Berkman Buzz: Week of March 30, 2009

April 03, 2009

BERKMAN BUZZ:  A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations.  If you'd like to receive this by email, sign up here.

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*Jonathan Zittrain: "Federalizing cybersecurity?"
*Ethan Zuckerman: "From protest to collaboration: Paul Simon’s 'Graceland' and lessons for xenophiles"
*StopBadware.org: "No fooling: Conficker, GhostNet in the news"
*Sam Bayard: "First Twitter Libel Suit, Starring Courtney Love"
*Harry Lewis: "Harvard Stops Printing (some) Books"
*Internet & Democracy: "Bluehost To Sack Iranian Blogs"
*Digital Natives: "Ubiquity: Laptop Culture and the Demise of the Campus Computer Lab"
*David Weinberger: "April Fools and the April Fooled"
*Weekly Global Voices: "Madagascar: Security forces harass bloggers and twitterers"

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"The Washington Post has reported that the U.S. Congress will shortly take up a bill to 'empower the government to set and enforce security standards for private industry for the first time.' Today’s conventional wisdom in cybersecurity circles is that: we’re very much open to attack (defined lots of ways; often people mean: PCs attached to the Internet can be compromised by outsiders and then put to bad uses, turned into spies, or made to self-destruct).  Virtually no one takes cybersecurity as seriously as he or she should, in part because the costs of compromise are not always charged back to the person who should take measures..."
From Jonathan Zittrain's bog post, "Federalizing cybersecurity?"

"A memetic virus gripped the world of popular music in late 1984 and 1985: the superstar benefit single. The phenomenon of superstar benefits can be traced back through George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh in 1971 and The Secret Policeman’s Balls organized by Amnesty International throughout the 1970s. But the epidemic of benefit singles that paralyzed the music scene in 1985 can be traced directly to Bob Geldof and the 1984 Christmas hit 'Do They Know It’s Christmas...'"
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post, "From protest to collaboration: Paul Simon’s 'Graceland' and lessons for xenophiles"

"There have been two high-profile malware stories in the news this week. The first is a report from our friends and colleagues at the University of Toronto’s Munk Center for International Studies. As reported by the New York Times: 'A vast electronic spying operation has infiltrated computers and has stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama, Canadian researchers have concluded...'"
From Maxim Weinstein's blog post for StopBadware.org, "No fooling: Conficker, GhostNet in the news"

"Twitter gets a lot of attention these days.  In recent weeks, we've seen jurors twittering from the jury box, lawmakers twittering during Obama's first address to Congress, and celebrity ghost twitterers, to name just a few examples of the growing visibility of the micro-blogging platform.  There's been enough hoopla for John Stewart to report the outbreak of a 'Twitter Frenzy.'  While Stewart expresses mock luddite skepticism ('I have no idea how it works, or why it is'), the New York Times hails it as 'an important marketing tool for celebrities, politicians and businesses, promising a level of intimacy never before approached online, as well as giving the public the ability to speak directly to people and institutions once comfortably on a pedestal...'"
From Sam Bayard's blob post for the Citizen Media Law Project, "First Twitter Libel Suit, Starring Courtney Love"

"Harvard announced yesterday that it would no longer print the course catalog, the Handbook for Students, and a few other softcover volumes that are issued annually to students and faculty. The Admissions Office had already announced that it would cut down on the amount of printed matter it sends to high school students. The rationale is for doing less printing is, of course, cost savings — Harvard is undergoing significant budgetary contraction. It’s a bit sad — I have a collection of Harvard course catalogs going back to about 1850. The earliest ones, before Eliot abolished most curricular requirements and instituted the elective curriculum, had the course schedule printed on a single page..."
From Harry Lewis' blog post, "Harvard Stops Printing (some) Books"

"Bluehost, which hosts several WordPress blogs in Iran, is set to start removing Iranian users due to a clause  which allows them to deny service to countries under American government sanctions. The sad irony is that this action only hurts political speech, civil society and democratic participation in Iran, the very values that thinking Americans would like to flourish there. In deeply conservative Iran, whose outspoken anti-Americanism and atomic ambitions have prompted punitive sanctions from the West, the blogosphere has become one of the few avenues of robust political speech. As Persian blogger Arash Kamangir eloquently puts it..."
From the Internet & Democracy Project blog post, "Bluehost To Sack Iranian Blogs"

"Last week, Ars Technica asked: When every student has a laptop, why run computer labs? The article reported on the University of Virginia’s recent decision to 'dismantle the community computer labs' at the school, after discovering that in 2007, 3,113 out of 3,117 freshmen arrived on campus with computers in tow (the vast majority of which were laptops.) School administrators took a look around, and realized that the computer lab’s moment may have passed. An artifact of a time when colleges were working to integrate computers, word processing, and eventually the Internet into the curriculum, computer labs operated as a kind of talisman against protest: teachers could demand papers be word-processed, because even if you don’t own a computer, the lab meant you had no excuse. The project succeeded: computers, today, are an integral part not only of students’ education, but of their entertainment and social life as well..."
From Diana Kimball's blog post for the Digital Natives Project, "Ubiquity: Laptop Culture and the Demise of the Campus Computer Lab"

"I like Google’s April Fools joke a lot, a singularity spoof. Be sure to visit the page Cadie built for herself based on her vastly intelligent analysis of the Web. (The little story the posts tell reminds me a little of something — The Turing Tests — I posted a few months ago, but which I had hesitated to post because I didn’t like it much.) But then there’s SlideShare. I like what SlideShare does, and I like that they did an April Fools joke. But, frankly, I think they didn’t think it through. This morning I got an email from them..."
From David Weinberger's blog post, "April Fools and the April Fooled"

"While Chinese foreign ministry spokesman refused to confirm Youtube had been blocked and stressed that China is not afraid of the Internet, Youtube confirmed yesterday (March 24) its website indeed has been blocked in China since March 23. Video clips on Tibet crackdown. It is not yet clear why the Chinese government decided to block the site, but reports said that it is related to the videos uploaded by Tibetan exiles on violent crackdown of Tibetan protesters by Chinese government in March 2008 and early 2009. I searched through Youtube and found a number of videos that have been uploaded in the past few days on the above topic…"
From Mialy Andriamananjara's blog post for Global Voices, "Madagascar: Security forces harass bloggers and twitterers"