Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor C. Boas: Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule

This set of studies seems to indicate that Internet access can be successfully controlled for state ends in practice. How? Not mainly through technological means but through intimidation. You don’t need to monitor everyone’s email and web access to frighten people – you just need a society where people censor themselves and are aware that at any time their Internet access could be being monitored. Indeed by making state government more effective and efficient it may even strengthen authoritarian regimes.


The book mentions an interesting resource – the Global Internet Liberty Campaign – “a free-lance journalist is traveling the world to report on the methods of Internet censorship used in the various countries and the ways possible to gain access to sites that are censored by governments and other groups”.home accredited loansunion acu creditcollege online accreditedamerican credit expresscredit alpena alconaaea credit unioncare accreditation ambulatory for association healthassociation american laboratory for accreditation Map

A new report by one of my professors, Robin Mansell is summarised here by the BBC. It points out (what should in any case be obvious) that third world organisations are not getting significant new orders via B2B exchanges because these tend to facilitate exchange between firms that already know each other. Companies are reluctant to place large orders with others without some kind of ongoing relationship built up through personal contact.movies free toon tgpmovies teen hotmovie sutra kamamovies fuck maturemovie nudepsp movie creatorin rape movies thesample movies sapphic Map

I went along to a lecture that Habermas gave in London about religious tolerance and cultural rights in democracies. I wasn’t planning to approach him, but he walked off-stage practically into me so I took advantage of the opportunity to ask him about his attitude towards new media. He confirmed that he hadn’t written anything specifically about the new media and that he felt its impacts were ambiguous. He expressed concern about the possible fragmentation of the public sphere that comes when the Internet brings interest groups together – concerns voiced by Cass Sunstein in his book Republic.com and other places. I could have argued with him on that point but I thought I had taken enough of his time – I just urged him to give the matter some more thought and let us know his views when he had formed them.

Thanks to the folks at iSociety for letting me know about the lecture!galerias interracialgranny holland sexnaked women masterbating pictures ofhairy – atk janellesonic porn furrystripers shemalemilfs interracialtoon school strip girl free Map

Robert King Morton – the inventor of the focus group and key terms like “role model” died on Feb 23rd.advance 8 loan cash paydayloan construction home 100loan home equity 100 phploan cash 11 payday advance17 card payday 24 loanbad 1st loan new home credit39 in payday loan 56software cash payday loan advancealoan americabank construction america loanfree verizon lg 20 ringtone 3200nokia 3595 polyphonic usa ringtone4500 ringtone lgnokia ringtone 6225 sprint8250 nokia free ringtonebarrington near airports illinoisfree ringtones 100253310 free composer nokia ringtones for Map

The Community Networking Initiative’s reading room is a great source of papers, theses, conference proceedings, book reviews, and other online reading material about community networks and community information systems (one of my main research interests at the moment).

Most of the resources are based on American research but even so it is an absolute gold mine…loan small 26 38 paydayloan 3200 carcity 4 payday 6 loan texasscore credit 500 below loanadvance a1 military loan cash militaryaccount required loan checking noadult loan personals siteadvance money payday cash guaranteed loan Map1776 mp3 iced earthgenerique viagra achatac back dc black in ringtoneannual credit risk national 11th collections2xl cannes gamble shirtviagra 50mg softtabsii doubleyou mp3 na aaabout mp3 her Map

This article in the Disenchanted webzine raises at least two interesting points – both related to class online:

He/she maintains because the Internet conceals identity:

people are choosing peers and personal competitors from the ranks of classes they’d otherwise never try to hold a candle to. Most of us judge our accomplishments against other people within the same age, income, and sometimes ethnic group as us. So a young lower-class kid is not going to feel he has to compete against the accomplishments of a upper-class, middle-aged man […] But since we began looking for friends and peers on the Internet, those traditional class distinctions have been ignored because they’re almost invisible […] That in turn has meant the pressure to excel is enormous on the young and the unaccomplished. Without visible class distinctions there’s no filter, and without the filter there’s a compulsion to compete with people who are ?out of your league¦.

I suspect there may be something to this effect but I believe it is somewhat over-stated. It is often not that difficult to judge the status of people writing online. If they are in the media (which is what most people consume online anyway) you will probably assume they are high status individuals. And these days people (like myself) often provide “about me” information when they publish. Moreover, the way that people write and what information they use can itself often be a guide to their status even if you don’t know anything else about them.

The other interesting assertion in the piece is that “the higher classes are now looking for other ways to recognize each other within the context of the Internet.” The author suggests that in future reputation systems attached to digital signatures will be used not to help people identify posts that would be likely to be interesting – instead they will be used like having a degree is today as a blunt instrument to indicate your status in society.

If you want to create an exclusive Internet club who’s members can only be two levels of trust away from Charles, then it’s as simple as writing a few lines of code on the login screen. If you want to screen job applicants, then you can require their electronic signature (which could be considered reasonable now that many people apply for jobs online)

I think that there will probably be a pretty high correlation between people’s online reputations (at least as regards “information quality”) and their social status. Higher status tends to indicate better education tends to produce more insightful postings, all things being equal.

However, I am more optimistic than the author – I believe that if what you produce is thoughtful, then online reputation systems (if they work, and none I have seen so far are without large flaws) would tend to highlight your work, whatever your social status. After all, why filter for status when you can filter for quality directly?

What interests me is what will happen if “low quality/high status” information sources start to get ranked below some “high quality/low status” ones. Will online reputation systems be able to undermine entrenched social forces?

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(Or at least some of the world). It’s a commonplace notion now, but this article on the OpenDemocracy site about the World Social Forum brought home to me the increasing importance and universality of email – not just in the first world but (at least among the political class) in the developing world as well.

“I realised that the wealth I had accumulated was all there in the stack of cards as thick as a blockbuster novel, which I had collected. All the rest I could lose.

Each of those cards is a thread which now connects me electronically with a person in the Philippines, Senegal, Santiago, Morocco or Budapest, a person with whom I have just eaten or taken a bus, a person whom I may never get to visit, but who carries another network of contacts, nationally or internationally, through NGOs or trade unions, a person who from now on will be my correspondent.”

The author goes on to talk about receiving business cards with email addresses from someone living in a shantytown in Cameroon or Guelmine in the Sahara. Being able to communicate with people from such remote regions is a phenomenon only a few years old, as the digital divide in such areas is slowly bridged…

Joi Ito has written a fascinating paper – Emergent Democracy about edemocracy, weblogs, the power law, trust and “emergence” (self-organizing systems).

It’s fascinating and I think it moves the debate along significantly but I don’t altogether agree with the optimism it expresses about the democratising power of weblogs. I also fear it bites off more than it can chew – bravely, Joi Ito tries to tackle edemocracy, privacy and copyright law in a single paper.

See below for a more in-depth initial analysis. In the spirit of the democratic weblogging phenomenon he describes, I welcome further comments.

I wrote a paper recently on a very similar theme: “Do the new digital media enable wider participation in the public sphere?“. I certainly wish I had read Joi’s paper earlier, but I hope mine still has interestingly contrasting things to say and I would be happy to email the full paper to people who are interested in reading further.

Thanks to Cory @ boingboing for the link
(more…)

Heather Havrilesky who used to write entertainingly for the late lamented suck has her own weblog now and recently found out that undergrads at the University of Texas are studying weblogs including her own. She waxes amusing about this…

If you are interested in serious sociological studies of home page creation they appear to be surprisingly thin on the ground. I just read an interesting overview in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication and found a good site from Nottingham Trent University that references other sites about identity and web pages – largely but not exclusively focusing on gender issues.

I have yet to come across many academic papers specifically about weblogs but doubtless they will be arriving soon. I was interviewed a while back by Dr Donald Matheson who is studying weblogs and I will link to the results of the research I was included in when it becomes available.6102i ringtonesproduct farrington a8310 nokia free ringtonefree 6800 ringtone polyphonic nokiaringtones alcatel tones mradd ringtones an iphone toringtone adult ozzy8350 ringtones Map

Lessig aside, two other speakers particularly impressed me. Alberto Escudero Pascual gave a fascinating talk. It was notionally to do with IPv6 – actually it was about privacy. He pointed out that web logs, mobile phone records and, yes, IPv6 packets, contain more metadata that old-fashioned telephone records. Therefore, the old division between “traffic data” – typically available to EU law enforcement authorities without much judicial oversight – and conversations (which are harder to get authorisation to tap) may be artificial – you can find out a lot about someone from their “patterns” without listening in to their actual conversations.

He also pointed out that IPv6’s freeing up of IP addresses allowing them to be assigned permanently to phones or to people could make surveillance easier. It’s true that IPv6 allows for randomising of your IP address, but it also requires you to indicate in your IP address that it is random – thus showing that “you have something to hide”.

There was lots of other interesting stuff in his presentation as well – more than he had time to talk us through in fact.

Alan Davidson also spoke about the work of the Center for Democracy and Technology, discussing how difficult it is to get the public and government interested in public policy problems thrown up by new technologies. He mentioned two scary privacy threats that have been brewing that I was not aware of and revealed how through working with standards bodies the CDT managed to tackle them.

1) RFIDs – wireless tags like bar-codes but storing more data and readable at “tens of metres”. They are already used in industry and are likely to replace barcodes for consumers in the coming years. Very useful for shopping but what about when you have bought an item? Do you want remote readers to be able to know everything you have in your knapsack as you walk around? Thanks to the CDT, the tags will come with the ability to make them “commit suicide”. Of course (as I pointed out) consumers and vendors have to know to use this facility but at least the facility is there.

2) Open Pluggable Edge Services – “application-level intermediaries in the network, for example, at a web proxy cache between the origin server and the client, that would transform or filter content. Examples of proposed OPES services include assembling personalized web pages, adding user-specific regional information to web pages, virus scanning, content adaptation for clients with limited bandwidth, language translation.” All sounds innocuous enough – but it could also be used by less benign intermediaries to seamlessly remove content that, say, a repressive government doesn’t want you to see or to add ads to the web pages you see that the website producer didn’t use. The CDT is helping to put in safeguards – though the requirement that such services should be authorised either by the website or by the reader seems to me possibly inadequate.

It was nice to bump into Steve Bowbrick again at the conference, a surprisingly un-grizzled veteran of the UK commercial Internet – he posted up some pictures including a few rather un-flattering ones of me at the reception.a personal fast loanaccount loann no bank paydayaccount payday advance loan cashcanada loan advance paydayadvance 20 loan instant cashadvance money payday loan cashcash loan online personal advanceloan payday texas advanceloans america payday advancedloan payday america advannceporn amature vids freefree anal sex video adult contentsex group 500 personadult pornography photosblack sex amatuerfree porn amateur videosporn for women amateur sitesaare kanal Maplevels mp3 adjust on6 mp3 minutesmujawwad abdullah mp3 basfar78 dose zenegra viagra2cc credit mortgage lendingpin gambling 9 bowlinghmo 2007 viagrareign acid ringtones Map