Promoting global Internet freedom: policy and technology

This report provides information about US government and private sector efforts to promote and support global Internet freedom and a description of Internet freedom legislation and hearings from the 112th Congress. Modern communication tools such as the Internet provide a relatively inexpensive, accessible, easy-entry means of sharing ideas, information, and pictures around the world. In a political and human rights context, in closed societies when the more established, formal news media is denied access to or does not report on specified news events, the Internet has become an alternative source of media, and sometimes a means to organize politically. The openness and the freedom of expression allowed through social networking sites, as well as the blogs, video sharing sites, and other tools of today’s communications technology, have proven to be an unprecedented and often disruptive force in some closed societies. Governments that seek to maintain their authority and control the ideas and information their citizens receive are often caught in a dilemma: they feel that they need access to the Internet to participate in commerce in the global market and for economic growth and technological development, but fear that allowing open access to the Internet potentially weakens their control over their citizens. Internet freedom can be promoted in two ways, through legislation that mandates or prohibits certain activities, or through industry self regulation. Current legislation under consideration by Congress, the Global Online Freedom Act of 2011 (H.R. 3605), would prohibit or require reporting of the sale of Internet technologies and provision of Internet services to “Internetrestricting countries” (as determined by the State Department). Some believe, however, that technology can offer a complementary and, in some cases, better and more easily implemented solution to ensuring Internet freedom. They argue that hardware and Internet services, in and of themselves, are neutral elements of the Internet; it is how they are implemented by various countries that is repressive. Also, Internet services are often tailored for deployment to specific countries; however, such tailoring is done to bring the company in line with the laws of that country, not with the intention of allowing the country to repress and censor its citizenry. In many cases, that tailoring would not raise many questions about free speech and political repression. This report provides information about federal and private sector efforts to promote and support global Internet freedom and a description of Internet freedom legislation and hearings from the 112th Congress. Three appendixes suggest further reading on this topic and describe censorship and circumvention technologies

Preserving Born Digital Art : Lessons From Artists\u27 Practice

This paper looks at the complex nature of developing effective and appropriate strategies for the preservation of born digital art, in particular networked art. These issues are approached from the perspective of artist practitioners, focusing on a case study of the preservation of a net art project by the author. It is suggested that any preservation strategy begins with artists and the conservation practices that are inculcated into the very act of creation. The paper proposes that for institutional digital art conservation initiatives to be successful they must originate from a pre-existing culture of preservation within digital art communitie

I'm sorry to say, but your understanding of image processing fundamentals is absolutely wrong

The ongoing discussion whether modern vision systems have to be viewed as visually-enabled cognitive systems or cognitively-enabled vision systems is groundless, because perceptual and cognitive faculties of vision are separate components of human (and consequently, artificial) information processing system modeling.Comment: To be published as chapter 5 in "Frontiers in Brain, Vision and AI", I-TECH Publisher, Viena, 200

Internet Predictions

More than a dozen leading experts give their opinions on where the Internet is headed and where it will be in the next decade in terms of technology, policy, and applications. They cover topics ranging from the Internet of Things to climate change to the digital storage of the future. A summary of the articles is available in the Web extras section

Wireless Mesh Networks to Support Video Surveillance: Architecture, Protocol, and Implementation Issues

Current video-surveillance systems typically consist of many video sources distributed over a wide area, transmitting live video streams to a central location for processing and monitoring. The target of this paper is to present an experience of implementation of a large-scale video-surveillance system based on a wireless mesh network infrastructure, discussing architecture, protocol, and implementation issues. More specifically, the paper proposes an architecture for a video-surveillance system, and mainly centers its focus on the routing protocol to be used in the wireless mesh network, evaluating its impact on performance at the receiver side. A wireless mesh network was chosen to support a video-surveillance application in order to reduce the overall system costs and increase scalability and performance. The paper analyzes the performance of the network in order to choose design parameters that will achieve the best trade-off between video encoding quality and the network traffic generated

A Whole Way of Life: Online Communities and Console Gaming

This thesis is a study of TrueAchievements (TA), an online community and social network for players of the Xbox 360 and Xbox One videogame consoles. It is a response to the emerging canon of book-length game studies ethnographic texts, in particular Boellstorff et al.’s Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: a Handbook of Method. The project is guided by two central threads. The first thread is a critique of danah boyd and Mikael Jakobsson’s uses of the rhetoric of social constructionism in their “socio-technical” theories of the relation of ‘the social’ and ‘the technological.’ Drawing on the work of Daniel Miller, I understand this relation to be a dialectic in which the technological is “invented” at the same time as those individuals who compose the social’s subjectivities’ are affected by their reception of the technological. The second thread guiding my thesis is an analysis of TA and its users vis-à-vis the theories of Ien Ang, Lauren Berlant, and Judith Butler. Building on Raymond Williams’ concept of the “structure of feeling” and Berlant’s concept of the “intimate public,” I analyze what participation in TA does for its users and how that doing is structured, ultimately arguing that the singular becomes general on TA through TA users’ learning to “latch onto” certain ideological genres. I understand identity to be a discursive effect: the diffuse but palpable ties which bind the members of TA together are performatively reified through TA users’ enacting of their relation to these ideological genres