Thursday, June 18. 2009The Web vs. the Republic of IranTwitter gives Iranians a voice, but the government still controls the Internet.
By Anne-Marie Corley
Attempts to censor the press have increased significantly since last Friday's disputed election. Yesterday, press credentials for foreign journalists were revoked, and many were told via phone and fax not to report from the streets. Other journalists have been injured, detained, or arrested by the authorities. Yet despite the media crackdown, information continues to leak out of Iran via social networking, microblogging, and photo- and video-hosting websites. These resources have been used before to organize during political crises--in Georgia and Russia, Burma and Kenya--but the sheer scale and scope are striking in Iran's case. Ethan Zuckerman, of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, at Harvard University, and cofounder of the blogger advocacy group Global Voices, says that people inside Iran who are blogging, Tweeting, and sharing photos are "doing an amazing job of making this political movement visible to the world." Photo and video sharing, in particular, have brought the situation home to foreign observers and have made it "much more real, and much more real time," Zuckerman says. Zuckerman attributes the continued information flow in part to "latent capability": savvy Internet users in Iran already know how to circumvent blocking measures, so in a political upheaval they don't have to relearn the process. "The longer a country censors and the more aggressively it censors," says Zuckerman, "the more incentive it gives citizens to learn how to get around that." Because Iran has been filtering since at least 2004, says Zuckerman, a lot of Iranians already know how to use proxies--computers that route traffic around a government-imposed block. So even if you're just using a proxy to surf porn, says Zuckerman, suddenly, a political crisis hits and you already have the means to communicate. Normally, Iran's government maintains a tight grip on Internet use. Because Iran is economically ostracized, the government doesn't have many business relationships that it can leverage to prompt censorship from the outside--unlike China, for example, which runs a censored version of Google (and its ads) through its state-controlled filters. But communications from Iranian ISPs serving the public, rather than academic institutions or private businesses, are all routed through the state-controlled Telecommunication Company of Iran (TCI), allowing for easy filtering. Blogs and websites dedicated to anti-Islamic and anti-government content are routinely blocked. Facebook was blocked sporadically in the months leading up to Friday's election and during the election itself, as were websites for the major opposition candidates and several pro-reform sites. Facebook and YouTube are still blocked in response to the post-election protests. Having reportedly purchased an electronic surveillance system for Internet monitoring in 2008, the Iranian government is well equipped to handle tracking and recording through its centralized system. According to a just-released report from the Open Net Initiative (ONI)--a project involving researchers from Harvard University, the University of Toronto, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Oxford--this has already occurred with women's-rights activists who were arrested and reportedly shown transcripts of their IM sessions. In the past, the Iranian government has used the U.S. product SmartFilter to block offensive websites, but the ONI reports that it now has a homegrown system for searching the Internet for objectionable content and keywords. This makes Iran and China the only two countries that "aggressively filter" Internet content using their own technology. Faced with similar unrest, other governments have pulled the plug on Internet communications entirely. Iran's authorities appear to have chosen to begin "bandwidth throttling" instead. By limiting the amount of information that gets through every second, the government can effectively slow down the Internet so that the average Internet user has to wait several minutes to add a post to Twitter or upload an image to Flickr. With reduced bandwidth, Zuckerman says, "it's harder to access Internet content from the outside, and it's really hard to upload content." Some analysts suggest it is unlikely that Iran's Internet connectivity would ever be turned off completely. "It's one thing to anger a group of protesting rioters," says Hal Roberts, also of Harvard's Berkman Center. "It's another to hurt the whole population" by shutting off Internet connection. With around 23 million Internet users in Iran, or about 35 percent of the population, Iran has far more Internet users than its Middle Eastern neighbors. Andrew Lewman, a member of the team behind Tor--software that routes Internet traffic around government filters anonymously--says that he's surprised by how little the Iranian government has blocked the Internet in recent days, given the attention that the current political unrest has received. He attributes the continuing flow of information out of Iran to two possibilities: either there are people in the government who want to see it disseminated, or the government is tracking and recording everything that's happened in order to round up the perpetrators later. The government's main focus right now, Lewman says, is most likely dealing with the actual protestors on the streets. Rob Faris, who contributed to the ONI report, is less optimistic about communication flow in Iran. The government has "ramped up filtering in a big way," he says. Even though Twitter remains accessible--through third party apps that don't access Twitter.com for example--"let's not kid ourselves," Faris says. "Access to Twitter, without all the other things you can do with the web, isn't a good deal." Meanwhile, the other measures Iran has taken have "significantly impacted" the communications infrastructure. "They've gone from a repressive regime to a more repressive regime," Faris says. Still Roberts believes that the Iranian government will likely crack down on the rioters first, and deal with the bloggers later. He suggests that government agencies may be tracking users via their Internet protocol addresses and planning to follow up with arrests. The most difficult question regarding the Web's involvement in the current situation, Zuckerman says, is to what extent these tools are helping to organize actual protests. "This is a legitimate street protest; people are extremely upset about their voting rights," he says. Zuckerman senses that the technology isn't helping opposition supporters as much as are traditional organizing methods like phone calls and word of mouth. According to Stephen Murdoch, a computer security researcher at the University of Cambridge, it's hard to tell how many people are actually involved with Web-based protests inside Iran because what we see outside the country is a "biased" sample. Twitter and Facebook are popular in the United States, but there are likely other social-networking sites geared toward Iranians that we can't monitor as closely. So the extent--and reach--of Web activity in Iran is hard to judge. But the effect on the global community is clear, Roberts says: "The press is driven by [Iran's] Twitter stream." Copyright Technology Review 2009. -----
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Science & technology
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Defined tags for this entry: communication, culture & society, monitoring, science & technology, surveillance
Wednesday, June 17. 2009How Cellphones, Twitter, Facebook Can Make History [VIDEO]TED, host to some of the most informative talks in technology, released a particularly timely talk today from new media expert and NYU professor Clay Shirky on “How Cellphones, Twitter, Facebook Can Make History”. While filmed in May, his points are brought into sharp focus by recent developments in Iran (see #iranelection), as social media tools prove their power to change the world. Shirky explains: “Media is increasingly less just a source of information; it’s increasingly more a site of co-ordination, because groups that see or hear or watch or listen to something can now gather around and talk to each other as well…members of the former audience can now also be producers and not consumers.” ----- Via Mashable Personal comment:
Feront-ils la révolution? Sont-ils en train de la faire? A Camera from a Sheet of FiberBy integrating sensors into a plastic fiber, researchers make a large, flexible camera.
By Kate Greene
Now researchers at MIT have integrated a collection of light sensors into polymer fibers, creating a new type of camera. Yoel Fink, a professor of materials sciences and engineering and the lead researcher on the project, notes that a standard camera requires lenses that are usually rigid and heavy. A camera made from fibers, however, could be lightweight, robust, and even foldable. Although Fink admits that the applications aren't yet well defined, he suggests that such a fiber-based camera could be used in a large foldable telescope or integrated into soldiers' uniforms. Previously, Fink's team has shown that it's possible to integrate semiconducting materials into fibers and create long and flexible sensors for temperature or light that can be woven into varying shapes and sizes. In the researchers' most recent work, they integrate eight sensors into a polymer fiber--more than ever before. In order to make the camera, the researchers integrated the eight semiconducting light sensors into a polymer cylinder with a diameter of 25 millimeters, controlling the sensor's spacing and angle within the fiber. Once the sensors, made of a type of semiconducting glass, were in position, the polymer cylinder was heated and then stretched so that the diameter shrank the diameter of hundreds of micrometers--a process that is identical to the way in which commercial fiber is made for telecommunication applications--retaining the orientation of the sensors. Fabien Sorin, the postdoctoral researcher who developed the fiber camera, says that he made a 36-by-36 grid of fibers and connected the fiber's semiconducting sensors to electrodes. When light hits the semiconductors, it displaces electrons within the material, creating an electrical current. The intensity of this current from the fibers is input into algorithms, running on an attached computer, that create the image of an object placed near the sheet of fiber. The eight sensors are grouped in pairs consisting of an inner and outer sensor, Sorin says. "If you know the thickness of the first layer, and you know the type of material, then you can reconstruct the energy of the photon because this energy is directly related to how deep a photon can penetrate into a material." In other words, the inner sensor provides information that lets the researchers find the energy, which corresponds to the wavelength, or color, of light. The outer layer of sensors is used to determine the angle at which the light is entering the fiber, which could be used to create 3-D images, says Sorin. The sensors are distributed evenly around the center of the fiber. If some sensors are collecting a large amount of photons, but adjacent ones are not, the researchers can determine at what angle the photons originate. The work is a very clever demonstration of how fibers with multiple materials can be used for various applications, says Juan Hinestroza, a professor of fiber science and apparel design at Cornell University. "I believe it is just the first of many possible applications to come for this technology," he says. Hinestroza suspects that these sorts of fibers could be weaved or knitted into fabrics to sense temperature, occupancy, and traffic in a room or terminal, or to detect the presence of traces of certain hazardous gases. John Rogers, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, says that the work falls into a "growing collection of reports that explore new and unusual, sometimes bio-inspired approaches to imaging," which includes a spherical, eye-shaped camera previously developed by his group. "The ability of the fibers to be spread over large areas, in a flexible format, could create an important niche for this new imaging technology," he says. However, Rogers adds, the fiber camera seems to be "a technology in search of a problem to solve." Sorin says that the next step for the MIT team is to build more layers of sensors inside the fiber, which can be used to re-create images with multiple colors. Adding more layers is doable but could be challenging. "As you put more layers inside the fiber, it becomes harder to keep the cross section uniform," Sorin says. It will take some testing to determine the best parameters, such as the speed in which the fibers can be drawn, as well as the maximum length that can sustain the original orientation of the sensors. Copyright Technology Review 2009. ----- Tuesday, June 16. 2009Par-veillance
----- Via Pruned Friday, June 12. 2009Social Networks Keep Privacy in the ClosetEconomics may explain why it's so hard to find and configure privacy settings on many social networks.
By Erica Naone
This situation encourages social networks to bury the privacy settings that they build, according to research that will be presented later this month at the Eighth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, in London, U.K. Social networks are under pressure from privacy-rights groups and activists to build in ways for users to control their information, the researchers say, but it's also in their interest to keep those settings off users' minds. "To the social network, your value increases the more data you share on the site," says Joseph Bonneau, one of two University of Cambridge researchers who worked on the project. More user data means better targeted advertising, and more of a feeling of community, he says. "Their goal is to create a very free-flowing environment where everybody is constantly sharing everything and seeing all this data on other people," he says. "The best way to achieve that is to not bring up the concept of privacy." To arrive at their conclusions, the researchers evaluated 45 social-networking sites from all over the world, looking at more than 200 criteria related to privacy policies and privacy controls. Although social-networking sites have often been criticized as a group for their privacy practices, the researchers say that they found a lot of variation in quality. Using criteria such as the amount of data collected during sign up, the default privacy settings, and whether information is routinely shared with third parties, the researchers judged Bebo, LinkedIn, and GaiaOnline to have the best privacy practices of all, and Badoo, CouchSurfing, and MyLife to have the weakest. Ironically, sites that made privacy a selling point tended to have lower-quality privacy controls. Facebook and MySpace ranked toward the middle, but the researchers note that these sites also offer users more features, making privacy harder to maintain. In general, more popular social-networking sites did better with privacy, which the researchers put down to these sites having more resources to devote to the problem, as well as to being under more pressure to protect user data. Bonneau believes that revealing the privacy practices of all sites could help put pressure on major sites to add further protections for users. For example, the researchers found one site, the business network Xing, that encrypts all interactions to protect personal information against eavesdroppers. This shows what kinds of features are possible, Bonneau says. Sören Preibusch, another researcher who worked on the project, says that establishing industry standards for privacy settings might help users understand and control what's happening to their information. Murky policies, confusing settings, and incentives to share all their information tend to distract users from the realities of what will happen to their data, he says. "Even though consumers report they are concerned about privacy, they forget their concerns when offered some rewards," Preibusch says. "Even small rewards such as chocolate bars or pennies will convince users to reveal personal information." Vitaly Shmatikov, a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, who studies privacy in social networks, says that the implications of the new study will become increasingly important as sites develop better ways to make money from users' data. "I expect that there will be a significant tension between monetization and privacy," he says. Incidents such as Facebook's Beacon fiasco--the site's controversial attempt to broadcast a user's offline shopping activities through Facebook--highlight the potential for conflict, Shmatikov says. However, he thinks that worse will come when social networks begin focusing less on attracting new users and more on making money from the ones they have. By their very nature, social-networking sites are designed to "promote the open flow of personal information," says Michael Zimmer, an assistant professor at the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. As a result, he says, they're "reluctant to heavily promote their privacy settings," adding, "Facebook has some of the most robust privacy settings out there but offers little to no help on how to use them." One way to remedy this situation is by finding ways to assist users in navigating privacy settings, Zimmer says. He has, for example, posted a cheat sheet on his site that walks users through the process of configuring the privacy settings on Facebook. Preibusch says that social-networking sites often leave user profiles almost 100 percent public by default. "Users should be aware that they still have the possibility of taking action by setting their privacy settings inside the network, and not sticking with the permissive defaults," he says. "The safe way to use the network is to assume that everything you post will eventually be public," adds Bonneau. Copyright Technology Review 2009. ----- Related Links:Personal comment:
La dernière phrase est intéressante: "The safe way to use the network is to assume that everything you post will eventually be public". Considérer les réseaux sociaux comme une place publique! Oui, mais il faut alors d'un autre côté que le design et les fonctions proposées laisse entendre que la place est publique... (alors que la tendance serait plutôt à laisser croire à une semi privacité) et que les données collectées sont elles-mêmes publique (alors qu'elles appartiennent à une société privée)! Ouvertes et exploitables par tous... Grosso modo, le deal actuel non formulé est: vos données contre notre service, dès lors gratuit.
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