Monthly Archives: June 2013

Greek Citizen Journalists Play Prominent Role in Response to Media Blackout

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On June 11, signals for the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation, known as ERT, went silent. Immediately after the government-ordered blackout, Greek journalists, many of whom had just lost their jobs, staged a 24-hour strike, refused to leave ERT headquarters, and continued to report the news on the Internet through the European Broadcasting Union, which is maintaining ERT’s radio and television frequencies via live stream on the EUB website.

Stating that ERT needed to save money and restructure, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s government suspended operations at the public network (comprised of 19 regional channels, four national channels—one that broadcast abroad—six radio stations, a TV guide magazine, websites and the national audiovisual archives). Plans were announced to reopen later in 2013 under the new name Hellenic Radio, Internet, and Television (NERIT). A blogger at Troktiko said in a news report, “We registered the domain name www.nerit.gr as soon as the new name was announced.”  The blog’s name means rodent in Greek and is a popular news source in Greece with an intriguing history and a reputation for hard-hitting investigative journalism.

Screen shot from www.NERIT.gr on June 12. “It’s not just about ERT, it’s about democracy.” Photo credit: Leigh Graham

Members of the Greek blogosphere were delighted and amused with the news, suggesting the government’s failure to register the domain name before publicly announcing it showed “how pathetic they are.” Internet users visiting NERIT.gr, before it was surreptitiously taken down, received live stream news, a ghoulish meme face, and the message: “It’s not just about ERT, it’s about democracy.” They were also redirected to the blog pitsaria-pou-eskise. This blog’s name is a riff on Samaras’s suggestion in an interview last year that his business experience running a pizzeria during his college days in America had prepared him to run the country. Pitsaria pou eskise is a colloquialism and translates roughly as “the pizzeria did extremely well or was a massive hit.” Samaras’s awkward attempt to relate to the people was quickly picked up by bloggers and turned into a taunt. NERIT.gr has been taken down, but pitsaria-pou-eskise.gr is still up and doing extremely well.

The days following the shutdown may have been a score for Greek netizens; yet, citizens on the ground were shocked and suffering. More than 2,500 people lost their jobs, and many people living in rural villages and remote islands where ERT is the sole source of outside information were cut off from current news as well as cultural programming.

The blackout of a national broadcaster, massive layoffs, and the isolation of entire communities of citizens are troubling events, and both professional and citizen journalists swiftly responded with collective voice and clear demands. Internet-based citizen media has been developing in Greece for a while. Radio Bubble is a good example. Operated out of a café in Athens, it is a mixed-media network of websites, radio channels, blogs, Twitter, and other online sources that blurs boundaries between being a member of a community on the Internet, on the air and on the streets. In classic power-to-the-people style, Radio Bubble exists to report underreported news in real time through the unfiltered lenses of tech-savvy, everyday activists. Radio Bubble also runs a program called Hackademyteaching citizen journalism skills such as using smartphones to interview and document real-time events, using laptops to edit films, and using social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to post real-time reporting. Hackademy also offers courses on how to verify stories and authenticate sources.

Thousands of demonstrators gather after Greece’s government announced the ERT closure. Photo credit: AFP/ Louisa Gouliamaki

In light of political corruption and economic turmoil presently crippling the country, many Greeks have lost faith in traditional media. Though many favor cuts in the public sector, including trimming within the notoriously mismanaged ERT, they are not pleased with the way things were handled. Aristides Hatzis, associate professor of law, economics and legal theory at the University of Athens told reporters “the ERT debacle illustrates the government’s lack of respect for the rule of law.” In response, Greek citizens took to the streets in protest, and unions launched a strike that throttled transportation and everyday business.  Their outrage also filled Internet channels.

In addition to galvanizing local citizens and members of the Greek diaspora, online reporters, Twitter users, and bloggers relentlessly demanded redress from Prime Minister Antonis Samaras. To this end, both citizen activists and opposition parties have achieved some gains. On June 17, ERT was ordered to reopen but has not resumed broadcasting. The EUB website reports, “The Council of State ordered the Greek government to restore the ERT signal and take all appropriate organizational measures to continue broadcasting through the ERT frequencies and Internet sites until a new public service broadcaster is established.” Ramifications from the ERT shutdown and stalled reopening are sure to play out for weeks, months, maybe even years to come. The outcome remains to be seen; however, one thing is certain: the Internet and citizen media have been irrevocably cast as lead actors in Greece’s continuing political drama.

Automating Slanderous Search

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Bill Froberg/Flickr

Modern editions of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein often drop Shelly’s 1818 full title for the celebrated novel, which reads, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The Prometheus legend has several variations, but Shelly’s story draws more upon Aesop’s version of the story, in which Prometheus makes man from clay and water. Prometheus’ creation, which violated the process for how life is naturally made, rebels against him, and Zeus punishes Prometheus for the unintended consequences of his act.

Last week, The Atlantic reported that Google and Bing seem to be autocompleting different stories about Microsoft’s upcoming game console the Xbox One. On Google, a search for “the Xbox One is” returns autocomplete suggestions for “terrible,” “ugly,” and “a joke.” The same search on Bing, Microsoft’s flagship search engine, returns a single autocomplete suggestion: “amazing.” Commentators on the Atlantic article pointed out that dropping the term “the” from the searches would yield different results and should put to rest any conspiratorial thinking that Google is smearing Microsoft’s product using its autocomplete. A search for “xbox one is” on Google is still pretty negative, suggesting “xbox one issues,” “xbox one is bad” and “xbox one is garbage.” However, Bing’s suggestions are even more scathing. When dropping “the,” Bing seems to agree with Google suggesting “xbox one issues” and “xbox one is bad.” However, it also suggests that Xbox One is “terrible,” “going to fail,” “ugly,” “watching you,” “crap,” and “doomed.”

Xbox One isn’t the only product to have an interesting mix of autocomplete suggestions. Autocomplete on Google suggests “google glass is stupid” and “google glass is creepy.” Bing suggests these too, but also suggests that google glass is: “ridiculous,” “[a] terrible idea,” “military tech,” “scary,” and “useless.”

Searching for other tech companies returns interesting results, too. Google suggests that “apple is”: “dying,” “evil,” “dead,” and “doomed,” while Bing suggests the company is: “evil,” “losing its cool,” “losing,” “a cult,” “dead,” and “going downhill.” (On the flip side, Bing’s autocomplete also suggests that Apple is a “good company to work for” and “better than android.”) Meanwhile, Bing’s autocomplete doesn’t seem to be advertising Windows 8 very well, suggesting that “windows 8 is:” “terrible,” “horrible,” “awful,” “slow,” “awesome,” “a disaster,” “great,” and “crap.” These are only a few of the latest examples, but FAIL Blog has a great collection of similar autocomplete fails collected by search engine users.

But what if a person’s name is autocomplete associated with something they might not like? In May 2013, former first lady of Germany Bettina Wulff successfully sued Google for automatically completing search terms entered into the company’s German search engine that associated her name with “escort,” “prostitute,” or “past life.” For years, rumors had been circulating that Wulff had worked as an escort before meeting her husband (and future president) Christian Wulff. Five similar autocomplete cases have been leveled against Google in Germany, most of which involve associations between a person’s name and terms like “fraud” or “bankruptcy,” and before Wulff, Google had won them all.

Before Wulff, Google’s main defense had been, as explained by the company’s Northern Europe spokesperson Kay Oberbeck, that the predictions come from “algorithmically generated result of objective factors, including the popularity of the entered search terms.” Google argued it was not responsible for simply displaying the mass input of users, but even if German courts had agreed, the marketing departments have some serious work ahead of them.

Despite Google’s assertions that “autocomplete predictions are algorithmically determined based on a number of factors (including popularity of search terms) without any human intervention” and that “objective factors” alone drive the suggestions, Google voluntarily and expressly intervenes in autocomplete results to remove hate speech, copyright infringement, and other terms on a country by country basis (for example, searches in German do not show Holocaust denial keywords, but they do appear in searches within the US). While Google had not lost an autocomplete case in Germany before Wulff, it had lost several defamation cases in Japan, Australia, and France.

And what if some clever person figured out how to use autocomplete to their advantage? In 2010, Internet marketing expert Brent Payne paid several assistants to search for “Brent Payne manipulated this.” Not long after, users typing “Brent P” into Google would see Payne’s results in their autocomplete suggestions. When Payne advertised what he had done, Google removed the suggestion.

idesignwebsitesnet/Flickr

Payne’s manipulation of Google’s autocomplete and Google’s own reaction should indicate that the algorithms built to guide and direct us through the Web are neither infallible nor incorruptible. In several countries, algorithm creators have been held responsible for the actions of their autocompleting creations. At the same time, decisions to intervene in the operation of algorithms can be viewed as censorship or an abuse of power. Shelly borrowed the term “Modern Prometheus” from Immanuel Kant’s description of Benjamin Franklin’s contemporary experiments with electricity. When the creators of algorithms can be held responsible for the defamation of their creation, by legal institutions or consumers, those creators are forced to accept the successes, limitations, and failures of their experiments with electronic discourse.

Cloud Computing, Cloud Polluting?

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courtesy of PayBit.pl

In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto (a pseudonym) announced plans to build a new electronic currency—totally peer-to-peer and requiring no third party intermediaries—called Bitcoins. In order to get new Bitcoins, users would install programs on their computers called “Bitcoin miners” that would solve complex mathematical puzzles. By making the puzzles difficult and only solvable after some heavy computing, coins would be slowly introduced into the system over time and the coins randomly distributed to users. These mining programs would search for a sequence of data that produces a particular pattern which, when found, gives the miner a small amount of Bitcoins. Simply put, users could make Bitcoins by using their computers’ processing power to solve these puzzles and generate new coins. As of 2009, the number of new Bitcoins has been designed to halve every 4 years until 2140, after which the number of Bitcoins will have reached a maximum of 21 million coins, and no more Bitcoins will be added into circulation.

This system worked well for the first few years, but since Bitcoin mining became widely practiced in 2009, the easy puzzles have been solved, and more processing power has been needed to solve the increasingly harder puzzles. Though there are other ways to obtain Bitcoins (like buying them with other currencies, or trading them for products and services, or through processing fees), mining the coins is still the only way to introduce more coins into the system. As Bitcoin mining requires increasing computing power for diminishing returns, the low-powered computers found in homes and offices are no longer up to the task of virtual mining.

courtesy of Zach Copley/Flickr

In April 2013, Mark Gimein at Bloomberg published an article calling Bitcoin mining an “environmental disaster” that consumes 982 megawatt hours a day, or enough power to run 31,000 US homes. Additionally, the value of Bitcoins is subject to massive fluctuations in the currency trading markets, threats by various governments to shut down the experiment, and hacker attacks on the Bitcoin system. Just three days before the Gimein published his article, Bitcoin values plummeted by 77% after hackers and new users put pressure on the system. A month later, US authorities seized the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange, and earlier this week the IRS declared Bitcoins a taxable income. While Bitcoin has made a few people wealthy, Bitcoin miners are quite literally converting thousands of megawatt hours into virtual currency, the future of which is extremely uncertain. Just like mining for gold in the real-world, mining for virtual coins presents serious political, economic, and environmental issues.

courtesy of Jeff Kubina/Flickr

While Bitcoins may be the one of the most obvious challenges to the virtual-material divide, it may not be the most significant. In September 2012, the New York Times estimated that digital data centers worldwide use about 30 billion watts of electricity (or about the same as the output of 30 nuclear power plants), with the US responsible for about one-third of that usage. According to Google, a single search uses about 0.0003 kWh (1080 joules) of energy, which is roughly the same as turning on a 60W light bulb for 17 seconds. Another estimate found that a 140 character Tweet consumes about 90 joules, which is roughly enough energy to power that same light bulb for 1.4 seconds.

But what about when no one is actively using these services? A McKinsey & Company report estimated that an average data center only uses 6 to 12% of its electricity for computation, while nearly 90% of energy use goes into keeping servers idling in case of a surge in activity that could crash operations. Companies keep their facilities running around the clock at maximum capacity, regardless of demand, because they fear what might happen if their services are interrupted.

Earlier this month, Google hosted a summit at the Googleplex to consider “How green is the Internet?” In his keynote address, energy researcher Jon Koomey estimated that the Internet is probably responsible for about 10% of the world’s total electricity consumption. Koomey, who has been studying the material impact of the Internet since 2000, noted that the numbers are difficult to track, but suggested that companies that have made their names collecting data could do a better job tracking electrical use. Eric Masanet from Northwestern University found this lack of data troubling enough that he launched a publicly available model for assessing the energy effects of cloud computing called CLEER.

Koomey also noted that moving to digital communications and networks has reduced overall electricity use. For example, Koomey argues, businesses and organizations reduce their use of electricity by allowing companies like Google to host their email servers rather than run their own. The subtext of many of the “How green is the Internet?” keynotes was fairly obvious; if you care about the environment, move your data and processing to the cloud. Google made this connection clear when the company posted on its blog about the summit and cited a study (sponsored by Google) from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that found that migrating all US office workers to the cloud could save up to 87% of IT energy use (or enough to power the city of Los Angeles for a year).

courtesy of Stuart Marsh/Flickr

From an environmental perspective, Google has done its best to make migrating to the cloud attractive. Google is one of the largest investors in renewable energy, has commissioned several wind farms, and uses more efficient cooling towers for its servers than most Internet companies (though currently only 33% of its energy use is renewable). Other companies are investing in clean and green technologies too. Last year Facebook opened a data center in a building designed to make its servers 40% more energy efficient, and this year it opened a data center in Sweden that completely runs on hydropower. Apple states that its data centers are completely powered by solar, wind, hydro and geothermal energy. Microsoft has pledged to become carbon neutral in 2013 and earned its place on the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2013 list of the top 10 renewable energy-using organizations in the US along with Intel, Starbucks, Wal-Mart, and Lockheed Martin.

courtesy of Kevin Saff/Flickr

Recently, several cloud computing companies like Cloud Hashing have begun offering services that allow users to use outsource their Bitcoin mining processes to their cloud servers. Bitcoin mining isn’t the only service being migrated to the cloud. Last year, Adobe announced its decision to begin offering its Creative Suite of products, like the popular Photoshop and Illustrator, on its cloud service exclusively. Adobe reported this week that 700,000 users have begun using their “Creative Cloud” service and hopes to have 4 million users by 2015. Adobe’s decision to offer its services via the cloud was primarily motivated by its need to combat piracy of its software and also to roll out updates quicker, not necessarily because the company wanted to decrease end user energy consumption. Other data gathering companies have a stronger interest in collecting, storing, and mining user data. Last week, Google caused some controversy and user confusion after completing an update to its mobile Gmail app, making archive (rather than delete) the default setting for mobile users. Google didn’t remove the delete option—it’s still available through menu actions—but the company is clearly nudging users away from deleting emails. Much like mining Bitcoins, mining user data or letting users search archived messages requires sifting through massive amounts of data looking for particular patterns or text.

courtesy of Peter Patau/Flickr

While Adobe’s new cloud services might use less energy than what individual computers running the software requires, and companies like Apple and Google are moving to renewable energies, the lack of energy usage transparency prevents users from knowing the actual costs of cloud computing. Many people go out of their way to turn off the lights when they leave a room or recycle soda cans, but become angry when a site loads slowly or they can’t instantly find an email archived four years ago in Gmail. The data centers that store and process old emails and tweets already use more than 2% of the US electricity supply (more than the notoriously energy demanding paper industry). When one considers how much energy is involved in Internet use, “the cloud” rapidly comes down to Earth.

#imweekly: June 24, 2013

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Tunisia
The Tunisian Internet Agency building, the center of the former Tunisian regime’s Internet censorship facuilities and once a home of the former dictator Ben Ali, is being changed into a hackerspace and open wifi hotspot for nearby citizens.  Plans are in the works to extend the range of the building’s routers to allow Internet sharing with more of the population.

Pakistan
A recent report from the Citizen Lab found that Pakistan is using Netsweeper, a filtering technology managed by a Canadian company, to block websites or tamper with DNS. The Pakistani government is planning to block more URLs and SMS text messages in the country. However, five international companies who sell surveillance and filtering software have committed not to help Pakistan, after protests from civil rights groups.

Mexico
Human rights activists have filed a request to investigate the use of the FinFisher surveillance software by the Mexican government, which they suspect has been used to spy on journalists and activists in the country. A Citizen Lab report detailing FinFisher’s use in 36 countries was the spark that prompted the investigation. Drug-related violence in the country may have allowed the government to launch several surveillance programs without significant resistance from civil society.

United States
Facebook announced it has fixed a bug on Friday which has potentially leaked 600 million users’ email addresses and phone numbers. The bug allowed users downloading an archive of their user account to also download other users’ information. Security researchers have also discovered that Facebook is collecting data on people without a Facebook account and also has been keeping a shadow profile of every user that includes information not shared by the users directly with Facebook. The bug had been active for the past year, though Facebook says it has no evidence that the bug was exploited maliciously.

#imweekly is a regular round-up of news about Internet content controls and activity around the world. To subscribe via RSS, click here.

Syrian Citizens Launch Memes and Throw Shoes in Viral Internet Campaign

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Syria’s tech-savvy and socially engaged citizens are resisting the state in creative ways. Conflict is never black and white, and in today’s ever-more-connected world, attempts to address conflict are often quite colorful. This was evident earlier this month when Chinese bloggers morphed a classic photo of citizen resistance from Tiananmen Square, changing a line of government tanks into a parade of big yellow ducks. The image was powerful and provocative; thus the role of the meme in Chinese social media. 

Syrian citizens’ imaginations are also playing out colorfully on the Internet. Taking a closer look at the nuances of Syria’s resistance movement can help us complicate the oversimplified and often exoticized picture of people and events in the Middle East that is presented in popular media. In a recent article for Jadaliyya, Berkman fellow and researcher Donatella Della Ratta suggests, “As much as images of violence, civil war, and sectarian strife become prominent in the media narrative of the Syrian uprising, little gems of innovative cultural production, artistic resistance, and creative disobedience continue to sprout across the virtual alleys of the Internet.”

So what does a civil society movement on the Internet look like in a time of civil war?  In the case of the “I am with Syria” campaign, it looks much like a volley of artistic images with subtle political messages. The back and forth that started on the streets continues to play out on Facebook, Twitter, and blogs.

Eye-catching posters began to show up in Syria around the time the uprising began in March 2011. The first round of images was published by the al-Bashar regime and featured the phrase, “I am with the law.” Iterations included, “whether progressive or conservative, I am with the law,” “whether boy or girl, …” and “whether young or old, ….” Citizens were insulted by the campaign’s assumption that the law was the exclusive domain of the state and that anyone opposed to the regime was outside the law. They responded initially by vandalizing the posters, but soon developed a less aggressive form of resistance. They designed their own posters with their own slogans, riffing on both “I am with the law” and on an updated version of the government campaign that used “I am with Syria, my demands are your demands” as the primary text.  These user-generated designs—ranging from “I am with Syria, my demands are freedom,” to increasingly humorous and satirical statements—appealed to Syrians’ sense of humor, beauty, and creativity rather than instigating division and bloodshed.

“I am with the law” government billboard campaign in Damascus Photo credit: Donatella Della Ratta. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license

Citizen-generated versions of the posters showed up on the streets and were widely disseminated online, particularly on Facebook. In May 2011, the “I am with Syria” Facebook page was launched; it continues to post images and host comments. One of the resistance posters states, “I am with Syria, I lost my shoes,” which is a cultural reference suggesting that people have thrown their shoes at al-Bashar as an expression of their disrespect. When a man threw his shoes at George Bush in 2008, it made global headlines. Throwing your shoe at someone is a serious insult in the Arab world. “I lost my shoes” is just one of the culturally rich jokes, parodies, and satirical slogans that went viral as part of the “I am with Syria” Internet campaign..

Collage of remixed versions of the original posters. one reads “My was is your way but the tank is in the way” and another “I am with the law, but where is it?” Image courtesy of Ammar Alani via Donatella Della Ratta.

“I am with Syria” is a playing out across the Internet like a conversation in the language of memes that gets a clear message of political resistance across, without inciting further violence in a country already ravaged by civil war. The central image of the campaign has always been an upward reaching human arm that represents an alif- the first of 28 characters in the Arabic alphabet. Atop the alif is a hamza, (an Arabic marker equivalent to a vowel sound in English). A human hand stands in for the hamza. The hand is open in both government and citizen- inspired posters. That the counter campaign kept the open hand speaks to its central spirit and purpose. The hand could have been a fist- a classic symbol of resistance- fight the power so to speak- but this hand is extended and open, waiting for another hand to grab on and link up.  One of the strategies of war is to divide and fracture communities; in the case of Syria, the Internet is helping people in battle-weary communities stay connected.

“Whether Anti or Pro-Regime, You Are Still My Brother..” Photo credit: http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/