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Berkman Buzz: June 22, 2015

Patterns in Charleston, preserving the Internet, sourcing the Snowden docs, the role of libraries, and a visit to Comedy Hack Day.
 
READ: News and commentary from around the community

Seeing patterns in Charleston. "[S]o long as we treat each mass shooting, each black death as an isolated tragedy, there’s nothing we can do," argues Ethan Zuckerman in his piece for The Conversation. "Look for the patterns." 

"My fear is that the Internet has been paved. You can spend an entire lifetime on the Internet and never feel its loam between your toes," writes David Weinberger in this piece for The Atlantic considering the impact of apps and commercial interests on the Internet.

China and Russia almost definitely have the Snowden docs. Did they get them from Snowden? Unlikely, says Berkman fellow Bruce Schneier who writes in Wired that a more likely source is  journalists' computers or the foreign intelligence agencies' own networks.

What's the library's role in the information age? In an interview with Boston Public Radio, Berkman faculty chair Jonathan Zittrain suggests that libraries' lasting advantage may be impartiality, and he 
calls for a redoubling of efforts to keep them in business. 

Is it really hacking if you have a password? In 
her piece for Slate, Berkman fellow Josephine Wolff considers the alleged hack of the Houston Astros' computers by the St. Louis Cardinals, and how we decide who's responsible for breaches.
 
How Internet Censorship Works
WATCH: How Internet Censorship Works 
from the archives

The Internet is not as free and open as we might think. How do governments, private companies, and service providers limit access and censor information? Find out, this video created by the Berkman Center's class of 2012 summer interns.  
 
LISTEN: Whose App is it Anyway?

You may be familiar with a typical hack-day or hack-a-thon. Throw a group of developers and creators in a conference room for the weekend, and they'll come up with some amazing app or product to make life better for all of humankind.

Radio Berkman recently stumbled on a hack-a-thon that turns hack-a-thons on their head. Last year a traveling event called Comedy Hack Day visited the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Run by a group called Cultivated Wit, the goal of the hack day is to bring some laughs to the world of tech entrepreneurship.

Listen to the episode

 
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