Posts Tagged ‘web-theory’

Zeynep Tufekci, a Turkish-American Princeton/UNC sociologist who studies social movements and the Internet is presently in Istanbul’s Gezi Park at the protests. She follows up on her earlier piece on the “social media style of protest” with a long and thoughtful look at what the protesters on the ground in Gezi Park are doing and why they’re doing it: After talking to the park protesters for days here is a very quick compilation of the main complaints and reasons people say brought them to the park: 1- Protesters say that they are worried about Erdogan’s growing authoritarian style of governance.        

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Why are the protesters in Gezi Park?

Screenshots of Despair: a Tumblr that features shots of computers interacting with humans in ways that seem calculated to make them sad and angry. As Bruce Sterling notes , “Somebody could teach a pretty good interaction-design course with this handy resource.        

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Screenshots of Despair: computers making humans sad

In The remixing dilemma: The trade-off between generativity and originality [PDF], a paper just published in American Behavioral Scientist, Benjamin Mako Hill and Andrés Monroy-Hernández analyzed a data-set of projects from the Scratch website that had been made available for download and remixing. They were attempting to identify the formalattributes that made some projects more        

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What makes a project remixable?

Philip N Howard wonders if there are any countries that have, on balanced, suffered as a result of the coming of the Internet — say, because improved networks created so many opportunities for dictators to spy on dissidents that it swamped any free speech/free association benefits that the Internet delivered. So he scatter-plotted PolityIV’s democratization        

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Internet penetration is never correlated with increasing power to dictators, and is usually correlated with increased freedom

Are you a lawyer in Ohio? If so, your pro-bono services are urgently needed to defeat a trollish, bullying legal action from Med Express, a company that sells refurb medical equipment on eBay. The company is suing one of its customers for providing accurate, negative feedback on eBay’s comment system, trying to establish a precedent        

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Med Express uses broken Ohio law to silence critics who say true things

Tim Wu has written an admirably economical and restrained review of Evgeny Morozov’s new book, “To Save Everything, Click Here.” I wrote a long critique of Morozov’s first book in 2011, and back then, I found myself unable to restrain myself from enumerating the many, many flaws in the book and its fundamental dishonesty, pandering        

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Blowing up Morozov’s "To Save Everything, Click Here"

Google’s rolled out an “Inactive Account Manager” — a dead-man’s switch for your Google accounts. If you set it, Google will watch your account for protracted inactivity. After a set period, you can tell it to either squawk (“Email Amnesty International and tell them I’m in jail,” or “Email my kids and tell them I’m        

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Google adds a "dead-man’s switch" — uses cases from torture-resistance to digital wills

I get a ton of spam sent to my personal WordPress site, which is evidently sent using some kind of toolkit for would-be SEO scumbags. The spams use the SEO-target’s URL as the sender’s web-page, and consist of a bland, usually mildly positive, usually ungrammatical comment. This morning, I woke up to find that someone

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Large collection of default spam-comments from a slimy SEO tool

People visiting the Russian-language Wikipedia today will find it blacked out, in protest of a proposed far-reaching Internet blacklist plan in Russia. Similar measures were used in the Italian Wikipedia to protest an Italian Internet censorship law, and in the English Wikipedia to protest SOPA/PIPA. The Russian proposal, Bill 89417-6, will establish a national censorwall

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Russian Wikipedia blacks out over censorship plan

My latest Locus colum, “Music: The Internet’s Original Sin,” asks why music copyright is such a hot potato on the Internet, even in the post-DRM age, when most tunes are $0.99 on Amazon in MP3. The short answer: music’s ancient compact is not entirely compatible with contemporary commerce, and the industry has tried to “fix”

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Why we still fight about music and copyright on the Internet

As I mentioned last week, Salon has put legendary online community The WELL up for sale again. WELL users have been rallying around, pledging funds to a user buyout. The major stumbling block appears to be the domain name, which, with its health implications, is worth a large amount indeed. That said, more than $100K

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WELL users pledge more than $100K to community buyout