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Archive for the 'Events in Cambridge' Category

Special Berkman Web Event: Jesse Dylan, Director of will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” – Thursday 3/6 at 10:30am

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Special Berkman Webcast Event with Jesse Dylan and Rob Holzer, Thursday 3/6 at 10:30AM

Jesse Dylan, the director behind will.i.am‘s Yes We Can video, and Rob Holzer, CEO of Syrup NYC, will discuss the next stage of their attempt to build a movement geared around the Hope|Act|Change web site (hopeactchange.com) in a special Berkman webcast event this Thursday (3/6) at 10:30AM ET. This is meant to be a discussion on how they can further develop their website, and through the Net, engage Americans in the process of political change. (The Hope|Act|Change site is not affiliated with the Obama Campaign and does not promote the candidate.)

This event will be webcast live at 10:30 AM ET on this page. Webcast viewers can join the discussion through IRC text chat or in the virtual world Second Life on Berkman Island.

Links

+ will.i.am’s Video

+ Jesse’s Page on Wikipedia

March 14: Book Release Party: OpenNet Initiative’s Access Denied

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Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering is now on bookshelves! To celebrate the release of the OpenNet Initiative’s new book, Berkman will host a release party on Friday March 14th at 6:30 PM at Harvard, and we welcome you to join us. This event follows the Journal of Law and Technology Symposium, which will feature a day of wonderful discussions.

Edited by the Principal Investigators of the OpenNet Initiative, Access Denied explores the landscape of censorship-oriented controls on Internet content, from the technology behind it to the policy that supports it and the social implications of it.

Access Denied documents the increasing fragmentation of the Net, to the detriment of all who value the free flow of information. “No one had a clear sense of the nature of Internet censorship until now. This extraordinary work maps the unfreedom of the Net. Unfortunately, that state is becoming the norm,” wrote Larry Lessig about the book.

We hope to see you on the 14th. In the meantime, keep an eye out for all of ONI’s continually updated research and insights.

Live Updates from Today’s FCC Hearing at Harvard Law School, Pt 2

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David Weinberger is liveblogging the event.

Kevin Parker is liveblogging the event.

Wendy Seltzer is liveblogging the event.

Drew Clark is liveblogging the event.

Join the live IRC Chat in the room.

Post a question for discussion here.

Listen to the live webcast here.

FCCBoston08 Del.icio.us Tag Stream

Statement from Copps (PDF)

Statement from Adelstein (PDF)

(These notes are by no means complete and comprehensive – and represent a summary, not a transcript, of the event)

4:00: Kevin Parker writes:

“Back to questions…

C. Martin: Should we investigate usage caps over time? P. Clark: Yes, you need to be careful, but we should recognize that there are costs associated with usage. This allows ISPs to have a postive engagement with customers instead of a negative one. This is simillar to the way things work in wireless.

P. Clark: The models don’t work very well. How do we quantify what is acceptable congestion? This is hard and Comcast has tried to say that it is what doesn’t interfere with others. How do we impose fairness among users? Nobody can send bits faster than anyone else at the same time (this is the historical approach). There has to be some way to deal with congestion.”

3:50: Playback of submitted selected video comments from the public

3:30: Via David Weinberger:

“Daniel Weitzner of MIT says the entire Web is peer-to-peer, although not technically. People use the Net in a synchronous, P2P manner. E.g., pages are pulled together from info all over. We depend on the open nature of the Web to enable that.

Richard Bennett (network architect): Does free speech require abandoning the active mgt of net traffic? If so, then we have to shut down the Internet. Is it legit to manage the Net by discriminating by application? The Net and its constituent nets serve different apps. E.g., VOIP needs to avoid jitter. It makes sense to move apps that don’t care about jitter (e.g., email) to the back of the queue. BitTorrent is insensitive to jitter; you care about the time between first and last packet, but not jitter of individual packets….except for apps like Vuze, but RB doubts Vuze’s business viability. If we abandon app discriminatory we have to get rid of IP because it includes info about the app in the packets. Get rid of Wifi because QoS discriminates among apps. Get rid of difference between UDP and TCP. We have to get rid of discrimination within their own homes. Even on Ethernet we have to discriminate among apps, e.g., WoS for audio systems to avoid lipsynching issues If you add capacity to a network, you’ve only moved the bottleneck from the first hop to the second hop. NN would inhibit rural delivery since it depends on wifi. So, sit back. We’ll solve it with more bandwidth and with revisions of the apps that use it, like BitTorrent.

David Clark says that TV is central here because it increases the traffic and it’s a collision of pricing models. We should be partnering, not fighting. Let’s talk about business model. The usage cost to Comcast for a month of user usage might be around $0.50. TV usage is 40 times as much (taking reasonable estimates), i.e., $20/month to cover your user costs. What’s going to give is the all you can eat flat rate pricing. We have to find a way that will be acceptable to the user. David likes selling tiers of consumption.”

Pictures from today’s FCC hearing at Harvard Law School

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Here are a few photos from the morning session:

Tim Wu on the big screen in front of the FCC commissioners

Yochai Benkler and Marvin Ammori sitting on panel

The whole panel

David Weinberger live blogs the event

Berkfolks watch the morning session

More as the day goes on!

FCC Hearing Agenda for Monday 2/25

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The agenda for this Monday’s FCC Hearing, hosted by the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, has been announced. You can learn more about the hearing at this link, and see the agenda below.

11:00 a.m. Welcome/Opening Remarks

11:45 a.m. Technology Demonstration – Gilles BianRosa, Chief Executive Officer, Vuze, Inc.

12:00 p.m. Panel Discussion 1: Policy Perspectives

* Marvin Ammori, General Counsel, Free Press
* Yochai Benkler, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School
* The Honorable Daniel E. Bosley, State Representative, Massachusetts
* David L. Cohen, Executive Vice President, Comcast Corporation
* The Honorable Tom Tauke, Executive Vice President – Public Affairs Policy and Communications, Verizon Communications
* Timothy Wu, Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
* Christopher S. Yoo, Professor of Law and Director, Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition, University of Pennsylvania Law School

1:30 Lunch break

2:15 Panel Discussion 2: Technological Perspectives
* Daniel Weitzner, Director, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Decentralized Information Group
* Richard Bennett, Network Architect
* David Clark, Senior Research Scientist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
* Eric Klinker, Chief Technology Officer, BitTorrent
* David P. Reed, Adjunct Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab
* Scott Smyers, Senior Vice President, Network & Systems Architecture Division, Sony Electronics Inc.

3:45 p.m. Closing Remarks
4:00 p.m. Adjournment

With a special Berkman post-panel discussion to follow in the Ames Courtroom, and a reception afterwards in Pound Hall 212, the John Chipman Gray room.

This week at blog group: Twitter

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Thursday evenings at 7 pm, the Berkman Blog Group meets to discuss blogs, wikis, feeds, mashups, and anything else of interest in the intersection of the social and the technical online. We welcome anyone who’s interested in these issues, from newbie to tech guru.

This week’s guests are Jack Hodgson and Bryan Person, who will lead a discussion of the new blog phenomenon surrounding Twitter.com. Twitter is a sort of “mini blog,” where users update multiple times daily with short, succint entries. Jack and Bryan are new media experts who have also presented on Twitter at BarCampBoston.
The full agenda is available on the Blog Group blog.

This week at blog group: Povo.com

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Thursday evenings at 7 pm, the Berkman Blog Group meets to discuss blogs, wikis, feeds, mashups, and anything else of interest in the intersection of the social and the technical online. We welcome anyone who’s interested in these issues, from newbie to tech guru.

This week, we’ll be joined by Hasty and Max, of the new map mashup site Povo.com. As they put it, “Povo is a wiki-based, collaborative tool that lets everyone in the community come together to create, evolve, and maintain city-wide and local neighborhood knowledge.”

The full agenda is available on the Blog Group blog.

Monday, April 30: Teresa Hackett on Digital Libraries in Developing Nations: Challenges and Opportunities

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University: Knowledge Beyond Authority
Internet & Society Conference 2007
Lead Up Event

Monday, April 30
12:30 pm – Berkman Center Conference Room
23 Everett St., Cambridge, MA

The role and mission of libraries is to collect, organise, preserve and make available the world’s cultural and scientific heritage for current and future generations. Publicly funded libraries operating for the public benefit support access to knowledge, as well as education and training, critical to developing nations whose human resource is central to their advancement. Digital technologies are transforming the way that libraries work. What new opportunities are being created? What challenges do we face and how is eIFL.net addressing them?

Teresa Hackett runs eIFL-IP “Advocacy for Access to Knowledge: copyright & libraries”, a programme to raise awareness in copyright issues for libraries in 50 developing and transition countries. The goal is to build capacity and expertise amongst the eIFL.net library community and to represent the interests of members in key international policy fora such as WIPO, UNESCO and the WTO. Previously, Teresa was the Director of the European library association (EBLIDA), provided technical support to the European Commission library research programme and was part of the team to establish electronic information centres at the British Council Germany. Teresa is currently an Expert Resource Person on the Copyright and Other Legal Matters Committee of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA-CLM). She is a chartered librarian and in 2004 completed a post-graduate diploma in legal studies at the Dublin Institute of Technology. Teresa is a native English speaker and speaks Irish, German and Dutch.

Please note, RSVP is required to attend this event – simply send an email to [rsvp at cyber.law.harvard.edu]

This event will be webcast live. Webcast viewers can join the discussion through IRC text chat or in the virtual world Second Life. If you miss the live chat, catch the podcast audio & video at MediaBerkman. Lunch is provided to those who RSVP. Please email rsvp at cyber.law.harvard.edu

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