Berkman Buzz: September 5, 2014

The Berkman Center's 2014-2015 Orientation and Academic Year Kickoff is taking place right now! Follow the Berkman Centaur to learn more about the suite of events taking place all over campus during the next week, and to RSVP.

As a University-wide research center at Harvard, our interdisciplinary efforts in the exploration of cyberspace address a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences. If you're interested in the Internet’s impact on society and are looking to engage a community of world-class fellows and faculty through events, conversations, research, and more please join us to hear more about our upcoming academic year.

People from all disciplines, universities, organizations, and backgrounds are encouraged to attend our orientation events. We look forward to seeing you there!

As of today, ProjectVRM is eight years old.

So now seems like a good time for a comprehensive (or at least long) report on what we’ve been doing all this time, how we’ve been doing it, and what we’ve been learning along the way.

The Case for Kill Switches in Military Weaponry http://t.co/NCdMHtwAsY @zittrain on existing tech and the possibility of disarming #ISIS
—Berkman Center (@berkmancenter)
 

Twitter’s CFO made some headlines recently by suggesting that Twitter was going to tweak the reverse chronology of the feed and introduce algorithmic curation.

Many on my Twitter feed were strongly opposed to the possibility.

...Why the distaste for a change that would benefit many of them? It’s simple: Twitter’s uncurated feed certainly has some downsides, and I can see some algorithmic improvements that would make it easier for early users to adopt the service, but they’d potentially be chopping off the very—sometimes magical—ability of mature Twitter to surface from the network.

It is important that, when possible, Internet companies that specialize in content, like social media companies, curb harassment within their platforms. Solutions like pending comment systems can limit nastiness without inhibiting diverse and creative free speech.

But we should also consider what we would lose were we to ban, or even discourage, the use of anonymity on the Internet. Debates about trolls routinely conflate anonymity with incivility but a broader look at online activities reveals that public good can come when users can hide their identity.

Advertiser strategies for tracking web users even when users try to protect their privacy. Time for some regulation? http://t.co/V23W0ns3ik
—Ethan Zuckerman (@EthanZ)

By cross-referencing information from a massive data leak in mid-August with the results of a recent parliamentary inquiry in Germany, we’ve come to suspect that the majority of surveillance technologies produced by German companies have been bought and sold under the table – in other words, without a license. The German government requires licenses for the sale of technologies that are considered to be “dual use” – products that can be used for both good and ill.