Interesting Snippets

Ultimately, Schmidt said he “firmly believes tech can be a force for good.”… Yet these are the things Schmidt said he is worried about:
• That the biggest cybersecurity threat will come from other nations,
• That there is no delete button on the Internet to erase errors or give people a second chance if they made mistakes when they were young and
• That the Web filtering technology used by governments to censor information will only get better

Part of the job of responsible corporate management in the 21st century is doing human rights due diligence on new markets, instituting internal review procedures, identifying principles by which decisions are to be made in tough situations, because we cannot let the short-term gains that all of us think are legitimate and worth seeking jeopardize the openness of the internet and human rights of individuals who use it without it coming back to haunt us all in the future. Because a free and open internet is important not just to technology companies but to all companies.

when ideas are blocked, information deleted, conversations stifled, and people constrained in their choices, the internet is diminished for all of us. What we do today to preserve fundamental freedoms online will have a profound effect on the next generation of users

India is trying to work with some of the Internet’s biggest names — including Facebook, Google and others — as it looks to screen and, in some cases, censor unsuitable comment before it is published online.

Authorities in Thailand recently warned the country’s Facebook users that sharing, and even liking, content that defames the country’s royal family could result in prosecution and jail. Like India, the Thai government has contacted Facebook for help in removing ‘harmful’ content from the social network.

The government in South Korea has recently established laws to to crack down on offensiveness and immoral content on mobile and the Internet in the country.

As of today, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority has ordered mobile phone companies to filter its list of 1,600 “offensive and obscene” words, according to AFP. Many of the words are in fact obscene. But a ridiculous number seem to have been copied off English language t-shirts spotted in the Tokyo subway.

Privacy as a justification for censorship now crops up in several different, but related, debates: le droit a l’oubli, the idea that content (especially user-generated content on social networking services) should auto-expire, the idea that data collection by companies should not be retained for longer than necessary, the idea that computers should be programmed to “forget” just like the human brain. All these are movements to censor content in the name of privacy.

Here’s a sound bite I can sign up for, from Simon Phipps: “Wikileaks is like Pirate Bay; something that I don’t like but have to defend because of the collateral damage caused by attacking it.” Unlike Simon, there are quite a few things I like about WikiLeaks; but even where it’s open to criticism, its sins pale beside those of the rabble of wastrels, guttersnipes, nincompoops, and cowards lined up against it.

The so-called Jugendmedienschutz-Staatsvertrag (JMStV) will task anyone operating a .de domain with adding an age certificate to his or her website… (law comes into effect on Jan 1, 2011)…
Not only is the law idiotic, it is also totally superfluous. Age verification processes are already in place for German smut peddlers, which require users to have their age and identity checked to make sure they’re not simply using dad’s credit card. Verification using Deutsche Post’s Postident identity check is the preferred method.

…As a consequence, popular German blog VZlog.de has said it will go offline on New Year’s Eve. VZlog.de states it doesn’t have the resources to check all of its content and comments, nor does it have the technical resources to make certain its readers are 18 and above…