Berkman Buzz: June 21, 2013

I'm happy to announce that my book on OA (Open Access, MIT Press, 2012) is now OA. The book came out in mid-June last year, and the OA editions came out one year later, right on schedule. My thanks to MIT Press.

How democracies learned to love internet censorship: http://atfp.co/104Ibkh (via @ForeignPolicy)
—Herdict (@herdict)

Here's a promise: I will buy products and services that offer me more security and privacy. I suspect that there are more people who would also do this than the tech giants believe. Perhaps more startups and investors will smell a nascent market. I believe it exists, and is just waiting for industry to notice.

Rewire officially launched Monday, and I’ve had the chance to do a couple of radio interviews about the book, with Anthony Brooks at Radio Boston and with Brian Lehrer on his show on WNYC. I had great fun with both radio hosts, and was reminded of how grateful I am for public radio, which is often the best forum for people to talk about books and big ideas to a broad audience.

You can't make this stuff up: The Strange Case of Barrett Brown (from @peterjludlow) - http://bit.ly/17sEwCz
—Stuart Shieber (@pmphlt)

The Internet is and has always been a space where participants battle for control. The two core protocols that define the Internet – TCP and IP – are both designed to allow separate networks to connect to each other easily, so that networks that differ not only in hardware implementation (wired vs. satellite vs. radio networks) but also in their politics of control (consumer vs. research vs. military networks) can interoperate easily. It is a feature of the Internet, not a bug, that China – with its extensive, explicit censorship infrastructure – can interact with the rest of the Internet.

I’m proud to announce today the release of an open access collection of five peer reviewed papers on the topic of Internet Censorship and Control. These papers appear in the May issue of the IEEE Internet Computer magazine, but today we also make them available as an open access collection. The collection was edited by Steven Murdoch and me.

Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo has called the popular microblogging service “the pulse of the planet.” With a little less than eight percent of the world’s population on Twitter, that pulse has room to grow. Nevertheless, recent big data research into the geography of the Twittersphere sheds light on where users tweet, with whom they tweet, and what information they share. The findings illustrate that Twitter helps people transcend geographic boundaries that restricted communication in a pre-digital age.

A research team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign examined location data from the Twitter Decahose, which includes 10 percent of tweets sent on a given day. The team examined more than 1.5 billion tweets sent from more than 71 million unique users over 39 days and documented its findings in a paper published online.

A webzine for women in Morocco is causing a stir for its frank treatment of religion and sexuality.

A year and a half ago, Fedoua Miski, who lives in Casablanca, launched Qandisha [fr], a magazine for women in Morocco and beyond. For the 32-year-old trained doctor, her involvement in human rights propelled her to get involved in citizen journalism. The magazine has since earned a strong following in Morroco and abroad, but along the way its web site has been hacked twice and attracted its share of disparaging comments and threats in response to its coverage.