In The News

Sites Feed Personal Details to New Tracking Industry

Julia Angwin, Tom McGinty August 10, 2010
Internet users are under constant surveillance, warns the Wall Street Journal after an investigation of 50 popular websites accounting for nearly half of US page views. Wikipedia.org was the only site without tracking devices, while other sites together included more than 3000 sensitive devices to track user interests behind every click. Analysts build profiles as trackers collect keystrokes and...

YouTube Banned by Russian Court

Tom Parfitt August 3, 2010
Hundreds of thousands of official and amateur videos from around the globe from cooking to music, fitness, pets, business, and politics are uploaded to YouTube daily. Users, like Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, even create their own YouTube channels. Purportedly targeting a single nationalist video, a Russian regional court took the extreme step of blocking the popular website among local...

The Whistleblowers: Is WikiLeaks a Blessing or Curse for Democracy?

John Goetz, Marcel Rosenbach July 29, 2010
Wikileaks posted more than 91,000 internal US military documents online – unleashing debate about an unpopular war, secrecy and media, technology, whistle-blowing, and whether the release is courageous exposure or a dire security threat. WikiLeaks.org publishes leaked documents deemed secret by companies and governments. Documents titled the Afghan War Diary are archived into 100 categories as...

Hollywood on the Danube

Dan Bilefsky July 19, 2010
Setting is an essential tool for movies to work their magic – and economic hard times require directors to innovate, finding inexpensive locales to stand in for high-cost cities already overrun with tourists. Besides having its own long tradition in producing filmmakers, Budapest offers low-cost, non-union crews and European allure, reports Dan Bilefsky for the New York Times. So the city, with...

Egyptian Group Wants to Censor Arabic Classic

Amro Hassan , Jeffrey Fleishman July 14, 2010
The collection of folktales known in English as “The Arabian Nights” are a classic work of globalization. For centuries, starting with the 9th, multiple storytellers traveled, spinning and elaborating the tales with themes and settings spanning ancient Mesopotamia, India, medieval Persia and Egypt. Arabic translators preserved the tales into book format, which later influenced modern writers of...

Our Vuvuzelas, Ourselves

Anne Applebaum June 30, 2010
Crowd noise is nothing new at soccer matches. And the same goes for the long trumpet-like plastic instrument South African soccer fans call “vuvuzela.” Yet the horn’s indiscriminate – indeed, overwhelming – use at World Cup matches sparked controversy: Even as some Germans want to ban the “mood killer” and French TV viewers can digitally filter out the “stadium tinnitus,” Chinese distributors...

McChrystal Tests Obama’s Priorities

David Sanger June 23, 2010
Throughout history generals have griped about civilian commanders, as summarized by this New York Times article. But with the internet and instant global communication, such complaints do not remain secret long, exposed to colleagues and enemies alike. Any hint of insubordination or internal divisions adds to war’s complexity, dulling public support in the homeland and afar. Complaints by General...