A new report by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, “Holyoke: A Massachusetts Municipal Light Plant Seizes Internet Access Business Opportunities,” documents the success of a municipally-owned electric utility in providing Internet access services.
Source: Berkman study finds public broadband can succeed – Harvard Law Today
At a talk hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society on June 23, Mitali Thakor, a PhD student in MIT’s HASTS program and a Berkman affiliate, discussed her findings on techniques and strategies for preventing and prosecuting child exploitation and human trafficking, and how new digital approaches to addressing these issues affect young people online.
Source: Human trafficking requires an unconventional approach to policing and prevention – Harvard Law Today
Sands Fish, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, said that the success of #TakeItDown materialized, at least in part, because there was an organized community ready to mobilize. “Black Twitter has become an established public essentially over the past year,” he said. Currently, Fish is working with the Mapping Police Violence project to identify the link between deaths of black people at the hands of the police, and national press attention.
Source: How Black Twitter Helped Take Down The Confederate Flag
Holyoke’s municipal utility has created a broadband network that can compete with cable companies, according to a study from Harvard University’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society.
Source: Public broadband networks can succeed, Harvard study finds – Business – The Boston Globe
“As a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, I have been interested in the problem of information asymmetry when it comes to social media, and how technology can provide us better solutions to understand the world around us in a way that is more open, and participatory,” he says. The TV sector was the most interesting to him because it’s in the hands of fewer gatekeepers, Heusser explains. “I’m extremely motivated with the idea to open and democratize the TV sector, starting with ‘live TV’ powered by mobile technologies,” he says.
Source: Rhinobird Enters The Live Streaming Race With Its Collaborative, Hashtag-Powered App | TechCrunch
He ran a research institute called the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and helped design Harvard’s open online course offerings. He also co-founded the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), a nonprofit, open-source alternative to Google Books that has the ambitious goal of making the entire cultural heritage of the United States accessible through a single online portal. During his years at Harvard, Palfrey even found time to launch a national campaign against cyberbullying, in partnership with Lady Gaga. “He has a capacity for work that I’ve never seen anywhere,” says Maura Marx, a former Berkman Center fellow who worked with Palfrey on the DPLA project.
Source: Class Rebel
“For a lot of people, libraries represent a certain kind of quiet, a certain kind of place, a certain kind of book in large numbers,” said Matthew Battles, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and co-author of “Library Beyond the Book.” “These are beautiful ideas and ideals. But they demand reinterpretation and cultivation from generation to generation.”
Source: Where are the books? Libraries under fire as they shift from print to digital. – The Washington Post
Other report authors include Harold Abelson, a computer science professor at MIT; Josh Benaloh, a leading cryptographer at Microsoft; Susan Landau, a professor of cybersecurity at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and formerly a senior privacy analyst at Google; and Bruce Schneier, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and a widely read security author.
The connection between Internet use and offline community dangers for minors has also been an area of intense study and scrutiny. For an overview, see a comprehensive 2008 report for the state attorneys general of the United States, led by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.