Websites around the world take part in 'The Day We Fight Back' protest against mass surveillance

When: Thursday, September 19th, 2013
Where: The Lodge at the Regency Center, 1300 Van Ness Ave, San Francisco, CA 94109, USA

EFF established the Pioneer Awards in 1992 to recognize leaders on the electronic frontier who are extending freedom and innovation in the realm of information technology. This year's winners will join an esteemed group of past award recipients that includes Internet pioneer and inventor of the mouse Douglas Engelbart, science fiction author and activist Cory Doctorow, and privacy rights advocate Beth Givens.

This year, we honor Aaron Swartz, James Love, and Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras for their tireless efforts to make the world a better place through democratizing the flow of information.

Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz's achievements and influence on the Internet and its activist community are profound, despite his untimely death at age 26 earlier this year. Among numerous technological achievements, he co-founded Demand Progress—a critical part of the successful campaign to block SOPA and PIPA—and was a committed open access activist. After two years of fighting CFAA charges for downloading millions of academic articles through MIT’s open network, Swartz tragically took his own life. He will be missed.

James Love
James Love is one of the leading champions in the international battle for access to knowledge, defending everyone's right to free speech, privacy, fair competition, and health across the globe for more than 20 years. Love was instrumental in the groundbreaking adoption of a global intellectual property treaty for people with reading and visual disabilities this year.

Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras
Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras brought the world clear and credible news and analysis about the massive domestic surveillance programs currently conducted by the NSA – transforming leaked documents by whistleblower Edward Snowden into riveting narrative that everyone could understand. These blockbuster stories exposed a web of convoluted, invasive spying on phone call history, email connections, and other communications data, sparking outrage across the globe and unprecedented admissions by the U.S. government about the extent of the surveillance. Both have a history of creating the incisive journalism and filmmaking essential to maintaining government accountability.

See full Details: https://supporters.eff.org/civicrm/event/register?id=59

'Grandpa Wen' left helpless as internet drives wave of unrest through China

Whenever China suffers a major disaster, a visit from Wen Jiabao, or "Grandpa Wen", is usually enough to comfort the victims and reassure the country that its Communist leaders are looking after them.

So five days after two Chinese bullet trains collided in the south of the country, killing at least 39 and injuring more than 200, Mr Wen duly arrived at the scene.

Standing on a patch of gravel on Thursday that had been cleared of the wreckage, the Chinese premier promised to "get to the bottom" of what had gone wrong and apologised for not arriving sooner, blaming an 11-day illness and doctor's orders to rest.

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Governments Are Still Trying to Kill, Replace or Undo the Internet

For all the optimism — much of it well-placed — about the Internet and social tools like Twitter and Facebook helping to create revolutions in the Middle East, there is a corresponding tide of repression, censorship and surveillance by governments aimed at the Internet and the freedoms it allows. A new UNESCO report looks at the scope of these efforts and the emerging effort to create a form of “digital rights” that can counter-balance the attempts of repressive governments to shut down free speech on the Internet. Meanwhile, both Iran and Syria have upped the ante in their attempts to blockade the web.

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Vivek Wadhwa: My Ethics

Several people have asked about my views on controversy swirling around the blogosphere about journalists/blogger ethics. Given the subjects that I research, and the controversial topics that I write about, I thought it best to document my own situation.

I presently hold appointments at five great universities—Duke, Harvard, Emory, UC-Berkeley, and Singularity. Duke pays me a base salary; Harvard pays for travel and funds some of my research; Emory pays me an honorarium for talks that I give there; UC-Berkeley is too broke to pay anyone anything; and I am not accepting payment from Singularity. This is my way of giving back to the world. I have gained a lot from my education and from society. What better way to give back than to impart education?

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New Greenpeace report digs up the dirt on Internet data centres

For most of us, when we think about our environmental footprint, the first things that spring to mind are how to commute to work, the kind of bags we use for grocery shopping, or the detergents we wash our clothes with. But how often do we consider the energy we use when surfing or searching the web? And how how much polluting, dirty energy does our Facebook profile generate?

"How dirty is your data?" is the first ever report on the energy choices made by IT companies including Akamai, Amazon.com (Amazon Web Services), Apple, Facebook, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo, and highlights the need for greater transparency from global IT brands on the energy and carbon footprint of their Internet infrastructure.

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Facebook shares green data centre technology

Facebook has announced that it will share the design secrets behind its new energy-efficient data centre with rival companies.

The social network's facility in Prineville, Oregon is said to use 38% less power than existing centres.

It hopes, by making the innovations public, to cut the amount of electricity the industry consumes.

Despite Facebook's advances, some environmental groups have criticised the firm over its green credentials.

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MT Expert's Ten Top Tips: Leading in an age of mass collaboration

How have online social networks changed the way leaders must operate? Here are ten top tips.

Gordon Brown has come in for a bit of stick this week following his conference speech – and a complaint often levelled against him is that he’s not a natural leader. ‘Brown is a manager and not a leader, which has always been his problem,’ leadership specialist Paul Bridle said afterwards. ‘He has no ability to understand what people want to hear’. And despite his wife’s efforts on Twitter, the PM’s hardly embraced social media (who can forget that eerie YouTube video). So what’s he doing wrong? MT asked Leadershift author Emmanuel Gobillot to give us his top tips on how to lead in the brave new world of mass collaboration…

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Sustainability and B2B Brands: Driving green for growth

Sustainability means many things to many people. Environmental sustainability, in particular, has definitions that vary across industries, companies, and business segments.

There are, however, a few basic truths that drive all organizations to adopt sustainable practices:

· Driving demand generation through product/service innovation
· Increasing brand equity internally and externally
· Managing cost efficiencies
· Becoming the moral compass for all stakeholders
· Managing risk as it relates to regulation

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Confronting Hate Speech on the Web

On Wednesday morning, Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center delivered a presentation to the students of New York’s Independence High School about the spread of hatred on the Internet. This was not your typical PowerPoint deck: Cooper’s tour through the darker recesses of the Web included YouTube videos depicting burning Korans; an image gallery belong to a Greek skinhead group on photo-sharing site Photobucket; and a controversial poem posted to IslamOnline.net entitled “How to Behead.”

In Simon Wiesenthal’s new report on this topic, “Facebook, YouTube +: How Social Media Outlets Impact Digital Terrorism and Hate,” the group discovered around 10,000 instances of what it considers hateful or potentially dangerous postings on the Web, an increase of 25% from last year. Cooper says this number of instances is, in a sense, “not even that important anymore” – since the conversational nature of the Web makes it hard to count the number of incendiary comment threads, Twitter posts and re-posts, and copycat videos.

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Internet Center for Corruption Research

A Joint Initiative of The University of Passau and Transparency International.

The Internet Center for Corruption Research provides you with the TI-Corruption Perceptions Index, a comparative assessment of countries' integrity performance, alongside with related academic research on corruption. Approach our research area for this purpose.

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Dar voz al capital silencioso

• Un estudio propone que internet facilite la implicación de los accionistas minoritarios en las compañías

• La ley debería adaptarse para garantizar los derechos de los socios

Reunión de accionistas Junta general ordinaria de Cepsa, el pasado mes de junio, en Madrid.

En muchas de las sociedades cotizadas, la mayor parte del capital está en manos de los socios minoritarios o de pequeños inversores. Las acciones en manos de los grupos de control o de referencia no superan el 20% del total, pero poseen la gestión de las sociedades, ya que cuentan con más medios para agruparse y ejercer sus derechos. ¿Por qué no pueden los minoritarios participar en la toma de decisiones de estas sociedades?

El estudio La inversión del minoritario: el capital silencioso, de la Fundación Alternativas, analiza cómo estos socios minoritarios se ven mermados en su intención de participar en la toma de decisiones y propone que sean las nuevas tecnologías (internet) las que faciliten la "participación efectiva" en las sociedades. "Existe un círculo vicioso: el accionista minoritario no dispone de los medios necesarios para ejercer sus derechos. Como no puede ejercer sus derechos, no puede exigir que se implanten medios que le permitan hacerlo", afirma la abogada Ángeles Pellón, una de las autoras del estudio.

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A Corporate Guide to the Global Blogosphere

The new model of peer-to-peer communications