January 2017 Archives

News digest | Open Society Information Program | Week ending 27 January 2017
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The Information Program NEWS DIGEST, published the second and fourth Thursdays of each month, aims to update colleagues in the Open Society Foundations and friends further afield about the news, opinions and events the Program team have been watching this fortnight. The views expressed in these stories do not necessarily reflect those of the Information Program or the OSF. Prepared by Wendy M. Grossman.

Our staff, advisers and major grantees tweet at http://bit.ly/13j5fjq. Current and former grantees featured in this issue: ADC, Creative Commons, Copyright for Creativity (C4C), Data and Society Institute, EDRi, EFF, IFLA, R3D, SPARC.

PROGRAM NEWS

NEWS
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For breaking news stories, visit: http://pinboard.in/u:osi_info_program/t:news/

US officially withdraws from Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement
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The BBC reports that, as expected, on his third day in office newly-inaugurated US President Donald Trump signed an executive order withdrawing from the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The deal had never been ratified by the US Congress. The BBC adds that the news is likely to be welcome in China, which was not included in the deal, and which saw TPP as an attempt by the US to dominate the region. The White House web page on trade deals says Trump is also committed to renegotiating the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has been in place since 1994. EFF, which opposed TPP because of its intellectual property and other provisions, wrote the agreement's post-mortem in November, but noted the agreement may still cause the same problems EFF has warned against if it goes ahead without the US. Bloomberg reports that Canada hopes to salvage the agreement without the US. Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary, Yoshihide Suga, told CNN that he hopes Trump will reconsider; signatories have until 2018 to ratify the agreement. 
BBC (TTP): http://bbc.in/2jsj8b4
BBC (China): http://bbc.in/2jUm5Q4
White House: http://bit.ly/2kvPxiu
EFF: http://bit.ly/2gjLVtV
Bloomberg: http://bloom.bg/2j7tVso
CNBC: http://cnb.cx/2jhWlLr

US: Appeals court rules US law doesn't au

The Washington Post reports that the Second Circuit federal appeals court has declined to overturn the lower court decision that US law cannot be used to compel Microsoft to hand over data stored on  its Irish servers. The Department of Justice may now try to appeal the case to the Supreme Court or push for legislation to support such extraterritorial data requests.
Washington Post: http://wapo.st/2kvW6BL

EU considers legally designating robots "electronic persons"
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The Law Street blog reports that the EU has issued a draft report, written by MEP Mady Delvaux (Socialist Workers Party-Luxembourg), that proposes designating robots as "electronic persons" for legal purposes, much as corporations have legal personhood. Electronic personhood would enable the allocation of liability. In the interim, the report views harmonised rules for self-driving cars as an urgent necessity, and favours an obligatory insurance scheme and fund to compensate victims of accidents. Delvaux and others are campaigning to create a new European agency for robotics and artificial intelligence. 
Law Street: http://bit.ly/2kvPEqr
European Parliament: http://bit.ly/2k3qlix

China: Government bans unauthorized internet connections
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SCMP reports that the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has announced a requirement that all special cable and VPN services on the mainland require prior government approval. The move makes most VPN service providers effectively illegal. The Ministry claims the purpose is to "strengthen cyberspace information security management"; however, the net effect is to tighten the country's "Great Firewall" by banning services that allow users to bypass it. At BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow reports on a Harvard study analysing the Chinese government strategically distracts its population from political dissent by injecting nearly 450 million posts a year into social media.
SCMP: http://bit.ly/2kmCCfy
BoingBoing: http://bit.ly/2jzU0N7

Australia: Biometrics will replace paper passports
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Gizmodo reports that Australia is implementing the Seamless Traveller biometric system for recognizing arriving international travelers to replace paper passports and other forms of identity documentation. The goal is to have 90% of arrivals passing through unmanned electronic stations, with humans intervening only in case of a technical issue or travel restriction. The system is budgeted for $94 million over five years. At the net.wars blog, Wendy M. Grossman recounts a presentation at the 2013 Biometrics conference by Accenture Ireland's Joe Flynn on how the streamlined "MAGICAL" airport of 2020 is supposed to work.
Gizmodo: http://bit.ly/2jUmCBy
net.wars: http://bit.ly/2jzYnb2

Bahrain: Government bans online newspaper publication
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Global Voices reports that on January 16 the Bahraini government banned the country's only independent newspaper, al-Wasat, from "using electronic media tools". Besides its website, the paper has accounts followed by hundreds of thousands of people on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, and also maintains a YouTube channel and an Instagram account. Activists speculate that the immediate cause of the ban may have been the paper's coverage of the January 15 execution of three men who had been convicted of killing three policemen in a 2014 bombing attack. The paper has been subject to similar bans in the past.
Global Voices: http://bit.ly/2k3mhP6

Open access mandate blocks Gates-funded research from publication
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Nature reports that scientists whose research is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are unable to publish the results in leading journals including Nature, Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The reason is the Gates Foundation's open access policy, which requires the researchers it funds to open the resulting papers and underlying data sets immediately upon publication. Peter Suber predicts that the journals will ultimately compromise. Inside Higher Ed gives further background and compares the Gates policy with those of other foundations.
Nature: http://go.nature.com/2jzSeLS
Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/2kvKUVB


FEATURES AND ANALYSIS
====================
For more features and analysis selected by the Program team, visit:
http://pinboard.in/u:osi_info_program/t:oped/

Online advertising: bad for the news business
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In this piece for the Verge, veteran journalist Walt Mossberg writes that the methods used to fund modern journalism - primarily advertising - simultaneously undermine trust in the news outlets. To advertisers, quality news is just a way to profile readers, whom they can then target with ads on cheaper sites. At Medium, Sean Blanda provides Exhibit A: Medium itself, which is struggling to break even like every other well-intentioned start-up aimed at providing a better system. Fake news is only one piece of the problem; the bigger issue is that people discover news via companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter, which do not make any more money by supporting good journalism. At the Guardian, Evgeny Morozov blames the advertising-supported business model, comparing the problem of getting rid of fake news to tackling climate change. At the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum recounts her experience as the focus of a smear campaign; the experience taught her how fake websites and fake news reinforce each other. IFEX argues that government regulation is a bigger threat than fake news. TechCrunch reports that a study conducted by social psychologists at Cambridge (UK), Yale, and George Mason (US) has found that using proactive warnings that pre-expose users to factual distortion in advance is an effective strategy for countering the spread of misinformation online. At the Data and Society blog, Danah Boyd considers whether part of the problem is US cultural norms which dictate teaching children that they can make good decisions if they do their own research and trust their gut instincts.
Verge: http://bit.ly/2kw1jJZ
Medium: http://bit.ly/2jUppLj
Guardian:: http://bit.ly/2k6sZUM
Washington Post: http://wapo.st/2jhVb2I
IFEX: http://bit.ly/2kmwHXQ
TechCrunch: http://tcrn.ch/2k3mXnK

Latin America, Europe: The ever-expanding national security state
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In this article at the Guardian, John Dalhuisen summarizes Amnesty International's report, "Dangerously Disproportionate", which reviews the expanding national security state across Europe and concludes that the edifice of rights protection carefully constructed after the Second World War is being dismantled. The report's eight themes: states of emergency, principle of legality, right to privacy, freedom of expression, right to liberty, freedom of movement, stripping of nationality, and the prohibition on sending people to places where they risk torture. In a blog posting, EFF and its partners summarize their review of surveillance in Latin America in 2016. Among the highlights: Chile's highest court has authorized surveillance balloons; Argentina, over opposition from ADC, is creating a registry of users' mobile communication services; Paraguay's military is spying on journalists; Peru has spent $22 million on software to surveil communications from the Israeli company Verint; and Mexico is fighting a court case brought by R3D opposing data retention.
Guardian:: http://bit.ly/2ji9kNf
Amnesty International: http://bit.ly/2k3sPNz
EFF: http://bit.ly/2kvJHts

The privacy paradox
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In this video clip, Benjamin Wittes discusses his and Emma Kohse's new paper on the "privacy paradox" at the Brookings Institution with Amie Stepanovich (Access Now) and Stewart Baker (Steptoe and Johnson). In their earlier paper, Wittes and Kohse challenged the assumption that privacy is an eroding value; instead, people may buy online to protect their privacy from specific people in their lives, such as neighbors and family members. Privacy scholars and activists, they hypothesized, focus on harms and generally fail to take these benefits into account. In this paper they tested the hypothesis using Google Surveys, which they admit is a crude measure. They found the platform challenging to adapt for their questions, as they had to find euphemisms for terms Google prohibits, such as pornography, vibrators, and condoms. The researchers found that the percentage of consumers who would rather buy sensitive personal items online is roughly double the number who do the same for general household items: these decisions are not solely driven by convenience.
Brookings (video): http://brook.gs/2jUneXW
Brookings (paper): http://brook.gs/2jzMIZK

Adapting the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
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In this blog posting for the LSE Media Policy Project, LSE academic Sonia Livingstone edits the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to reflect today's digital world. Although it was adopted in 1989, Livingstone believes the Convention is not out of date. Her edited version is intended to remind policy makers that a third of internet users worldwide are under 18 and that children's rights merit our collective attention. Children should be empowered; for example, incoming laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation should include requirements to simplify terms and conditions for this younger audience.
LSE: http://bit.ly/2jssWll

Hungary, Ukraine: Working towards accountability and transparency
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In this blog posting, The Engine Room discusses (and updates the progress of) its second replication sprint, which involves taking past successful projects and working with organizations facing similar challenges to develop immediately useful tools and complete end products developed to their specific needs. For this week's challenge, The Engine Room is working with Opora (based in Ukraine) and K-Monitor (Hungary), which are fighting for more transparency and accountability in their countries. Opora's project aims to increase citizens' influence on the government, beginning with creating a database for election donations from 2014 onwards. K-Monitor, which maintains the biggest news database on corruption cases in Hungary, wants to make the assets and incomes of decision-makers transparent and comparable over time.
Engine Room: http://bit.ly/2kvFCcO

Copyright Week
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On these pages, EFF provides links to myriad organizations celebrating Copyright Week, including Creative Commons, Copyright for Creativity (C4C), IFLA, SPARC, EDRi, New Media Rights, Public Knowledge, the Authors Alliance, and the American Library Association. Each of the linked pages discusses an aspect of copyright such as: the public domain, digital rights management, copyright reform, the use of copyright law for censorship, and transparency. Intellectual Property Watch surveys the year ahead for IP law in the US.
EFF: http://bit.ly/2kmy2xE
IP Watch: http://bit.ly/2jzUgeS

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DIARY
==============
To see more events recommended by the Information Program team, visit:
https://pinboard.in/u:osi_info_program/t:events/. If you would like your event listed in this mail, email info.digest@opensocietyfoundations.org.

FOSSDEM 2017
When: February 4 - 5
Where: Brussels, Belgium
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FOSSDEM is a two-day event organised by volunteers to promote the widespread use of free and open source software. A free and non-commercial event organised by the community for the community, the goal is to provide free and open source software developers and communities a place to meet to get in touch with other developers and projects, and be informed about the latest developments in the open source and free software worlds.
http://bit.ly/2k6u0MA

Internet Freedom Festival
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March 6-10, 2017
Valencia, Spain
The Internet Freedom Festival gathers the community keeping the Internet open and uncensored for a week of free-form multidisciplinary collaboration intended to help groups achieve their goals. Attendance is free and open to the public.
http://bit.ly/2dI8EV1

Open Education Global 2017
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March 8-10, 2017
Cape Town, South Africa

This year marks several important milestones in Open Education, including the 15-year anniversary of the term "Open Educational Resources" and the five-year anniversary of the Paris OER Declaration. For those who remember the start of the movement, this conference will provide the opportunity to celebrate and reflect on these and other achievements, reconnect with colleagues and friends, and learn about new ideas and initiatives.
http://bit.ly/2jUcqJp

Rightscon 2017
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March 29-31, 2017
Brussels, Belgium
RightsCon will tackle the most pressing issues at the intersection of technology and human rights. Session proposals are being accepted until November 25, 2016.
http://bit.ly/I2ZAUZ

We Robot
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March 31-April 1, 2017
New Haven, Connecticut
The sixth annual We Robot will be held at Yale Law School and will focus on the coming legal and policy conflicts as robots and AI become part of daily life.
http://bit.ly/2fVF2SI

Personal Democracy Forum 2017
April 6-7
Gdansk, Poland
The 5th edition of Personal Democracy Forum will serve as a platform for exchanging ideas and experiences for people using new technologies to work for civic participation and transparency in public life in Central and Eastern Europe.
http://bit.ly/2j7q7HT

TICTeC 2017
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April 25-26, 2017
Florence, Italy
This will be the third mySociety conference on the impacts of civic technology.
http://bit.ly/2e5NifJ

2017 IFLA International News Media Conference
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April 27-28, 2017
Reykjavik, Iceland
This conference will examine issues and challenges in collecting and preserving the news and making it available to users. Do access and preservation have different prerequisites? In addition, the conference will explore how news media is used and transformed by researchers and the public. Can we recognize variable user needs? Do we offer the most suitable APIs? 
http://bit.ly/2gjYmu2

Creative Commons Global Summit
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April 28-30, 2017
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
This event will gather a global community of technologists, academics, activists, creatives, and legal experts to work together on the expansion and growth of the commons, open knowledge, and free culture for all. 
http://bit.ly/2cO3x0P

MetLib 2017
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Montreal, Quebec, Canada
The 2017 programme theme is "Partnerships: Creating a new vision for libraries". Among the subthemes will be discussions of how and why to use, form, and manage partnerships, management tools, and best practices. 
http://bit.ly/2ghPOPp

4th Africa Library Summit and 2nd AfLIA conference
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May 14-20, 2017
Yaounde, Cameroon
Moved from Ethiopia to the site of the second bidder due to safety concerns, this conference co-locates the fourth Africa Library Sumit and the second African Library and Information Associations and Institutions conference.
http://bit.ly/2hsw64E

Citizen Science Conference 2017
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May 17-20, 2017
St Paul, Minnesota
The biennial citizen science conference brings together a diverse group of researchers, practitioners, community organizations, and participants. 
http://bit.ly/2jspOWl

IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
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May 22-24, 2017
San Jose, California
The 38th annual meeting will present developments in computer security and electronic privacy, and for bringing together researchers and practitioners in the field. 
http://bit.ly/2hsqUhj

Workshop on Technology and Consumer Protection 
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May 22-24, 2017
San Jose, California
Co-hosted with the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, ConPro will explore computer science topics with an impact on consumers. This workshop has a strong security and privacy slant, with an overall focus on ways in which computer science can prevent, detect, or address the potential for technology to deceive or unfairly harm consumers. 
http://bit.ly/2fJ6ShN

Next Library Festival 2017
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June 11-14, 2017
Aarhus, Denmark
Next Library 2017 will offer a "patchwork" of co-learning, co-creative, participatory, engaging, pluralistic and interactive meetings, and lots of parallel sessions, keynote speakers, wildcard sessions, demos/exhibitions, gaming, Networking Dinner Party, Get2Gether, Social un-conferences, alternative events and surprises.
http://bit.ly/2hHNt4W

CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication
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June 21-23, 2017
Geneva, Switzerland
The organizers of the biennial CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication - OAI10 - include representatives from the Open Society Foundations, SPARC, PloS, CERN, UCL, and other academic institutions..
http://bit.ly/2jzXj6X

Open Repositories 2017
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June 26-30, 2017
Brisbane, Australia
The annual Open Repositories Conference brings together users and developers of open digital repository platforms from higher education, government, galleries, libraries, archives and museums. The Conference provides an interactive forum for delegates from around the world to come together and explore the global challenges and opportunities facing libraries and the broader scholarly information landscape.
http://bit.ly/2aOCiGp

Summer courses on privacy and international copyright laws
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July 3-7, 2017
Amsterdam, Netherlands
These courses, run by the Institute for Information Law, are intensive post-graduate courses aimed to help professionals stay abreast of changing rules. The first, on privacy law and policy, focuses on recent developments in EU and US privacy law relating to the internet and online media. The second, on international copyright law, comprises nine seminars, each focused on one specific copyright issue.
https://www.ivir.nl/education/summer-courses/

IFLA World Libraries and Information Congress
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August 19-25, 2017
Wroclaw, Poland
The theme of the 83rd annual IFLA congress will be "Achieving a healthy future together: diverse and emerging roles for health information professionals". 
http://bit.ly/2gErkVa

Privacy + Security Forum
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October 4-6, 2017
Washington, DC
The conference breaks down the silos of security and privacy by bringing together leaders from both fields. 
http://bit.ly/1PZhExo

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News digest | Open Society Information Program | Week ending 13 January 2017
====================================================
The Information Program NEWS DIGEST, published the second and fourth Thursdays of each month, aims to update colleagues in the Open Society Foundations and friends further afield about the news, opinions and events the Program team have been watching this fortnight. The views expressed in these stories do not necessarily reflect those of the Information Program or the OSF. Prepared by Wendy M. Grossman.
 
Our staff, advisers and major grantees tweet at http://bit.ly/13j5fjq. Current and former grantees featured in this issue: EDRi, OKFN, R3D.
 
PROGRAMME NEWS
 
Correction
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The report on an OKFN blog posting on the Open Government Partnership in the NEWS DIGEST for the week ending December 23 2016 misspelled Mor Rubinstein's last name and misreported her gender. We apologize for the error.
OKFN: http://bit.ly/2iavapN
 
Life in a Quantified Society
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The Open Society Foundation has published a basic guide to its work on the Quantified Society, explaining the underpinning technologies and their impact on individuals' everyday lives. Topics include pervasive data collection, algorithmic decision-making, and the problems these pose for accountability and open access to information.
https://osf.to/2hTp3Ub
 
 
NEWS
=====
For breaking news stories, visit: http://pinboard.in/u:osi_info_program/t:news/
 
US formally accuses Russians of hacking the November elections
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Writing for the NYU Law School Just Security blog, Ronald Deibert calls the joint FBI-Department of Homeland Security report on Russian cyber interference in the 2016 US election "badly constructed". Deibert complains that the White House fails to present the evidence linking the cyber espionage operations to Russia and that much of the critical evidence vital to the public interest is being kept secret, either by the National Security Agency or by private cyber security firms. At Esquire, Kings College professor Thomas Rid outlines the background of 20 years of Russian hacks of the US and discusses the role Wikileaks played in publishing the results. The New York Times calls the situation the realisation of "Julian Assange's years-old vision". Bruce Schneier discusses the problem of attribution in cyberspace. 
JustSecurity: http://bit.ly/2iP7G6u
Esquire: http://bit.ly/2jqZ0nl
NY Times: http://nyti.ms/2j7u0Jr
Schneier: http://bit.ly/2iP9qwt
 
EU: European Commission launches e-privacy directive
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EDRi reports that the European Commission has released its proposals for the e-privacy directive, which EDRi argues needs substantial improvement. It consists of three elements: a legislative proposal for replacing regulation 2001/45; a communication on the "data economy", and a communication on exchanging and protecting international data flows in a globalized world. The EC's press conference to discuss the announcement will be live-streamed on January 17.
EDRi: http://bit.ly/2iOYLBR
EC (press release): http://bit.ly/2irF0Tj
EC (regulation): http://bit.ly/2j7vKCI
EC (data economy): http://bit.ly/2jf5hoE
EC (data flows): http://bit.ly/2iP4PdX
 
US: Police subpoena Amazon Echo data in murder case
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The Center for Democracy and Technology reports that police investigating a murder in Bentonville, Arkansas ended 2016 by issuing a warrant to Amazon to demand that the company turn over audio recordings from an Echo home automation device. Amazon has refused to comply, and it is not clear which aspects - wiretap, stored communications, or trap and trace - of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act apply to the snippets of voice recording retained by the company. The Register reports that when a TV reporter, discussing the story of a child who accidentally ordered her family's Alexa device to order her a dollhouse, repeated on-air the command, "Alexa, order me a dollhouse", Echo devices around the country began attempting to fulfill the order. Online purchasing is turned on by default on these devices. 
CDT: http://bit.ly/2ik9PLa
Register: http://bit.ly/2iP59JA
 
Australia: Commission recommends adoption of fair use
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InfoJustice summarizes the report issued at the end of December 2016 by the Australian Government Productivity Commission has recommended the introduction of fair use into copyright law, along with other changes on patents, copyright, and enforcement. The Commission has warned that copyright is too restrictive, in both scope and length of term, and proposes introducing a system of user rights. TechDirt lists the main points and reposts the entire 766-page report, which was released under a CC-BY license.
InfoJustice: http://bit.ly/2irDiBe
TechDirt: http://bit.ly/2jE2FO0
 
New York proposes mandating passenger GPS coordinates
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Freedom to Tinker reports that New York City's Taxi and Limousine Commission has proposed a new rule that would require car service platform companies such as Lyft and Uber to add GPS coordinates of customers' drop-off and pick-up points to existing requirements. New York's Freedom of Information law would make the bulk data subject to full public release. The stated justification is to combat "driver fatigue" and improve safety; however, the rule does not match the purpose and raises serious threats to passenger privacy. 
Freedom to Tinker: http://bit.ly/2irFHvI
 
Germany, Peru, Taiwan: Scientists lose access to Elsevier journals
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Nature reports on the alternatives being pursued by scientists in Germany, Peru, and Taiwan now that their access to Elsevier journals has ended. Peru's government has terminated funding to pay for a license. Contract negotiations in Germany and Taiwan broke down in December; because negotiations resumed in Taiwan in early January, Elsevier has granted a one-month extension to the Taiwanese universities that had canceled their subscriptions.
Nature: http://go.nature.com/2jeF7Tq
 
Iran: Pornography filter breaks browsers across the world
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The Verge reports that 256 websites, many of them pornographic, were blocked for users from Russia to Hong Kong when Iran activated a censorship filter using a technique called BGP hijacking that directs computers to phony routes. Iran's national telecom company is pivotal to the transit of data through the region. The situation began to resolve after approximately 28 hours. At its blog, Dyn has more detail and background on BGP hacking in general and Iranian censorship in particular.
Verge: http://bit.ly/2jeNezz
Dyn: http://bit.ly/2inpZi1
 
AI research fund founded to promote research into the public interest
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TechCrunch reports that LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar have each put $10 million into seeding the $27 million Ethics and Governance of Artificial intelligence Fund to promote research into artificial intelligence in the public interest. As algorithms make an increasing range of key decisions with ramifications throughout society, the Fund's founders believe it's crucial that AI research should include input from many disciplines, including social science, law, ethics, and religion. The founding academic institutions will be the MIT Media Lab and Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. 
TechCrunch: http://tcrn.ch/2jeGAJo
 
FEATURES AND ANALYSIS
====================
For more features and analysis selected by the Program team, visit:
http://pinboard.in/u:osi_info_program/t:oped/
 
Chaos Computer Congress 33
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In this Guardian piece, Alex Hern lists five key technologies talks at the 2016 Chaos Computer Congress identified as broken: intercoms, boarding cards, smart meters, elections, and random number generators. At his blog, Edward Hasbrouck discusses the boarding card issues - which he highlighted more than 15 years ago - in greater detail. CCC-TV makes available video of the conference talks; EDRi's page highlights those given by its members and observers on topics such as German state surveillance, the state of internet politics in Austria, and the issues surrounding law enforcement hacking. Among notable talks is Aylin Caliskin's discussion of prejudice in word embeddings - language models that translate words into numeric vectors for uses such as web search, sentiment analysis, and machine learning. 
Guardian: http://bit.ly/2irLcdV
Hasbrouck: http://bit.ly/2jLU8Ne
C3: http://bit.ly/2iP3ZO8
EDRi: http://bit.ly/2ikipcT
C3 (Caliskin): http://bit.ly/2ikbyQK
 
Building the LibreRouter
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In this interview at Global Voice, published in Spanish and English, Gui Iribarren, vice-president of AlterMundi, discusses the LibreRouter project, which aims to make it easier to get online without relying on a corporate hardware manufacturer and build community networks. AlterMundi expects to delivery the first version of this router to community networks in Argentina and South Africa.
Global Voices: http://bit.ly/2jr3tGL
 
(Dis)Information mercenaries
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In this posting at Medium, University of Zurich mathematician and PersonalData.io founder Paul-Olivier Dehaye studies the methodology of Cambridge Analytica, which has been widely reported to have helped the Trump campaign micro-target messages based on the thousands of data points it claims to have on every American. Dehaye reports that the same vendor and its affiliates have built "PSYOPS" dashboards to manipulate populations in Libya, Afghanistan, and countless other countries. In a YouTube talk, Cambridge Analytica founder Alexander Nix discusses the power of big data.
Medium: http://bit.ly/2j7IhGa
YouTube: http://bit.ly/2ikeFbe
 
The real name fallacy
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In this Coral Project blog posting, J.Nathan Matias dissects the fallacy that requiring real names will end bad online behavior. Among his points: most online attackers are already known to their targets in real life; identity protection is important for vulnerable people; and many hate groups seek legitimacy by operating openly. Design alone is not a solution, and the outcomes of such efforts should be systematically tested.
Coral Project: http://bit.ly/2jDUf9s
 
The new world
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In this series of radio programs the BBC explores aspects of "The New World" such as globalisation, changing demographics, the rise of anti-elitist populism, the balance of power, and the "post-truth" world. Each piece traces its topic back to the roots of the change, seeking to answer the main question, "When did this happen?"
BBC: http://bbc.in/2ik4gfL
 
Cyberwar for sale
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In this piece from the New York Times magazine, Mattathias Schwartz explores the activities of the privately-owned Milan-based surveillance software maker Hacking Team as revealed by documents made public after the company was itself hacked. The Mexican civil liberties group R3D, for example, was able to use the leaked documents to unveil surveillance in the state of Puebla; Mexico is Hacking Team's largest export market. Hacking Team has fewer than 50 employees, but its global roster of companies include the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Egypt, Honduras, Uzbekistan, Turkey, and Sudan. Once surreptitiously installed on a target's computer or phone, Hacking Team's Remote Control System software can secretly eavesdrop on location data, text messages, email, phone, and Skype calls, grabbing the data before it can be encrypted. The article also explores the spread of the belief that "privacy is secrecy and secrecy is terrorism".
NY Times: http://nyti.ms/2ik90SC
 
 
***
 
DIARY
==============
To see more events recommended by the Information Program team, visit:
https://pinboard.in/u:osi_info_program/t:events/. If you would like your event listed in this mail, email info.digest@opensocietyfoundations.org.
 
Privacy Camp
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January 24, 2017
Brussels, Belgium
Co-organised by EDRi, Privacy Salon, USL-B, and VUB-LSTS, the fifth annual Privacy Camp brings together civil society, policy makers, and academia to discuss existing and looming problems for human rights in the digital environment.
http://bit.ly/2evfpa9
 
Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection
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January 25-27, 2017
Brussels, Belgium
The tenth CPDP's main theme is artificial intelligence. The conference is accepting proposals for panels in April (from academic consortia, research projects, think tanks, and other research organisations) and May (from individuals wishing to present academic research papers).
http://bit.ly/1OrQSv6
 
Internet Freedom Festival
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March 6-10, 2017
Valencia, Spain
The Internet Freedom Festival gathers the community keeping the Internet open and uncensored for a week of free-form multidisciplinary collaboration intended to help groups achieve their goals. Attendance is free and open to the public.
http://bit.ly/2dI8EV1
 
Rightscon 2017
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March 29-31, 2017
Brussels, Belgium
RightsCon will tackle the most pressing issues at the intersection of technology and human rights. 
http://bit.ly/I2ZAUZ
 
We Robot
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March 31-April 1, 2017
New Haven, Connecticut
The sixth annual We Robot will be held at Yale Law School and will focus on the coming legal and policy conflicts as robots and AI become part of daily life.
http://bit.ly/2fVF2SI
 
TICTeC 2017
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April 25-26, 2017
Florence, Italy
This will be the third mySociety conference on the impacts of civic technology.
http://bit.ly/2e5NifJ
 
2017 IFLA International News Media Conference
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April 27-28, 2017
Reykjavik, Iceland
This conference will examine issues and challenges in collecting and preserving the news and making it available to users. Do access and preservation have different prerequisites? In addition, the conference will explore how news media is used and transformed by researchers and the public. Can we recognize variable user needs? Do we offer the most suitable APIs? 
http://bit.ly/2gjYmu2
 
Creative Commons Global Summit
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April 28-30, 2017
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
This event will gather a global community of technologists, academics, activists, creatives, and legal experts to work together on the expansion and growth of the commons, open knowledge, and free culture for all. 
http://bit.ly/2cO3x0P
 
MetLib 2017
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Montreal, Quebec, Canada
The 2017 programme theme is "Partnerships: Creating a new vision for libraries". Among the subthemes will be discussions of how and why to use, form, and manage partnerships, management tools, and best practices. 
http://bit.ly/2ghPOPp
 
4th Africa Library Summit and 2nd AfLIA conference
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May 14-20, 2017
Yaounde, Cameroon
Moved from Ethiopia to the site of the second bidder due to safety concerns, this conference co-locates the fourth Africa Library Sumit and the second African Library and Information Associations and Institutions conference.
http://bit.ly/2hsw64E
 
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
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May 22-24, 2017
San Jose, California
The 38th annual meeting will present developments in computer security and electronic privacy, and for bringing together researchers and practitioners in the field. 
http://bit.ly/2hsqUhj
 
Workshop on Technology and Consumer Protection 
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May 22-24, 2017
San Jose, California
Co-hosted with the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, ConPro will explore computer science topics with an impact on consumers. This workshop has a strong security and privacy slant, with an overall focus on ways in which computer science can prevent, detect, or address the potential for technology to deceive or unfairly harm consumers. 
http://bit.ly/2fJ6ShN
 
Next Library Festival 2017
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June 11-14, 2017
Aarhus, Denmark
Next Library 2017 will offer a "patchwork" of co-learning, co-creative, participatory, engaging, pluralistic and interactive meetings, and lots of parallel sessions, keynote speakers, wildcard sessions, demos/exhibitions, gaming, Networking Dinner Party, Get2Gether, Social un-conferences, alternative events and surprises.
http://bit.ly/2hHNt4W
 
Open Repositories 2017
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June 26-30, 2017
Brisbane, Australia
The annual Open Repositories Conference brings together users and developers of open digital repository platforms from higher education, government, galleries, libraries, archives and museums. The Conference provides an interactive forum for delegates from around the world to come together and explore the global challenges and opportunities facing libraries and the broader scholarly information landscape.
http://bit.ly/2aOCiGp
 
IFLA World Libraries and Information Congress
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August 19-25, 2017
Wroclaw, Poland
The theme of the 83rd annual IFLA congress will be "Achieving a healthy future together: diverse and emerging roles for health information professionals". 
http://bit.ly/2gErkVa
 
Privacy + Security Forum
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October 4-6, 2017
Washington, DC
The conference breaks down the silos of security and privacy by bringing together leaders from both fields. 
http://bit.ly/1PZhExo
 
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