It’s a dance as old as (digital) time. When faced with a challenge, politicians will look for a scapegoat in which to assign the blame of a complex issue, and propose allegedly easy solutions to fix impossible problems. Terrorist attack? End encryption. Rise in populism? End fake news. Violent crime Read more…
In 2004, one of my favourite Machinima, “Red vs Blue”, released a short called “Real Life vs the Internet” showing the disparities between our online and offline existence. One of my favourite sections is the discussion on politics. In real life you usually tend to avoid the topic, while political Read more…
One of the most over-used (yet true) legal comparisons in Internet regulation studies is to contrast the European and US approaches to freedom of speech when it comes to cyberspace. The United States favours an almost unlimited view of freedom of speech, while Europe has put in place large caveats Read more…
The Parliamentary Intelligence Security Committee (ISC) has published a special report on the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby by two extremists. The report offers an interesting insight into the workings of the security services, and while it criticises oversights by intelligence agencies that failed to identify the threat posed by Read more…
Julien Blanc, alleged member of the human species, has been ejected from Australia where he was conducting a series of paid seminars teaching young men how to pick up women with abusive and borderline criminal tactics. The reason given by Australian authorities was that he exceeded the terms of his Read more…
The Guardian has reported that on July 20th 2013, “shadowy” government officials destroyed several hard drives in their offices, under threat of legal action that would make it impossible to continue publishing stories about the NSA surveillance scandal. These devices contained copies of the files from Edward Snowden, obtained by Read more…
The Cold War is long over. Or is it? Slowly, a new conflict is brewing in the frontiers of cyberspace between armies of hackers deployed to inject viruses in enemy systems and disrupt a country’s economy before a shot has ever been fired. Or so the reports go. Is there Read more…
You might remember that during last December there was a bit of a scandal regarding Instagram’s new terms of service. Given the level of discontent arising from the decision to change the existing agreement in terms that would be seriously detrimental to users, Instragram has announced that it will be Read more…
A coalition of individuals and organisations from the US has released a very interesting initiative, the Declaration of Internet Freedom: We stand for a free and open Internet. We support transparent and participatory processes for making Internet policy and the establishment of five basic principles: Expression: Don’t censor the Internet. Read more…
If you live in Costa Rica, the answer to the question appears to be ‘No’. La Nacion newspaper reports today that Facebook has decided to close the accounts of 19 convicts, who had maintained a presence in the social network despite being in jail. FB took this decision prompted by Read more…