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News of the Week Top 5; February 18, 2015

News of the Week Top 5; February 18, 2015

1. Why the Copyright Board of Canada Needs a Leafs-Style Tear-Down 2. The Canadian Privacy Cases of 2014 3. How “omnipotent” hackers tied to NSA hid for 14 years—and were found at last: “Equation Group” ran the most advanced hacking operation ever uncovered. 4. Russia Reaches The Censorship Endgame: Banning VPNs, Tor And Web Proxies 5. Facebook still suspending Native […]

Conference version of “Relating Memes of Justice & Technology”

Conference version of “Relating Memes of Justice & Technology”

Though most but far from all of the slides in this presentation to the 2015 SLS Conference at TRU Law on February 5, 2015 have made it into some the decks in this course, thought it might be slightly helpful to anyone really interested in the ideas if the latest full presentation appeared all in […]

Tuesday Presentation Materials

Ahead of my presentation on Tuesday, please check out the following: Glen Greenwald: Why privacy matters   Sarah Lewis: Creativity and Privacy Go Hand in Hand Chapter 11 of Code 2.0 Have a great weekend, Amjad

“Press Start: Culture, Industry, and Innovation in Japanese Gaming” conference @ UBC – February 27 & 28, 2015

Video games are within the purview of this course but because of  the “other” course we have generally stayed away from the subject. That said the conference at UBC t his coming Friday and Saturday, February 27 & 28, 2015 may be of some interest. Scholars, players, and designers will come together in a wide […]

Jon Ronson on public shaming

Jon Ronson on public shaming

Jon Ronson will be coming out with a new book next month entitled So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. As one of my classmates has pointed out in a previous blog post, social media is increasingly being used as a forum for public shaming; a ‘digital mob’, so to speak. Ronson was also interviewed in this […]

The ‘Reddit exodus’

The ‘Reddit exodus’

Currently in the news: “… In a strange twist that perfectly illustrates the current culture-wide debate around online speech, a group of disgruntled users have begun an exodus off the site — claiming, against all odds, that Reddit is censoring them as a matter of corporate policy.” There is also a Gawker news article that expands […]

Utilitarian Justifications at the Grammys

Utilitarian Justifications at the Grammys

Recording Academy president Neil Portnow used the Grammys as an opportunity to highlight the importance of copyright protection, using a argument you might recognize as utilitarian: “What if we’re all watching the Grammys a few years from now and there’s no Best New Artist award because there aren’t enough talented artists and songwriters who are actually able […]

News of the Week Top 5; February 11, 2015

News of the Week Top 5; February 11, 2015

1. An Open Letter to Prime Minister Cameron: 20th-century solutions won’t help 21st-century surveillance (Jonathan Zittrain) 2. US’s ‘Naughty List’ Of Countries Whose Intellectual Property Rules We Don’t Like Is A Joke That’s No Longer Funny 3. Left Shark Bites Back: 3D Printer Sculptor Hires Lawyer To Respond To Katy Perry’s Bogus Takedown 4. Coding Creativity: Copyright and […]

Class 5 & 6 Slides; February 3 & 10, 2015

Class 5 & 6 Slides; February 3 & 10, 2015

Have remixed the last two sets of slides into one (hopefully coherent) whole… jon

Impact of twitter’s “mass shaming” problem

Impact of twitter’s “mass shaming” problem

This article does a great job of showing the real-life impact of online harassment in the context of “naming and shaming” people on Twitter (it focuses on people who have said unintentionally offensive or stupid things which went viral and usually resulted in them losing their jobs, etc.). It gives some interesting insight into the point […]