http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/10/26/internet-and-surveillance-the-challenges-of-web-2-0-and-social-media/ http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/10/26/internet-and-surveillance-the-challenges-of-web-2-0-and-social-media/#comments Wed, 26 Oct 2011 14:00:06 +0000 Michael Cervieri http://futurejournalismproject.org/post/11949127101

Internet and Surveillance: The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media

Edited by Christian Fuchs, Kees Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund and Marisol Sandoval

A 40-page intro is available here (PDF).

Originally posted at the Future Journalism Project

]]> http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/10/26/internet-and-surveillance-the-challenges-of-web-2-0-and-social-media/feed/ 0

New research shows that personal information including names and sometimes even email addresses is routinely passed from the biggest sites on the web to third parties such as Google, ComScore and Facebook.

Conducted by researchers at Stanford University, the study shows how personal information is commonly — and often unintentionally — leaked when a username is included as part of a URL or a page title after a user registers to use a site, for example. Third parties embedded in that page could receive the URL — and, thus, the user’s name, which is often easily deduced from a username or user ID — in a referrer header, or the data informing a website about pages that link to it, explained Jonathan Mayer, lead researcher on the project.

Mr. Mayer and his group looked at 185 of Quantcast’s top 250 sites — sites that allow users to sign in or provide other identifying information, don’t require a purchase for sign-up, and that weren’t inordinately complex (thus excluding Google, Facebook and Yahoo) — and used fictitious accounts to create profiles or change user settings. They then examined the referrer headers and other relevant data that resulted from the interactions and searched them for personal information.

According to their findings, a username or user ID was leaked to third parties on 109 websites, or 59% in their sample, and the top five recipients of leaked information were sites operated by ComScore, Google Analytics, Quantcast, Google’s DoubleClick ad platform and Facebook.

Originally posted at the Future Journalism Project

Facebook has as many users today as the whole internet had in 2004, the year Facebook was founded.

The data comes from Royal Pingdom, which cites an internet growth statistics site that plots the amount of users using the internet in any given year.

Facebook has over 800 million active users today, while seven years ago in May 2004, there were only 757 million people using the internet worldwide in grand total.

In other eye-popping numbers: it’s now estimated that over 500 million people are now online in China and it’s estimated there’ll be 4.5 billion global mobile phone subscribers by 2012. 

Originally posted at the Future Journalism Project.

]]> http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/10/06/facebook-its-biggie-sized/feed/ 0 http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/09/30/laying-cable/ http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/09/30/laying-cable/#comments Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:27:46 +0000 Michael Cervieri http://futurejournalismproject.org/post/10850597774 Visualization: How does the Internet get information around the globe?]]>

If I’m here and you’re there, and there are great patches of water between us, how does the Internet get information from me to you? Submarine cables, of course.

TeleGeography, a US telecommunications research firm, launched an interactive map that depicts 188 active and planned submarine cable systems and their landing stations.

Selecting a cable gives you information such as its length, who owns it and its capacity.

A global information transmission issue has been — and continues to be — that while there’s a lot of east-west redundancy, north-south infrastructure — and in particular southern hemisphere connectivity — continues to lag.

For example, eastern Africa just recently received a high speed transmission line, and in 2008 cut cables in and around the Suez Canal knocked large swaths of the Middle East offline. 

Originally posted at the Future Journalism Project.

]]> http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/09/30/laying-cable/feed/ 0 http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/08/17/what-happens-on-the-backside-of-your-favorite-web-sites/ http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/08/17/what-happens-on-the-backside-of-your-favorite-web-sites/#comments Thu, 18 Aug 2011 02:22:00 +0000 Michael Cervieri http://futurejournalismproject.org/post/9063463019

Luckily for us there’s a Tumblr for that. And while you might think it’s all a bunch of code the site illustrates otherwise.

Created by Jeff Lam and Josephine Yatar, we now see the secrets behind Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and others. 

H/T: WebUrbanist.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

]]> http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/08/17/what-happens-on-the-backside-of-your-favorite-web-sites/feed/ 0 http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/08/12/the-evolution-of-web-design/ http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/08/12/the-evolution-of-web-design/#comments Fri, 12 Aug 2011 19:54:00 +0000 Michael Cervieri http://futurejournalismproject.org/post/8832707106

The Evolution of Web Design is a great stroll down memory lane noting the text only pages created after Tim Berners Lee’s very first in 1991, the rise of Macromedia’s Flash in the late 90s, the emergence of JavaScript, CSS and Ajax in the early to mid naughts, and the rise of HTML5 and the mobile Web of today.

That’s a whole lot of ground to cover over twenty years. And to think that in another twenty today will seem as quaint to us then as 1991 hypertext seems to us now.

Check it.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

]]> http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/08/12/the-evolution-of-web-design/feed/ 0 http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/03/28/us-know-how-leads-to-mideast-censorship/ http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/03/28/us-know-how-leads-to-mideast-censorship/#comments Mon, 28 Mar 2011 17:11:33 +0000 Michael Cervieri http://futurejournalismproject.org/post/4161971173

Via the Wall Street Journal:

As Middle East regimes try to stifle dissent by censoring the Internet, the U.S. faces an uncomfortable reality: American companies provide much of the technology used to block websites…

…For the U.S., the role of Western companies in Internet censorship poses a dilemma. In a speech last year, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said, “Censorship should not be in any way accepted by any company from anywhere. And in America, American companies need to take a principled stand.”

Lately the State Department has spent more than $20 million to fund software and technologies that help people in the Middle East circumvent Internet censorship that is sustained by Western technology.

Let it be noted that the US bans the sale of technologies it think unsavory regimes could use for military purposes. So what about for civil and human rights violations? Just asking.

Originally posted on The Future Journalism Project.

http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/03/16/your-future-audience-has-arrived/ http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/03/16/your-future-audience-has-arrived/#comments Wed, 16 Mar 2011 10:31:10 +0000 Michael Cervieri http://michael.cervieri.com/?p=134371489

Your future audience has arrived. 

A study on children by Sesame Workshop and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center  concludes that TV still rules the roost but the Internet is gaining ground, with 80% of those under five going online at least once a week. 

Original Report. H/T: Mashable. Photo via Padawan Neophyte on Flickr.

Random aside: whatever happened to playing with blocks?

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

]]> http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/03/16/your-future-audience-has-arrived/feed/ 0