Monthly Archives: July 2006

Photo IDs for India cyber cafes?

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The India blogging community is buzzing over another step in restricting Internet use in India, taking a cue from China. The lone report from IBN (looking for other sources):

In first such move within the country, the Delhi Police on Fridayissued orders to all cyber cafe owners to ask for photo identity cardsfrom the users.

The cyber cafe owners have also been asked to maintain a register for entry and exit of each and every cafe user.

See the BloggersCollective discussion of this thread for more info.

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Blogged with Flock

India Blocks Slowly Lifted

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Reports are trickling in that ISPs in India are slowly releasing blocks on the big guys – Blogger and Typepad, either because they’re refining the blocks to be more precise, or they’re backing off completely for the short term. There still seems to be a directive in place to block specific controversial sites.

Sify and BSNL are two ISPs that have reportedly eased the blocks.
Also, WSJ has a story about this (available without subscription for a short time):

The Indian government told the country’s Internet-service providers to cease blocking popular sites full of Web logs after attempts to restrict access to the sites spurred protests from the online community.

In a meeting yesterday, India’s Department of Telecommunications clarified that the Internet-service providers have to block access only to specific blogs within the sites — not entire sites that contain blogs, according to the Internet Service Providers Association of India. The confusion had resulted in many blogs being blocked inadvertently.

Last week, the telecom department gave service providers a list of more than 15 Web sites they wanted blocked to users in India. The orders were issued without an explanation of why the sites needed to be blocked or how long they should be blocked. As a result, many service providers extended blanket blockades over sites popular for posting personal Web pages.

Are bloggers journalists?

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Teaching new media and Internet publishing over the last few years, I’ve always been asked by news industry folks, “Are blogers journalists?”

I never liked this simplistic question, so my typical answer – “Some are, most aren’t.” In other contexts, I’d answer with a question – “Is every person who cooks a gourmet chef?”

A recent Pew Internet & American Life study confirmed that bloggers view themselves the same way. From Reuters:

About 34 percent see their blogging as a form of journalism; 65 percent disagreed. Just over a third of bloggers said they engage often in journalistic activities such as verifying facts and linking to source material.

At the recent BBC/Reuters WeMedia conference, David Sifry of Technorati asked if we could stop asking this question, and the bloggers in the audience were overwhelmingly in agreement.

Pakistan Tools for India

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Pakistan had to deal with its own Internet blocks in March 2006, after the Muhammad cartoons controversy, when Blogger and other sites were blocked. The site pkblogs.com was setup as a proxy specifically to circumvent the block. Just today, Dr. Awab Alvi of the Don’t Block the Blog movement in Pakistan sent a message to give the software to India users to install.

It’s good to see an Internet free culture that transcends national and religious boundaries. Dr. Alvi talked about the project at the recent Free Expression in Asian Cyberspace conference in Manila. You can see his presentation at the site.
The message to the Bloggers Collective mailing list:

Hi Everyone,

I am a fellow blogger living across your borders in Pakistan I am also the co-founder of the Don’t Block the Blog campaign when Pakistan was confronted with the dilemma of facing a blanket blockade of the entire blogspot domain. We seriously thought it was because of a thick and stubborn headed Pakistani government that resulted in such a stupid move but seeing the Indian Government react similarly it seems all governments are the same when they want to implement decisions always without due thought and consideration.

Reading a few emails in this group just recently it seems the Indian government might actually come to its senses and finally lift this blockade surely a big relief to the world, but until then we would like to present the Indian Blogging community with yet another tool to be used on their websites which converts all Blogspot links into a URL utilizing the proxy servers of pkblogs.com.

Feel free to download this tool from the Don’t Block the Blog website – http://help-pakistan.com/main/2006/07/19/pkblogs-url-script-for-website-owners/ – credit to Adnan Siddiqui

The Pakistani blogging community has over the few months learned to co-exist with the ban and has created a number of tools to by-pass this ban.

· You all have already used the proxies of PkBlogs.com and just recently InBlogs.net a creation by Yasir Memon and Naveed Memon

· You may have been exposed to the Grease Monkey script by Mansoor which is designed for Firefox users. – The Word of mAn[S]o0r

We share all these as a gift to build better friends across the border and hope to shed the image of hatred and violence and give way to a peaceful co-existence between to lovely nations.

On behalf of all Pakistanis

Dr. Awab Alvi

—–

Teeth Maestro


India Government Stance on Blocking

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This message was posted to the South Asian Journalists Association list, and was a response directly to Sreenath Sreenivasan, journalism professor, tech reporter and founder of the group:

A two-page write up containing extremely derogatory references to Islam and the holy prophet which had the potential to inflame religious sensitivities in India and create serious law and order problems in the country appeared in a blog facilitated by well known search engines. The matter was immediately taken note of by our CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) and the Department of Telecommunications (DOT) was informed of it. The DOT took up the matter forthwith with the search engines and instructions were also issued to all Internet providers to block the two impertinent pages. Because of a technological error, the Internet providers went beyond what was expected of them which in turn resulted in the unfortunate blocking of all blogs. Department of Telecommunications have now clarified the issue and the error is being rectified and it is expected that normalcy in respect of blogs will soon be restored.
This is for your information.

A.R. Ghanashyam
Deputy Consul General
New York

This is interesting because it does not say that the block will be entirely lifted, but it says “normalcy in respect of blogs” will be restored.

Unfortunately, blocks like this often call more attention to the objectionable material than there was previously.

One question circulating on mailing lists, did the government attempt to go to the source (ie. web site operators) first, to ask for the blogs to be taken down? If they contained hate speech, then it may have violated the terms of service agreed upon at Blogger, Typepad or any other site. That would have gone a long way to avoid this problem in the first place.

India’s Blocking Tech, Learning from China?

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Yesterday, the Asian blogosphere was abuzz with the news that India had started blocking 18 or so major sites, including blogger.com and typepad.com. China-India competition is going a bit too far when India aspires to learn from China’s Internet filtering. Related to this, InfoWorld Nederland had an interesting quote related to China’s Great Firewall (GFW):

Under India’s Information Technology Act 2000, Web sites can be blocked if they are found to be promoting hate, violence, terrorism, and pornography including child pornography.

Although the communication from the DOT to ISPs lists specific pages and Web sites, several ISPs have blocked some key blogs altogether because they were not equipped to filter specific pages, Maheshwari said.

Also on Hindustan Times:

“Indian ISPs don’t have the technology to block individual name servers — say a particular blog hosted on Blogspot. So they had no choice but to block the root servers of major blogging networks — blogspot, geocities and typepad,” said a senior official in the IT Ministry. A senior official from an ISP confirmed this.

This point about “blocking precision” has been made before, but it merits repeating – the sophistication of China’s Internet filtering technology often, counterintuitively, allows more free access than in the past. Maheshwari’s comment shows that crude tools (ie. DNS blocks) often overblock, while fine-grained techniques more precisely address objectionable content, and allow all other information to flow. In a military analogy, think of it as carpet bombing vs. precision smart bombing. Continue reading →

India Internet Filtering

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A favorite topic for Asia watchers is to debate India vs. China – who to put your money on, and who will succeed? I say it’s not either-or. Both will work together and be powerhouses.
But I was surprised by this headline in Boingboing.net:

Report: Indian gov blocks Blogspot, Typepad, Geocities blogs

So it seems India has followed in China’s footsteps (for now) and blocked popular blog sites like Blogger.com and Typepad.com. Reports are rolling in that it is indeed true, with “fighting terrorism” being the justification and no announcement about when it will end.

For those in India, welcome to the life behind the Great Firewall. Essential reading:

We hope your stay will not not be long.

Interview with Wikipedians

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In advance of WikiSym, there is a good extensive interview with three prominent Wikipedians from English, German and Japanese projects.

This article presents an interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko. All three are leading Wikipedia practitioners in the English, German, and Japanese Wikipedias and related projects. The interview focuses on how Wikipedia works and why these three practitioners believe it will keep working. The interview was conducted via email in preparation of WikiSym 2006, the 2006 International Symposium on Wikis, with the goal of furthering Wikipedia research [1]. Interviewer was Dirk Riehle, the chair of WikiSym 2006. An online version of the article provides simplified access to URLs [2].

Good to see more feedback from the Japanese Wikipedia, which has always been formidable in size and strength, but relatively quiet in terms of dialogue with the rest of the interntional Wikipedia community.

Washington Post Wikipedia analysis

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As opposed to the [[Ken Lay]] article “controversy” that Reuters initiated, Washington Post’s Frank Ahrens has a thoughtful piece on Wikipedia that is informed and often uncomfortable for Wikipedians to read. Ahrens gets how Wikipedia works, how it can be useful, and states the major conundrum.

But here’s the dread fear with Wikipedia: It combines the global reach and authoritative bearing of an Internet encyclopedia with the worst elements of radicalized bloggers. You step into a blog, you know what you’re getting. But if you search an encyclopedia, it’s fair to expect something else. Actual facts, say. At its worst, Wikipedia is an active deception, a powerful piece of agitprop, not information…

I’m a fan of Wikipedia and Wiki notions, such as “citizen journalism.” I just want them to be better.

Even the hardcore Wikipedians know this, and have been debating how to address it in the long term.

You will immediately have problems approaching Wikipedia with the same expectations as a uniformly and systematically edited publication, such as a traditional encyclopedia, a newspaper or a published book. It’s simply not built the same way. Parts of it are spectacular (computer science, science fiction, pop culture, geography) and lots of it often poor (medical, literature, arts). The content reflects the quality and scope of its participants. You can increase the quality of the participants (hard, because it’s a self-selecting bunch) or increase the scope, which is done by raising flags on problematic articles, and systematically editing articles for quality, accuracy and depth. This is often done with WikiProjects.

For example, on priority effort is to raise the average quality of subjects that are “commodity” in other encyclopedias. Jimmy Wales has dubbed this “Britannica-or-better” quality. That is, it’s pretty objectionable if the article on [[World War II]] is flawed or inaccurate since so much information is available. But if the more obscure [[Unit 731]] has problems, that’s more forgivable.

I feel it becomes a media literacy issue, and managing expectations when you arrive at the doorstep. But that’s the problem – some people arrive at the front door, some jump directly into an article that is hyperlinked from another site. And experiences will vary widely depending on the method of arrival.

Hopefully, some of these issues will be addressed at Wikimania 2006 in Boston next month, where Wikipedians will meet face-to-face.