Berkman Buzz: June 15, 2012

On Tuesday, at the same time that thousands of Russians marched through Moscow to protest President Vladimir Putin, the websites of three independent Russian news organizations suffered distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, rendering them temporarily inaccessible during the height of the protests. The coordination of such attacks with organized mass protests or elections has become increasingly common in Russia over the last year.

There is something powerful in the mere celebration of PDF, which has to do with the savvy design of PDF performance. The radical political goal, which is in favor of the defense of the principles of Internet’s Freedom and in favor of Internet with the final political goal of promoting Democracy, is presented in an elegant, beautiful, notorious, attractive, and entertaining way. This performance serves the political goal by bringing the attention of the issues to new audiences, which in other settings would not know or pay attention.

Wow. Datagrid spokesperson says they have matched 80% of offline voter records to an online cookie. She's proud. I'm worried. ?#pdf12?
—Zeynep Tufekci (@techsoc)

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is pleased to release “Public-Private Partnerships for Organizing and Executing Prize-Based Competitions,” co-authored by Berkman Center Researcher Raymond Tong and Berkman Center Faculty Associate Karim R. Lakhani, and developed in collaboration with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

From the Executive Summary:
Prizes can be effective tools for finding innovative solutions to the most difficult problems. While prizes are often associated with scientific and technological innovation, prizes can also be used to foster novel solutions and approaches in much broader contexts, such as reducing poverty or finding new ways to educate people.

The Library Test Kitchen has served up a newspaper documenting its first full year of work. It includes feature pieces by the LTK directorial troika (myself, Jeff Goldenson and Ann Whiteside); documentation of projects by Jessica Yurkofsky, Kaitlyn Fitzgerald, Yuhka Miura, Dan Borelli, Ben Brady, Jennifer Esposito and Andre Villejoin, Vera Baranova, and Stacy Morton; descriptions of the Bibliotheca seminar and the spring Library Test Kitchen launch; and a selected bibliography.

What is the most embarrasing thing about you? Something you’d only share with a really good friend or a licensed professional? Doc asks us to think about that question while we watch a clip from The Onion News Network, which reports on Facebook as an intelligence agency project, described by undercover agent Mark Zuckerberg as “the single most powerful tool for population control ever invented.”

Privacy is very simple in the material world. But it took us thousands of years to understand how privacy should work. We created technologies like clothing and houses to allow ourselves different degrees of privacy. The internet as we know it, Doc tells us, is 17 years old, with widespread adoption of the graphical web browser. There are no rules of privacy in this new world – it simply wasn’t designed into the protocols.

Summer 2012: metaLAB is experimenting with quick & dirty 3d scanning techiniques/tricks. Anything ultracool out there we should know about?
—Jeffrey Schnapp (@jaytiesse)

Bloggers from the Cuban diaspora are concerned about the reported beating and detainment of dissident Jorge Luis García Pérez, more popularly known as Antunez, after he testified via teleconference at a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing about the human rights situation on the island.