Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society: Audio Fishbowl

Robin Chase — cofounder of Zipcar and Veniam (building a dynamic communications network for the Internet of moving things) — lays out a near term future where communications and software platforms will deliver us smart cities, smart homes, and ubiquitous clean low-cost shared transport. On the one hand we have an environmental imperative to get […]

Listen:or download | …also in Ogg You’ve likely heard of Silk Road – the black market e-commerce hub that was shutdown in 2013 for becoming a magnet for vendors of illicit goods. But the story of its shutdown, and the investigation and trial that followed, is complicated enough that we need a guide. On this […]

Listen:or download | …also in Ogg On your computer, you don’t ever really “take out the trash.” Data doesn’t get picked up by a garbage truck. It doesn’t decompose in a landfill. It just accumulates. And because space is becoming less and less of an issue — hard drive space keeps getting cheaper, and a […]

Crowdwork — “the process of taking tasks that would normally be delegated to an employee and distributing them to a large pool of online workers, the ‘crowd,’ in the form of an open call” — has become an entire category of global employment we could never have imagined existing a few short years ago. In […]

Women are disparately impacted by harassment on the Internet. Harassment can be framed as a civil rights problem, with legal solutions proposed and vitriol directed towards platforms for failing to protect female users. But, as Sarah Jeong — a lawyer and journalist who covered the Silk Road trial for Forbes — suggests, the Internet has […]

Listen:or download | …also in Ogg Facebook has had a lot of trouble with misogynistic speech. A few years ago, several women’s groups joined together to petition Facebook to work harder to block misogynistic pages, posts, and replies. At the time Facebook had strict standards against hate speech that was racist or anti-semitic — such […]

In this conversation with Jonathan Zittrain, Cory Doctorow — author and EFF Special Advisor — explains how he plans to kill all DRM in the world forever, within a decade. Download the MP3 …or download the OGG audio format! More info on this event here.

Listen:or download | …also in Ogg A recent New York Times survey of the top 50 news sites showed that blocking ads while surfing their mobile news sites could save up to 14 megabytes per page loaded. 14 megabytes adds up to 30 seconds over 4G, and, if you’re on a restricted data plan, it […]

In 2013, the Berkman Center helped to launch the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), which brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. This online portal delivers incredible resources and artifacts from all over America to the fingertips of students, teachers, scholars, and the […]

Less than 15 years after the RSS 2.0 standard was developed (by Berkman Center fellows!), paving the way for the subscribe-able audio medium we know as “Podcasts,” four leading figures in the invention and re-invention of podcasting come together to discuss the past, present, and future of serialized audio content. Chris Lydon (Radio Open Source), […]

Researcher Camille François leads a discussion of the “Mozilla Delphi Cybersecurity 1.0. Study: Towards A User Centric Policy Framework” with Berkman community members Josephine Wolff, Andy Ellis, and Bruce Schneier, who participated in the study. More than 30 leading cybersecurity experts from a wide variety of backgrounds – including academia, civil liberties, government and military, security, and technology […]

The LibraryBox Project (along with other emerging projects like PirateBox, occupy.here, IdeasBox, and others) is an attempt at bridging the divide in delivery of digital information in areas where there is a lack of communications infrastructure or where that infrastructure has been damaged or is overly monitored or controlled. As self-contained, non-connected portable servers, these […]

The past decade has seen a dramatic decline in user agency all across the Web, but especially in education. The Aughts saw the budding of a golden age of user-produced media on the Web. But these buds never fully flowered, over-shadowed by the development of proprietary platforms like Facebook in the social sector and learning […]

Anyone seeking to participate in the 21st century needs to understand how to find and use the vast stores of information available online. Libraries play a crucial role in making these skills and information available, and yet are at risk. John Palfrey — Head of School at Phillips Academy, Andover and President of the Board […]

Microsoft Research PhD Interns Ifeoma Ajunwa, Stacy Blasiola, Nathan Matias, and Aleena Chia present their current research on corporations and the quantified self; the Facebook newsfeed algorithm; how sites like Reddit and Wikipedia are made accountable to their users and the public; and the participatory politics of online gaming. Download the MP3 …or download the […]