Filed under: Internet, Technology | Tags: City University, data, Journalism, MA, privacy, surveillance
As you may have noticed, this blog has been quiet for a while. This is due to my MA project, which you can look at here. Surveillance News is a news and aggregation website about privacy, databases and surveillance in the UK, please check it out. If you’ve been interested in anything I blog about here, chances are you’ll be interested in this project too. Please leave comments, all feedback is much appreciated!
Filed under: Internet, News | Tags: conservationism, environment, prince charles, rainforest campaign
Prince Charles has put away the Smythson and instead chosen to push his latest environmental message on YouTube, which seems to have become the new political equivalent of writing an open letter to the Times. Robin Williams, William n’ Harry, Daniel Craig and the Dalai Lama star among others in this plea to save the rainforests but, as the Times reports, the show is undoubtedly stolen by a certain amphibian extra.
Filed under: Internet, Media | Tags: bbc, datastore, dreamgrove, factcheck, fail blog, guardian, huffington post, Internet, jackson pollock, jason nelson, new york times, webby, webby awards, wordle
The Webby Awards winners are in, with relatively few surprises I think. You can view the full list here, though this year’s 5 word speeches will have to wait til the awards ceremony which isn’t actually held until June. You’ll be able to watch it on YouTube though. Big ‘of the year’ wins were NIN frontman Trent Reznor for artist (woo!), comedian Jimmy Fallon for person, Twitter for breakout and Sarah Silverman for best actress. Would’ve picked Tina Fey myself, but whatever.
Worth checking out is the beautiful net-art category winner, Dreamgrove. Users are invited to ‘plant’ their dreams in a virtual field, while visitors can viewers these dreams categorised by mood, colour, name, word or date. People’s choice winner was the slightly sillier JacksonPollock.org, which can only be described as SPLAT.
Another art project, Jason Nelson’s Digital Oddities, topped the ‘weird’ category. I haven’t finished exploring it yet and I’ve yet to decide whether it’s beautiful or just odd. New media artist Jason Nelson assembles a patchwork collection of…well, new media art. Think of those Guardian Datablog visualisations but to the power of 100. There’s something for gamers, surrealists and amateur YouTubers. If that’s too taxing on the brain, there’s always the delightfully snarky FAIL blog.
In politics, the HuffPost took the main prize, while US political journalism site FactCheck was popular among the people. Wordle nabbed best use of typography after ridiculous overusage by the global press (including me). Just to remind you, here were my predictions:
Best newspaper
I predicted….New York Times to pip Guardian.
Winner Guardian
People’s choice New York Times (so half a point, surely)
Best news
I predicted…The Huffington Post
Winner BBC Worldwide
People’s choice BBC Worldwide
Podcast
I predicted…Guardian
Winner Guardian
People’s choice NPR Podcasts. No, no idea who they are either.
Jason Nelson’s award winner for weird.
Filed under: Internet, Media | Tags: bbc, daily beast, guardian, huffington post, new york times, postsecret, sad guys on trading floors, webby awards
Webby Award winners will be announced tomorrow, with hundreds of techies nominees jostling to win accolades across the categories of ‘website’, ‘interative advertising’, ‘mobile’ and ‘online film & video’. Obviously website is the biggie, and site categories range from ‘activism’ to ‘youth’. Two awards are available in each site category; the panel’s choice and the people’s choice.
Mostly no one really cares about the Webbies, but they’re an excellent way of discovering new sites. Look out for the ones favoured by the great unwashed people’s choice rather than the judge panel. I only discovered PostSecret after last year’s awards, and Sad Guys on Trading Floors is an excellent piss-take this year. Take a look at the rest of the Weird section by way of example.
British websites are doing reasonably well with 58 nominations, with the Beeb vying for eight and the Guardian for six. A few of my own media-related predictions. I’ll be posting on the winners tomorrow:
Best newspaper: New York Times. Tough call, but it’s consistently one step ahead of the Guardian when it comes to innovating news content.
Best news: The Huffington Post. Daily Beast has been gaining momentum, but isn’t quite there yet.
Podcast: The Guardian. Maybe because of my own particular attachment to the nice producers there who let me mess about in the control room on work experience.
Perhaps to compensate for the fact that really, it should be a cloud-based ceremony, techie histrionics are limited to a 5 word acceptance speech. Corkers include ‘Can someone fix my computer?’ from 2007’s top artist Beastie Boys and ‘Shit, I only get five words? Shit, that was five. Four more there. That’s three. Two’ from David Bowie accepting a lifetime achievement award.
Here’s a pick of the best from last year:
Top 5 5-worders, 2008
“Thank you for this Pulitzer.” Onion News Network, News & Politics: Series
“We enjoy sleeping with you.” Ikea Mattress, Retail
“Get your money for nothing.” Mint.com, Banking
“And your mint for free.” Mint.com, Financial Services
“Thanks, in 72 point Helvetica.” Veer, Best Use of Typography
You can view the rest here, and you can submit your own #5words speech to @thewebbyawards.
Filed under: Internet, News | Tags: flash dance, flash mob, liverpool street station, t-mobile, trafalgar square
Breaking news for you right here. T-Mobile will be filming another flash mob stunt (rumoured to be another dance) between 6-7pm tomorrow at Trafalgar Square, no doubt in the hope it will go viral. Can’t get any more specific than that because my dad deleted the text from T-Mobile before I got a good look at it. Yes, I will go and film it for you. Sheesh. The things I do.
UPDATE: Actually, after wading through the magnificent beaurospeak of the bye-laws I discover I can’t film without permission from Boris. Should’ve just asked when I met him really. I also spotted this little gem, to give you an idea of how much T-Mobile might be paying to pull this little stunt:
Anyone using Trafalgar Square must obtain Public Liability Insurance with a minimum of £5 million cover for each act or occurrence or series of acts or occurrences. A higher level of insurance cover may be required depending on the event content.
Ouch! Still, you can enjoy the first flash mob dance at Liverpool Street Station:
Video by T-Mobile.
Filed under: Internet, Politics, Technology | Tags: counter-terrorism, data privacy, database, government, home office, interception modernisation, ISP, jacqui smith, serious cat, terrorism, voip
Decent, upstanding British citizens will no doubt be spending today reading Jacqui Smith’s latest opus on data privacy. Yes, all 49 pages of it, so that you can answer some questions (which are, incidentally, in ‘Annex A’ so get reading) . This is, after all, for your sole benefit and the government ‘would welcome your views’.
Oh alright. I’ll summarise it here.
Since May last year, the government has been bleating about a central database in which to store information about how we communicate. Primarily it’s a counter-terrorism measure but it’s um, also quite a big privacy infringement. So under the Interception Modernisation Programme (which really, when you think about it, literally means ‘better ways of snooping’) the government is proposing ways to effectively ’save lives’ while not spying.
The database isn’t going to happen any more, it says. Which is peculiar, because it then goes on to outline exactly how it would go about creating a data store, if it was allowed to. Which it isn’t.
Nothing’s law yet. Hence this consultation report where you – because that will be your data eventually – get to raise objections.
It’s an educational document. By the second page I am graced with such insights as: Communications data is information about a communication. And Jacqui Smith’s inappropriately beaming face on the introduction which, for your own safety, I have replaced with serious cat.
This is the bit where she says the database isn’t happening. But, in case you were interested, she tells you how it would work anyway on p25.
The next bit’s quite important though. And for all the paranoia, it’s not as though anyone will actually read your racist jokes/cybersex/ascii art.
Communications data does not include the content of a call or the content of any other communications event, such as an email. This consultation does not propose changing the law to collect or store the content of any communication.
No, but it will try and get everything but. Mostly by coercing service providers into doing it for them.
As it stands, VoIP services like Skype currently don’t hold that much information about you. Or at least, not enough to be of any use. Indeed, Skype isn’t actually a UK service provider, so it’d be down to ISP’s like BT, Virgin etc to actually collect the times and destinations of your Skype calls. They’d also have to arrange it nicely so that the authorities aren’t flailing around uselessly with numbers. This, aside from the database or doing nothing, is the ‘middle way’. And here, quietly tucked away, is the £2bn cost estimate to compensate the private sector.
What next?
UK service providers will take a look over these suggestions and respond. This isn’t good news for them; they’ll be bearing the brunt of the costs for a lot of extra work, and potentially compromising the privacy of their customers. Equally, the intelligence agencies are disappointed by this seemingly flimsy resolution. Not having a central database makes piecing together data about one individual more difficult. In short, no one has won.
Filed under: Internet, Technology | Tags: closures, geocities, web hosting, yahoo
Reports are filtering through the web that the latest Yahoo amputee will be 90’s DIY webkit GeoCities. Similar tools Angelfire and Tripod are reputed to be in trouble according to a comic eulogy from PC World. The Guardian feels a certain ‘pixel nostalgia’ for the swathes of dreadful content relegated to the digital abyss.
Most people have forgotten about GeoCities, because it failed to innovate. Its interface didn’t get any cleaner or easier to use. No one has an ‘about me’ page just for the hell of it any more – you know, the kind of thing with a picture of your dog and an awful Word 97 fun ‘border’. Users have become a lot savvier about building their own websites, especially since friendly CMS’s like WordPress popped up.
Being a 2.0 nerd I naturally created my own GeoCities monstrosity back in the day. Isn’t it beautiful? Mismatching colour schemes, in-built ad bar and what one visitor described as a ‘flaming turd’ across the masthead. I hasten to add that I was about 16. At least it wasn’t chatrooms, alright?
All of that was created with the wonderful PageBuilder which is so backward I couldn’t even get it to open in Firefox. From memory though, it was a web building tool which took an age to load across several Explorer windows and then crashed. A lot.
The ‘main page’ buttons on my site used to flash – an effect created by making two separate picture files interchange very quickly when your mouse hovered over them. Sadly that sophisticated little feature seems not to work on most modern browsers…and soon, neither will GeoCities.
Apologies to anyone who read an accidental first draft of this. Got a bit keen pushing the new post on Twitter. So keen, I hadn’t even completed it.
Filed under: Internet, Media | Tags: bill thompson, budget, charles arthuer, darren waters, g20, guardian, Journalism, justin williams, shane richmond, Social media, telegraph, twitter, twitterbitching, twitterfail, twitterfall, website
Ah, sweet proof that even the best of us are prone to the occasional FAIL, troll and snarkfest. First up in the Twitterbitching ring -
Charles Arthur v …the entire Telegraph web team
The Guardian was rubbing its liberal hands with glee after the Telegraph’s Budget homepage was spammed by Twitter-users merrily taking advantage of the #budget tag to appear on the site’s Twitterfall feed. The Guardian then went on to list its favourite spammers before the feed was eventually taken down….
….and then put back up. Rumour has it that the Telegraph now has monkeys (in fact, quite possibly my City colleagues who are currently working there) frantically filtering the tweets before they’re actually allowed onto the live feed – unsubstantiated as yet. Certainly the feed appears to have slowed down, which has not gone unnoticed by Guardian Tech editor Charles Arthur, who tweeted:
50 tweets with #budget for the past hour. I could do this faster than the Telegraph. I could *automate* this better than them. Guys, give up
You can read the response from Telegraph assistant web editor Justin Williams below. Miaow! The sniping played itself out over Twitter until BBC tech heavyweights Darren Waters and Bill Thompson eventually weighed in on Charles’ side. Rather sweetly, Telegraph communities editor Shane Richmond tweets, “It’s a snapshot of the conversation that’s going on around the Budget. Why is that so hard to figure out?” Because it’s “undirected and pointless” says Charles.
There is an interesting underlying debate here – Shane, Justin and co. seem to be entirely in favour of unfiltered conversation. Except when they have monkeys filtering it (hm). Charles and the Guardian crew lean towards using social media for journalistic purposes, but favouring ‘authoratative’ voices. Have a look at their G20 Twitterfall-style feed (actually using Scribblelive) by way of example. Rather than allowing all and sundry through with a #G20 tag, the Guardian only showed tweets from its own journalists and bloggers. Elitism, or a sensible way to avoid spam?
The Twitter fight, read from the bottom up.
UPDATE: A quick glance back at the Budget homepage shows the Twitterfall feed has been pulled off again. You can see a screenshot on the Guardian’s article, however. Ding ding ding!
Filed under: Internet, Technology | Tags: censorship, china, dalai lama, great firewall, hacking, snooping dragon, tibet
A friend of mine has just begun to blog about teaching sixth-formers English in an eastern province of China. Commenting on setting up his WordPress, he says:
I found my initial attempts at communication barricaded by the Great Firewall of China (no, not an example of my parched dry wit; Party officials really do refer to it as such) and so I’ve had to look into other options. If you’re currently scanning this page, it’s finally worked…
The sheer manpower needed for Chinese paranoia to run at all levels continues to astonish, since it includes not merely the harmless gap year blog but its highest political enemies.
So says the ’snooping dragon’ report, a joint effort from Cambridge University and the University of Illinois. Look beyond the academic propensity for headline puns and it makes a terrifying read. Authors Ross Anderson and Shishir Nagaraja describe how the Dalai Lama’s offices first became aware of information leaks with potentially dire consequences for Tibetans. His administration set up one meeting with a foreign diplomat via e-mail. Before they had even made the follow-up courtesy phone call, Chinese government officials contacted the diplomat to instruct him that the meeting could not go ahead. How was this possible without a security breach?
Further investigation showed that Chinese IP addresses – not associated with the Dalai Lama’s offices - had logged into their servers.
Obviously the monks hadn’t been watching Swordfish, although frankly even they managed to be more up-to-date than Jack Straw. Hacking into their email accounts was, it seems, relatively easy since they were defended by low-security passwords and plain-text mail. Unfortunately, even encryption wasn’t going to work as the monks had fallen for the virus-as-a-link gag, otherwise known as phishing.
Easy enough to avoid, but more nastily, the hackers managed to interrupt legit mail in transit and replace harmless attachments with malicious ones. So while Gyaltsen Norbu might have been showing off his new robes to Tenzin Gyatso in a picture attachment, it probably arrived as something unmentionable.
Luckily for the Tibetans, no deeply secret documents were exploited and their safety has not been compromised. But the authors finish on an ominous note – that these personalised phishing and hacking techniques are easily replicable:
In the medium term we predict that social malware will be used for fraud, and the typical company has really no defence against it. We expect that many crooks will get rich before
e ffective countermeasures are widely deployed.
Jack Schofield writes that Western companies should learn to safeguard against this, and fast. What is perhaps more sad is those who continue to believe in the ideals of the internet – the sharing and movement of information – may find themselves increasingly cynical of how this freedom will be exploited. Once you’ve scaled the Great Firewall, a dragon lies in wait.
