Archive: Year: 2014

Dorian Mode The man Newsweek identified as the inventor of Bitcoin denies it, reports the AP's Ryan Nakashima. An account belonging to Satoshi Nakamoto on the P2P Foundation site, which had been dormant for 3 years, has posted this message: "I am not Dorian Nakamoto." Redditors aren't happy that Nakamoto (if it is indeed him) was "doxxed," Andrew Beaujon reports for Poynter. Newsweek's editor says they're standing by the story, reports Gawker's J.K. Trotter. PandoDaily attacks Newsweek for "putting a man's life at risk." By the way, if this is your first exposure to the P2P Foundation, definitely check them out. Its founder, Michel Bauwens, is currently advising Ecuador on how to become an "open social knowledge, commons based society." Edward Snowden's testimony to the European Parliament...

Don't Spill Anything The CIA's monitoring of Senate staffers computer usage apparently came to light after the agency complained to the Senate Intelligence Committee that aides working on the committee's investigation of its detention and interrogation program had printed out secret documents pertaining to that program and removed them from CIA headquarters. This, reports McClatchy DC's Jonathan Landay, Ali Watkins and Marisa Taylor, led "to a determination that the agency recorded the staffers’ use of the computers in the high-security research room." Asked by McClatchy DC about the apparent CIA monitoring of Intelligence Committee computers, President Obama--who was then eating lunch during a visit to Connecticut with four New England governors--said, "I'm going to try to make sure I don't spill anything...

Launch Codes Foreign Policy's Shane Harris reports that Russian forces are "jamming cell phones and severing Internet connections" between Crimea and the rest of Ukraine, but so far they have not launched full-fledged cyber attacks on Ukraine's government or infrastructure. Reuters reports that the mobile phones of members of the Ukrainian Parliament have come under attack. Inside Russia, more than a dozen websites on VKontakte linked to the Ukraine #maidan movement have been shut down by the country's Internet monitoring agency, AP reports. Our Jessica McKenzie offers a roundup of resources to help you follow the Ukraine crisis. PDF Poland-CEE, coming up this March 13-14 in Warsaw, will include a special focus on Ukraine, "featuring civic activist and journalist Svitlana Zalishchuk and Roman Udot, co-chairman...

Kicking Off The New York Times' Robert Mackey reports on how Ukraine's #EuroMaidan activists are using social media to try to counter the Russian narrative about what is taking place in the eastern part of their country. Global Voices' Tetyana Bohdanova takes the pulse of social media users in Ukraine and Russia and finds many worrying that "In case of war, everyone will lose!" In case you missed it, here's our Carole Frediani's new report on the role of the Internet and social media in the #EuroMaidan movement's rise. The Crimean Center for Investigative Journalism was broken into and seized by masked gunmen yesterday, David Kaplan reports, but not before the center's entire web history was backed up by the Internet Archive in...

Tools The new installment of the Knight News Challenge is focused on strengthening the free and open Internet. $2.75 million will go to those with a good enough idea--the deadline for the first round of applications is March 18. David Meyer reports for Gigaom on the rise of consumer-friendly privacy tools like Mailpile. Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation explains why they're backing open source encryption tools. (Maybe Knight can send them a check?) WTF? The Houston City Attorney has issued a cease and desist order against Uber, demanding that it stop "transmitting or aiding in the transmission of form e-mails to City officials." He adds, "the excessive number of e-mails has gone unabated, to the point that it has become...

Whiz Kids "It's just a website. We're not going to the moon." Steven Brill's cover story account in Time Magazine of how a relatively unheralded group of tech stars swooped in to save HealthCare.gov last fall is studded with such gems. That quote is from Google engineer Mikey Dickerson, one of the squad. As Brill cogently writes: "This is the story of a team of unknown--except in elite technology circles--coders and troubleshooters who dropped what they were doing in various enterprises across the country and came together in mid-October to save the website. In about a tenth of the time that a crew of usual-suspect, Washington contractors had spent over $300 million building a site that didn't work, this ad hoc team...

The Internet Is… Comcast's toughest and most knowledgeable critic, Susan Crawford, explains why Netflix's agreement to pay the giant cable conglomerate a premium for better handling of its streaming video service is an "arbitrary" tax that sets a terrible precedent for other high-capacity innovative uses of the Internet in the U.S. Nilay Patel has written a passionate screed for The Verge whose title says it all: "The Internet is Fucked (but we can fix it)." Time magazine is running a fun excerpt from Julia Angwin's new book, Dragnet Nation, describing her quest to break free from Google's tracking on her online search habits. VC Marc Andreessen explains why he is so bullish about the future of the news business. Ralph Nader wants a billionaire...

Post-Ambition and Fear Not The Obama Administration has developed an offensive cyberwar plan to disrupt the Syrian military, but not deployed it because of an ongoing debate inside the government over the possible consequences of its use, David Sanger reports for The New York Times. Culminating a series of reports done with NBC News, Glenn Greenwald explains in greater detail the work of Britain's GCHQ Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group to "monitor and influence internet communications, and covertly infiltrate online communities in order to sow dissension and disseminate false information." The slide deck accompanying the story is pretty chilling. Words spoken by Will Smith and Sylvester Stallone in "After Earth" and "Rocky Balboa" get repurposed into an inspiring video tribute to Ukraine's protest...

On March 10, I'm going to be talking with noted author and journalist Glenn Greenwald at South by Southwest, in a main hall session co-organized by Personal Democracy Media. We're going to focus on the future of journalism, civil liberties and politics. The idea for this session is that it be a conversation, not a speech or a typical one-on-one interview, and in setting it up we decided that it would be great to try to include lots of questions from the public. To that end, Glenn and I are asking that folks go to his page on AskThem, the new open-source nonprofit platform for crowd-sourcing questions to politicians and public figures, to post and vote up the questions you...

Secret-Spilling Machine The news from Ukraine, where last week's violent anti-government protests have ended, seemingly, with the collapse of President Victor Yanukovich's regime, is heartening and suggests that even in the age of hyper-surveillance and police forces willing to use live ammunition against civilians, authoritarians don't always prevail. Some questions I'd love to see more reporting on: How did the "sotni"--the irregular but well-disciplined groups of roughly 100 street fighters each--get organized and what holds them together? Unlike other recent protest movements, which have been more adept at using social media to organize to dissolve power than to build counter-power, how have did #EuroMaidan coalition get built? What happened to the Yanukovich regime's use of mobile phone tracking--recall those intimidating text messages it sent...