Berkman Buzz: Week of March 2, 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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*John Palfrey discovers where in the world the spammers are
*The Internet & Democracy Project thinks about the future of fact checking
*Ethan Zuckerman live blogs Rebecca MacKinnon's talk on China's Internet culture
*Isaac Mao discusses social media's power to combat censorship
*Chris Soghoian discovers YouTube's new "nocookie" feature might be half baked, on CNET
*Harry Lewis examines the actions some physician are taking against anonymous libel
*danah boyd figures out the next step in evolution
*Weekly Global Voices: "Egyptian -and Muslim- Girls between a Rock and a Hard Place"
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"Our friends at StyleFeeder have offered up some great data about the geographic sources of social media spam on their tech blog. The background: Philip Jacob, the founder of StyleFeeder, is a long-time anti-spam advocate, while also being a careful guy who doesn’t want to ruin the Net in the process of fighting nuisance online. At StyleFeeder, they are seeing a growing number of posts about illegal movie downloads, pharaceuticals, adn the usual spammy subjects. Along with his colleagues, he’s developed a tool called Assassin to identify the source of the posts and get rid of them on the StyleFeeder site. In the process, they’ve noticed that the vast majority comes from India (with the US next, Pakistan as a distant third, and China weighing in over 5% in fourth place)..."
From John Palfrey's blog post, "Spamdog Millionaire: Social Media Spam and Internet Filtering"
"Remember Jayson Blair, the New York Times “reporter” who fabricated tens of articles by gliding through a loop hole in the reporter’s code of honor? Some established magazines like The New Yorker or The Atlantic can afford to pay fact checkers, but even the Times — whether for reasons of deadline or budget — must rely on reporters to fact-check themselves, taking any heat from the public if they misquote or misrepresent..."
From the Internet & Democracy Project blog post, "The Future of Fact Checking"
"The Chinese internet is lots more complicated than you think. That’s the core message of Rebecca MacKinnon’s talk at the Berkman Center on the Chinese internet, deliberative government and internet filtering. Most of the models we have for understanding the Chinese internet are wrong, or at the very least, deceptive. Scholars who follow the Chinese internet closely, like Rebecca, and wrestling with explanations of what, in fact, is happening with the Internet and movements towards participatory democracy..."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post, "China’s complicated internet culture"
" It's a very long history for China to deploy censorship system( I think the legacy came from it's ever regimes since Qinshi Huangdi, the first emperor ). So although the current communist party were ever not so agile first when Internet was introduced to this country in early stage, now seems they are more boastful on controlling it with both technical and social deployment. On the technical part. Great Firewall (GFW in short) in China is now seen as the most complicated one around the world for it's scale, consistency and super computing power behind the infrastructure. The economic boom in this country ensures investment of the system. It came from people and used toward people..."
From Isaac Mao's blog post, "Great Firewall v.s. Social Media"
"Responding to criticism from privacy activists, YouTube in the past two weeks has rolled out a number of new privacy features. Chief among these is a "delayed cookie" option thatYou Tube promises will not leave cookies in the browsers of users who have not yet clicked the "play" button to view a video. While this statement is true for traditional Web browser-based cookies, YouTube's cookie-lite solution still leaves long-term, non-session Flash cookies behind in the Web browser of visitors who have yet to actually click play to watch the YouTube videos..."
From Chris Soghoian's blog post, "YouTube's new 'nocookie' feature continues to serve cookies"
"A few months ago, a physician who attended one of my talks started a correspondence with me about sites in which patients critique doctors. Anonymously, sometimes ungently. And sometimes by making statements that are false and injurious to the doctor’s reputation. That’s the definition of libel. What, I was asked, can be done? There are, of course, many sites where anonymous garbage gets posted — think rottenneighbor.com or dontdatehimgirl.com. But a site such as RateMDs.com – the libel is discrediting a laboriously earned professional credential, in a way that could cost physicians their livelihood..."
From Harry Lewis' blog post, "Fighting Anonymous Libel"
"Whenever I'm in a public space where folks are blabbing away on their phones, I want to scream. Trains, cafes, busses... they all drive me batty. I'm dreading the day in which cell phones are viable on planes. Or when VOIP isn't blocked. When I'm forced to listen to half of a conversation, I start fuming. First, I mentally grumble about how rude the person is. But then I start berating myself, lamenting my age, and wondering if I were younger or from a different culture if half-conversations wouldn't drive me so utterly insane..."
From danah boyd's blog post, "I want to evolve to not hear the cell phone"
"Egyptian women are trapped between who they are and who they are expected to be; they are required to live up to the expectations of their parents, families, colleagues, and later on, their husbands and children. In their attempt to meet those expectations, some of them feel that they lose touch with who they really are and the great things they can really do. Scene and Heard asked Egyptian men why they prefer to get married to Non-Egyptian/Arab women..."
From Marwa Rakha's blog post for Global Voices, "Egyptian -and Muslim- Girls between a Rock and a Hard Place"