censorship

#SharetheNet: Support Cuban Net Freedom, Community Networks on #GivingTuesday

Posted on by David Solomonoff
 #GivingTuesday

The Internet Society New York Chapter (ISOC-NY) is now supporting other organizations that share our vision of open technology for social good.

Today, Tuesday, December 1, ISOC-NY sponsors our first crowdfunding campaign as part of #GivingTuesday, a global campaign for charitable giving as an alternative to Black Friday.

#SharetheNet will fund Apretaste, an initiative that brings Internet access to Cuba, and NYC Mesh, a wireless community network in NYC.

This is a critical point in the evolution of the Internet:Will the Net remain open and accessible to all – or locked down by repressive governments and corporate monopolies?

The ISOC-NY answer to that question is:

Empower Internet users to build their own Net and share it!

We’re asking your help to raise $152,000 in 24 hours to to make this happen.

Every dollar you give helps the open Net.

For Apretaste:

  • $6 provides one Cuban Internet user access that bypasses government censors
  • $120 connects 20 Cubans to the Net
  • $480 funds 80 Cubans to the Net as well as the development of an online encyclopedia, maps, store and weather service

Help Apretaste now

For NYC Mesh:

  • $65 buys a router with open source software for an NYC resident so they can cut the cord to monopoly ISP’s
  • $480 buys an antenna and sector radio to improve WiFi reception in lower Manhattan and the North and South side of Brooklyn
  • $2400 creates a supernode that connects one neighborhood to the next

Help NYC Mesh now

This is also a critical point for ISOC-NY – we’re asking for your help so our Chapter can take the lead in building an Internet that is truly for everyone.

There are many ways to get involved in #GivingTuesday. I encourage you to join the movement and visit www.givingtuesday.org to learn more about how you can make a difference.

Thanks!
David Solomonoff, President ISOC-NY

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What infrastructure is needed for positively disruptive technology?

Posted on by David Solomonoff

Cosponsored by Disruptive Technologists

and the New York Chapter of the Federal Communications Bar Association

Infrastructure in this sense could be physical (fiber in the ground) – or open source software, legal/policy, etc. – more broadly any type of support structure.

This will be the beginning of ongoing initiatives to address the issues raised and follow with hackathons afterwards. A major component will be the development of standards and protocols for new Net-connected technologies with consideration of the social and ethical issues as machines become intelligent. We’ll also explore innovative funding methods for these projects using digital currencies.

David Solomonoff, President, Internet Society of New York

November 11, 2014

Brooklyn Law School

Fell Hall, 205 State Street, Brooklyn, New York

10:00 am to 8:00 pm

Admission: $20.00

Students with valid ID admitted free of charge

RSVP here

Zephyr Teachout, New York gubernatorial candidate, organizer, educator, and scholar

Teachout is a constitutional and property law professor at Fordham Law School. She is a deeply experienced leader in the fights for economic and political equality and against concentration of wealth and control in the hands of the few. She is one of the leading legal experts on corruption.

Timothy Karr, Senior Director of Strategy, Free Press

Timothy builds on Free Press’ grassroots and policy work to promote universal access to open networks and protect free speech everywhere. Before joining Free Press, Tim served as executive director of MediaChannel.org and as vice president of Globalvision New Media. He has also worked extensively as an editor, reporter and photojournalist for the Associated Press, Time, Inc., the New York Times and Australia Consolidated Press. Tim critiques, analyzes and reports on media and media policy for the Huffington Post.

Serene Han, Ideas Engineer, Google

Technological initiatives to help people confront threats in the face of conflict, instability, and repression

Dave Burstein, publisher, DSL Prime:

Wireless Engineers predict 50x improvement in capacity; How do we make it so?

Spectrum should be WiFi and less licensed. WiFi wiil do more and more, becoming increasingly crowded. Mobile carriers, using existing spectrum, can increase their capacity using MIMO and more with little or no increase in capex. Logical policy: All newly available spectrum go to WiFi/unlicensed.

Bob Frankston, Ambient Connectivity – merging wired and wireless telecom infrastructures

Co-creator with Dan Bricklin of the VisiCalc spreadsheet program and the co-founder of Software Arts, the company that developed it. In recent years, Frankston has been an outspoken advocate for reducing the role of telecommunications companies in the evolution of the internet, particularly with respect to broadband and mobile communications. (remote)

Sander Rabin:  Neurosecurity, National Security and Cognitive Liberty

Sander Rabin, a physician-attorney, is the executive director of The Center for Transhuman Jurisprudence, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is education in human enhancement and the development of policies and model rules of law for human enhancement that protect our rights to our minds, bodies and genomes, while minimizing human enhancement’s potential for divisiveness and harm.

Nate Heasley, Executive Director, Goodnik

Goodnik has developed a labor-backed digital currency for information workers to share resources with non-profits and for-profit companies with a social mission.

Nate has been working as a manager of and consultant to  non-profit and technology related companies for 20 years. Nate also founded GrassrootsCamp, an organization that provides free training seminars to non-profit organizations and social entrepreneurs. It is from that experience that Goodnik started as a way to broaden the impact of those events and ideas from that community. Nate holds a BA from St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD and a J.D. from Fordham University School of Law where he was a Crowley Fellow in International Human Rights and a Stein Scholar for Public Interest Law and Ethics.

Jim Dutcher, CIO, State University of New York, Cobleskill

How broadband is transforming rural America and what is needed now

Panel: Bitcoin and related cryptocurrency-related technologies

• Margaux Avedison, Moderator. Co-founder of EvotionMedia, a “Crypto-Media” production and finance entity. She is on the advisory board of the Bitcoin Shop and organized the first Bitcoin Education Day on Capitol Hill as an Advisor for the Chamber of Digital Commerce.She also consults for banks, individuals, large corporations and venture capitalists on Bitcoin and Blockchain 2.0 technology.  She is an early entrepreneur in the digital currency space and relaunched the first American Bitcoin Exchange, Tradehill, in 2012.

• Erik Anderson, Chairman, WC3 web payments group. Lead/Senior Software Engineer for much of Bloomberg’s Charting, Technical Analysis, Trading Strategies, Data Science, Interactive Data Visualization, Backtesting and Technical Analysis Screening, Core Graphics Infrastructure, math/Quants Developer, Financial Services

• Attorney Jeffrey Alberts, Partner in Pryor Cashman’s Litigation Group. Head of the firm’s White Collar Defense and Investigations Practice. Jeffrey’s practice focuses on government investigations and prosecutions and related regulatory proceedings, asset forfeiture and money laundering litigation, victims’ rights representation, and complex civil litigation. Jeffrey is an experienced trial lawyer who has served as lead counsel in numerous trials, including civil and criminal federal jury trials, state jury trials, and state and federal bench trials. Jeffrey has represented clients in disputes involving virtual currency. He also has been quoted by the media concerning criminal prosecutions of virtual currency service providers and government seizures of bitcoins. Immediately prior to joining the firm in 2013, Jeffrey spent six years as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, where he investigated and prosecuted a wide variety of white collar criminal offenses, including money laundering, securities fraud, bank fraud, mail and wire fraud, and bankruptcy fraud.

• Adam Krellenstein, Co-founder Counterparty. Lead developer of counterpartyd; chief architect of the Counterparty Protocol. Counterparty is a free and open platform that puts powerful financial tools in the hands of everyone with an Internet connection. By harnessing the power of the Bitcoin network, Counterparty creates a robust and secure marketplace directly on the Bitcoin blockchain, extending Bitcoin’s functionality from a peer-to-peer payment network into a full fledged peer-to-peer financial platform.

  • Patrick Deegan CTO, ID3 Chief Architect. ID3 is developing a new social ecosystem of trusted, self-healing digital institutions. This endeavor seeks to address the severe structural limitations of existing institutions by empowering individuals to assert greater control over their data, online identities and authentication.

Panel: Hear Me, Touch Me, See Me, Feel Me: Moving Natural User Interface (NUI) to the Mainstream

This panel discussion will explore the world of NUI and what it will take to move today’s emerging NUI technologies (voice recognition, Kinect, haptics, facial recognition, etc.) into widespread adoption and make them accessible to all.

  • Deb Benkler, Moderator. Co-founder of NUI Central – NY, the largest NUI group on earth and is known as NYC’s leading NUI evangelist. She is a practitioner of lean and logical UX focusing on best practices in the broader context of CX (customer experience). In 2012, she won a User Experience Award for her work on the Maryland Transit Administration Interactive Maintenance Kiosk, which incorporated facial recognition.
  • Ken Lonyai Co-founder of NUI Central and is known as the other NYC leading NUI evangelist. He’s a 15+ year veteran of user centered interactive project development including some of the industry’s most unique experiential systems. His skills span the on-line world and nearly every realm of human/computer interface used by brands and retailers – mobile, interactive kiosks, experiential displays, etc. He is a User Experience Award winner.
  • David Melville is a Research Staff Member at IBM. He has worked in the area of semi-conductor fabrication and nano-technology, exploring meta-materials and techniques for optimizing illumination and patterning masks for photo-lithography processors before making a jump to developing visualization and interactivity solutions for smart-grid projects. Most recently, he has been exploring what it means to interact with learning systems and working to establish a new era of computing experience.
  • Sean Montgomery is head of hardware at Ringly, the first fashion ring to manage your mobile device. He’s an engineer, professor, and new-media artist in New York City. While finishing his Ph.D. in neuroscience, Sean began to consider the fact that from the perspective of a neuron inside the human brain, both a cold winter day and the embrace of a loved one feels like a sequence of electrical impulses. Sean co-founded SENSORSTAR Labs, an agile R&D consulting group in New York City.
  • Tanya Kraljic is a Principal Designer for Nuance’s mobility division. Her work focuses on the strategy and design of speech experiences in mobile, wearable, in-home, and other emerging technologies. Prior to joining Nuance in 2010, Tanya earned a PhD in cognitive psychology, with an emphasis on adaptation in interactive spoken dialog.

#InternetSociety Calls for Restoration of Full Internet Access in #Turkey #censorship #netfreedom

Posted on by joly

Internet Society President and CEO Kathy Brown issued the following statement on March 31 2014.:

We are deeply concerned with recent reports that the Turkish government is mandating curtailed access to key social media sites for millions of users across Turkey. Recent actions to implement the Turkish government’s requirement include the redirection of network routes so that Turkish citizens are not getting the correct information from the Domain Name System (DNS). They are instead being redirected to other web sites controlled by Turkish service providers. In addition to undermining core technical functions of the Internet’s architecture, such actions also threaten users’ fundamental human right to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas across frontiers.

Interfering with a country’s routing of Internet traffic not only harms citizens’ ability to communicate and innovate as part of the global Internet platform; it can also lead to a fragmentation of the network at the regional and global levels. Ultimately, the Turkish people and nation are the ones that will suffer, as their voices will be lost across the net.

The Internet Society believes that the Internet is a global medium that fuels economic and social development, empowers users with limitless access to knowledge, and supports aspirations for freedom. Bob Hinden, Chair of the Internet Society Board of Trustees, added, “We strongly urge the Turkish Government to stop requiring the blocking of access to social media sites and to allow full Internet access to all Turkish citizens immediately. We believe that the opportunity to participate in the global information society should never be taken away from individuals.”The Internet Society hopes that nations around the world will come to understand that blocking citizens’ access to the tools of online communication only serves to fuel discord and is not the way to address the underlying concerns of their citizens. Such measures can only undermine citizens’ trust in their government’s ability to provide an enabling Internet environment for economic and social progress.

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Internet Society Statement on Syrian Internet Shutdown

Posted on by joly

Internet SocietyOn behalf of Lynn St. Amour, President and CEO, and the Internet Society Board of Trustees:

Emerging reports from various organizations and individuals indicate that international Internet connectivity was shut off in Syria today. The Internet is an open, global medium for communication, idea exchange, empowerment, and innovation. Access to the global Internet is a crucial enabler of human rights.

As with previous actions to block Internet traffic in Egypt and Libya, the effect of cutting off Internet traffic – ceasing the flow of information in and out of the country – is a serious action. It harms not only the citizens of Syria, but also Syria’s economy and society at large. The Internet Society stands with other organizations around the world in calling for Internet access to be restored with all due speed and cooperation so that vital services can continue to function and citizens won’t be further impacted.

First and foremost, the Internet Society joins with the rest of the world in its utmost concern about the safety and security of the Syrian people. Previous cases where such actions were deliberately taken have proven not only to be harmful, but to be ineffective. The Internet Society hopes that the volatile situation in Syria will come to a peaceful solution and that the citizens of Syria will soon be able to join the rest of the world in having their voices heard online.

http://www.internetsociety.org/news/internet-society-syria%E2%80%99s-internet-shutdown
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Internet Society statement on DNS Filtering in the US

Posted on by joly

The Internet Society has noted with concern a number of U.S. legislative proposals that would mandate DNS blocking and filtering by ISPs in order to protect the interests of copyright holders. We agree with proponents of the Protect-IP Act (PIPA) and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that combating illegal online activities is a very important public policy objective. However, policies that are enacted to achieve this goal must not undermine the viability of the Internet as a globally reachable platform. After close examination and consultation with the Internet community, we do not believe that the current U.S. legislative proposals are consistent with these basic principles.

In particular, we are concerned with provisions in both laws regarding DNS filtering. DNS filtering is often proposed as a way to block illegal content consumption by end users. Yet policies to mandate DNS filtering have not proven to be effective – these approaches interfere with cross-border data flows and services undermining innovation and social development across the globe. In addition, DNS blocking raises significant concerns with respect to human rights and freedom of expression and may curtail fundamental international principles of rule of law and due process.

The United States has an important leadership role when it comes to online Internet freedoms and should show the way when it comes to balancing local responsibilities and global impact, especially with respect to Internet policy.

In short, the negative impact of DNS filtering far outweighs any short-term, narrow, legal, and commercial benefits. The Internet Society believes that sustained, global collaboration amongst all parties is needed to find ways that protect the global architecture of the Internet while combating illegal online activities. We must all work to support the principles of innovation and freedom of expression upon which the Internet was founded.

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Internet Society statement on Egypt

Posted on by joly

The Internet Society has issued a statement on the current situation in Egypt.

“We are following the current events in Egypt with concern as it appears that all incoming and outgoing Internet traffic has been disrupted. The Internet Society believes that the Internet is a global medium that fundamentally supports opportunity, empowerment, knowledge, growth, and freedom and that these values should never be taken away from individuals.

The Internet Society considers this recent action by the Egyptian government to block Internet traffic to be an inappropriate response to a political crisis. It is a very serious decision for a government to block all Internet access in its country, and a serious intrusion into its citizens’ basic rights to communicate. If the blockage continues, it will have a very detrimental impact on Egypt’s economy and society. Ultimately, the Egyptian people and nation are the ones that will suffer, while the rest of the world will be worse off with the loss of Egyptian voices on the net.

However we are most concerned about the safety and security of the Egyptian people. Alongside the rest of the world, we share the hope for a positive and lasting solution to the problems that have risen to the surface there.

In the longer term, we are sure that the world will learn a lesson from this very unfortunate example, and come to understand that cutting off a nation’s access to the Internet only serves to fuel dissent and does not address the underlying causes of dissatisfaction.”
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Twitter and Iran – Forest Hills Library 10-10-09

Posted on by joly

queens_libraryIn a post OneWebDay event: Ali Emami will speak on the topic ‘Twitter and the Iranian Election Controversy’ at the Forest Hills Public Library in Queens on Sat Oct 10 at 2pm.

***Video is below***

What: ‘Twitter and the Iranian Election Controversy’
When: Sat Oct 10 2009 2pm
Where: Queens Forest Hill Public Library – 108-19 71 Avenue
Forest Hills, NY 1137 (map

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Berkman introduces Herdict Web browser add-in

Posted on by joly

herdict The Berkman Center at Harvard has announced an new extension to their Herdict “verdicts of the herd” project.. Herdict Web aggregates reports of inaccessible sites, allowing users to compare data to see if inacessibility is a shared problem. By crowd-sourcing data from around the world, Herdict can then document accessibility for any web site.


A nifty explanatory video has been produced:


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In Brief

Posted on by David Solomonoff
  • CircleID reports on Vint Cerf’s views regarding Government’s Role in Internet Broadband Access: “Perhaps the Internet should be treated more like the road system. You don’t have multiple roads going to your house for example. Instead, it is a common resource.”
  • ars technica discusses how bandwidth caps could lead to ISPs benefiting from piracy. But they predict that the profits to be made from charging high bandwidth users a premium will also create an incentive for ISP’s to filter content suspected of copyright infringement. They also cover the recent survey results by the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Internet and American Life project suggesting that the US broadband market is edging towards saturation. The study suggests that there are still significant untapped
    markets for broadband – but they would require significant investments in
    infrastructure or lowered prices. 14% of those surveyed said they simply couldn’t get broadband in their area. By contrast, British Telecommunications (BT) claims more than 99% of British households have access to broadband, although speeds remain an issue for those in rural areas.
  • Dan Brickley talks about how the recent court decision requiring Google to turn over YouTube user logs in the Viacomm infringement suit has broader privacy implications. With the Social Graph API, a new Google service, personal information from YouTube accounts that
    was already public is increasingly accessible to automated processing.

FCC requests comments on plan for free, censored broadband

Posted on by David Solomonoff

We previously reported that the FCC plans to provide universal wireless broadband with content filtering. In a press release on Friday, June 20th they request comments on the plan to license access to the 2.1GHz Advanced Wireless Spectrum (AWS). The winning bidder must use 25% of the spectrum for free two-way broadband Internet service at a minimum rate of 768kps downstream. They must be able to provide the free service to 50% of the U.S in four years and at least 95% by the end of the 10-year license term. Continue reading →