Massive props to the amazing Kathryn Corrick, for a wonderful Saturday morning spent in her company as she turned so-so weather and a less-than photogenic subject into this wonderful set of press shots ahead of the media storm that we anticipate attending on the launch of my book next week (after all, news is quite slow these days, no?).
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Posted in Barefoot Into Cyberspace, Vanity
Last Saturday, I donned my highest heels and headed to Shaftesbury Avenue for the premiere of Just Do It, the crowd-funded documentary film about direct action in the envrinomental movement directed by wonderwoman Emily James.
I loved it. Not just for the honest yet loving portrayal of the young, and not so young, activists whose story it follows. Not just for the biting sense it leaves you with that you could, right now, be doing so much more to safeguard the planet for your children and grandchildren. Not even just for the close examination of the appalling way we often treat dissent in this country, a subject very close to my heart. I loved it for its joy. It is a truly joyful film, a film that lifts you up and makes you feel better about the world and your place in it. That is a serious achievement, and one about which I hope Emily feels very proud.
It’s a serious achievement when you think that this film was made for the most part outside of the traditional film-making industry. The sheer confidence and drive that Emily and her team must have had to keep going over the last two years is an inspiration to me as I continue my own modest project in heterodox media. In exchange for their troubles, they’ve maintained the trust and support of the activists who star in the film (many of whom were at the premiere last weekend), and it is the total access to this community that was granted to the film-makers that is what makes this film so unique.
Tonight is the film’s opening night (at the Ritzy in Brixton – I’ve just checked and it looks like there are about a dozen tickets left, so act fast). I urge you to go and see this film, and I promise you won’t regret it. Here’s the trailer:
The film will be coming to Cambridge at the start of next week for a four day run, and is also showing at Aberdeen, Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Henley, Kendal, Liverpool, Nottingham, Oxford, Poole, Stratford, York and many more independent cinemas and festivals across the UK over the Summer. For full details, visit the Just Do It website.
I blogged about Just Do It, and the reasons I was supporting them with advice and cash, last year. One of the great things about this project is that from early on, Emily saw the value that releasing the film under a Creative Commons licence would offer her in terms of getting her message out. The Creative Commons release is not out yet, but is expected in Autumn this year. As Emily explains:
The Just Do It team are very much committed to a Creative Commons release of the film. In order to balance the demands of the traditional capitalist distribution system (which still holds many of the cards in getting a film out) with our desire to participate in a more progressive movement which re-envisions the relationship between creative work and capital, we have had to agree to hold back the Creative Commons release to give a window to the cinema, TV, and dvd releases.
Once these are out of the way (we hope Autumn 2011), then we shall be releasing the full theatrical version of the film for peer-to-peer sharing, via a range of bit-torrent sites, which we shall actively seed and promote.
Purists might groan at this, but I think it is a pragmatic and thoughtful approach from a film-maker keen to do her film and its subjects justice by getting it through as many different channels and in front of as many different viewers as possible. Mixing the best of the progressive and the traditional has been an approach I’ve seen the Just Do It team adopt in everything from sourcing people to translate the film’s subtitles, to persuading local cinemas to show it. One current project is co-ordinating a massive day of free screenings across university campuses, pencilled in for 18 October.
A final thought. It’s interesting that Emily uses the word “capitalist” to describe traditional film distribution channels. Without spoiling the film for you too much, that’s a word that many of the young activists use to describe themselves by the end of the story, prefixed, of course, by “anti-“. But I left the screening wondering if these people were really anti-capitalists, or if it was something else they were “anti-“. Back when I was a full-time digital rights activist, I baulked at the close quarters the political class kept with global corporations like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! (not to mention the BPI and the MPA) The relationship between government and big business is being thrown into some relief by the current scandal around Murdoch and his media empire. What shocks most is not that companies pursue profit, but that government seems so happy to collude and fast-track that profit-seeking, above and beyond the interests of the people who they are meant to represent. Chris Marsden calls this rotten corporate-state nexus “regulatory capitalism” I’ve also heard it called “corporate mercantilism” and, occasionally, “fascism”. Identifying as “anti-capitalist” might be the wrong thing to do if your aim is to prize apart the state and corporations from their current huddle for safety.
Thinking a little more about this is something I’d like to do once I’ve got this book launch out of the way. That and scaling the fences of a few coal-fired power stations.
Posted in Just Do It film
Open Government Partnership launched
US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Brazilian Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota this week announced the launch of an international partnership to promote more open government. The initiative, called the Open Government Partnership, seeks to use innovative technologies to promote government transparency and public engagement. The Transparency and Accountability Initiative, a donor collaborative, welcomed the news, which was met by scepticism in other quarters.
News | Scepticism
Fifty years of Kenyan Parliamentary debates published
The Kenyan National Council for Law Reporting, in partnership with Google Kenya, has published parliamentary records dating back to the 1960s, giving Kenyans free, electronic access to the records for the first time. The project uses the Google Books platform to display the data.
Graduated response-style copyright enforcement comes to the US
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) digests the news that a coalition of internet service providers (ISPs) and rightsholder bodies have announced a collaborative effort to curb copyright infringement on peer-to-peer networks. The scheme involves ISPs alerting their customers based on notifications received from rightsholders that infringing activity is taking place. ISPs will be expected to take mitigating action, such as reducing internet speeds, against persistent offenders.
Turkmenet shines during Abadan explosion
Following the suppression of news about a still-mysterious explosion in the Abadan region of Turkmenistan reported to have resulted in high numbers of deaths, New Eurasia examines “both the struggles and discoveries of the Turkmenet during the crisis”.
EFF urges Microsoft to reconsider censored China service
The EFF publishes a short note condemning Microsoft over recent news that it has struck a deal with Chinese search market leader Baidu to offer its Bing web search results in English.
What’s Wrong with Government 2.0?
Using the profit-seeking privatisation of micro-credit as an analogy, Tom Slee sounds a warning about the limitations and risks around the open government data agenda, in this series of blog posts.
Post 1 | Post 2
The most menacing malware in history
This accomplished and compelling long-form feature from Kim Zetter at Wired charts the rise of the Stuxnet worm, its origins and target, and the security researchers who found themselves caught up in what emerged to be a story of truly international proportions.
Report: Threats in internet freedom in Russia, 2008-2011
The Agora Association have released the first of a new series of reports documenting threats to internet freedom in Russia. Types of threats enumerated in the report range from proposals to regulate the internet to defamation suits and cyber-attacks, as well as harassment, assault and murder of internet activists.
Special Feature: The World Bank and open data
This New York Times feature examines the strategic thinking behind the World Bank’s decision to open up its data.
Video: Enduring Voices
Enduring Voices, a joint project of National Geographic and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, documents endangered languages across the world: “By 2100, more than half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth — many of them not yet recorded — may disappear, taking with them a wealth of knowledge about history, culture, the natural environment, and the human brain.”
Google+ for journalists at risk
Danny O’Brien of the Committee for the Protection of Journalists gives his initial review of new social networking platform Google+ and its utility for at-risk journalists.
Audio: Joi Ito on how to save the internet from its own success
An interview with Joi Ito that hints at some possible coming changes at the MIT Media Lab under his leadership including greater adoption of Creative Commons licences and more participation in Open Courseware.
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Posted in Link Digest
Update: This ended up being a really good interview, and I urge you to listen to it on the Little Atoms website.
I’m just about to head into London to interview Angela Saini, author of Geek Nation, for tonight’s episode of Little Atoms. If you’re in London you can tune in from 7pm to Resonance 104.4 FM to hear the interview, or you can listen live online here. A podcast of the interview will be made available on the Little Atoms website in the fullness of time. You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here.
I used to work with Angela at openDemocracy.net, and it’s been fantastic to watch her journalism career go from strength to strength since she left that esteemed organ. I caught up with her at the recent Little Atoms event “Which Way to techno-Utopia?”, where I was impressed by the engaging way she spoke about the work she did for the book travelling around India to discern whether, as a nation, it has what it takes to be the world’s next scientific super power. The book addresses a number of issues I find fascinating, like the way science and spiritualism mix more readily in India than they do in the West, the ideological/nationalistic nature of the debate around GMOs, and the potential of e-government to transform India’s notorious bureaucracy. I’m looking forward to talking about these issue in more depth with Angela, and Little Atoms godfather and co-host Neil Denny, tonight.
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Posted in Books, Little Atoms
Civil Society representatives reject OECD internet policy plan
European Digital Rights (EDRi) report on the decision of the Civil Society Information Society Advisory Council to the OECD (CSISAC) not to endorse the OECD’s draft communiquÈ on internet policy: “the implication of much of the text is to abandon the rule of law and hand over both enforcement and policing of cyberspace to online intermediaries”.
Police crack down on Minsk protest using social media
Global Voices reports on a crackdown against a protest in Minsk, Belarus, detailing how authorities used Facebook and Twitter to identify, intimidate and discourage protestors.
EU: No mandatory internet filtering against images of child abuse
The Open Net Initiative reports that, “the European Commission, Council, and Parliament came to an agreement last week regarding controversial plans to mandate internet filtering as a means to fight the circulation of child abuse images”. Thanks to EDRi’s intensive, year-long campaign, internet filtering will now most likely not be mandated by draft legislation being negotiated.
Minimal stakeholder engagement at multilateral IP enforcement treaty negotiations
Krista Cox of Knowledge Ecology International reports from last week’s Vietnam round of negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, a multilateral free trade agreement which contains worrying proposals on intellectual property enforcement that could harm access to knowledge: “overall, civil society and academics were displeased with the limited stakeholder engagement and restricted opportunities to interact with the negotiators”.
FOIA: How to break the bottleneck
The New York Times looks at the future of Freedom of Information law and practice in the US, in light of news that “two and a half years after the president’s call for openness, only 49 of 90 federal agencies have reported making concrete changes to their FOIA procedures”.
Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia reader
This collection of essays, interviews and artworks seeks to provide new insight on the next generation of Wikipedia-related research, examining everything from “radical artistic interventions and the significant role of bots” to “hidden trajectories of encyclopaedic knowledge and the politics of agency and exclusion”. It is supported by, among others, the Centre for Internet and Society – India.
Social media: Good for revolution, bad for democracy?
Dave Power draws on a range of thinkers to make a case that social media’s ability to enact political change stops short of helping constitute new governing structures after a successful popular revolution.
Book: The power of open
Creative Commons (CC) publish a series of case studies into use of their licences, to demonstrate, “the breadth of CC uses across fields and the creativity of the individuals and organizations that have chosen to share their work via Creative Commons.”
ICT Accessibility progress report
This report, released this week by a United Nations accessibility taskforce, finds that despite commitments on paper to protect the rights of people with disabilities to access ICT, many countries are failing to guarantee those rights in practice. The report is based on a survey of 33 of 147 countries which have signed or ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Beyond impact workshop report
Cameron Neylon of York University UK publishes a report of the Beyond Impact workshop, held in London in May 2011 to identify opportunities and barriers in the aggregation, analysis, and measurement of research outputs.
Video: Internet connectivity in Ghana
Russell Southwood interviews a Ghanaian internet service provider about the challenges of providing connectivity in the country.
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Posted in Link Digest
Brazil introduces OER into federal legislation and adopts local government policy
Creative Commons reports on two new developments in Brazil around open educational resources. Thanks to sustained advocacy from OER-Brazil, legislation is being debated in Brazil that would require government-funded educational resources to be made open. Meanwhile, the municipality of São Paulo’s Department of Education has mandated that all the educational content it funds should be released under a Creative Commons licence.
United States faces legal challenges to domain name seizures
The Open Net Initiative reports that “Puerto 80 Projects, owner of one of Spain’s most popular websites, is suing the United States government for seizing their domains, rojadirecta.com and rojadirecta.org”. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and the Center for Democracy and Technology have filed an amicus brief arguing that the seizures amount to prior restraint on speech.
ONI report | Amicus brief
French government plans to extend internet censorship
La Quadrature du Net reacts to reports of a draft executive order put forward by the French Government which would several of its ministries the power to arbitrarily censor any content or service on the internet.
Turkey continues to push for restraints on internet
Voice of Amwerica summarises developments in the Turkish government’s bid for increased control of the internet.
Knight Foundation announces winners of 2011 News Challenge, plus funding for Center for Civic Media
Sixteen winners of the 2011 Knight News Challenge were annouced this week, including the Open Knowledge Foundation, Ushahidi’s Swiftriver social media parsing web application and UK-based data lab ScraperWiki. In parallel, the foundation has announced over $3m of support for MIT’s Center for Civic Media (formerly the Center for Future Civic Media) over three years. The rebranded Center will be led by Ethan Zuckerman.
News Challenge winners | Interview with Ethan Zuckerman about his new role
Information imperialism?
Adam Fish points at the dark side of US State Department funding for “Internet Freedom” projects in other countries.
Book: The Long History of New Media: Technology, historiography, and contextualizing newness
This new collection of essays takes the long view on “new” media, arguing that “the new in new media must be understood to be historically constructed… with an eye on the future, or more correctly, an eye on what we think the future will be.”
EIFL 2010 annual report
The annual report of the activities of the Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) project in 2010 celebrates the role the organisation played in getting libraries’ copyright concerns on the agenda at the World Intellectual Property Organisation, and in negotiating over $175 million of savings on commercial e-resources for libraries in its network, which stretches over 45 countries.
The state of e-Government in Latin America
The Information Civica blog has published an English translation of Juan Arellano’s comprehensive profile of e-government initiatives in Latin America.
Fair use best practices: the Israeli experience
This paper describes the authors’ experience building a coalition of scholars in Israel to decipher and defend fair use provisions in the context of education and research. The website openeducation.org.il provides a summary of the paper, and a copy of the best practice guidelines the scholars developed for teachers and researchers making use of fair use provisions in Israeli copyright law.
Paper | Summary | Guidelines
Audio: Through a Web Darkly
Participants including Ben Hammersley and Evgeny Morozov discuss how the web spreads ignorance and conspiracy, and examines ways in which an open society can mitigate these effects at this event co-sponsored by OSF.
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Posted in Link Digest
President of Poland declares support for building open government
Poland looks set to fast track its way to open government, as reports emerged this week that the President of Poland, Bronislaw Komorowski, has declared his support for a policy to open up public sector data at a rapid pace. In May, the Polish Prime Minister announced “all information funded from public sources should be available as public property, free for everyone to use as they wish”. The work of Koalicja Otwartej Edukacji (“Coalition for Open Education”) has been vital in pushing forward this agenda.
Presidential support | Prime Ministerial announcement
WIPO’s leader calls for “positive agenda”
The Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Francis Gurry, has raised concerns among intellectual property reformers by calling for what he dubbed a “positive agenda” for future work at the UN institution, IP Watch reports. Such an agenda could move WIPO away from discussions about mandatory limitations and exceptions to copyright law which, for example, facilitate access to knowledge for disadvantaged groups.
ECLAC launches regional broadband observatory
The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) has launched a regional broadband observatory with the aim of lowering costs and increasing access in the region.
Turkey: 32 suspected “Anonymous” members arrested
The Open Net Initiative reports: “The Turkish government has arrested 32 hackers for their suspected involvement in a series of recent attacks against government sites launched by the online activist group Anonymous”. The attacks were motivated by government plans to implement nationwide filtering of the internet.
WSJ and Al-Jazeera lure whistleblowers with false promises of anonymity
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) present a legal analysis of WikiLeaks “copycats” launched earlier this year by Al Jazeera and the Wall Street Journal, warning users not to fall for “false promises of anonymity offered by these sites”. The detailed analysis follows earlier reports that the sites security measures were technically unsound.
Netherlands first European nation to adopt net neutrality
The Dutch Parliament have voted to adopt a new telecommunications law that mandates net neutrality principles. The Register reports: “The law will force ISPs and telecom operators to ensure access to all types of content, services or applications available on the network”.
EU ministers seek to ban creation of ‘hacking tools’
Computerworld reports on a recent meeting of EU Justice Ministers to discuss proposals put forward by the European Commission to combat cyberattacks, stating that “in addition to approving the Commission’s text, the ministers extended the draft to include ‘the production and making available of tools for committing offenses'”. Where such laws have been enacted in member states – in particular the UK and Germany – they have been met with fierce criticism, centred mainly on the fact most of the tools the laws seek to ban have legitimate and crucial uses in computer security work.
US: Hacking blitz drives cyberinsurance demand
Reuters reports that demand for insurance by US companies seeking to cover the costs of cyberattacks is soaring: “companies [are trying] to protect themselves against civil suits and the potential for fines by governments and regulators, but also [seeking] help paying for mundane costs like ‘sorry letters’ to customers”.
Kenya: Finance Minister uses social media to prepare budget
Global Voices reports on the Kenyan finance minister’s use of Facebook, Scribd and Google Docs to solicit public opinion on what to include in the country’s budget.
Russia: 6 month suspended sentence for forum comment
Global Voices reports on the 6-month suspended sentence handed down to former government employee and blogger Yuri Yegorov for what the court ruled were libellous comments he posted online detailing corruption in the office of the Tatarstan ombudsman: “additionally, the court ruled to destroy Yegorov’s laptop ‘as a weapon of crime'”.
Of goats and headaches
The Economist exposes the workings of the academic journal industry in this short feature.
Working paper: Social media, human rights and political change
This working paper provides a good overview of current critiques of the role of social media in political change, with a focus on the Arab Spring.
Book: The internet of elsewhere
This new book by Cyrus Farivar exposes US readers to internet cultures in Estonia, Iran, South Korea and Senegal, arguing that those who see the ‘net uniquely through a US lens miss crucial developments elsewhere.
Book review: The filter bubble
Evgeny Morozov reviews Eli Pariser’s new book “The Filter Bubble”, which he concludes “deserves praise for drawing attention to the growing power of information intermediaries whose rules, protocols, filters and motivations are not always visible.”
Video: Interview with Rufus Pollock on Open Spending
Breaking Tech interview Open Knowledge Foundation co-founder Rufus Pollock about his work to build a platform to track government spending across the world.
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UN rejects copyright enforcement approach in new report on free expression
The UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Frank La Rue, has this week published a report warning governments they should refrain from restricting the flow of information on the internet, and not hold intermediaries such as internet service providers liable for content which travels across their wires. The report singled out measures designed to enforce copyright that would disconnect users from the internet, labelling them a violation of article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Report (via Article 19) | Analysis (via the Center for Democracy and Technology)
Egypt used Western tools to intercept Skype
Memos uncovered following raids of the Egyptian state security agency earlier this year show the agency was intercepting calls made using Skype before the fall of Hosni Mubarak. The wall Street Journal reports that Skype “is the communications tool of choice for dissidents around the world because its powerful encryption technology evades traditional wiretaps”, while going on to highlight “a cottage industry of US and other companies” designing tools to either block or eavesdrop on Skype conversations.
Kazakhstan: Google redirects users away from google.kz
Citing concerns over network efficiency, “but also about user privacy and free expression”, Google announced this week that it will redirect all users of its Kazakh search service google.kz to google.com. The news follows an order issued by the Ministry of Communications and Information in Kazakhstan that requires all .kz domain names to operate on servers located inside Kazakhstan.
Microsoft ready to cooperate with FSB over Skype?
Following its acquisition of the internet telephony company last month, conflicting reports have emerged this week over the extent to which Microsoft intends to cooperate with Russian state security and hand over details about the software’s functionality. This Bloomberg report repeats claims in the Russian business press that Microsoft may disclose Skype’s source code to the FSB, but has no plans to make Skype’s encryption codes available: “The FSB… won’t be able to listen to individual Skype calls with only the source codes, though the data may help it hack the service”.
Nigeria: internet and mobile shutdown during presidential inauguration
The Open Net Initiative reports that: “internet and mobile networks were inaccessible for 12 hours in Abuja during President Goodluck Jonathan’s inauguration on Sunday, May 29”.
YouTube introduces Creative Commons support
YouTube has begun offering its users the option to license their videos using a Creative Commons licence which allows third parties to remix and share their work. In conjunction with the new policy, YouTube has launched a Creative Commons video library containing 10,000 CC-licensed videos from organisations including C-SPAN and Al Jazeera, and a special CC-only search functionality.
A click away from the KGB: internet revolution in Belarus?
Belarus Digest publishes an up-to-date overview of online censorship and surveillance practice in Belarus which explains why, despite levels of internet penetration comparable to Egypt and Tunisia, Belarus is unlikely to experience its own internet revolution soon.
Digital mappers plot the future of “maptivism”
A helpful summary by Nancy Scola on the current and future use of mapping in activism with highlights from Russia, Japan, Haiti, and the Philippines.
When social networks become tools of oppression
In this column for Bloomberg, Jilian York highlights the dangers to cyber-activists in repressive regimes posed by using commercial social networking platforms, and identifies steps both companies and governments can take to mitigate against them.
Report: the case of the Syrian Electronic Army
This new report from the Open Net Initiative studies the rise of pro-government computer hackers the Syrian Electronic Army, who actively target political opposition and Western websites.
Book Review: Information in search of meaning
This multi-book review for the Australian takes in recent books by Evgeny Morozov, James Gleick, Timothy Wu and others to try and make sense of current thinking on the future of technology and society.
Evgeny Morozov guest edits the Browser
Evgeny picks his favourite technology-related articles of the week for The Browser, including insights into industrial espionage, a progress report from the Library of Congress on its project to archive the world’s tweets, and a provocative essay from Dissent magazine that argues the transparency agenda is being undermined by data fetishism.
Video: What the internet is hiding from you
The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal discusses how social media is distorting our consumption of news and culture with Eli Pariser, author of “The Filter Bubble”.
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Posted in Link Digest
The Barefoot Technologist 