The Guardian
By Tania Branigan
In the opaque world of Chinese censorship, a few red lines shine through the murk. One of the clearest is: no gossip about top political leaders, their families or internal party affairs.
Restore the Fourth is a privacy movement started in the summer of 2013, in reaction to Edward Snowden's revealing of the National Security Administration's extensive spying on American and foreign citizens. The movement seeks to uphold the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which protects American citizens against unfounded search and seizure of their property or identity.
Fundacion Via Libre is an Argentinian digital rights group that advocates for more user awareness of internet surveillance and policy. To build this awareness the group not only conducts activist projects and attend events, but they also work with legislative bodies to reflect the growing technology and protect users.
Media@McGill will be hosting The Participatory Condition, an International Colloquium, which will be held in Montreal at the Musée d’art contemporain (MAC) on November 15 and 16, 2013. The Colloquium’s main objective is to assess the role of media in the development of a principle whose expansion has become so large as to become the condition of our contemporaneity.
On January 18, 2012, numerous website across the internet called for an internet blackout in protest of SOPA and PIPA. SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, and PIPA, the Protect IP Act, were a series of bills promoted by Hollywood in the US Congress that would have created a “blacklist” of censored websites.
Games for Change is a community of game designers, activists, artists and individuals focused on creating and using digital games for purposes of social change. Games for Change is a large and loose community, but it has a major nonprofit organization at its center, who organizes the majority of the meetups and work of the movement.
In the past few years we have seen a growing awareness and concern with Internet freedom and privacy, fuelled by Edward Snowden’s revelations of the vast U.S.
Sojo Studios, a new entertainment company, made plenty of headlines this week with its first social game, WeTopia. The studio is gaining plenty of attention with news of its $8 million arsenal, a roster of partnerships with non-profits like Save the Children, Children’s Health Fund and buildOn, consumer brand advertisers, and Ellen DeGeneres as one its business investors and partners.
The elimination of Net Neutrality is a much bigger issue than most people would like to admit. This issue stems far from just an issue dealing with an open internet, free from biased control of the internet service providers, whom which we rely on.
The aim is to create an on line community that seeks to find new ways to articulate what it means to be an international women in relation to art and sexuality.
International visual artists who are making cutting edge fine art, with an erotic edge, please upload your work onto the web site for free. (see link) Also a competition has been launched, giving you a chance to win £300.
Spent is an online in-browser game designed by ad agency McKinney as part of a partnership with Urban Ministries of Durham, NC, calling attention to the problem of poverty and educate people about homelessness. In the game, players are challenged to live on $1000 over a month, often having to decide between essentials and utilize outside options in order to survive.
"Dark Side of the Prism" is a Firefox Add-on that provides a soundtrack for our surveilled internet meanderings.
The public recently learned that the US National Security Agency's on-going internet surveillance program, Prism, collects data from users of major websites.
War Drags You Out is a project by artist "Saint Hoax" looking at the similarities between defining characteristics of Drag Queens and Political Leaders.
Text from St. Hoax's website:
"After attending a drag show for the first time, I was struck by the richness of this glamour oriented culture.
I took a minute to actually look at the faux queens and deconstruct their main components.
There’s a fine line between offensive and hilarious, and Arizona lawmakers aim to make that boundary legally protected. If House Bill 2549 passes, online harassment could become a criminal offense – but some hacktivists are there to help you rejoice.
A couple of weeks ago, a group of activists working with Rainforest Action Network’s Energy and Finance campaign hit the streets of San Francisco to bring a little truth about Bank of America’s misdeeds to its customers—not in the lobbies of the bank’s local branches, but at its ATMs throughout the city.