreds of websites without ever leaving our RSS reader, however, many of us have abandoned our bloated RSS subscriptions. I am one of you. For the past 3 years Google Reader has been my primary pipeline for discovering and reading the latest and greatest around the web but it has simply lost its usefulness the past 6 months. It’s value did not diminish due solely to the content but more so because I chose not to manage it well. I suffered from excessive unread counts and the feeling of never quite “catching up”. I nurtured an “inbox mentality” that demands I process all the information from my RSS feeds. Then I had a moment of clarity that revealed my motivation behind my RSS hoarding. Then I found the answer in this short blog post by Brent Simmon at Inessential.com. “The journalist in me loves the the fact that there’s so much competition in online news. Eureka! In my case I’ve implemented a Newspaper approach.
What the new FCC open Internet rules could mean for net neutrality The Federal Communications Commission adopted new rules for regulating Internet access at a hearing today in Washington. After FCC commissioners Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn said yesterday they will not stand in the way of Chairman Julius Genachowski’s modified order, it paved the way for a 3-2 vote to approve new rules of the road for the Internet. The tech policy reporters at Politico made the following assessment of the rules in their excellent Morning Tech newsletter this morning and got it about right. 1) Transparency for both wireline and wireless services, requiring disclosure to consumers, content and device providers, 2) Wireline providers are prohibited from blocking any lawful content, apps, services or devices; wireless providers, from blocking websites and competing telephony services, 3) Wireline providers are prohibited from unreasonably discriminating against any traffic (but no such rule for wireless). “To be sure, there is more to be done,” Harris said.
La belle histoire de la neutralité des réseaux » Article » OWNI, Digital Journalism Perdu dans la neutralité ? Pour y voir plus clair, Lobbynomics réalise un éclairage original du concept, à travers l'histoire des réseaux de télécommunication. L’histoire de la neutralité des réseaux depuis la fin du 18e siècle, quel intérêt ? Si l’on considère cette idée à l’aune du seul réseau Internet, difficile de saisir l’utilité d’une telle remontée dans le temps. Mais si cet embranchement de tuyaux est aujourd’hui au centre de toutes les attentions, il ne faut pas oublier que d’autres moyens de télécommunication, avant lui, ont jeté les bases de la réflexion actuelle sur la neutralité. Lobbynomics a retracé la sinueuse histoire réticulaire dans une infographie, consacrée au déploiement des lignes de télécommunications américaines et européennes entre 1770 et 2010. C’est d’ailleurs dans cette perspective mi-figue, mi-raisin que la FCC, équivalent de notre Arcep national aux États-Unis, s’est effectivement prononcée, peu avant Noël. Infographie initialement publiée sur Lobbynomics.
Wikileaks ISP Anonymizes All Customer Traffic To Beat Spying In order to neutralize Sweden's incoming implementation of the European Data Retention Directive, Bahnhof, the Swedish ISP and host of Wikileaks, will run all customer traffic through an encrypted VPN service. Since not even Bahnhof will be able to see what its customers are doing, logging their activities will be impossible. With no logs available to complete their chain of investigation, anti-piracy companies will be very, very unhappy. In 2009, Sweden introduced the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED). The legislation gave rights holders the authority to request the personal details of alleged copyright infringers. This prompted Jon Karlung, CEO of ISP Bahnhof, to announce that he would take measures to protect the privacy of his customers. “In our case, we plan to let our traffic go through a VPN service, ” Bahnhof’s Jon Karlung told SR. Bahnhof Servers Since the service will encrypt user traffic, not even Bahnhof will know what their customers are doing online.
WikiLeaks to Release Secret Swiss Bank Account Info Swiss whistle-blower and former banker Rudolf Elmer has given WikiLeaks information about bank accounts of more than 2,000 prominent individuals, potentially exposing tax evasion, the BBC reports. The data is not yet available on WikiLeaks, but it was publicly given on two discs by Elmer to WikiLeaks founder and owner Julian Assange at a press conference in London this morning. The data needs to be vetted before it gets released, and some of it will likely be handed over to the authorities. "Once we have looked at the data... there will be full revelation," said Assange. The freshly leaked data covers the period from 1990 to 2009 and concerns companies and individuals from many countries, including the UK, U.S. and Germany, Swiss newspaper Der Sonntag reports. Rudolf Elmer has previously worked in Swiss bank Julius Baer; he was fired from his position in 2002 and has previously leaked information to WikiLeaks about Julius Baer's offshore operations at the Cayman Islands. [via BBC]