BBC News - Internet access is 'a fundamental right' - 0 views
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Countries such as Mexico, Brazil and Turkey most strongly support the idea of net access as a right, the survey found. More than 90% of those surveyed in Turkey, for example, stated that internet access is a fundamental right - more than those in any other European Country.
The end of Skype in Egypt | Bikya Masr - 1 views
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the lobbying of the three Egyptian mobile operators, Vodafone, Mobinil and Etisalat have won the most recent battle with regulators to ban the Internet phone service
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“Now, I don’t think I will be able to talk to my brother in Virginia because it is too expensive. I don’t make enough money to buy a computer and get the Internet at home,”
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In September, Indian agencies recommended a ban on international internet telephony until a system to trace the calls was put in place.
A little less internet, a little more radio please. « ICT4Accountability - 0 views
Is That Egyptian Facebook Sign for Real? (Updated) | techPresident - 0 views
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One takeaway: the debate over what real true role of the Internet (and Facebook, and Twitter) has been in this historic Egypt uprising has to include consideration of what the idea that is the Internet (and Facebook, and Twitter) means to the ones doing the rising up.
Why the Internet Is a Great Tool for Totalitarians | Magazine - 0 views
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Modern communications technologies are already being deployed as new forms of repression.
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not all blogs are revolutionary. China, Iran, and Russia all have bloggers who are more authoritarian in their views than their governments are. Some of these governments are even beginning to follow the path laid by Western corporations, actively deploying regime-friendly bloggers to spread talking points. Is this “samizdat”? Cold War baggage, in short, severely limits the imagination of do-gooders in the West. They assume that the Internet is too big to control without significant economic losses. But governments don’t need to control every text message or email. There’s a special irony when Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggests—as he did in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations last November—that China’s government will find it impossible to censor “a billion phones that are trying to express themselves.” Schmidt is rich because his company sells precisely targeted ads against hundreds of millions of search requests per day. If Google can zero in like that, so can China’s censors.
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modern authoritarian governments control the web in ways more sophisticated than guard towers
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Global Voices Gathers Information From Citizens All Over the Globe - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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“Our job is to curate the conversation that is happening all over the Internet with people who really understand what is going on,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, a former Tokyo bureau chief for CNN who founded Global Voices with Ethan Zuckerman, a technologist and Africa expert, while they were fellows at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “We amplify, contextualize and translate what these conversations are and why they are relevant.”
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“We don’t parachute in. We are there all the time. “
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Mr. Sigal said that having editors work with volunteer bloggers brought traditional journalistic values to the operation, like checking facts and sources. “But it is less about a finished story and more about a conversation,” he said. “When we build a story, we include links back to the original sources, so you can follow the story as far down as you want to. We want you to leave our site and go find the original, find more.”
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ONI Releases 2009 Middle East & North Africa Research | OpenNet Initiative - 0 views
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While not all countries in the Middle East and North Africa filter the Internet, censorship across the region is on the rise, and the scope and depth of filtering are increasing. Testing has revealed political filtering to be the common denominator across the region; however, social filtering is on the rise.
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Based on ONI testing results, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and the West Bank do not currently filter any material; however, none of those are without regulations.
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Bahrain, Iran, Syria and Tunisia have the strictest political filtering practices in the region.
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Search Engine Helps Users Connect In Arabic : NPR - 0 views
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new technology that is revolutionizing the way Arabic-speaking people use the Internet
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Abdullah says that of her 500 Egyptian students, 78 percent have never typed in Arabic online, a fact that greatly disturbed Habib Haddad, a Boston-based software engineer originally from Lebanon. "I mean imagine [if] 78 percent of French people don't type French," Haddad says. "Imagine how destructive that is online."
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"The idea is, if you don't have an Arabic keyboard, you can type Arabic by spelling your words out phonetically," Jureidini says. "For example ... when you're writing the word 'falafel,' Yamli will convert that to Arabic in your Web browser. We will go and search not only the Arabic script version of that search query, but also for all the Western variations of that keyword."
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Should we support internet activists in the Middle East? | Marc Lynch - 0 views
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In many ways it was a pessimistic talk, which pushed back against expectations that new media technologies like blogs, Facebook or Twitter were going to radically change politics in the short or medium term. Over the longer term, there is a more real transformative potential, especially for the individuals who use the technologies. But analysts need to not be confused by the bright sparkling lights of fancy new technology or assume that it will have effects independently of the real lines of power and politics.
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politics come first, and that technology alone can have only a very limited impact in the face of authoritarian states. Where internet activists have had a significant impact in Arab countries, it has usually been tied to distinct political opportunities – such as the Kwuaiti royal transition or elections --- or else led by people who were activists first and used technology as a tool. New media did help activists in Egypt, Bahrain and elsewhere to punch well above their weight for a while... but eventually the regimes caught up and the real balance of power showed.
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I have a hard time thinking of a communications technology more poorly suited for organizing high-risk political collective action than Facebook.
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Op-Ed Columnist - Tear Down This Cyberwall! - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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The push to remove witnesses may be the prelude to a Tehran Tiananmen. Yet a secret Internet lifeline remains, and it’s a tribute to the crazy, globalized world we live in. The lifeline was designed by Chinese computer engineers in America to evade Communist Party censorship of a repressed Chinese spiritual group, the Falun Gong.Today, it is these Chinese supporters of Falun Gong who are the best hope for Iranians trying to reach blocked sites.“We don’t have the heart to cut off the Iranians,” said Shiyu Zhou, a computer scientist and leader in the Chinese effort, called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium. “But if our servers overload too much, we may have to cut down the traffic.”
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China is fighting back against the “hacktivists.” The government has announced that new computers sold beginning next month will have to have Internet filtering software, called Green Dam (the consortium has already developed software called Green Tsunami to neutralize it). More alarming, in 2006 a consortium engineer living outside Atlanta was attacked in his home, beaten up and his computers stolen. The engineers behind Freegate are now careful not to disclose their physical locations.
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bullets usually trump tweets
The Making of a YouTube Radical - The New York Times - 0 views
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Mr. Cain, 26, recently swore off the alt-right nearly five years after discovering it, and has become a vocal critic of the movement. He is scarred by his experience of being radicalized by what he calls a “decentralized cult” of far-right YouTube personalities, who convinced him that Western civilization was under threat from Muslim immigrants and cultural Marxists, that innate I.Q. differences explained racial disparities, and that feminism was a dangerous ideology.
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Over years of reporting on internet culture, I’ve heard countless versions of Mr. Cain’s story: an aimless young man — usually white, frequently interested in video games — visits YouTube looking for direction or distraction and is seduced by a community of far-right creators. Some young men discover far-right videos by accident, while others seek them out. Some travel all the way to neo-Nazism, while others stop at milder forms of bigotry.
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YouTube and its recommendation algorithm, the software that determines which videos appear on users’ home pages and inside the “Up Next” sidebar next to a video that is playing. The algorithm is responsible for more than 70 percent of all time spent on the site
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