In episode 13 of Social Change Technology Burcu Bakioglu (Postdoctoral Fellow in New Media at Lawrence University) returns to talks to Hector Postigo about his new book The Digital Rights Movement: The Role of Technology in Subverting Digital Copyright. Hector is Associate Professor in the Department of Broadcasting, Telecommunications, and Mass Media in the School of Communications and Theater at Temple University. In the podcast Burcu and Hector discuss the complex relationships between technology, law and emergent social movements such as what became known as the digital rights movement.

One unmissable conclusion from Mr. Brunton's engrossing story is that spam has meant very different things at different times. In the 1970s, it meant the breach of commonly held norms. In the 1990s, it implied the invasion of user communities by outsiders. Today it means the intrusion of automated bots into a formerly human realm. By tracing the evolution of the many meanings of spam, Mr. Brunton upsets the traditional Whiggish narrative of digital culture, which suggests that users simply find one another and build new communities as they please. Rather, he suggests, they were in some ways fortunate to be forced to come together to fight a common enemy.

new industry group, "NetChoice" has placed OA legislation on their watch list for bills to be targeted and defeated.

in Cyber War Will Not Take Place, Thomas Rid, reader in war studies at King’s College London, throws a well-timed bucket of cold water on an increasingly alarmist debate. Just as strategic bombing never fulfilled its promise, and even air power at its apogee – Kosovo in 1999, or Libya two years ago – only worked with old-fashioned boots on the ground, Rid argues that the promise of cyber war is equally illusory.

Ethan has crafted a beautiful, engaging book for all who seek to transcend the cultural, political, and linguistic barriers that history has placed between us. Unfortunately, I fear that those of us who aspire to global citizenship are a small and diminishing minority. In a world where information is everywhere, time is compressed, and attention is fragmented, I sense an emerging impulse to cultivate local community around common shards of our fragmented culture.

In our previous post on Strongbox, the New Yorker’s newly launched tool for secure data submissions by anonymous sources, we asked for your thoughts on the project’s uses, security, and potential benefits and problems for journalists and their sources.

Our first wave of responses includes thoughts from the New York Times’ Jacob Harris, the Overview Project’s (and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism’s) Jonathan Stray, and Mike Tigas, OpenNews Fellow at ProPublica. Each responded via email, and we’re publishing their comments here in full because they were too interesting to excerpt.

This morning, The New Yorker launched Strongbox, an online place where people can send documents and messages to the magazine, and we, in turn, can offer them a reasonable amount of anonymity. It was put together by Aaron Swartz, who died in January, and Kevin Poulsen.

The first thing I want to do, then, is slow us down a bit, and go through the last year with a bit more care than we’re usually able to do, to do a “close reading” of the year of the MOOC, as it were. Not only because I have the time, but because, to be blunt, MOOC’s only make sense if you don’t think about it too much, if you’re in too much of a hurry to go deeply into the subject.

It is that, in the UK anyway, many or most of the recording functions of Google Glass seem likely to be illegal. The 1998 Data Protection Act defines data as ‘information which is being processed by equipment operating automatically in response to instructions; or is recorded with the intention that it should be processed.’ I don’t speak fluent lawyer, but it seems clear that definition encompasses the recording function of Glass. As for ‘processing’ the data, or doing stuff with it, the definition covers ‘obtaining, recording or holding the data, carrying out any operation or set of operations on the data … disclosure of the information or data by transmission, dissemination, or otherwise making [them] available’.

Productivity and creativity, in other words, can be polar opposites. So how to find a balance?

Despite this vast wealth, and their newfound interest in lobbying Washington, the tech firms are notorious for paying as little as possible to the taxman. Facebook paid no taxes last year, while making a profit of over $1 billion. Apple, “a pioneer in tactics to avoid taxes,” has kept much of its cash hoard abroad, out of reach of Uncle Sam. Microsoft has staved off nearly $7 billion in tax payments since 2009 by using loopholes to shift profits offshore, according to a recent Senate panel report.

counter-intuitive take on US surveillance plans

the implied omniscience of the digital revolution is a gift to power

The topline recommendation of the Lescure report is to ‘re-orientate the fights against piracy’ to focus on commercial-scale counterfeiting. In that regard, it repeals the third strike of the 3 strikes law – that it, suspension of Internet access ( cutting people off the Internet). In parallel, it reduces the level of fine for copyright infringement online – down from €1500 to just €60.

The Commission today unveiled plans for the Global Internet Policy Observatory (GIPO), an online platform to improve knowledge of and participation of all stakeholders across the world in debates and decisions on Internet policies. GIPO will be developed by the Commission and a core alliance of countries and Non Governmental Organisations involved in Internet governance. Brazil, the African Union, Switzerland, the Association for Progressive Communication, Diplo Foundation and the Internet Society have agreed to cooperate or have expressed their interest to be involved in the project.

OASPA conference in Riga

"Big data" is the jargon du jour, the tech world's one-size-fits-all (so long as it's triple XL) answer to solving the world's most intractable problems. But is big data really all it's cracked up to be? Can we trust that so many ones and zeros will illuminate the hidden world of human behavior? Foreign Policy invited Kate Crawford of the MIT Center for Civic Media to go behind the numbers.

new award program for pioneers using OA to innovate. $90k in awards.

It’s fair to say that Wikipedia has spent far more time considering the philosophical ramifications of categorization than Aristotle and Kant ever did.

an example of state OA initiatives which are developing (with SPARC's support).

The Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, in Egypt, has issued a “legal guide to digital security” as part of its digital freedoms program. The guide was produced for campaigners and human rights activists and lawyers interested in digital freedom of expression and the confidentiality of communications and information stored on mobile phones, computers or any other device used to store or distribute data or information.

Rick Smolan says that Big Data is like "watching the world come alive and develop a nervous system. It's unlike anything we've ever seen before." Nora Young interviews Rick about his book, The Human Face of Big Data

Especially if you’re an NGO dealing with open data. You cannot help noticing that the balance of activities in this field is still not quite right. For years, NGOs have been supplementing the role of state in publishing data in Slovakia. Now the government started focusing on this role but the process is very slow and it will take a lot more time until the data is really usable and reliable. In the meantime, data journalism becomes more and more innovative - something that shows great potential but needs a lot of time and resources in order for it to be meaningfully useful.

So what should we do to bring about the strongest possible impact?

Should we let the data-gathering be? Stop supplementing the state’s role and only focus on reusing the data for our own stories and cases? Or should we focus on advocacy? Or should we stay with the data because we wouldn’t trust anyone else to keep it in good shape? Or should we train the journalists to use the data? Or a piece of each?

I’ve got the feeling that right now, this is a common dilemma. That there are many NGOs in a similar situation. So what do we do? What direction do we take at this crossroads?

For us the answer is simple: there was a period of experimenting in the open data community, when everyone was trying to figure things out -- find the best tools and solutions, learn as much as possible – and that was all right. But now it’s time to move on and focus on making an impact. It’s time to work with people who are able to use the data to bring relevant stories based on the data to streamline. Because technology is only a tool with which we want to make an impact - in the form of sparking positive change – let’s use as much of it as we possibly can.

Glass is Google’s unintentional public service announcement on the future of privacy.

Valleywag relaunches with the mission of chronicling the dot-com bust-to-come, in the tradition of the much revered F**kedCompany.com