Script for turning messy texts into well-structured, -outlined and -formatted Word documents

Some interesting pieces of software have been developed in recent years that aim at replacing the venerable Word as an authoring tool for large and complex writing projects. On the Mac side, two humbly named applications, Ulysses and Scrivener, have most notably emerged as popular writing tools. While everything is nice and fine as long as you write, sharing your output and delivering well-structured (in a technical sense) and formatted documents is a bit cumbersome and usually requires dreary manual intervention. As I had written a script for Word for Windows back in my, well, teens that did just some of that things I until now had to do manually on the Mac, it should be fairly easy to update and extend that thing and write some code.

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The emergence of internet security governance as a research field in social sciences

It’s finally happening. After an abysmally long time of politicians, military, and the security industry coming up with streams of innovative policy tangle in the name of internet security or cybersecurity, a critical mass of social scientists and research interested practitioners has teamed up to start deepening our knowledge of internet security and its governance. While Hungary was having difficult times by floods and economic turmoils, Budapest couldn’t have been a more lovely and welcoming place in the last couple of days.

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Nagging questions in cybersecurity research

It doesn’t happen too often that you read about a conference or a workshop and think: Now, that was about time! Internet governance is about to undergo some fundamental changes, states are getting ever more involved, mostly for addressing internet security problems. A plethora of questions need to be resolved to deal with these problems with well designed institutions. And yet, as far as I can tell, there is no major research programme on internet security governance going on anywhere on this planet. Hence, the workshop “Europe And The Global Information Society Revisited: Developing A Network Of Scholars And Agenda For Social Science Research On ‘Cyber Security’” could not have been launched more timely.
The Center for Media and Communication Studies at the Central European University (Budapest, Hungary), in partnership with the Centre for Global Communications Studies at the Annenberg School of Communications (Philadelphia, USA) will convene 30 selected experts next week at CEU in Budapest for a Strategic Workshop sponsored by the European Science Foundation (ESF). As flattering as rather undeservedly, I will be on a panel discussing the relations between cybersecurity on the one hand and International Relations, governance and institutions on the other. Following, my take on some blind spots in internet security research from a social scientific perspective.

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blog, research, interests

Security of the internet isn’t provided by a hierarchical, secretive and central organisation. There is no global internet police, and there is no internet defence corps. Internet security is the result of the collaboration of diverse types of actors such as internet service providers, technical experts, police and law enforcement, governments and academics. These actors make a dense, highly complex internet security governance network in which each type of actor is characterized by its own organisational idiosyncrasies while at the same time being part of the overall governance structure.

My focus currently is on bottom-up processes to provide internet security, like task-forces and working groups that are set up in an ad-hoc manner to tackle with the lates security phenomenon. Academics, engineers, experts and geeks from all over the world collaborate to provide. The way in which they are addressing security problems resembles what could be called peer production of internet security. My interest is to learn to what extent this mode of security provisioning is used, the settings in which we can observe it and whether this mode is sustainable or not. And how this all relates to internet security and the overall structure of internet security in general.

The internet is a tool that already has fundamentally changed business processes and business models. It is too early to tell what its long-term impact on societies and politics will be. Debates about ‘freedom’ on the internet have been going on for a while, such as if and how the internet fosters freedom of expression, or how authoritarian internet governance approaches could suppress individuals’ rights. The practices of internet security provisioning will have decisive consequences for the shape of ‘freedom’ on the internet.