This Week In Cyberspace

The United Nations is currently holding its 67th session of the Commission on the Status of Women and the main theme for this 12-day think fest is: “Innovation and technology for gender equality”. It’s the first time that digital gender inequalities have been highlighted by the Commission and high time too because there are 238 million more men on line than women. At the Fourth World Conference on...

Rainbow flags are flapping from police stations, shop fronts and Surf Rescue buggies thanks to Sydney WorldPride. Inclusivity and diversity is the mantra of the Rainbow Tribe, but globally, identity wars ares raging. We discuss how the LGBTIQmmunity is enhanced by digital platforms in some countries, and targeted by them in others. 

“The country was a construction site. It has become a cemetery.” wrote one journalist in the wake of the mega earthquake that rocked Turkey on February 6 killing nearly 50,000 people, many of them buried beneath the rubble of poorly built apartment blocks. A further two earthquakes destroyed even more buildings weakened by the previous quake. In the midst of this natural disaster, Twitter and Tik...

There are potentially dangerous experiments taking place in the Artificial Intelligence sphere that could shape the way we all live. The latest one is Tik Tok’s Focused View, an emotional recognition feature that targets ads to the user based on your reactions to various videos. But there are serious questions about whether it actually violates European Union laws. We attempt to get our real live...

It’s been 2 years since the military took over rule in Myanmar. Playing from the authoritarian's playbook, the regime is  using CCTV's and International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) registration to control their citizens. It's a digital dictatorship where people think that Facebook IS the Internet, and human rights abuses are hidden behind internet shutdowns. But dictatorships always fall...

In  the world’s largest democracy, censorship has been running rampant around a BBC documentary that the Indian Foreign Ministry has called a “propaganda piece” made with a “colonial mind-set.” When students in New Delhi organised screenings of the two-part series, authorities called in the riot police, cut off electricity and detained the organisers. ‘India - the Modi Question’ explores the...

We reboot in 2023 with Brett Solomon  (CEO of accessnow.org) fresh from the World Economic Forum in Davos where he’s been on a panel with the Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine. He also took selfies with Will I Am who loves CHAT GPT, the Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer owned by Microsoft. Nick Cave calls it ‘a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human’. Is this the end of humanity as...

A defining moment of the past year has been the massive data breach that left millions asking the question, "Who Am I?". This question wont go away in 2023 as we try to define ourselves not only in physical spaces but online ones too. As governments around the world ramp up their use of cyber warfare, internet shutdowns like the 180 plus we saw in 2022, will continue to occur. What the world needs...

Shutting down the internet is a powerful digital weapon used by autocrats the world over. It’s currently being used by Putin in his war against Ukraine. In the past 10 months, Russia has also managed to block nearly 3,000 news websites and make civilians in occupied parts of the country pay for SIM cards with Rubels. So how can the rest of the world help restore some sense of interconnectedness in...

Millions of people are exploring their artificially generated, inner iridescent, cartoon essence. That’s right, with the recent release of  the “magic avatar” by the photo-editing app Lensa, we can all be fantasy stars in our own lunchtime. But concerns are mounting about how it not only collects massive amounts of personal data, often sexualises your image while potentially breaching artisti...

The 17th Internet Governance Forum has just wrapped up in the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, with a call to urgently connect the 2.7 billion who are unconnected by increasing infrastructure investment, fostering digital literacy, harnessing advanced technologies, and building a safe and secure digital space where fundamental human rights are realised. Our regular guest and CEO of the digital ri...

Brett Solomon joins us from a noisy cafe in Amsterdam for a chat ahead of the 17th Internet Governance Forum in Addis Adaba, Ethiopia. The big irony is that the northern Ethiopian province of Tigray is currently under a two-year internet blackout and this is not on the IGF's agenda yet. Nor is the situation in China nor Russia. There's a battle for control of the internet going on globally...

The mass layoffs in the tech sector include human rights experts, specialist rights and ethics teams, and content moderators that speak local languages in places like Asia and Africa. Twitter has shed 90% of employees in India and only has one marketing person left  in Japan, its second largest market. So what do these changing priorities mean and is this a reckoning for the industry?

Things are hotting up as COP27 enters its final days and human rights defenders demand the release of Alaa Abd el-Fattah. The Egyptian-British pro-democracy activist has been on a six month hunger strike and has refused water since the climate conference began ten days ago . British Parliament is up in arms over it. Lady Boycott is concerned about human rights abuses, Lord Purvis of Tweed wants to...

Elon Musk wants to “authenticate all real humans", so why is he dressing up in red samurai gear and posing as the ‘Devil’s Champion’? The Tesla founder’s recent halloween outfit, with its inverted cross and goat’s head breastplate, seems to have inflamed conspiracy theorists who think his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter is part of a global battle against evil. It would be funny if it wasn't so...

This week we look  to Finland for tips on how to protect human rights online and be happy. Turns out this involves some schizophrenic thinking and lots of forests. Brett Solomon from accessnow.org has been speaking with top officials in the happiest Scandanavian country, and says that instability and policy confusion means that we may just be at a tipping point where we can have some signific...

Facial Recognition is now so embedded in our lives that we forget how this data is being used. The securitisastion and corporatisation of everything has led to a point where our identity could be owned by a private company without our consent. How can mere mortal small fry like us reclaim our basic human rights? Hear how regulatory frameworks to govern surveillance capitalism are progressing in pl...

This Week In Cyberspace, we investigate spyware. It’s just been found to have been used by the Mexican army to spy on citizens. So what exactly is it, and how can we protect ourselves from it? Tune in for some digital details.

What do you do when your identity is stolen? Laugh. There are bigger problems, like Israel and Palestine.....still. Facebook's Oversight Committee has brought down its first report and it's fascinating!