June 18th, 2009
More mentions of the 2009 Computers Freedom and Privacy Conference from the news and blogosphere.
Futures, Wendy M. Grossman, net.wars, 6-13-09
US Justice Department Considers Possible Antitrust Violations in Google Books Deal, Rachel Balik, Finding Dulcinea, 6-11-09
Let’s Make a Data Deal, Brian Quinton, The Big Fat Marketing Blog, 6-10-09
Talk About Targeting, Cristina Smith, Privacy Gurus Blog. 6-9-09
My Talk on the Good and Bad Sides of Digital Activism at the CFP 2009 Conference, Gaurav Mishra, Gauravonomics Blog, 6-9-09
Data Privacy Issues Still Plague E-Health Record Efforts, Lora Bentley, ITBusinessEdge 6-8-09
Tags: CFP&N
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June 9th, 2009
The next few weeks will be a little schizophrenic around here, as we wrap up CFP 2009 and start the planning for CFP 2010. For ideas about speakers or topics you’d like to see at the conference, please continue to use the CFP 2010 brainstorming thread. This thread is specifically for discussions about the goals.
Potential co-chair Elizabeth Stark and I came up with these as a first cut … what do others think?
- “from conference to community”: move towards a year-round community, with online hubs and smaller in-person regional workshops/salons complementing the main conference
- reconnect CFP with hackers and the free culture community
- diversify CFP community and conference — planning team, audience, presenters, …
- build on the high-quality content, engagement with government, and online visibility success of 2009 and continue “rebooting CFP”
Please discuss!
jon
Tags: cfp2010, goals, planning
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June 8th, 2009
At Thursday’s Online activism around the world session, Ralf Bendrath described how the path to getting 75,000 people in the streets in Germany to protest surveillance started with “a mailing list and a wiki”, and I showed Willow Witte’s slide of the Join the Impact wiki and talked about the work Baratunde Thurston had done with the Voter Suppression Wiki. Notice a theme here?
The wiki page we’ve created for the session has the video, presentations by Ralf, Gaurav Mishra, and me, and links out to moderator Nancy Scola’s Global Digital Activism Case Study: Germany’s Freedom Not Fear in techPresident as well as Gaurav’s The 4Cs Social Media Framework, which provided a great intellectual framework for the session. There’s also a document Katrina Neubauer put together summarizing panelists’ email responses to a handful of questions. If there’s other information that should be here, please add it to the page or leave it as a comment here … thanks!
There were a lot of logistical challenges with this panel, and so four of the invited panelists weren’t able to attend in person. We’ll try to work with Basem Fathy, Evgeny Morozov, Michael Bolognino, and Willow Witte to incoporoate their perspectives on the page as well, via a presentation, video, blog post, and/or article. Over time, we’ll hopefully have with similar pages for other sessions as well. In other words, stay tuned for more!
And it’d be great to hear what others thought of the session — and thoughts what other campaigns we should have covered. So please feel kick off some discussion in the comments!
jon
Tags: Activism, CFP Program, wiki
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June 8th, 2009
More CFP09 news and blog coverage.
China’s “Green Dam Youth Escort” software, Rebecca MacKinnon, RConversation, 6-8-09
Computers Freedom and Privacy, Mike Banks Valentine, Larry English , 6-8-09
The role of design in protecting cyberspace: thoughts from CFP 2009, Ian Glazer, tuesdaynight, 6-8-09
Signs of the Times News fit, Keine Kommentare, privacy laws, 6-7-09
House Curbs “Virtual Strip Searches” At Airports, Declan McCullagh, CBS News Political Hotsheet, 6-5-09
CFP Panel on Voting and the Internet, Association for Computing Machinery Weblog, 6-5-09
Internet Voting: How Far Can We Go Safely?, Ed Felton, Freedom to Tinker, 6-5-09
Bush FBI sent 18 armored agents to search my house, wiretap whistleblower says, John Byrne, The Raw Story, 6-5-09
Global Digital Activism Case Study: Germany’s Freedom Not Fear, Nancy Scola, Personal Democracy Forum, 6-5-09
Tags: CFP&N
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June 5th, 2009
Below is more blog and news coverage of CFP09. If you’re blogging about the conference, let us know so we can include you in your links!
NSA Whistleblower Meets Anthrax ‘Person of Interest’, Kevin Poulsen, Wired.com’s Threat Level, 6-4-09
Deep Packet Inspection Here to Stay, Say Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference Experts, Douglas Streeks, BroadbandCensus.com, 6-4-09
Are We Really Inching Toward Cybarmageddon?, Matthew Harwood, Security Management, 6-4-09
Is Internet Voting Safe? Vote Here, Kevin Poulsen, Wired.com’s Threat Level, 6-4-09
Business and the Internet on Tiananmen’s 20th Anniversary, Chip Pitts, CRS Law, 6-4-09
Tags: CFP&N
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June 4th, 2009
I know, I know, CFP09 isn’t even over … but it’s not too early to be thinking about CFP 2010!
If you’ve got an idea for a panel, workshop, or tutorial, please submit it via the CFP 2010 submission system. Or use this thread for brainstorming! A few questions to think about …
- What do you want to see more of?
- What other topics should we cover?
- Who should we get as speakers?
- How can we make the online aspects better?
Other topics, suggestions, critiques, etc. welcome …
Please discuss!
jon
PS: thanks to Lenny Foner for getting the submission system up so quickly!
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June 4th, 2009
Despite the varied backgrounds of the panelists, there was a good deal of agreement about the uses and abuses of Deep Packet Inspection during the discussion today. The overall conclusion was that the technology itself was neutral, but that specific uses could be either good or evil, and the solution to this was not to ban the technology outright, but rather to encourage openness on the part of ISPs as to how they are using DPI on their networks, as well as guidelines to its appropriate use. Whether those guidelines should be in the form of legislation or not was one of the points of contention.
When discussing the negative uses of DPI, the panel mostly focused on the actions of ISPs, who want to limit specific types of traffic in order to increase their profits. While legislation may be effective at ensuring that DPI is not used to compromise net neutrality or privacy in the US and other relatively open countries, it will do nothing to ensure that DPI is not used for bad ends in less open countries, such as Iran or China, where DPI will almost certainly become a valuable tool in their censorship and surveillance arsenal, if it isn’t already. The possible uses of DPI for overt censorship of political speech, as opposed to limiting economic competition was not directly addressed by the panel. However, Ralf Bendrath of the Delft University of Technology, brought up the issue of non-ISP actors who have an interest in using DPI to monitor traffic when he discussed recent court cases in Europe where the music industry has attempted to force ISPs to use DPI to prevent the transfer of copyrighted MP3s. He brought up the valid point that once the ISPs have put advanced DPI technology in place in order to “manage traffic” or bill users different amounts for different services, they may have trouble fending off legal requirements to use it to do more.
At the same time, there are many valid uses of Deep Packet Inspection. It is used in routers to allow for IP sharing on a home network, to assist in the transition to IPv6, and to defend against denial of service attacks and other network-breaking attempts.
What I took away from this panel is that Deep Packet Inspection is the latest in a long series of technology that is being defined in the public mind by its worst uses (see: last year’s substantial limiting of Usenet access by several major ISPs because child pornography was being traded on a couple of groups; the general demonization of P2P file sharing because it is frequently used to transfer copyrighted material, despite other more legally clear uses.) I think what we should be more concerned about is the varied actors who have a vested interest in limited our choices to serve their own desires– be they advertisers who want to invade our privacy to sell to us, governments who want to control what political views we are exposed to, or ISPs who want to prevent us from using internet services that compete with their interests. The debate over what rights we, as internet users, have, and how to keep corporations and governments from abusing those rights, regardless of what technology they use to do it, seems to be much more substantial and much deeper than just DPI.
-Eliza Bonner
Guest Blogger
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