It has become increasingly common for a reader to follow a URL cited in a court opinion or a law review article, only to be met with an error message because the resource has been moved from its ...original online address. This form of reference rot, commonly referred to as ‘linkrot’, has arisen from the disconnect between the transience of online materials and the permanence of legal citation, and will only become more prevalent as scholarly materials move online. The present paper*, written by Jonathan Zittrain, Kendra Albert and Lawrence Lessig, explores the pervasiveness of linkrot in academic and legal citations, finding that more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information. In light of these results, a solution is proposed for authors and editors of new scholarship that involves libraries undertaking the distributed, long-term preservation of link contents.
Reports on a new generation of Internet controls that establish a new normative terrain in which surveillance and censorship are routine.
Internet filtering, censorship of Web content, and online ...surveillance are increasing in scale, scope, and sophistication around the world, in democratic countries as well as in authoritarian states. The first generation of Internet controls consisted largely of building firewalls at key Internet gateways; China's famous “Great Firewall of China” is one of the first national Internet filtering systems. Today the new tools for Internet controls that are emerging go beyond mere denial of information. These new techniques, which aim to normalize (or even legalize) Internet control, include targeted viruses and the strategically timed deployment of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, surveillance at key points of the Internet's infrastructure, take-down notices, stringent terms of usage policies, and national information shaping strategies. Access Controlled reports on this new normative terrain. The book, a project from the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a collaboration of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies, Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and the SecDev Group, offers six substantial chapters that analyze Internet control in both Western and Eastern Europe and a section of shorter regional reports and country profiles drawn from material gathered by the ONI around the world through a combination of technical interrogation and field research methods.
The architecture and offerings of the Internet developed without much steering by governments, much less operations by militaries. That made talk of "cyberwar" exaggerated, except in very limited ...instances. Today that is no longer true: States and their militaries see the value not only of controlling networks for surveillance or to deny access to adversaries, but also of subtle propaganda campaigns launched through a small number of wildly popular worldwide platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. This form of hybrid conflict - launched by states without state insignia, on privately built and publicly used services - offers a genuine challenge to those who steward the network and the private companies whose platforms are targeted. While interventions by one state may be tempered by defense by another state, there remain novel problems to solve when what users see and learn online is framed as organic and user-generated but in fact it is not.
Will the Web break? Zittrain, Jonathan
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences,
03/2013, Volume:
371, Issue:
1987
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
What is the Web? What makes it work? And is it dying? This paper is drawn from a talk delivered by Prof. Zittrain to the Royal Society Discussion Meeting 'Web science: a new frontier' in September ...2010. It covers key questions about the way the Web works, and how an understanding of its past can help those theorizing about the future. The original Web allowed users to display and send information from their individual computers, and organized the resources of the Internet with uniform resource locators. In the 20 years since then, the Web has evolved. These new challenges require a return to the spirit of the early Web, exploiting the power of the Web's users and its distributed nature to overcome the commercial and geopolitical forces at play. The future of the Web rests in projects that preserve its spirit, and in the Web science that helps make them possible.
Will the Web break? Zittrain, Jonathan
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences,
03/2013, Volume:
371, Issue:
1987
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
What is the Web? What makes it work? And is it dying? This paper is drawn from a talk delivered by Prof. Zittrain to the Royal Society Discussion Meeting 'Web science: a new frontier' in September ...2010. It covers key questions about the way the Web works, and how an understanding of its past can help those theorizing about the future. The original Web allowed users to display and send information from their individual computers, and organized the resources of the Internet with uniform resource locators. In the 20 years since then, the Web has evolved. These new challenges require a return to the spirit of the early Web, exploiting the power of the Web's users and its distributed nature to overcome the commercial and geopolitical forces at play. The future of the Web rests in projects that preserve its spirit, and in the Web science that helps make them possible.
Better Data for a Better Internet Palfrey, John; Zittrain, Jonathan
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
12/2011, Volume:
334, Issue:
6060
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Debates about Internet policy lack, or ignore, good data upon which to make policy decisions.
When people took to the streets across the UK in the summer of 2011, the Prime Minister suggested ...restricting access to digital and social media in order to limit their use in organizing. The resulting debate complemented speculation on the effects of social media in the Arab Spring and the widespread critique of President Mubarak's decision to shut off the Internet and mobile phone systems completely in Egypt (see the photo).
How to end the copyright wars Zittrain, Jonathan
Nature,
01/2009, Volume:
457, Issue:
7227
Journal Article, Book Review
Peer reviewed
Open access
Lessig hopes to appeal to the Sousa within Valenti's successor and partners, yet as the founder of modern cyberlaw, he has a more ambitious agenda: dealing with what he sees as a more general ...corruption of the democratic political system originally intended to save us from our economic, legal and cultural ruts.
Archivists regularly contend with a wide range of security threats, including data breaches, inadvertent loss, and legal action by those hoping to make sealed records public. These threats are ...particularly salient when sensitive materials are donated with delayed-release conditions. Trust in archivists' ability to enforce such conditions gives donors the confidence to enter into the historical record materials that they might otherwise destroy. But as these materials are increasingly born-digital (and therefore hackable, convenient to exfiltrate en masse, and more easily corrupted), and as governments and private parties become ever more aggressive in their efforts to secure early releases, we must innovate in order to stand still. To compensate for these new dynamics, we propose Strong Dark Archives (SDA), a blended legal and technical protocol for securing delayed-released archival materials among a network of libraries. SDA leverages modern cryptography and institutional agreements to coordinate access-control across multiple accredited archival organizations, providing broad resilience to data breaches, technical failures, and legal process. Through this distributed approach to security, SDA imposes meaningful friction on efforts to force the early disclosure of archival records.
Adversarial attacks on medical machine learning Finlayson, Samuel G.; Bowers, John D.; Ito, Joichi ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
03/2019, Volume:
363, Issue:
6433
Journal Article
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