The Internet’s capacity for making information seamlessly accessible is even more impressive given its largely unregulated and decentralized nature. This freedom from regulation has allowed superior technologies like Google to quickly make themselves the standard. Yet although the protocols and codes for the Internet belong to the private sector, important components of the Internet rest within the grasp of a single power: the United States gove...
...hnology to foster anti-communist civil society. Using memory sticks and computers, the rich can now buy the cheaper models manufactured and sold on the black market, which means dissidents have been able to leak news onto the Internet, even in mainstream media. “In one case,” wrote Gershman and Gutierrez, “a video of students at the computer science university confronting National Assembly president Ricardo Alarcón about economic injustices and r...
...abilities of this software include the ability to spy on political opponents by identifying and matching social media profiles to email accounts, other users’ network profiles and other relevant data sets located on the Internet. Even more disconcerting, the software has the ability to manufacture large-scale “consent” on social networking sites through the mass generation or mass manipulation of social network profiles. In other words, the...
...victimize those we are aiming to help, giving people the means they need to take charge of their own destiny. Leilah Janah, who created the idea of microwork, small jobs people in the developing world can complete through the Internet, understood this. My friend, Kosta Grammatis, who started a non-profit to bring free Internet to the world, understood this. William Kamkwamba, a young Malawian man whom I had the pleasure of meeting last week at Da...
...nocking on doors, no press events, no meeting voters. Not until you raise more money.” This particular senator’s version of “tough love” was harsh, perhaps, but it was purposeful—he knew this was the only way I could win. THE INTERNET The incumbent senator I was running against, Caesar Trunzo, was about 80 years old—I, on the other hand, was 25 at the time. Trunzo could raise money the traditional way from special interest groups and PACS at a f...
Illustration by Esha Maharishi We have learned by now to expect and to fear the masked army of the internet: Anonymous. It makes the consumer aware of the volatility of his privacy, at a time when our intense networking and the establishment of facial profiling and information databases have made our privacy disappear. By toying with the digital presence of Sony and the CIA, Anon has established the faceless mass as a player, however symbolic,...
...bscenity might be necessary. Another more recent complication to the legal legitimacy of using local community standards in determining what is obscene has been the mushrooming access of almost every segment of society to the Internet. Some public library computers must think it their noble mission to bring porn to the masses. But is the idea of the local community even viable as technology connects not only distant and distinct regions of the co...
Its veracity be damned, the conspiracy theory explained to me by Columbia Law Professor Eben Moglen was just plausible enough to be deeply unsettling, probably because it involved that most ubiquitous of generational signifiers: online social networking. It went a little something like this: back when Mark Zuckerberg needed startup capital for a certain internet venture, he attracted the interest of two downright sinister sources of funding: cyb...
...exico City’s key sites) was the moment in which students from all universities, both private and public, got together for the first time. This established a link between them, which was highlighted by the effective use of the Internet, Facebook and Twitter as a means to coordinate each other. Days after, students met in Tlatelolco (a park emblematic for the 1968 student protests and shootings) to organize the movement. It was then that “La Coordi...
...ews grew increasingly subjective and profitable, print news remained objective and dependent on the traditional advertising revenue business model. This, too, changed with the development of social media and the growth of the Internet. Although print journalism still struggles with profits, newspapers like The New York Times and Wall Street Journal have raised revenue with online advertising and pay walls. Although the number of actual home and o...
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