- Mobile Email Numbers (Luke Wroblewski) — 79% use their smartphone for reading email, a higher percentage than those who used it for making calls and in Feb ’12, mobile email overtook webmail client use.
- ProperSSL — a series of best practices for establishing SSL connections between clients and servers.
- How We Are Losing the War for the Free and Open Internet (Sue Gardner) — The internet is evolving into a private-sector space that is primarily accountable to corporate shareholders rather than citizens. It’s constantly trying to sell you stuff. It does whatever it wants with your personal information. And as it begins to be regulated or to regulate itself, it often happens in a clumsy and harmful way, hurting the internet’s ability to function for the benefit of the public.
- The Amazingly Low Cost of PRISM — breaks down costs to store and analyse the data gathered from major Internet companies. Total hardware cost per year for 3.75 EB of data storage: €168M
"open Internet" entries
Four short links: 3 July 2013
Mobile Numbers, SSL Best Practices, Free and Open No More, and PRISM Budget
We the People need our existing Bill of Rights to apply in the digital domain
Why propose principles for Internet freedom and a "Digital Bill of Rights" when existing ones will do?
How the Bill of Rights is being upheld in a digital context is, to say the least, an interesting living story to follow.
The passage of a resolution that human rights must also be protected on the Internet in the United Nations Human Rights Council was a historic affirmation of the principle that “the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online.”
This affirmation may play well in the headlines, but it does raise some practical questions. For instance, would this high-level resolution by the U.N. Human Rights Council inhibit member countries if they violate their citizens’ right to freedom of expression online, if such countries are already violating human rights offline? Or would the U.N. Security Council ever vote for sanctions over Internet censorship of political or religious content that might be online speech in one country and deemed blasphemous or even illegal in another?
Violators could include Iran, Russia, Cuba, Syria — but also Pakistan, China, India or the United States or United Kingdom, should a livestreamer’s smartphone be taken away during a march or cell service shut down during a protest, as it was at a BART in San Francisco.
In this context — and related to their concerns about similar bills to the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act — Rep. Darrell Issa and Sen. Ron Wyden proposed a “Digital Bill of Rights” at the 2012 Personal Democracy Forum in New York City this summer.
In a phone interview last month, I asked Rep. Issa about the ideas behind the proposal principles and freedom of expression online.
FCC contest stimulates development of apps to help keep ISPs honest
The winners of the FCC's Open Internet challenge provide consumers with new tools to monitor ISPs.
The FCC Open Internet Challenge stimulated the creation of a new mobile application that enables consumers to analyze the performance of their mobile broadband network. Combined with the other two winners of the challenge, consumers now have better tools to measure their Internet service.