Berkman Buzz: February 14, 2014

Eric Gordon, Committee Member for the 2014 Digital Media and Learning Conference, explains his conference track, "Playing For Keeps: Gameful Design For Real-World Action and Social Change."

The DML 2014 Conference will be held March 6-8, 2014 in Boston, Massachusetts. The DML Conference is supported by the MacArthur Foundation and organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the University of California’s systemwide Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine.

Eric is interviewed by Howard Rheingold, a cyberculture pioneer, social media innovator, and author of "Smart Mobs."

'Open Access' by @petersuber Named Outstanding Academic Title http://t.co/5S2NSGk2Zj
—Berkman Center (@berkmancenter)

A theoretical question on my mind: has anyone ever tried putting a voluntary botnet at work to mine crypto-currencies for philanthropic fundraising purposes?

Botnets mining bitcoins (botcoins!) is no new idea. Though usually there not voluntary botnets, and they mine for profit, which makes it a criminal activity. See ZeroAccess for instance. Or ESEA, the gaming company that got caught mining behind its user’s backs (“serious gamers like ESEA’s customers made excellent soldiers for a botnet army: Gaming machines have powerful graphical processing units that are pretty good at bitcoin mining”). They got sued for it in the States, which gives us a nice peak into a legal discussion around non-voluntary botnet bitcoin mining.

If the corporations are storing the data already—for some business purpose—then the answer is easy: Only they should store it. If the corporations are not already storing the data, then—on balance—it's safer for the NSA to store the data. And in many cases, the right answer is for no one to store the data. It should be deleted because keeping it makes us all less secure.

Tomorrow, the taxi committee of Seattle’s City Council is voting on proposed new regulations for ridesharing services. The gist of the proposed regulations is to treat rideshare vehicles (such as those dispatched by Sidecar, Lyft in the US, and Carpooling.com and BlaBlaCar in Europe) like taxis — imposing a traditional regime of licensing, inspection, limitations and disclosure.

The proposed Seattle regulations are a perfect example of a “1.0” trust regime. Build a high bar for participation, where new actors (TNC companies, drivers) must prove a lot up front and ask permission to operate. This is how we’ve regulated the real world in the industrial era. This is NOT how things are typically regulated in the internet era.

New on Herdict blog: Bing Needs to Explain Its Search Algorithms: This week, Microsoft’s Bing search engine wa... http://bit.ly/1iTC7D4 —Herdict (@herdict)

Happy Valentine's Day! This February 14 we are talking about love and courtship around the world. We'll be sharing stories from the Global Voices community, including a lovely first-hand account from the couple Sylwia Presley and Dan Braghis who met through Global Voices, a daughter who told her father she got married via text message, and a story of modern love with a traditional twist from Pakistan.