Green Design » Communications and Networking

Iran, Citizen Media and Media Attention

Ethan Zuckerman — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:54:25 +0000

It’s been an interesting few days for people who study social media. As the protests over election results have continued in Iran, and Iranian authorities have prevented most mainstream journalists from reporting on events, there’s been a great deal of focus on social media tools, which have become very important for sharing events on the ground in Iran with audiences around the world. I, like many of my friends at the Berkman Center and Global Voices, have spent much of the past two days on the phone with reporters, fielding questions about:

- Whether social media is enabling, causing or otherwise driving the protests in Iran
- How Iranian users are managing to access the internet despite widespread filtering
- The ethics (and practice) of distributed denial of service attacks as a form of information warfare
- Whether such online activities are unprecedented

Rather than tell you what I and colleagues have been saying to reporters, I’ll point you to one of the better stories, by Anne-Marie Corley in MIT’s Technology Review - she interviews several of my Berkman and Open Net Initiative colleagues and outlines the argument many of us are making:

- Social media is probably more important as a tool to share the protests with the rest of the world than it is as an organizing tool on the ground.
- Iranians have been accessing social networking sites and blogging platforms despite years of filtering - there’s a cadre of folks who understand how to get around these blocks and are probably teaching others.
- Because so many Iranians use social media tools - often to talk about topics other than politics - they’re a “latent community” that can come to life and have political influence when events on the ground dictate.

Gaurav Mishra rounds up dozens of blog and MSM articles and offers an excellent overview of arguments around these questions (with a strong dose of his own interpretation, much of which I share.) He references Evgeny Morozov, who’s got a thorough denunciation of DDOS as a strategy for protest, correctly pointing out that it mostly functions to make participants feel better about themselves by giving them a way to feel involved with the protests. Unfortunately, unlike positive online gestures of solidarity (retweeting reports from Iran, turning Twitter or Facebook pictures green), this one does little more than piss off sysadmins, helps Iranian authorities make the case that forces outside Iran are “attacking the country” and encourage user-driven censorship as a response to unwanted speech.

So, given the wealth of commentary on the questions above by folks smarter than me, let me weigh in on some of the questions I haven’t heard asked.

Biases and social media - One of the reasons MSM outlets are so focused on social media is that they’re not able to deploy reporters to cover these protests. In some cases, the majority of reporting from the ground is coming from social media. It’s worth asking what the biases might be in amplifying those social media reports. Ahmedinejad’s supporters tend to be poorer, more rural, less educated and more likely to speak Farsi than Mousavi’s supporters - a picture of the protests via social media runs the danger of overstating Mousavi support or minimizing Ahmedinejad support. We’ve been trying to counterbalance this a bit at Global Voices - Hamid Tehrani, our Iran editor, did a brief roundup last night of bloggers supporting Ahmedinejad. It’s worth noting that the posts he quotes are all in Farsi: language may well be a barrier that is influencing coverage as well, if voices for reform are easily quoted in English and voices for the status quo are in Farsi.

My friend and colleague David Sasaki reminded GV editors that bloggers had predicted a Rafsanjani victory in 2005, and suffered their “Howard Dean” moment when it became clear that their candidate had little support outside the most liberal bloggers. That’s a very different situation than what’s happening now - the hundreds of thousands of peple in the streets points to profound support for Mousavi - but reminds us that the online voices from Iran, especially the English-speaking ones, probably aren’t representative of mainstream opinion.

An Iran story, not a social media story - Iran is one of the countries American and British media pay closest attention to. The use of social media for protest - especially to promote a protest to international audiences - is far from unique. But because there’s such strong media focus on Iran, and such interest in the use of social media for protest, this is a perfect storm for interest in this topic.

I’ve been asking some of the reporters I’ve spoken with where they were on other recent social media and protest stories. Citizen media has emerged as one of the key spaces for journalism in Fiji in the wake of a coup government that’s censoring mainstream media. It’s been a key source of information in Madagascar as that country’s suffered through a violent change of government. (One reporter who I mentioned this to remarked that Madagascar was “just a speck of an island somewhere”. That speck is twice the size of Great Britain and has the population of Australia…) In Guatemala, online media publicized the assassination of a lawyer by forces close to the president… and government authorities began arresting people for twittering the story to amplify it. These weren’t huge stories for most newspapers - the Iran story is huge not because of the social media aspect, but because protests in Iran are a huge story independent of citizen media.

Flock - I’ve written at some length about homophily, the tendency of birds of a feather to flock together. Turns out that reporters flock, too. It’s somewhat amazing to me the extent to which reporters from really good newspapers are all asking the same questions. I’m glad that people are taking a close look at the phenomenon of social media in the Iranian protests - it’s an important, fascinating and worthwhile topic. But there’s a lot of topics out there, and I wonder whether we benefit from a thousand well-researched stories on this phenomenon rather than a hundred, and nine hundred other stories.

This article originally appeared in Ethan Zuckerman's blog, My heart's in Accra.

Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Emmanuel Gadenne.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Communications and Networking at 12:54 PM)

New York Times on Social Translation

Ethan Zuckerman — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:14:31 +0000

Leslie Berlin did a great service to proponents of social translation by featuring a range of online translation efforts in her column for today’s New York Times, titled “A Web That Speaks Your Language“. Not only did she give an overview of some of the important players in the space, she focused on reasons why human approaches to translation are important at a time when people around the world are creating online content in their native languages.

I’ve gotten several email and Facebook messages asking for information on social translation and the idea of “the polyglot internet”. Here are a few references from my blog and around the web for those interested in finding out more about the topic.

The phrase “polyglot internet” comes from an essay I wrote late last year as a thought piece for a discussion in Dubai hosted by the World Economic Forum. I was trying to make the case that we were likely to miss the diversity and nuance of the user-generated web unless we found better ways to translate the variety of languages we’re seeing online. To be a pain in the ass, I turned in a version of the essay translated by Global Voices volunteers into a dozen languages - my colleagues at the WEF weren’t able to print it correctly, because it included a couple of character sets they’d never seen before. (Serves me right).

The Times piece mentions Global Voices Lingua, the community translation arm of Global Voices. Solana Larsen, managing editor of Global Voices, offers a history of the project. I’d note that Lingua, like all these social translation projects, involves a technical aspect as well as dedicated translators and project managers - Lingua owes a real debt of gratitude to Boris Anthony, who built the original architecture that allowed a post translated on one word press blog to “signal” the English-language “master” blog, and to Jeremy Clarke, who’s been maintaining, extending and expanding the code.

The article leads off with a screen shot from TED’s Open Translation project, and quotes June Cohen, who’s championed the use of social translation to make TED’s video content available in dozens, and ultimately hundreds, of languages. June talks about the project in an interview with Newsweek. I wrote about the launch of the Open Translation project a couple of days back, arguing that the model TED is using could be used for any high-quality, compelling internet content. It’s worth mentioning that the TED project is built around dotsub.com, a powerful platform to enable subtitling and translation of web video.

Berlin’s tour of social translation also includes Meedan, an ambitious project that uses machine translation, backed by human translation, to enable dialog between English and Arabic speakers. And she mentions efforts by Google and by Wordpress to work with volunteer translators to make software interfaces available in multiple languages.

I’d urge people interested in this topic to look at Pootle, a translation framework developed by Dwayne Bailey, who has dedicated a great deal of time to making open software available in South Africa’s 11 official languages, via translate.org.za. And everyone interested in social translation should be paying close attention to Worldwide Lexicon, an exciting project by Brian McConnell, which invites bilingual and multilingual people to translate texts in sections as small as single sentences or as large as whole articles.

Almost everyone mentioned in this blogpost will be attending the Open Translation Tools Summit hosted by Aspiration in Amsterdam this June. I’ve got high hopes that articles like Berlin’s will get more people interested in participating in these efforts, and that the hard work Allen Gunn at Aspiration and others are doing to bring toolmakers and project leaders together will help build a global movement around the idea of social translation.

If you'd like to learn more about how you can help translate Worldchanging TED talks click here.

This piece originally appeared on Ethan Zuckerman's blog, My Heart's In Accra.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Communications and Networking at 12:14 PM)

New York Times on Social Translation

Ethan Zuckerman — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:14:31 +0000

If you'd like to learn more about how you can help translate Worldchanging TED talks click here.

This piece originally appeared on Ethan Zuckerman's blog, My Heart's In Accra.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Communications and Networking at 12:14 PM)

Unpacking “The Twitter Revolution” In Moldova

Ethan Zuckerman — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 00:38:23 +0000

On Sunday, April 5th, the governing Communist party won over 50% of the vote in Parliamentary elections. This was decidedly a surprise, as Communists had lost the last round of municipal elections, and as an organized anti-Communist movement had been warning that elections might be rigged. More than 10,000 young activists took to the streets of Chisinau on Tuesday, occupying Chisinau’s central square, the Piata Marii Adunari Nationale. The protests turned violent in the evening: government buildings burned and dozens of protesters were injured.

Now, two days later, another battle is raging, a far less serious one. Inquiring internet users want to know: Was this a twitter-driven revolution? My friend and colleague Evgeny Morozov appears to have started the Twitter meme, with a thoughtful post in his new blog on ForeignPolicy.com, net.effect. The post, titled “Moldova’s Twitter Revolution”, observes that the tag #pman (short for Piata Marii Adunari Nationale, the square where protests unfolded) had been one of the most active on Twitter on Tuesday. Evgeny’s post is more careful than the headline - he notes that Moldovan friends tell him there’s little mobile phone coverage in the square, and notes that many social networking tools were likely used to organize protests, not just Twitter. (Global Voices has excellent coverage of both the protests and the social tools used.)

But it’s the Twitter headline that stuck. Yesterday’s story on the protests in the New York Times was titled “Protests in Moldova Explode, With Help of Twitter”. The meme has legs, and stories with titles like “Twitter 1, communism 0” are appearing in English-language newsapers: “A victorious moment. Technology over tyranny. A youth united tapping Twitter in the name of democracy.”

It seems unlikely, though, that Twitter was the key tool in a victory of “technology over tyranny”, if that is, in fact, what happened. For one thing, the Communist party in Moldova doesn’t have much in common with the Communists of old - Moldovan communist favor foreign direct investment and promoting entrepreneurship, though they’d like closer involvement with Russia and less with Romania. But to the extent that this was a technological “triumph”, it may have more to do with other social network tools - including blogs, LiveJournal and Facebook - than with Twitter.

Mentioning Twitter is currently the best way to pick a fight in geek communities. My friend David Weinberger tells me that his recent essay, “4.5 lessons from Twitter” is one of the most controversial pieces he’s written recently, observing that positive and negative reactions have both been surprisingly strong. I find that reactions to Twitter are roughly as strong (and usually as ill-informed) as debates about Second Life 18 months ago - this may simply be the pattern for any new technology that becomes this month’s media darling.

But it’s certainly no surprise that there are now commentators arguing that Moldova’s protests aren’t and couldn’t be a Twitter revolution. One of the better arguments I’ve read comes from Daniel Bennett on the Frontline Club’s blog site. His essay, “The myth of the Moldova ‘Twitter revolution’” makes the case that there’s little evidence that Twitter was actually used to organize the Moldovan protests. He cites Morozov’s observation that there was little cellphone coverage in the square as evidence that Twitter wasn’t the main tool for coordination, and notes that Moldova’s twitter community appears to be very small, likely fewer than 200 users. Cezar Maroti, writing from Rotterdam, uses a clever Google search to suggest that there are fewer than 100 twitter users in Moldova, an observation that Morozov agrees with in a follow-up article to his original post.

Here’s my guess at what happened as regards the use of social networking tools and the recent Chisinau protests:

- The ThinkMoldova and HydePark used a variety of social media tools to organize and publicize their actions. Both groups maintain websites and use blogs and LiveJournal accounts to disseminate ideas and publicize events. An active and growing Facebook group, “Support Moldova”, points to organizers skill with that toolset. And Deutsche Welle reports that protests were organized in part via SMS.

There’s nothing unusual about this. Media-savvy organizers understand that different communication tools are useful for achieving different goals - when I run trainings for activists on new media tools, I try very hard to ensure that activists don’t get attached to any one particular tool - the right tool is one that the community you’re trying to mobilize is using, one that works at the same speed you do (if you’re writing political manifestos and essays, don’t do so on Twitter) and the one that helps you gain the most attention.

- Twitter is a genuinely great tool for offering short reports about breaking news. During the Malagasy coup, those of us following the situation from off the island clung to Twitter for current information - though much of the information we got was from broadcasts on radio or television within the country, that information wasn’t available outside Madagascar, and Twitter made it possible to get updated information, rather than daily wire reports.

Moldova has a huge diaspora - an estimated quarter of the population lives abroad, and reports suggest that a similar number are applying for Romanian passports. It’s quite possible that Moldovans living abroad, hungry for news about the demonstrations, looked online and ended up flocking to Twitter.

- Twitter is a great way to get attention, if only because it’s the flavor of the month in social media. Morozov notes that Moldovan organizer Oleg Brega has a great deal of facility with social media, noting “a typical Brega stunt: provoking the Moldovan police to arrest him and have someone capture this on video and then republish to YouTube.” It’s fair to assume that Brega and colleagues either knew that the Twitter community would be fascinated by protest-related tweets (as they were with breaking news tweets from the Bombay bombings and, to a lesser extent, the Malagasy coup), or that organizers were able to embrace the tool when it became clear there was the potential for international attention via Twitter.

It’s also frustratingly predictable that mentioning cool new tech is a great way to get journalists to cover an event they might otherwise miss. Moldovan youth protests make for a good story if they succeed and lead towards an Orange Revolution-esque change in government. But the failure of the Demin revoluion in Belarus suggest that these comparisons be made carefully. Even if the protests don’t lead to a change in government, a story that confirms our sense that new technologies are inherently democratizing is likely to be amplified and argued about. Everyone likes evidence that they’re living in the future, where tyrants quake at the power of our mobile phones.

- It’s going to be very hard to figure out what actually happened on Twitter during the past few days. Twitter leaves fewer traces than many other online media - its transiency is one of its strengths, but it makes life very difficult for scholars. A search for #pman on Twitter reveals 1500 tweets in the past four hours -- and no ability to search beyond those recent tweets, even through the API.

(There is a way, I suspect - currently banging on Twitter’s search engine and will report back if I have any success. If you know of a good tool that tracks the incidence of a tag on Twitter over time, or lets you do searches on Twitter that go deeper than 1500 results, please let me know. Hashtags.org is close to what I need, but I’d like something that gives me numbers and dates as well as the pretty graphs.)

Smart researchers would start recording Twitter behavior by subscribing to Twitter feeds as soon as it becomes clear which ones to follow. In the meantime, aggregators that follow the key tags may prove to be very useful for researchers. But I suspect the definitive answer about whether Twitter was or wasn’t core to the Moldovan protests will come from interviews with the demonstration organizers, not from technical forensics.

As the debate about Moldova and Twitter unfolded yesterday, I was watching another blame game unfold: the Moldovan government blaming the riots on Romania. I posted the following to Twitter: “NYTimes argues Twitter leads to Moldova riots. Moldovan gov’t blames Romania. Romania = Twitter? #pman”

I got two interesting responses almost immediately.

Dinu Popa noted: “@EthanZ #pman moldovan govenrment blames everybody: the West, Romania, Jesus, even Russia(!). The real cause is fraudulent elections.”

But my favorite was from Bigubax, who tweeted, “#pman @EthanZ NYTimes argues Twitter leads to Moldova riots. Moldovan gov’t blames Romania. Romania = Twitter? -> Twitter=Freedom. So: Yes!”

This piece originally appeared in Ethan Zuckerman's blog, My Hearts in Accra.

Image credit: flickr/7son75, Creative Commons License.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Communications and Networking at 4:38 PM)

Unpacking “The Twitter Revolution” In Moldova

Ethan Zuckerman — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 00:38:23 +0000

Here’s my guess at what happened as regards the use of social networking tools and the recent Chisinau protests:

I got two interesting responses almost immediately.

Dinu Popa noted: “@EthanZ #pman moldovan govenrment blames everybody: the West, Romania, Jesus, even Russia(!). The real cause is fraudulent elections.”

But my favorite was from Bigubax, who tweeted, “#pman @EthanZ NYTimes argues Twitter leads to Moldova riots. Moldovan gov’t blames Romania. Romania = Twitter? -> Twitter=Freedom. So: Yes!”

This piece originally appeared in Ethan Zuckerman's blog, My Hearts in Accra.

Image credit: flickr/7son75, Creative Commons License.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Communications and Networking at 4:38 PM)

twittervotereport.com: Toward a More Networked Electorate

Julia Levitt — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:40:08 +0000

This election season, we've seen communication technologies like SMS and social networking sites take a more active and more sophisticated role in politics than ever before. A recently developed website, twittervotereport.com, allows voters across the U.S. to connect with one another in real time via short messages sent various ways: from cell phones, Twitter accounts, or even home phones.

Worldchanging contributor Nancy Scola was one of the founders of this innovative volunteer project, which went live last Wednesday in the hopes of helping identify and smooth any problems voters encountered, whether during early voting on in-person at the polls. The format has generated considerable attention from media organizations including NPR, and the recognition is helping drive response rates even higher.

As this article by The American Prospect's Jessica Clark notes, twittervotereport has offered users a chance to call out warnings like this one, from Michigan:

"My #early #votereport - absentee ballots in #48823 require extra postage. Don't let a $0.15 slipup keep your voice from being heard!"

The story of twittervote's creation is, in itself, a testament to innovative interaction. It started with an idea that Scola and colleague Allison Fine blogged on the site techPresident (a side project of the Personal Democracy Forum). The post offered a list of specific prescriptions for using Twitter to address common problems that plague U.S. general elections.

According to Scola, most of the volunteer developers, organizers and activists behind the project never met in person. "Through chatting in IRC chat rooms, Google Groups nad the occasional conference call," she says, "we've built what I think is a ground-breaking way of people being engaged in how elections work. This whole thing went from a humble blog post to a fairly big networked effort in less than a month."

To add your experience to the thread, use your Twitter account or text 66937 to send a short message containing the tag #votereport (you can also use other tags, outlined here to further specify your location, type of complaint, etc.). To contribute using a home phone, call 567-258-VOTE. For more information, visit twittervotereport.com.

Also note: due to overwhelming traffic today, the site has been experiencing some difficulties. If for any reason you can't access www.twittervotereport.com, you can still contribute comments, and view incoming responses in real time on Twitter.

Photo of voters lining up at their polling place in Brooklyn, New York. Credit: flickr/elisbrown, Creative Commons license.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Julia Levitt in Communications and Networking at 9:40 AM)

Reader Report: National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation

WorldChanging Team — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:52:12 +0000

by Phil Mitchell

One of the least talked about but most far-reaching worldchanging innovations is the development of new processes of citizen-centered democracy. These processes (such as citizen assemblies) are not just solutions to specific problems; they hold out the promise of better collective decision-making in general. In this time of ultra-polarized, dysfunctional politics, such a promise is a beacon in a dark night. Yet, because most of us are focused on specific issues rather than on process itself, much of this innovation does not get noticed or used to its full potential.

Earlier this month, at the National Conference on Dialogue and Deliberation, facilitators, mediators, citizen participation gurus, and deliberative democracy advocates gathered in Austin, Texas, to learn from each other and reflect on the field. Much more than just a set of workshops, the conference was an exercise in process itself, with the organizers challenging participants to figure out how their field can really make a difference. As a climate activist who uses D&D in my work, I was invited to lead up the conference challenge area around Moving from dialogue to action.

Indeed, tying dialogue and deliberation to actual political outcomes is perhaps the key challenge the field faces. The wonderful fact is that we know how to create the conditions for healthy dialogue and good collective decision-making. The sobering reality is that actually using good decision-making requires taking power away from those who currently hold it, and that is tangling with gravity.

My beacon of hope was in finding examples at the conference where practitioners were able to create the conditions that made a power shift inevitable. I found one of those examples in Varun Vidyarhi.

At the conference Vidyarthi spoke about the systematic removal of obstacles to change as well as his experience in North India, where he has spent two decades figuring out how to empower those who are at the bottom of the proverbial totem pole even in remote, impoverished areas.

His organization, Manavodaya (Human Awakening), runs facilitated dialogue circles as a key to building self-esteem and collective identity. But he has learned that such circles alone rarely succeed. The circle must have a material basis, which he accomplishes by having each member contribute to a pooled fund and then used for micro-loans. Even if each member can contribute only one handful of rice per month, this changes everything. The participants have an experience of agency and of building power that changes them and changes the material conditions that have defined them.

But still, groups fail. Another key characteristic of success that Vidyarthi has identified is that the group be a group of equals. He argues that mixed, unequal groups, with different levels of investment in the pool and different power backgrounds, do not succeed. And so on. Failures help identify the obstacles to success. Each and every obstacle must be addressed. The result has been an emergence of women as village leaders, a decrease in discrimination toward the low castes, and almost incidentally a reliance on dialogue circles as an informal center of decision-making.

This example might seem far-removed from those of us in the affluent, global north. Yet in my own work running climate change dialogue circles in Seattle, I've seen many flavors of disempowerment block groups from taking meaningful action. Vidyarthi's brilliance lies in showing that it is both necessary and possible to systematically remove the obstacles.

Editor's Note: We encourage "Reader Reports" -- submissions from members of Worldchanging's global audience who volunteer to write up their notes from travels, conferences, workshops and other worldchanging happenings they participate in. If you'd like to contribute your own report, please email editor@worldchanging.com.

Phil Mitchell writes from Seattle, Washington. He is the director of Climate Dialogues and founder of 2people.org.

Photo credit: flickr/coyenator, Creative Commons license.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Communications and Networking at 1:52 PM)

Internet Censorship and Nose-Thumbing

Ethan Zuckerman — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 04:15:29 +0000

There’s understandable outcry about revelations that reporters covering the Olympics in Beijing will be using censored internet connections which block access to sites on sensitive topics, like human rights and Falun Gong. In classic fashion, a Beijing Olypics spokesman, Sun Weide, offered statements that verge on self-parody: “I would remind you that Falun Gong is an evil fake religion which has been banned by the Chinese government… I said we would provide sufficient, convenient internet access for foreign journalists to report on the Olympics…”

Andrew Lih points to another major constraint on internet access - the cost. His wife is staying in the Media Village in Beijing, and discovered a pricing structure for ASDL connections that beggars belief:

* 512/512 it costs 7712.5 RMB (1,131.20 USD);
* 1M/512 it costs 9156.25 (1,342.95 USD);
* 2M/512 it costs a whopping 11,700 RMB (1,716.05 USD).

Those costs are for a single month’s worth of access. I guess if you’re planning on uploading videos from the games, you’re making a pretty serious investment in your filtered bandwidth. As Lih points out, not a big deal for the NBCs of the world, but tough for smaller entities.

I’m sitting in a conference room at Microsoft right now and remembering just how much filtered internet sucks. I realized that most filesharing ports were blocked when I tried to download footage from the last day of the Nagoya basho - no go, without tunneling through ssh or via Tor… not something I really wanted to do. This morning, as we tried to set up a backchannel via IRC, we discovered those ports were blocked, so folks are now IRC’ing via Mibbit.

The temptation in these cases, I think, is to find creative ways to break the filtering and thumb your nose at the authorities. At the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia - ludicriously held in a nation that extensively censors the Internet - a favorite game was to use proxies to evade censorship, then photograph the evasion with a WSIS backdrop visible. The photo above is of me loading the (censored) website of Citizen Summit, held by a Tunisian human rights organization in opposition to the summit with the map of the WSIS booths in the background. (I don’t think there’s any utility at all to this sort of nose-thumbing, but it does feel really good when you’re frustrated by a situaltion.)

I’ll be interested to see what sorts of creative nose-thumbing press folks in Beijing will engage in. For folks heading to Beijing, BoingBoing has a lovely list of possible circumvention strategies, a few of which will work on the Great Firewall. CitizenLab’s guide to Circumvention is probably the best single resource on the topic - it’s available as a PDF. To offer a very quick piece of advice - if you work for a news organization that has even a minimum of tech resources you want to either set up an instance of Psiphon or learn how to tunnel your net connections via a SSH connection.

Happy nosethumbing.

This piece originally appeared on Ethan Zuckerman's excellent personal blog My Heart's In Accra.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Communications and Networking at 8:15 PM)

FaceChanging, WorldTwitter, Headlines

Alex Steffen — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:42:13 +0000

By the way, you can connect with us on Facebook here:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2219936585&ref=ts

You can follow Worldchanging's update tweets on Twitter here:

http://twitter.com/Worldchanging

While my personal twitter account is here:

http://twitter.com/AlexSteffen

and, of course, if you're not signed up for our newsletter, you're missing out on lots of good stuff:

http://www.worldchanging.com/signup/

Thank you. That is all.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Alex Steffen in Communications and Networking at 12:42 PM)

Fighting dog fraud in Cameroon

Ethan Zuckerman — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 18:13:32 +0000

At a conference in Maryland - where I’m dropping in for a 24 hour visit - I met Charlie Stross, geek and sci-fi writer extraordinare, who’s responsible for the very excellent (and Hugo-nominated) “Halting State”. I’m a big fan of "near futures" science fiction, books like “Pattern Recognition“, which seize themes in contemporary life and spin them out to logical conclusions, rather than violating the laws of physics to ask interesting conceptual questions.

“Halting State” is a police procedural, the story of Scottish cops and private investigators seeking the truth behind an unusual bank heist, the robbery of a bank charged with regulating the economies of a set of massively multiplayer online games. The story turns into a complex tale about virtual worlds, augmented reality, massively multiplayer games and confusion over motivations. It’s a very good read. The book ends with an email that may or may not be a 419 scam, and I was thrilled to hear Stross talking about the possibility of writing a book focused on online advance fee fraud.

My regular readers may know that I’m somewhat obsessed with 419 - I think 419 is the perfect example of an internet-mediated encounter where both sides misunderstand and attempt to take advantage of the other party. The traditional 419 only works when you assume a nation is so corrupt that millions of dollars in oil profits are sitting around, waiting to be transfered into you account, and where you’re willing to do something illegal to get your share of the gains. (Obviously, other versions of the scheme have emerged which prey less on the recipient’s greed.) I’ve lately been buying the books written by “scambaiters”, those enterprising souls who’ve decided to string along scammers in the hopes of “wasting their time” - unfortunately, there’s very little reflection on the morality of scambaiting in those books, which is really what I’d been hoping for - just lots of accounts of emails flying back and forth.

I mentioned to Stross a new scam I’d become aware of: fraudulent dog sales from Cameroon. Buyers are offered a chance to buy a pedigree’d pooch from an “AKC-certified” breeder in Cameroon - when the sale goes through, the buyer will be asked for additional fees, including travel insurance and vaccination fees. Needless to say, the dog never arrives. Message board posts on this topic make it clear that this is an increasingly common scam, and that lots of people fall for it.

I heard about this scam not because I was dog-shopping, but because my friend Njei Moses Timah has made fighting these scams a personal quest. A proud Cameroonian, he’s upset that Cameroon’s online reputation may be compromised in the same way that Nigeria’s has been. So he’s posting the details of these frauds in the hopes that buyers will read them and beware.

I’m always interested in the ways people try to use blogs and other participatory media to brand their nations and cultures - I see bridgeblogging as the process of trying to change the brand image of your nation, culture, religion or people online. But it’s rare to see someone like Njei Moses engaging in this battle in realtime, trying to take down the cybercrooks who are sullying Cameroon’s reputation.

(This article originally appeared on Ethan's excellent personal site, My Heart's In Accra.)

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Communications and Networking at 10:13 AM)