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Hi,<BR>
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Tomorrow the 30st is meeting day,<BR>
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Anyone interested in changing the venue to the Santa Fe Complex for one night?<BR>
there's this talk <BR>
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<A HREF="http://cafenm.org/2010/cafefall10_crandall.html">http://cafenm.org/2010/cafefall10_crandall.html</A><BR>
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<B><FONT SIZE="4">Is Big Brother Watching and Restricting Your Internet Activity?</FONT></B><BR>
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<B>Jed Crandall, Department of Computer Science, University of New Mexico</B><BR>
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“Connection timed out.” “Server not found.” “The connection has been reset.” Has your web browser ever told you these things? Was it telling you the whole truth? Have you ever become interested in an Internet meme or something political someone said but you mysteriously couldn't find the video on YouTube? This Cafe will be about Internet censorship and threats to privacy that are occurring all over the world, and the parallels that I see here in the United States. <BR>
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If you use a search engine to search for something from a typical high school in New Mexico, there's a good chance that your query and the results you get back are being filtered or recorded at least half a dozen times. When the search engine is deciding which results to send you in response to your query, it has to check for compliance with laws such as the Digital Millienium Copyright Act. On your end, your school may be using proxy filtering software such as Websense to enforce the Children's Internet Protection Act. The Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that route Internet packets between your school and the search engine (e.g., Comcast, Qwest, or AT&T) filter certain kinds of communication and record things like network flows and clickstreams, which basically means who you communicated with and what you communicated with them about. Some of them pass this information on to the U.S. Government in compliance with the Protect America Act. The search engine probably also records your query. Your high school may record Internet traffic and store it for weeks at a time for compliance with various laws, particularly if government employees (such as teachers) also use the Internet there. <BR>
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And all that's happening just if you use a search engine from a school. What would you like to do when you're done with school? Foreign correspondent for a major newspaper? Human rights activist? Soldier? Defense lawyer? Whitehat hacker? If you plan on doing anything that requires access to information that someone, somewhere considers important, then you can bet that current trends on the Internet will have a profound effect on how you do your job in the future. In some parts of the world today, people put their lives at stake to use the Internet as a tool for getting their message out to the world. The activity during the recent “green revolution” protests in Iran regarding the election results in March is an example. Among the many interesting questions that computer scientists face, how to keep the Internet open and free is one that my own research focuses on. <BR>
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The purpose of my talk will be two-fold. First, I want to get you thinking about how Internet censorship and threats to privacy affect you and your community, and what kinds of restrictions you can expect to bump into now and in the future (especially if you go looking for them ;-). Second, I hope to get you interested in some of the deep computational and scientific questions that Internet censorship and privacy issues raise, since some sharp scientific minds are needed if we're going to be able to address the technology and policy issues of the 21st century. <BR>
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