Another use for Twitter

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From Ethan Zuckerman

When I saw Alaa a few weeks ago in Doha, the first thing he did was grab my computer, log into Twitter and, as he put it, “let everyone know I’m still alive.” This is a good thing to do when you’re an activist who routinely gets detained or arrested. Alaa’s Twitter feed includes updates for his compatriots every time he goes to the police or to a demonstration so he can let people know where he is… and if they don’t here from him, perhaps they need to reopen the FreeAlaa blog.

Twitter is also potentially useful for activists organizing a demonstration, as it’s a lightweight mass-SMS sending system, which lets you warn your fellow activists where the police are and what path they should take. Probably not the purpose the designers had, but an excellent use nevertheless.

What the attacks on Estonia have taught us about online combat

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Good piece in Slate by Cyrus Farivar…

The Estonia case also shows how easy it is to cause massive panic on a shoestring budget. All you need to deploy a cyberattack is some malicious software, a bunch of zombie computers distributed around the world, and an Internet connection. Sure, you may need to pay for a “professional-grade” botnet—a network of computers that have been surreptitiously infected to run nefarious software. But surely that costs orders of magnitude less than the price of heavy artillery, battleships, and nuclear submarines.

Perhaps the most telling lesson here is how difficult it is to catch the perpetrators of online terrorism. Covering one’s fingerprints and footprints online is relatively simple, compared with getting rid of physical evidence. IP addresses can be spoofed, and an attack that appears to come from one place may actually originate somewhere else. As such, the Kremlin (or anyone else) can plausibly deny that they had anything to do with the attacks, even if the Estonians’ server logs show that the attacks first originated from Moscow. If the Russians don’t want to hand over data or documents—or even pick up the phone, for that matter—there’s not much that Estonia, or anyone else, can do to figure out the real story…

Spam still increasing, but users are less bothered by it

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That just about sums up the latest Pew survey.

The volume of spam is growing in Americans’ personal and workplace email accounts, but email users are less bothered by it.

Spam continues to plague the internet as more Americans than ever say they are getting more spam than in the past. But while American internet users report increasing volumes of spam, they also indicate that they are less bothered by it than before. Users have become more sophisticated about dealing with spam; fully 71% of email users use filters offered by their email provider or employer to block spam. Users also report less exposure to pornographic spam, which to many people is the most offensive type of unsolicited email. Spam has not become a significant deterrent to the use of email, as some observers speculated it might when unsolicited email first began flooding users’ inboxes
several years ago. But it continues to degrade the integrity of email. Some 55% of email users say they have lost trust in email because of spam.

Full report here.

Blog valuations (contd.)

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I blogged recently about the Cyberwire valuation of this and various friends’ websites. One I forgot to feed into the calculating machine was Ray Corrigan’s splendid blog about IP madness. Ray, however, fed it in and was delighted to discover that his blog is worth over $70 million. I’m ashamed to say that I thought he was making this up, so I repeated the calculation just now.

The result? Ray’s site is apparently worth $76,785,151. I expect he’s already ordered that yacht. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Teaching done right

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Cory Doctorow has been teaching an undergraduate course at the University of Southern California called ‘PWNED: Everyone on Campus is a Copyright Criminal’. The class was open to anyone on or off campus, and lectures were podcasted. The students edited a class blog and were expected to improve Wikipedia posts relevant to the class. For the end of semester, each student turned in a final project that related the course material to their lives and major areas of study.

In this post Cory highlights some of the projects. “From the class discussions and one-on-ones”, he writes,

I knew I had a really amazing bunch on my hands, but I was absolutely gobsmacked by the incredible quality of the final projects. From founding a record label to conducting public polls to writing guidelines for journalists to interviews and classroom materials, my students did me better than proud.

I encouraged my students to do work that would be of use to the world at large. I hate the idea of the usual college final paper, which the student doesn’t want to write, the prof doesn’t want to read and no one else wants to ever see. Instead, I challenged them to produce useful work that the world could benefit from, and they met and exceeded the challenge…

Worth reading in full. Wonderful stuff. Cory is a genius.

Quote of the day

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Lecturer: What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy?

Class: Zzzzzzzz…..

Lecturer: Oh come on — surely someone knows the difference!

Bored student: I don’t know and I don’t care.

From a talk given by Jeremy Hunt MP at the launch of the Open University’s Ethics Centre.

Google bans essay writing adverts

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From BBC NEWS…

Google is to ban adverts for essay writing services – following claims that plagiarism is threatening the integrity of university degrees.

About time, too. Stand by for squeals of protest from purveyors of bespoke essays to clueless undergraduates.

On this day…

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… in 1934, bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were shot to death in a police ambush as they were driving a stolen Ford Deluxe along a road in Louisiana.

Just thought you’d like to know.

Google: your, er, trusted advisor

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From today’s FT.com

Google’s ambition to maximise the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand and the company believes that is the logical extension of its stated mission to organise the world’s information.

Asked how Google might look in five years’ time, Mr Schmidt said: “We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation.

“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”

Now why am I not reassured by this prospect?

The article goes on to discuss the implications of Google’s personalised search offerings. It also reports that

Autonomy, the UK-based search company is also developing technology for “transaction hijacking”, which monitors when internet surfers are about to make a purchase online, and can suggest cheaper alternatives.

One of the non-exec directors of Autonomy is Richard Perle, aka the Prince of Darkness.

Microsoft invents fat (finger) controller

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From Technology Review…

Retrieving the stylus for a personal digital assistant takes time. But for detailed work, a stylus is usually better than a finger. Microsoft researchers believe that they’ve found a better way to activate tiny targets, such as a name on a contact list or a street on a map.

Microsoft’s solution, called Shift, allows users to employ their fingertips to select pixels in a new way. First, the user presses a finger on the screen over the area of interest. Holding down her finger activates the Shift software. A detailed view of the area of interest appears nearby on the screen, in a pop-up window on top of the original image. With slight movements of her finger, the user can guide a pair of crosshairs over her desired target within the pop-up window and then make her selection by lifting her finger off the screen…