According to anasonline blog, access to Wikipedia Arabic, the Arabic language version of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, is now blocked by all ISPs in Syria.

I agreed to help judge the competition for Second Life and the Public Good: A Community Challenge gives real rewards. I need to say no to all offers for the rest of the summer, so I can concentrate on the social media classroom/collaboratory, but I couldn’t say no to this.

The USC Network Culture Project is hosting a Community Challenge entitled Second Life and the Public Good; request for Proposals is now available on the web at http://networkculture.usc.edu. Teams and individuals can apply to win a three month grant of L$100,000 per month with land to develop their vision for real world action.

A special international language session will be held on May 12, 2008 at 9PM PST to ask questions about the new community challenge. Panelists and USC Network Culture hosts will be on hand to answer questions about this new grant cycle within Second Life on 5/12 and 5/15 at Noon at the International Island amphitheatre. Community Challenge panelists include Howard Rheingold, Rik Panganiban, Craig Wacker, Lori Bell and Randall Moss; community leaders from Second Life and social media circles.

Led by Doug Thomas, principal investigator at the USC Annenberg School of Communication, the USC Network Culture project invites the residents of Second Life to imagine new ways that virtual worlds such as Second Life can be used to make a contribution to the public good. Thomas introduced the challenge inworld: “We really wanted to put out a challenge to the various communities that make up Second Life to find ways to use a virtual world to make a difference in the physical world”.

Community Challenge proposals from groups, organizations or individuals will show how Second Life can enhance, develop, or sustain the public good. The best submissions will be selected based on how well they demonstrate the significance of virtual worlds for making an impact on society or culture. Up to three finalists will be selected by community vote to receive sizable grants for a three month development season. The Network Culture group in Second Life will help avatars track progress through the June voting cycle.

Projects may address any social need and could include conservation, human rights and international justice, global peace and security, reproductive health, digital media and learning, or juvenile justice. Finished proposals will be emailed to networkculture@gmail.com and should provide a clear description of how the project uses the abilities of Second Life to advance the project goals.

This Community Challenge is part of ongoing philanthropic research in virtual worlds by the USC Network Culture Project. Thomas notes “We are hoping this challenge will expand the possibilities and opportunities for philanthropy in virtual worlds. Building off the creativity and energy of virtual world residents, we also hope to challenge philanthropic organizations to start taking note of the possibilities that these spaces offer. We are really looking forward to the conversations, collaborations and new ideas that this challenge is sure to produce.”

For more information visit the Annenberg Amphitheatre on International Island at http://slurl.com/secondlife/International%20Island/142/55/30 or contact Evonne Heyning, USC Network Culture events producer, In Kenzo in Second Life at inkenzo@gmail.com.

YouTube was blocked again in Turkey on May 6, 2008 following an Ankara court order. YouTube has been banned a number of times in the last two years, usually because of videos offensive to the country hero Kemal Ataturk or to the broadly defined “Turkishness”. Article 301 of the Turkish Criminal Code, which criminalizes activities insulting “Turkishness”, is one of the most debated provisions in the Code, and has been widely used by the Criminal Courts of Peace to regulate online activities.  Any such offensive video is sufficient to trigger prosecutor’s office reaction despite YouTube’s previously expressed agreement to take down offensive videos if advised in advance, as noted by UK Times Online (here).

Most of the court rulings remain hidden from the public eye. One of the reasons for this is the recent change in the Attorneys’ Law in Turkey, which restricts, in this type of cases, the right to make a copy of a court decision available to only the parties. This provides leeway for speculation on the grounds of these decisions and makes it difficult for other Web sites to understand how they can fully comply with the law. 

ONI research has shown that usually the court grounds its rulings on the Turkey Internet Law that sanctions criminal activities committed online and on a number of other laws, including the Criminal Code and the Law on Crimes Against Ataturk. The Telecommunications Regulatory Agency is not always made aware of the ban prior to its implementation.  Instead, the main ISP in the country, TurkTelecom, implements the ruling directly and sometimes other ISPs may be requested to block the site as well. As a result, most often the content providers and site owners hear of the court proceedings and eventual ban only after their site has been blocked. (For example, see previous bans on WordPress and YouTube).

In addition, an individual claim may be sufficient to cause a ban of a whole site: a recent GoogleGroups ban, according to ONI research, was enforced following an individual claim that a blogger posted a defamatory comment on the server against the claimant.

The most recent YouTube ban, however, has been executed by the Telecommunications Agency following a court decision; specific reasons for the ruling remain unknown. The block page says in English and Turkish “YouTube was blocked by Telekomünikasyon İletişim Başkanlığı, according to the order of Ankara 11. Sulh Ceza Mahkemesi, April 24, 2008 of 2008/468.” Interestingly, on several occasions when access to YouTube was attempted, the connection timed out.

A number of sites has been blocked in Turkey for the last months, including P2P sites, live stream sport sites, CNN blogger, military, and forum sites. Some of the blocks remain even after the domain names expire.

In January was ordered a ban on Slide.com, which was executed days later. A site representative confirmed to an ONI researcher that Slide had not received any official notice from the Turkish court regarding his issue. Apparently, other services of Slide.com were also blocked, including the FunWall and SuperPoke applications on Facebook. The Turkish users received a block message when attempting to access these services.

According to Reuters, cited by Turkishdaily.com, the Slide.com team had to find a way to help users within Turkey regain access to their services. The Slide’s site and its applications are available now but the number of sites blocked or threatened to be blocked in Turkey is rapidly growing.

 

The online Apple store has currently no iPhones in stock. Both the 8GB and 16GB iPhone are marked as "Currently Unavailable", reports I4U.

This could also just be a store glitch, but we also already learned that week that O2 has run out of iPhones in the UK.

It is suspected that this shortage already heralds the 3G iPhone, but I still think that Apple will continue to offer the normal iPhone for a while. Not everybody gets 3G coverage.

Foreign aid workers dedicated to delivering emergency telecoms in disaster areas have been prevented from going into cyclone-hit Burma. The BBC reports.

"Like many charity groups, the Telecoms Sans Frontières (TSF) organisation has so far been denied entry visas by the military-run government.

A TSF team has been waiting in Bangkok, Thailand, with its equipment all week.

If visas are eventually granted, the team will go in to set up phone and other network links.

These will be used by many aid groups to co-ordinate the huge relief effort that is needed.

Locals will also be offered "welfare calls", to make contact with friends and family who will have been worried about their safety.

The UN fears more than 1.5 million people have been affected by Cyclone Nargis which struck on Saturday.

You know that moment in the old movies when they take the bandage off the patient’s eye? He blinks once, twice and as his vision resolves, he sees the beautiful nurse smiling at him.

That’s not how it happened for me.

As the medical resident took the bandages off me, I saw nothing but a yellow cloud. She covered my good eye, and asked me to tell her how many fingers she was holding up. I saw nothing, not even her hand.

The main feature of the surgery I had midday on Tuesday was the removal of the vitreous humor from my right eye. That’s the clear jelly that your eyes are filled with. That jelly had turned fibrous in my eyes and was acting as a trellis for blood vessels to grow on. So the surgeon removed the vitreous, the bad blood vessels, the scar tissue and refilled the eye with saline.

So far, so good. But there’s a lot of blood, tissue and crap in the eye, and that’s all mixed with the saline, resulting in a fluid much like muddy water.

Muddy water settles, but it takes a while. I used to carry a small vial of water and sand - the centerpiece from an art piece I installed my junior year - from apartment to apartment early in my life. Each time I packed my things, the water would turn dark and muddy. I’d put it in a place of pride in the new apartment and wait for it to settle. One day, I’d glance at it and it would be clear water and sand again.

And that’s what’s happening right now in my right eye. One day away from the surgery, the world through my right eye looked like a Mark Rothko painting. Yesterday, I’d made it as far as later Monet. Today, the world through my right eye looks like a 1950s Playboy shoot, the kind with heavy vaseline on the lens.

I’d figured that the challenge of healing would be forcing myself not to be dumb, not to race right back into reading and writing email. Truth be told, it simply hasn’t been possible. I can’t read at all without closing my right eye, and that’s painful to do more than a few minutes at a time.

And so… I’ve spent the last three days watching the first season of The Wire, and playing Grand Theft Auto. (Not the new one - I never finished San Andreas.) All of which seems to be helping, though I feel like an absolute and total slug. Aside from not using my eyes, my doctor has ordered me not to work out or even go for a walk at least for the first week of recovery. Turns out I’m very, very bad at sitting still.

The good news, however, is that the surgery was a complete success. I’m just looking forward to some moment in the future where I’ll actually be able to see those results. And I’m beginning to get my head around the idea that it might be another week before that happens.

More than 300 people ran riot and destroyed the award-winning Millenium Square garden in Leeds UK after they responded to a campaign for a mass water fight on social networking website Facebook.

Videos and pictures of people destroying the garden have been posted on the Facebook site and footage has also featured on YouTube. Organisers even boast of the “success” of their “event”.

Plants were trampled, turf ripped up, water features emptied and filled with foam and the mechanism for the fountains is thought to have been damaged during the rampage.

Daily Mail of May 9th shows the pictures

A new british reality-game show produced by Justin Timberlake for MTV involves cell phones. The BBC reports.

"The program is based on a Dutch production and begins each time with two hidden mobiles ringing in different locations of a big city.

In the MTV show called "The Phone", contestants who answer the mobiles will have five seconds to decide if they want to play the game for a cash prize.

A guide on the other end of the line then gives them a mission to complete before time runs out.

And hardly going over board, MTV executive vice-president Tony Disanto described the show as "genre-busting".

"Reinvention is at the core of what we do, and The Phone does just that. Each week will be an action-packed mini-movie," he added. "

Gizmowatch, a Hand Phone concept.

Cellphones have become consumers’ most personal technological devices. Some industry executives, along with consumer groups and security experts, are concerned that unwanted text messages on phones will be an even greater headache than unwanted computer messages. [via The New York Times]

"... American consumers are expected to receive an estimated 1.5 billion unsolicited text messages in 2008, according to Ferris Research, based in San Francisco, which tracks mobile messaging trends. That is nearly double what they received in 2006.

Of course that is a small percentage of the overall number of messages: an industry survey showed that consumers in the United States sent and received about 48 billion text messages in December alone. But for many people who are charged as much as 20 cents for an incoming message or are interrupted in the middle of dinner, even one is too many."

I have to laugh when I see commercials like this from AT&T-or any wireless carrier for that matter:



I can name at least a couple of places where I get zero bars on AT&T. And you know what? They're inside buildings, much like the bar in this commercial.

The voice over on this commercial says "for the best coverage," to which the text disclaimer on the screen says "based on global coverage." That may be true, but it still doesn't mean you'll have coverage everywhere. For example I frequently have zero bars when I'm in the locker room at the YMCA or at the gymnastics place I take my kids sometimes.

Bottom line, folks, even the coverage maps don't tell the complete tale. You've gotta try the service out to see where the service works or doesn't. Take advantage of whatever trial period the carrier offers to ensure it has more bars in more places-places you actually go on a regular basis. See full article.

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Spotted on Just Another Mobile Phone Blog, a concept phone that separates the handset from the screen, so you can talk on the phone while watching mobile TV.

Back in April, I blogged about how Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was “dead wrong” when he testified before the Senate that personal information can’t be “skimmed” from an unencrypted barcode, which all driver’s licenses will have under the REAL ID program. Chertoff completely denied that there are any privacy risks associated with the REAL ID card’s “machine-readable zone.”

Sen. Feingold, D-WI, was right to question Chertoff’s testimony that day and followed up with a letter asking the Secretary to further explain why he thought citizens’ personal information wasn’t at risk or why they couldn’t be tracked by scanning REAL ID cards during a multitude of transactions. Just this week, DHS responded to Sen. Feingold via letter. The Department again shirked responsibility for ensuring that Americans’ personal information stored on REAL ID cards is protected and not accessible by unauthorized parties – businesses and government agencies alike.

As with virtually all REAL ID privacy issues, DHS has punted the security of the machine-readable zone (i.e., barcode) to the states. CDT has consistently highlighted this as a key privacy issue (among many), arguing that the REAL ID program in total should be scrapped. Or, at the very least, the privacy and security shortfalls should be addressed by new legislation. Congress must act soon because DHS clearly can’t be trusted to meaningfully protect personal privacy.

Chertoff did not sign the DHS response letter. This saved the Secretary the embarrassment of admitting that he was the one who was wrong on this matter and not the privacy advocates seeking to protect the security of Americans from identity theft and other threats by raising the issue.

Often, in social/business situations, we are either a hub[blue node] or a spoke[green node] in the network of interaction and knowledge exchange.

A few months ago, I blogged about how "not to be taken advantage of" if you are a spoke in an interaction. Now my old network buddy, Guy Hagen, tells us how to be an effective hub in a negotiation.

See how these two strategies use similar, yet opposing, network dynamics?

Connect your allies, fragment your opponents.

According to TUAW, Switzerland, Spain, Poland who are still waiting for the iPhone, may finally be getting them.

For Switzerland, earlier this week, Le Matin reported that Swisscom would be the official iPhone carrier and would launch the 3G version of the iPhone this summer.

However the official spokesperson for Swisscom, Christian Neuhaus, remains secretive about the deal and said "nothing is done".

Electromagnetic signals from cell phones can change your brainwaves and behavior. But don't break out the aluminum foil head shield just yet, writes Scientific American.

Could the electrical signals coming from a phone affect certain brainwaves operating in resonance with cell phone transmission frequencies? After all, the caller's cerebral cortex is just centimeters away from radiation broadcast from the phone's antenna. Two studies provide some revealing news: cell phones alter your behaviour and cause insomnia.

lthough this research shows that cell phone transmissions can affect a person's brainwaves with persistent effects on behavior, there is no need for concern that cell phones are damaging.

The arousal effects the researchers measured are equivalent to about half a cup of coffee, and many other factors in a person's surroundings will affect a night's sleep as much or more than cell phone transmissions.

• Nearly 1 in 4 emails to opt-in addresses lands in junk/bulk folders
  From 10/1/07 - 12/31/07, Lyris HQ EmailAdvisor monitored the full delivery trajectories of 436,558 production level, permission-based email marketing messages sent from 69 different businesses and non-profit orgs to multiple accounts at 59 domains...

As mentioned in the previous post, I attended the INSNA Sunbelt conference and had a wonderful experience. The only negative with the event was the conference hotel's awful WiFi service -- and their response to it.

Hotels are used to dealing with disconnected customers -- hotel guests who do not know each other. They can tell these guests anything. Since most guests do not talk to each other, nothing is verified, no action is coordinated. In terms of social network analysis: the hotel staff spans structural holes between the guests -- occupying the power position in the network. Below is a network map of the situation. The centralized hotel staff are shown by the blue node in the middle, while hotel guests are represented by the green nodes. The green nodes only talk to the blue node and not to each other.


When INSNA arrived, the hotel guests were no longer disconnected -- many people in INSNA know each other and after initial greetings started to talk.

The conversation soon went to the lack of connectivity in the hotel -- no one could get a connection out of the hotel to the internet. Not only did everyone discover they were having the same bad experience, but they discovered they were receiving the same lie from the hotel staff -- "everything is fine, no one else is complaining". Being lied to made "being disconnected" all the more infuriating.

Soon "emergent clusters" of INSNA members went to the front desk as small groups and started demanding better service -- after all we were being charged for WiFi. The front desk manager became overwhelmed by the coordinated action and soon went into hiding and refused to talk about the topic. A network illustration of the connected INSNA hotel guests looks different. Because the green nodes are talking to each other and coordinating a strategy, the big blue node is now more constrained in it's response, and ability to act.


Eventually, wifi service improved, but not to the level one would expect in a business class hotel.

This white paper shows how power dissipates when people in a hub-and-spoke network [a.k.a. hierarchy] start to talk to each other.

Power dissipates, but learning begins.

I will be teaching a graduate level course in Organizational / Social Network Analysis @ Michigan State University during the summer semester. In preparing the reading list for the course I ran across an absolute gem of an article and podcast by one of my favorite network scholars -- Herminia Ibarra.

Herminia is one of those rare academics that can effectively straddle the two worlds of research and business -- she can talk to either audience and translate between the two. In fact, this boundary spanning behavior is an example of her own advice -- bridging between the inside and outside [of whatever organization you belong to] is vital to career success.

Download her interview [MP3] and put it on your iPod and listen to it until you can recite it in your sleep. IMHO, this is the best 10 minute lesson in building effective social networks that I have heard in a very long time!

Listen, learn, and link.

Much happened in the world of filtering in the past year, and ONI has compiled and is now releasing a review of some of the filtering events that took place in 2007. Browse by month, and see what happened over the past year — web sites being blocked and unblocked, and legislation considered and passed. This isn’t a comprehensive list, but perhaps gives a general idea of what has changed, and what may have stayed the same. Look for many more reports of recent changes, as we release updated profiles of our test countries in the coming months.

A leading visionary and enthusiast for virtual learning, Cory Ondrejka is featured in a story in The Wired Campus this afternoon. The headline is: Co-Founder of Second Life Says Academics Are Biggest Trailblazers in Virtual Worlds. Cory says the academics are adopting more than gamers and industry. He also comments on how the professors learn to use the new medium:

Mr. Ondrejka said that when professors first build a virtual campus, they usually try to exactly replicate a classroom in Second Life, with desks, chairs, and walls. But then they realize that the world allows different kinds of movement and communication than the real world. “You realize that in a world where you can fly, classrooms aren’t really that useful,” he said. So professors have built new kinds of classrooms online with no roofs. “Suddenly you see this explosion of classroom forms that matches what they’re trying to teach,” he added.

© functoruser

A number of teachers are adding cell phone features to their online classes. Today's cell phones can do more than store numbers and play games. Many students receive online class updates via programs like Twitter. Here are a few other ways the Teach 42 blog suggests phones can be used:

"1) Check the spelling/definition of a word
2) Research a topic
3) Look up reference images
4) Pull up maps (even with satellite imagery)
5) Document a science lab with built in digital camera/video
6) Fact check on the fly
7) Mail questions to the teacher that they might be embarrassed to ask"

Phones don't have to be a distraction - if used wisely they can actually be a learning tool. Take a look at the full post for other ways today's students are using their cell phones. Crossposted from The Online Universities Weblog See full article.

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There’s an appealing simplicity to “all-you-can-eat” service plans. But at the buffet, there’s a natural limit to how much any individual can consume. Just think what would happen if a few large-volume eaters with virtually limitless appetites started slurping up virtually all the food at the buffet as fast as the restaurant could put it out. The rest of the diners either would face slim pickings, or would have to pay a lot more for the ticket to the buffet line, essentially subsidizing the mega-eaters, so the restaurant could afford to put out a lot more food. All of a sudden, “all-you-can-eat” wouldn’t seem like such an appealing arrangement.

Broadband Internet service in the United States has been sold as an all-you-can-eat offering, but that pricing system is showing some cracks. Time Warner Cable in January announced a trial of usage-based pricing, albeit in just one town. This week BroadbandReports.com was reported that Comcast is considering implementing a monthly usage cap, with overage charges for those who exceed the cap more than once. Usage caps are common in other countries.

Some say that users in the United States are accustomed to all-you-can-eat and will reject these new pricing models. But as in the buffet analogy, it depends what the alternative is. Flat-rate service for “unlimited” use sounds like a good deal, other things being equal It might not turn out to be such a good deal if the result is congestion due to a small percentage of users who engage in constant, high-volume file sharing or other high-volume activities. More modest users could suffer slower service due to congestion; could find their traffic subject to a new level of gatekeeper control and interference as the ISP responds to congestion by throttling back selected traffic, a la Comcast’s throttling of BitTorrent, or could end up paying higher prices to subsidize network expansion.

In the end, wouldn’t it just be more fair to put the burden on those users who are causing the congestion?

In saying this, I don’t mean to suggest that the high-volume users are necessarily doing anything inappropriate. While large-scale copyright infringement and spamming can drive volume, there also may be perfectly legitimate reasons for high-volume usage, whether file sharing or other applications. The problem really isn’t high-volume users per se — it’s the wide disparity in usage volumes among different users. When the disparities are that large, the all-you-can-eat model has major drawbacks. Asking the high-volume users to bear the costs of their usage doesn’t seem like a radical concept for avoiding those drawbacks. And it carries far less risk to the openness of the Internet than having ISPs pick and choose whose traffic will get dropped or bogged down and whose traffic will sail through.

As for consumer acceptance, it may be that nobody wants to have the sense that “the meter is running” with every second spent online. But it should be easily possible to design pricing plans in which only a tiny percentage of users has to worry about surcharges or volume caps. This week’s report about the plan Comcast may be considering offers a case in point. According to the article, only the top 0.1% of all subscribers would hit the usage cap and owe surcharges. For everyone else, the service would feel the same way it does today — essentially unlimited.

Of course, the service today isn’t entirely unlimited. Most carriers have vague restrictions against excessive usage, which they reportedly sometimes enforce. Now, maybe making the bandwidth limitations clear and explicit would change the way some consumers feel about their broadband service. But letting them know that their bandwidth allotment isn’t infinite wouldn’t be a bad thing. Today, users have no reason to inquire about the bandwidth usage of applications they use, much less to steer clear of ones that are inefficient bandwidth guzzlers. Encouraging users to place some value on bandwidth efficiency, the same way they may with energy efficiency, could help address congestion issues in a way that doesn’t raise a whole host of Internet neutrality concerns .

Two final points. First, any move to capped or usage-sensitive subscription plans should be accompanied by the provision of easy-to-use tools so subscribers can see how much bandwidth they are using and where they stand vis-a-vis any applicable caps or surcharge thresholds. Greater consumer awareness of bandwidth usage requires . . . (drumroll) . . . greater consumer ability to see what bandwidth they’re using. Even if the caps or surcharges are only going to affect a tiny percentage of users, anyone should be able to check their status. And providing such tools should not be difficult.

Second, any usage caps or thresholds will need to rise over time, if the idea is to target only the most active users. A cap that affects only 0.1% of users today could in the future start affecting a large proportion of average users once (for example) high-definition video becomes commonly available over the Internet. But this is something that network operators could monitor and adjust over time. Pricing plans can be usage-sensitive and still impose negligible additional complication or hassle on average users.

San Jose Mercury News: Wanted: Los Gatos bloggers. We’re looking for community bloggers in Los Gatos who can write about such things as events in town, school fundraisers, the score of the latest football game. We need someone who would love a forum for reflecting on the latest buzz story in town, or even write things to do for runners, kids, moms, retirees or other groups in town.

This could be a fairly big deal, especially if it means the paper will do more than just highlight what the bloggers do (i.e. pay them for what they do).

But the very fact that the paper has recognized what has been obvious for years — that the bloggers and others running websites in a community are able to supplement, and in some cases replace, what the newspaper has been doing, or failing to do.

Every newspaper should be a portal to the bloggers, Flickr and YouTube posters and others who are creating media about the towns and neighborhoods in the circulation area. That so few understand this is testament to the industry’s continuing cluelessness.

The Merc is owned by a company that has, from all available evidence, vastly more concern for profit than journalism — a company that appears not to see the value of excellence as a business proposition. So if this move is essentially to get more “content” for less money, it’s a loser.

But to the extent that the Mercury News is recognizing and helping to promote a wider and more diverse media ecosystem, this is a potentially noteworthy move.

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With thanks to Peter Vesterbacka.

Hollywood is still the world center of the entertainment business and its movies form the vast majority of what we see on the small and big screens. But, as anyone knows, in the recent years, the enabling powers of the Internet — by providing mass dissemination of production tools and access to new global channels of distribution — make it possible for smart mobs of artists to give life to independent movie projects.

One example is the Star Wreck movie of which it’s been said that it’s ‘the most successful feature-length Internet-distributed film of all time. [It] was made by 3000 people, has been downloaded 8 million times, is under a CreativeCommons license, and made good money both through DVD sales, and through an eventual deal with Universal.’

Encouraged by such a success, the team from Star Wreck comes after 3 years with their second project: Iron Sky, tagged in its press release as a dark science fiction comedy. The tag line of the movie — “In 1945 the Nazis fled to the moon. It’s 2018, and now they’re coming back.” — seems to translate into artistic vision the conspiracy theories that surround The Third Reich — with the promise of a Fourth — and the demystification of the flights to the Moon that were subjects of inspiration and debate for quite a great deal of documentaries in the last years.

A teaser for the movie was released as of the 5th of May and you can watch it on the coming movie’s website. That’s the place where you can find out more about the story of the movie, the main team and other piquant details. Iron Sky is an open community-based project. An active, vibrant and collaborative community of 10,000 people is expected to gather around the project. If you feel interested in making a contribution and getting a place on the ‘hall of fame,’ don’t shy away from this opportunity and subscribe to www.wreckamovie.com, where anybody with a movie idea can start their own production and get the community involved in the project.

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of participating on a panel about location-based services at the FTC’s town hall meeting, Beyond Voice: Mapping the Mobile Marketplace. Now that the number of U.S. consumers who own a mobile device has outpaced the number of U.S. Internet users, the policy issues in the mobile space are taking on increased importance. And with numerous new technologies that can determine the location of a mobile device – not to mention a government mandate that mobile phones should be locatable for 911 emergency purposes – location privacy issues are sure to be front and center.

In a separate proceeding at the FTC, the Commission recently asked for input about what kinds of data should be considered “sensitive” in the behavioral advertising context, where consumers’ online activities are tracked for the purposes of displaying relevant advertisements to them. CDT suggested that geographic location information should be considered as a sensitive data category that deserves special protections, in part because of the unique privacy challenges that location information presents.

Unlike clickstream data, location information can be collected all the time and everywhere. Although many consumers may not realize this – 35% of respondents in a recent study did not believe law enforcement had the ability to track the location of their cell phones – mobile devices are constantly making location information available, even when they’re not in active use. Location information can also reveal potentially sensitive destinations, like government buildings and medical clinics, and it has the potential to be abused for physical stalking or domestic violence. All of these qualities differentiate location information from other kinds of data.

What location privacy does have in common with other kinds of privacy issues is the lack of a uniform set of rules governing the use and disclosure of the information. Telecommunications carriers are held to one set of standards for commercial use and disclosure of location information, while VoIP providers are held to a slightly different set, and third-party applications providers are covered under neither. The standards for government access to location information are also unclear; the case law in this area has not fully coalesced around what is required of government investigators before they can request real-time or historical location information from companies that have it.

Clearing up some of these uncertainties will help to foster consumer trust in the burgeoning location-based environment. On the FTC panel we heard about both the wide array of services that may be able to leverage location and about the kinds of self-regulatory and internal company policies that are helping to shape the creation of location-based initiatives. If these are developed with privacy in mind from the beginning, consumers may soon realize, in a new mobile way, the promise of the age-old saying: location, location, location.

Take note of what’s been happening in Malaysia these past few days since popular blogger and political commentator Raja Petra Kamarudin, 58, was imprisoned on Tuesday after a trial which saw him charged with sedition for having written a blog post.

If the Malaysian government was truly worried about bloggers effecting social unrest, now they have it. Remember, this is a country where any politician worth their mutton—Jeff Ooi was one of several Malaysians who rode their blog and calls for reform to Parliament in recent elections—has a blog, and even the old goats now blog too.

Ex-Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has a highly-read blog, as does PM hopeful Anwar Ibrahim.

“They set up their blogs, and they try to close down our blogs.”

Raja is one of the sharpest voices both online and off in Malaysia, so it’s highly suggested you check out his statements to the public right after his sentencing, vlogged by Malaysian citizen media stronghold, Malaysiakini.

Raja Petra (or RPK) has had his case brought to parliament, where MP-bloggers are calling RPK’s arrest politically-motivated retaliation sought by the current ruling coalition following its heavy losses in recent elections, elections that saw for the first time popular bloggers winning seats, on a platform of increased transparency and post-colonial racial integration.

As the Malaysia Star points out, this is the first time that a blogger has been charged under the Sedition Act, and RPK now faces a fine of up to just over USD 1,500 and/or three years in prison. The trial, which saw businessman Syed Akbar Ali charged with sedition for a comment he left on RPK’s blog, appears to have been carried out with no clarification given as to which part of the Act RPK had supposedly violated.

Multi-ethnic reform lobby group Aliran looks at the text of the Sedition Act, and expresses shock that this led to anything more than a defamation charge.

As of Thursday morning, RPK’s readers have raised online far more than what he stands to be fined, and also today comes news that Raja Petra is on a hunger strike, and refusing to meet even with his own wife.

Following a candlelight vigil held outside Sungai Buloh prison last night, another vigil will be held at 8pm this evening in downtown Kuala Lumpur.

A Facebook group that has been set up to call for RKP’s release is buzzing today, and a whole set of images can be found there, among other places, for anyone who wants to put a badge on their blog to show their
support:

At the center of all this is still the murder of Mongolian former model and polyglot Altantuya; Raja Petra’s blog post calling for justice in her death to be resolved has been posted widely in recent days; here’s how it begins:

Today, we shall not be talking about politics. We shall also not be talking about race or religion. Today, we shall talk about doing the human thing. Today, let’s discuss how to launch a ‘Justice for Altantuya: restore Malaysia’s dignity’ campaign. And let’s send those bastards who murdered Altantuya to hell where they belong.

An invitation was extended earlier to Mr. Kamarudin to come speak at this year’s Global Voices Advocacy summit to be held in Budapest this June, and remains extended now.

A sensor-equipped glove, known as HandTalk, can translate gestures into spoken words on a cell phone. It was developed by students at Carnegie Mellon University as part of a class research project. [via Post Gazette]

"The prototype was demonstrated yesterday at Carnegie Mellon's "Meeting of the Minds" expo of undergraduate research projects.

Someday, the young inventors hope, it may allow deaf people to communicate with those who don't know American Sign Language by having their cell phones speak their words aloud.

When the glove is held in a fist, for instance, the cell phone says "Good morning." When the index finger, second finger and thumb are extended, it says, "I'm having a good time." And when the index finger, little finger and thumb are held out, it politely says, "Thank you for your time."

The top mobile phone operator in Latin America, America Movil SAB, said Wednesday that it has inked a deal with Apple Inc. to bring the multimedia gadget to more than a dozen countries starting later this year. Associated Press reports.

"No details were offered about the arrangement, including whether it would be the exclusive iPhone provider in the targeted countries."

German police are unable to decipher the encryption used in the internet telephone software Skype to monitor calls by suspected criminals and terrorists, Germany's top police officer said on Thursday. The Sydney Morning Herald reports.

"... Experts say Skype and other Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calling software are difficult to intercept because they work by breaking up voice data into small packets and switching them along thousands of router paths instead of a constant circuit between two parties, as with a traditional call.

Ziercke said they were not asking Skype to divulge its encryption keys or leave "back doors open" for German and other country's law enforcement authorities."

• The Gluten Free Insider
  This is maybe my favorite corporate blog ever.
• Skitch.com > akeenan
  maybe my new favorite thing ever.

The next Drupal Meetup is right around the corner. This coming Monday, May 12, we'll be meeting at Stetson's Bar and Restaurant at 7:00 pm to get together and talk Drupal. We'll be in the room upstairs.

As usual we'll kick off the meeting with several five minute lightening round talks. This is your chance to share your latest project or module with the group. Since this meetup is for people of all levels of Drupal expertise - including experts, newbies, those interested in becoming newbies, and users - we do ask that you focus on the big picture needs and functions and keep out the Drupal jargon.

So far, we have these talks on the schedule.

• Showcase of Green Media Toolshed: A community-powered set of tools for communications experts that allows them to create and customize group workspaces - and control the branding and urls. This is done with new advances made the to context module.
• Announcement of ChinaOSL, a two month long code camp happening this summer in Bejing

If you want to talk, post your topic here or come prepared to take over the floor.

read more

Worried about your civil liberties and privacy? Then it may come as a shock to discover that you have unwittingly been allowing your phone to signal your every move writes New Scientist.

"Bluetooth, a wireless link built into many cellphones, makes our movements trackable by anyone equipped with a PC and an appropriate receiver. Vassilis Kostakos at the University of Bath in the UK placed four Bluetooth receivers in the city's centre. Over four months, his team tracked 10,000 Bluetooth phones and was able to "capture and analyse people's encounters" in pubs, streets and shops.

Bluetooth is now more of a privacy threat than the more frequently publicised RFID chips, Kostakos says. "If people are worried, they should turn off the Bluetooth function on their mobile phones."

An American soldier in Afghanistan accidentally dialed his parents' phone number in Oregon, just as he was in the middle of a battle. Techdirt reports.

"His parents weren't home, but the message was recorded on their voicemail, including (as you might expect) guns firing, lots of swearing, and the son yelling about problems he was having with his gun as well as the need for more ammunition. Even worse, the call cut off just as another soldier yelled "Incoming! RPG!"

The voice mail has been posted on YouTube via KPTV.

As you might imagine, the parents were a bit freaked out, but eventually reached their son, who says he's a bit embarrassed by the whole ordeal. Yet another reminder to make sure to "lock" the keypad on your phone. "

Ben Rigby and Rock the Vote have put together a book for activists, politicos, and organizers called "Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web 2.0." It is a how-to guide to help those who want to mobilize using the web, focusing on how organizers can leverage blogging, social network sites, photo/video sharing, mobile phones, wikis, maps and virtual worlds. Interspersed between the directly practical and usable are a handful of "Big Picture" essays which are intended to help organizers put the practical and usable into a broader context. I had the honor of writing one of these based on my talk last year at Personal Democracy Forum. My essay is called "Digital Handshakes in Networked Publics: Why Politicians Must Interact, Not Broadcast." In short, I outline why it is important the politicians treat the online world as another form of public space where direct outreach and interaction is critical. If you see networked publics as a modern-day street, it only makes sense to login to the street and start shaking hands.

If you're only looking to read what I've written, you can check my essay out here. If you're an organizer or activist, you might enjoy it better in the context of the whole book.

activism

I4U reports that Pope Benedict will text message thousands of young Catholics on their mobile phones during World Youth Day in Sydney in July.

"The Pope will text daily messages of inspiration and hope during the six-day Sydney event while digital prayer walls will be erected at event sites and the church will set up a Catholic social networking Web site akin to a Catholic Facebook.

The Catholic Church said it decided to use technology to connect to the estimated 225,000 young Catholics expected to attend the World Youth Day (WYD) celebrations that start on July 15.

Telstra said it plans to connect 8,000 volunteers, 2,000 clergy, 3,000 media and an anticipated 225,000 pilgrims to more than 700 locations around Sydney."

Previously: - World Youth Day - Pope reaches pilgrims by SMS

The aptly named "Data-backup mobile phone charger" from Longshow automatically performs the task of backing-up your contacts whilst your phone is charging, and not only that, the multi-talented device also acts as a portable power supply in case you run out of juice away from mains power, as well as a SD/MMC card reader. Gizmag reports.

"The device supports many major phone brands including Nokia, Motorola, Blackberry, Samsung and Sony-Ericsson and as a portable charger, it can also be used for PMPs, digital cameras and other portable gadgets."

Spotted on FarEast Gizmo, a Hello Kitty car cigar lighter / charger for cell phones.

India had 261 million mobile phone subscriptions at the end of March, ranking it second in terms of the size of the mobile market—behind China. Wireless connections outnumber the 39 million fixed-line phones in India by seven to one.

[via MocoNews.net]

A lousy Q1 and scary message from Synchronoss, which handles gadget activations for companies like AT&T (T) and Time Warner Cable: The company has "materially lowered" its growth expectations for 2008 "due in large part to reduced revenues associated with the iPhone, which masks the underlying growth and momentum of the rest of our business," CEO Stephen Waldis said in the company's earnings release.

Why the drop? Waldis listed three reasons during the company's conference call. Most important: More iPhones are being sold to be "unlocked" -- and never officially activated -- than Synchronoss expected.

[Silicon Alley Insider via Gizmodo]

As I reported elsewhere, Qwest is looking to get out of it's MVNO deal with Sprint. Instead, they will be simply reselling Verizon Wireless service. Qwest customers with more than one service will be able to retain combined billing once Verizon Wireless and Qwest get their billing systems talking with one another.

The obvious question that came from this: what's going to happen to the existing Qwest Wireless customers? Their PR folks told me that the Sprint MVNO agreement doesn't expire until February 2009 and existing customers will continue to receive service without any need to take action. Existing customers will be given a choice to change their service to Verizon Wireless, though the exact details of how and when this will occur is still being developed. No customer will be switched to Verizon Wireless without their consent.

Crossposted from The Wireless Weblog See full article.

Related Entries:

Salt Lake City Grants Qwest Video Franchise - 02 December 2005

Verizon Wireless Gives Its Customers a (Tiny, Irrelevant) Gift... - 01 October 2007

Qwest Exiting Sprint Deal, Switching to Verizon Wireless - 28 February 2008

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The size of the French mobile telephony market reached almost $34 billion in 2007 and was the source of 100,000 direct and indirect jobs in France. By the end of 2007, investment in mobile telecoms networks in France totalled almost $51 billion, according to the French Association of Mobile Operators.

[via Cellular News]

A class of MIT students in mechanical engineering has studied the carbon footprints of different lifestyles, from the homeless to multimillionaires. And the results are both fascinating and frightening. According to the study, even the people with the lowest incomes in the U.S. emit twice more carbon than the average people on Earth. These results might be controversial because the study assumed that everyone in the U.S. is equally using government services. Here is one of the students’ conclusion: ‘Due to the combined effects of subsidies and rebound, the magnitude of possible reductions in energy use for people in the United States by voluntary changes in spending patterns appears limited.’ But read more…

Links: ZDNet, Primidi

Dozens of San Diego State University students were arrested after a sweeping drug investigation found that some fraternity members openly dealt drugs and one even sent a mass text message advertising cocaine, authorities said Tuesday, reports MSNBC.

... "Those arrested included a student who was about to receive a criminal justice degree and another who was to receive a master’s degree in homeland security.

A member of Theta Chi sent out a mass text message to his “faithful customers” stating that he and his “associates” would be unable to sell cocaine while they were in Las Vegas over one weekend, according to the DEA. The text promoted a cocaine “sale” and listed the reduced prices."

Cambridge (UK) is the worst place to live when it comes to mobile phone crime.

According to the Metropolitan Police, as many as 10,000 mobile phones are stolen every month, affecting 20 per cent of the population. The likeliest location for theft: the pub.

[via The Shefiield Telegraph]