RConversation

links for 2007-02-28

• Global Voices Online » Meet Sami Ben Gharbia, Global Voices’ new Advocacy Director
  "The first priorities are to bring the existing anti-censorship groups and activists together."
  (tags: globalvoices freespeech cyber-activism blogging humanrights)
• Ann Althouse NYT Op-Ed: A license to blog? - International Herald Tribune
  "Let life on the blog unfold like off-blog life... What undermines my trust is [the] impulse to control. Those who want such things worry me as much as a candidate with too little body fat."
  (tags: blogs blogging WEBCRED trust journalism)
• AsiaMedia :: CHINA: Propaganda officials set out banned subjects for the media
  "Mainland media authorities have marked out 20 forbidden areas in an attempt to promote a "harmonious" atmosphere for upcoming national and party conferences."
  (tags: china censorship freespeech media journalism news)
• China Web2.0 Review » » Exclusive Interview with Keso on His New Startup
  "His new startup is an Internet business consulting company called Five Seasons." Congratulations Keso!
  (tags: web2.0 china chineseinternetresearch business)

Preparing to embarrass myself

(Click to enlarge poster).

I somehow agreed to be on a panel tomorrow called News Uncovered, discussing how the Hong Kong media covers (or doesn't cover) international news. All the other panelists will be speaking Cantonese, except yours truly, who will be speaking in Mandarin. If you live in Hong Kong and know one of those languages and feel like coming to make fun of my street Mandarin and rusty vocab, feel free. It would also be great to have some folks asking provocative questions.

You may be wondering: I just showed up in Hong Kong. How am I qualified to speak about the quality of the Hong Kong media's international news coverage? When I asked that very question to the organizers, they replied that they wanted me to be the person who brings a more international perspective to the debate and ties the discussion to the issue of global news coverage in other countries.

The one observation I will make about HK news coverage of international stories is that when I have encountered HK journalists in mainland China or in other countries, 99% of the time they are in a big pack. Outside of Hong Kong it seems very rare to run across a solo HK journalist striking out on his or her own on a story that none of his or her competitors aren't also covering. Talking to Hong Kong journalist friends about the reasons why, people say it has a lot to do with the editorial pressures that news editors put on the journalists not to "miss" anything that the competition may have. Journalists are not rewarded for doing original work, especially if it happens at the expense of not being present at the same press conference that everybody else plus their dog and uncle attended. Go figure. (To be fair, Western news organizations aren't immune to such tendencies either, but with the HK media it seems much more extreme.)

Other than that I'll stick to my usual themes: issues of global news and attention imbalances, the rise of international blogging as an alternative source of international story-telling, and the debate amongst U.S. newsies and media pundits over the future (or end?) of "foreign correspondence. " More of my recent rantings by me here and here, plus a couple new articles on the demise of the "foreign correspondent" - both very worth reading - in the Washington Post and on the website of the Committee of Concerned Journalists.

I expect to learn quite a lot from the other panelists and hopefully from the audience about what journalism schools like the JMSC might be able to do to encourage better international reporting by Hong Kong's media.

links for 2007-02-27

• Learning Cantonese: Faan Laih La! [Musings on India vs China}
  "China will "win". I just wonder what that "winning" is ultimately worth. "
  (tags: china india economy culture development india-china)

Tor responds to safety concerns

tor 淘(上网一套)
Originally uploaded by Isaac Mao.

Isaac Mao posted this great mashup to his Flickr stream last summer, reflecting the enthusiasm of many Chinese Internet users for Tor.

Tor is a toolset developed by a non-profit team that helps you circumvent Internet censorship and increases your privacy and security as you surf the web. (Disclosure: I'm on Tor's Board of Directors)

On Sunday some people began to worry that people may have been putting too much faith in Tor after somebody posted on Slashdot about a technical paper (PDF) that lays out an attack against Tor - in other words exposing one of its vulnerabilities that might enable an attacker to trace a user through the network.

The Tor team has posted a detailed blog post in response. An excerpt:

Using Tor is relatively safe. If there were a published way to attack the network that we thought made it less safe to use Tor, we’d tell you first — since, so far, the authors of every genuinely new vulnerability have told us before their work hit the web. We announce security patches and other issues on [email protected].

The UColorado/Boulder technical paper is an example of the evolving research in anonymity. Refining well-known attacks from several years ago, the researchers better documented what an attack on the network might look and behave like. They combined a bandwidth overstatement attack with a correlation attack.

They consulted with us on the project. We are aware of these kinds of potential attacks — but such a bandwidth overstatement attack, to be successful, would leave fingerprints all over the Tor directories. We have never seen such an attack “in the wild,” and we think it no more likely that this paper would make such an attack easier or more likely than it was a few years ago when another version of it was documented.

They point out that the UColorado Boulder researchers were themselves surprised at the furore their paper has created, and have now posted an FAQ. The first Q&A:

Q0. Most importantly, does this attack mean that we should stop using Tor?

    A0. ABSOLUTELY NOT! Despite our findings, Tor is the most secure and usable privacy enhancing system available. We believe that the system is safe for end-users; however, the system is experimental and the developers make no guarantees about the degree of privacy that it can provide. Let us re-iterate: Concerned users should NOT stop using Tor.

    For the short-term, the maintainers of the Tor directory servers can monitor the router list to ensure that there are no anomalous advertisements, and blacklist any suspicious routers. In our paper, we point out several counter-measures that significantly reduce the attack's effectiveness by increasing the resources required by an attacker to mount the attack.

The Tor team emphasizes that Tor is not 100% secure and nor is any other tool.  They have always been open with the public on their website and in their public information e-mail lists about what their vulnerabilities are and welcome researchers to help them find vulnerabilities so they can be fixed. They're a small team working for a newly-established non-profit organization and are seeking funding so that they can do more to close Tor's vulnerabilities ASAP. In conclusion they point out:

We appreciate that people care about Tor. If in the future you are worried about some issue in Tor, please feel free to contact us directly. If you read speculation about Tor, please encourage the bloggers to check with us — we’re very blogger friendly, and part of our purpose is to protect bloggers where blogging isn’t safe.
Imagine this scenario — a very small risk documented in a technical paper gets sensationalized in the blogosphere. Some number of dissidents and bloggers in places such as China abandon Tor. As a result, they might be arrested, jailed, or disappeared.

Blogstorms can have real world consequences. Please ponder before you write, critically examine what you read, and ask us for updates.

If you're interested in learning more about all this stuff, one of the smartest writers about Internet "hacktivism" is my friend and former colleague Ethan Zuckerman. Check out his guide to anonymous blogging with Wordpress and Tor; thoughts on how cyber-activists should approach privacy and circumvention "threat models", and evaluation of Psiphon, another tool that takes a different approach to circumvention, and comparison with Tor.

Click here for slides of a workshop Ethan did with security expert/ "hactivist" Nart Villeneuve on how to use Tor and other circumvention and privacy tools.

links for 2007-02-26

• Millions of Videos, and Now a Way to Search Inside Them - New York Times
  "at least for now, Blinkx leads video search: it searches more than seven million hours of video and is the largest repository of digital video on the Web."
  (tags: search video)
• Global Voices Online » Iraq - Life, Death, Rape and Execution
  "In this post I hope to give a cross section on how life is for Iraqis in a world of violence and general insecurity."
  (tags: globalvoices iraq blogs blogging)
• 王宁博客2之再延续: 中国blog世界的特色：开了关，关了开
  "说起来这话一点都不新鲜，中国大陆BSP随时随地删帖子，隔三差五封博客..."
  (tags: 言论自由 blogs blogging china internet chineseinternetresearch freespeech censorship)

links for 2007-02-25

• Google Images China Censors - Friend and Foe? | WebProNews
  "Yahoo China also censors all images in a search for Hu Jintao’s Chinese name, but decided to completely delete your query from the search box, omit the censorship disclosure, tell you there’s no occurrence of these words on the web, and show women in
  (tags: google yahoo! censorship freespeech china chineseinternetresearch)

links for 2007-02-24

• Center for Citizen Media: Blog » Rethinking Media Education
  Dan Gillmor calls for "a broad rethinking of journalism education itself."
  (tags: citizenmedia journalism education internet newmedia teaching)
• Global Voices Online » China: Disgraced Party member promoted?
  "One of the most blogged-about political scandals of 2006, it was given fresh momentum with the news last week of Lan Qinghua’s appointment as Deputy Director of the Statistics Bureau for Chongqing Municipality.."
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch internet censorship politics blogs blogging freespeech)
• America tortures (yawn) - Los Angeles Times
  "It should be huge news when two of our European allies demand the arrest of U.S. government agents — but these stories were rapidly superseded on the front pages by news of Anna Nicole Smith..."
  (tags: torture humanrights u.s.policy u.s.a.)
• Europeans' chill deepens on US policy | csmonitor.com
  "European capitals are wavering over how to approach the final two years of a US administration saddled with inconclusive wars."
  (tags: u.s.a. u.s.policy iraq afghanistan europe)
• Gen Kanai weblog: digg on Japanese "racism"
  "Digg may be worse than Slashdot for commentary. It's a trainwreck reading this stuff."
  (tags: Japan racism digg socialnetworking misinformation hype)
• MediaShift . Open Source Reporting::Imagining a Future Tense for Newspapers | PBS
  Mark Glaser ask for your suggestions: "perhaps together we can come up with a list of ways in which newspapers can enter this new age while retaining their goodness"
  (tags: newspapers newmedia internet blogs journalism news)
• BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » New rule: Cover what you do best. Link to the rest
  "Try this on as a new rule for newspapers: Cover what you do best. Link to the rest."
  (tags: newspapers newmedia internet journalism news blogs blogging)
• Sun Bin: HK's cyber dream
  Sun Bin's conclusion upon visiting Hong Kong's cyberport: "So much for HK's cyber dream."
  (tags: hongkong tech)
• Finding the Next Generation of Foreign Correspondents | Committee of Concerned Journalists
  "While the future of foreign reporting may look glum, there may be ways to rethink how news organizations report from overseas." (His ideas include making smart use of good bloggers... hmm... Globalvoicesonlne.org)
  (tags: globalvoices news journalism international blogs blogging)
• Demise of the Foreign Correspondent - washingtonpost.com
  "Today, Americans' need to understand the struggles of distant peoples is greater than ever."
  (tags: journalism news international)
• Cass R. Sunstein - A Brave New Wikiworld - washingtonpost.com
  "If the past is prologue, we're seeing the tip of a very large iceberg."
  (tags: wikipedia wiki information newmedia)

Zoeller's Wikipedia lawsuit

The South China Morning Post has a front page article today - which I can't link to because it's only available to paying subscribers - headlined "Golfer sues over Wikipedia entry."  It is a compilation from several sources including the Associated Press. One version of the AP story is on PGA.com, titled Zoeller sues to identify the author of a disputed entry on Wikipedia.

The basic story: Apparently in December somebody posted untrue information on golfer Fuzzy Zoeller's Wikipedia entry, alleging drug use.  Zoeller is now suing a law firm whose computer appears to have been used by somebody to post that information. Good luck tracking down the physical person who posted the offending information via an IP address belonging to a computer belonging to that firm.... 

None of the reports about this story answer a few questions I have:

1. How long was the libelous information on the front of the Zoeller wikipedia page before it was taken off?
2. When Zoeller or one of his minions discovered what had happened, did they try to correct his page? (After all anybody can edit wikipedia without even creating a username.)
3. Apparently this information was picked up by some other websites but nobody specifies what they were. What kinds of sites were they? Sites belonging to news organizations? Chatrooms? Blogs?

Does anybody out there know the answers? If so please post them in my comments section.

One other interesting thing: the news stories all mention that the offending information was removed from Zoeller's Wikipedia page.  Here some stuff they didn't mention: Normally when something gets removed from Wikipedia it can still be found in the page's history section which documents all changes ever made to it. However according to the discussion page for the Zoeller entry, the offending material has been removed by administrators even from the history page. If you scroll down that discussion page you'll see that one wikipedian has responded to somebody's question about whether it was correct to do so: "It makes no sense to make these revision available. Maintaining them would be asking for Wikipedia to be sued. The libel text can be viewed in the lawsuit."

From that discussion page you can see that Wikipedians continue to watch the page closely. My favorite remark: "Heh someone beat me to removing the pe--s joke in the version you reverted to :-)" [p-word was changed by me so as not to trigger filters on people's work computers and such]

Cass Sunstein, author of the excellent book Infotopia, has an essay titled A Brave New Wikiworld in today's Washington Post. He describes Wikipedia as the small beginning of a new technology-driven reality in which the dispersed masses aggregate and shape human knowledge - not just elite editors and journalists. He argues that this is similar to how markets, comprised of small choices made by many millions of people, dictate prices:

Wikipedia's entries are not exactly prices, but they do aggregate the widely dispersed information of countless volunteer writers and editors. In this respect, Wikipedia is merely one of many experiments in aggregating knowledge and creativity, that have been made possible by new technologies.

The good and bad of Wikipedia is not dissimilar to the good and bad of stock prices: "No less than stock prices, prediction markets may be subject to manipulation." He also believes "we're seeing the tip of a very large iceberg."  Might it be instructive to look at how markets evolved from the early days of capitalism to get a sense of how to prevent abuses in the new and emerging "market of information" that Wikipedia represents? 

As it so happens, my class has just been learning about wikis and Wikipedia. (In addition to the obligatory assignment to edit a Wikipedia entry themselves, and observe the relevant "history" and "talk" pages, readings include the recent New Yorker piece on Wikipedia, a NYT story about how courts use Wikipedia, and Andy Carvin's recent post about Middlebury College's ban on the use of Wikipedia as a source in papers. I also showed them Steve Colbert's recent hilarious comedy routine on "Wikilobbying." ) This ongoing case will be great fodder for student blogs and student-led discussions about their assignment and the readings this coming week.

(Disclosure: I am on the Advisory Board of the Wikimedia Foundation.)

links for 2007-02-23

• Egypt: Blogger’s Imprisonment Sets Chilling Precedent (Human Rights Watch, 22-2-2007)
  "The Egyptian government today for the first time sentenced a blogger to prison for his writings, threatening a window of free speech that has emerged on the Internet, Human Rights Watch said today."
  (tags: egypt blogs blogging freespeech humanrights)
• BBC NEWS | Middle East | Egypt blogger jailed for 'insult'
  "An Egyptian court has sentenced a blogger to four years' prison for insulting Islam and the president."
  (tags: blogging egypt freespeech internet islam)
• Global Voices Online » Arabisc: Bloggers Rally to Kareem’s Support
  "Despite a support site, petitions and demonstrations in Bahrain, London, Stockholm, Paris, Rome, New York (twice) and Washington DC calling for his release, an Alexandria court found him guilty and sentenced him to four years in prison."
  (tags: globalvoices egypt blogging freespeech blogs humanrights)
• Yang Hengjun: My Publisher - The Internet (via ESWN)
  "Will the emergence of the Internet cause the age of free creative writing to come forth earlier? Will it bring out more independent writers? These phenomena already exist. The good works that I have read all came from the Internet..."
  (tags: china internet chineseinternetresearch freespeech literature)
• El Oso, El Moreno, and El Abogado » Blog Archive » Who You Calling Soft?
  "Blogs are there. Podcasts are there. YouTube celebrities are there. Global Voices is there. So what?"
  (tags: blogs blogging citizenmedia journalism wemedia)
• El Oso, El Moreno, and El Abogado »Foreign Correspondents Replaced By Digital DJ’s
  "the supply chain of global reporting has lost one layer and added another. Foreign correspondents ...are a passé and unnecessary obstacle in how we learn about what is happening in the rest of the world. In their place, we find a new position in the new
  (tags: blogs blogging news journalism globalvoices international newmedia wemedia)
• North Korea and the internet | Weird but wired | Economist.com
  "Despite the signs that North Korea's web culture is ready to take off, internet-juche remains a reassuring form of control in the hermit regime."
  (tags: nkorea internet)
• Global Voices Online » Pakistan: Online freedom of speech as collateral damage?
  "What can you do, as a defender of online free speech, when your country, your fellow citizens–and maybe you –are insulted by those exercising freedom of speech?"
  (tags: pakistan freespeech internet censorship humanrights globalvoices)
• …My heart’s in Accra » Free Kareem, and everyone else illegally imprisoned in Egypt
  " the reaction from the blogosphere in Egypt and throughout the Middle East is a bit more complicated. Kareem’s blog posts have upset many Egyptian bloggers, who were upset with his comments criticizing Islam. "
  (tags: blogs bloggers freespeech humanrights islam egypt)

Neha wins Bloggy Valentine contest

I'm so pleased to learn that Caribbean writer and critic Nicholas Laughlin's number one choice in the Global Voices Valentines Day poetry contest was my favorite as well! 

Madam, I am 28, single is by our South Asia editor Neha Viswanathan, a very talented and very original writer.

Here it is:

    Madam, I am 28, single.
    I live alone, and nobody
    has my Orkut password.

    I have never had a girl
    friend. Madam, I think
    I am lonely. Are you?

    Scrap me with your
    ladyfingers. On IM we
    will profess online love.

    Don’t tell me you are
    married. Does not say so
    on your very public profile.

    On Valentine, I hunt for
    empty scrap books. I am
    finding your lovely self Madam.

Congratulations Neha!