Recently in Elsewhere Category

Africa is rapidly becoming "the place to be" for Western businesses. Despite common preconceptions expressed in Twitter hashtags like #FirstWorldProblems, a lot of African economies are growing rapidly, and US and European companies are looking to the continent for their next wave of consumers. This is not as surprising as you might initially think. Compared to Western Europe with its declining birth rates and, in many countries, negative population growth, Africa's population continues to grow rapidly.

Read more on OrgZine.

Back in April this year, the Guardian published its "Open 20" - a list of twenty "fighters for internet freedom". As with any such list, the opportunities for criticism and disagreement are endless. What struck me in particular, though, is that not only does the list contain just four women but one of them is Ada Lovelace. As illustrious and pioneering a woman as the Countess of Lovelace was, she died in 1852, over a hundred years before anything that can be legitimately seen as a progenitor of the internet, and thus can hardly be described as a fighter for internet freedom. You know we're struggling to showcase female participation in a field when we have to scrape the barrel for examples from before the field even existed.

Read more on ORGZine.

Governments are not in the business of defending freedom

To seasoned digital rights campaigners this is probably not news, but it's definitely something worth reminding ourselves of. It was certainly a theme that ran through the "Freedom and Security" session at the Turing Festival in Edinburgh on Saturday morning.

Read more over on ORGZine.

As a woman and feminist working in technology and interested in digital rights, I occasionally find that the different worlds I am part of collide quite spectacularly. Case in point: the growing controversy over how women are treated in certain online spaces, notably gaming and blogging, but also in everyday social interactions online. Let's take a quick tour of the female experience of online spaces.

Read more on ORGZine.

At the end of May this year, new EU rules on cookies came into force. We are not talking the chocolate chip variety here, but the small chunks of seemingly-random text which websites save on your computer as you browse the web. These little files enable basic functionalities like online shopping or setting your language preferences, but they can also be used to identify you and track your browsing across multiple sites. This allows, for instance, advertisers to build up detailed profiles of your interests and behaviour to better target their ads. Most internet users are only vaguely aware of cookies, what they do or how they work.

Read more over on ORGZine.

I was born Bulgarian, am legally Austrian, have spent most of my life in the UK and I self-identify as European. So let me tell you about Englishness.

It strikes me as highly amusing that the English - and, frankly, from Newcastle it looks more like just those south of Watford - are having an identity crisis prompted by Scots' desire for independence. It feels like they are waking up to realise that not everyone on this island is English after all. But if they're not, then what is it that makes English people special and unique? Well, as an outsider, more-or-less, who has spent a substantial amount of time in this country, I have some thoughts on how "Englishness" relates to Britishness and other national identities of the UK.

Read more at the Scottish Times.

I am usually the last person to cry "Think of the children!" It is a rallying cry too often used to restrict the rights of adults without having any measurable impact on children's lives. Want to impose your 19th-century morality on the country? Think of the children - we need to block all porn on the internet! (And never mind Page three of the Sun - that's run by our good friend Rupert Murdoch.) Want to read the nation's emails? Think of the children - by accessing your communications data we'll catch paedophiles! (If you're not a paedophile you have nothing to fear! You're not a paedophile, are you?)

Read more over at ORGZine.

That politicians and bureaucrats don't - and frankly often have no desire to - understand the internet is a given. It has also been highlighted over the last week by, among other things, the antics of Argyll and Bute Council.

Quite why the council thought it was a good idea to pick a fight with a nine-year-old girl raising money for a children's charity is anyone's guess. For six weeks or so, Martha Payne had been taking pictures of her school lunches and posting them on her blog, together with some evaluation - how tasty, how healthy, how many pieces of hair, etc. Some of the food looks okay - and Martha is quite complimentary about it; some is shocking both in terms of nutritional value and portion size, even for a nine-year-old.

Read more at the Scottish Times.

An increase in traffic to my blog inevitably comes with an increase in comment spam. I must admit I do not exactly feel like an enemy of free speech every time I hit "Delete" on something like this:

Read more at ORGZine.

It's been nearly ten years since I left academia, but I have enough friends who are academic researchers in various fields to know that academic publishing continues to be stuck in the 19th century. Every so often I need access to a research paper, and I have to beg friends at universities with the right subscriptions to get it for me; occasionally, I act as a broker for such requests from other people.

Read more over at ORGZine.