LIRNEasia places emphasis on developing capacity for ICT policy and regulation in the region, as well as developing the capacity of the members of its own team. Part of the problem, we find, is that organizations do not put their money where their mouth is: while platitudes about the importance of training come easy to leaders of organizations, actually committing money for training and releasing staff for training does not come that easy. We try to walk the talk at LIRNEasia, but obviously we can be more systematic about it. Here is brilliant idea from IBM, which may be too complicated for an outfit that is still 12-14 people depending how the counting is done. But still worth thinking about.
The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) concludes that the scale, the scope, and the sophistication of state-based Internet filtering have all increased dramatically in recent years. The survey highlights the tools and techniques used by countries to keep their citizens from viewing certain kinds of online material. ONI is a collaboration among four leading universities: Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, and Toronto. Read more.
Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, Associate Professor at Harvard’s John F Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachussetts, has criticised the increasing global tendency for everything on the Web, in telephony and in computing to be recorded, archived and kept forever. He said, “In March 2007, Google confirmed that since its inception it had stored every search query every user ever made and every search result ever clicked on. Like the Soviet state, Google does not forget. Google remembers forever.” He adds, “If whatever we do can be held against us years later, if all our impulsive comments are preserved…our words and actions may be perceived years later and taken out of context…the lack of forgetting may prompt us speak less freely and openly.