Berkman Buzz: Week of April 27, 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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*StopBadware: "Canadian Parliament considers anti-malware law"
*Ethan Zuckerman: "The importance of being a dork"
*OpenNet Initiative: "The Worst Places to be a Blogger"
*Harry Lewis: "The White House Confused PhotoStream"
*David Weinberger: "[berkman] Stephen Wolfram - WolframAlpha.com"
*Internet & Democracy: "Roxana Saberi on Hunger Strike"
*Citizen Media Law Project: "Orlando Police Chief v. The First Amendment"
*Weekly Global Voices: "Malaysia: Humans as Commodities"
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"The Canadian House of Commons is considering bill C-27, the Electronic Commerce Protection Act. In addition to providing civil penalties for unsolicited commercial e-mail (spam) and the unauthorized interception of e-mail (man in the middle attacks), it provides for similar penalties for the unauthorized installation of software..."
From Maxim Weinstein's blog post for StopBadware, "Canadian Parliament considers anti-malware law"
"I had coffee recently with Gavin McCormick, a bright young economist who worked with me at Geekcorps some years back. He took a position with a think tank out West and was telling me that, after leaving Boston, he was thinking about going back to Namibia for a vacation, where he’d spent a difficult year as a volunteer teacher..."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post, "The importance of being a dork"
"The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has just released a list of the ten worst countries in which to blog. Topping the list is Burma, followed closely by Iran, Syria, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Tunisia, China, Turkmenistan, and Egypt..."
From Jillian York's blog post for the OpenNet Initiative, "The Worst Places to be a Blogger"
"In a continuation of President Obama’s campaign for openness, a White House photostream has been created. The terrific photos were taken by the official White House photographer, but anyone can download them and use them. The photos are offered under a Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution license. All you have to do when you use the photo is to attribute it. This is modern, open, and terrific..."
From Harry Lewis' blog post, "The White House Confused PhotoStream"
"Stephen Wolfram is giving at talk at Harvard/Berkman about his WolframAlpha site, which will launch in May. Aim: 'Find a way to make computable the systematic knowledge we’ve accumulated.' The two big projects he’s worked on have made this possible. Mathematica (he’s worked on it for 23 yrs) makes it possible to do complex math and symbolic language manipulation. A New Kind of Science (NKS) has made it possible that it’s possible to understand much about the world computationally, often with very simple rules..."
From David Weinberger's blog post, "[berkman] Stephen Wolfram - WolframAlpha.com"
"Reporters without Borders reports that Iranian-American journalist, Roxana Saberi — sentenced last Saturday to 8 years in prison after a sham 1 day closed trial in Tehran — is protesting her detention with a hunger strike. (For more background on Saberi, and her dubious arrest by Iranian authorities, read this profile by her former employer, the BBC.)..."
From Bruce Etling's blog post for the Internet & Democracy Project, "Roxana Saberi on Hunger Strike"
"There aren't too many elected officials in Flori-duh that I respect. Orlando Police Chief Val Demings, used to be one of the select few. She hasn't done a perfect job, and had a particularly embarrassing incident in which her gun was stolen. Nevertheless, my general impression of her has been that she is competent and ethical..."
From Marc Randazza's blog post for the Citizen Media Law Project, "Orlando Police Chief v. The First Amendment"
"In early 2009, Malaysia had the dubious privilege of being investigated by the US senate for the trafficking of humans. News reports stated that the migrants involved were mostly from Myanmar, but other foreigners were also allegedly taken by the government officials to the Malaysian-Thai border, where they were extorted or sold to human trafficking syndicates. According to AFP reports, a senate official stated..."
From Daniel Chandranayagam's blog post for Global Voices, "Malaysia: Humans as Commodities"