Radio Berkman

Reddit is sometimes called "the frontpage of the Internet." 170 million people a month help upload, curate, and make viral the cat photos, prank videos, and topical discussions that help fuel our neverending thirst for content.

But recent moves by Reddit management to tighten up their content policy have threatened what is seen as the fundamentally "free speech" culture at Reddit.

David Weinberger and Adrienne Debigare recently wrote about Reddit's crossroads for the Harvard Business Review (https://hbr.org/2015/07/how-reddit-the-business-lost-touch-with-reddit-the-culture).

They joined us this week to talk about the culture of Reddit, free speech, and just who gets to make these decisions anyway?

Flickr photo courtesy of fibonacciblue

Music from Neurowaxx and Timo Timonen

Why are over 450 towns in the US building their own high speed Internet networks?

Let's look at the example of the small town of Holyoke, Massachusetts.

A few years back the town's mayor asked if the local cable or telephone companies wanted to build a fiber network to serve local schools and municipal buildings. The companies declined. The project was turned over to the local gas and electric utility, HG&E. Eighteen years later, HG&E have expanded this network to serve local businesses, and even other towns in the area. And it turns out this investment has more than paid for itself.

On this week's episode we talk about what happens when municipal utilities and companies compete to provide local Internet services.

Find out more about this story here: https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/98962

Public spaces function based on a varying give-and-take relationship with community members. Publicly supported media -- whether it be college radio, a local NPR station, cable access, or PBS -- shares the word "public," but traditionally doesn’t have the same relationship with members as other "public" institutions, for examples parks and libraries.

On this episode of Radio Berkman we speak with Nieman Fellow Melody Kramer who is researching what it means to be a member of a public or community radio station. Kramer pulls from examples at stations all over the country of people supporting their public radio stations in non-financial ways, including code and story ideas.

You can see some of what she’s uncovered on her github.

The International Labour Organization estimates that between forced labor and the commercial sex trade, more than 20 million men, women, and children are being trafficked internationally.

The web plays a huge role in keeping trafficking industries viable, but new technology is also contributing to the efforts to police and prevent human trafficking and the child exploitation that results from it.

As a PhD student in MIT’s HASTS program, Mitali Thakor is studying the problems associated with a tangled web of different institutions and companies trying to solve these problems. Thakor points to questions of surveillance and the rights of youth online in her discussion with Radio Berkman producer Elizabeth Gillis.

The more comfortable we get using digital platforms the more important it becomes to understand our relationships to them. From Facebook, to Fitbit, to Wikipedia, to networked games, and even to our schools and employers, the more we entrust our data to an outside platform, the more we have to ask the question: "How are they accountable to us?"

For this week's podcast we spoke to four PhD candidates who are working with Microsoft Research. First, Ifeoma Ajunwa explains the tricky employers use big data collected from their employees. Then, Aleena Chia describes the unique system of governance that’s formed around the digital gaming world of Eve Online. Next, Berkman fellow Nathan Matias addresses the nuanced relationship between users and platforms where users create the content, like Wikipedia and Reddit. Finally, we speak with Stacey Blasiola about her research topic, “Newsfeed: Created by you?”

You may be familiar with a typical hack-day or hack-a-thon. Throw a group of developers and creators in a conference room for the weekend, and they'll come up with some amazing app or product to make life better for all of humankind.

Radio Berkman recently stumbled on a hack-a-thon that turns hack-a-thons on their head. Last year a traveling event called Comedy Hack Day visited the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Run by a group called Cultivated Wit, the goal of the hack day is to bring some laughs to the world of tech entrepreneurship. Instead of trying to attract millions of dollars in venture capital, they're bringing comedians and developers together to create prank inventions, satirical sites, and smart phone apps to poke fun at our increasingly tech-obsessed world.

A lot of personal information about you is completely invisible, intangible, and racing around cyberspace on a mission to pay your bills and geolocate your Facebook status. And, of course, this is useful and in a lot of ways really cool.

But today on Radio Berkman we’re going to talk about the obstacles presented by a data-driven society. How can we keep mountains of information out of the wrong hands without compromising all the great benefits we get everyday?

First, we talk to Bruce Schneier, a fellow at the Berkman Center and the author of Data and Goliath, The Hidden Battles to Capture Your Data and Control Your World. In this book, Schneier notes that the bulk collection of data isn’t going away, but changes in policy and public perception could allow citizens to have more control over how this information gets used.

And in the second half of the show we talk to Josephine Wolff, who is also a Berkman Fellow and PhD candidate in the Engineering Systems Division at MIT studying cybersecurity and Internet policy. If you were concerned by the major credit card or email breaches of the last few years, you’ll want to hear this.

Credits for this episode here: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2015/06/08/radio-berkman-218-the-threats-and-tradeoffs-of-big-data/

Few sectors of the networked environment get a worse reputation for hate speech than online gaming. Competitive games with chat functions have always involved some level of trash talking. Slurs, shaming, and casual threats are part of the players' toolkit for riling up their opponent.

But the toxicity levels of video game forums have reached a dangerous point. Unregulated and unchecked, many gaming networks have become zones where cyberbullying, misogyny, racism, and homophobic language are the norm.

At least one gaming company has decided that this behavior should NOT be the norm. In 2012, Riot Games - makers of the insanely popular League of Legends (over 60 million players around the world) - hired a cognitive neuroscientist named Jeffrey "Lyte" Lin to "game" the game. Jeffrey is in charge of building social systems that de-incentivize bad behavior and bring about a more sportsman-like culture.

On today's episode, we talk to Jeffrey about what the web can learn from how games are fighting hate speech.

This is the first episode in a series on hate speech online. If you have any comments, or suggestions for future guests and topics, leave us a note in the comments, or send us a tweet!

In Radio Berkman 216 we tackle the web as we know it in 2014-2015. Hate speech online, freedom of speech online, censorship and surveillance online, and, of course, whether our smart machines are out to destroy us.

All of these stories and more are part of this year's Internet Monitor report (https://thenetmonitor.org/research/2014), a collection of dozens of essays that track how we are changing the web and how the web is changing us.

This episode's guests include:

• Andy Sellars, author of "SOPA Lives: Copyright’s Existing Power to Block Websites and 'Break the Internet'" (http://medium.com/internet-monitor-2014-platforms-and-policy/sopa-lives-copyrights-existing-power-to-block-websites-and-break-the-internet-5b5a76ec6ff5)

• Susan Benesch, author of "Flower Speech: New Responses to Hatred Online"

(https://medium.com/internet-monitor-2014-public-discourse/flower-speech-new-responses-to-hatred-online-d98bf67735b7)

• Nathan Freitas, author of "The Great Firewall Welcomes You!"

(https://medium.com/internet-monitor-2014-international-issues/the-great-firewall-welcomes-you-c58e366def6b)

• Sara Watson, author of "Dada Data and the Internet of Paternalistic Things"

(https://medium.com/message/dada-data-and-the-internet-of-paternalistic-things-7bb4321d35c4)

• David Michel Davies, of the Webby Awards on their recent report "Understanding the Sky-High Demands of the World’s Most Entitled Consumer" (http://www.slideshare.net/TheWebbyAwards/at-your-service-the-webby-awards)

We also mentioned:

• Randall Munroe's XKCD chart "Stories of the Past & Future" (http://xkcd.com/1491/)

This episode features Creative Commons Music from:

Berdan

Chad Crouch (http://podingtonbear.com/)

Learning Music Monthly (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Learning_Music/An_End_Like_This/04_Ovulation)

Timo Timonen (https://soundcloud.com/timotimonen/timo-timonen-shadow)

Not long ago, illegally downloading a movie could land you in court facing millions of dollars in fines and jailtime. But Hollywood has begun to weather the storm by offering alternatives to piracy — same day digital releases, better streaming, higher quality in-theater experiences — that help meet some of the consumer demand that piracy captured.

But the porn industry is not Hollywood.

While the web has created incredible new economic opportunities for adult entertainers — independent production has flourished, as well as new types of production, which we won’t go into here simply to preserve our G-rating — few other industries on the web face the glut of competition from services that offer similar content for free or in violation of copyright.

Simply put, there’s so much free porn on the net that honest pornographers can’t keep up.

It’s hard to get accurate numbers on how much revenue is generated from online porn. It’s believed to be in the billions, at least in the United States. But it’s even more difficult to get a picture of how much revenue is lost in the adult entertainment industry due to copyright violation.

Surprisingly though, the porn industry doesn’t seem that interested in pursuing copyright violators. Intellectual property scholar Kate Darling studied how the industry was responding to piracy, and it turned out that — by and large — adult entertainment creators ran the numbers and found that it simply cost more from them to fight copyright violators than it was worth.

For today’s episode, Berkman alum and journalist Leora Kornfeld sat down with Kate Darling to talk to her about how porn producers are losing the copyright battle, and why many don’t care.