Berkman Buzz, week of August 20

BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School
Week of August 20, 2007.

What's going on... take your pick or browse below.

*StopBadware.org teaches webmasters to fight hackers.
*Ethan Zuckerman sees a new tool to encourage African agricultural trading.
*Dan Gillmor finds error and irony in an attack on blogging.
*Urs Gasser announces a new case law collection.
*Citizen Media Law Project: Activist Takes on West Publishing Seeking Unfettered Public Access to Court Decisions.
*Weekly Global Voice: Bangladesh: Under Curfew.

The full buzz.

"The webmaster of a site that was hacked to distribute badware has teamed up with a volunteer on the StopBadware discussion forum to trace the hack through her site, and share her story with others. Rebecca the webmaster and Jart the volunteer hope their case study of the cleaning and securing of Rebecca’s site can help educate other webmasters about dealing with attacks and the bad code and backdoors hackers can leave behind.”
StopBadware.org, “‘No tears, no glory’: Rebecca the webmaster traces a hacking attack to her site”

“What does maize cost in Ghana today?  That’s a useful question to ask if you’re a farmer in Burkina Faso, wondering if it’s worth selling your harvest locally, or whether you might invest in a lorry to take your grain south, where it might fetch a higher price. The TradeNet system built at the BusyLabs technology incubator in Accra makes it possible to find up-to-date prices on agricultural products throughout West Africa, and to offer transactions to users in other countries, selling commodities across national borders. The aim of systems like this one is to increase regional trade, which will benefit local farmers and should help decrease food emergencies, which tend to be highly local and can often be corrected by bringing food from other parts of a country or region into the affected area.”
Ethan Zuckerman, “The price of maize”

“Please read ‘Annals of Reporting’ from today’s Talking Points Memo, in which Josh Marshall describes what looks like a classic example of journalistic malpractice.  Here’s the gist.  Michael Skube, a former newspaper editor and Pulitzer Prize winner who’s now a journalism professor, wrote an opinion piece for the LA Times in which he flays bloggers for alleged violations of journalistic principles. In this case, Skube writes, bloggers show little willingness to do serious reporting: devoting “time, thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance” to the topic.  But the piece cites Marshall, whose work is among the best journalism – by any standard – that you can find on the Web in any form, in a passing reference, as if he’s one of the offenders."
Dan Gillmor, “An Astonishing Admission by a Journalism Professor”

“I’m delighted to announce that our Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen - usually focusing more on basic research rather than implementing project work - has just launched an online data privacy case law collection (in German and French) that features the entire collection of cases decided by the Swiss Commission for Data Privacy and Freedom of Information from 1993 - 2006. The Commission has now been integrated into the ‘Tribunal administrativ federal,’ the branch of the Supreme Court that deals with administrative law issues."
Urs Gasser, “Open Access to Law: Swiss Data Privacy Cases Now Online”

“The New York Times reports that Carl Malamud and his non-profit organization, Public.Resource.Org, have begun an ambitious campaign to make US court decisions available to the public for free online. According to its website, Public.Resource.Org seeks to create an "unencumbered public repository of federal and state case law and codes." To do this, Malamud will be scanning West Publishing's federal and state case reporters," extracting the public domain content and republishing it on the Internet for use by anyone." Malamud has already started with West's Federal Supplement, Federal Reporter, and Federal Appendix. So far, only cases from the 1880s are up on the website.”
Sam Bayard, “Activist Takes on West Publishing Seeking Unfettered Public Access to Court Decisions”

“Civil unrest began in Bangladesh on the 20th of August when a petty dispute broke out concerning comments passed by armed forces personnel during a soccer match at a university gymnasium ground. An army camp has occupied part of the ground since the declaration of a state of emergency on January 11, 2007. The Raising Voices: Rising citizen Journalism blog has the background on this dispute. Ershad Ahmed posts some pictures of the Dhaka University Gymnasium field where it all started.  Then it got worse. By evening, the university area had turned into a battle zone, with intermittent fights between police and students and over 100 students injured.”
Rezwan, “Bangladesh: under curfew”