News and Research articles on World

Surveillance

Criminal complaint filed in aftermath of security conference

Monika Ermert, Heise, Intellectual Property Watch, VDI-Nachrichten

PUBLISHED ON: 3 Feb 2014

Early warnings by German government officials at the Munich Security Conference proved true. On February 3, the International League of Human Rights in Germany, together with the Chaos Computer Club and civic group digitalcourage filed a criminal complaint against the German government for not acting on the mass surveillance by intelligence services.

Volume 2, Issue 4

Re-thinking civil disobedience

Theresa Züger, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society
PUBLISHED ON: 11 Nov 2013 DOI: 10.14763/2013.4.216

Civil disobedience is a familiar and well established phenomenon in Western societies. Currently, this concept of political action is challenged by new practices evolving on and around the internet. This paper focusses on the question of whether several forms of digital civil disobedience are legitimate.

KEYWORDS: Activism, Civil disobedience, Online civil disobedience, Hacktivism, Wikileaks, Whistle-blower, Edward Snowden, Hannah Arendt
Volume 2, Issue 4

Flawed cloud architectures and the rise of decentral alternatives

Primavera De Filippi, Research and Studies Center of Administrative Science (CERSA/CNRS), Université Paris II (Panthéon-Assas)
PUBLISHED ON: 1 Nov 2013 DOI: 10.14763/2013.4.212

Currently dominant cloud services raise challenges in terms of security, privacy and user autonomy. Decentralisation, advocated by civil society, may overcome some of the drawbacks.

KEYWORDS: Cloud computing, IT system architecture, Informational self-determination, Decentralisation, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Autonomy, Centralisation, Privacy
New gTLDs

What the new domain names could mean

Monika Ermert, Heise, Intellectual Property Watch, VDI-Nachrichten

PUBLISHED ON: 30 Oct 2013

Just a week ago, the first new TLDs were pushed to the root zone of the internet. Just in time for the Munich Conference on New Top-Level Domains 2013. But what do all the new names on the net impact?

Resource management

Fragmentation of the net ahead?

Monika Ermert, Heise, Intellectual Property Watch, VDI-Nachrichten

PUBLISHED ON: 9 Oct 2013

Routing security sounds like a nice idea, yet in "post Snowden" times the trust in centralised core resources has vanished even more. Internet adminstrators warn against fragmentation, while at the same time making use of one tool that could go in that direction: the RPKI system.

Volume 2, Issue 3

The changing role of collecting societies in the internet

Sebastian Haunss, University of Bremen
PUBLISHED ON: 30 Sep 2013 DOI: 10.14763/2013.3.199

The system of national collecting societies provided a relatively stable framework for licensing musical works – until the internet changed the field of music distribution. The GEMA-Youtube case serves as a starting point to discuss the future of collective copyright management.

KEYWORDS: Copyright, License, Intermediaries, Music, Distribution, Intellectual property rights, Collecting societies, European Union
Volume 2, Issue 3

Necessary and inherent limits to internet surveillance

Joss Wright, Oxford Internet Institute
PUBLISHED ON: 5 Aug 2013 DOI: 10.14763/2013.3.184

There are significant dangers in surveilling online communications unless the mechanisms and policies of surveillance are subject to strict and legally enforceable standards of transparency, oversight, and control.

KEYWORDS: Surveillance, Intelligence services, Base rate fallacy, Interception, Fundamental principles, Predictive algorithms, Privacy, Security, Content data, Communications data, Bundestrojaner, National Security Agency (NSA), PRISM, Tempora, Encryption, Liability, Transparency, Cyber security, Content, Censorship, Filtering
Privacy

Actionable technical outcomes for privacy online

Fred Baker, Internet Engineering Task Force; Cisco Systems

PUBLISHED ON: 29 Jul 2013

This week the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meets in Berlin. In this guest commentary Fred Baker, longtime IETF chair, calls upon the technical community, legislators and researchers to make a stronger effort in advancing privacy online.

Privacy

Joint forces for a cloud computing privacy manual

Monika Ermert, Heise, Intellectual Property Watch, VDI-Nachrichten

PUBLISHED ON: 26 Jul 2013

Privacy gets another push from recent surveillance revelations, but who shall provide it? A workshop on data protection in cloud computing prior to the upcoming meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force tries to get an answer from politicians and techies.

Volume 2, Issue 3

Law of the cloud: on the supremacy of the user interface over copyright law

Primavera De Filippi, Research and Studies Center of Administrative Science (CERSA/CNRS), Université Paris II (Panthéon-Assas)
PUBLISHED ON: 18 Jul 2013 DOI: 10.14763/2013.3.175

The provisions of copyright law can potentially be bypassed by cloud computing applications whose interface is designed to regulate the access, use and reuse of online content.

KEYWORDS: Copyright, User interface, Terms of service, License, Public domain, Enclosure, Private regulation, Cloud computing