Posts tagged: internet
This morning, if you opened your browser and went to NYTimes.com, an amazing thing happened in the milliseconds between your click and when the news about North Korea and James Murdoch appeared on your screen. Data from this single visit was sent to 10 different companies, including Microsoft and Google subsidiaries, a gaggle of traffic-logging sites, and other, smaller ad firms. Nearly instantaneously, these companies can log your visit, place ads tailored for your eyes specifically, and add to the ever-growing online file about you. There’s nothing necessarily sinister about this subterranean data exchange: this is, after all, the advertising ecosystem that supports free online content. All the data lets advertisers tune their ads, and the rest of the information logging lets them measure how well things are actually working. And I do not mean to pick on The New York Times. While visiting the Huffington Post or The Atlantic or Business Insider, the same process happens to a greater or lesser degree. Every move you make on the Internet is worth some tiny amount to someone, and a panoply of companies want to make sure that no step along your Internet journey goes unmonetized.
A thoughtful article about what is essentially a brave new world of digital tracking.
Behold! What the Stop SOPA blackout managed to accomplish in 24 hours.
High five, internet.
Beautiful.
Haven’t read the article, but it does appear that porn is winning the War on Christmas.
The GYWO guy has come out of retirement in response to the threat of SOPA - yeah!
More than 1000 Wikileaks mirror sites spring up in a week
More text from Hillary Clinton’s speech in January, 2010:
We are also supporting the development of new tools that enable citizens to exercise their rights of free expression by circumventing politically motivated censorship. We are providing funds to groups around the world to make sure that those tools get to the people who need them in local languages, and with the training they need to access the internet safely. The United States has been assisting in these efforts for some time, with a focus on implementing these programs as efficiently and effectively as possible. Both the American people and nations that censor the internet should understand that our government is committed to helping promote internet freedom.
We want to put these tools in the hands of people who will use them to advance democracy and human rights, to fight climate change and epidemics, to build global support for President Obama’s goal of a world without nuclear weapons, to encourage sustainable economic development that lifts the people at the bottom up.
Via BoingBoing
[…] the Obama administration is proposing new legislation that would provide the U.S. Government with direct access to all forms of digital communication, “including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct ‘peer to peer’ messaging like Skype.”
The government wants to make sure that you never have a way to communicate that they can’t easily eavesdrop on. The Republicans keep saying that the Obama administration is socialist, but this seems more like fascism to me.
Why the revolution will not be tweeted.
The small commitments associated with on-line movements result in only small accomplishments.
The internet has been a great unifier of people, companies and online networks. Powerful forces are threatening to balkanise it.
I love the hypocrisy here:
Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy — who has been responsible for pushing through Australia’s national Internet censorship program — has been caught censoring his own website: the script that creates a tag cloud of topics covered on his site had been modified to ignore any references to his censorship initiatives. This means that visitors to his site would not have an easy means of reading the Minister’s statements in support of censorship, and anyone who relied on the tag-cloud to understand the Minister’s agenda would have no way of knowing he’d been involved in the censorship initiative.
It was revealed today a script within the minister’s homepage deliberately removes references to internet filtering from the list.Conroy’s website removes references to filter (via /.)In the function that creates the list, or “tag cloud”, there is a condition that if the words “ISP filtering” appear they should be skipped and not displayed.
The discovery is unlikely to do any favours for Senator Conroy’s web filtering policy, which has been criticised for its secrecy.
