- Refections from participants in the Finsbury Square Occupy camp, which is due for eviction in the near future



- A discussion about the social impacts of default, specifically looking at the parallels between contemporary Greece and the Argentina of 10 years ago



- An interview on 'take the flour back', an upcoming mass action against genetically modified wheat in the UK happening on 27 M…

I you think you're not technical enough to understand some of the debate on distributed social networks as opposed to centralised ones (like this one) check out this comic animation. It tries to explain the differences and the problems of centralised corporate services in plain English.

http://blip.tv/visionontv/michael-albert-what-s-wrong-with-facebook-and-twitter-5714971

Filmed at the Rebellious Media Conference http://rebelliousmediaconference.org/

Michael Albert talking about Znet, facebook and twitter, and new political social network alternatives and ideas around zsocial.



http://www.zcommunications.org currently down due to dos

Earlier today I posted about a current crisis of censorship on Facebook.

Background:

• Citizen activists created J30Strike.org, a website advocating peaceful demonstration against austerity measures in the U.K. on June 30th
• Sometime in the last 48 hours or so, anyone who tried to post or share a link to J30Strike on their Facebook account was blocked from doing so, receiving instead an error me…

Geotime software, bought by the Met, collates data from social networking sites, satnavs, mobiles and financial transactions

Britain's largest police force is using software that can map nearly every move suspects and their associates make in the digital world, prompting an outcry from civil liberties groups.

The Metropolitan police has bought Geotime, a security programme used by the US milit…

 

Following the events of Tunisia, Egypt and other Southern Med States where a popular people’s movement was started over the Facebook and Social networks, a small group of Portuguese youth started up a Facebook page-calling for a million people march on the main street in Lisbon, Avenida da Liberdade, for March 12th 2011, to fill up the entire street. They called themselves the “Geracao A Rasca…

The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described a…

I'm afraid I haven't been able to follow events in Tunisia and Egypt as closely as I would have liked as I was determined to enjoy an overdue holiday and a break from computer screens. And my mission was largely accomplished.

As part of an attempt to catch up, I've just been reading Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and C.W. Anderson on the renewed argument over "Twitter revolutions". The role of Twitter…

Yesterday after 11 days in occupation the students decided to have a bit of fun at the expense of the ConDem coalition social media mouthpieces.

Co-ordinated posts with profile pic letters made a nice banner down the pages :)

This is the result.

Many of the most popular applications, or "apps," on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people's names and, in some cases, their friends' names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, …

If you ask anyone on the street, "what business is Google in?", they'll answer without hesitation, "they are in the search business." Google is seen primarily as a search company. It gives us, the public, internet search services for free, out of the generosity of its corporate heart. It also happen to give a us a whole pile of other great services: Gmail, YouTube, Gtalk, and the Android mobi…

Underscoring the permanence of data published on the internet, a security researcher has compiled the names and URLs of more than 100 million Facebook users and made them available as a BitTorrent download.

Ron Bowles, who describes himself as a certified penetration tester, said he used some hastily written code to harvest the names of more than 100 million users who had set their accounts to be…

On today, May 31, 2010, over 25,000 people have pledged to quit Facebook. But where will they go to? What are your options for social interaction online? An "unofficial blog about the diaspora project" published a table of options, including brand new inventions. Interestingly, we.riseup.net is not included in the list.

opensource, facebook and all the evil... in a comic!

The heartfelt tune it plays is CC licensed, and you can get it from my seed on JoinDiaspora.com whenever that project gets going.

Loveable Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg called his first few thousand users "dumb fucks" for trusting him with their data, published IM transcripts show. Facebook hasn't disputed the authenticity of the transcript.

Zuckerberg was chatting with an unnamed friend, apparently in early 2004. Business Insider, which has a series of quite juicy anecdotes about Facebook's early days, takes the credit

Danah Boyd is an anthropologist. She is also a critical user of and expert on corporate social networks. Here she rants about facebook's fake-claim to radical transparency.

The first Hyperactive Summit was held this past weekend, 7-9 May 2010. The meeting was a mix of politics and technology centering around issues of free code, autonomous/anarchist social movements, grassroots reporting, and state and corporate surveillance. It had a special focus on the Hyperactive content management system used by London Indymedia, which was built by the London collective over the…

In a recent speech which was very much in line with discussions happening inside Indymedia London during the past two years, Eben Moglen of the Free Software Foundation and the Software Freedom Law Centre recently gave a speech deriding Facebook and Google for their dangerous, privacy-killing, corporate-owned software systems.

Moglen called for the creation of a Free Software distributed social n…

A "youth against the banks" Facebook party at a Mayfair mansion in London was broken up by officers in riot gear last night after revellers pelted police with bricks and bottles.