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Sci Tech    H2'ed 6/12/12

Report from Personal Democracy Forum

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I've been attending the Personal Democracy Forum, in NYC. This is my fourth year covering it and I have to say it's become one of my favorite conferences. Why? It always brings incredible voices, faces and information.  Go to the link above for the schedule and archived videos. There is awesome content there. (twitter hashtag to follow is #PDF12 )

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I'll be writing articles and doing interviews based on my attendance. If you can, you should seriously consider attending next year, if you use the internet for politics, activism or government. 
Presenters this year included protesters, experts in transparency, internet campaigning, internet freedoms and SOPA and PIPA,  shared economy, demographics and data, malware as weapons (flame, Stuxnet) International trade, privacy.
Make sure to read below about how visual memes are used in China to evade censors. It seems that memes should also be used more for all activism. They are incredibly powerful. 
Actually, as I write this report, I'm listening to an expert on internet security-- Christopher Soghoian. 
Here are some notes from his talk:
5% of the world uses Internet explorer 6, which is 10 years old and has many security flaws. Firefox also has had many security flaws. Google Chrome seems to be the most aggressively updated for security-- automatically.  (I use chrome almost all the time.)
Computers that don't auto-update are much more likely to get infected. Then they turn into Zombies, which are used as parts of bot-nets-- millions of infected computers used to send out spam and worse. 
And here are some notes from other talks, panels and conversations:
Van Jones had this to say about Occupy: "Occupy Wall Street is the most important thing that's happened in this country in the last decade." He said that in response to an accusation that he'd been attempting to co-opt occupy for the Democrats. I have to say that his response, which this was a part of, was convincing. I'll have the rest of the respons in a full article later this week. 
Here are some more notes. 
The conference opened with a three way conversation between Andrew Rasiej, one of the meeting co-founders, Senator Ron Wyden and congressman Darrell Issa, talking about SOPA, PIPA and TPP. I'm particularly interested in TPP-- the Trans Pacific Partnership, which I believe is the most under the radar, dangerous Trade Agreement ever. Wyden agreed to be on my radio show to discuss it. 
More notes;

Leslie Harris, president of CDT

Leslie Harris - Center for Democracy and Technology

The internet is threatened by a sweeping censorship, aimed at a growing threat to the american way of life-- the internet.

Advocacy has always mattered for the open internet. 

We did not get the internet we have today by code alone. 

It takes more than a moment to make a movement. 

Depending on outcome of the election, it's possible we'll have to deal with the end of net neutrality. 

Need a politics more welcoming to women

Nee dot grab our passports and leave the republi of Nerdistan

We do have to set a positive vision for the internet-- then an agenda that captures the imagineation of the electorate-- one that they can envision themselves, for their future and the future of their children.  The hard part is we to get beyond no. 

No is the right strategy for SOPA. We have to be prepared to grapple with the issues that affect all intent users and 

Answers will not always be as easy as "hands off."

We must articulate a common set of ethics for the internet community and be welling to step up and call out those who step out of line. 

We need to work out our place for the global internet freedom. When we (in the US) 

quoting an Indian "The world is waiting to cherry pick from the USA's worst practices"

Susan Crawford

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Rob Kall Social Media Pages: Facebook Page       Twitter page url on login Profile not filled in       Linkedin page url on login Profile not filled in       Instagram page url on login Profile not filled in

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune 500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom Up Radio Show, and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
 

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