by Robert Macmillan, If you did a double-take yesterday when Facebook announced that it was spending an astounding $19 billion to buy mobile messaging softw
It is rolling out 376 small cells that will cover 1 million people who are currently without a signal and the roll-out is now underway. The cost of the investment is US$10 million. That’s US$10 million to cover 1 million people. Now Rwanda’s a small country and it would cost more to cover a larger geographic area but the potential is clearly enormous if it works.
"Key provisions of the proposals which are not acceptable from the point of view of important public interests include: a prohibition of requirements to hold data locally; a prohibition of otherwise regulating cross-border data transfers; a prohibition of requiring a local presence for goods/service providers in the country; and a prohibition of requiring open source software in government procurement contracts. It is also proposed that there be no border taxes on digital products.
Furthermore, it is being proposed to effectively give the WTO jurisdiction to adjudicate whether a national technology or data regulation was “reasonable,” “objective,” “transparent,” and “not more burdensome than necessary to ensure the quality of the service.” WTO’s adjudication processes have historically tended to favour commercial interests, and giving them a blanket supervision of technology/ data regulation may go against governments’ obligation to ensure that services are operated in the public interest and respect human rights and freedoms
In addition, discussions in WTO and in so-called free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations are neither transparent nor inclusive, thus resulting in decisions that do not take into account the interests of all concerned parties. The processes are overly influenced by big business interests."
Review of Yasha Levine's book Surveillance Valley. The secret military history of the Internet. " It tells a story about Silicon Valley that really isn’t told enough, and it points out some really unpleasant – but, alas, all too true – aspects of the technology that we have all come to depend on. Google, the “cool” and “progressive” do-good-company, in fact a military contractor that helps American drones kill children in Yemen and Afghanistan? As well as a partner in predictive policing and a collector of surveillance data that the NSA may yet try to use to control enemy populations in a Cybernetics War 2.0? The Tor Project as paid shills of the belligerent US foreign policy? And the Internet itself, that supposedly liberating tool, was originally conceived as a surveillance and control mechanism?"
in a syllabus from June 2017, The Supreme Court of the USA underlines the importance of the internet in relation to the first amendment to the US constitution. The internet's forums are decribed as "what for many are the principal sources for knowing current events, checking ads for employment, speaking and listening in the modern public square, and otherwise exploring the vast realms of human thought and knowledge."
Military's 'sock puppet' software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda Jeff Jarvis: Washington shows the morals of a clumsy spammer Nick Fielding and Ian Cobain The Guardian, Thursday 17 March 2011 "The multiple persona contract is thought to have been awarded as part of a programme called Operation Earnest Voice (OEV), which was first developed in Iraq as a psychological warfare weapon against the online presence of al-Qaida supporters and others ranged against coalition forces. Since then, OEV is reported to have expanded into a $200m programme and is thought to have been used against jihadists across Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East."
Petra Sorge, Cicero Weltbühne 15 Maj 2014: "Indeed, Edward Snowden would not have been able to escape his Russian asylum in order to go to Stockholm. However, his invitation would have been a symbol. With a little imagination the hosts could have included him anyway. The German NSA parliamentary committee is currently discussing a video interrogation. Snowden has already answered questions posed by the European Council via a live broadcast; that was also the way he chose to spoke to participants of a tech festival in Texas. Sweden could also have allowed Snowden’s confidantes to speak for him. That’s what other hosts of large computer and internet conferences have recently done. The Net Mundial in São Paulo, Brazil, chose a live broadcast with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, hacker Jacop Appelbaum was there personally. The Chaos Communication Congress had Glenn Greenwald speaking via video. Appelbaum and Harrison spoke there too, as well as at Berlin’s re:publica."
By Jeremy Hsu, Posted 14 Mar 2014 "We should be more concerned about bullets than bytes at this time," Bumgarner says" "Hacker groups will do what they will outside of government control. But the Georgia incident and the more recent Ukrainian incident suggest that Russia has shown great restraint in its strategic use of cyber attacks, Bumgarner says."
Cognitive Design 2005 @mprove Technological Dreams & Nightmares – An Outlook To The (Near) Future Hermann Maurer, Professor at the Technical University of Graz, Director IICM & Chairman Hyperwave Inc. Memory, Plato etc ca 23 min into the video "what we really have to think about is not how we learn but whnhat we should learn" "we are on very shake grounds
Sweden will soon hold the Stockholm Internet Forum to discuss global development and global surveillance. The forum will open on 26 May and will be held in the famed Stadshuset, site of the annual Nobel banquet. The motto of the conference will be 'Internet Freedom for Global Development'.
Netnod manages i.root-servers.net, one of the 13 logical Internet DNS root name servers. i.root-servers.net was the first DNS root server to be established outside the USA. (Today there are also DNS root servers operating from Amsterdam and Tokyo.) It has changed configurations a number of times during the years from its humble beginnings as a Sun 3/60 with 4MB RAM.