Internet is easy prey for governments - CNN.com

Internet is easy prey for governments - CNN.com: "(CNN) --

For all that the revolution in Egypt tells us about the power of networked media to promote bottom-up change, it even more starkly reveals the limits of our internet tools and the ease with which those holding power can take them away.

Yes, services such as Twitter and Facebook give activists the means to organize as never before. But the more dependent on them we become, the more subservient we are to the corporations and governments that control them.

Some of us might like to believe that the genie is out of the bottle and that we all have access to an unstoppable decentralized network. In reality, the internet is entirely controlled by central authorities."

‘Dating’ Site Imports 250,000 Facebook Profiles, Without Permission | Epicenter�| Wired.com

‘Dating’ Site Imports 250,000 Facebook Profiles, Without Permission | Epicenter�| Wired.com:

"How does a unknown dating site, with the absurd intention of destroying Facebook, launch with 250,000 member profiles on the first day?

Simple.

You scrape data from Facebook.

At least, that’s the approach taken by two provocateurs who launched Lovely-Faces.com this week, with profiles — names, locations and photos — scraped from publicly accessible Facebook pages. The site categorizes these unwitting volunteers into personality types, using a facial recognition algorithm, so you can search for someone in your general area who is “easy going,” “smug” or “sly.”

Or you can just search on people’s real names.

The duo behind the site say it’s art, not commerce.

In what seems to be liberal-arts-grad-schoolese, Paolo Cirio, a media artist, and Alessandro Ludovico, media critic and editor in chief of Neural magazine, explain why they made the site.

“Facebook, an endlessly cool place for so many people, becomes at the same time a goldmine for identity theft and dating — unfortunately, without the user’s control,” the two explain. “But that’s the very nature of Facebook and social media in general."

Vodafone: We were forced to send pro-Mubarak texts | Politics and Law - CNET News

Vodafone: We were forced to send pro-Mubarak texts | Politics and Law - CNET News: "The Egyptian government of President Hosni Mubarak forced Vodafone to send out prescripted, propagandistic text messages during the country's recent unrest, the carrier said today in a statement on its Web site.

A text message by someone identified as 'Vodafone' was sent to an Associated Press reporter in Egypt on Sunday appealing to the country's 'honest and loyal men to confront the traitors and criminals and protect our people and honor,' according to an AP report."

Anonymous Hacker Group Attacks Egyptian Government Sites

Anonymous Hacker Group Attacks Egyptian Government Sites: "NEW YORK — Hacker activists started attacking Egyptian government websites on Wednesday, apparently taking them offline soon after the country restored Internet service.

An Internet forum run by a loose international group that calls itself 'Anonymous' directed participants to attack the websites of the Egyptian Ministry of Information and the ruling National Democratic Party. Neither was accessible from New York on Wednesday afternoon.

In a Twitter post, the group claimed credit for taking down the ministry's website and said the group was motivated by a desire to support Egyptian protesters."

Questions on Lanier

1.  What does Lanier mean when he criticizes "meta-ness"?

2.  Can you outline the opposition Lanier poses between digital maoism and the business improvements he suggests?

3.  What do you think he means when he says that capitalism has become a search engine? (96)

4. What does he mean when he refers to the cloud and the lords and peasants of the cloud? (think about aggregators and free content)

5. What does Lanier mean when he refers to the "planet of the help desks?" (94).

6.  What is Lanier's worry when he talks about crowds working for free? Does this suggest to you a serious economic concern? (is work paid? what is the financial model?)

7.  Lanier ultimately values the individual voice more than the opinion of the crowd. Do you agree? If you agree, do you agree with his basic account of the ways the individual is devalued in open culture? Why or why not?

8.  If Lanier bugs you, what is it exactly that feels off?

Jaron Lanier

Music 

Video

Egypt entirely off line

From a post at Al Jazeera:

Egypt's last working Internet service provider, the Noor Group, has been disconnected, a US Web monitoring company said, leaving the crisis-torn country completely offline.

Renesys, a New Hampshire-based firm that monitors Internet routing data in real time, said on Monday that the Noor network "started disappearing from the Internet" around 20h46 GMT.
"They are completely unavailable at present," Renesys vice president and general manager Earl Zmijewski said in a blog post.

Attempts by the AFP news agency to access noor.net and other websites in Egypt serviced by
the company, such as the Egyptian stock exchange site at egyptse.com, were unsuccessful.
Egypt's four main Internet service providers - Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt and Etisalat Misr - cut off international access to their customers on Thursday.

The move left the Noor Group as the only working Internet provider in the country rocked by days of protests against President Hosni Mubarak.

Mobile telephone networks have also been severely disrupted in Egypt along with the Internet.
Activists have used mobile phones and the Internet to organise the most serious anti-government demonstrations in decades, protests inspired by the uprising in Tunisia.

I left facebook last week : EURODISNEY.BIZ

I left facebook last week : EURODISNEY.BIZ: "I left facebook last week
by EZ

tired of the mirrors, noise and eyes.

tired of prickly, intimate and fleshy human relationships being flattened into ‘friend’-nodes, the erasure of myth by constant visibility and exhausting availability.

what kind of network society do i want to support? a closed compound of willingly data-mined crayons or an open net of chance and unpredictability?

if facebook is the brightly-lit suburban mall of internet communication, i want to be under the bridges; in the torrent-swapping irc channels, small social networks, anonymous message boards and darker locations thriving with their own individual languages and codes.

tired of feeling exposed, of being infantilised, of being farmed.

the incessant ‘now’ of FB started to infect my creative process; making for ‘blip’ attention spans and the enormous appetite of the beast, as Geert Lovink puts it ‘feeding a machine’. I want to think in longer time frames to make deeper work.

tired of feelings of interpassivity and the formless mild angst it instills in me; spectacle 2.0 and the build-your-own-ego-ghetto.

hello friends, goodbye facebook."

The Twitter Revolution Must Die!

Excerpt from this blog (read the whole thing):

Have you ever heard of the Leica Revolution? No?

That’s probably because folks who don’t know anything about “branding” insist on calling it the Mexican Revolution. An estimated two million people died in the long struggle (1910-1920) to overthrow a despotic government and bring about reform. But why shouldn’t we re-name the revolution not after a nation or its people, but after the “social media” that had such a great impact in making the struggle known all over the world: the photographic camera? Even better, let’s name the revolution not after the medium itself, but after the manufacturer of the cameras that were carried by people like Hugo Brehme to document the atrocities of war. Viva Leica, cabrones.

My sarcasm is, of course, a thinly veiled attempt to point out how absurd it is to refer to events in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere as the Twitter Revolution, the Facebook Revolution, and so on. What we call things, the names we use to identify them, has incredible symbolic power, and I, for one, refuse to associate corporate brands with struggles for human dignity. I agree with Jillian York when she says:

“… I am glad that Tunisians were able to utilize social media to bring attention to their plight.  But I will not dishonor the memory of Mohamed Bouazizi–or the 65 others that died on the streets for their cause–by dubbing this anything but a human revolution.”

Granted, as Joss Hands points out, there appears to be more skepticism than support for the idea that tools like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are primarily responsible for igniting the uprisings in question. But that hasn’t stopped the internet intelligentsia from engaging in lengthy arguments about the role that technology is playing in these historic developments. One camp, comprised of people like Clay Shirky, seem to make allowances for what Cory Doctorow calls the “internet’s special power to connect and liberate.” On the other side, authors like Ethan Zuckerman, Malcolm Gladwell and Evgeny Morozov have proposed that while digital media can play a role in organizing social movements, it cannot be counted on to build lasting alliances, or even protect net activists once authorities start using the same tools to crack down on dissent.

Both sides are, perhaps, engaging in a bit of technological determinism–one by embellishing the agency of technology, the other by diminishing it. The truth, as always, is somewhere in between, and philosophers of technology settled the dispute of whether technology shapes society (technological determinism) or society shapes technology (cultural materialism) a while ago: the fact is that technology and society mutually and continually determine each other.
So why does the image of a revolution enabled by social media continue to grab headlines and spark the interest of Western audiences, and what are the dangers of employing such imagery? My fear is that the hype about a Twitter/Facebook/YouTube revolution performs two functions: first, it depoliticizes our understanding of the conflicts, and second, it whitewashes the role of capitalism in suppressing democracy.

Revolution and Digital Networks

Revolution and digital networks (excerpts from the original post by Matthew Ingram available here):

Foreign Policy magazine columnist Evgeny Morozov has argued that Twitter and Facebook should not be credited with playing any kind of critical role in Tunisia, and suggested that doing so is a sign of the “cyber-utopianism” that many social-media advocates suffer from: that is, the belief that the Internet is unambiguously good, or that the use of Twitter or Facebook can somehow magically free a repressed society from its shackles. Morozov, who has written an entire book about this idea called Net Delusion, made the point in his blog post after the Tunisian uprising that while social media might have been used in some way during the events, tools like Twitter and Facebook did not play a crucial role — that is, the revolution would have happened with or without them.

Zeynep Tufekci, a professor of sociology who has also looked at this issue, described in a post following the revolution in Tunisia how professional observers distinguish between what she called “material,” “efficient” and “final” causes — in other words, things that are required in order to produce a certain outcome, and things that are nice to have but are not a requirement. Tufekci argues that social media was a crucial factor in Tunisia, while Jillian York of Global Voices Online believes that social media tools are useful, but not necessary. Ethan Zuckerman, one of the founders of Global Voices Online, has also written about how the uprisings in both Tunisia and in Egypt have more to do with decades of poverty and repressive dictatorships than they do with social media.

But is anyone really arguing that Twitter and Facebook caused the revolutions in Tunisia or Egypt, or even the earlier public uprisings in Moldova or Iran for that matter? Maybe cyber-utopians somewhere are doing this, but I haven’t seen or heard of any. The argument I have tried to make is simply that they and other social media tools can be incredibly powerful, both for spreading the word — which can give moral or emotional support to others in a country, as well as generating external support — as well as for organizational purposes, thanks to the power of the network. As Jared Cohen of Google Ideas put it, social media may not be a cause, but it can be a powerful “accelerant.”

Did Twitter or Facebook cause the Tunisian revolt? No. But they did spread the news, and many Tunisian revolutionaries gave them a lot of credit for helping with the process. Did Twitter cause the revolts in Egypt? No. But they did help activists such as WikiLeaks supporter Jacob Appelbaum (known on Twitter as @ioerror) and others as they organized the dialup and satellite phone connections that created an ad-hoc Internet after Egypt turned the real one off — which, of course, it did in large part to try and prevent demonstrators from using Internet-based tools to foment unrest. As Cory Doctorow noted in his review of Evgeny Morozov’s book, even if Twitter and Facebook are just used to replace the process of stapling pieces of paper to telephone poles and sending out hundreds of emails, they are still a huge benefit to social activism of all kinds.

Reminders

Be sure to link all your blogs together. Each student should have a blog roll/blog list that includes every other student blog as well as the class blog.

Be sure to comment on each others' posts. There is already an interesting post up on Tuesday's reading. And there is another interesting post on the grading/assessment discussion. I've decided that we won't spend class time on that debate for a while. I want to see the debate unfold in your blogs. An alternative plan needs to emerge, one that enables fair assessment, inspires people to push themselves and excel, and can garner support from a significant number of students.

Be sure to bring your book to class on Tuesday.