Smart Take on a Changing World: Humans Are The Routers

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Excerpt from Shervin Pishevar's article on TechCrunch:

On January 7, 2010 I was ushered into a small private dinner with Secretary Hillary Clinton at the State Department along with the inventor of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and a few others. We were there to talk about technology and 21st Century Diplomacy. As we mingled I noticed next to me the small table that Thomas Jefferson wrote the first drafts of the Declaration of Independence. I was inspired by the history around us as we discussed the unfolding history before us. I was sitting in front of Secretary Clinton and when she asked me a question I said, “Secretary Clinton, the last bastion of dictatorship is the router.” That night seeded some of the ideas that were core to Secretary Clinton’s important Internet Freedoms Speech on January 21, 2010.

Fast forward almost exactly one year later to January 25, 2011—a day that shall live in history in the company of dates like July 4, 1776. Egypt’s decision to block the entire Internet and mobile telecommunications network was one of the first salvos in a war of electronic munitions. In this new frontier humans are the routers and armed with new technologies they can never be blocked or silenced again.

I was staying up for days sharing and tweeting information as they happened. I had two close personal friends of mine in Egypt who were passing me information when they could. The day Egypt blocked the internet and mobile networks my mind went back to what I had said to Secretary Clinton. The only line of defense against government filtering and blocking their citizens from freely communicating and coordinating via communication networks was to create a new line of communications technologies that governments would find hard to block: Ad hoc wireless mesh networks. I called the idea OpenMesh and tweeted it.."

read the full post on techcrunch.com

Sadly, disturbingly true: As freedom blooms in the East, it's withering in the West - The Globe and Mail

One of the great ironies of watching the uprisings across the Arab world and Africa is witnessing them struggle and bloody themselves to achieve basic human rights, while across the U.S. and Britain hard-won liberties are shrinking like a bar of soap left in a shower.

I can't remember the last time anyone mentioned Wisconsin outside the confines of football or various cheese-producing activities – before this month, that is. Now it's a battleground, where the Republican governor, Scott Walker, is attempting to severely restrict the collective-bargaining rights of public-sector unions. He says the measure is necessary to patch over the state's deficit; the thousands of people protesting in the streets of Madison say that he has created the deficit himself through unnecessary tax cuts to corporations and that the whole thing is camouflage anyway, the thin edge of a (cheddar-shaped) wedge: Republicans want to disembowel unions because unions traditionally support the Democratic Party.

Read Elizabeth Renzetti's full article on theglobeandmail.com

Love this work: Street art scales down: why Cordal and Slinkachu are masters of miniature | The Observer

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Excerpt from Tom Lamont's article for the GuardianUK:

"Most urban artists find the biggest obstacle to their work is Johnny Law – that ill-timed arrival of a policeman interrupting a graffiti epic mid-completion, a complicated installation having to be abandoned to flight. Not the case for artists Slinkachu and Isaac Cordal, who specialise in "miniature street sculpture": for them the biggest dangers are roadsweepers, heavy-shoed pedestrians and jackdaws.

Since 2006 these two London-based artists have been (independently) installing tiny dioramas in cities around the world, taking photographs – then leaving their work to be kicked or ignored or taken away. In one striking piece, Slinkachu constructed a scene of children bathing in a discarded chicken tikka takeaway in east London; in another, he positioned a group of riot police posing for holiday snaps in front of the Acropolis in Greece. Cordal put a row of suited men emerging from a grate at ankle height in Brussels, and a suicidal-looking figure on a high beam in Hackney. No individual sculpture by either is more than 5cm in height.

"I don't hang around to see what happens to the work," says Slinkachu, 31, a London-based former art director who prefers not to reveal his real name. "I don't want not to know. But there is a strange kind of buzz to abandoning your creations on the street."

Next month he will exhibit photographs of his past work, as well as installing some purpose-built new pieces at the Andipa Gallery in London for his show, Concrete Ocean.

Spanish-born Cordal's work, meanwhile, will be collected in his first solo book, Cement Eclipses, published by Carpet Bombing Culture in May..."

Brilliant: Crowdsourced translations get the word out from Libya - tech - 25 February 2011 - New Scientist

The oasis town of Al Khufrah lies deep in the Sahara desert in the far south-east of Libya. Lying almost 1000 kilometres from its nearest sizeable neighbour, it is not somewhere foreign journalists tend to visit.

But on 23 February, news from the town reached the English-speaking world. "Greetings this is an urgent message from Kufra," said the anonymous source. "Young people have taken complete control of the city, they hoisted the flag of Libya and Gaddafi down the flag."

The message arrived by an ingenuous route. It started with a voice message in Arabic left on a phone line operated by Google. Software managing the line published the message on Twitter, from where it was picked up by the website Alive in Libya. The tweet went out to Alive's army of volunteers, who provided an English translation for the site. It is just one of around 170 reports, from videos to tweets to audio recordings, that Alive in Libya has translated since it started on 19 February.

Crowdsourced software could stop SMS spam - tech - 26 February 2011 - New Scientist

Is your cellphone buzzing with unwanted text messages? A system that filters out SMS spam by enlisting the help of your friends could calm things down.

In the western world, receiving an illicit text is a minor annoyance, but it's a major problem in developing countries like India. In that country, it is estimated that 100 million spam messages are sent every day, according to a report issued last year by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.

"That was one of the big motivations for us to start looking at this problem," explains Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, who developed the software package, SMSAssassin, with colleagues at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology in New Delhi, India.

SMS filtering is not a new idea, and existing methods work much like email spam detectors. They all learn to identify spam messages by examining known spam, but this is less effective for SMS messages because their brevity makes it hard to identify features unique to spam. Abbreviations and regional words, common in text messages, make this even worse.

Kumaraguru's team worked around these limitations by relying on crowdsourced spam markers. SMSAssassin learns in the same way as other spam filters, and the researchers hope toone day allow users to share spam keywords with one another through a central server or by creating a distributed network via Bluetooth.

The team say this will let the system react quickly to new kinds of spam or messages tied to certain time periods, such as the Diwali religious festival. For now they are gathering user data by asking users to contribute their spam through a Facebook page.

Read the full post on newscientist.com