You are here

What we're reading: Provocation

CLOUD COMPUTING: CORPORATE ENCLOSURE OF THE GENERAL INTELLECT

A thought piece from 2011, but even more relevant in 2013; on the subject of Cloud computing, influential Slovene philosopher Slavoj Žižek is wary: "Cloud computing offers individual users an unprecedented wealth of choice — but is this freedom of choice not sustained by the initial choice of a provider, in respect to which we have less and less freedom?”

BEFORE FACEBOOK GETS HACKED

It's not a case of if, but when, argues Adam Levin on the Huffington Post. "The nonstop Facebook information grabs of late, coupled with recent high-profile security breaches, point to the inevitable: a catastrophic breach at Facebook," he says. "When that happens, the most concentrated dossier about you, including all your personally identifiable information, will be in the wrong hands."

SOCIAL MEDIA IN EGYPT: A MIXED BLESSING

"Two years ago, the international media was churning out endless articles about the impact of social media on the political upheaval in the Middle East," writes Lisa Goldman in Techpresident: "This was particularly the case for the Egyptian uprising, which was dubbed the Facebook Revolution." There is, of course, a flip side to social media use in Egypt, however. Some analysts say that in some cases, social media has actually contributed significantly to political polarisation.

EGYPT: CROWDSOURCING AS A FORCE OF CENSORSHIP

When clips  of the film The Innocence of Muslims hit the internet, there was pressure on Muslim countries to do something about it.. In Egypt, various censorship ideas did not get off the ground due to impossibility, impracticality, cost or illegality.  The government could not force sites hosting content from the film to take it down, and could not ban Youtube either. But then they hit on something else: censorship through crowdsourcing

EUROPE vs GOOGLE

The troubled relationship between the European Union and Google continues to be.... troubled. The latest news is that the French Data Protection Commissioner, acting on behalf of the European Union, has announced it will take action against Google after the company failed to reply to questions about its handling of user information

Pages