I hope I’ve piqued your interest with all of the Herdict buzz. You’re excited, perhaps, waiting with bated breath for the next installment of Herdict blogging. You’re raring and ready to participate. Or perhaps you’re simply wondering, “What can Herdict do for me?” As you know, you can do a lot for Herdict. Your input […]

Room 221 at The Berkman Center, home to the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) and Herdict, is a lively office constantly abuzz with discussion: of Internet filtering, surveillance, and sheep. But ONI and Herdict don’t just share an office; the two initiatives also share very similar ideals…but very different methods. ONI’s aim is “to investigate, expose, and […]

I’m co-moderating a retreat with John Palfrey about the future of privacy, and one of the morning provocateurs was Hal Abelson.  He mused back on the days of SAFE — a campaign against a U.S. government proposal for a “Clipper Chip” that would permit, with a warrant, the government to gain access to encrypted data […]

After praising the iPhone as wholesome as warm bread, Colbert takes to task the iPhone for its “kill switch” (“It actually kills you!”).  In the meantime, Gizmodo reports that there’s a “BossPrefs” app to disable it, joining the more labor intensive method of tricking the iPhone into thinking that the Apple update server is found […]

It’s been clear from the start that information appliances like the iPhone, tethered to their vendors, would have a kill switch — that’s just a subset of the vendor’s (in the case, Apple’s) ability to reprogram any aspect of the phone from a distance at any time.  In a world of third party apps, that […]

Followers of Herdict’s progress may have noticed by now that our chosen icon is the sheep. “What’s up with the sheep?” they might ask. “Herdict” is a portmanteau of “herd” and “verdict” – used to mean “the verdict of the herd.” Since the goal of Herdict Network Health is to gain insight into what the […]

This fall the Berkman Center for Internet and Society (and JZ’s new home) will unveil Herdict, a suite of programs that gathers data from users around the world about their PCs’ performance and ability to access websites. Herdict aggregates this information and aims to provide a real time picture of users’ PC health and web […]

I don’t mean to only talk about the iPhone apps system — Facebook apps, Google mash-ups, and plenty of other emerging platforms share the fascinating if troubling characteristics of iPhone apps — but it’s an example that’s continuing to expand. On the one hand is the NYT’s reporting that the iPhone Apps Store has pressured […]

The iPhone has come some way since the days when Steve Jobs pledged that Apple would “define everything that is on the phone.”  Yet even with a software development kit allowing for outside coding, Apple reserves the right to … define everything that is on the phone.  Application makers submit their apps for Apple’s approval, […]

document.domain = “futureoftheinternet.org”;The makers of Scrabulous have apparently relaunched it as “Wordscraper,” a word game that can support a variety of rules, and whose tiles no longer look so much like Scrabble’s. Players can themselves set the rules to simulate a Scrabble game — but that would make the infringement that of the users rather […]