JonCamfieldBlog

With all this ire suddenly released against Google (have we been waiting for them to prove that they weren't perfect?) Yahoo (it's been a while since we got to tear into them), Microsoft (best punching bag evar, OMGLOL) and Cisco (a not-just-software company, for variety), why is everyone walking gingerly around the elephant in the room?

Filtering software providers. They're (drumroll) overwhelmingly American. To quote Boas:

Market conditions have facilitated the imposition of censorship: since 1999, Saudi Arabia has outsourced the provision of censorship software to U.S.-based Secure Computing. Saudi authorities currently rely on the pre-set list of sexually-explicit sites contained in Secure Computing’s SmartFilter software, which is customized with the addition of political and religious sites (Zittrain and Edelman 2002a).

BoingBoing.net got blocked from UAE this past week, which has revealed more countries using SmartFilter, (including most branches of the US Military). Interestingly, while the US Military is proudly listed on their customers page (http://www.securecomputing.com/our_customers.cfm), Saudi Arabia, Iran, and UAE are absent.

Further, the US Gov's getting all paranoid about Israel's CheckPoint Security acquiring Snort (an open-source Intrusion Detection System, it's like anti-virus against hackers).

It's beyond hypocrasy, it's fragmentation, and it's not even (at least at first blush) aligned with foreign policy objectives -- shouldn't we be trying to increase media liberalization and "democractization" in the Middle East? Isn't that the whole idea behind the national security strategy? (Conspiracy Theory: Or maybe some of these filtering systems are crippleware?)

Posted by Jon at 02:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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Der Spiegel, as picked up in YaleGlobal and Eldis's ICT-for-Dev RSS feed reports a (French) worry about "the homogenization and commercialization of culture that could result from the concentration of control in the hands of just a few [US --ed] companies," based on the idea, as said by Chirac, that "There is the threat that tomorrow, what is not available online will be invisible to the world." Chirac's response is a state-sponsored Euro-centric anti-google, called Quaero.

OK. First: Sorry Chicken Little, the sky already fell, this is just the last few pieces -- the near-monopoly of Hollywood and American-centric media companies in TV/film has already won the day. Thankfully, though, there's been pushback from this, and non-Hollywood TV and film still exists, and even thrives, despite the immense power and money of Hollywood. EuroDisney was a spectacular failure, and McD's and KFCs are the first against the wall in almost every anti-globalization protest.

Second, There's a problem with Google. Ideally, technology and culture are not connected too tightly, but in reality there probably is a better indexing, globally, of English-language sites than there are of non-English sites. At the same time, trying to compete with Google means competing with their technology first and foremost.

Third, trying to compete with Google using a state-sponsored company seems, other than classically *cough*Airbus*cough* rather continental, but also probably doomed to failure. Google relies upon a much larger high-tech community to cherry-pick its developers from, and creating a Google in isolation wouldn't be the same. A more optimal solution is to work with Google and create a toolkit site that improves the presence of non-English media on Google's (and the Internet at large's) radar. This might mean sponsoring bundling translation software into desktops, finding an optimal way to enable sites to offer multi-language support without recreating content. You'll win (or hold your own) in a culture war by providing a valid, freely available, and interesting alternative.

To some extent, this is just competitive advantage; the US currently has a good supply of software innovators, and to counterbalance that, you'll have to put some long-term effort into it, but culture, OTOH, is a good unique to each region/locality, which can be capitalized on, and connected to the Internet without having to compete against Google.

There's another point which feels like it's in the subtext of Chirac's statements, not to mention the curious timing of this, which is a vote of no-confidence in US companies being independent and (reasonably, accepting inherent cultural blind spots that come with being American) neutral in the wake of the China dealings. This is also silly; Google/Yahoo/MSN are playing ball with the foreign, sovereign governments to cater to their specific needs. France (and Germany, who is also considering supporting Quaero) of all countries, should be ecstatic that these big names are willing to help them with their culturally-specific filtering (say, of nazi paraphrenalia, for instance). If they moved on it, they could maybe use the China-filtering as precedence for different treatment in the search engine. How about auto-translation of search terms to return relevant results regardless of language? Heck, that kinda sounds like a fun Firefox plugin...

Posted by Jon at 02:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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I think it's abhorrent that China is even sending uniformed patrols to local libraries to enforce what citizens can and cannot read on the often-already-filtered government-supported public terminals.

Wait. Did I say China? I meant the US.

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In "Weaving the Authoritarian Web: Liberalization, Bureaucratization, and the Internet in Non-Democratic Regimes," Boas, details primarily Saudi and Chinese control on the Internet. This really made me want to buy some land on the Bahrain/Saudi border and install a little headless Linux box connected to a high speed or multi-modem dialup unfiltered connection in Bahrain on one end, and a wifi cantenna rig (O'Reilly recommends Pringle's) on the other.

Actually, in for a dime, in for a dollar, might as well use the winning methodology of the most recent DefCon "security" conference's wifi shootout (the 2005 winner achieved 125 miles), or the 2003 winner, which managed over 30 miles with equipment (beyond the wifi card and laptop) under $100.

The underlying point to the Boas paper of course is that they don't have to be perfect, just good enough to make the few who can evade the restrictions politically insignificant. This will continue to be somewhat of a cat-and-mouse game, as costs for access to alternate technologies/networks will likely fall over time (e.g. satellite, cell networks from neighboring countries, mesh wifi networks that route out through foreign connections, etc.), not to mention brave souls willing to take risks, as Jake mentioned talking about the Chinese reporter who posted a "blistering letter on the newspaper's computer system attacking the Communist Party's propaganda czars and a plan by the editor in chief to dock reporters' pay if their stories upset party officials." (The plan got dropped, but the hero of the story eventually got fired and the entire section of the newspaper has since been shut down).

Regardless, these ingenious little (architectual) tools and original-sense hackers provide an invaluable resource to ICT development; the Pringle's Cantenna has already found a use for an Egyptian entrepreneur to connect his home to his Internet cafe, and I can only imagine there are other similar projects.

Creativity becomes almost as valuable as access in rolling out ICT infrastructure projects, and the same forces are at work -- laws (protecting monopolies or restricting radio frequency usage, for example), cultural norms (a mesh network requires cooperation and a method to arrange antennas to maintain a mesh and not get stolen), market (cost-to-connect, cost of equipment...), and architecture; but it is with the architecture that creativity can have the impact. The others (law, culture, market) are beyond the control in almost every development project's time-frame and budget, but the architectural challenges might be already being pursued by the "mice" of the world.

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There's an old adage among geeks that goes something like, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon packed full of tape drives travelling at high speeds across a desert." It appears that the same can be held true of snails harnessed to DVD-wheels, which are faster than ADSL, as well as the controversial RFC 1149, A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers.

There's a point to this, which is that most development workers have come to take Net access as a given, but in many countries receiving ICT-earmarked aid, there may be any number of hurdles to get over (including basic electrification).

I had to overcome this assumption as an ICT volunteer in Jamaica was being disconnected. I had no Internet at home [1], and no Internet in most of the school labs that I was visiting, or if any, shared dialup at a blazing 33.6 (bad wiring), and when you're spending the day in a converted shipping container with no A/C in the Jamaican heat with a lot of computers, sitting around waiting for your virus-software and anti-spyware tools to download is not an easy thing.

These hassles led to my side-projects, which ended up being my lasting legacies. I'll leave my magic done with the local cell phone systems for a different topic, but for now let me focus on the problems of downloading files.

I started out with a CD R/W of my favorite tools, which contained a hacker's-delight of tools, registry editors, virus removers and anti-virus programs, anti-spyware, common drivers needed, ethernet-snooping software, network analysis junk -- basically a mix of everything I ever had thought "if only I had...." during a school visit, and results of brainstorming with my coworkers. It came to include a few floppies for those times that the CD drive was dead of course, but it wasn't very useful outside of my hands.

Lab managers began to ask if I could leave a copy of it with them, and this struck me as a great idea, until I got home later that night and started thinking of scenarios where they destroyed their registry, deep-erased their hard drive, or changed word documents to be opened by the calculator or something like that.

So I gave the CD a UI. It's continued to make itself useful even back in the states as my one-stop tool CD for PC troubleshooting, although it's been morphed to a form almost anathema to its existance, a website.[2]

My other project developed out of this, for those not-so-rare occasions that a duppy (Jamaican ghost) was 'pon the computer, and Windows just wouldn't even think about booting -- so I started carrying around a Knoppix bootable Linux CD -- pop it in, reboot, and you're running Linux. This is pretty fun, except kinda useless by itself, so I remastered Knoppix into a Jamaican-Education version, focusing the software on useful games and programs for educational environments, and burned a local copy of the entire Ministry of Education website into it, with all of its multi-meg curricula guide PDFs.

The Knoppix remaster had limited success, though the USAID education project took up distribution of it, but the SchoolTools CD became a popular item around the office and more advanced school labs we visited.

This is all a very long-winded way to make the point that in development, ICT practices have to be revisted. Sure, wikis and blogs and all these wonderful web tools and hosted services are great, but they are rarely as widely relevant as we'd like to think. Still in 2006, a paltry percentage of the world's population has ever been online (I think only 2/3rds has ever made or received a phone call!). This means that we should continue to think about options for the disconnected world (and, for the ICT standpoint, what to do with a computer but no Internet).

Perhaps, though, snails with DVDs might not be the right method (for purely security and data integrity issues, not to mention salt in the data path).

[1] We got on the waitlist for a landline phone and discovered that it was estimated at a 9 year wait, 9 years being the probable time of someone dieing or moving out of our area, the switching circuit was full.

[2] To be fair, it also has a semi-permanent place on my thumbdrive.

Posted by Jon at 02:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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In Two Ways to Emerge, Johnson gives a good argument on how electronic mobilization (as seen, for example, in the Dean campaign) is good at building a swarm of activity, but bad at moving to a more self-monitoring whole that is able to prevent wholescale runaway and manages it's capacity and can direct and adapt.

Arguably, this is parallel to the whole problem with the net-as-community that Lessig and Post looked at, and as discussed in class, the problem of growth on the net led to a breakdown of its emergent self-governance features. The networked structure of media is built to spread and multiply and create positive feedback loops of communication, but there's little if any limit. The only communities that have survived massive growth have done so by finding ruling structures that limit the runaway tendency (think of the evolution of Slashdot.org's system of registration, karma, and meta-moderation). It's like there's a carrying capacity to Internet communities, where, instead of actual death of the community, it's more like cancer.

All of this reminded me of the Cyber-Zapatista movement, and their attempt at the first "DDOS" (Distributed Denial of Service Attack) using an e-performance-art-group's floodnet program, but starting in 98 with a "manual" DDOS:

In solidarity with the Zapatista movement we welcome all netsurfers with ideals of justice, freedom, solidarity and liberty within their hearts, to a virtual sit-in. On January 29, 1998 from 4:00 p.m. GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) to 5:00 p.m. (in the following five web sites, symbols of Mexican neoliberalism):

Bolsa Mexicana de Valores: http://www.bmv.com.mx
Grupo Financiero Bital: http://www.bital.com.mx
Grupo Financiero Bancomer: http://www.bancomer.com.mx
Banco de Mexico: http://www.banxico.org.mx
Banamex: http://www.banamex.com

Technical instructions: Connect with your browser to the
upper mentioned web sites and push the bottom "reload" several times for
an hour (with in between an interval of few seconds).

Electronic Disturbance Theatre Archives

So, the legality of this is a bit shady, and I think it's unsurprising that there's no widely-popular DDOS/activism tool (floodnet hardly counts compared to a full-scale DDOS). The other side of this distributed-activism idea, though, a more creative (rather than destrucive) side has some interesting ideas as well.

Projects like Actlab TV/Alluvium and soon, digital witness provide the average joe schmoe with an unexciting Internet connection to host an online TV show and not have his modem burn to the ground or get kicked out of his hosting/ISP company -- it uses similar technology to bittorrent, so that the more users interested in the video stream, the better the quality of the stream becomes, as each viewer shares his/her bandwidth to help stream the rest of the video. It takes a bit more effort than bittorrent, though, as obviously for a stream, it matters which segment of the file you're downloading to keep the stream running smoothly.

This same technology also has interesting street-activism benefits, potentially speaking -- a small organized group could set up some hardware to videotape an event, say a WTO demonstration, and stream it with a very short delay live to the Internet, using a wireless mesh network to connect the cameraman on the scene to a recording person in a nearby safe(r) location (no fear of having the cameraman arrested and the film confiscated), and the use a high-speed cellular connection to stream it to the net.

The barriers to cyber activism remain the cost, training, and straight-up knowledge that these tools even exist. In some cases, this need gets addressed through other means -- leapfrogging into cell networks provides many useful tools for the 3rd world cyber-activist, as does getting involved (as many developing countries are trying to do) into the open source movement -- which requires local technologists skilled in things like Linux (which we all know is a gateway drug to piracy and anti-government, anti-establishment lunacy).

There are also the occasional benefits of government programs, such as Venezuela's TeleSur. TeleSur is an attempt led by Chavez to combat the US media's dominance in South America, and is meant as a CNN competitor, but (at least as originally intended) there's some hope for some grass-roots reporting:

Another part of the inspiration comes from Venezuela's community TV movement.

I joined Iris, Gladys and Wilfredo, of Catia TV, in a small community hall in the Caracas shanty town of San Juan. They were beginning to recruit and train another of Catia TV's so-called community production teams.

The idea is to give poor communities like this their own say, by teaching ordinary people, from children to pensioners, to make television programmes for themselves.

One of Catia's founders, Blanca Eekhout, is now the head of Venezuelan state TV. She was an adviser on the establishment of Telesur.

"For me it's indispensable for communities to have in their hands channels of communication which are their own. And what's more, this has to have an international aspect."

Viva la independencia!

Posted by Jon at 02:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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So yeah, it's obvious that I like computers, and think that this whole "Internet" thing holds some transformative power for development. I really hope the $100 laptop project goes well, but at the end of the day I'm pragmatic, I'd rather have gotten something done that's helpful than talked about something that might be. This of course means that withi 30 years I'll have moved to some remote corner of the world to pursue off-the-grid subsistence farming as an occupation, but that's for later discussion.

It pleases me to see some big inventors focusing their attention on fundamental technologies. The Segway inventor is now putting the finishing touches on a flexible portable whatever-burning generator and a water-purifier that can largely run off the waste heat of the former. Read the full article on this at CNN.

A computer grant has a huge list of prerequisites that aren't thought of by development people behind desks, or grant-givers. As a volunteer, we had tons of companies trying to unload their old 486s and Pentium-Is on us and our schools, and we simply couldn't take them -- the cost of customs on them was more than the schools could pay, and their utility was so incredibly low. Sure, we could get FreeDos or some prehistoric Linux running on them, or maybe Linux Terminal Server if we could source one powerful machine to serve desktops, but these things all required skills that were not easily available locally, especially in deep rural settings. But even a modern, new computer has a lot of requirements. First, for it to last any time at all, in needs some technical expertise setting it up to be safe from the nasty Internet, virii, spy-ware and the like. Second, it has to be in a reasonable environment -- the roof can't leak, there should be some A/C or good fans at least, the dust should be at a minimum, salt air should be kept out, and for security's sake, the windows and doors have to be barred and locked.

Beyond that, you'll still need electricity, and lots of it for the computers and A/C. And, in Jamaica and many developing countries, black and brown outs are common, and even sometimes spikes, so you'll need a UPS, which don't come cheap and need replacing often in that climate.

And, to reap the benefits of the Internet, you'll still need a phone line, dedicated for the Internet. Cable and Wireless, the monopoly land-line company in Jamaica, had a great deal for Jamaican schools -- if you filled out the right form (only available from the Kingston head office) and sent it through the regional Ministry of Ed. office to a specific person within C+W, they would give you free Internet access. Of course, you still had to pay the monthly and per-minute phone charges. We were working with the competitive cell-phone company, digicel, to get cheap or at least flat-rate Internet for particularly rural schools which couldn't even get a land line strung to them.

But beneath all of this, there are fundamental problems of development that are More Important. Clean water, sanitation services (double-ventilated pit latrines will banish every bad thought you've had about pit latrines!), and sufficient food come to mind. A child who's hungry, or sick is not a child that's going to be learning much from anything, even if it has a mouse attached.

The problem here is message. What foundation or agency wants to say "we installed 50 pit latrines" when they could say "We set up a computer lab in a rural community" ? Who will fund pit latrines over computers? Along the same lines, who will fund a project to maintain existing labs, build local capacity, or set up a repair fund over dropping new computers in?

These questions end up going to fundamental morality-of-development-policy issues that I'm not sure have pretty answers.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/16/technology/business2_futureboy0216/index.htm

Posted by Jon at 02:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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