RConversation

links for 2006-10-24

• Innovate - October/November 2006 Volume 3, Issue 1
  "In this special issue of Innovate, our contributors explore, assess, and illustrate the potential of open source software and related trends to transform educational practice. "
  (tags: education innovation internet opensource software)
• China Media Project: Chinese media criticize proposed "identification system" for Weblogs in China
  Excerpt from the Yangcheng Evening News: "Only when freedoms are guaranteed does the question of "abusing freedom" arise. Only when there is freedom of expression can we talk about self-restraint . . ."
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch media journalism blogs blogging freespeech realname anonymity)
• Blog Real Name System Undecided - Nan Chang :: China Digital Times (CDT) 中国数字时代
  quote from Fang Xingdong: "Unless China would completely close the Internet, there will be a trend for Chinese netizens to choose overseas blog service. "
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch blogs blogging realname anonymity freespeech)
• Xinhua News Agency: Blog real name system undecided
  "With widespread online rumor saying China will implement a blog real name system, the Internet Society of China (ISC) has clarified that so far the Ministry of Information Industry has not officially made any related policies."
  (tags: blog blogging china media freespeech chineseinternetresearch internet xinhua)

links for 2006-10-23

• EdCone.com: The way we leak now
  "The Internet takes things that used to be hidden and puts them a mouse-click away from ubiquity, and not just government reports."
  (tags: news journalism media blogs blogging internet)
• North Korea ranked 'worst Internet black hole' - Technology - International Herald Tribune
  "while other restrictive regimes have sought ways to limit the Internet - through filters and blocks and threats - North Korea has chosen to stay wholly off the grid."
  (tags: nkorea internet)

links for 2006-10-22

• Global Voices Online »China: Botched jobs
  John Kennedy translates a blog post by "Siyi" who writes that while some Chinese journalist suffer for their principles, most have sold out completely: "For media workers like these, China is definitely not a prison, but a sauna center." More good stuff
  (tags: china blogs blogging chineseinternetresearch humor journalism media)
• CBS News and the blogosphere | Gristmill: The environmental news blog | Grist
  "Whoever's producing CBS News doesn't seem to grasp that "the blogs" are not some undifferentiated goo to spread on stories for spice."
  (tags: blogs news journalism media)
• China gears up for mobile TV bonanza - IT Week
  "More than 22 million people in China will be watching TV broadcasts on mobile devices within four years, according to a new forecast published this week."
  (tags: china mobile wireless tv video chineseinternetresearch)
• Epic 2014 & Epic 2015 - Museum of Media History
  I hadn't noticed till now that there's now an update to the original Epic 2014 flash movie on the future of news.
  (tags: news media future blog blogs)
• Newsweek poll puts Democrats far ahead in Congress | Top News | Reuters.com
  "More than half of Americans, 55 percent, would like to see Democrats take control of Congress, according to a poll by Newsweek magazine released on Saturday."
  (tags: u.s.a. politics elections)
• MercuryNews.com | 10/21/2006 | Google flexing political muscle
  "Google, a global economic force but a latecomer to Washington politics, is trying to boost its influence in Congress with the first campaign contributions from its new political action committee."
  (tags: google search politics)

Has LiveJournal let in the KGB? Some Russian users fear so.

These badges were created by Russian LiveJournal users who are very suspicious (to put it mildly) of a new partnership between SixApart's LiveJournal and the Russian Internet company SUP.  I learned about this controversy by reading Veronica Khokholva's latest post over at Global Voices Online. She writes:

The Russian-language blogosphere (commonly known as ZheZhe) is on fire: some users are shutting down their blogs, others are emigrating to the virtual Trinidad & Tobago - all because LiveJournal.com's owner Six Apart has decided to team up with the Russian internet company Sup, founded this year by Aleksandr Mamut, a Russian "oligarch," and Andrew Paulson, an American entrepreneur.
...
Assurances from managers of Six Apart and Sup have left many unconvinced and still concerned over whether the Russian security services would gain access to their personal information and whether the new Abuse Team would carry out ruthless purges.

[read the whole thing here]

Apparently there is a certain element of anti-Semitisim coming from some of the ethnic Russian LJ users which is of course very bad.   But there is another issue at play here which I think really needs to be taken seriously: local users don't trust local internet companies not to sell them out to Russian security forces. One Six Apart employee tried to assuage Russian LJ users' fears in this post. She answers a  number of questions, including this one:

* Will information from these journals be given to the Russian government? Personal information?
No. Not in any way that would not happen today, such as a court-ordered subpoena. SUP is acting as our agent and will be bound by our Privacy Policy

* Will they have access to Russian users' private account information?
Again, only under our privacy policy, and bound by the same terms.

* Is SUP under any legal obligation to keep users' information confidential?
Yes, they are. They don't own any information, and they can't reuse it in any way not covered by our policies.

One thing isn't clear: will Russian LJ user data now be housed in Russia? If so then it is definitely subject to Russian legal jurisdiction. I am no expert in Russian law, but the question is, does the Russian legal system define "crime" in a way that is consistent with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Or not? Does the Russian legal system guarantee the right to free speech (article 19)? In practice as well as on paper? Or not? Seems like LJ's Russian users don't think so. If they are right, then compliance with a court-ordered subpoena could result in the suppression of peaceful political speech and in the violation of human rights.

One needs only to look at Yahoo's experience in China to see how the path to evil is paved, if not with good intentions, then at least with failures to think things through. Yahoo also promises not to share Chinese user info to except in cases where it is obligated to do so by local law. The problem is that the Chinese legal system defines "crime" in such a way that criticism of the government is also included. As a result, Chinese political dissidents have gone to jail because Yahoo was required to hand over user information in compliance with Chinese law.

Could the same thing happen in Russia under LiveJournal auspices?  I don't know enough about where and how LJ is storing user data, or about Russian law, to know the answer. But it seems like many Russian LJ users think the answer is "yes."

It will be interesting to see how seriously this user trust problem is taken by SixApart, LJ, and their Russian partner Sup.

links for 2006-10-21

• RED HERRING | Anonymity Ending in China Blogs?
  "an insider at China’s Ministry of Information Industries (MII) now says that upcoming regulations will require bloggers to register with real names and identification numbers."
  (tags: anonymity china censorship freespeech internet chineseinternetresearch blogs blogging)
• Is Google Evil?
  "Google already knows more about you than the National Security Agency ever will. And don’t assume for a minute it can keep a secret."
  (tags: google search privacy surveillance)
• Neeka's Backlog - looking for stuff to translate...
  "I'm so tired of reading through other people's hatred."
  (tags: russia globalvoices)
• Good Girls Go Bad, for a Day - New York Times
  "the abundance of risqué costumes that will be shrink-wrapped around legions of women come Oct. 31 prompts a larger question: Why have so many girls grown up to trade in Wonder Woman costumes for little more than Wonderbras?"
  (tags: women sex gender self-image internalized-sexism lack-of-decent-female-role-models)
• 社会企业家(by 方军) - 思维的乐趣BLOG
  "一个热点，一个趋势。在企业的经济性之外，开始重视社会性。"
  (tags: trust business ethics CSR)
• MediaShift . Media Usage::Finding Balance in Teen Use of Social Media | PBS
  "The subject of the talk was teen use of social media such as online social networks, blogs, instant messaging, text messaging. The questions put to me were: How prevalent is the usage? Is this dangerous and isolating? How should we guide kids in this tec
  (tags: socialnetworking media teens instantmessaging blogs)

See my cousin Melinda perform in Taiwan!

Continuing the theme of shameless plugs for my relatives...

If you happen to be reading this from Taiwan (and I know some people do), go see my cousin Melinda Heywood Pavlata and her partner Sacha Pavlata perform their Cirque Passion trapeze act this weekend.  They are on tour with the world famous Flying Wallendas who perform death-defying high-wire stunts without any safety net.

Click here for an article in Chinese about the performance, and here for info in English (scroll down towards the bottom of the page). Essential info: 空中飛人大馬戲團 on October 21 and 22 at the Taipei Arena台北小巨蛋 ( Nanjing East Rd. Sec.4, Taipei 台北市南京東路四段2號; Tel: (02) 2577-3500 ) Click here to book tickets.

Here's a (not very good) video of the Wallendas in action, taken last year on my digital camera at a Circus Flora performance in Nantucket:

Zephyr's Hungarian adventure...

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We definitely need to send Rachel Rawlins to as many conferences as possible. She goes to this Hungarian Internet conference with Zephyr Teachout and a bunch of other web-heads of various stripes and look what happens!! Can't wait to see what she'll do at the Global Voices Delhi Summit!

links for 2006-10-19

• Open Systems and Opening Societies: Guo Liang on China's Internet | M/C Dialogue
  "Professor Guo argues that the open system at the heart of the Internet will actually deeply impact Chinese society, but at the same time, that we must understand it within a Chinese context."
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch internet)
• Idlewords: Hong Kong
  Maciej Ceglowski writes on his first visit to Hong Kong: "A century of proximity has taught Hong Kongers one of the West's best-kept secrets, which is that Westerners are not that interesting."
  (tags: hongkong travel culture china)
• spiked | 'Free speech' is more than a slogan
  "Rather than seeing change as a threat and seeking to contain discord, we can talk openly about the future, exchange ideas and argue over them rather than trying to suppress those that make us uncomfortable."
  (tags: freespeech censorship)

Global Voices Reader Survey: Please help us out!

Last week Georgia Popplewell, Global Voices' Caribbean Editor, Co-Managing Editor, Podcast editor, and all-round blogger extraordinaire, wrote a beautiful and hilarious post on the occasion of her one-year anniversary working with Global Voices Online. It begins like this:

My dear GV friends:

This coming Friday will mark a year since I wrote my first piece for Global Voices. Some days prior to that date, I’d received an e-mail from a mysterious individual with a Japanese surname and a Spanish nickname. Would I care to cover the Caribbean for a web site called Global Voices as a volunteer author? he asked. The whole thing sounded time-consuming and rather byzantine, if you asked me, and what if this individual, with his unlikely combination of physical (a little Googling had revealed him to be sandy-haired and freckled) and transnational attributes, turned out to be a Keyser Söze

Yet, against what seemed, at the time, to be my better judgement, I agreed to add this to the already complex mix of potentially missable deadlines and things that I do. I wrote the first article. Then I wrote another. And another. Within weeks, my dreams had become populated with green adinkra symbols; I was mumbling the GV tag line in my sleep, spouting the GV Manifesto at cocktail parties. . . .

Read the rest, it gets even funnier. If anything, the people who contribute to Global Voices are an amazing collection of characters.

...and when you're done chuckling, if you are a reader of Global Voices Online, please do help us make it even better by clicking on the logo at  right and taking our reader survey. GVO is definitely a work-in-progress. The more feedback, the better it will get. Thanks!!

links for 2006-10-18

• Ethics: Trust and reputation on the web
  "Trust and reputation are fundamental to scholarly publishing. The web provides tantalizing new ways to publish, but can these win the trust that is crucial to scientific acceptance?"
  (tags: trust publishing science knowledge academia scholarship)
• Technical solutions: Evolving peer review for the internet
  "Peer review needs to adapt to the pace and volume of information published online"
  (tags: academia publishing trust scholarship)
• The Skinny On Web 2.0 - News by InformationWeek
  "Web 2.0 is all the Web sites out there that get their value from the actions of users."
  (tags: internet web2.0)
• Business Communicators of Second Life®: Reuters Opening Second Life Bureau
  "Reuters Second Life News Center signals that Reuters believes Second Life is a viable and "real" business sector – an environment that real business should be monitoring."
  (tags: secondlife business newmedia virtualworlds reuters news media)
• RFA: Users Take Aim at China Telecom Software
  "Broadband customers across China have hit out at software provided by the country’s biggest Internet Service Provider (ISP), saying it limits their autonomy online."
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch internet censorship freespeech)
• Andrew Lih » Blog Archive » Chart: Wikipedia access in China
  "Here’s an update - bloggers and Wikipedians across the PRC have helped me assemble this chart of Wikipedia reachability."
  (tags: wikipedia china internet censorship freespeech)
• Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | Iran bans fast internet to cut west's influence
  "Service providers told to restrict online speeds Opponents say move will hamper country's progress"
  (tags: iran internet freespeech broadband)
• Defecting From Despair - Los Angeles Times
  "A perilous odyssey aided by the Internet gives N. Korean refugees a chance to settle in the U.S."
  (tags: NKorea internet humanrights)