Iran is planning on on joining the list of nations abandoning the global internet for their own national intranet, and officials say that the transition may be completed by 2013.
via Business Insider.
“The Iranian government, which presides over one of the most educated and connected populations in the Middle East, is building an Internet all its own. Observers expect it will be fully operational as soon as next year. Iran’s so-called national or halal Internet will be a kind of anti-Internet—a self-contained loop within Iran’s borders featuring only regime-approved Iranian sites, and cut off from the World Wide Web.”
Read more: Iran’s network in a bottle – Ideas – The Boston Globe.
Yesterday, the Netherlands became the first country in Europe to adopt laws that protect net neutrality. The rest of Europe, and indeed most the world, needs to follow suit before we sleepwalk into letting corporations use their deep pockets to gain an unfair advantage online.
via The Dutch Adopt Net Neutrality Laws, Lets All Follow Suit.
The net changes the world’s power structures in a much more fundamental way than changing the way a few groups of entrepreneurs are able to make money. The net is the greatest equalizer that humankind has ever invented. It is either the greatest invention since the printing press, or the greatest invention since written language. The battles we see are not a result of loss of money; they are caused by a loss of the power of narratives.
via TorrentFreak.
Millions of Internet users in Iran will be permanently denied access to the World Wide Web and cut off from popular social networking sites and email services, as the government has announced its plans to establish a national Intranet within five months.
Mobile telecom companies regularly block voice over IP VoIP and prevent services such as Skype from functioning on their networks, the group that represents EU telecom regulators BEREC says in the preliminary findings of a much-awaited report on internet neutrality.
Source: EurActiv.
Read the Press Release here.
“Even with the limitations on available data, this preliminary assessment suggests that cyberwarfare has become an unavoidable element in any discussion of international security. Cyber capabilities are attractive as a cost-effective asymmetric weapon. Informational advantage and networks attack play a large role in modern strategy. Defending computer networks is a concern for many states. Most major military powers have developed cyberwarfare capabilities and doctrine and more states will acquire these capabilities in the future. Airplanes were once possessed by only a few states and had limited military value, but then grew into a key component of military power possessed by most states. Military cyber capabilities appear to be on the same path. This trend raises questions regarding norms for cyberwarfare, the obligations of states regarding the application of offensive cyber capabilities, and the applicability of existing laws of war and norms on use of force in cyberspace.”
On Feb. 27, a diplomatic process will begin in Geneva that could result in a new treaty giving the United Nations unprecedented powers over the Internet. Dozens of countries, including Russia and China, are pushing hard to reach this goal by years end. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last June, his goal and that of his allies is to establish “international control over the Internet” through the International Telecommunication Union ITU, a treaty-based organization under U.N. auspices.If successful, these new regulatory proposals would upend the Internets flourishing regime, which has been in place since 1988. That year, delegates from 114 countries gathered in Australia to agree to a treaty that set the stage for dramatic liberalization of international telecommunications. This insulated the Internet from economic and technical regulation and quickly became the greatest deregulatory success story of all time.
via WSJ.com.
Details of every phone call and text message, email traffic and websites visited online are to be stored in a series of vast databases under new Government anti-terror plans.
Read More: Telegraph.
Thoroughly researched by one of the experts in the field, the book straddles the line between an academic and general audience. MacKinnon entreats internet users to see themselves as active citizens – not consumers or eyeballs. She harks back to Huxleys Brave New World: “Our desire for security, entertainment and material comfort is manipulated to the point that we all voluntarily and eagerly submit to subjugation.” She ends with a rallying cry: “We have a responsibility to hold the abusers of digital power to account, along with their facilitators and collaborators. If we do not, when we wake up one morning to discover that our freedoms have eroded beyond recognition, we will have only ourselves to blame.”
Read more: The Observer.
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