Berkman Buzz: February 17, 2012

Public Resource republishes many court documents. Although these documents are all part of the public record and PR will not take them down because someone finds their publication uncomfortable, PR will evaluate and honor some requests to remove documents from search engine results. Public Resources does so using a robots.txt file or "robot exclusion protocol" which websites use to, among other things, tell search engine's web crawling "robots" which pages they do not want to be indexed and included in search results. Originally, the files were mostly used to keep robots from abusing server resources by walking through infinite lists of automatically generated pages or to block search engines from including user-contributed content that might include spam.

The result for Public Resource, however, is that PR is now publishing, in the form of its robots.txt, a list of all of the cases that people have successfully requested to be made less visible!.

Try out the Gender Remixer for LEGO's marketing to girls and boys http://www.genderremixer.com/lego/ @berkmancenter
—John Palfrey (@jpalfrey)

Hey folks! We’re hoping to take Radio Berkman in some amazing new directions this Spring, but we want your feedback.

Should we change our name? How can we tell better stories? What’s missing from current reporting on tech and internet issues?

We’ve made up a cute little survey right here, and would love for you to drop us some thoughts!

The Citizen Media Law Project has had a busy month on all fronts! In January, the CMLP filed an amicus brief (under our new name, the Digital Media Law Project - more on that coming soon) with the support of our colleagues at Harvard Law's Cyberlaw Clinic in the Massachusetts Appeals Court. As our press release notes, in the brief - filed in the case Jenzabar, Inc. v. Long Bow, Inc. - CMLP expressed concerns about use of trademark law in cases that center around communicative, critical speech about a trademark's owner or affiliates, as the free-speech balancing tests employed in trademark law do not adequately protect such critical speech. The CMLP wishes to send a big thank you to HLS students Alan Ezekiel, Michael Hoven, and Andrew Pearson for their impressive work on the brief.

Mountain Lion is slated to include a feature called Gatekeeper as part of the security and privacy settings. Gatekeeper allows administrators (those with full privileges on a Mac) to limit the applications that can run on the Mac. They can choose among allowing apps downloaded from the Mac App Store only, or apps from outside the Store so long as they are digitally signed to Apple’s satisfaction by their developers, or apps from anywhere. (The latter has been the way both Mac and Windows PCs have worked, for better or worse, since the introduction of the Apple II in 1977.)

We here at Future of the Internet will refrain from saying “I told you so” about the prospect of Macs only running applications from the Mac App Store.

Smart, insightful piece from Julian Dibbel on the potentials and limits of mesh networks: http://t.co/mJMou47w—Ethan Zuckerman (@ethanz)

Trend-tracking isn’t my day job. But in my own shuttling back and forth between physical and digital curation, scholarship, and teaching, I’m regularly struck by the ways in which the normativity of screen culture today is intensifying urges for sensorially richer, more tactile forms of experience and communication. From the revival of knitting and other forms of manual craft to the chapbook subculture that seems to be spreading worldwide to makers fairs, “analog” modes of experience, culture, and knowledge making/sharing are showing signs of renewed vigor. Or, rather, their renewal is being fed by the very pervasiveness of networked electronic screens.

Syrian security forces arrested Syrian blogger and freedom of speech advocate Razan Ghazzawi on Thursday 16 February, 2012, during a raid on the offices of the Syrian Center for Freedom of Expression in Damascus where the activist works. Ghazzawi was arrested along with 13 of her colleagues, including the Head of the Center, Mazen Darwish.

This is the second time Razan Ghazzawi is arrested by the Syrian authorities. She was first detained in December 2011 at the Syrian-Jordanian border while on her way to attend a conference on freedom of expression online. Her arrest sparked an online outcry and an international campaign called for her immediate release. Razan was eventually released after spending 15 days in jail..