New project launch:

GoogleCensorship

Google Censorship

Monitor Google censorship in Play Stores worldwide. Explore evidence, track removals and availability, and understand the impact on digital freedoms.

This platform by GreatFire will monitor censorship practices in Google Play Stores worldwide

Agreeing here: “Durov and Telegram might yet be exonerated from the charges they face—and we should indeed reserve judgment as the case unfolds. But nothing about his arrest to date suggests that it has anything to do with ‘free speech.’ The narrative that global authoritarian censors are persecuting a free speech hero is pure myth-making in this case.”

Platforms like Telegram Accused of Facilitating Child Sexual Abuse Can’t Invoke Free Speech Protections

Respectable voices shouldn’t fall for Elon Musk’s hysterical claims that the arrest of Pavel Durov, the messaging service’s billionaire CEO, ...

Any follow recommendations on internet freedom?

My favorite #Riga scene: this Putin portrait is the view the Russian ambassador wakes up to. Latvian know right from wrong.

Is there a go to place for all #nostriga slide decks?

Delon est un homme devenu acteur par accident, qui a appris film par film, en avançant. Lui dira qu’il n’interprète pas mais « vit » ses ­rôles.

Client Challenge

Funny to see Sweden described as tiny https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/13/business/sweden-economy-europe-competitiveness.html only in America…

Russia / Venezuela: Signal's built-in censorship circumvention feature might be able to help if a connection is affected: Signal Settings > Privacy > Advanced > Censorship circumvention (on)

Mass outages of YouTube in Russia today, this affects how millions of people get information https://denvergazette.com/news/nation-world/youtube-slowdown-in-russia-darkens-freedom-of-speech-outlook/article_eadc3592-dae0-5fba-a3fb-141c7c95c301.html everyone has been expecting this to happen sooner or later, but the assumption was it won’t for as long as pro Putin propaganda dominated on YouTube which is probably still the case. Curious if that changed or if the regime now just feels sufficiently confident in VK as a satisfactory substitute.

“The harms of surveillance aren't merely spiritual and psychological – they're material and immediate. The commercial surveillance industry provides the raw feedstock for a parade of horribles, from stalkers and bounty hunters turning up on their targets' front doors to cops rounding up demonstrators with location data from their phones to identity thieves tricking their marks by using leaked or purchased private information as convincers:

Pluralistic: Privacy first (06 Dec 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

The problem with Google's monopolization of the surveillance business model is that they're spying on us. But for a certain kind of competition wonk, the problem is that Google is monopolizing the violation of our human rights, and we need to use competition law to "democratize" commercial surveillance.”

Pluralistic: The Google antitrust remedy should extinguish surveillance, not democratize it (07 Aug 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

5G vulnerability allows for tricking phones with vulnerable basebands into connecting to a fake base station

TechCrunch

Hackers could spy on cell phone users by abusing 5G baseband flaws, researchers say | TechCrunch

Security researchers found a dozen vulnerabilities in 5G baseband chips found in phones made by Google, OPPO, OnePlus, Motorola, and Samsung.

Ted Cruz vs internet access

Techdirt

Ted Cruz Proudly Pledges To Kill Last Ditch Funding Effort For Popular Low-Income Broadband Program

We just noted how several Trumplican lawmakers recently killed a popular program that helped deliver a $30 discount off of the broadband bills of l...

The Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell is running a survey for a project to study the privacy expectations and content moderation experiences of people who use encrypted messaging apps. https://surveys.citizensandtech.org/216171?lang=en

Every month, I set aside one afternoon to write and reflect about my work and the media space more broadly in a newsletter. It's very helpful as an exercise to pause and reflect. I strongly recommend it. This month, I wrote about some similarities between audience research and investigative reporting in their purest forms. Some wishful thinking around platform and vendor data certainty, in research along with performative aspects of both fields, has made the two drift apart. In reality, they're actually quite similar. Journalism is much simpler than we make it out to be. It only gets complicated when we seek to perpetuate systems that aren't of service. This is the real opportunity right now: to disentangle and rebuild.

Gazzetta

Re:filtered #7: Research is reporting, reporting is research

"Your desire to find out needs to be stronger than your desire to predict."

Venezuela: VEsinFiltro documented 12 new cases of blocking against media outlets, human rights organizations and a VPN

VeSinFiltro

Venezuelan presidential elections took place in a context of restriction of human rights on the internet

The elections were held in a restricted media ecosystem, reducing guarantees for free and informed participation. To date, 62 media outlets are blo...

also Wikipedia and WSJ

Turkey blocks Instagram https://explorer.ooni.org/chart/mat?probe_cc=TR&since=2024-07-30&until=2024-08-03&time_grain=day&axis_x=measurement_start_day&test_name=web_connectivity&domain=www.instagram.com

A media project I consulted with is looking for a UX frontend designer with native Chinese skills to work full time on a new b2b media venture, remotely from anywhere ideally US, (just not Chinese mainland.)

Great opportunity for media folks to work with OTF. They are looking for experts in editorial services, and graphic design to support the adoption of censorship and surveillance resilient technologies. Check out the RFP for more details: https://www.opentech.fund/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Impact_and_Engagement_Lab_RFP.pdf

From scissors to scraping: a good read on the evolution of content sharing:

Techdirt

Sharing Material Used To Be The Norm For Newspapers, And Should Be For LLMs

Even though parents insist that it is good and right to share things, the copyright world has succeeded in establishing the contrary as the norm. N...

packaged content has very little inherent value, information or relationships have

A federal judge in New York ruled that Customs and Border Protection can’t search travelers’ phones without a warrant. The ruling theoretically applies to land borders, seaports, and airports — but in practice, it only applies to New York’s Eastern District.

The Verge

Customs agents need a warrant to search your phone now

This ruling only applies to one specific region.