"We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of Lulzsec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency". Parmy Olson, London bureau chief for Forbes magazine, provides a clear timeline through Anonymous’s complicated, winding history. She concentrates particularly on how it spun off the smaller, jokier group LulzSec.

As robots grow more autonomous, society needs to develop rules to manage them

Tumblr by the developer running mySociety's POPit project. Mostly technical!

2 million USD from Knight to Columbia for improving data journalism/visualization

"Apple has full approval rights over every bit of what appears in its store. There's a trade-off there. Mobile apps can be enormously powerful, offering perks such as the ability of the Romney app to tap into an iPhone or iPad's built-in camera. But the Apple mobile model also puts Cupertino in a position to act as gatekeeper to a degree that doesn't really exist on the web."

Cyberweapons aren’t easy or cheap to procure—and they could even promote peace.

There’s a craving in the air for a definitive statement on what journalism is, something to rally around as everything changes. But I want to do the opposite. I want to explode journalism, to break it apart into its atomic acts. I’m beginning to suspect that taking it apart is the only way we can put it all back together again.

This issue of LIMN focuses on new social media, data mining and surveillance, crowdsourcing, cloud computing, big data, and Internet revolutions. Rather than follow the well-worn paths of argument typical today, our contributors address the problems in new ways and at odd angles: from the power and politics of statistics and algorithms to crowdsourcing’s discontents to the capriciousness of collectives in an election; from the focus group and the casino to the worlds of micro-finance and data-intensive policing. Together they raise questions about the relationship of technology and the collectives that form in and through them.

Contributors:  Christopher Kelty, Alain Desrosières, Lilly Irani, Chris Csikszentmihályi, Gabriella Coleman, Nick Seaver, Emmanuel Didier, Alek Felstiner, Tarleton Gillespie, Roma Jhaveri, Daniel Kreiss, Natasha Dow Schüll, Rebecca Lemov, Maria Vidart, Amira Pettus, Jonathan R. Baldwin, and Ruben Hickman

Infogr.am takes the same approach that Tumblr took to blogging, by turning the otherwise daunting task of creating great infographics into a process that's dead-simple. You bring the raw data to Infogr.am, and the site's online tool can help you turn that data into a nice looking chart or full-blown infographic in minutes.

Seeming public apathy over climate change is often attributed to a deficit in comprehension. The public knows too little science, it is claimed, to understand the evidence or avoid being misled1. Widespread limits on technical reasoning aggravate the problem by forcing citizens to use unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk2. We conducted a study to test this account and found no support for it. Members of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate change. Rather, they were the ones among whom cultural polarization was greatest. This result suggests that public divisions over climate change stem not from the public’s incomprehension of science but from a distinctive conflict of interest: between the personal interest individuals have in forming beliefs in line with those held by others with whom they share close ties and the collective one they all share in making use of the best available science to promote common welfare.

On Tuesday, the European Commission's digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes said the release of the report from by the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) means she will make recommendations to the EU on preserving net neutrality, which aims to make sure ISPs do not unfairly restrict customers from accessing the service or application or their choice.

Perlow persuaded the team to try an experiment – collectively to agree to disconnect from their smartphones and computers for a few predetermined hours every week. She called it Predictable Time Off (PTO). The results surprised both her and them. The consultants reported that they felt more motivated, had increased job satisfaction and were more satisfied with their work-life balance. They also reported that they had become more efficient, effective and collaborative as a team.

David Eaves' list of rules for funding software by governments -- many applicable for non-profit/foundation funding as well.

Friends of WikiLeaks social network

English fork of Heisse's "Social Share Privacy" anti Facebook and Twitter button software.

This data consists of the copyright removal notices received for Search since 2011, with some omissions.

Computational thinking is a fundamental skill for everyone, not just for computer scientists. To read- ing, writing, and arithmetic, we should add compu- tational thinking to every child’s analytical ability.

DuckDuckGo and Ixquick take a tiny bite out of Google.

Examines cases in which individuals treat their own habits, bodies, moods, and thoughts as objects of scrutiny, analysis, and intervention. Explores what shifting modes of self-tracking, self-care, and self-governance reveal about changing understandings of the self, and how they remake subjectivity. Topics range from 19th century diary writing and Benjamin Franklin's self-monitoring practices to contemporary diet techniques and the Quantified Self movement's digital data collection apps.

BH NOte - unfortunately, course materials are not available on MIT OpenCourseware)

The investigative news non-profit was a bold experiment in traditional reporting in the time of digital upheaval. Five years later, it's still a viable organization. 

A censored talk about inequality causes controversy -- and proves that the conference has some curious values

Last week TED came to Shanghai to audition speakers for the annual conference, where brains meet fame in Long Beach, California. In China, like everywhere else on earth, the intelligentsia loves Ted: YouTube may be blocked, but Ted talks circulate freely among those who love the idea of having ideas. ... But the mainland audience at the auditions rapidly discovered what democratic audiences have known for a long time: that not all ideas are created equal. Some are just not worth listening to.

It has become an exclusive, expensive elite networking experience. Strip away the hype and you're left with a reasonably good video podcast with delusions of grandeur.

A personal story about how running your own data project can go horribly wrong, and some of the vulnerabilities in platforms like Ushahidi (and many others). Generally speaking, a cautionary tale about why (trusted) hosted services for many small projects can be the best way to go.

The Metropolitan Police has implemented a system to extract mobile phone data from suspects held in custody.

Creator of Texifter, a text analysis tool used by USG to filter out genuine citizen response to government consultation from boilerplate/lobbyists.

AlchemyAPI is a cloud-based text mining platform providing semantic tagging to over 18,000 developers in six continents, processing 2.5+ billion API calls per month. AlchemyAPI provides the most comprehensive set of natural language processing capabilities of any text mining platform, including: named entity extraction, sentiment analysis, concept tagging, author extraction, relations extraction, web page cleaning, language detection, keyword extraction, quotations extraction, intent mining, and topic categorization.

Similar to Pippi Longstrings?

Govcom.org is an Amsterdam-based foundation dedicated to creating and hosting political tools on the Web. Much of the work involves mapping issue networks on the Web, using the Issue Crawler software, where one now may auto-request an account.

Report from WeRobot

"Sometimes the ideas we are certain are true, are dead wrong"

When Stanford University used the internet to open up Andrew Ng’s computer science class to the public free of charge last year, more than 100,000 people signed up. That’s when Professor Ng got the idea for Coursera, an online education programme he has developed with fellow Stanford professor Daphne Koller and with the backing of $15m in venture capital.

Supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, and produced in partnership with the World Wide Web Foundation and the UNDP, this book is designed as “a compendium of articles by recognized experts describing the real and potential effects of the World Wide Web in all major aspects of economic and  social development”.  Chapters cover the following main themes:

Chapter 1 – Introduction (George Sadowsky)
Chapter 2 – Fundamental Access Issues (Michael Jensen)
Chapter 3 – Technical Access Issues (Alan Greenberg)
Chapter 4 – Policy Access Issues (Cynthia Waddell)
Chapter 5 – Governance (Raúl Zambrano)
Chapter 6 – Agriculture (Shalini Kala)
Chapter 7 – Health (Najib Al-Shorbaji)
Chapter 8 – Education (Tim Unwin)
Chapter 9 – Commerce and Trade (Torbjörn Fredriksson)
Chapter 10 – Finance (Richard Duncombe)
Chapter 11 – Gender (Nancy Hafkin)
Chapter 12 – Language and Content (Daniel Pimienta)
Chapter 13 – Culture (Nnenna Nwakanma)
Chapter 14 – Conclusion

The veteran technology guru offers up a set of five literacies: attention, participation, collaboration, “crap detection,” and network smarts. As we’ve become more sophisticated in the ways we use the web, we need to adjust how we use it, being able to tell fact from rumor and able to call on the skills and resources of a community to help answer our questions.

Blog post from a service delivery/municipal accountability project (focused on water delivery) in Tanzania.

Journalism and news fund supported by Gates, Omidyar, State.gov, the Adenauer Stiftung, Google, IFCJ and others to support innovations in news creation and distribution in Africa. Zohra Dawood of OSF-ZA is one of the judges.