China Took Down a Chunk of the Web Ahead of Wuzhen Major Internet Conference

There are a number of ways China cuts off access to websites it deems inappropriate for its populace. It can co-opt telecoms companies as part of its Great Firewall to simply blacklist sites one by one. But it can also shut off reams of websites in one fell swoop by blocking companies that run content …

Brazil leads creation of Internet governance initiative

Summary: The country’s steering committee teams up with ICANN and WEF to create “essential mechanism” that will influence the way the global Internet is run Six months after hosting governance conference NETMundial, Brazil is leading the creation of a permanent platform to discuss improvements in the way the Internet is managed.The country’s Internet steering committee …

EU parliament votes to invite Snowden to testify over NSA Surveilance

The European Parliament has voted to formally invite former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden to provide official court testimony on NSA spying, in the face of overwhelming concern from conservative MEPs. European conservatives seemed reluctant to pay full attention to the possibility of the hearing on Wednesday. The European People’s Party (EPP), which is …

Is the Risk Real With the New gTLD Program?

It’s late in the new gTLD day and the program looks to be inching ever closer to the finish line. Yet last minute hiccups seem to be a recurring theme for this ambitious project to expand the Internet namespace far beyond the 300 odd active TLDs in existence today (counting generics and country codes). A …

Is Data Quality Overrated?

The inherent limitations of this approach spurred the author of the article, Patrick Meier, and his team to enhance Ushahidi with a set of Twitter classifiers — algorithms that could automatically identify Tweets that were relevant and informative to the crisis at hand. For example, classifiers automatically categorize eyewitness reports, infrastructure-damage assessments, casualties, humanitarian needs, …