Evgeny Morozov bangs his drum again questioning the democratizing power of the Internet. Though I find him overly reactionary, I do generally agree with Morozov. My original master’s thesis proposal was on the Internet as a propaganda tool for clerics in Iran. Morozov’s basic point over the past couple of years is that the Internet is just a tool, to be used for good or ill — with an emphasis on the ill. This article sums up his view once again, except he brings up an excellent point about techno-utopian bias that he dubs “orientalism-in-reverse”:

While we fret about the Internet’s contribution to degrading the civic engagement of American kids, all teenagers in China or Iran are presumed to be committed and engaged global citizens who use the Web to acquaint themselves with human rights violations committed by their governments.

Read the whole article and the comments. I follow Morozov’s blog and his writing in FP. Often I find his op-eds heavy in rhetoric and light on data, so I am looking forward to his book on the Internet and democracy, which will be released later this year.

Related: Evgeny Morozov’s TED talk

Amazing map of ship and port traffic using AIS and accurate up to one hour. Brought you by the U of A Department of Product and Systems Design Engineering. This project is so amazingly useful, I don’t know what to say. Zoom in and check out some of the individual ships. See full size here.

Evgeny Morozov (who also blogs at FP) has been a long-time critic of the notion that the internet is ultimately a liberalizing force in international politics. His contrarian views on tech in authoritarian regimes are always thought-provoking. In the TEDtalk below, Morozov lays out his case against “cyber-utopianism” and “iPod liberalism”. I would also recommend reading the comments which offer more information and some contrary views.

Autobiographical note: As many may know, my graduate thesis was on Chinese-Japanese competition over energy resources. Before switching to that topic at the last minute, I was working on the use of the internet and blogs by Iranian mullahs and political activists. Imagine my sense of regret at the missed opportunity during the Twitter revolution in Iran earlier this year.

Says Industry, Science and Technology Critic Marc Garneau

The issue of net neutrality is a global one. Internet management should be neutral and not be permitted for anti-competitive behaviour nor should it target certain websites, users, providers or legitimate software applications. We must protect the openness and freedom of the internet, and maintain competition to spur innovation, improve service levels and reduce costs to users.

Positive development in a country which has a very active media censorship bureaucracy. Net neutrality has been part of the Green Party platform since 2007. The NDP followed in 2008. Now only the Conservatives (and of course the People’s Political Power of Canada and other nutcase parties) are lagging behind. For the sake of my fellow countrymen who suffer terribly at the hands of the communications monopoly, I hope the Conservatives cave sooner rather than later.

Net neutrality and digital copyright management has become a greater topic of concern in Canada over the past couple of years. See Michael Geist’s site for more information.

iA has released the gold master of its latest map of web trends. The map takes the most influential domains and people on the Internet and overlays them onto the Tokyo subway system based on a number of factors. Great execution and brilliant insight into what is happening on the web today. Best of all, it illustrates that the web is really just a series of tubes.

Wrongtomorrow.com is a slaughterhouse for the punditocracy, keeping tabs on predictions made by public figures “in order to hold people and media outlets accountable for pretending to see into an unpredictable future.”

On the surface this seems like a great idea: use the power of the Internet and crowdsourcing to gather the commentary of our talk radio culture in one place and prove once and for all who is for real and who is full of sh*t. However, this is a disaster waiting to happen for real analysts. The populace doesn’t have a clue about how intel forecasting works. Something like this could cause the mob to get out the pitchforks, weighing ducks and fake beards (not that the pundits aren’t already accomplishing this).

What I hope is that this site gets popular enough that public figures are more careful with their words, think before they speak and offer the citizenry well formed, nuanced policy options. What I fear is that this site will become so popular that it stifles risk-taking in the analysis and forecasting world, silencing that one person who could identify next black swan, but was too scared of the mob to do so.

I agree with Henri Poincare, one of the pioneers of chaos theory, who said that “It is far better to foresee even without certainty than not to foresee at all.”

Via DF. Quote in the title is attributed to Nils Bohr, Nobel laureate in Physics.

The Infowar Monitor reports that Kyrgyzstan is under a massive denial of service attack, flatlining three of four ISPs in the country. The attacks are suspected to be both political and commissioned.

The cost and manpower requirements to black or brown out a nation’s Internet access is exceedingly small while the potential payoff exceedingly large. Consider the following: Last month, the US and NATO closed their Pakistani supply route (which accounts for 80 percent of supplies to the war in Afghanistan) becoming entirely dependent on Central Asia. However, since US bases in Uzbekistan were closed in 2005, and Russian bases in Tajikistan preclude any American ones, only Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan remains. During the original invasion of Afghanistan the technology-dependent American military was plagued by insufficient bandwidth. Eight years later I am assuming this is no longer a problem, but for speculative purposes I wonder how a DOS attack on a bandwidth-starved region such as Central Asia or Africa could affect a technology-dependent military? I do not want to insinuate that the Kyrgyz DOS attack was directed at US/NATO supply lines. Rather, the coincident events caused me to consider future situations as the bandwidth gap is more pronounced in the less stable (and therefore less connected) regions of the globe. Maybe someone with a background in computer security like selil could give us some perspective on this issue.

After reading about the latest incident of undersea cables being cut (causing fourteen countries to lose access to the Internet) I found a link describing the fifty cable ships that operate around the world. There are some pretty big and ugly ships in that lineup, registered to some of the most remote places. Up to twenty-five are of these ships are at sea at a time repairing on average three cut or bent cables per day.

Hopefully this round of cut cables doesn’t result in the conspiracy theory frenzy that happened earlier this year.

Once again the Internet throws a spanner in the works for 20th century, nation-based legal frameworks.

UK ISPs Filtering Access to Wikipedia
ZDNet is reporting that six British ISPs are filtering access to Wikipedia as a result of the site being added to the Internet Watch Foundation after accusations that it is hosting what some consider child pornography.

The filtered content involves the controversial 1970s record album cover from the German band Scorpions that features a naked prepubescent girl. The album, Virgin Killer, was banned in many countries when it was released until a replacement cover was created.

Unfortunately the filter has some side-effects. Besides not being able to see filtered content, all user traffic is given a single IP address per proxy. Since Wikipedia blocks vandals by IP address, if one person is blocked, everyone on that ISP is blocked. If one person on each of the six ISP’s are blocked, everyone in Britain (except those using BT apparently) will be unable to contribute to Wikipedia. Users are getting the following message when attempting to edit:

“Wikipedia has been added to a Internet Watch Foundation UK website blacklist, and your Internet service provider has decided to block part of your access. Unfortunately, this also makes it impossible for us to differentiate between different users, and block those abusing the site without blocking other innocent people as well.”

Registered users are still able to edit.

Censorship laws are always tricky and usually end up restricting all sorts of benign activity. The universality of the Internet and its refusal to comply with the boundaries and laws of sovereign states only compounds the problem. I think the spectacular utility of the Internet should trump all prudish laws of censorship.

Related: Map of Internet censorship from The Atlantic.

Internet television has been slowly rolling out around the world. However, garden walls still remain as national television corporations can’t figure out how to deal with the inherently global internet. Sites like Hulu and apps like the BBC iPlayer are brilliant if you are in America or Britain, but if you are an expat outside your own borders you are out of luck.

For those like me that like to watch their morning news with their coffee and live outside their own country I would like to introduce you to Livestation.

You no longer have to go to the websites of each of your favourite news outlets. This free app (Windows, Mac or Linux) aggregates the live streams of news (and other) channels from around the world into one app. Get CNN, C-SPAN, Bloomberg, BBC, Al Jazeera etc. on your computer — live. It also offers desktop alerts for breaking news and chatrooms for each channel. I have been playing with this all day and am loving it. Download it from Livestation.