Government mandated blocking of foreign Web content

Blocking of foreign Web content by Internet access providers has been a hot topic for the last 18 months in Germany. Since fall 2001 the state of North-Rhine-Westphalia very actively tries to mandate such blocking. This paper will take a technical view on the problems imposed by the blocking orders and blocking content at access or network provider level in general. It will also give some empirical data on the effects of the blocking orders to help in the legal assessment of the orders.Comment: Preprint, revised 30.6.200

Hang With Your Buddies to Resist Intersection Attacks

Some anonymity schemes might in principle protect users from pervasive network surveillance - but only if all messages are independent and unlinkable. Users in practice often need pseudonymity - sending messages intentionally linkable to each other but not to the sender - but pseudonymity in dynamic networks exposes users to intersection attacks. We present Buddies, the first systematic design for intersection attack resistance in practical anonymity systems. Buddies groups users dynamically into buddy sets, controlling message transmission to make buddies within a set behaviorally indistinguishable under traffic analysis. To manage the inevitable tradeoffs between anonymity guarantees and communication responsiveness, Buddies enables users to select independent attack mitigation policies for each pseudonym. Using trace-based simulations and a working prototype, we find that Buddies can guarantee non-trivial anonymity set sizes in realistic chat/microblogging scenarios, for both short-lived and long-lived pseudonyms.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure

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

Survey of LAN infrastructure and ICT equipment in schools 2005: main report

Nationally representative technical audit of school infrastructure - full repor

Implementing Web 2.0 in secondary schools: impacts, barriers and issues

One of the reports from the Web 2.0 technologies for learning at KS3 and KS4 project. This report explored Impact of Web 2.0 technologies on learning and teaching and drew upon evidence from multiple sources: field studies of 27 schools across the country; guided surveys of 2,600 school students; 100 interviews and 206 online surveys conducted with managers, teachers and technical staff in these schools; online surveys of the views of 96 parents; interviews held with 18 individual innovators in the field of Web 2.0 in education; and interviews with nine regional managers responsible for implementation of ICT at national level