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The popular digital currency Bitcoin, witha market capitalization of over $16 billion, was in the news over the weekend after it recrossed the $1,000/Bitcoin value threshold. Despite the buzz around Bitcoin, there is another cryptocurrency-related project that is poised to revolutionize the way in which we exchange.

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The Ethereum Project, an open source platform developed by 22-year old programmer Vitalik Buterin, is seeking to build upon the blockchain technology established by Bitcoin by allowing developers to use the blockchain to build decentralized applications.

The blockchain is a decentralized database where records and entries are virtually unchangeable. While Bitcoin utilizes blockchain technology to manage a currency, the Ethereum Project provides an open source environment where programmers can create applications on the blockchain.

Tristan Winters, a reporter at ETHNews, the leading online Ethereum news site, explained to me the Ethereum project in laymans terms: Ethereum is a world computer. Instead of hosting apps on a server, you host them on the Ethereum blockchain and p2p network (world computer). So the apps are censorship resistant and no one can shut them down, even if they want to.

Ethereum is driven by Ether, a cryptocurrency that acts as fuel for the system. According to the projects website, Ether is a necessary element that ensures that developers are writing quality applications:

Ether is a necessary element a fuel for operating the distributed application platform Ethereum. It is a form of payment made by the clients of the platform to the machines executing the requested operations. To put it another way, ether is the incentive ensuring that developers write quality applications (wasteful code costs more), and that the network remains healthy (people are compensated for their contributed resources).

Because of the open source nature of Ethereum, its has almost limitless functions. Developers have proposed and began work on decentralized file storage systems, financial systems, and business management systems.

Ethereum allows actors to create smart contracts, which are programs that run on the blockchain that can handle currency in a way that is unchangeable. Smart contracts can be used for a variety of business functions, such as the representation of shares, organizational voting, and fundraising.

The decentralized nature of the Ethereum blockchain would allow for social networks that are truly resistant to censorship. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, a social network operating on Ethereum wouldnt be accessed via centralized servers. Such a network would exist as a peer-to-peer network that lives on computers throughout the world. Because such a network would have no centralized body, censorship would be extremely difficult.

Although it is unclear what the future holds for the Ethereum Project and the value of Ether, it seems likely that there is increasing interest in decentralized applications that have the potential to liberate an increasingly centralized world.

Tom Ciccotta is a libertarian who writes about social justice and libertarian issues for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @tciccotta or email him at tciccotta@breitbart.com

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Ethereum Project Offers Censorship Resistant 'World ...

The bill would require schools to notify parents of any potentially sexually explicit classroom material and require that schools offer an alternative for the students of any parents who opt out. (Thinkstock)

WASHINGTON Virginias House of Delegates could take a final vote Monday on a bill that would require schools to notify parents of any potentially sexually explicit classroom material and require that schools offer an alternative for the students of any parents who opt out.

Opponents of the bill said it amounts to censorship in schools. Supporters said it is simply a requirement to keep parents informed and in control.

This does not prohibit any teacher from assigning any type of material they deem necessary or appropriate. It does not ban books. It does not ban any materials that teachers or school systems would like to have on their reading list and the like. It doesnt do that, the bills patron Del. Steve Landes, R-Augusta, said Friday.

This legitimately addresses a legitimate concern that parents raised, he said.

Del. Dave Albo, R-Springfield, described the bill as a compromise that strikes a fair balance.

I think that 99.99999 percent of the parents in Virginia would like to know if someone assigned a book that has scenes about sexual abuse of a child and infected sexual battery, Albo said.

Del. Alfonso Lopez, D-Arlington, said that even though this years bill set for a final vote is narrower than the bill that was vetoed by Gov. Terry McAuliffelast year, there would still be significant unintended consequences and problems.

More than likely, a teacher will not be able to do two entire lesson plans for the same class, sometimes on a very quick turnaround, after an objection from just one parent. This makes it much less likely that theyd be willing to even attempt to use anything that might be considered objectionable in their lessons, Lopez said.

He said it would be a form of censorship that could limit all kinds of classic art and literature.

For a junior taking AP English and learning iambic pentameter, what is less objectionable literary work that is the equivalent to any of Shakespeares plays? Lopez said.

Most importantly, what is an equivalent work to Toni Morrisons Beloved, which teaches us in a very raw and unflinching manner and terms about the horrors of slavery? he added.

The bill was originally triggered by a Fairfax County mother who protested the use of Beloved in her sons class when he was a senior in high school.

Lopez and Del. Vivian Watts, D-Annandale, warned of a potential black eye for Virginias reputation if the bill passes, and it becomes widely reported or mentioned on late-night TV.

Lopez cited the widespread reaction to the recent move in Accomac, Virginia, to pull To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn following a parents complaint.

We will end up with excluding for all what might be objectionable to just a few, she added.

The bill advanced Friday on a voice vote to a final vote that is expected on Monday. The bill would then go to the state Senate.

Del. Nicholas Freitas, R-Culpeper, said this is simply a service for parents.

I dont care how many Pulitzer Prizes it has. If its sexually explicit material, that might be something as a parent that I want to be notified of, Freitas said.

Read the proposed bill on theVirginia General Assembly website.

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Censorship or parental control? Va. lawmakers divided on bill - WTOP

Slide: 1 / of 2. Caption: RadiTo

Slide: 2 / of 2. Caption: RadiTo

Reza Ghazinouri remembers the importance of pirate radio as a teenager growing up in in the city of Mashhad in northeast Iran. His father tuned in multiple times a day to the banned Farsi version of the BBC transmitted from neighboring countries, to hear the truth about Iranian political scandals like the impeachment of the countrys liberal minister of culture, and the shutdown of dozens of its newspapers. While Ghazinouri studied for his college entrance exams in 2003, hed listen to the US government-funded Radio Farda coverage of student protests against university privatization. I still remember those programs so clearly, Ghazinouri says, Every night Id imagine myself protesting like the students.

Today, Ghazinouri has found his own form of protest. Hes one of the creators of an app that aims to bring the same contraband audio to modern Iran in a revamped form: the pirate podcast. Today he and his fellow activists and coders at the Berkeley-based, Iran-focused app developer IranCubator will launch RadiTo, an audio app for Android uniquely suited to the conditions of the countrys internet. It navigates slow, expensive data connections, users who speak a variety of languages and dialects ignored by most podcast distributors, and trickiest of all, a draconian digital censorship regime. With RadiTo, the group hopes to evade that internet filtering and bring a rare stream of aural information about the outside world to the countrys burgeoning smartphone culture.

For now, the app works as a kind of digital radio tool, offering banned foreign channels like the BBC, Radio Farda, and Amsterdam-based Radio Zamaneh. But eventually RadiTo, whose name means Radio You in Farsi, plans to let anyone create their own podcast channel, serving as a kind of audio-only Iranian YouTube for illicit ideas and entertainment. This allows individuals to have a platform to broadcast whatever they want to broadcast, says Firuzeh Mahmoudi, one of IranCubators founders and the executive director of its creator United For Iran. Getting access to radio stations outside the country is imperative, and a platform where individuals can have channels to share information is critical.

Beyond mere news, RadiTo will offer audio channels devoted to other subjects forbidden in Iran. One show it plans to distribute, called Taboo, has in the last several months devoted episodes to censored topics like pre-marital sex, separatist groups, and the female orgasm. Another show will focus on Iranian mysticism, a controversial topic under Irans strict interpretation of Islam. Both shows are run by Iranians living in America; the subjects they cover, after all, are a form of thought crime in Iran. Irans digital censorship body, the Supreme Council for Cyberspace, has long blocked all internet content in the country that violates its tight restrictionseverything from political dissent against the countrys hardline regime to cultural content it considers anti-Islamic.

RadiTo has a few ideas about how to stay ahead of that filtering. It offers two ways to download RadiTo: both Google Play and trusted Telegram accounts, like the one run by pseudonymous Iranian activist and blogger Vahid Online. Iran doesnt currently block either method, Ghazinouri says, and since connections to Google Play are encrypted, the Iranian censors cant easily block downloads of RadiTo without blocking all connections to the Android app store that serves more than 70 percent of the countrys smartphone users. The server that hosts RadiTos content, Ghazinouri explains, is hosted on Amazon Web Services and encrypted, which similarly hides its data in a tough-to-block collection of other services. (The encrypted calling and texting app Signal recently used a similar tactic to circumvent blocking of the app in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.)

Ghazinouri concedes that the government might still find a way to block the apps connections by, say, identifying the exact IP range of the apps Amazon servers, or using deep packet inspection to spot its data in transit. So the group also has a workaround in mind: In the case of a block, its ready to push an update to the app via both Google Play and Telegram that would embed a proxy function, routing its data over the Psiphon network, an anti-censorship tool created by the University of Torontos Citizen Lab, which bounces users connections through the computers of volunteers outside Iran. Individual Farsi audio apps from broadcasters like Radio Zamaneh do have their own Android apps, but probably arent as well prepared to play the cat-and-mouse game of censorship evasion, argues Ghazinouri. The Iranian government comes up with new censorship techniques all the time, says Ghazinouri. You always have to have a Plan B.

Iranians can already access some of these services piecemeal, through proxies and other workarounds. But RadiTo on top of censorship circumvention, RadiTo also has features that solve uniquely Iranian problems. Its interface offers not only Farsi and English, but four other Iranian minority languages: Balouchi, Iranian-dialect Turkish, Kurdish, and Arabic. And it allows users to download content and listen offline, a crucial setting in a country where a lack of infrastructure and intentional government throttling slows internet speeds to an expensive trickle. Theres no other Iranian app that offers all this, says Fereidoon Bashar, an internet activist and developer at the Toronto-based technology lab ASL-19, which is working with IranCubator on future apps for the same market. Its accommodating not just the user experience, but also the internet ecosystem that exists in Iran, the limited access to data.

RadiTo is only the first official launch for IranCubator. In the coming months, it hopes to launch a dozen apps, all tailored for Iranian users and the challenges of Irans cloistered internet. Later in February, for instance, IranCubator plans to release a tool called Hamdam, aimed at womens health education. Hamdam will include a period tracker, information about marriage rights and divorce, and advice about dealing with domestic violence.

IranCubator founder Mahmoudi says she hopes the groups human-rights focused apps can collectively ride the growing wave of mobile device adoption in Iran, where 40 million people already own smartphones, with a million more added every month. Iranians are tech-savvy and globally minded. They want to be in a county thats more democratic and worldly, says Mahmoudi. All the indicators are there. Technology is the right tool to engage people where they want to engage.

The rest is here:
A Pirate Podcast App Takes on Iran's Hardline Censors - WIRED

PHOENIX A Senate panel voted Thursday to give student newspapers new freedom from censorship by school administrators.

SB 1384 specifically declares that student editors and not administrators are responsible for determining the content of school-sponsored media. More to the point, the legislation would prevent administrators from censoring publications and preventing publication except under four narrow circumstances.

The unanimous approval by the Education Committee came after a parade of student editors and advisers told lawmakers of situations where administrators had stepped in to block stories or cartoons.

Peggy Gregory of Greenway High School who said she has taught journalism and advised student papers for 36 years, told lawmakers that student press freedom was the law of the land following a 1969 U.S. Supreme Court ruling declaring that it was protected by the First Amendment. But nearly 20 years later the same court partly reversed itself, declaring that student newspapers do not have the same constitutional rights as other publications.

After that second ruling, Gregory said, everything changed.

For example, she said students were working on a news story on what she said was a testing program the district liked. That article quoted a teacher who was critical of that testing.

Gregory said the school superintendent instructed the principal to tell her to kill the story or lose her job.

The result was censorship, she said. But Gregory said the harm done to student journalists from these kinds of situations is much greater.

If they're only allowed to publish puff pieces, how will they ever learn the power of the press to bring about change, to challenge ideas, to take the responsibility for their words, and to take up the mantle of the great journalists who have preceded them? she asked.

The shield against prior restraint in SB 1384 is not absolute. The legislation spells out that it does not authorize content that is libelous, an unwarranted invasion of privacy, violates federal or state law, or creates an imminent danger of inciting students to violate the law or district regulations or materially and substantially disrupts the orderly operation of the public school.

Sen. Steve Smith, R-Maricopa, questioned whether that goes far enough. He envisioned situations where students might use words or publish cartoons that are inappropriate or unfairly poke fun of someone.

But Sen. Kimberly Yee, R-Phoenix, the sponsor of the legislation, said she anticipates those kinds of issues can be handled by the teachers who advise the newspapers. Yee said, though, she might add some language about material being age appropriate when the measure goes to the full Senate.

Henry Gordon, a student at Sunnyslope High School in Phoenix, said censorship sends a bad message.

What we're taught now in schools is we have to defer to government officials, to our school administrators, in the content we produce, he said. We are censoring ourselves and letting government officials manipulate the facts.

Yee knows something about this kind of censorship. In fact, this is actually the second time she has pushed the legislation.

The first time was in 1992 when she was a 17-year-old senior student at Greenway High School and was a reporter and cartoonist for the Demon Dispatch. She said there were numerous times when administrators refused to let items remain in the paper before it went to print, apparently because they believed they shed a bad light on the school.

So Yee convinced Stan Furman, who was the state senator from the district, to sponsor anti-censorship legislation.

And I came to the Capitol for the first time, she said, sharing her story and that of other students. In fact, Peggy Gregory also testified for the bill, as she was the newspaper's faculty adviser.

The result was not only approval by the Education Committee but a 21-8 vote by the full Senate.

Based on that, Yee assumed the problem was resolved. But Yee said she did not learn until last year, when asked about it, that the measure died after never getting a vote in the House Judiciary Committee.

Original post:
Student journalists gain freedom from censorship - Arizona Daily Sun

ANARCHY: Anti-free-speech protesters lit fires and damaged property Wednesday to protest the appearance of campus speaker Milo Yiannopoulos.

In an embarrassing display of vulgarity and violence, rioters at the University of California, Berkeley lit fires and destroyed property to shut down a campus event featuring a speaker whose speech they oppose.

Breitbart technology editor Milo Yiannopoulos was scheduled to speak Wednesday night, but had to be evacuated from campus when protesters masked with black scarves began throwing fireworks at the building where hisspeech was to occur.

I have been evacuated from theUC Berkeleycampus after violent left-wing protestors tore down barricades, lit fires, threw rocks and Roman candles at the windows and breached the ground floor of the building, Yiannopoulos wrote on Facebook. My team and I are safe. But the event has been cancelled. Ill let you know more when the facts become clear. One thing we do know for sure: the Left is absolutely terrified of free speech and will do literally anything to shut it down.

TOLERANCE: Included among the property damage at UC Berkeley weregraffiti death threats against the president of the United States.

The good newsfor the protestersis that they shut down Yiannopoulos speech. The bad news for protesters is that this will likelyhelp Yiannopoulos, as Reason associate editor Robby Soave explained in detail.

[The protesters] turn Yiannopoulos into a free speech martyr, which is exactly what he wants, Soave wrote. When Milo is censored, Milo wins.

A freshmen at Berkeley told Soave that the press gained by the riots turned Yiannopoulos event from one that was going to be attended by 500 people to one that attracted the attention of thousands.

It was a 500-person event, thats like the max occupancy of the room, said university freshman Kevin Quigley. If it was just 500 people going to hear him talk it wouldnt be in the news, but when you have thousands of people gathering in the streets theyre just making him more famous.

Many of the people hearing about the riots will, as Soave wrote, see college students and social justice warriors acting in a belligerent fashion. The riotsmay even cause those who arent familiar withYiannopoulos to seek him out on social media andevaluate his message for themselves. Either way, the campus speakerstands to becomemore famous the opposite of what the rioters intended.

At the core of this situation is the First Amendment, and whether peoplewith differing opinions should be allowed to speak.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education released a statement on the riots late Wednesday evening:FIRE condemns both violence and attempts to silence protected expression in the strongest terms.We also urge that decisions affecting long-term policy be made only after all the facts are gathered and with appropriate opportunity for reasoned discussion.

The university had previously refused to cancel Yiannopoulos speech, which was organized by College Republicans. Changing speech codes to kowtow to violent disrupterscould send themessage that violence is a suitable responseto disagreement, and that censorship is valid.

Former President Barack Obamaon numerous occasions told college students not to shut downthose with whomthey disagree, but to use peaceful dialogue and verbal arguments.

President Donald Trump weighed in on the violence, questioning whether the school should lose federal funding as a result its handling of the anti-free-speech riots. It is unclear what authority the federal government has to remove funding over the actions of violentprotesters and students.

Those who resort to violence stand to lose public support. Moving forward, UC Berkeley will have to bestrong in defendingfree speech to avoid becoming the new face ofcensorship among college campuses.

More here:
Violence and censorship rule at UC Berkeley - Watchdog.org