n response a loose coalition of Islamist hackers have defaced several French websites. Several hacking groups are claiming responsibility for “religiously motivated defacements,” Helmi Noman, a researcher with the Berkman Center at Harvard University and the Citizen Lab at University of Toronto told Mashable.One group, calling itself the United Islamic Cyber Force, taunted Anonymous in various defacement while calling on other Muslim hackers to join its “OpFrance” hacking campaign.

via It’s hacker jihad: Islamist skiddies square up to Anonymous • The Register.

A loose coalition of Islamist hackers has defaced several French websites in response to “OpCharlieHebdo,” a cyber operation launched by Anonymous hackers late last week after the attacks that killed 12 people at the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

In the last few days, “tens” of hacking groups have started claiming responsibility “for religious motivated defacements,” according to Helmi Noman, a researcher with the Berkman Center at Harvard University and the Citizen Lab at University of Toronto. These defacements seem the latest development in an ongoing online spat between Islamist and pro-Western hacktivists.

via Islamist hackers deface French sites in response to ‘Operation Charlie Hebdo’.

It’s also quaint to think that users would click through the multiple dialogue boxes necessary to mimic informed consent, said Jonathan L Zittrain, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Would you? Instead, he said, there ought to be independent proxies who represent the users and can perform that checking function.”I worry about leaning too hard on choice,” he said, “when the real thing is just treat your users with dignity.”

via Big data scientists face ethical challenges after Facebook study – University World News.

. Shapiro got his start in public radio as an intern at The Connection, a show hosted by Christopher Lydon on WBUR. Shapiro moved to Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society in 2002, where his interest in public radio, the Internet, and entrepreneurialism grew.“It was sort of a nascent moment. I feel like it was the end of the dot-com first wave — this huge, churning commerce machine sort of collapsed and none of the new architecture had taken shape. There was no new investment going into startups.”

via Five things you should know about Jake Shapiro, of PRX – Business – The Boston Globe.

Any time Google censors something, it notes it in a public log on its transparency report. Google also provides a link to chillingeffects.com, a Web site run by Harvard’s Berkman Center that records online content that has been censored.

via Google: The reluctant censor of the Internet – ABC15 Arizona.

The Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain summarised the findings thus: “Overall, users notified of their friends’ voting were 0.39% more likely to vote than those in the control group, and any resulting decisions to cast a ballot also appeared to ripple to the behaviour of close Facebook friends, even if those people hadn’t received the original message. That small increase in turnout rates amounted to a lot of new votes. The researchers concluded that their Facebook graphic directly mobilised 60,000 voters, and, thanks to the ripple effect, ultimately caused an additional 340,000 votes to be cast that day. As they point out, [in 2000] George W Bush won Florida, and thus the presidency, by 537 votes – fewer than 0.01% of the votes cast in that state.”

via Could Facebook be a factor in the next election? | Technology | The Guardian.

It could have been North Koreans but not connected to the government. According to security expert Bruce Schneier, “reusing old attack code is a sign of a more conventional hacker being behind this.” There is consensus among security experts that there was nothing about this hack that required the resources of a nation-state.

Both the US Government and Sony Have Political Reasons to Blame North Korea

Sony faces the possibility of numerous lawsuits as a result of sensitive data from employees, ex-employees and various partners being exposed. According to Jonathan Zittrain, professor of law and computer science at Harvard University, Sony might have some immunity from these lawsuits if this attack was part of an act of war.

via Why Security Experts Are Skeptical that North Korea Masterminded the Sony Attack – Business Insider.

On the other side, some experts said an accepted privacy policy will emerge as new tools give consumers more control of the information they wish to share.

“Key to our emerging privacy-creating system will be the ability of individuals to assert their own terms, policies and preferences in dealings with others, including companies and governments …” wrote David “Doc” Searls, director of ProjectVRM at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

via Tech Spotlight: Pew looks at the future of privacy.

Doc Searls, founder of Project VRM at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, wrote in a study by Elon University: “We need to to understand the Internet as what it really is: a way to connect anyone and anything to anybody and anything else, with little if any regard for the means between the ends.”

Nobody owns protocols that control operations of the Internet, Searls said.

“Everybody can use them,” he said, “and anybody can improve them.”

via Obama asks FCC to regulate Internet as utility | Region | The State.

“The FBI points to reused code from previous attacks associated with North Korea, as well as similarities in the networks used to launch the attacks,” said writer Bruce Schneier. “This sort of evidence is circumstantial at best. It’s easy to fake, and it’s even easier to interpret it wrong. In general, it’s a situation that rapidly devolves into storytelling, where analysts pick bits and pieces of the ‘evidence’ to suit the narrative they already have worked out in their heads.”

Schneier also said that diplomatically, it may suit the US government to be “overconfident in assigning blame for the attack” to try and discourage future attacks by nation states.

He also pointed to comments by Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain, who said Sony might be encouraged to present the hack as an act or terrorism to help fend of likely lawsuits from current and former employees damaged by leaked material.

via Sony hack: sacked employees could be to blame, researchers claim | Film | The Guardian.