Category Archives: Censorship

How WikiLeaks stayed online despite the DDOS attack

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From Technology Review.

As of this moment, according to Wikileaks itself, the site is under a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack “now exceeding 10 Gigabits a second.” These kinds of attacks are typically carried out by a widely distributed ‘botnet’ of zombie computers under the control of a single or a group of hackers. They are par for the course on the web, and have been used in everything from extortion efforts against businesses to cyberattacks on neighboring countries.

What’s interesting about this attack is that Wikileaks’ webmasters have switched from their usual host, Swedish company PRQ, which has at times also hosted the media pirating site The Pirate Bay, to Amazon’s cloud services.

According to network analyst Andree Tonk, who posted his observations on the mailing list of the esteemed North American Network Operators’ Group, Wikileaks moved to Amazon hosting, in particular Amazon’s EU cluster in Dublin, some time Sunday, when the first denial of service attack was launched against the site.

Hmmm… Yet another way of rationalising my (inordinate) spending on Amazon.

UPDATE (December 4): Scrub that last remark. Amazon dumped them when the going got rough. See later post.

Look before you leak

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This morning’s Observer column.

In the annals of the net, one of the sacred texts is John Gilmore’s aphorism that “the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”. Mr Gilmore is a celebrated engineer, entrepreneur and libertarian activist, who is regarded by the US Department of Homeland Security, the National Security Agency and men in suits everywhere as a pain in the ass. He was the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems, which meant that he made a lot of money early in life, and he has devoted the rest of his time to spending it on a variety of excellent causes. These include: creating the ‘alt’ (for alternative) hierarchy in the Usenet discussion fora; open-source software; drugs law reform; philanthropy; and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (which last week won a notable concession from the Library of Congress to legalise the “jailbreaking” of one’s iPhone – ie liberating it from Apple’s technical shackles).

The aphorism came up a lot last week following publication by the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel of extensive reports based on the stash of classified US military reports published on the WikiLeaks website. And of course in one sense this latest publishing coup does appear to confirm Gilmore’s original insight. But at the same time it grossly underestimates the amount of determination and technical ingenuity needed to make sure that the aphorism continues to hold good…

Google and China

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Rebecca MacKinnon offers a typically informed and intelligent comment on the Chinese decision to renew Google’s operating licence.

Since Chinese regulators don’t confide in me personally I can only speculate on their motivations. It seems that the pragmatists have prevailed over the ideologues in this case. If Google’s web license were to be denied, Google would be shut out of China completely. That sends a very negative message to the international business community, which is already concerned about China’s politicized business environment. Questions would be raised about barriers to trade. The problem could be taken to the governmental level at a time when the last thing the U.S. and China need is more cause for tension. Now that Google.cn is in technical legal compliance and the uncensored search engine has been taken offshore out of mainland Chinese jurisdiction to Hong Kong where it is perfectly legal, it’s better for Chinese regulators to declare victory and allow Google to pursue business activities in China that do not run afoul of Chinese regulations: R&D, advertising sales, mobile operating platforms, etc.

Yep. It looks to me as though Google judged this one very astutely.

Apple bans Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist from iPhone

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From The Register.

This week, a California political cartoonist was awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. Last December, Apple’s App Store police barred his work from its hallowed online halls.

As reported Thursday by Harvard University's Nieman Journalism Lab, Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Mark Fiore submitted his cartoon app NewsToons to the App Store Police, only to have it rejected.

Fiore’s sin: violation of the sacred section 3.3.14 of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement, which reads:

Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple's reasonable judgment may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.

We’ll gloss over that risible ‘reasonable judgement’ bit and instead pose a simple question: Keeping in mind that Fiore is a political cartoonist, might that “offensive or defamatory” judgment be solely in the eyes of the beholder?

Meaning, are the App Store police censoring commentary based upon their own tastes? Well, of course they are.

LATER: It seems that the ban has been rescinded. Amazing what a firestorm of bad publicity can achieve.

Google learns to dog-whistle

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This morning’s Observer column.

Another sign of Google’s growing political sophistication is the way it has started to translate its Chinese difficulties into terms that the US government takes seriously, namely trade. “Since services and information are our most successful exports,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin told the Guardian, “if regulations in China… prevent us from being competitive, then they are a trade barrier.”

This is pure dog-whistle politics. Western governments, especially in the US, engage in endless posturing about human rights, but rarely do anything to endanger their economic interests. But governments do care about restraints on trade and are minded to take action to deal with them. As General de Gaulle, paraphrasing Lord Palmerston, once observed: “Great nations do not have friends; they only have interests.” By aligning their company’s commercial interests with the wider economic interest of the US, the Google boys have begun to recruit powerful allies…

Libraries and the digital record

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Jonathan Zittrain from the Berkman Center at Harvard gave this riveting lecture at Duke University on March 3. It’s quite long — an hour and a quarter — so you need to allocate some serious time to it, but IMHO it’s worth it. It starts slowly as he lays out an analytical framework that, at first sight, seems to have little to do with libraries, but about 27 minutes in to the presentation he really hits his stride. For anyone interested in the cultural responsibilities of libraries in a digital era, this is eye-opening stuff becasue it gives some concrete examples of cases where libraries will need to assume really serious responsibilities as curators of the digital record, not just in terms of preservation, but also in defence of historical accuracy.

The Google Three

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This morning”s Observer column about the Italian convictions handed out to three Googlers.

In the case of the Google Three, however, it’s likely that they will be vindicated because even if the Italian appeal fails, there is always the possibility of recourse to the European Court in Strasbourg, which will take the view that European Union law, as currently drafted, appears to give hosting providers a safe harbour from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The downside of this, of course, is that Google will have to be much more responsive to complaints, which will make it much easier to have videos taken down because the prudent course will always be to “take down first and ask questions later”.

The glory days of YouTube may be coming to an end. And Silvio Berlusconi remains at large.

The Myth of Techno-Utopia

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Evgeny Morozov has a book coming out later this year about the Internet and democracy in which he takes a critical look at techno-utopianism. In the WSJ today he sets out his stall.

our debate about the Internet's role in democratization—increasingly dominated by techno-utopianism—is in dire need of moderation, for there are at least as many reasons to be skeptical. Ironically, the role that the Internet played in the recent events in Iran shows us why: Revolutionary change that can topple strong authoritarian regimes requires a high degree of centralization among their opponents. The Internet does not always help here. One can have "organizing without organizations"—the phrase is in the subtitle of "Here Comes Everybody," Clay Shirky's best-selling 2008 book about the power of social media—but one can't have revolutions without revolutionaries.

Contrary to the utopian rhetoric of social media enthusiasts, the Internet often makes the jump from deliberation to participation even more difficult, thwarting collective action under the heavy pressure of never-ending internal debate. This is what may explain the impotence of recent protests in Iran: Thanks to the sociability and high degree of decentralization afforded by the Internet, Iran's Green Movement has been split into so many competing debate chambers—some of them composed primarily of net-savvy Iranians in the diaspora—that it couldn't collect itself on the eve of the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution. The Green Movement may have simply drowned in its own tweets.

Google and China: from drama to crisis in one easy step

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This morning’s Observer column.

ONE USEFUL spin-off from the developing story of Google’s difficulties with the Chinese communist regime is that it may finally spur the west to discard the rose-tinted spectacles through which it has chosen to view China in the past decade – and not before time.

The west’s response to China’s rapid industrialisation was determined by a recipe blending three parts greed with one part naivety. The greed was understandable: the stupendous rate of Chinese economic growth triggered a desperate desire for a slice of the action. Everywhere, whether in companies or universities, one found a palpable determination to “get into China”. In the political world, we saw western governments scramble to out-do one another in fawning upon visiting Chinese potentates.

Still, greed is part of human nature; we have to make a living, and often behave reprehensibly while doing so. What was less forgivable about the west’s approach was the implicit naivety. It was a product of wishful thinking brought about by market triumphalism, the belief that, in the end, it is impossible to have a capitalist economy without also having liberal political institutions…

FOOTNOTES:

  • Full text of Hilary Clinton’s speech on Internet Freedom is here. And Clay Shirky has done a useful abridged version.
  • Microsoft, of course, has no problems with Chinese censorship. Indeed Steve Ballmer thinks the Google view is nuts, at least according to this report:

    At a conference in Houston on Thursday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer spoke critically of Google’s recent decision to stop censoring its search results in China. Paraphrasing some of Ballmer’s statements, Forbes says Ballmer called it an “irrational business decision” on Google’s part.

    Ballmer suggested that Google’s decision to no longer filter out internet searches objectionable to the Chinese government was an irrational business decision. After all, Ballmer said, the U.S. imports oil from Saudi Arabia despite the censorship that goes on in that country.

    “The U.S. is the most extreme when it comes to free speech,” said Ballmer, noting however that even the U.S. bans child pornography, while France bans internet access to Nazi imagery.

    Forbes says Ballmer made the statements during the Q&A session after a speech to oil company executives. Ballmer also said that Bing will comply with requests to censor its search results “if the Chinese government gives us proper legal notice.”

  • Perry Anderson has a terrific piece about Sinomania in the current issue of the London Review of Books.