Today the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs announced Jonathon Penney as its 2011 Google Policy Fellow. Jon is currently a pursuing a doctorate in information and communication sciences at Oxford University.

Before Oxford, Jonathon spent time studying and researching at Columbia Law School, where he was a Fulbright Scholar, and at Victoria University , where he was a Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer in the law faculty. A graduate of Dalhousie University and native Nova Scotian, he has served as Associate Editor of the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal, and worked as a lawyer and as a policy adviser at the federal level.

Welcome Jon!

Full details can be found here.

World Press Freedom Day, Canadian Committee for World Press Freedom
13th CCWPF Press Freedom Award

Acceptance speech on behalf of the Citizen Lab
Rafal Rohozinski, senior scholar
National Arts Center, Ottawa, Canada.
3 May 2011

Excellency, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen,

It is truly an honour and a humbling moment to accept this award on behalf of the Citizen Lab.

Just under 10 years ago, Ronald Deibert founded the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Following in the footsteps of other great Canadian media theorists — Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan — Ron recognized that the impact of technology lay in the social domain. With the help and support of Janice Stein, he created a unique space — a hothouse of sorts — where engineers, mathematicians, social scientists, and economists could treat cyberspace as a giant petri dish and examine its various transformative social and technical trajectories.

The Citizen Lab seeks qualified applicants for a full-time Research Assistant position.

Full details can be found here.

Applications for a 2011-2012 Canada Centre for Global Security Studies-Citizen Lab Post-Doctoral Fellowship are now being accepted. The fellowship will be awarded to a scholar with a project in the general thematic areas of Internet governance, cyber security, or information controls.

The Canada Centre for Global Security Studies attracts top researchers in global affairs engaged in innovative, interdisciplinary work. Fellows receive a competitive annual stipend, work space and staff support, and the opportunity to re-apply for a second year of funding. They will become members of a vibrant community of faculty, post-doctoral researchers, and students with wide-ranging interests in information communication technologies, human rights, and global affairs.

Further details on the fellowship and application process can be found here

The Information Warfare Monitor (Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and The SecDev Group, Ottawa) announce the release of Koobface: Inside a Crimeware Network by Nart Villeneuve, with a foreword by Ron Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski.

This report documents the inner workings of Koobface—a botnet that spreads by compromising the computers of users of social networking platforms and placing them under the control of the botnet’s operators for the purpose of monetization.

The Globe and Mail covered the latest Citizen Lab report, Shadows in the Cloud.

“Research In Motion Ltd., maker of the BlackBerry smart phone, faces increasing challenges to its overseas expansion as developing countries tighten restrictions on mobile e-mail.

‘It’s a reflection of fears of cyber-security and espionage that now extend to mobile phones,’ said Ron Deibert, director of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, who helped colleagues uncover a plot against the Indian government that involved computers in China. ‘It’s the type of thing that will become more common for RIM as they grapple with public policy and ethical issues in emerging markets.'”

From San Francisco Chronicle

“The type of steps taken by the UAE are going to become more common in the future as governments struggle to gain control of cyberspace for national security reasons,” said Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

“Just like Google has had to grapple with the pressures of China and other countries who censor search engines, RIM will find itself the centre of pressures from governments eager to tap encrypted mobile data streams.”

From The Globe and Mail

“As of this writing, numerous major American and European news outlets are reporting that Google is blocked in China, based on the information appearing on Google’s Mainland China service availability page.

However no journalist has actually confirmed with a human being at Google that this information is correct. What’s more, I’ve heard from several dozen people all over China who say that Google isn’t blocked for them when they access it on their Internet connections from Beijing to Shanghai to Sichuan to Hunan.

I have yet to hear from a single person who can’t access Google search in Mainland China. I am collecting people’s responses via Twitter here. Also see the #googlecn tag. For a sampling see here, here, here, here, and here.

The most insane part of this whole non-story is that Google’s stock fell 1.4 percent and Baidu’s stock rose 3.5 percent. What’s even funnier are all the financial analysts who commented to Reuters about the block…funny that is if you don’t own Google stock…”

From RConversation