The weekly Berkman Buzz, as compiled by Rebekah Heacock

• Berkman community members suggest questions for Secretary Clinton in advance of her “Internet freedom” speech: link

• Ethan Zuckerman posts his suggestion for Secretary Clinton’s entire speech: link

• Doc Searls is ready for the live web: link

• Dan Gillmor reviews Apple’s new subscription model: link

• Weekly Global Voices: “Special Coverage: Bahrain Protests 2011”: link

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Especially when a prepared talk is being given in the midst of a difficult controversy, most of what matters is in what is not said. For that reason, I think Secretary Clinton’s speech on Net Freedom yesterday was actually quite encouraging about the State Department’s attitude toward Wikileaks. In this I seem to differ with many of my friends and colleagues. (See, for example, this thread from the Berkman mailing list. See also Mathew Ingram. Ethan Zuckerman posts his overall reaction, plus a brilliant draft speech he’d suggested Clinton deliver. Yochai Benkler has posted a draft of a paper [pdf] that — with Yochai’s accustomed astounding command of facts, law, argument, and moral insight — assails the claimed grounds for prosecuting Wikileaks) [Disclosure: I am a Franklin Fellow at the State Dept., attached to the group that works on the internal use of social media. This is a non-paying fellowship, and I feel no obligation to make nice, although I’m human.]

Secretary Clinton spent a substantial portion of her talk discussing Wikileaks.

The Internet’s strong culture of transparency derives from its power to make information of all kinds available instantly. But in addition to being a public space, the Internet is also a channel for private conversations. For that to continue, there must be protection for confidential communication online.

Think of all the ways in which people and organizations rely on confidential communication to do their jobs. Businesses hold confidential conversations when they’re developing new products, to stay ahead of their competitors. Journalists keep the details of some sources confidential, to protect them from retribution.

And governments also rely on confidential communication—online as well as offline. The existence of connection technologies may make it harder to maintain confidentiality, but it does not change the need for it.

Government confidentiality has been a topic of debate during the past few months because of Wikileaks. It’s been a false debate in many ways. Fundamentally, the Wikileaks incident began with an act of theft. Government documents were stolen, just the same as if they had been smuggled out in a briefcase.

Some have suggested that this act was justified, because governments have a responsibility to conduct all of their work out in the open, in the full view of their citizens.

I disagree. The United States could neither provide for our citizens’ security nor promote the cause of human rights and democracy around the world if we had to make public every step of our most sensitive operations.

Confidential communication gives our government the opportunity to do work that could not be done otherwise. Consider our work with former Soviet states to secure loose nuclear material. By keeping the details confidential, we make it less likely that terrorists will find the nuclear material and steal it.

Or consider the content of the documents that Wikileaks made public. Without commenting on the authenticity of any particular documents, we can observe that many of the cables released by Wikileaks relate to human rights work carried out around the world. Our diplomats closely collaborate with activists, journalists, and citizens to challenge the misdeeds of oppressive governments. It’s dangerous work. By publishing the diplomatic cables, Wikileaks exposed people to even greater risk.

For operations like these, confidentiality is essential, especially in the Internet age, when dangerous information can be sent around the world with the click of a keystroke.

Of course, governments also have a duty to be transparent. We govern with the consent of the people, and that consent must be informed to be meaningful. So we must be judicious about when we close off our work to the public and review our standards frequently to make sure they are rigorous. In the United States, we have laws to ensure that the government makes its work open to the people. The Obama Administration has also launched unprecedented initiatives to put government data online, encourage citizen participation, and generally increase the openness of government.

The U.S. government’s ability to protect America — to secure the liberties of our people — and to support the rights and freedoms of others around the world depends on maintaining a balance between what’s public and what should remain out of the public domain. The scale will always be tipped in favor of openness. But tipping the scale over completely serves no one’s interests—and the public’s least of all.

Let me be clear. I said that we would have denounced Wikileaks if it had been executed by smuggling papers in a briefcase. The fact that Wikileaks used the Internet is not the reason we criticized it. Wikileaks does not challenge our commitment to Internet freedom.

One final word on this matter. There were reports in the days following the leak that the U.S. government intervened to coerce private companies to deny service to Wikileaks. This is not the case. Some politicians and pundits publicly called for companies to dissociate from Wikileaks, while others criticized them for doing so. Public officials are part of our country’s public debates, but there is a line between expressing views and coercing conduct. But any business decisions that private companies may have taken to enforce their own policies regarding Wikileaks was not at the direction or the suggestion of the Obama Administration.

Now, one way to read this is to imagine what you wish Clinton had said, or what you would have said if given the opportunity. That certainly has its uses. But it’s essentially a daydream, for it acts as if high-visibility political speeches occur outside of political consequences and negotiations. (Ethan’s imagining, noted above, was within a pragmatic context, attempting to provide a vision for the talk.) If instead we take this speech as the result of a political struggle, then we have to hear not just the daydream, but the nightmare: Forces within the government must have been urging Clinton to take a hard line against Wikileaks and to use Wikileaks as a justification for constraining the Internet. When you consider all that Clinton does not say about Wikileaks, this speech is actually, in my view, quite encouraging. Indeed, in saying that “It’s been a false debate in many ways,” she does not narrow the criticism to the media’s participation; we are left to assume that she is also scolding elements of the government.

You say “Pshaw!” to the idea that this is a pretty enlightened speech? I understand that reaction, since this address is coming from a government that has reacted overall quite poorly to the Wikileaks leaks. (See especially Yochai Benkler’s comments in the Berkman thread and his comprehensive article.)( But that’s exactly why we ought to view the speech as a sign of hope that at least some elements of the government are catching on to what the Net is about, what it’s for, and what it can and cannot do. (“What the Net can and cannot do” is, from my point of view, pretty much the theme of the entire speech, which by itself is encouraging.)

Here’s an example of what I mean by reading the speech in light of what it does not say. Secretary Clinton does say that the Wikileaks incident “began with an act of theft.” But, she is careful not to say that Wikileaks was the thief. Instead, she refers to Wikileaks as making the documents public, as releasing them, and as publishing them. You can imagine the pressure on her to characterize Wikileaks as the source of the documents — as the thief — rather than as the recipient and publisher of them. (She does slip in an ambiguous phrase: “we would have denounced Wikileaks if it had been executed by smuggling papers in a briefcase.”)

Overall, I read the Wikileaks section of the speech as a refusal to blame the Internet, and as a refusal to issue threats against Wikileaks (and against the next Wikileaks-like site). True, Secretary Clinton “condemns” the leaks, but given the range of options for a Secretary of State, what else would you expect? That she would condone the indiscriminate leaking of confidential information? It’s confidential. Of course she’s going to condemn leaks, and in no uncertain terms.

The question is what follows from that condemnation. What followed were not threats against Wikileaks, not a clamping down on State Department security to ensure that “this never happens again,”not a retreat from Clinton’s emphasis on building a “need to share culture” within State, and not support for new policies that would put “reasonable” controls on the Internet to “ensure” that such “illegal acts” never recur, for “a free Internet does not mean a lawless Internet.” (All items in quotes are phrases I’ve made up but that I can imagine some in the government insisting be inserted.) The only statement about policies to address such leaks says that the Obama Administration did not “coerce” private companies to act to shut down (or shut off) Wikileaks; the clear implication is that the government should not engage in such coercion.

Now, we can imagine our own preferred words coming out of Secretary Clinton’s mouth, and we certainly can and should compare her statements with the actual behavior of State and the government overall. There was room for her to have gone further; I would have liked it better if she had, as per Yochai’s suggestion, acknowledged that State initially over-reacted in some chilling ways. But, in the context of the political debate, I think Secretary Clinton’s remarks on Wikileaks are encouraging, and her explicit rejection of limiting Internet freedom because sometimes leaks happen is hopeful.

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The weekly Berkman Buzz, as compiled by Rebekah Heacock:

• Ethan Zuckerman [twitter:ethanz] explores media coverage (and the lack thereof) of the protests in Tunisia, Egypt, and Gabon link

• The Citizen Media Law Project and the Cyberlaw Clinic First Circuit support the right to make cellphone recordings of police link

• Dan Gillmor [twitter:dangillmor] argues that the Huffington Post should pay its bloggers link

• Joseph Reagle analyzes Wikipedia’s gender gap across countries link

• Weekly Global Voices: “Ghana: Want a new constitution? Text 1992”:
  link

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Brian Kernighan is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk called “Millions, Billions, Zillions: Why (In)numeracy matters.” Brian teaches at Princeton, but is at the Berkman Center this year, writing a book based on his undergrad course on what we need to know about computers. (Yes, Brian is that Brian K.) Brian teaches a course at Princeton on quantitative reasoning. He’s going to give us the “numeric self defense” portion of the course. [He assures us that none of us in this room need it, but speaking for myself I’m pretty sure he’s wrong.]

He gives as an example of quantitative reasoning a question about how long our oil reserves of 660 billion barrels (according to Newsweek) will last, based on how many vehicles there are and how big a barrel of oil is. He proposes a rough estimate. Figure there’s one car per person in the US: about 300M vehicles. And figure a barrel is in the range of a 55 gal drum. Call it 50 gals. He simplifies the numbers and does the math, and figures that we use 3 billion barrels/year. The Reserve contains 660 billion barrels, which means it will last over 200 years. Even if the numbers are off by a factor of 2 or 3, there seems to be enough to tell OPEC to take a hike. But, it turns out that Newsweek later corrected itself: The Reserve holds 660 million barrels, not billions. Oops. He then presents a scary list of major media being wrong about millions vs. billions vs. trillions. The problem is that those words signify to most people just an order of vastness, not actual quantities.

Cutting numbers down to size. The annual US budget deficit is $1.3B, according to the NYT, which comes down to $4/person. In fact, it’s $1.3 trillion, or $4,000/person. It gets worse when you’re dealing with computer terms: “a petaflop is a thousand trillion instruciios per second, not a million trillion” (NYT, 3/25/09) He gives another example of the WSJ getting a zettabyte calculation wrong by a couple of orders of magnitude. (Zettabye = 1o^21.) Had they been able to do some rough calculations, they would have seen that their comparison to the number of books in the Library of Congress would have result in there being 10,000 books in that collection.

Brian suggests numeric triage: “Is the number likely to be much too high, much too low, or plausible.” E.g., Dear Abby said that Americans receive almost 2 million tons of junk mail daily.” 2B tons = 4B pounds * 300 millions Americans = 13lbs/person/day. “Each person eats about 60 tons of food in a lifetime.” Yup: a ton a year is 5lbs/day. It’s plausible. Or, from another newspaper: You can save $88/day by turning off your computer when you’re not using it. Or, the London Times reported on a Nasa jet that travels 850 miles in 10 seconds. Newark Star Ledger: “The Passaic River was traveling about 200 miles per hour, about five times faster than average.” (They probably meant “per day.”)

Brian suggests having some benchmarks you can use for quick assessments. E.g., 6.8b people in Chinathe world, 300M in USA. A gallon of water weights about 8lbs. MP3 music is about 1 MB/minute. Light goes about a foot in a nanosecond; sound travels about 1000 feet in a second. There are 2000 working hours in a year.

It’s good to learn to estimate, Brian says. E.g., there’s a supposed Google interview question: How many golf balls can fit in a school bus? Brian asks his students: How many petabytes could you fit in this room. He shows a hard drive from a laptop. Figure out how many in a cubic foot, and how many cubic feet in a room.

“Every year, 1,000 Americans turn 50 years old,” says Gambling Magazine. How do you triage on it? Little’s Law relates how many items enter or leave a process and how long it will take to process them. [Not sure I got that.] There are 300M Americans. Each lives to 75. (Simplifying, of course). The arrival rate is: 4M born each year, and 4M die each year. That means 4M reach any given milestone each year, which means about 10,000 reach any milestone every day. So, 350,000 Americans turn 50 each month, as Forbes noted, and 4M students graduate from HS each year, as the NYT says. This sort of cross-article consistency is a very good sign.

Brian points to some errors to watch out for.

Errors of dimensionality: Young male bears roam 60-100 sq miles, while the females stay close to the cave, foraging within a 10-mile radius (says the Newark Star Ledger)…but that radius results in 314 sq miles.

Oddly precise numbers: “When a yacht is over 328 feet, it’s so big that you lose the intimacy” (The Yacht Report) This came from a conversion of 100m.

Brian strongly recommends Darrell Huff’s How to Lie with Statistics. Huff talks about (for example) graphs that clip the extent of graphs to magnify the differences. And one-dimensional graphs: E.g., a Starbucks growth chart that increases the width of the vertical bars, magnifying the growth.

Brian gives us one that Huff did not talk about. US News ranks colleges. Princeton usually gets the #1 slot for doctoral schools. Colleagues of Brian’s at AT&T looked at the “Places Rated” book that rates the livability of cities. His colleagues showed that by tinkering with the weighting of the categories, they could move 50% into first place, and 25% of the cities could be ranked first or last. These sorts of things combine flaky ratings with arbitrary weights.

Finally, when someone gives you a number, you should ask why they’re providing it. E.g., an ad in the Times said “Four thousand teens will try their first cigarette today.” It’s plausible. But, two weeks before, an ad said that 5,000 teenagers try pot for the first time every day. It’s hard to decide on the plausibility. That number was sponsored by a single issue advocacy group, who has an interest in making the number seem large. That should make us cautious. Or, Naomi Wolf (in The Beauty Myth) says that 150,000 American women die of anorexia every year. 2M women die a year, so that number seems way to high. (An audience member: 30,000 people die in car accidents every year. He knows people who have died in car accidents, but not of anorexia. Hence, the number is suspect.)

“The number of American children killed by guns has doubled every year since 1950” (Nany Day, Violence in schools.) (From Joel Best, Damned Lies and Statistics)

Defenses:

• Recognise the enemy

• Beware of the source

• Learn some useful numbers, facts, shortcuts

• Use your common sense and experience

Other sources: Charles Seife, Proofiness; John Alle Paulos, Innumercay

Sites:
innumeracy.com
megapenny.com
math.temple.edu/~paulos/

Q: How about the use of graphics?
A: Sure.

Q: About 40 years ago, I lectured in Italy, when the Lira was 1/1000 of a US dollar. A bank offered to convert it for 20%. They gave him a million dollars. A few days later they figured it out.

Q: [tom stites] Newspaper reporters tend to be pretty innumerate; they like words. But that’s been getting better. But there are fewer copy editors. And, when I worked at the Times, we insisted on graphs marking the discontinuity in the scale, but they don’t that any more.

People have been kvetching about this for decades, but I wonder if there’s any evidence that countries with higher math scores are less susceptible to fuzzy thinking?
A: I don’t have any data.

Q: I’ve been looking at the conversion to IPv6 where the number of addresses is many orders of magnitude higher. People worry that we’ll run out of them, but that underestimates the magnitude of the IPv6 addresses.
A: It’s about 79,000 trillion trillions more addresses.

Q: We’re getting more info, but it’s sloppier. Will people pay a premium for proper info? A magazine has instituted fact editors. Writers have to show two sources for word sources, and reputable sources for figures. It helped.
A: The economics might bring us there.

Q: It’s easy to lie with stats, its even easier to lie without them by sing vague words.
A: Proofiness is good on this.

Q: [me] We ought to standardize on some new cliched measurements: from “length of a football field” or “books in the Lib of Congress” to “number of atoms in the universe”

Q: We need checkers!
A: A Mechanical Turk for checking.

Q: As the numbers get larger, is there more of a breakdown in whether people can understand them?
A: Megapenny.com is an interesting site, but at the end of the day it probably doesn’t help your intuition that much.

Q: Powers of Ten is great.

Q: The log scale of earthquakes is misleading to almost everyone.
A: Yes, and decibel scales, too.

Q: The same issues are probably happening with policy makers. We need an advanced class on this. Who would be taking it?
A: People take my class to satisfy a quantify reasoning requirement. There’s a class based on “Physics for Future Presidents.” It’d be great to have one on genomics, or psychology … lots of opportunities.

Q: JunkCharts is a good blog. It analyzes charts from around the Web.

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The latest Berkman Buzz, as compiled by Rebekah Heacock:

• Yashomati Ghosh [twitter:yashomatig] describes bringing ICT to India’s citizens link

• Dan Gillmor [twitter:dangillmor] reviews essential mobile phone apps for journalists (and you) link

• Stuart Shieber [twitter:pmphlt] discusses the costs of open access link

• Wendy Seltzer [twitter:wseltzer] explores the legality of the US government’s recent domain name seizures link

• Weekly Global Voices [twitter:globalvoices] : “Gabon: The Invisible Revolt”:
  link

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The weekly Berkman Buzz, as compiled by Rebekah Heacock:

• The OpenNet Initiative explains Egypt’s “just-in-time” style of Internet censorship: link

• Herdict looks at the reports it’s received from Egypt: link

• Jonathan Zittrain discusses how editing an academic journal can be dangerous: link

• Doc Searls’ discussion of Flickr has received nearly 100 comments: link

• Weekly Global Voices: “Special Coverage: Egypt Protests 2011”
  link

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Hal Roberts, Ethan Zuckerman [twitter:ethanz] , and Jillian York [twitter:jilliancyork] are doing a Berkman lunchtime talk on Distributed Denial of Service [DDoS] Attacks against Human Rights Sites, reporting on a paper they’ve posted.

A DDoS is an attack that consumes the resources of the target machine so that that machine is not able to respond, Hal says. It is an old problem: there was a CERT Advisory about an IP spoofing attack in 1996. A distributed DoS attack uses lots of machines to attack the host, typically via botnets (armies of infected machines). Hal gives an example in which infected machines check Twitter once a minute looking for encoded commands to do nefarious tasks. Gambling sites have often been targets, in part because they are reluctant to report attacks; they’ve also been known to attack each other. In one case, this resulted in the Net going down for 9 hours for most of China. Hal points out that botnets are not the only way DDoS attacks are carried out. In addition, there have been political uses. Botnets have been used to spy as well as bring down sites.

One monitor (Arbor Networks) notes 5-1500 DDoS attacks per day, globally. Hal thinks this number is too low, in part because there are many small attacks.

An application attack “crashes the box.” E.g., a slowloris attack slows down the host’s response time, reducing the number of available TCP connections. App attacks can be clever. E.g., simply reloading a homepage draws upon cached data, but doing searches on random words can be much more effective.

A network attack “clogs the pipe.” It floods the target with as much traffic as it can. This often will take down all the sites hosted by the ISP, not just the target site. The powerful network attacks are almost all “amplification” attacks. E.g., you request a big chunk of data: a little data in requests a massive amount of data back.

To defend against DDoS, you can optimize your server and harden it; you can build in over capacity; you can create a system that adds more resources as required; you can do packet filtering or rate limitation; you can scrub the attacking packets by “outsourcing” them to highly experience sys admins who look for signs in the packets that distinguish good from bad; if flooded, you can do source mitigation, asking routers routing the flood to you to block the packets; or, you can tell your ISP to dynamically reroute the packets. But, none of these technique work well enough or are too expensive.

The study by Hal, Ethan, Jillian, et al., asked a few key questions about how this affects human rights sites: How prevalent are DDoS attacks? What types are used? What’s the impact? How can sites defend against them? To answer these, they aggregated all the media reports, they surved human rights and media organizations. They interviewed respondents. And they hosted a meeting at Harvard. They learned:

• Attacks are common

• Sites on the edge of the Net, such as indie media, are particularly vulnerable

• It’s not just DDoS attacks

• There are some good answers for application attacks, but fewer for network attacks

• Network attacks may provoke a move to the core

• It helps to connect local geeks with core sysadmins

In their media research, they found lots of attacks, but not a strong correlation between the attacks and the politics of the attacked sites. The data are hampered, however, by the difficulty of gathering the info. Not all sites know they’ve been DDoS’ed. And the study had to use large boolean queries to try to find coverage in the media.

Even though there are many attacks, the core (Tier 1 providers, plus their direct customers) does well against DDoS attacks. Those Tier 1 sysadmins work closely together. But, as you get out further from the center — a customer of a customer of a customer of a Tier 1 operator — people have little recourse. “Being at the edge in terms of DDoS is a really bad thing,” says Ethan. The core has dedicated staff and a ton of bandwidth. They typically respond to a DDoS within an hour, and probably within 15 mins. So, if you’re Google, it’s not that much of a problem for you.

But, if you’re a small human rights site, it’s much harder to defend yourself. E.g., Viet Tan has been attacked repeatedly, probably by the Vietnamese government. Worse, they’re not just being DDoS’ed. 72% of those who said they’ve been DDoS’ed are filtered by their governments. 62% have experience ddos attacks. 39% have had an intrusion. 32% have been defaced. Viet Tan was being attacked not just by a botnet, but by the Vietnamese around the world by people who had downloaded a keyboard driver that logged keystrokes and could issue attacks. The people attacking them were the people they were trying to reach. “It’s an incredibly sophisticated way of doing things,” says Ethan.

Arbor Networks says 45% are flood-based, and 26% are app based. Hal et al. sent Arbor the list of attacks his research had uncovered, but Arbor had only known of a small percentage of them, which is some small evidence that Arbor is under-reported.

Of the sites that eperience a DDoS attack last year, 56% had their sites shut down by their ISP, while 36% report that their ISPs successfully defended them. E.g., there was an attack on the Burmese dissident site, irrawaddy.org. This knocked not just that site out, but all of Thailand. Thailand has its own national ISP, which is Tier 2 or 3; a 1gb/sec attack will take down an ISP of that size. Irrawaddy moved ISPs, got hit with a 4gb attack and could not afford to pay for the additional bandwidth.

Hal points to the consolidation of content through fewer and fewer ASNs. In 2007, thousands of ASN’s cotribted 50% of content. In 2009, 150 ASNs contributed 50% of all Net traffic. This may be in part due to the rise of high def video (coming through a few providers), but there’s also fewer on the long tail providing content (e.g., using gmail instead of your own mail server, blogging on a cloud service, etc.). Small sites, not in the core, are at risk.

Should you build dedicated hosting services for human rights sites? That puts all your most at-risk sites in one pool. How do you figure the risk and thus the price? One free host for human rights sites does it for free because they’re a research group and want to watch the DDoS attacks.

The paper Hal et al wrote suggests that human rights sites move into the cloud. E.g., Google’s Blogger offers world class DDoS protection. But, this would mean exchanging the control of the DDoS attackers for the control of proprietary companies that might decide to shut them down. E.g., WikiLeaks moved onto Amazon’s cloud services, and then Amazon caved to Joe Lieberman and shut WikiLeaks down. The right lesson is that whenever you let someone else host your content, you are subject to intermediary censorship. It is an Internet architecture problem. We can respond to it architecturally — e.g., serve off of peer-to-peer networks — or form a consumer movement to demand non-censorship by hosts.

(The attacks by Anonymous were successful mainly against marketing sites. They don’t work against large sites.)

Recommendations:

• Plan ahead

• Minimize dynamic pages

• Have robust monitoring, mirroring, and failover

• Strongly consider hosting on blogger or something similar

• Do not use the cheapest hosting provider or dns registrar

Bigger picture recommendations: In the most successful communities, there is an identifiable, embedded, technical experts who can get on the phone to highly-connected core systems. Many of these core entities — Yahoo, Google, etc. — want to help but don’t know how. In the meantime, more will move to cloud hosting, which means there’s a need for a policy, public pressure approach to ensure private companies do the right thing.

Q: Shaming as a technique?
A: We need to do this. But it doesn’t work if you’re, say, a large social media service with 500M users. Human rights orgs are a tin percentage of their users. They tend to make the easy decisions for them, and they’re not very transparent. (Tunisia may turn out to be turning point for Facebook, in part because FB was under attack there, and because it was heavily used by Tunisians.)

Q: Public hosting by the government for human rights groups?
A: Three worries. 1. It’s hard to imagine the intermediary censorship being less aggressive than from commercial companies. 2. It’d be a honeypot for attacks. 3. I’m not sure the US govt has the best geeks. Also, there’s a scaling problem. Akamai carries 2TB/sec of legit traffic. It can absorb an attack But the US would have to create a service that can handle 200gb/sec, which would be very expensive.

Q: What sort of tech expertise do you need to mount an attack?
A: The malware market is highly diversified and commodified. Almost all the botnets are mercenary. Some are hosted by countries that in exchange ask the botnets be turned on enemies now and then.

Q: Denial of payment?
A: We have a case in the study called “denial of service by bureaucracy.” E.g., a domain name was hijacked, and it took 6 wks to resolve. A denial of service attack doesn’t have to attack the server software.

Q: Can botnets be reverse engineered?
A: Yes. Arbor Net listens to the traffic to and from infected computers.
A: You either have to shift the responsibility to the PCs, or put it on the ISP. Some say it’s crazy that ISPs do nothing about subscribers whose computers are running continuously, etc.

[Fabulous presentation: Amazing compression of difficult material into a 1.5 hour totally understandable package. Go to the Berkman site to get the webcast when it’s ready.]

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The weekly Berkman Buzz, compiled by Rebekah Heacock:

• Stuart Shieber wonders if open-access fees disenfranchise authors with fewer financial resources link

• Dan Gillmor discusses changes in Google’s leadership link

• Herdict explores how unrest in North Africa is affecting online censorship link

• Ethan Zuckerman will be publishing his first book link

• The OpenNet Initiative reports on the Federal Communication Commission’s new proposal on net neutrality link

• Weekly Global Voices: “DR of Congo: Discreet Commemorations of the 50th Anniversary of Patrice Lumumba’s Assassination” link

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The weekly Berkman Buzz, as compiled by Jillian York.

• Ethan Zuckerman discusses the media and Tunisia: link

• Dan Gillmor offers suggestions for protecting online anonymity: link

• ICT4Peace releases a report on peacebuilding in the information age, with Berkman contributors: link

• Jonathan Zittrain discusses the issues surrounding the IPv4 to IPv6 upgrade: link

• The OpenNet Initiative tackles the new Saudi blogger licensing law: link

• Weekly Global Voices: “Tunisia: Tweeting Ben Ali’s Speech-Change 2.0 or Just a Show?” link

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I haven’t had a chance to read this yet, but it sounds promising:

10 January 2011, Switzerland: The ICT4Peace Foundation, in collaboration with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and GeorgiaTech, is pleased to release, on the occasion of the anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti, the first in a series of papers looking at the increasingly important role of information and communication technology (ICT) in conflict prevention, peacebuilding, peacekeeping and crisis response.

Unlike other papers on innovative technologies (crowdsourcing, social networking etc) dealing with crisis response, reconstruction and humanitarian aid, this collection of thought provoking pieces by esteemed writers, including former Finnish President and Nobel Peace Prize Winner Martti Athisaari and a younger generation of cutting edge practitioners and scholars in this fast moving space, aims to encourage meaningful debate and action on how to solve the serious challenges that still exist in the effective use of ICTs.

You can download it here.

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