Cliff Stoll (who helped catch a ring of computer hackers/Soviet spies in the 1980s) and Jonathan Zittrain (principle investigator at the OpenNet Initiative) are speaking at Harvard’s Berkman Center tonight. Subject: When Countries Collide Online: Internet Spies, Cyberwar, and Government-sponsored Skullduggery.

I’ll be sequestered in the industrial-sized kitchen of my co-op, chopping vegetables to make stir fry for my 27 roommates, but if you’re free, check out the live webcast at 6pm EST to find out how governments are using the Internet, how far their online spying has gone, and what the legal implications of state sponsored network espionage might be.

Posted in ICT, berkman, international politics, technology | Leave a comment

It would be hilariously ironic if it weren’t so terrifying: United Nations security forces confiscated a poster mentioning Chinese Internet censorship at this weekend’s meeting of the Internet Governance Forum, a UN body that promotes open discussion on public policy related to Internet governance.

The OpenNet Initiative, a research group headquartered at Harvard that studies Internet censorship worldwide (full disclosure: I’ve worked for them on and off since the fall of 2007, including full time last summer), held a reception during the forum to announce their new book. On the wall was a poster mentioning China’s Great Firewall censorship and surveillance project.

UN officials asked ONI to take down the poster to avoid “creat[ing] a political crisis with a UN member state.” When ONI said no, UN security took the poster away.

According to Ron Diebert, an ONI principle investigator who was at the forum, “We were told that the banner had to be removed because of the reference to China. This was repeated on several occasions, in front of about two dozen witnesses and officials, including the UN Special Rapporteur For Human Rights, who asked that I send in a formal letter of complaint.” Deibert has since filed a complaint with the UN Human Rights Commission.

A video taken at the forum shows the discussion between UN security and ONI representatives:

More info, including links to media coverage of the incident, is at the ONI blog.

Crossposted on The Morningside Post.

Posted in berkman, international politics, internet censorship, the morningside post, united nations | Leave a comment

In addition to censorship in China and Twitter in Tehran, I spent a decent part of this summer writing about Internet infrastructure in Africa. The summer had plenty of stories: damage to the SAT-3 cable in western Africa caused major Internet blackouts in Nigeria, Niger, Togo and Benin, a situation that hopefully won’t happen again now that Nigeria’s new GLO-1 cable has arrived.

But the biggest story of all was Seacom: a new cable connecting eastern Africa to the global undersea cable system. For years eastern Africa has been the only part of the continent without access to this system. Seacom’s arrival will bring faster, cheaper broadband Internet to a number of countries that have long relied on expensive satellite connections.

While I haven’t personally experienced the joys of Seacom yet (though here’s hoping I’ll be back in Uganda at some point before the end of the year), friends tell me it’s mindblowing. The 27th Comrade writes:

Something big—quite big—and fast—very, very fast—is happening here.

As excited as the blogren and I are about Seacom, Harvard professor Calestous Juma is even more thrilled. Professor Juma is one of the world’s leading experts on how science and technology can contribute to sustainable development, and here’s what he has to say about Seacom:

The launching of Seacom’s fiber optic cable in July was the single most important infrastructure investment in eastern Africa since the construction of the Uganda Railway, then dubbed “The Lunatic Express.”

The single most important infrastructure investment since the construction of the Uganda Railway. For those of you who aren’t familiar with The Lunatic Express, its construction began in the 19th century.

Professor Juma will be at Harvard’s Berkman Center on Tuesday afternoon to discuss broadband and Internet policy in East Africa. I’ve been debating how many of my limbs I would be willing to give to be able to see his talk in person, but unfortunately you can’t buy time or a train ticket with bodily extremities these days. I’ll settle for watching the webcast.

Posted in ICT, ICT for development, africa, berkman, technology | Leave a comment

The summer of 2009 was a hectic one for online social media: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and a bevy of other sites fell under the censors’ axe in China and Iran as political events — namely the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre and the Iranian presidential election — shook both countries.

If you’ve been having a hard time keeping track of whether Twitter is accessible in Tehran or if Fallujah is blocked Facebook, you’re not alone. Luckily, I just completed a project for the OpenNet Initiative to help you out.

Based on testing conducted in 2008-2009, ONI has compiled data on the most frequently blocked social media sites around the world. We are proud to present five new social media filtering maps that serve as easy visual guides to the countries where Facebook, Flickr, Orkut, Twitter and YouTube are blocked.

Visit them now, and lay your social media filtering questions to rest.

Posted in berkman, internet censorship | 2 Comments

Liveblogging Giorgos Cheliotis’s presentation on Mapping the Global Commons: A Quantitative Perspective on Free Cultural Practice at the Berkman Center. Please excuse misrepresentation, misinterpretation, typos and general stupidity.
Cheliotis is interested in measuring the use of the Creative Commons content pool. How much content exists? How free/open is it? How fast is it changing? How much of it is being remixed and fed back into the pool?

You can try to count everything individually, or you can use estimates, community-specific data, external reports and local knowledge. There’s an inverse relationship between the scale and the accuracy/richness of your data.

The CC Monitor project tracks the global development of Creative Commons (CC) licensing. It is still being developed, but the project has been tracking the use of CC licenses for over three years. It does not include unported licenses, often used by those in countries that do not have country-specific licenses.

According to the project’s World section, North America and Europe use CC licenses more than most regions in the world, with a few notable exceptions: Brazil, which has a sizable CC movement, and some parts of Asia.

Cheliotis is interested in the spread of CC licensing — who is using it and why, and how is it moving from person to person or organization to organization?

The CC Monitor project assigns a “freedom score” to each country based on the most frequently used type of CC license. CC licenses give users of licensed content different permissions. Some works can be used with no restrictions, while the use of others is constrained to non-commercial purposes or in cases where the resulting work is also CC-licensed.

CC Monitor assigns points to each license on a scale of 1 to 6, 6 being the most free (most permissive), then assigns an overall score based on these points. The global freedom score is 3.2. Some other scores:

• South Africa: 3.67
• South Korea: 1.76
• Thailand: 2.58

One way that Cheliotis tracks content reuse is through CCMixter, which allows people to create remixes, samples and mashups of CC-licensed content. Cheliotis’ analysis of this content has shown that with a few small exceptions, all of the content on CCMixter is interconnected. The maximum number of remixes he’s found so far is 6, but the number of works per generation of reuse drops quickly — most remixes draw on original content, rather than a pre-existing remix. He also found a significant number of peer-to-peer relationships: “I remix content from you, you remix from me.”

It’s not yet possible to break down content by type (music, video, text, photography), nor is Cheliotis’ project currently tracking content that’s in the public domain (as opposed to strictly CC-licensed). These are both areas into which he would like to expand in the future.

Posted in berkman, technology | Leave a comment