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Mallory Knodel

Mallory Knodel

10 ways the internet makes things worse for human rights

The internet has facilitated a new era of challenges and threats to human rights. While it has enabled e-commerce, it has exacerbated inequality. While it has democratized freedom of expression, it has given a megaphone to hate speech. While it has lowered barriers to access information, it has proliferated misinformation.

New radio regulations; Digital trade

At the WRC-23, the ITU-Radio sector meeting, 151 states signed 43 new resolutions, revised 56 existing ones, and suppressed 33 resolutions. You could read the 629 pages for fun, but the main resolution that I wanted to highlight is Resolution COM6/6 (pages 561-562) that spells out a new area

WHODIS? WHOIS.

Identity on the internet: Digital identity has become a central priority for service providers, governments and users of the internet. From authentication to credentials to passwords and, of course, user privacy considerations, the ideas space is pretty crowded. At the same time, cooperation in standards and across standards development organizations

A multimedia compendium of splinternet

This week in Montreal is the invite-only inaugural edition of Splintercon, an event focused on innovative solutions for isolated networks. Here are some highlights: * The Splintercon knowledge base is everything already, and growing https://splintercon.net/resource * Splinternet is an evolution of Internet Without Borders a nomadic event series held

Why is the Struggle for Democracy So Hard?

RFC 9505: Newly minted RFC 9505 is an informational document from the Internet Research Task Force that "describes technical mechanisms employed in network censorship that regimes around the world use for blocking or impairing Internet traffic." The best part about this project that extended over nine years is

Targeting targeted ads; Everything old is new again

Behavioral advertising is about to meet its demise. Scholar-activist Nathalie Maréchal and privacy expert Nick Doty, with colleagues at the Center for Democracy and Technology, have just launched The Future of Online Advertising project. For years it's been apparent that Targeted Advertising Is Ruining the Internet and Breaking

AI has 99 problems

... but PR isn't one. Everyone is talking about AI– even me! Just like no one "goes online" anymore, AI is already everything everywhere all at once. Tim Wu (gift link) centers actual harms in his analysis of the White House executive order on AI, to get

AI has 99 problems and none are technical

It’s critical to confront the reality that AI is just modern data science with one major promise (or peril): It’s our only hope of making sense of the vast quantities of unstructured data produced by ubiquitous sensors and surveillance. It is this underlying motivation that needs our attention.

#NoTechForApartheid; IETF 118; Intimate Partner GBV

The latest in "tech isn't neutral": The ITU spoke out against the internet shutdown in Gaza: “ITU condemns the communication blackout in Gaza and calls for life-saving access to networks to be restored." Full internet blackout means the siege on Gaza is happening in darkness.

Beyond carbon; IP Go!; Part II: Human rights + tech

Beyond carbon: This summer I attended a retreat at a convent in Montenegro with the critical infrastructures lab to talk about standards, emerging tech and environmental sustainability. Most discussion in the tech industry focuses on the important and nearly insurmountable problem of energy consumption and emissions, there are many impacts