Teemu Arina posts this great video about the past two decades, and upcoming couple of years, of mobile phone design.

Then Arina offers this brisk, bold vision of what he thinks is coming down the pike:

“The future of mobile phones is perhaps… not a mobile phone at all, but rather a contextually aware and active mobile magic wand. It’s not about skins anymore. Not even about features, open source, multi-touch or iPhoney. It’s about who is going to make the device interact with your environment as well as capturing it in context. It’s a wand, I tell you. You know what, it’s going to talk with the clouds rather than with native applications. It might or might not link with the global brain.

But what I know for sure, it’s going to combine cloud computing, augmented reality and the internet of things in a meaningful way.”

(via Bruce Sterling)

Android apocalypse

For millenniums mankind has been the most powerful species on Earth. And yet, perhaps without knowing, man slowly but surely has been creating his evolutionary successor. Once dismissed as fantasy, the idea that scientists could build a machine that surpasses the human brain’s mental capabilities is becoming a reality.
Source: Charles Purcell, Sydney Morning Herald, Australia, June 30, 2008

Bags to help laptops pass air security

For years at airport security checkpoints, passengers have heard the refrain, almost a dirge: “Laptops must be removed from their cases and placed on the belt.” Get ready for a change. The Transportation Security Administration has given the go-ahead for passengers to use newly designed carry-on bags that will let them pass through security without having to take their laptops out for the X-ray inspection.
Source: Joe Sharkey, The New York Times, July 1, 2008

Logan will install body scanners

The Transportation Security Administration said yesterday it will beef up screening at Boston’s Logan International Airport with better X-ray machines to check carry-on bags and full-body scanners that can see through clothing to detect whether travelers are concealing objects.
Source: Nicole C. Wong, The Boston Globe, July 1, 2008

Ray-Ban gets arty with flash mob stunt

What do you do when you want to generate a crowd to look at your latest ad? Pay them of course! Ray-Ban has done just that to promote its latest outdoor creation – a huge building wrap created by Ron English.
Source: UTalkMarketing, July 4, 2008

Rising Voices is one of the coolest new projects at Global Voices.

Rising Voices, an outreach initiative of Global Voices, aims to help bring new voices from new communities and speaking new languages to the global conversation by providing resources and funding to local groups reaching out to underrepresented communities.

[...]

Launched in May 2007 thanks to the support of a Knight News Challenge Award, Rising Voices seeks to empower under-represented communities to make their voices heard online by 1.) providing financial support to outreach projects, 2.) developing a series of participatory media tutorials, and 3.) cultivating a network of passionate citizen media activists to help encourage and support the replication of outreach trainings.

This is a dotSUB video recapping some of the projects from last year. Please take a look and register and help finish translating it to to your native language if the translation is incomplete.

Congratulations to the whole team.

David Sasaki

Rezwan
Photo by Neha Viswanathan - Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic License

OhMyNews English edition has posted the text and video of my address to the Korean people, in response to the recent smart mob political demonstrations that have been taking place in Seoul recently. Video now also available on my videoblog.

June saw for the first time ever a blog suspended in Portugal because of a local court decision. The now defunct Póvoa Online blog had been taken to court by Póvoa do Varzim’s council president, Macedo Vieira, and his deputy, Aires Pereira, who claimed the bloggers had been using the blog merely to defame them. The court concluded that most of the blog’s content were opinionated articles, and that its authors criticized Macedo Vieira and Aires Pereira not only as the council’s president and vice-president, but also as “citizens, fathers, family members and friends”.

Tongue in cheek Póvoa Online, which had been available since 2005, was very popular among locals because of its sharp sense of humour and funny caricatures of local politicians, some of which illustrate this piece. Last week, the administrators received the following message from Google explaining the reasons for the closure of the blog hosted with Blogspot:

“Hello,

We’d like to inform you that we’ve received a court order regarding your blog http://povoaonline.blogspot.com. In accordance with the terms of the court order, we’ve been forced to remove your blog. A copy of the court order we received is attached. Thank you for your understanding.

Sincerely,The Blogger Team

No sooner was Povoa Online deleted than a new blog was created by the same group of irreverent bloggers who sign under the pseudonym Tony Vieira. Povoa Offline made its first appearance publishing the full court decision and amassing nearly 150 comments so far. However, they are still not sure why, as citizens, they were forbidden from expressing themselves in a blog, as Tony explains [pt]: “To my knowledge, nobody has been able so far to explain the legal aspects of the court decision to thousands of “bloggers” who are out there in Portugal, only to mention the Portuguese Lusosphere.”

Ludwig Krippahl [pt] believes that the Portuguese judges don’t understand the basic principle that blogs, as opposed to the established media and journalists, are open spaces that represent people’s opinions and this should be therefore defended under the right of expression. He also points out that since 2000 the Portuguese courts have been given five convictions by the European Court of Human Rights for violations of this fundamental right:

Este caso caricato mostra que os autarcas não percebem bem como estas coisas funcionam. Além de chamar mais atenção para estas alegações, agora qualquer um pode ler na notificação do tribunal precisamente aquilo que eles queriam retirar do acesso público. Além disso, apesar de não se saber se as alegações são verdadeiras, a decisão do tribunal só mencione o ataque à reputação, honra e bom nome dos queixosos e não a sua inocência.

Blogger JMSP [pt] has decided to resort to auto-censorship, and thought it was better not to comment further about the reasons behind the decision:

Nem queria acreditar: o blogue mais lido da Póvoa e um dos mais lidos em Portugal, o povoaonline foi eliminado! Resta a cache, aqui e aqui e suas sequelas que perdurarão no etérea www. Nem me atrevo a pronunciar-me sobre o caso, não me bloqueiem também a mim ou, pior, não me mandem para o Tarrafal. Mas, obviamente, disponibilizo-me para testemunha abonatória do velho Tony.

[*Translation note: Tarrafal, also known as "Camp of the Slow Death", was a concentration camp in the former Portuguese colony, Cape Verde]

JCD [pt] says that the blogger could not really be considered a loose cannon, but agrees that it is only fair that the courts deal with the type of accusations they used to make in cases where people felt victims of libelous accusations. However something does not feel quite right:

Mas… não é incomodativo este tipo de actuação judicial, semelhante à queima dos livros, esta opção pelo apagar da história das ofensas passadas? “Crime”, disse o juiz. “Que as palavras heréticas jamais sejam lidas…”

Beijing’s Olympic Plan for the mainland China-based portion of the blogging and BBSing netosphere is starting to take shape. While on one hand it’s coming coated in talk of self-restraint and uses words like “professional” and “responsibility”, the wording in an official notice [zh] which appeared online this week and is being spread by webmasters of sites that stand to be affected suggests that the coming month will see a similar massive shutdown similar to the one we saw leading up to the seventeenth National People’s Congress last year.

This comes at a time when even major commercial web 2.0 sites with tens of dollars of foreign venture capitalist funding can drop dead on the spot with no explanation.

The notice appears to have originated at the Beijing [zh] Communications Authority and was then spread by its local counterparts from Jiangsu to Zhejiang and, further south, Guangdong province:

Special rectification notice for the Olympic period

Dear customer:

We’ve just received notice from upper management that for the duration of The Olympic Period beginning June 20 and ending August 25, the appropriate departments will be carrying out strict investigations to check that websites are on record, that BBSes have been specially recorded, as well as checking for illegal information on websites. If your website meets any of the following criteria, please immediately carry out the appropriate operations, or else your website will be ordered by the upper administrative departments to be shut down:

1. Website is not on record: please immediately proceed to the Ministry of Information Industry website and submit your information to be recorded. Once recording has been successful, please open the Virtual Host Control Panel -> ICP Records and submit your registered record number there.

2. If your website has a BBS or blog, etc., which has obtained a Specially Recorded Forum license, please first close the the BBS or blog, etc., to prevent the forum resulting in the entire website being closed. For details on the procedure of having a forum specially recorded, please contact your local Communications Administration [zh] to enquire. Only local Communications Authorities are clear on how to handle the special recording of local BBSes. Your questions regarding the special recording of forums cannot be accurately handled here.

If there are dynamic information distribution components to your website, such as comment boards, reciprocal information distribution, categorized information distribution, news….etc., please be sure to active a pre-screening publishing mechanism so that all information is screened before it is released and all illegal information is subject to strict screening.

Speaking of regionalization, one tech BBS in northwestern China’s Xinjiang province has reworded the notice such that the website sounds desperate for users not to go beyond the above guidelines, and even defines “illegal information” as the words ‘handgun’, ‘air gun’, ‘dart gun’, ’shotgun’, ‘bomb’ and other weaponry/explosives-related vocab, stating that all such words will be filtered without exception.

On July 2, someone at the Feelings BBS and claiming to represent it added this at the end of the notice in an attempt to clarify the rules for users:

PS: For the duration of the Olympic Period, all major BBSes are already undergoing widespread rectification, and this forum will severely strike at any and all illegal speech and advertising behavior, and IPs will be locked down and reported if any illegal behavior is noticed!

You are not to discuss the current political system (including current military situations, the Ti*be* is*sue, the Tai*wan is*sue, domestic situations, etc.) and it is not allowed for there to appear in any posts any text or image jokes about national leaders! It is not allowed for baseless, unproven news to be reposted, and all that is posted must come from Xinhuanet and other mainstream websites! Are members are invited to self-screen before posting, thank you!

A post last month on the ChinaGFW blog shows that severe measures were also put in place from the end of May to the end of last month as the Olympic torch continued to hobble its way around the country.

A UC San Diego computer scientist has turned his face into a remote control. One of his goals is to ‘use automated facial expression recognition to make robots more effective teachers.’ In fact, this project is ‘at the intersection of facial expression recognition research and automated tutoring systems.’ Changing the speed of the delivery of automated lessons to remote students could make a huge difference in learning. If the robotic teacher goes too fast for you, you need to tell it that it needs to slow down. And this can be done through smiling or frowning at a simple webcam installed on your laptop. But read more…

Links: ZDNet, Primidi

Just as pictures from Hong Kong’s annual march for democracy began appearing on Facebook, a segment of the users of the social networking site in mainland China began blogging their troubles accessing the site altogether, seemingly fulfilling predictions made when news that a localized Chinese version of Facebook was in the works first surfaced last year. Zh-cn.facebook.com went live exactly two weeks before people began documenting access issues:

As these things go, experiences appeared to conflict with each other, leaving many left to conclude that Facebook itself was screwing them around.

Except for the new redirect to zh-cn.facebook.com, the situation at present appears to be mostly as it was, wherein tech-unsavvy Facebook users are left unable to access certain parts of Facebook containing so-called sensitive keywords. Ad hoc tests carried out by five friends of Global Voices Advocacy based in different parts of mainland China today showed that some Facebook groups can still only be loaded partway before freezing in an apparent keyword filter. Of the following Facebook groups, the fifth in order was consistently difficult (including with tests I ran myself) to access and appeared to result in a temporarily reset connection to facebook.com:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16929680703
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7765017060
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2257397452
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5187862317
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2248992944
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=20894947280
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2222354198
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2561706410
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2229467649
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2213066526

If facebook.com really does end up getting blocked and users inside mainland China are forced instead to use zh-cn.facebook.com to set up groups like ‘Redress the Tiananmen Massacre’ or communicate with foreign media workers, will FB follow in the footsteps of its predecessors and filter or hand user-to-user messages over to Chinese police when asked? Or, with its robust user-created networks, will Facebook create an entirely new business model for penetration of the Chinese SNS market?

On Wednesday, Iranian members of parliament voted to discuss a draft bill that seeks to “toughen punishment for disturbing mental security in society.” The text of the bill would add, “establishing websites and weblogs promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy,” to the list of crimes punishable by death.

In recent years, some Iranian bloggers have been sent to jail and many have had their sites filtered. If the Iranian parliament approves this draft bill, bloggers fear they could be legally executed as criminals. No one has defined what it means to “disturb mental security in society”.

Such discussion concerning blogs has not been unique to Iran. It shows that many authorities do not only wish to filter blogs, but also to eliminate bloggers!

A state policy to control blogs

About a year and a half ago, the Iranian government demanded that bloggers should register and provide their names and addresses on a site called Samandehi. Many people believed such a process would facilitate legal action against them.

Bloggers resisted and many published an “I do not register my blog/site” banner on their blogs. The Government then realised it cannot have real control of the situation, or force bloggers to register.

In the footsteps of Yemen?

Unfortunately, the Iranian case is not unique to the Middle East and to the world. In April, MidEastYouth talked about new repressive measures adopted by Yemen, quoting Walid Al-Saqaf, YemenPortal.net’s administrator:

“This week, the government’s Minister of Information threatened to file lawsuits against news websites on the justification of ‘inciting hatred’ or ‘harming national interests’ and the other usual excuse they often use to prosecute journalists. The threat is even more severe for websites because the government would use the penal code instead of the press law. This means that website owners could receive even death penalties.”

“Don’t be upset, we’ll execute you legally”

Nikahang, a leading Iranian online cartoonist and blogger, says [Fa]:

if this draft bill becomes law, everything will be based on interpretation and a simple blogger will be considered a center to destroy people’s religion! What can I say? Only people who disturb people’s mental security could support such a thing.

Mirza Kasra Bakhtyari writes [Fa] that Ali Larijani, the Iranian Parliament’s President, supported discussing this draft bill and added that they have talked for hours with the Judiciary about it.

Ghomarashegahneh says [Fa]:

Mentioning ‘blogging’ among crimes such as kidnapping, raping, armed robbery makes accusing bloggers easier than before… Such a law will harm the mental security of society more than the poor bloggers, who do not know what awaits them.

The blogger adds that the real causes of mental security problems are the economic crisis and repressive government policies.

Bazri warns [Fa]: “We should do our best to stop members of parliament from approving this draft bill. Tomorrow it will be too late. It is easy to accuse a blogger of apostasy and corruption. Let’s tell the Parliament that to think differently is not a crime that should be punishable by death.”

Balocuh has published a cartoon where a cleric tells a woman about to be executed: “Don’t be upset, we’ll execute you legally.”

Marshall Kirkpatrick reports on the ReadWriteWeb that the Iranian parliament is set to debate a draft bill that would add a number of crimes to the list of those that can result in execution, among them “establishing weblogs and sites promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy.” Apostasy means the abandonment of a religion. The official Iranian news agency reports that the bill is intended to “toughen punishment for harming mental security in society.”

Talk given to the Global Voices Summit 2008 Session “Frontline Activists meet the Academy: Tools and Knowledge” on 27th June 2008

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Talk given to the Global Voices Summit 2008 Session “Frontline Activists meet the Academy: Tools and Knowledge” on 27th June 2008

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Talk given to the Global Voices Summit 2008 Session “Citizen Media and Online Free Speech” on 27th June 2008

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Talk given to the Global Voices Summit 2008 Session “Citizen Media and Online Free Speech” on 27th June 2008

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Talk given to the Global Voices Summit 2008 Session “Living with censorship” on 27th June 2008

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Talk given to the Global Voices Summit 2008 Session “Living with censorship” on 27th June 2008

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Talk given to the Global Voices Summit 2008 Session “Frontline Activists meet the Academy: Tools and Knowledge” on 27th June 2008

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The user perspective.

What do people really use, challenges they have, and recommendations for the future.

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Chris Salzberg discusses internet regulation and censorship trends in Japan

Talk given to the Global Voices Summit 2008 Session “Towards a Global Anti-Censorship Network” on 27th June 2008

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Talk given to the Global Voices Summit 2008 Session “Citizen Media and Online Free Speech” on 27th June 2008

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Talk given to the Global Voices Summit 2008 Session “Towards a Global Anti-Censorship Network” on 27th June 2008

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The federal court hearing Viacom’s billion-dollar copyright lawsuit against YouTube issued an order earlier this week in the discovery phase of the case. The court denied Viacom’s audacious request to require YouTube to turn over the source code that powers YouTube’s (and Google’s) search engine. But the court granted the request to compel YouTube to turn over the “logging database” that records all video viewing history information for the site — a compilation of which users watched which videos and when.

This raises privacy concerns. The logging database does not identify users by name, but it does contain users’ IP addresses and unique login IDs. A login ID will be whatever the user chose — which could be anything from a nonsensical set of characters or a random word to the user’s actual name. I’d guess that in a substantial number of cases, the login ID will contain name or email information. In those cases, the login ID, perhaps aided by IP address, could be sufficient to identify the actual, real-world world identity of the user. So the logging database will include identifying information for such individuals, linked to their full YouTube video viewing history.

Information about what videos individuals choose to watch can be very sensitive from a privacy perspective. And disclosing such information can chill expressive activity — after all, people may be reluctant to access certain videos if they know that everything they’ve chosen to watch could later be disclosed to third parties as part of legal disputes to which the affected individuals aren’t even party.

Moreover, as EFF’s Kurt Opshal has already pointed out, there’s a law specifically governing disclosure of individual video viewing logs. 18 USC 2710 prohibits a video tape provider or anyone else engaged in delivery of audio visual materials “similar” to video tapes from disclosing personally identifiable data about individual renting/viewing histories. It seems to me there is a very strong argument that YouTube delivers viewing material similar to video tapes; if online videos aren’t similar to video tapes, what would be? There’s also a strong argument that records for many users with revealing login IDs would qualify as personally identifiable. The court ruling this week mentioned the video tape statute briefly, but didn’t come close to offering a satisfactory analysis for why it shouldn’t apply. And if the statute does apply, it addresses the discovery question explicitly: disclosure of video usage information can be required by a court order in a civil proceeding if there is a compelling need that can’t be accommodated some other way. In addition, the consumer must be given reasonable notice and an opportunity to contest the disclosure. The court order this week does not feature such safeguards.

It seems likely, however, that Viacom doesn’t actually need to link specific videos to specific users. Viacom’s goal, presumably — and more on that in a moment — is to try to show that providing access to infringing video is a crucial and perhaps dominant aspect of YouTube’s business. For that purpose, aggregate and/or anonymous data (i.e., not linked or linkable to actual login IDs or IP addresses) should be perfectly sufficient. Viacom shouldn’t actually need specific login IDs or IP addresses at all. Significantly, Google says it is asking Viacom to let it anonymize the data before turning it over. Hopefully Viacom will agree that anonymous data is sufficient.

For those looking ahead to the merits of the case, Viacom’s request for the logging database raises the more speculative question of how Viacom may want to use the data it will get. Under the Sony Betamax case, the maker of a tool that can be used to infringe should not be secondarily liable for infringements committed by users so long as the tool has “substantial non-infringing uses.” The Supreme Court in Grokster declined to specify a quantitative threshold for “substantial non-infringing use.” But it seems clear, in YouTube’s case, that there are many people using the service for non-infringing purposes. I think there is no way the data will show that (say) 90 percent of YouTube’s use is infringement. So what does Viacom hope to show? I don’t know exactly what the data will reveal, but suppose that it allows Viacom to argue that 60% of the use of YouTube is infringement. I don’t see how a court could say that 40% of the huge amount of usage YouTube gets is not “substantial.” If that is the type of argument Viacom hopes to make, it will amount to an attempt to eviscerate Sony’s “substantial non-infringing use” defense.

David Weinberger has an intriguing post up today about the “Fallacy of Examples“. He’s reacting to a column from Nick Kristof in the New York Times titled “The Luckiest Girl“, which recounts the story of Beatrice Biira, a young woman from Uganda whose improbable journey through Connecticut College began with the donation of a goat to her family through Heifer International.

David finds the story moving - how could you not! - but points out that Biira’s amazing journey is hardly a typical outcome of livestock donation programs. Indeed, the reason Kristof is telling it is that it’s so remarkable. And that may be something of a problem:

I’ve noticed in business writing in particular the frequency of what we can call the Fallacy of Examples (a type of Fallacy of Hasty Generalization). You read some story about a successful CEO as if we should learn from his (yes, usually it’s a him) example. But we are struck by examples frequently because they’re exceptional. As exceptions, examples are the last thing you want to learn from.

Not always, though. Sometimes examples are typical. That’s different. The trick is determining which are which.

The problem of deciding whether an example is typical or exceptional struck me as resonant with Clay Shirky’s new (brilliant, must-read, go buy it now) book Here Comes Everybody. Throughout the book, Clay points out that online communities tend to experience a power-law (Pareto) distribution of participation. If you attempt to generalize about the group as a whole from the most prolific participants, you’re going to misunderstand what’s going on.

This is a predictable misunderstanding - we appear to have a tendency to assume that people we encounter are distributed on a bell curve. Fly into Amsterdam and you’ll notice that there are a lot of tall people around. Spend a day or two and you’ll likely conclude that Dutch people are tall, significantly taller than Americans. This turns out to be true - Dutch people are now roughly two inches taller than their American counterparts, likely due to a better diet and excellent state-subsidized healthcare - your extrapolation from a few data points is a pretty accurate one.

Try a different experiment - watch some American TV and try to extrapolate the bell curve of body type in the US. You’re going to get it wrong, and you’re going to feel fat, no matter how skinny you happen to be. People on American television aren’t a bell curve distribution in term of weight - they’re way, way out on an extreme. Media critics suggest that the relentless repetition of images of underweight actresses has a negative impact on young women, leading them to aspire to extreme body types.

Here’s the thing - it’s lots easier to write about extreme examples rather than median ones. (It’s probably easier to watch extremely thin people on TV than ones of median weight as well.) Stories of prolific wikipedians, alpha bloggers or brilliant flickr photographers are more interesting than stories about someone who set up a LiveJournal, posted five times then gave up… which is lots more typical. And Biira’s story is far more compelling than the story of a girl whose family got a goat, and is slightly better fed than the median Ugandan, but who didn’t get to go to school. This, unfortunately, is probably closer to the median effect of livestock donation - not a bad thing, by any means, but not wholly transformative.

The answer to the Fallacy of Examples is not to stop giving examples. Human beings need stories to be interested in issues - that appears to be how we’re wired to take in information. Joi Ito, writing about the recent Global Voices summit, talks about how personal stories can help solve “the caring problem”, making international incidents relavent to audiences who might not care about this news otherwise. Kristof needs to tell us about Biira to get us interested in livestock donation - we’re not going to pay attention without a human story to hold onto.

(Indeed, some critics point out that livestock donation is a form of storytelling as well. Your $120 isn’t buying a goat - it’s a way of getting you to donate to an agricultural charity which will use your money to provision livestock, but also to pay staff salaries, fundraising expenses, etc. The story of giving a goat to a poor family convinces you to give, and perhaps to give more than you otherwise would.)

The solution may be to try to contextualize the story - is the example given an ordinary or an extraordinary one? Kristof signals this with his title, making it clear that Biira is an extraordinary case. But the story would probably be a fairer one with a more representative, median example, offered as a contrast. If you buy a goat for a Ugandan child, you’re probably not going to send a young woman to college… but you just might. It’s hard for me to blame Kristof for telling this amazing story, but it makes me wonder how many unconcious and inaccurate generalizations I’m making every day, looking at extremes and unconciously assuming they’re medians.

There’s this guy, Matt Harding. He describes himself as “a 31-year-old deadbeat from Connecticut who used to think that all he ever wanted to do in life was make and play videogames.” After Matt got sick of his job making videogames in Brisbane, Australia, he started an extended global walkabout. And as he travelled the world, he danced - badly - and had friends record him performing the same dance in front of some of the great sites of the world.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Matt is something of an internet celebrity - his videos have been watched millions of times, and the most recent one (above) is pretty damned charming. I watched it about half a dozen times yesterday, realizing that I liked it so much because the goofy smile on his face in the scenes where dozens of people rush on screen to dance with him is the best approximation of the way I felt at the recent Global Voices Summit. Trust me - there’s very little in life that feels better than talking, singing, dancing and drinking with people from around the world who are working with you on the same project, sharing many of the same values, goals and perspectives - dancing like an idiot on the streets of Lisbon or Sana’a is a pretty good approximation.

(I will also admit that I got a little choked up by Matt’s decision to edit, back to back, a clip of him dancing with a wild group of friends in Tel Aviv followed by a clip of him dancing in the streets of East Jerusalem in the West Bank with a small group of children. Rachel is in West Jerusalem right now, and was planning on travelling to the West Bank tomorrow, for an encounter program intended to let rabbinic students stay with Palestinian families to better understand the complexities of modern Israel and the personal dynamics of the ongoing conflict. Unfortunately, yesterday’s bulldozer attack means the trip was called off, and she’s now looking for other ways to connect with the local Palestinian population.)

Since I’m obviously having some trouble returning to my ordinary work life after the Summit, I spent a bit more time today looking at Matt’s videos, digging into his earlier dance videos. As I started watching his original video, shot in 2005, I winced involuntarily as I realized that the soundtrack was Deep Forest’s “Sweet Lullaby”, a piece of music I have strong feelings about.

“Sweet Lullaby” is a song based around a vocal sample misrepresented as a Pygmy song from Central Africa. Actually, the sample is from a lullaby, “Rorogwela”, sung in the Solomon Islands. The song is sung by a woman named Afunakwa, who was recorded in 1970 by the legendary ethnomusicologist, Dr. Hugo Zemp. The story of Deep Forest’s unauthorized use of the sample, their miscrediting of the sample’s origins and Zemp’s understandable anger has been brilliantly documented by Professor Steven Feld in an article called “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music” in Public Culture. Suffice to say that the guys behind Deep Forest, who portray themselves as “sound reporters”, didn’t feel compelled to properly credit the person or culture the sample came from, or the ethnomusicologist who recorded it.

I used the story of Afunakwa as a way to discuss intellectual property in developing nations in a law class I co-taught, which I documented in a piece called “Tumeric, pygmies and privacy“, one of my favorite blogposts, though one that’s literally never gotten a blog comment or much reaction. (And the students, for the most part, seemed to think that my argument that developing nations might want to use copyright to protect indigenous knowledge was pretty contrary to everything they believed about free culture, remix and all that cool web2.0 stuff…)

So I was pretty blown away to discover a video on Matt’s page titled “Where the Hell is Afunakwa?” Matt evidently discovered the controversy over the song and went to the Solomon Islands - as he says in the opening of the video, “I figured it was time I learned what I can about the song and Afunakwa… and also see about paying back my debt.”

On the island of Malaita in the Solomon Islands, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, in the town of Auki, Matt met David Solo, a cousin of Afunakwa. Talking to David, he learns that Afunakwa has been dead for some years, and gets a partial translation of the lyrics of the song:

[Small brother or sister] keep quiet
I tell you, even though you cry, I try to stop you
Even though you cry, I still carry you

Solo and a friend agree that they’re not able to accurately translate, as the words used are no longer used by people of his generation - they offer to take him to meet with relatives of Afunakwa, older people who can offer a better translation. He wasn’t able to change his flight to have that meeting, but he has plans to visit Afunakwa’s family in Baegu village in a future trip.

I find it deeply moving that a man best known for his goofy dancing felt compelled to discover the real story behind Afunakwa, and I’m grateful for this next chapter in the story. If you’re a documentary filmmaker looking for a tale to tell, allow me to suggest flying Matt and Professor Feld off to the Solomons and tell a final chapter of this story.

By the way, Internet, have I told you lately how much I love you?

The report gives an overview of CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act), how it is implemented, related legislation, and legal actions based on the act. The report also looks at the FTC rules on CAN-SPAM compliance and related state anti-spam laws.

CRS No. RL31953, May 14, 2008

From the report’s summary:

Proponents of CAN-SPAM have argued that consumers are most irritated by
fraudulent email, and that the law should reduce the volume of such email because
of the civil and criminal penalties included therein. Opponents counter that
consumers object to unsolicited commercial email, and since the law legitimizes
commercial email (as long as it conforms with the law’s provisions), consumers
actually may receive more, not fewer, UCE messages. Thus, whether or not “spam”
is reduced depends in part on whether it is defined as only fraudulent commercial
email, or all unsolicited commercial email. Many observers caution that consumers
should not expect any law to solve the spam problem — that consumer education and technological advancements also are needed.

According to several news sites Iran’s parliament is set to debate a draft bill which could see the death penalty used for those deemed to promote corruption, prostitution and apostasy on the Internet. According to this draft bill bloggers can face the death penalty too.