Experiments in Cyberspace

German government is trying to push a law that will prevent employers to check their prospective employees' Facebook data. The draft presented by Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere is a lame -still positive, though, attempt to address surmounting problems created by social networks: It will be illegal to become a Facebook friend with an applicant in order to check out private details as some people seem to be indiscriminate about whom they accept as a friend. If an employer turns down an application based on the Facebook postings, a rejected job applicant could take the company to court and claim damages. The new law also aims to limit video surveillance in the workplace like lavatories and locker rooms after a public outrage when it was discovered that some corporations have been checking on employee e-mails and filming sales clerks during coffee breaks. However, de Maiziere continues, Employers will still be allowed to run a search on the web on their applicants. Anything ...

As threats to public security increases day by day, there is a growing demand for more surveillance in all aspects of our lives. E-mails, Facebook profiles, search queries, surfing habits, you name it, are all recorded and used. Now, considerable amount of that data is for marketing purposes and it can be viewed either good or bad depending on its exact purpose. Some of it are in the hands of the law enforcement agencies for apparent public safety. Still, I can not help but be concerned. If you told me a country like Australia would propose a country wide Internet censorship, I would not believe you, or Germany would shut down sites like Wikileaks , no, I would say it was unlikely, either. Nor would I believe copyright treaties would be negotiated behind closed doors. And, no, I would not think it was possible for a company like Airbus, or any company if that matters, to spy on staff bank accounts for due diligence. Not in those parts of the world anyway. But they all happened. ...

Germany's registration authority has suspended investigative journalism site Wikileak's Internet domain registration without a notice. The action comes two weeks after the house of the German WikiLeaks domain sponsor, Theodor Reppe, was searched by German authorities. Police documentation shows that the March 24, 2009 raid was triggered by WikiLeaks' publication of Australia's proposed secret Internet censorship list. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) told Australian journalists that they did not request the intervention of the German government. The publication of the Australian list exposed the blacklisting of many harmless or political sites and changed the nature of the censorship debate in Australia. The Australian government's mandatory internet censorship proposal is now not expected to pass the Australian senate. It is also worth mentioning a secret draft of international copyright treaty negotiated behind closed doors by some...

Goldman Sachs has instructed Wall Street law firm Chadbourne & Parke to pursue blogger Mike Morgan, warning him in a recent cease-and-desist letter that he may face legal action if he does not close down his website goldmansachs666.com. According to the C&D letter, dated April 8, the bank is rattled because the site 'violates several of Goldman Sachs' intellectual property rights' and also 'implies a relationship' with the bank itself. Morgan claims he has followed all legal requirements to own and operate the website and that the header of the site clearly states that the content has not been approved by the bank. The uninitiated can read and learn what Streisand effect is while those in the know may wish to purchase goldmansucks.com domain which is still available at the time of writing this post. Short URL for this post

Gods must be hungry as they are looking for more pain and misery. Nine Iranian bloggers (five of them ethnic Azeris ) will be jailed and whipped for good measure to satisfy and feed the ever starving Gods so that stormy weathers will cease, crops will flourish and harvests will yield record levels of produce. What did these bloggers do? I really can't tell as my Persian is rusty and the damn alphabet is not Latin, but apparently they upset a few religious figures with colorful turbans with their articles in their blog, which is usually blocked or temporarily closed so that they will behave. Go Gods!

Some headlines from the Vienna Document by the Open Cultures Working Group hosted by "Towards a Culture of Open Networks" - a collaborative program developed by Sarai CSDS (Delhi), Waag Society (Amsterdam) and World-Information.Org (Vienna). While global information cities increasingly resemble neo-medieval city states, market concentrations establish a dominion over knowledge. On the way to information feudalism, diversity seems to loose out. We applaud all initiatives that reclaim the benefits of new communication technologies for the common public. We know that the future is too precious to leave it to experts; digital human rights in everyday life are everyone's concern. We trust nodes open of information cultures to explore the diversity of choices in the shaping of information societies based on semiotic democracy. We recognize that street level open intelligence is of high public value and a cultural process that is highly dependent on information climat...

Four Google executives in Italy is facing trial over a video shown in that country. If found guilty, they will be sentenced up to three years in jail. This is an interesting case. Let me sum up: The video recorded by a cell phone was about four male high school students in Turin harassing a 17-year-old boy with Down syndrome. Google removed the video in 24 hours after receiving the complaint. All four offenders were caught, possibly with the help of the video. The lawsuit is not against Google but the people working for Google. As you might have guessed it, what makes this interesting is the last item in the list above. Apparently, it is getting riskier to work for Internet companies as you can all of a sudden find yourself looking at the judge because, a co-worker slipped and some unwanted content is uploaded; some may think you deliberately allow the content be distributed; you did not remove the content right away and spent some time with your family instead; this will ...

Analyzing the crisis of journalism and whether blogging or independent on-line journalism can take the place of media reporting as we know it or not, are not easy issues to tackle. The difficulty stems from the fact that, public's right to access to information, ensuring public's safety, personal and privacy rights, safeguarding the bloggers and anonymity, upholding copyright and patent laws  are all intertwined in a beautiful mixture of a soup we call Internet. Since the topics are huge and will provide enough material to write for many years, I am going to start at a random point. Unlike many though, I do have a proposition to solve most of the problems of today, but to present it gracefully requires time; so it will have to wait. Today, I would like to give three seemingly unrelated news and want you to focus on not who is right or wrong but on the mechanics of them, i.e. how things operate or unfold. First, we have the report of Committee to Protect Journalists, ...

I have (sort of) established that censorship in internet cannot succeed without violating basic human rights. Sadly, this is the de facto case, they are not observed in half of the world today. There are a number of experimental projects that aim to provide freedom of expression and of information retrieval. I would like to introduce one of them: The Free Network Project . Freenet, as is commonly known, is software designed to allow the free exchange of information over the Internet without fear of censorship, or reprisal. To achieve this Freenet makes it very difficult for adversaries to reveal the identity, either of the person publishing, or downloading content. The Freenet project started in 1999, released Freenet 0.1 in March 2000, and has been under active development ever since. What makes Freenet different from other similar projects is found in these few sentences: The journey towards Freenet 0.7 began in 2005 with the realization that some of Freenet's most vulnerab...

A recent article about Argentina's attempt to block Internet users from searching for information about some of the country's most notable individuals that showed up in Slashdot has made me ponder. How do you run a successful censorship campaign in the Internet? As explained in the post, it is trivial to make such attempts a complete failure [1]. What most people forget or do not want to acknowledge is in order for it to succeed a coercive element has to be present, and that is the lack of basic human rights. Let us for instance take my home country, Turkey. Access to YouTube is blocked (I am using a proxy, kind of slow but it works), whole wordpress.com is unreachable (I am not using ISP's DNS and can run my own if necessary, I have bind installed, so the miserable attempt fails). Now, think again. Why does it fail? It fails because no one is knocking down my door in the middle of the night and take me and my computer with a lame excuse that I am using a proxy or VPN,...