From September the 22nd till the 29th, Amsterdam will host PicNic 2007. Picnic is a conference, festival, diy thingie, and much more. Although a lot of hot shots (euhm, interesting speakers) are coming and the program is quite nice, it is quite expensive (come on, +-500 Euros a day??). Fortunately there are good and sometimes free, or cheap, evening and side shows.

Best of all though, is that there will be some 1200 people carrying a RFID badge, linked to a social network. And I can play with it I was invited to join a very interesting group of people at the RFID Hackers Camp. The idea is to think up and realize 6 to 8 projects with the available hardware and data. Mjummy.

Afgelopen week vroegen Karel Brascamp en Jeroen Joosse van Creative Industries.nl me of ik kon helpen bij het ontwikkelen van de backend van de orakelmachine. De orakelmachine is een installatie voor de façade van De Balie in Amsterdam. Het is een machine die zinnen van internet ophaalt rondom een zekere issue en die projecteert op de ramen van De Balie. De issues worden aangeleverd door De Balie maar kunnen ook bepaald worden door voorbijgangers dmv een sms. De orakelmachine brengt het virtuele publieke domein dichter bij het fysieke publieke domein. De opening is vanavond om 20u in De Balie maar de machine zal 2500 uur te bezichtigen zijn … totdat de lamp van de beamer stuk gaat.

Next week we‘ll be presenting a couple of beautiful maps on internet censorship at the protect-the.net event in Toronto. I’ll make sure we put the maps online once the event has gone by, you can already see one here: Iran.

Announcement:

Once an unfettered forum for global communications, the Inernet is today under seige.

Upwards of forty countries now censor Internet traffic. Most of the censorship takes place in secret, without any public accountability or civilian oversight.

Protect the Net is a worldwide campaign to help restore the hope and promise that the original notion of the internet once held out as a frontier-less form of free expression, democratic communications, and access to information. It is about preserving and enlarging the global commons of information, shedding light on unlawful censorship and surveillance practices where they exist, and holding states and corporations accountable for the limitations they impose on free speech and access to information online.

Protect the Net Toronto is the first stop in the worldwide campaign. This event will be highlighted by presentations on Internet censorship, surveillance and infowar as well as the worldwide public release and demonstration of the psiphon censorship circumvention tool.

Psiphon is a human rights software project developed by the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies that allows citizens in uncensored countries to provide unfettered access to the net through their home computers to friends and family members who live behind firewalls of states that censor.

Protect the Net will educate and empower citizens worldwide about the perilous state of human rights online and what they can do to help rescue and restore those rights.

Hi all,

I’m back I didn’t get to much blogging latetely as I was having holiday and work(shops) in New York and Philadelphia for the Hyperlinked Conference together with Auke. I think the conference was actually a little disappointing – too much old media, but it was great being there. I also went to Canada to work with citizenlab and govcom.org for the Open Net Initiative. The first map on Iran can be found here (pdf). When the project has finished of course more results will be published on my blog. When you can’t wait you can go to Nart’s blog at ice.citizenlab.org where you will find the most current findings on internet censorship.

So what does the future has got in petto? First I need to finish my thesis (two more weeks ) and then I’ll work on some projects with govcom.org for impakt, the issuecrawler, the issuescraper and the open net initiative. Eventually I’ll probably get a full time job at the new media department of the UvA. I’ll also work on the Open Search initiative.

I’ll be blogging more often, probably mostly about my work, but of course also about great new media events. Therefor I have set up a calendar plugin which you can see at the right side. It’s a pretty neat plugin, the only downside is that you have to actually edit the time stamp of your post instead of having a separate input box where you can set the date and duration. The nice thing however is that is exportable to any calendar app

Joehoe,

heb eindelijk de eerste wordpress plugin gereleased waarvoor ik ook betaald ben: http://wp-plugins.net/plugin/bliki/
Meer info hier: http://twiki.justlol.net/twiki/bin/view/Newmedia/Bliki

Natuurlijk is ie gereleased met een GPL licentie zodat iedereen hem gratis kan gebruiken en aanpassen. Delen van de code komen trouwens uit een andere plugin

Who controls the information? In this modern age, search engines have a distinct influence on the retrieval of information from the internet. Your average user will, when prompted with the need to look up information, go to google and look for the pages. This gives google power: when google decides a certain topic, company, organisation or whatever is not acceptable they can keep it out of the search result. In effect, the major search engines bias what the average user sees of the internet.

In order to remedy this situation, we came up with the OpenSearch idea: a search engine that is distributed, not under central control and therefore difficult to manipulate.

China has reportedly developed a system called “night crawlerâ€? that can “locate and blockâ€? websites located in China (by IP address range) that have not registered with the Ministry of Information Industry (MII). Nart Villenueve of Citizenlab explains what this system really is about. Of course we already knew for a long time that they have the great Chinese firewall and that they shutdown internet cafes, weblogs, and fora that are not in lign with current Chinese policies. For more information on internet in China read this in depth article: “China: The Net Effect” by Steven Cherry.

But not only communist and dictatorial countries use filtering software. More and more companies and countries use software like smartfilter to deny people from accessing certain sites. See smartfilters promotional flash movie, which explains how it works. And yes, also European companies use netfilters more and more (dutch article about netfilters in companies).

As a result of reading articles like this wired article on internet censorship, Richard Rogers and Auke Touwslager are mapping routes to avoid internet censorship as well as mapping the countries which have most censorship. I’m interested in their findings and will give a link to their research later on.

To be able to monitor which sites are blocked by which countries, I wrote a script that first got a list of public proxy servers, and then queried a whole bunch of sites through those proxies (see wikipedia on proxies if you don’t know what they are). The problem is that I don’t know which rules are enforced on those proxies. Each proxy can specify which sites it blocks and I don’t know if the proxies I found are the government controlled proxies. Therefore I cannot do good empirical research. I guess citizenlab’s current approach is the only way to go: put your own proxyservers in all countries through which you query sites. This way you know you will be routed through the countries’ proxy servers and not through a proxy with different rules. Bummer for my research

For more information on internet censorship see http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/, the open net intiative, and wikipedia on internet censorship.

Update:

Users of Microsoft’s new China-based Internet portal have been blocked from using the words “democracy”, “freedom” and “human rights” in an apparent move by the US software giant to appease Beijing. … Microsoft is not the only international tech company to comply with China’s stringent Internet rules. Yahoo! and Google — the two most popular Internet search engines — have already been criticized for cooperating with the Chinese government to censor the Internet. (link)

Yesterday i wrote my first couple wordpress plugins. One you can find already on every post at the bottom. If you click ‘Show wikified noun phrases ‘ you’ll see a select appear with all noun phrases my little script extracted. Clicking on a noun phrase will point you to wikipedia. The script is pretty simple, through regular expressions it gets out nouns and noun phrases (yeah I know, it’s not optimal yet). Those nouns are compared to a (for now outdated) local database of wiki entries. If such an entry is found the noun(phrase) is made into a link and placed into the select. Pretty cool huh? I think something like this can give a user more information about something related to the post. Any ideas and suggestions are more than welcome. The source will be made available soon, after some more tweaking.

As a second plugin i made a simple script which makes an array of words in the post and the amount of times it appears in the post. The idea behind this is that recurring words might be good tags to classify this post in. I’m thinking how to let my wordpress make good use of tags. Maybe tags could replace categories and could, through something like touchgraph, make you find related information on our blog pretty easy. This script could also be used to insert tag statements for Technorati, to link it to del.icio.us … The possibilities are legio Again, any ideas are welcome!

Yesterday Koen came up with a brilliant idea. Let’s make a distributed Open Google. Read his preliminary thoughts over here.

We’ll have to have some decent brainstorming before it’s going to happen, but the idea is great. As Koen rightly points out, Google is closed source. We know of stories where google censors it’s results, e.g. child porn and nazi sites. I don’t think this is a bad idea, but what else will they filter out of the results? It now is on wallstreet and needs to defend the shareholders values … Let’s hope the carlyle group or halliburton, i.e. the bush administration don’t take share in it.

Extra source for Auke: Google watch

Last night i wrote a script which provides you with the del.icio.us tag neighbourhood of a link. Just enter a link, the script gets the rss through durl and all tags are indexed and counted. See how other people describe the given link. As a bonus you get the rss as well

One drawback of the current script is that it only receives the top 10 people who delicioused, and assigned tags to, this link. Later on – time, I need time – i’ll have to find out how to get more results.

I thought it might be interesting to feed the outcome of my script into touchgraph. You start with a url or a tag on a topic and surf through categories (tags) and links. As pointed out in a previous post the start of a useful semantic web opens new ways to explore information.

As i was writing this post i did a technorati query for touchgraph, and what pops out as the top result?

Visualising the collective brain.

Delicious fed into touchgraph, and at the bottom

the touchgraph life journal browser

which actually won the technorati developers contest lately.

Finally, exploring information has become a journey where you decide what you want to learn (don’t forget wikipedia). Let’s see what the future has got in mind

I was surfing http://www.technorati.com/tag/ lately, querying philosphy and what did i get back? Well, have a look. I really like the rise of searching through user defined tags together with providing it in rss. Rss makes it very flexible data to play with.

Got 2 try out furl some day. Apparently it

… opens up a new window with the title and URL of the page you are looking at already filled in. You then have the option of adding comments to, rating, and categorizing the page.

Something like a blog and del.icio.us at the same time? We haven’t seen the end of new social software connections yet

Technorati and del.icio.us remember me of the lifespan of bittorrent. As soon as something is hyped out other links will be at the top of the search results. Good to find current information about tags (topics?, issues?). How will it do on old but relevant information? What will the effect of massive amounts of users be? Won’t there be to much noise?