Sunday, Dec 4, 2011 9:00 AM EST Twitter takes sides on the Internet’s future While some tech companies aim to sell surveillance, one aims to thwart it. By Nancy Scola <http://www.salon.com/writer/nancy_scola/> If you’re wondering where Internet and other digital technologies are headed, take note of two news items from this past week. The first was a piece in the Washington Post profiling the Wiretappers’ Ball <http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trade-in-surveillance-...>, a recent gathering in suburban Maryland for those who make tools for surveilling, monitoring and throttling the Internet — and for the people who buy them. The get-together, according to the Post, featured more than three dozen countries and nearly as many U.S. federal agencies. It’s a showcase event for an industry in which behemoths like Cisco, and smaller players like Blue Coat, help control and track the Internet activities of the government’s enemies in China (Falun Gong) and Syria (revolutionaries). The second, smaller development, reported by the Wall Street Journal, was thatSan Francisco-based Twitter Inc. had acquired Whisper Systems <http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/11/28/twitter-adds-team-who-created-privacy...>, a two-person firm that specializes in securing the Android mobile operating system. The firm’s only employees — the marvelously named Moxie Marlinspike and fellow researcher Stuart Anderson — seek to make it harder for snoops to monitor who and how) you are texting, calling and otherwise connecting with digitally. These seemingly unrelated events represent alternative visions of the roles technology companies, large and small, will play in the future of the Internet. Will the Internet remain a healthy, flexible, sustainable platform for discourse? Or will it turn into yet another medium controlled by whoever has the most offline power? [...] Continua qui: http://www.salon.com/2011/12/04/the_difference_between_twitter_and_cisco/sin...