kagablog

I was sentenced to death
the minute she vomited me
out of her hole
Snip snip
Surgeon cut the cord
then the howling began
The taste of dry air in my lungs
as repulsive as the tit that I bit on
Now I’m 39 years old
Half my allotted lifespan is over
8 months before I’m 40
I don’t want to become like you
You are my worst nightmare
A blog reader

Charles Bremner in Paris

Anyone who persists in illicit downloading of music or films will be barred from broadband access under a controversial new law that makes France a pioneer in combating internet piracy.

“There is no reason that the internet should be a lawless zone,” President Sarkozy told his Cabinet yesterday as it endorsed the “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” scheme that from next January will hit illegal downloaders where it hurts.

Under a cross-industry agreement, internet service providers (ISPs) must cut off access for up to a year for third-time offenders.
France’s anti-piracy law is unworkable

Using heavy-handed tactics with ISPs is only latest in a line of tactics to defeat online piracy - and it won’t work

* Mobile music downloads take on iTunes

* How online extremists evade capture

Related Links

* France’s anti-piracy law is unworkable

* Court delivers blow to record companies

* Has France cracked the piracy problem?

In a classical French approach the scheme will be enforced by a new £15 million a year state agency, to be called Hadopi (high authority for copyright protection and dissemination of works on the internet).

The law has strong backing from Mr Sarkozy, who has taken a close interest in artists’ rights since marrying Carla Bruni, a model and folk singer. However, it has run into opposition from a range of bodies including the state data protection agency, consumer and civil liberties groups and the European Parliament. Big web companies, including Google, and Dailymotion, the video-sharing firm, refused to sign up to the 40-member industry accord last November.

Mocking the scheme yesterday Libération newspaper gave warning that families could be stripped of their internet and broadband telephone and television if a neighbour’s teenager uses their wireless router to load his iPod.

Christine Albanel, the Culture Minister, who is responsible for the creation- and-internet law, said that it will replace criminal action with dissuasion. “It takes a preventive and educational approach,” she said. Over the past two years French courts have convicted 300 people for piracy, most of them professionals and none of them minors. The prosecutions have had little impact on the sales of a recording industry in steep decline.

Under the accord, the entertainment industry will also drop existing copyright protection on French material so that music or videos bought legally online can be played on any sort of device. The industry has hailed the French scheme as a model for the EU, which is losing hundreds of millions of pounds a year to illicit sharing of films and music. “This is the most important initiative to help win the war on online piracy that we have seen,” John Kennedy, head of the IFPI, the worldwide recording industry body, said.

this article originally appeared on the times online

By Jonathan M. Gitlin |

No matter what you think of blogging, Internet-based citizen journalism is a real threat, not just to traditional media business models but to totalitarian governments. How do we know that bloggers are drawing blood? Because some governments are hitting back harder and harder; last year saw a tripling in the number of bloggers arrested around the world compared to 2006, according to a report from the University of Washington.
Related Stories

* Chinese government wants real names of bloggers
* China backs off mandatory blogger identity registration
* China says “no” to Internet rumormongering
* Blogosphere growth slowing considerably

“Last year, 2007, was a record year for blogger arrests, with three times as many as in 2006. Egypt, Iran and China are the most dangerous places to blog about political life, accounting for more than half of all arrests since blogging became big,” said Assistant Professor Phil Howard, lead author of the World Information Access Report. Howard also suggests that the real number of arrests may be much higher, as not every arrest makes it into the media.

The report separates the reason for arrests into six categories: violation of cultural norms, blogging involved with social protest, blogging about public policy, blogging about political figures, exposing corruption or human rights violations, and finally “other.” In addition to Iran, Egypt and China, Middle Eastern regimes in Syria and Saudi Arabia, and South East Asian nations such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand also figure in the report. 2007 saw 36 bloggers arrested around the world, and since 2003 at least 64 have been arrested, with a total of 940 months of prison time served.

Even liberal democracies are not immune; France, Canada, the USA, and UK have all arrested people following their blogging activity since 2004. However, some of these cases might not seem so egregious; last year a blogger was arrested in Los Angeles following his postings about his attraction to young girls, and the beginning of 2008 saw an arrest in the UK after one Gavin Best used his blog to threaten a police officer’s family following his arrest for a large number of thefts.

Another troubling trend has been the complicity of western Internet firms such as Yahoo and Google, both of whom have handed over details of bloggers to the Chinese government, despite publicly condemning such policies.

The Internet isn’t just landing people in prison; occasionally it helps get them out too. Earlier this year there was the widely publicized case in Egypt where US blogger James Buck used Twitter, the microblogging platform, to alert his friends and colleagues to the fact that he’d been arrested following his efforts to cover an anti-government protest.

Meanwhile, the worldwide blogging community shows no signs of going away, although fear of persecution may drive more of them to do so anonymously. But long may they continue to show that the pen (or, in this case, the keyboard) is mightier than the sword.

this article originally appeared on arstechnica

this mail received from a kagablog reader at the sabc:

“Didn’t quite see the interest for all- that the SABC was banning the blog. Any hoo spoke to IT Securities, who informed me that the site had been being monitored by US? UK (who are these people??) for the last month, and was found to have objectionable adult content-hence the SABC’s removal of access to staff.!!!! I did argue the issue (see lettre)-and what about ‘MIRON’ etc etc or the other –to me CRIMINAL ‘adult’-orus sites accessible in the Sauk? Where in the Sauk were the young bodies ‘n soles that were going to be damaged by THE BLOG…?

I was told however that if I wrote an Email briefly explaining my need –for work purposes- for access to the site, it would be unlocked for me only…

Well thar yi gow-your webpage for some reason IS still roamable, but definitely NOT the BLOG…

So use what you want –hopefully I have covered my delicates…

–the communiqué to Security……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

To whomever it concerns.

Disclosure.

I frequently visit a blog on the internet that provides information on upcoming events-primarily art related, but including generally, occasions of global interest as well. As an SABC employee in the news media, I find the website of immense value; it keeps me abreast of intellectual focus in South Africa and its ‘outskirts’-which knowledge I find vital in the performance of my delivery of news output to the public. The blog keeps me informed of intellectual movements and concerns.

I therefore find it quite surprising that access to the site is now denied to SABC staff. Manny de Oliviera has indeed explained the recent access removal, and that it is due to the “adult” content and nature of many of the submissions on the blog.He also suggests that accessing the content might somehow be ‘abused’ by some staff ,therefore the ‘protection’.

I nevertheless still believe the website to be an important one, since it insists on debate of all the items in its content. There is an immense and critical response to all the material available and I believe this converts what is ‘objectionable’ into something enlightening.

In the light of the nature of the spirit of the contributors to this site, I feel it is incumbent on me to notify the website of the SABC’s recent policy change regarding access to that forum’s material.

I could find no clear ‘POLICY’ stipulations within SABC Security Policy regarding this kind of disclosure in the SABC Security Policy -hence this communication to you.

I would appreciate any responses to these observations, and also thank Manny for his time and contribution to my understanding of web policy.

the kagablog has been informed that it has been placed on the “banned list” by the sabc

what does this mean?

here is the transcript of an email received from an anonymous kagablog reader

“It MEANS….

That: either the USA or UK have evaluated the blog as having objectionable /SUSPECT adult or … NEWS material

- which suggestion the SABCick joyfully embraces as valid and then implements a ban upon the scourge…

Or of course that you have subversively? instituted automatic streaming

-causing masses of money to be drained from the - of course - lean coffers of the ‘sick.

However the …sickers have promised to reveal the mo behind their crime on Monday…

It MEANS the MADNESS has increased…

Most importantly, IT MEANS…

I CANNOT HAVE GREAT ART DAILY, except on my cell (sic) screen…

I SHALL NOT RECEIVE MY ADEQUATE NUTRITIONAL INTAKE AND MIGHT DIE OR BECOME VERY VERY ILL… “

JONATHAN WERVE (Director of Operations, Global Integrity)
Tuesday February 19, 2008 Reposted from The Global Integrity Commons

Using data from the Global Integrity Index, we put a U.S. court’s recent order to block access to anti-corruption site Wikileaks.org into context. In summary: The Wikileaks.org shutdown is unheard of in the West, and has only been seen in a handful of the most repressive regimes. Good thing it doesn’t work very well.

Starting in 2007, Global Integrity added specific questions about Internet censorship to the Integrity Indicators, which are a set of 304 questions addressing the practice of anti-corruption in national governments. We have always held that a free and critical media is an essential component of good governance; adding an analysis of Internet censorship was an overdue refinement.

We asked two questions:

1. Are Internet users prevented from reaching political material on the Internet?
2. Are content creators prevented from posting political material to the Internet?

The results of this work are generally encouraging. In examining a diverse group of 50 countries, a majority earn a full score on both counts. Freedom of speech is a widely held right. Moreover, Internet censorship is difficult and is often ineffective in suppressing political activity. Most governments, aside from targeted libel restrictions, don’t bother regulating online political speech at all.

The Many Flavors of Internet Censorship

A few countries, however, are deeply committed to trying to make censorship work. On this list in 2007 are Algeria, China, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Russia and Thailand. Each has it’s own flavor to the repression of online speech — Internet censorship is still in an experimentation phase, and even the most aggressive approaches don’t seem to work very well.

* Algeria has no firewalls or filters, but outlaws hosting content critical of the government, and monitors chat rooms for political speech.

* China is home to 1.3 billion people and has a highly scalable technological approach based on extensive content filters known satirically as the Great Firewall of China. China is also using technology to discourage content creation, deploying cute animated police characters (pictured above) to remind Internet users they are being watched.

* Egypt has limited technical means to discourage content creation, so it relies on an old-fashioned technique — harassment, beatings and arrests. Hala Al-Masry used to publish in a blog entitled “Cops Without Boundaries” until the government harassed her, “unknown people” beat her father, and she and her husband were arrested and signed a commitment to shut down the blog. Similar techniques haveshut down websites of opposition parties.

* Kazakhstan has little Internet capacity. The government uses this to mask censorship — rather than block sites, it slows them down, frustrating the users of political content into looking elsewhere. The KNB (formerly the KGB) has a special program called Bolat, which slows down, but does not stop, access to sites of terrorist organizations. Popular opinion holds that it is used to slow opposition party sites as well.

* Russia has a mixed bag of state persecution and neglect, allowing a rare opening for free expression in a country with highly restricted media. However, the sophistication of the attacks that do occur is frightening, with hackers singling out individual online targets. For instance, the website of Ekho Moskvy, a liberal Moscow radio station critical of the Kremlin, was brought down by a DDoS attack last year.

* Thailand’s military junta moved aggressively to shut down message boards and the formerly-ruling party Thai Rak Thai website after taking over the country in 2006. But the junta’s censorship cops work to keep the thinnest appearance of tolerance — message boards were allowed to reopen under the condition that they did not “provoke any misunderstandings.” Message received.

So how does the United States fit into this picture?
The court order that muzzled Wikileaks.org (covered here) was prompted not by the government but by a bank registered in the Cayman Islands. The bank used American courts and a compliant domain registrar to scrub the wikileaks.org URL from the Internet. It is extremely unlikely that this decision will stand up in an appeals court, but the larger point is that there is no reason this case should even be fought. Wikileaks should not need a legal team to explain to the courts that the First Amendment requires freedom of speech.

The whole event seems to encapsulate the constant criticism of governance in the United States: that the government has been captured by corporate interests, and that the world-leading rule of law and technocratic mechanisms in place can be hijacked to serve as tools for narrow, wealthy interests.

Online Censorship: Sounds good, but it never works.

While there is much diversity in the style of Internet censorship among the world’s worst offenders, one common thread unites them: Internet censorship doesn’t work. Cut off one site, and a thousand more pop up. In China, censorship online is sparking criticism that off-line censorship has rarely seen.

So Wikileaks.org went offline, but Wikileaks mirror sites hosted overseas hold the same content, and the original site is still up and running from Sweden (http://88.80.13.160) without its easier-to-type URL. As it turns out, shutting down Wikileaks-the-website has focused our attention on Wikileaks-the-idea, which is spreading at the speed of light.

by chan’ad bahraini

i set up my blog for two main reasons: (i) it’s fun to write without any formal restrictions, deadlines, or requirements, and (ii) to try to contribute to and encourage the discussion of topics in Bahrain that rarely get proper treatment in the local mainstream media.

Currently, Bahrain’s only TV and radio stations are run directly by the government, so there is no reporting or discussion of issues that are even distantly related to the local political situation. All of the local newspapers are privately-owned, so they enjoy relatively more freedom than the broadcast media. Yet even in the written press, the situation is not much better because editors do not dare to openly criticize certain influential individuals, such as members of the government, or the royal family (particularly the king and his uncle the prime minister).

The Internet however provides a means for individuals to freely express their opinions in public, without facing the scrutiny of the government. Although the Bahraini government does have a history of monitoring and blocking political websites, it seems to have become more relaxed in the past one or two years, though the situation has deteriorated recently. Moreover, the ease with which someone can set up a website and write anonymously (like myself) makes it difficult for the government to take any action against the writers. So for these reasons I felt there was a real need to have free and frank discussions on all issues (including politics) somewhere – especially as the country attempts to make a transition to democracy – and the Internet was the obvious choice for where I could share and discuss my opinions. I was encouraged to see that Mahmood (www.mahmood.tv), the pioneer of Bahraini bloggers, had been blogging for about a year prior to my start, without
any issues with the government.

One of the main aims of my blog has been to discuss and analyze events in Bahrain. But because of the limited amount of first-hand information available, I’ve been trying to do some pseudo-journalism myself. This means that whenever possible I try to personally attend events (especially protest demonstrations) and then write about them on my blog and provide photographs.

There are now several bloggers in Bahrain and the effect of this has been quite positive. A space has been created where a wide range of topics are discussed with honesty. I have certainly learned a great deal of information from the other Bahraini blogs that I would never have been able to learn anywhere else. And this community is not only online, as many of the Bahrain bloggers meet up once a month to discuss in person the various issues that we blog about.

However, most of the online activity in Bahrain takes place at the many Arabic-language online discussion forums that have been around for much longer (e.g. bahrainonline.org). Blogging has not yet caught on as a mainstream phenomenon in Bahrain, however our sites are more and more assuming the role of “bridge blogs”” (as defined by Hossein Derakshan: http://hoder.com/weblog/archives/013982.shtml). Because most bloggers in Bahrain write in English, we are able to communicate (in both directions) with people around the world, so they look to us as a source of information about what is “really” happening in Bahrain.

So for example, when the three moderators of Bahrainonline.org were arrested in February 2005, we wrote about it on our blogs so the news of this spread around the world even faster than it did within Bahrain. Reporters Without Borders had issued a statement about the case within a day of the arrests. I believe that all the international attention that was generated probably played some role in the government’s eventual decision to release the three a couple weeks later. More generally, our blogs have broken the monopoly of the government in communicating news about Bahrain to the outside world.

Generally, bloggers in Bahrain have not faced any repercussions from the government regarding what we write, but this has been changing since the start of this year. As noted, three moderators of an online discussion forum were arrested in February for messages posted that supposedly “incited hatred towards the government”. One of the moderators, Ali Abdulemam, also maintained his own blog. Also, in April, the government announced it would now oblige all website owners to register with the ministry of information or face legal action. This shows the government still does not fully understand the Internet (and blogs) and does not know how to handle the situation when it feels threatened by online writers.

Originally from southeast Asia, Chan’ad Bahraini is now living in Bahrain, where he has set up his blog http://chanad.weblogs.us. He chooses to remain anonymous.

by yan sham-shackleton

t is 12:23 am, in the early morning of June 4. Today is the 16th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing. When the event happened in 1989 I was sitting in a tunnel outside the Xinhua News Agency office in Hong Kong where hunger strikers had set up. We were supporting the students in China. We wanted democracy for them and for ourselves. We no longer wanted to be colonial subjects of Britain and we did not want to be subjects of the Communist Party either. We wanted to be free.

About two, maybe three hours later, I heard the first shots coming through the radio, followed by the sound of singing, screaming and tanks reverberating though the walls, and we looked at each other and saw tears streaming down our faces. We all know now that China will use tanks against those who seek democracy, but until then we did not. I think it was at that moment that Glutterwas born in my head, when I heard the ending of the 1989 Democratic Movement on the radio, in a tunnel, with bright fluorescent lights. I was 15.

If not at that moment, it was soon afterwards. I would make promises only young women with no experience in the world could make with as little doubt as I did :

“I will not forget. I promise to remember forever. I will live my life better and for all of us because I am alive and you are no longer. I won’t let this happen again. I will remind the world for you, the students of Tiananmen Square. My Heroes. My Big Brothers and Sisters.”

I made those promises in haste, in fear, in naivety. It never occurred to me how something like that was to be achieved or if it was even possible. I only knew that it sounded right, and all the adults were yelling those things out of loudspeakers. It is only tonight that I’m thinking that all this writing, all the photos and artwork I have done in the name of democracy, the cyber-protest I organized, the interviews I agreed to, and the stories I published in the name of free speech are not only because I fervently believe in it but also because it is a way to placate my subconscious.

Blogging allows me to keep my promises to the dead.

I write this because I think people should know that’s why I have managed to create Glutter, not because I followed any rules, or copied anybody else. Not because I wanted attention or wanted to make a name. I often prefer it best when it is quiet and will let the blog die a little when I feel there is too much attention focused on it because then I can just write what I want, and tell the story that needs to be told in the way I like without pressure.

My advice to those interested in starting a blog is: don’t listen to anyone except yourself. Don’t read anyone else’s blog and try to emulate it. Don’t sit down with a list of “musts” and try to achieve it. I broke so many rules because I didn’t know there were any and I did just fine.

All you need to create a blog is the will to start.

All you need to keep one going is a will to record what you have to say.

Each of us experienced a moment of political awakening, a trigger that made us understand a kind of injustice that needed to be fixed. Otherwise you would not be an activist with an idea to create something. Let that realization guide you. I hope you can convey enough of your conviction to remind and inspire others to fight for change. That’s all the wisdom I can impart tonight.

It is now 2:33am. I can hear gunshots. Put, put, put. I hear them every year at this time. I was 15. Probably too young to have experienced the events the way I did. But others were too young to die.

Yan Sham-Shackleton wants you to know she spent six weeks writing six versions of this article where she tried to record all she knows about blogging until she realized the beauty of the medium is that you can be yourself. On her blog, glutter.com, she talks about art as well as politics. Her outspokenness and stands in favour of true democracy in Hong Kong mean that she is regularly censored inside China.

by arash sigarchi

today we understand Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “the world is a global village” better than he did. The invisible lines of the Internet mean that if something happens in Asia, the Americas, Europe or a remote island off Africa, we will get to know about it. For years journalism has been faced with restrictions, but these can now be removed by technology.

I am a journalist in a country where restrictions prevent me from doing my job. In addition to “inter-organizational” factors that exist in most media of the world, “out-of-organization” elements such as legal restrictions, the influence of government and individuals, one-sided support of news resources, pressure groups and owners of capital have greater influence than in advanced countries. So I have to think about the independence of my country and its reflection in true news and my analysis of news. One of my solutions for breaking through the hindrances was a blog.

We can freely write in blogs. Since they do not involve printing or expressing news in audio-visual media, writing in them provides news and points of views more quickly. Blogs can be seen as small news or comment agencies where the writer is both a correspondent and editor-in-chief.

Some say blogs should focus less on news. People like to record their daily activities there. These amateur writers have fewer readers, often just friends and relatives. But the blogs of noted journalists and artists, and political, economic, social and sports personalities, even if they just write about their daily lives, are noticed because of their news value and fame. These people have a lot of subjects to write about and attract readers. I believe each blog attracts its own readers depending on their interests, so no restriction is required on blog writing.

I have chosen two methods for blog writing. In the first, I express unofficially (colloquially) my views on current issues. In the second, I write news, analyses, interviews, reports, or essays. So I can have both groups of readers: those who want to know what I am doing these days and those who want me to express my views more precisely as a journalist, writer and poet.

A blog as an on-line media provides the writer with an opportunity to have the frank views and criticism of readers and reply to them or improve himself. In this close relationship with the readers, the blogger has the opportunity to guide his reader directly with his views and write the things that readers enjoy more.

As I have already mentioned, if you want to print a book, poem, story, or even newspaper or magazine in Iran, you have to obtain permission from the authorities. Very many writers and journalists are affected by this.

But if you want to publish a story, poem or essay in a newspaper or magazine, it will be censored. So many Iranian writers publish their views in blogs, at less cost and they are not forced to censor themselves. So the government, as in China and elsewhere, restricts Internet use.

Internet journalism could advance freedom of expression and wider viewpoints. Although I have been convicted by Iranian courts, I have not lost hope and I am sure that in coming years the rulers of my country will have to respect the free flow of information and expression freedom.

Journalist and blogger Arash Sigarchi was born in 1978, during the revolution that eventually overthrew the Shah, and began doing journalism in 1993, aged only 15. When reformist President Mohammad Khatami was elected in 1997, he joined the reformist press. After this media was shut down in April 2000, he went to live in northern Iran, where he edited a 12-page daily paper, Gilan Emrouz(now Gilan). He began blogging in 2001 on a collective blog called Gileh Mard (“The Man from Gilan”). In 2002, he started up his personal web site, Panjereh Eltehab(“The Window of Hope”) (www.sigarchi.com). In early 2005, he was held for two months by the information and security ministry and then sentenced to 14 years in prison. He is free pending an appeal.

check out arash sigarchi’s blog here

this is a quick technical guide to anonymous blogging that tries to approach the problem from the angle of a government whistleblower in a country with a lessthan-transparent government. It’s not intended for cypherpunks, but for people in developing nations who are worried about their safety and want to take practical steps to protect their privacy.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s guide, “How to Blog Safely”
(http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Anonymity/blog-anonymously.php), also offers some very good advice on this.

SOMMAIRE

Introducing Sarah
Step 1 - Pseudonyms
Step 2 - Public computers
Step 3 - Anonymous proxies
Step 4 - This time it’s personal!
Step 5 - Onion Routing through Tor
Step 6 - MixMaster, Invisiblog and GPG
How much anonymity is enough? How much hassle is too much?

INTRODUCING SARAH

Sarah works in a government office as an accountant. She becomes aware that her boss, the deputy minister, is stealing large amounts of money from the government. She wants to let the world know that a crime is taking place, but she’s worried about losing her job. If she reports the matter to the minister (if she could ever get an appointment!), she might get fired. She calls a reporter at the local newspaper, but he says he can’t run a story without lots more information and documents proving her claims. So Sarah decides to put up a weblog to tell the world what she knows about what’s happening in the ministry. To protect herself, she wants to make sure no one can find out who she is, based on her blog posts. She needs to blog anonymously.

There are two major ways she can get caught when trying to blog anonymously. One is if she reveals her identity through the content she posts – for instance, if she says: “I’m the assistant chief compliance accountant to the deputy minister of mines,” there’s a good chance that someone reading her blog is going to figure out who she is pretty quickly. The other way Sarah can get caught is if someone can determine her identity from information provided by their web browsers or email programs. Every computer attached to the internet has – or shares – an address called an IP address - it’s a series of four numbers from 0-255, separated by dots – for instance: 213.24.124.38. When Sarah uses her web browser to make a comment on the minister’s blog, the IP address she was using is included on her post.

With a little work, the minister’s computer technicians may be able to trace Sarah’s identity from this IP address. If Sarah is using a computer at home, dialing into an Internet service provider, the ISP likely has records of which IP address was assigned to which telephone number at a specific time. In some countries, the minister might need a subpoena to obtain these records; in others (especially ones where the ISP is owned by the government), the ISP might give out this information very easily, and Sarah might find herself in hot water.

There are a number of ways Sarah can hide her identity when using the Internet. As a general rule, the more secure she wants to be, the more work she needs to do to hide her identity. Sarah - and anyone else hoping to blog anonymously – needs to consider just how paranoid she wants to be before deciding how hard she wants to work to protect her identity. As you will see, some of the strategies for protecting identity online require a great deal of technical knowledge and work.

STEP ONE - PSEUDONYMS

One easy way Sarah can hide her identity is to use a free webmail account and free blog host outside her native country. (Using a paid account for either email or webhosting is a poor idea, as the payment will link the account to a credit card, a checking account or Paypal account that could be easily linked to Sarah.) She can create a new identity – a pseudonym – when she signs up for these accounts, and when the minister finds her blog, he’ll discover that it belongs to “A. N. Ymous”, with the email address anonymous.whistleblower@hotmail.com.

Some providers of free webmail accounts:

Hotmail
Yahoo
Hushmail - free webmail with support for strong cryptography

Some providers of free weblog hosting:

Blogsome - free WordPress blogs
Blogger
Seo Blog

Here’s the problem with this strategy. When Sarah signs up for an email service or a weblog, the webserver she’s accessing logs her IP address. If that IP address can be traced to her - if she’s using her computer at home or her computer at work – and if the email or weblog company is forced to release that information, she could be found. It’s not a simple matter to get most web service companies to reveal this information – to get Hotmail, for instance, to reveal the IP Sarah used to sign up for her account, the minister would likely need to issue a subpoena, probably in cooperation with a US law enforcement agency. But Sarah may not want to take the risk of being found if her government can persuade her email and weblog host to reveal her identity.

STEP TWO - PUBLIC COMPUTERS

One extra step Sarah could take to hide her identity is to begin using computers to make her blogposts that are used by lots of other people. Rather than setting up her webmail and weblog accounts from her home or work computer, Sarah could set them up from a computer in a cybercafé, library or university computer lab. When the minister traces the IP used to post a comment or item, he’ll find the post was made from a cybercafé, where any number of people might have been using the computers.

There are flaws in this strategy as well. If the cybercafé or computer lab keeps track of who is using what computer at what time, Sarah’s identity could be compromised. She shouldn’t try to post in the middle of the night when she’s the only person in the computer lab – the geek on duty is likely to remember who she is. And she should change cybercafés often. If the minister discovers that all the whistleblower’s posts are coming from “Joe’s Beer and Bits”on Main Street, he might stake someone out to watch the cybercafé and see who’s posting to blogs in the hope of catching Sarah.

STEP THREE - ANONYMOUS PROXIES

Sarah’s getting sick of walking to Joe’s cybercafé every time she wants to post to her blog. With some help from the neighborhood geek, she sets up her computer to access the web through an anonymous proxy. Now, when she uses her webmail and weblog services, she’ll leave behind the IP address of the proxy server, not the address of her home machine… which will make it very hard for the minister to find her. First, she finds a list of proxy servers online, by searching for “proxy server” on Google. She picks a proxy server from the publicproxyservers.com list, choosing a site marked “high anonymity”. She writes down the IP address of the proxy and the port listed on the proxy list.

Some reliable lists of public proxies:

• publicproxyservers.com - anonymous and non-anonymous proxies.
• Samair (http://www.samair.ru/proxy/) - only anonymous proxies, and includes information on proxies that support SSL.
• rosinstrument proxy database (http://tools.rosinstrument.com/proxy/) - searchable database of proxy servers.

Then she opens the “preferences” section of her web browser. Under “general”, “network” or “security” (usually), she finds an option to set up a proxy to access the Internet.
(On the Firefox browser, this option is found under Preferences – General – Connection Settings.)
She turns on “manual proxy configuration”, enters the IP address of the proxy server and port into the fields for HTTP proxy and SSL proxy and saves her settings. She restarts her browser and starts surfing the web. She notices that her connection to the web seems a bit slower. That’s because every page she requests from a webserver takes a detour. Instead of connecting directly to hotmail.com, she connects to the proxy, which then connects to Hotmail. When Hotmail sends a page to her, it goes to the proxy first, then to her. She also notices she has some trouble accessing websites, especially those that want her to log in. But at least her IP isn’t being recorded by her weblog provider.

A fun experiment with proxies: Visit noreply.org, a popular remailer website. The site will greet you by telling you what IP address you’re coming from: “Hello pool-151-203-182-212.wma.east.verizon.net 151.203.182.212, pleased to meet you.”

Now go to anonymizer.com, a web service that allows you to view (some) webpages through an anonymous proxy. In the box on the top right of the anonymizer page, enter the URL for http://www.noreply.org (or just click [http://anon.free.anonymizer. com/http://www.noreply.org this link].) You’ll note that noreply.org now thinks you’re coming from vortex.anonymizer.com. (Anonymizer is a nice way to test proxies without needing to change your browser settings, but it won’t work with most sophisticated web services, like webmail or weblogging servers.)

Finally, follow the instruction above to set up your web browser to use an anonymous proxy and then visit noreply.org to see where it thinks you’re coming from. Alas, proxies aren’t perfect either. If the country Sarah lives in has restrictive Internet laws, many websurfers may be using proxies to access sites blocked by the government. The government may respond by ordering certain popular proxies to be blocked. Surfers move to new proxies, the government blocks those proxies, and so the circle continues. All this can become very time-consuming.

Sarah has another problem if she’s one of very few people in the country using a proxy. If the comments on her blog can be traced to a single proxy server, and if the minister can access logs from all the ISPs within a country, he might be able to discover that Sarah’s computer was one of the very few that accessed a specific proxy server. He can’t demonstrate that Sarah used the proxy to post to a weblog server, but he might conclude that the fact that the proxy was used to make a weblog post and that she was one of the few people in the nation to use that proxy constituted evidence that she made the post. Sarah would do well to use proxies that are popular locally and to switch proxies often.

STEP FOUR - THIS TIME IT’S PERSONAL

Sarah starts to wonder what happens if the proxy servers she’s using get compromised. What if the minister convinces the operator of a proxy server - either through legal means or bribery - to keep records and see whether anyone from his country is using the proxy, and what sites they’re using? She’s relying on the proxy administrator to protect her, and she doesn’t even know who the administrator is. Though the proxy administrator may not even know she’s running a proxy – proxies are often left open by accident.

Sarah has friends in Canada - a country less likely to censor the Internet than Sarah’s own country - who might be willing to help her maintain her blog while protecting her identity. Sarah phones her friend and asks him to set up “Circumventor” on his system. Circumventor is one of dozens of proxy servers a user can set up to allow people to use his computer as a proxy.

Sarah’s friend Jim downloads Circumventor (http://www.peacefire.org/circumventor/simple-circumventor-instructions.html) from Peacefire.org and installs it on his Windows system. It’s not an easy install - he needs to install Perl on his system, then install OpenSA, then Circumventor. And he now needs to keep his computer connected to the Internet constantly, so that Sarah can use it as a proxy without previously asking him to turn it on. He gets the software set up, calls Sarah’s cellphone and gives her a URL she can start using to surf the web through his proxy, or post to her blog. This is especially convenient, because Sarah can use the proxy from home or from a cybercafé, and doesn’t have to make any changes on her system.

While Sarah’s very grateful for Jim’s help, there’s a major problem with the arrangement. Jim’s computer – which runs Windows – reboots quite often. Whenever it does, his ISP assigns a new IP address to the machine. Each time this happens, the proxy stops working for Sarah. Jim needs to contact Sarah again and tell her the new IP that Circumventor is associated with. This rapidly gets expensive and frustrating. Sarah also worries that, if she uses any one IP address too long, her ISP may succumb to government pressure and start blocking it.

STEP FIVE - ONION ROUTING THROUGH TOR

Jim suggests that Sarah experiment with Tor, a relatively new system that provides a high degree of anonymity for websurfing. Onion routing takes the idea of proxy servers – a computer that acts on your behalf – to a new level of complexity. Each request made through an onion routing network goes through two to 20 additional computers, making it hard to trace what computer originated a request.

Each step of the Onion Routing chain is encrypted, making it harder for the government of Sarah’s country to trace her posts. Furthermore, each computer in the chain only knows its nearest neighbors. In other words, router B knows that it got a request for a webpage from router A, and that it’s supposed to pass the request on to router C. But the request itself is encrypted - router B doesn’t actually know what page Sarah is requesting, or what router will finally request the page from the webserver.

Given the complexity of the technology, Sarah is pleasantly surprised to discover how easy it is to install Tor (http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/tor-doc-win32.html), an onion routing system. She downloads an installer which installs Tor on her system, then downloads and installs Privoxy, a proxy that works with Tor and has the pleasant side benefit of removing most of the ads from the webpages Sarah views.

After installing the software and restarting her machine, Sarah checks noreply.org and discovers that she is, in fact, successfully “cloaked” by the Tor system – noreply.org thinks she’s logging on from Harvard University. She reloads, and now noreply thinks she’s in Germany. From this she concludes that Tor is changing her identity from request to request, helping to protect her privacy. This has some odd consequences. When she uses Google through Tor, it keeps switching language on her. One search, it’s in English – another, Japanese. Then German, Danish and Dutch, all in the course of a few minutes. Sarah welcomes the opportunity to learn some new languages, but she’s concerned about some other consequences. Sarah likes to contribute to Wikipedia, but discovers that Wikipedia blocks her attempts to edit articles
when she’s using Tor.

Tor also seems to have some of the same problems Sarah was having with other proxies. Her surfing slows down quite a bit, as compared to surfing the web without a proxy – she finds that she ends up using Tor only when she’s accessing sensitive content or posting to her blog. And she’s once again tied to her home computer, since she can’t install Tor on a public machine very easily. Most worrisome, though, she discovers that Tor sometimes stops working. Evidently, her ISP is starting to block some Tor routers – when Tor tries to use a blocked router, she can wait for minutes at a time, but doesn’t get the webpage she’s requested.

STEP SIX - MIXMASTER, INVISIBLOG AND GPG

Surely there’s a solution to the blogging problem that doesn’t involve a proxy server, even one as sophisticated as Tor. After spending quite a long time with the local geek, she explores a new option: Invisiblog (http://www.invisiblog.com/). Run by an anonymous group of Australians called vigilant.tv, it’s a site designed for and by the truly paranoid. You can’t post to Invisiblog via the web, as you do with most blog servers. You post to it using specially formatted email, sent through the MixMaster remailer system, signed cryptographically.

It took Sarah a few tries to understand that last sentence. Eventually, she set up GPG (http://www.gnupg.org/) - the GNU implementation of Pretty Good Privacy, a public-key encryption system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography).

In two sentences: Public-key encryption is a technique that allows her to send messages to a person that only she can read, without her needing to share a secret key with you that would let you read messages other people send to her. Public key encryption also allows people to “sign” documents with a digital signature that is almost impossible to forge. She generates a keypair that she will use to post to the blog – by signing a post with her “private key”, the blog server will be able to use her “public key” to check that a post is coming from her, and then put it on the blog. (see also the chapter on “How to ensure e-mail is truly private”)

She then sets up MixMaster, a mailing system designed to obscure the origins of an email message. MixMaster uses a chain of anonymous remailers – computer programs that strip all identifying information off an email and send it to its destination – to send email messages with a high degree of anonymity. By using a chain of 2 to 20 remailers, the message is very difficult to trace, even if one or more of the remailers is “compromised” and is recording sender information. She has to “build” MixMaster by compiling its source code, a project that requires a great deal of geek assistance.

She sends a first MixMaster message to Invisiblog, which includes her public key. Invisiblog uses this to set up a new blog, with the catchy name “invisiblog.com/ac4589d7001ac238” - the long string is the last 16 bytes of her GPG key. Then she sends future posts to invisiblog, by writing a text message, signing it with her public key and sending it via MixMaster. It’s not nearly as fast as her old style of blogging. The misdirection of MixMaster mailers means that it takes anywhere from two hours to two days for her message to reach the servers. And she has to be very careful about looking at the blog – if she looks at it too often, her IP address will appear in the blog’s log frequently, signaling that she’s likely to be the blog author. But she’s reassured by the fact that the owners of Invisiblog have no idea who she is.

The main problem with the Invisiblog system is the fact that it’s incredibly difficult for most people to use. Most people find GPG a challenge to set up, and have difficulty understanding the complexities of public and private keys. More user-friendly crypto tools, like Ciphire, have been set up to help the less geeky of us, but even they can be tricky to use. As a result, very few people – including those who might really need it – use encryption for most of their email.

MixMaster is a true technical challenge for most users. Windows users can use an early DOS version of the program by downloading it here: http://prdownloads. sourceforge.net/mixma er/mix204b46.zip?download. I downloaded and tested it, and it doesn’t appear to work… or perhaps my email is still being remailed back and forth between remailers. Anyone wanting to use the newer version, or wanting to use the program on Linux or Mac, needs to be able to compile the program themselves, a task beyond many expert users. It’s possible that Invisiblog would become more useful if it accepted messages from web-accessible remailers, like riot.eu.org but for now, I can’t see it as being particularly helpful for the people who need it most.

There are other problems with strong encryption in repressive countries. If Sarah’s computer is seized by the government and her private key is found, it would constitute strong evidence that Sarah had authored the controversial blog posts. And, in countries where encryption is not widely used, simply sending out MixMaster messages – mail messages wrapped in strong encryption – might be enough to cause Sarah’s Internet
activity to be watched closely.

HOW MUCH ANONYMITY IS ENOUGH? HOW MUCH HASSLE IS TOO MUCH?

Is Sarah’s solution – learning enough about cryptography and software to use MixMaster – your solution? Or is some combination of steps 1-5 enough to let you blog anonymously? There’s no single answer. Any path towards anonymity needs to consider local conditions, your own technical competence and your level of paranoia. If you’re worried that what you’re posting could put you at risk and you’re capable of installing it, posting to a blog through Tor is a very good idea.

And remember not to sign your blog posts with your real name !

Ethan Zuckerman is a fellow at the Berkman Center for
Internet and Society at Harvard Law School where his
research focuses on the relationship between citizen journalism
and conventional media, especially in the developing
world. He’s a founder and former director of
Geekcorps, a non-profit organization that focuses on technology
training in the developing world, and was one of
the founders of webhosting company Tripod.

ludovic pierrat

most governments now have the means to spy on electronic messages. The cyberpolice” in repressive countries use it to spot and arrest political opponents and many Internet users have been thrown in prison for sending or even just forwarding an e-mail. A political dissident in the Maldives was given a 15-year jail sentence in 2002 for corresponding by e-mail with Amnesty International. An Internet user in Syria has been in prison since February 2003 for forwarding an e-mail newsletter.

So here are some tips on how to ensure your e-mails remain private.

Using the e-mail account supplied by your Internet service provider (ISP), such as AOL, Wanadoo or Free, or by a firm doesn’t guarantee any e-mail confidentiality. The owners of the networks your messages pass through can very easily intercept them. When the authorities in any country want to investigate Internet users, they usually go through their ISP to read their e-mail.

A “webmail” account (such as Yahoo! or Hotmail) is more secure because it doesn’t use the servers of a local ISP. To read webmail messages, you have to force your way in or intercept messages as they’re being transmitted, which is technically more difficult. Unfortunately this protection is only relative, since police experts or hackers can easily look at your webmail. Encryption (writing protected by a code) is the main way to really ensure the privacy of your messages. There are two kinds.

CLASSIC ENCRYPTION

Ann and Michael want to exchange secret messages, so they agree on an encryption and decryption code and a key. Then they exchange messages using them. The snag with this method is that if a third person intercepts the messages in which Ann and Michael exchange their key, that person can see it and use it, perhaps to send bogus
e-mails to Ann and Michael. So Ann and Michael have to exchange their key when nobody else can see it, by meeting in person, for example.

ASSYMETRIC ENCRYPTION

The best way to fix the problem is to use “asymmetric” encryption. Two keys are needed for this, one to encrypt, the other to decrypt. Details of the encrypting key (the “public key”) can be exchanged without risk over the Internet because it can’t be used to decrypt messages. The decrypting key (the “secret key”) must never be communicated. With asymmetric encryption, Ann has her own pair of keys (a public key that she gives out and a secret one that she keeps). Ann sends her key to Michael, who uses it to encrypt his messages to her. Only Ann, with her secret key, can then decrypt Michael’s messages. Michael, with his own pair of keys, in turn sends his public key to Ann, who can then reply to his messages in complete privacy. But since the public key is exchanged over the Internet without special protection, it’s best to check its validity with its owner. Each key has a “fingerprint” (a short string of characters), which it’s easy to communicate in person or over the phone.
An unverified key may be a false one issued by a third person with evil intent, making the encryption totally useless. The reliability of assymetric encryption depends entirely on protecting the secret key and checking the public key of the other person. OpenPGP (Open Pretty Good Privacy) is the standard asymmetric encryption. The most popular software to create and use a pair of keys and manage the public keys of its correspondents is GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard), which can be used both with mail programmes such as Thunderbird or Outlook, with webmail or with instant messaging.

Download GnuPG at : www.gnupg.org
Download special version for Windows at : www.winpt.org

Ludovic Pierrat is a computer engineer who runs Wa Company, an information technology consultancy and production firm.

most of the world’s authoritarian regimes are trying to control what their citizens read and do online. They’re getter better and better at blocking “objectionable” material, usually with technology bought from US firms. China is far and away the world champion. But it’s felt the heat of competition in recent years. Each country in this far from complete list has its own style and tactics but they all have one purpose, to keep ahead of the game.

CHINA, THE WORLD CHAMPION

China was one of the first repressive regimes to realise it couldn’t do without the Internet and so it had to be brought under control. It’s one of the few countries that’ve managed to block all material that criticises the regime while expanding Internet facilities. What’s the big secret? A clever mix of investment, technology and diplomacy. Beijing has spent tens of millions of dollars on the most sophisticated Internet filtering and surveillance equipment. The system is based on a constantly-updated blacklist of websites. Access to “subversive” ones – a very broad notion that includes pornography, political criticism and sites that are pro-Tibet or favour Taiwanese independence – is then blocked at the level of the country’s Internet “backbones” (major connection nodes). But censorship doesn’t stop there and the regime can automatically bar access to sites in which “dubious” keywords, or combinations such as “tianamen” + “massacre,” are spotted.

The regime can also censor online discussion forums almost instantly. State-of-the-art software and a cyber-police thought to number tens of thousands have enabled it to gut online forums (very active in recent years) of virtually all political dissent. A call for free elections, for example, has a maximum online life of about half an hour. The ministry of industry and information has also zeroed in on blogs and done a deal with Chinabased blog platforms to censor users. So a post about the Dalai Lama will appear online full of automatically-inserted blank spaces in place of “illegal” words.

But how did China get hold of such advanced and effective censorship equipment when only a decade ago the country had no major Internet firms? With the help of big US companies, led by Cisco. These firms, to get a slice of the enormous Chinese market of already more than 100 million people online, have closed their eyes to how their technology is being used. Some have probably worked directly with the regime to set up filters and surveillance. Beijing has even got the world’s major search-engines to go on bended knee. Yahoo! agreed a few years ago to remove all material offensive to the regime from its Chinese version. For a long time, Google refused but now seems to be moving in the same direction.

The country’s police and courts also treat very harshly website editors who don’t obey the rules laid down by the governing Communist Party. 75 cyber-dissidents are currently in prison for trying to post independent news online, some of them serving sentences of more than 10 years. So before you set up a blog in China, it’s best to find out what the rules are. Bloggers living in the country holding the world online censorship title have to be cautious and crafty.

VIETNAM: A VERY TOUGH TEAM

Vietnam faithfully follows China’s example, but though it’s more ideologically rigid, it doesn’t have its neighbour’s economic and technological capacity. It has a cyber-police that filters “subversive” material out of websites and spies on cybercafés. But it cracks down just as hard on cyber-dissidents and bloggers. Three have been in prison for more than three years for daring online to speak up in favour of democracy.

TUNISIA: “MODEL” PLAYERS

President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, whose family has a monopoly on Internet operations in Tunisia, has set up a very effective system to censor online activity. Access to all opposition websites is banned and users also can’t see quite a few news sites, such as the French daily paper Libération. The regime also tries to dissuade people from using webmail, which is harder to spy on than standard e-mail systems such as Outlook Express. Getting on to Yahoo! mail in a Tunisian cybercafé can take 20 minutes, often ending before then with a “timed out” or “page not found” message. The Reporters Without Borders website can’t be read from inside the country.Yet the international community seems to approve how Tunisia locally runs the Internet, since the UN-affiliated International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has chosen the country to host the November 2005 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). The idea that Tunisia is a model of Internet development is a chilling one.

IRAN: A VICIOUS SQUAD

Online censorship isn’t only done by communist regimes in Asia. Filtering systems in Iran have greatly improved in recent years and the information ministry boasts that it currently blocks access to hundreds of thousands of websites. The country’s mullahs especially target all content dealing in any way with sex but also they also don’t tolerate independent news sites. The regime is capable of the worst censorship and also set a record in 2005 by throwing nearly 20 bloggers in prison over the preceding 10 months. Three of them were still there on 1 August 2005.

CUBA: THE “LEGEND”

The Cuban regime is well-known for its phone tapping expertise but it’s also very good at censoring the Internet. The Chinese model of encouraging online activity while controlling it is too expensive, so President Fidel Castro has plumped for an easier way – simply keeping the Internet out of reach of virtually all Cubans. Internet access in Cuba is the privilege of a tiny few who have to get
express permission from the ruling Communist Party. Even when you do get online, often illegally, you find a heavily censored version of the Internet. Few people know that Cuba is one of the least Internet-connected countries in the world and that online material is as tightly controlled as in the traditional media. Why don’t people know this? Perhaps because of the still-powerful myth of the Cuban revolution.

SAUDI ARABIA: RECORD GOALS

The Saudi authorities openly admit they censor the Internet. No “page not found” like in China. When you try to go to a banned site, you’re told straight out it’s been blocked by the government’s filters. The official Internet Service Unit (ISU) is proud to tell you it’s barred access to nearly 400,000 sites and has even posted a form online for users to suggest new websites that could be blocked. The ISU says it filters sites to shield citizens from offensive material violating Islamic principles and social norms. It’s also interesting to note that a US firm, Secure Computing, sold the regime its online filtering system.

UZBEKISTAN: DUMMY PASS EXPERTS

“There’s no way to censor the Internet in this country,” the Uzbek information minister said in June 2005. An odd statement when all the country’s opposition websites can’t be accessed and when online journalists are regularly threatened and physically attacked. Julien Pain is head of the Internet Freedom desk at Reporters Without Borders

In 1980 in Brockton, Massachusetts, the Fannings threw a high-school graduation party. The party quickly swelled out of control and over 3,000 people stormed the property. John Fanning, 14, was trying to raise money to pay for everything, and made a few thousand dollars off it. Meanwhile, his older sister Colleen hooked up with one of the members of the band Macbeth that had been hired to play. She got knocked up, and the jerk dumped her, but she was convinced to keep the son, who she named Shawn.

How appropriate, then, that the bastard son of an out-of-control house party would grow up to create one of the more controversial computer programs in history and, by some standards, change the music industry permanently.

Shawn and John Fanning always got along together, and John would often lend Shawn computer equipment and whatever else he could find. John gave Shawn a job at NetGames, one of his many companies he started, and let him work on various programming projects to his heart’s content (although he had a reputation for not finishing what he started). Shawn eventually went to college at Northeastern, where he gained the nickname “Napster” from his nappy hairstyle. He eventually dropped out, but not before writing an MP3 trading program that became, simply, Napster.

And then the whole thing went to hell.

John Fanning saw the potential for Napster and started funding its continued development. To anyone who used the program in its various iterations, some things are obvious: professional, talented programmers were brought in to make the thing run better, and a lot of legal maneuvers were put into place to try and protect the company. For all his name being on the building, Napster had as much to do with Napster 2.0 and the growth/direction of the company as Ronald McDonald did with flipping burgers at the local Mickey D’s.

The lawsuits came, with Napster (the company) squelching this way and that to get out of the mess. People started hacking Napster protocols to make their own versions of the program. Napster, which based its entire business model on trading copyrighted works, started sending legal threats to people selling Napster T-shirts and hats. And then Metallica got involved. The Record Industry went completely over the top, and if nothing else came of the entire event, the world was shown how entirely out of control the music industry had become in terms of methods, lawsuits, and behind-the-scenes skullduggery, a show of the man behind the curtain that they will ultimately regret very much.

Ultimately, Napster sold itself out to Bertelsmann, a worldwide media conglomerate (and fuckers of the first order), but by any of a number of accounts, John Fanning’s clinging to control of the company to the end and demanding huge amounts of cash for its properties doomed it completely.

As for the created industry of Peer-to-Peer File Sharing that Napster lit off, one firm tracking filesharing statistics said that more files were traded in the month after Napster was shut down than in the previous two years Napster had existed, combined. Translation: The music industry thought it was already in trouble, until the second dildo slid in.

this article first appeared on rotten.com

By Johanna Drucker © 2003
A lecture presented to the Syracuse University History of the Book Seminar, April 25, 2003.

Abstract: What do designers of electronic books have to learn from the traditional, paper-based codex? Drawing on scholarship in the history of the book, this talk argues that the idea of a book should be as much grounded in what it does as what it looks like. Using examples from the development of marginalia, tables of contents, and other paratextual features to analyze the way books work, and creative innovations wrought by book artists, this talk suggests that many principles useful for the design of electronic information spaces– and the “virtual” book– can be extracted from traditional codex works.

The brief career of the “e-book” has been plagued with fits and starts. In the twenty years since desk-top computers have come into widespread use, a whole host of surrogates for traditional books have been trotted out with great fanfare and high expectations. In almost every case, these novelties are accompanied by comparisons between familiar forms and their reinvented shape in an electronic context. That legacy can be traced in nearly every descriptive title:: the expanded book, the super-book, the hyper-book, or, my personal favorite for its touching, underdog, sensibility – the “book emulator”. Such nomenclature seems charged by a need to acknowledge the historical priority of books and to invoke a link between their established cultural identity and these electronic surrogates.

Nonetheless, the rhetoric that accompanies these hybrids tends to suggest that all of the advantages are on the electronic side. The copy written in support of what are frequently new products bidding for market share contains conspicuous promises of improvement. The idea that electronic “books” will “supercede the limitations” of paper-based books and overcome the “drawbacks” of traditional books features largely in such promotional claims. But why? On what grounds? In this rhetoric, books are supposedly static, fixed, finite forms that can be vastly improved through the addition of so-called “interactive” features. Testing those claims against the design of various means of text access and display in electronic formats one encounters a field fraught with contradictions. Electronic presentations often mimic the most kitsch elements of book iconography while the newer features of electronic functionality seem not to have found their place in the interface at all. So we see simulacral page drape but very little that indicates the capacity for such specifically electronic abilities as rapid refresh and time-stamped updates. Might the design of e-books (the term I’ll rely on for lack of a better moniker) be aided by a different approach?

A glance at the literature on electronic books shows the persistence of these hyperbolic claims over more than a decade. Voyager, the adventurous and frankly visionary early pioneer in the design of on-line formats for hypertext and other new media presentations of experimental works launched its “Expanded Book” in the early 1990s, before the Web was in operation, using CDs and other storage devices. But Voyager abandoned this development, out of money and out of spirit for the task. Audiences have not materialized, and the alternative reading practices of hypertext story structures have not found large followings. The one area where branching narratives and experimental pathways have taken off dramatically is in the design of games, a field that rarely feels compelled to reference books as a point of historical or conceptual origin. The experiment to develop new reading formats would appear to have reached an impasse.

keep reading this article here

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers – at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer.

from “the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction”

Can blogs, wikis, and other participatory web architectures change the world for the better? Does the Sociable Web reach developing countries?

Currently, not even a quarter of the world’s population has Internet access. 70% of North Americans are able to go online– Europe 36%, Asia roughly 10%, and Africa 2%. Willinsky’s arguments for Open Access to research don’t apply to those who don’t have net access in the first place. But — imagine– what would a broad movement of bloggers/citizen journalists in Africa, bring to the attention of the rest of the world? This would be a personal reporting with an affect that you would not find on CNN. South Africa already has an active Indymedia (image above).

Resources of the Sociable Web including Wikipedia are still of little use to those without a computer and command of English. Most African languages have only about a thousand articles in Wikipedia. The problems encountered are ranging from keyboards supporting a particular language to computer manuals in a local language.

The current explosion of the cellphone industry in Africa is a widely known fact. Africans may not have ready access to the Internet but more than half of them own mobile phones with SMS capability but without the ability to run the Internet. In South Africa, net access is still sparse but alternatively banks are looking into low cost banking options via cellphones. Notably, also the world’s first feature-length movie was shot on a cellphone in SouthAfrica. The film titled “SMS Sugar Man” was directed by Aryan Kaganof and the story, not far as interesting as the technology, is about a pimp and two high class prostitutes.

Currently there are several initiatives that are focusing on educating African youth via cellphone. Tomi T Ahonen reports that “There are more radios than mobile phones, but those radios are in North America and Western Europe, built into our cars etc. In Asia, Africa and Latin America many more mobile phones exist than radios. … 30% of the total population on the planet carries a mobile phone. Every one of them can do basic texting, basic mobile commerce, receive basic news, etc. ”

The future of the Sociable Web in developing countries is the bridging between simple mobile phones and the resources available online. The project MobilED is a good example:

In March 2006 the pilot of MobilED was launched with teachers of Corwall Hill College in Preotoria (South Africa). The project focuses on HIV/AIDS and is for 15-16 year-olds. “The platform will offer access to Wikipedia content with SMS, so that students can search the Wikipedia by sending a query term to the server. The server will then call back and a speech synthesizer will read the article for them.”

cell2.jpgThe 2004 blog explosion did not make it to the sub-Saharan Africa with the exception of South Africa. For most Africans the Internet is as far away as a semi-soy latte at a Starbucks. With little net access and all of the action happening in North America and Europe, so far blogging was limited to Western ex-pats. But this is changing: the Ethiopian blogging scene is up and coming with blogs like Nazret.com. And, outside of Africa, in South Korea, OhmyNews is a strong and successful example of the Sociable Web.

Ethan Zuckerman points out that through citizen journalism and the Sociable Web the world will have more access to what is going on in places that are not sufficiently covered by news agencies.

Zuckerman: “None but the largest news agencies are able to pay the travel costs and insurance for reporters to cover these stories. Most choose not to cover a conflict that’s bloody, dangerous, difficult to summarize in a soundbite and unknown to most of their readers or viewers. The net result - we simply don’t have information about many parts of the globe relevant to world debate. … Even when we do have some information about under-covered parts of the world, we have another problem, what Ito terms “the caring problem”. People pay attention to subjects they care about. They tend to ignore subjects they know little about. Media, trying to serve its customers in a free market, responds by giving them more information on subjects they’ve demonstrated an interest in and ignoring other subjects.”

Mark Warschauer’s work on Technology and Social Inclusion is also definitely worth considering in this context.

Citizen journalism that cares about local topics in Congo, for example, will produce a decisively different media sphere than that curr