Want to help fight Internet censorship and help promote freedom of expression online? Become a Herdict intern for this spring.
Herdict is seeking an intern for the spring semester, who is passionate about Internet freedom and eager to help this exciting project. The intern will be responsible for brainstorming blog posts with the Herdict staff, writing blog posts and tweeting about Herdict and current events relevant to the project, and coordinating with our local outreach coordinators.
Required Education, Experience and Skills:
* Highly motivated individuals who are excited about furthering a free and open Internet
* Creative thinkers who can help identify relevant news issues and events
* Excellent writing skills
* At least well on the way to a bachelors degree or better
Additional Skills and Interests:
* Experience writing blog posts or other articles, particularly those that discuss legal or Internet freedom issues, for a non-legal audience
* Experience organizing volunteers
* Proficiency in Chinese, Arabic, Turkish, or Thai is a bonus, but certainly not required
* Experience with Excel is a plus
Hours and Pay:
* Commit to helping Herdict for five – ten hours per week.
* Interns are paid $11.50 an hour. No other benefits are provided.
Eligibility:
* The intern does not have to be a student.
* The intern does not have to be affiliated with Harvard University.
* We are unable to hire interns who will conduct their work outside of the state of Massachusetts.
* We do not have the ability to provide authorization to work in the U.S.
To apply:
Please email the following information to contact at herdict.org
* A cover letter indicating your interest in the position
* A current resume
* A sample of a blog post (or similar) that you’ve previously published
Please direct any questions regarding these opportunities or your applications to contact at herdict.org.
We look forward to hearing from you soon!
The Herdict Team
Tonight, several US-based websites will begin an important and unprecedented protest against two pieces of legislation: Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) in the US House of Representatives and Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the US Senate. These pieces of legislation, if enacted as currently written, would give the American government and corporations the power to alter the structural underpinnings of the Internet in the name of stopping online piracy.
Much has been written about the proposed legislation (see, e.g., EFF, Wikimedia, BoingBoing, Reddit, WordPress, Tor, and Fight For The Future), but in short, it will muck with the free and open Internet, while creating a high risk of abuse. In other words, corporations and the government would receive the power to censor sites with nearly no due process.
In protest of these two pieces of legislation, several organizations have agreed to black out some or all of their services/sites beginning tomorrow, January, 18, 2011. These organizations include: Wikipedia, TwitPic, MoveOn.org, Mozilla, Reddit, WordPress, Tor, and the iCanHasCheezburger sites.
Although not everyone believes this blackout is a good idea, we support the protesting organizations in demonstrating the potential negative consequences of these bills. In support of their blackout, we are encouraging all US members of the Herd to report through the Herdict Reporter when these sites become all or partially unavailable. For people in the US, our Reporter will automatically load the sites of several of the protest participants (and you can easily input others to test).
At Herdict, we typically stay away from political issues. Our position is that we are a network resource that provides information about the continuous state of the Internet at large. Although we clearly believe in the importance of a free and open Internet, by overtly politicizing what we do, we risk our status as a conduit of data. However, in this case, we don’t need to choose: we can track the unavailability of these sites as they go dark, while also supporting the organizations in their demonstration of the censorship risks SOPA and PIPA pose.
We encourage you all to report as this blackout gets underway.
Yesterday the Dutch lower court of ’s-Gravenhage ordered Dutch Internet Service Providers (ISPs) Ziggo and XS4ALL to start blocking IP-addresses and domain names that are used by the Pirate Bay. The court had previously rejected the Dutch Entertainment Industry Trade Association’s (BREIN) request for a preliminary injunction. But BREIN has now received essentially everything that it had sought.
The court agreed with BREIN after considering how a Swedish court convicted the administrators of the Pirate Bay and a Dutch lower court previously (but ineffectively) ordered them to delete all torrents that link to BREIN member-owned copyrighted material.
In its earlier judgment, the court held that blocking the Pirate Bay was not a proportional measure. BREIN could have also asked Ziggo to release personal data of certain infringers so that BREIN could target these individual users. In contrast, the court yesterday argued that trying to sue individual Internet users has proven to be too difficult. Even if BREIN is able to trace IP-addresses of copyright infringing users, BREIN would have to request the ISPs to identify their users, which is something the ISPs have not done on a voluntary basis so far.
Besides blocking the Pirate Bay’s current IP-addresses and domain names, the court ordered the two ISPs to also block future Pirate Bay IP-addresses and domain names that are listed by BREIN.
XS4ALL has announced that it will appeal the case.
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