Berkman Buzz: January 12, 2015

It has been sixteen years since our previous communication.

In that time the People of the Internet - you and me and all our friends of friends of friends, unto the last Kevin Bacon - have made the Internet an awesome place, filled with wonders and portents.

From the serious to the lolworthy to the wtf, we have up-ended titans, created heroes, and changed the most basic assumptions about How Things Work and Who We Are.

But now all the good work we've done together faces mortal dangers.

Internet and digital technologies allowed for the emergence of new modes of production involving cooperation and collaboration amongst peers (peer-production). In contrast with traditional models of production oriented towards the maximization of profits, these alternative modes of production are, more often than not, oriented towards the maximization of the common good. To ensure that content will always remain available to the public, the output of production is often released under a specific regime that prevents anyone from subsequently turning it into a commodity (the regime of information commons).

Compromise is great, but no democratic country should sacrifice the ideal of the global, interoperable Internet - and the speech and innovation it facilitates - in the name of pragmatism. I'm talking about the issue of "zero rating": the practice being followed by mobile carriers around the world to provide Web access "for free" to their users to certain chosen services. Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Wikipedia become "the Internet" for the users of mobile data supported by "zero rating" plans, because accessing these services doesn't cause users to hit the data caps applied by the carriers, and in many cases the plans don't require the user to sign up for mobile data at all.

Many of us in the computer-security field are skeptical of the U.S. government's claim that it has positively identified North Korea as the perpetrator of the massive Sony hack in November 2014. The FBI's evidence is circumstantial and not very convincing. The attackers never mentioned the movie that became the centerpiece of the hack until the press did. More likely, the culprits are random hackers who have loved to hate Sony for over a decade, or possibly a disgruntled insider.

The chief executive officer of edX, Anant Agarwal, declared that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) should serve as “particle accelerator for learning” (1). MOOCs provide new sources of data and opportunities for large-scale experiments that can advance the science of learning. In the years since MOOCs first attracted widespread attention, new lines of research have begun, but findings from these efforts have had few implications for teaching and learning. Big data sets do not, by virtue of their size, inherently possess answers to interesting questions. For MOOC research to advance the science of learning, researchers, course developers, and other stakeholders must advance the field along three trajectories: from studies of engagement to research about learning, from investigations of individual courses to comparisons across contexts, and from a reliance on post hoc analyses to greater use of multidisciplinary, experimental design.

The Cyberlaw Clinic began in 1999, with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society's announcement of a new "Clinical Research Program." As the program heads into its sixteenth year, we at the Clinic have the opportunity to reflect on the events of 2014. From student work and public events, to changes among the Clinic staff, to new modes of teaching and updates to structure of the program itself, we wanted to share some highlights of the past calendar year as we look ahead to the rest of 2015.

Mobile financial services are a recent phenomenon in Bangladesh, but they have created a radical change in the country's banking system. On average, 3.33 billion taka (about 42 million US dollars) worth of transactions are made every day via mobile banking systems.

There are more than 50 government and private banks in Bangladesh, yet a lot of people, mosty in remote and rural areas, remained unbanked. In 2010, the central bank of Bangladesh introduced mobile financial services to facilitate services for the country's unbanked people. To date, a total of 28 banks have received permission from Bangladesh Bank for mobile banking; 19 banks have already launched the services.