Internet Freedom Declines Again, with ‘Polarized Echo Chambers’ Aiding Censorship Efforts

The amount of freedom on the global Internet has declined for the eighth straight year, with a group of countries moving toward “digital authoritarianism,” according to a new report from Freedom House.

A number of factors, including the spread of false rumors and hateful propaganda online, have contributed to an Internet that “can push citizens into polarized echo chambers that pull at the social fabric of the country,” said the report, released Thursday. These rifts often give aid to antidemocratic forces, including government efforts to censor the Internet, Freedom House said.

During 2018, authoritarians used claims of fake news and of data breaches and other scandals as an excuse to move closer to a Chinese model of Internet censorship, said the report, cosponsored by the Internet Society.

“China is exporting its model of digital authoritarianism throughout the world, posing a serious threat to the future of free and open Internet,” said Sanja Kelly, director for Internet Freedom at Freedom House. “In order to counter it, democratic governments need to showcase that there is a better way to manage the Internet, and that cybersecurity and disinformation can be successfully addressed without infringing on human rights.”

Thirty-six countries sent representatives Continue reading

Future Thinking: Natali Helberger on the Impact of Consolidation on Media Diversity

Last year, the Internet Society unveiled the 2017 Global Internet Report: Paths to Our Digital Future. The interactive report identifies the drivers affecting tomorrow’s Internet and their impact on Media & Society, Digital Divides, and Personal Rights & Freedoms. We interviewed Natali Helberger to hear her perspective on the forces shaping the Internet’s future.

Natali Helberger is a professor of Information Law at the University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Law. She researches how the role of information users is changing under the influence of information technology, and the regulation of converging information and communications markets. Focus points of her research are the interface between technology and information law, user rights and the changing role of the user in information law and policy. Natali has conducted research for the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of Europe, and national governments and is a regular speaker at national and international conferences. Among others, she is member of an Expert Committee of the Council of Europe on AI and Human Rights, and one of the leaders of the Dutch VSNU Citizenship & Democracy research agenda.

The Internet Society: You recently wrote a chapter for Damian Tambini and Martin Moore’s book Digital Continue reading

LEDE on Raspberry PI

In December 2017, I created a home router based Linux piCore installed on Raspberry PI3. I use this router in everyday life in order to provide Internet connection for my home devices. So far I have not noticed any issues. However, the router offers only basic functionality. The number of packages that extends router's functionality is limited by the number of available PiCore extensions in repository. Therefore, it is better to load Raspberry with a advanced network distribution that provides a better customization of embedded netwrok devices with many available packages.

The article discusses an installation and configuration of Linux Embedded Development Environment (LEDE) on Raspberry PI3. LEDE is an opensource project that was created in 2016 as a fork of OpenWrt - Linux OS for embedded devices. In 2018, LEDE and OpenWrt projects reemerged and they announced their unification  under OpenWrt name .

1.  LEDE Installation

The part 1 discusses installation of LEDE on Raspberry Pi3 and resizing LEDE image. After copying LEDE to SD card, we need to resize file system in order to use full capacity of SD card.

1.1 Downloading and Extracting LEDE for Raspberry PI3

$ wget https://downloads.lede-project.org/releases/17.01.4/targets/brcm2708/bcm2710/lede-17.01.4-brcm2708-bcm2710-rpi-3-ext4-sdcard.img.gz

$ Continue reading

Masscan and massive address lists

I saw this go by on my Twitter feed. I thought I'd blog on how masscan solves the same problem.


Both nmap and masscan are port scanners. The differences is that nmap does an intensive scan on a limited range of addresses, whereas masscan does a light scan on a massive range of addresses, including the range of 0.0.0.0 - 255.255.255.255 (all addresses). If you've got a 10-gbps link to the Internet, it can scan the entire thing in under 10 minutes, from a single desktop-class computer.

How massan deals with exclude ranges is probably its defining feature. That seems kinda strange, since it's a little used feature in nmap. But when you scan the entire list, people will complain, with nasty emails, so you are going to build up a list of hundreds, if not thousands, of addresses to exclude from your scans.

Therefore, the first design choice is to combine the two lists, the list of targets to include and the list of targets to exclude. Continue reading

Site Work

I spent some time this week moving to a new theme, specifically Beaver Builder. It was a bit more work than I expected because of some serious limitations with the way Beaver Builder works—had I known about these limitations, I probably would have worked with another product, but by the time I discovered them, it was either find a way around the limitations, or spend a lot more time and/or money working through them.

In the process, I completely rebuilt the menu, and cleaned up the categories.

The site should be a good bit faster now. I’m not entirely certain the social sharing bits are working, and I will likely find a few things wrong here and there that need to be fixed over the next few weeks. I just discovered, for instance, that I lost all the work on the papers and topical pages I’d done earlier today, so those need to be redone, which will take a good bit of time.

Terraform Azure Provider Setup

Microsoft Azure is one of the worlds leading cloud providers. While it is possible to point and click your way though the web interface to manage your Azure environment that is not how I want to live my life. This post will cover how to prepare your local development machine to enable ...

Education Service Center Region 11 Protects Student Data with VMware NSX Data Center

Rory Peacock is the Deputy Executive Director of Technology at Education Service Center Region 11, where he oversees all technology services provided to Region 11 schools.

Region 11 is one of 20 education service centers throughout the State of Texas. In Texas, an education service center manages education programs, delivers technical assistance, and provides professional development to schools within its region. With regards to technology, education service centers assist their schools with hosted services and technical support.

Education Service Center Region 11 serves 70,699 educators and almost 600,000 students across 10 urban and rural counties.

I had the opportunity to talk to Rory about some of his largest technology challenges since he joined Region 11 in 2015.

 

Day Zero

Region 11 is a long-time VMware customer, introducing VMware vSphere in 2009. Since then, Region 11 has virtualized over 95% of their server environment. They’ve also made the move to virtual desktops utilizing VMware Horizon to support their 200 employees.

On the very day in 2016 that a meeting was set with the VMware NSX Data Center team to demo the product, Region 11 was hit with a zero-day attack of ransomware. A legacy system was hit in its demilitarized Continue reading

Cray introduces a multi-CPU supercomputer design

Supercomputer maker Cray announced what it calls its last supercomputer architecture before entering the era of exascale computing. It is code-named “Shasta,” and the Department of Energy, already a regular customer of supercomputing, said it will be the first to deploy it, in 2020.The Shasta architecture is unique in that it will be the first server (unless someone beats Cray to it) to support multiple processor types. Users will be able to deploy a mix of x86, GPU, ARM and FPGA processors in a single system.Up to now, servers either came with x86 or, in a few select cases, ARM processors, with GPUs and FPGAs as add-in cards plugged into PCI Express slots. This will be the first case of fully native onboard processors, and I hardly expect Cray to be alone in using this design.To read this article in full, please click here

Cray introduces a multi-CPU supercomputer design

Supercomputer maker Cray announced what it calls its last supercomputer architecture before entering the era of exascale computing. It is code-named “Shasta,” and the Department of Energy, already a regular customer of supercomputing, said it will be the first to deploy it, in 2020.The Shasta architecture is unique in that it will be the first server (unless someone beats Cray to it) to support multiple processor types. Users will be able to deploy a mix of x86, GPU, ARM and FPGA processors in a single system.Up to now, servers either came with x86 or, in a few select cases, ARM processors, with GPUs and FPGAs as add-in cards plugged into PCI Express slots. This will be the first case of fully native onboard processors, and I hardly expect Cray to be alone in using this design.To read this article in full, please click here

Optical networking breakthrough will run networks 100x faster

Researchers reckon they could speed up the internet a hundredfold with a new technique that twists light beams within fiber optic cable rather than sending them in a straight path.“What we’ve managed to do is accurately transmit data via light at its highest capacity in a way that will allow us to massively increase our bandwidth,” Dr. Haoran Ren, of Australia’s RMIT University, said in a press release.[ Learn who's developing quantum computers. ] The corkscrewing configuration, in development over the last few years and now recently physically miniaturized, uses a technique called orbital angular momentum (OAM).To read this article in full, please click here

Optical networking breakthrough will run networks 100x faster

Researchers reckon they could speed up the internet a hundredfold with a new technique that twists light beams within fiber optic cable rather than sending them in a straight path.“What we’ve managed to do is accurately transmit data via light at its highest capacity in a way that will allow us to massively increase our bandwidth,” Dr. Haoran Ren, of Australia’s RMIT University, said in a press release.[ Learn who's developing quantum computers. ] The corkscrewing configuration, in development over the last few years and now recently physically miniaturized, uses a technique called orbital angular momentum (OAM).To read this article in full, please click here

Optical networking breakthrough will run networks 100x faster

Researchers reckon they could speed up the internet a hundredfold with a new technique that twists light beams within fiber optic cable rather than sending them in a straight path.“What we’ve managed to do is accurately transmit data via light at its highest capacity in a way that will allow us to massively increase our bandwidth,” Dr. Haoran Ren, of Australia’s RMIT University, said in a press release.[ Learn who's developing quantum computers. ] The corkscrewing configuration, in development over the last few years and now recently physically miniaturized, uses a technique called orbital angular momentum (OAM).To read this article in full, please click here

Fiber breakthrough will run networks 100x faster

A kind of twisting of light beams, within a fiber optic cable, rather than the sending of them linearly will let computer systems, and the internet overall, run faster, according to researchers who have just announced new findings. The group reckon they could speed up the internet a hundred-fold using the twisted technique.“What we’ve managed to do is accurately transmit data via light at its highest capacity in a way that will allow us to massively increase our bandwidth,” Dr. Haoran Ren, of Australia’s RMIT University, said in a press release.To read this article in full, please click here

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