Announcements
Fighting for Which Future? When Google Met Wikileaks
The power struggles in the Internet are waged between conflicting sides, but framing them in terms of good against evil, anarchist versus conformist, freedom fighter against the power hungry is simplistic and ignores the complexity of these debates.
The Era of Pretended Transparency
“Transparency and trust are core values at Facebook ” the report says. But now after Snowden-Gate we know that certain governments (say the US) have direct access to data from Facebook and other big companies.
Shouldn’t Facebook disclose information about this as well? How much data and kind of data is extracted on a daily basis by governments (say the US)? Of course Facebook is not the issue. The same request can be made to Google, Yahoo, Apple or Microsoft. Publishing a report and pretending it is transparency, is a good way to mask the relevant information that should be accessible to users.
It is All about Networks: Attribute to the life of Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini
This is an attribute to the life of a courageous scientist-woman, Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, who died at the age of 103 at her home in Rome. Her eagerness to study and research defeated any artificial boundaries to learning: Fighting against masculine domination in science; and fighting against the blind racist anti-Semite rules issued by Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime. They didn’t let her do research in a university because she was Jewish, so she set up a small laboratory in her home. Among other things, she discovered critical chemical tools that the body uses to direct cell growth and build nerve networks.
Petition to the High Court of Justice against the Biometric Database
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) filed a petition to the High Court of Justice today (February 20), seeking to annul a law that would establish a governmental biometric database and to cancel of the database’s two-year pilot program. The petition was filed by ACRI attorney Avner Pinchuk along with The Movement for Digital […]
Pic of the Day: George Orwell and Modern Information Technology
Now what would George Orwell say about this picture? The irony of surveillance… (BTW, Placa de George Orwell is located in Barcelona. He went to Barcelona in 1936, and hoped to write articles about the Spanish Civil War. )
Call for Papers – Social and Digital Inclusions in Networks
This mini-track calls for papers that study social and digital inclusion in networks at different levels. In the forthcoming conference, we would like to emphasize four areas: (i) connections between off-line divides and on-line divides; (ii) inequalities within and among communities; (iii) information and communication technologies for development; and (iv) inequalities between users with respect to social and digital divides. Possible levels at which to examine such areas include international, national, local, sector, communal, and individual. Both empirical and theoretical papers are invited. Building on the success of this mini-track from the past nine HICSS conferences, we invite submissions to the 2011 mini-track on social networking and communities.