“In a world where the most important currency is attention, celebrities are the real winners,” said Judith Donath, who studies how social networks affect behavior at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. “If you create an account like this, you’re able to gather an audience that thinks that you’re that person and they’re following your every word.”

Source: It’s Easier Than Ever To Impersonate A Celebrity Online — And We’ve All Been Duped

This would also go a long way to keeping library knowledge relevant, for this information could be linked from other sources of information about authors, courses, geography, historical weather data . . . to everything. There are important efforts — such as the Linked Data for Libraries project led by Cornell, Harvard, and Stanford — getting started on that task. Opening up resources in this way enables the culture of libraries to be knit into the online network where our culture has taken up residence. Someday perhaps the content will catch up. David Weinberger is a senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Source: Libraries need a deeper online presence – Opinion – The Boston Globe

So, last year the Obama administration lifted sanctions on American tech companies that sell personal communication technologies. “It is fully legal to sell cellphones, laptops, tablets, modems, Wi-Fi routers and most of the software that most people use every day,” says Vivek Krishnamurthy, who teaches at Harvard Law School. But, Krishnamurthy says, that hasn’t meant that American tech companies have jumped into Iran — there’s still no Apple Store there. “Doing business with Iran is extremely difficult today because of the comprehensive financial sanctions,” he says. “It’s really hard to get money in or out of the country.”

Source: Politics Overshadows U.S. Tech Firms’ Hopes For Entering Iran : All Tech Considered : NPR

One of Posner’s opponents was Jonathan Zittrain, another distinguished cyberlaw professor, based at Harvard University. He drove to the other extreme. Even if we might see some merit in Europe’s data laws, Zittrain is not at all happy about them being used to carve holes out of Google search. To counter the database of ruin argument, he says we are creating a “swiss cheese internet”. The nub of Zittrain’s concern is that the practice of shaping what stays and what goes from the database is hopelessly individualistic. By allowing the delisting of information that is incorrect, outdated or harmful for individuals, who knows what else will follow. It sets us on a path, Zittrain claims, where the internet becomes the lowest common denominator result of what all the world’s countries and courts are prepared to leave behind.

Source: Right to be forgotten: Swiss cheese internet, or database of ruin? | Technology | The Guardian

Since 2014, the Internet Monitor project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society has been collecting data about Internet access and analyzing what different communities around the world are saying. Internet Monitor’s online data platform presents and analyzes data from about 100 countries with the two-part goal of providing better data for better decision making, and conducting original research that analyzes this data to see what it says about the status of the Internet.

Source: Berkman’s Internet Monitor project to release new online data platform this fall – Harvard Law Today

They are chasing the thieves and making them pay for their heinous intellectual crime. Enter Bruce Schneier, a Fellow of Harvard University’s Berkman Center. Recounting a personal experience of academic kidnapping (plagiarism has the Latin root plagiarius, meaning kidnapping and theft), he exposes the dirty tactics of the three plagiarist professors from the International Islamic University, Islamabad.

Source: Plagiarism: The plague of pilferage – The Express Tribune