Week in Review: July 1, 2015

Facebook: Transgender Former Facebook Employee Challenges the Company's Username Policy

Zip, a former Facebook employee, came out online and criticized the way the company expects its users to follow its "one-to-one mapping" of their names. The company reportedly blocked her account the day the Supreme Court made same sex marriage legal in the United States. While names remain notoriously tricky entities for most social networks, Facebook's policy in particular has irritated many members of the LGBT community, who, for safety or other reasons, prefer to not use the names linked to their birth certificates or passports. In an online town hall meeting, Mark Zuckerberg responded, "Real name does not mean your legal name." Other groups, like EFF, have noted that Facebook's name verification policies still remain difficult to navigate.

Google: The Search Engine Makes "Revenge Porn" Harder to Find

Google Search Senior Vice President Amit Singhal announced in a blog post that Google would begin to remove sexually explicit images from search listings, if they were posted without the subject's consent. The decision has been hailed as a step forward by the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, but questions still remain on how to limit the distribution of nonconsensual pornography online. Google follows in the footsteps of Facebook, which banned the sharing of "revenge porn" earlier this year.

Iraq: Intentional Internet Outages Aim to Prevent Academic Dishonesty

On Saturday, June 27, the Iraqi government shut down all Internet service for three hours. Reports [AR] are suggesting that this recent outage was an attempt to prevent academic dishonesty on Iraqi junior high entrance exams. As Sean Gallagher of Ars Technica noted, "In Iraq, education is only required for all students up to the sixth-grade level; those who fail to score well enough on exams at the end of the sixth year generally don't continue their education."

Russia: The Country's Attorney General Blocks the Internet Archive

Russian digital activists are reporting that the Natalia Poklonskaya, Russia's current Attorney General, has banned Internet users from accessing some parts of the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge." The Internet Archive hosts the WayBack Machine, which currently stores 485 billion snapshots of the world's