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Jan 20 2012
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News, Media & Sport

This war between government and online anarchists must stop

As I mentioned in my last blog post (I’ve got to stop beginning posts like this, it’s just getting annoying now) the hacking collective Anonymous went after a series of major websites last night. This has happened because US authorities have chosen to close down Megaupload in order to clamp down on piracy.

The scale of the arrest is quite huge: each person arrested have been charged with five counts of copyright infringement and conspiracy. This includes the founders who were arrested by local police in Auckland, New Zealand. The maximum jail sentence for copyright infringement? Five years. The maximum jail sentence for conspiracy to commit racketeering and money laundering? Twenty years. This is also all rather timely following the SOPA/PIPA outrage and goes to show that perhaps SOPA/PIPA isn’t needed to go after people who are hosting copyrighted material.

The one major problem of this whole battle between the authorities and online anarchists is that it weakens the prospect of proper dialogue between people who have the power to make laws and citizens. If you thought that the idea of a compromise was a stretch before all this kicked off then it seems like a near-impossibility at this moment in time. The longer that this ‘war’ goes on the less likely we are to make major process on an issue that has polarised politicians, the entertainment industry and internet users for at least a decade.

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Dec 14 2011
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Are the government taking out their austerity too much on the disabled?

I’ve had my fair share of problems with the welfare system over the years. When I applied for Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) straight after leaving university I found out I couldn’t actually get any of it because they thought I could live off my girlfriend’s part-time income (which is almost an insult, to be frank) and then when we tried to get some housing benefit last winter we came unstuck because we had to keep sending document after document after document to prove our case. In the end, we gave up since it was causing so much stress.

Something needs to be fixed on those specific areas and that is what makes the coalition government’s decision to ‘re-haul’ it by cutting money out from disability benefits particular perplexing.

They’re hoping to pass the welfare reform bill before Christmas and instead of clamping down on benefit cheats they are removing certain forms of disability benefit like the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) with Personal Independence Payments (PIP) and announcing the introduction of the Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), which claimants may only be get for a year if they have a partner that earns £7,500 or more or there are limited savings.

Basically, instead of showing compassion, they’re trying to throw in as many loopholes to stop disabled people get the money that they actually need.

The other truly ridiculous thing about these proposed changes is that it’s basically saying to couples: “If you want to get benefits, split up!” Who knows what kind of damage that would do. For the disabled, it’s important that they have people around them to support them and make them stronger. It’s also crying out for benefit cheats to claim more money from the government that they don’t really need. Heck, if it’s easy enough already when it comes to the JSA and housing benefits then they’ll crack this one too eventually.

What angers me the most though is that this sends out the message that because we are broke it’s going to be the disadvantaged that have to pay. Has it really now come to this?

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Dec 07 2011
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China’s attempts to create a “healthy internet”

In China, a battle has been waged for some time as the government try to clamp down on social networks. A senior official even went to the headquarters of Sina, the biggest social network in the country, to ask them to prevent the spread of “toxic rumours”. There was growing cynicism that the government’s attempts to crack down on ‘rumours’ might be a little bit more than creating a “healthy internet”. According to Reuters, one user said in August:

If this was really about quashing rumours, Internet users would surely welcome that, but I fear that this is not about mere rumours. It’s more about waving this banner as a pretext to cleanse so-called rumours and ban the people from telling the truth.

Despite these fears, Sina have just recently started to put into place some methods to try and cleanse the social network of information that could be a cause for concern. A ‘rumour control’ team has been set up recently and there’s, according to The Next Web, about ten members of that team watching activity on a round-the-clock basis. Their role is to issue warnings to users that they think have crossed the line and they also have the power to suspend and delete accounts. Tan Chao, director of the rumour control team, told China Daily:

The job is vital, as we want to protect the truth and maintain an unpolluted Web. There is a lot of information on Weibo, much of it eye-catching, which means it attracts a lot of people. Yet users are not always good at judging what is true and what is false. They can be easily misled.

Could you imagine Twitter implementing similar measures on their service based on the request of a UK government? Given that one of the ideas mentioned in the wake of the UK was a shutdown of social networks to stop people from communicating at times of social unrest, the answer probably isn’t clear-cut as you might think.

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Dec 06 2011
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“The Four Horsemen” – Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple

Another interesting nugget from Greenslade’s blog on the Guardian website:

I attended a breakfast lecture this morning – at the Savoy, since you ask – about the ongoing transition from print to online. I accepted the Chatham House rules so I can’t go into details.

However, the excellent speaker illustrated how, if traditional media owners adopt a digital first strategy, think, innovate, take risks, think again, accept the value of trial and error, go on thinking, and – of course – invest, then there is no reason that publishers need to fold their tents.

I was particularly taken with his acknowledgement of the key part played in our lives by what he called “the four horsemen” – Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple.

They never stop innovating and they never seem to stop growing. And these are the companies building a media future.

You can read the rest here.

Interestingly, at the Great Escape festival in May (this is a music industry event) someone managed to come up with a similar theory; describing the four main players in the digital music industry. They were Spotify, Amazon, Google and Apple – or SAGA if you wanted to abbreviate them. It’s quite remarkable how similar the aforementioned ‘Four Horsemen’ analogy matches that of the SAGA analogy and perhaps another example of how the news media and music industries are not too dissimilar.

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Dec 05 2011
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Russian websites are attacked on the eve of national election

Websites which revealed violations in Russia’s legislative polls were targeted in a mass hacking attack Sunday their operators said was aimed at preventing the exposure of mass election fraud.

Popular Russian radio station Moscow Echo and election monitoring group Golos said their websites were the victims of massive cyber attacks, while several opposition news sites were inaccessible.

“The attack on the website on election day is clearly an attempt to inhibit publication of information about violations,” Moscow Echo editor-in-chief Alexei Venediktov wrote on Twitter.

Golos said it was the victim of a similar “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attack, while several other opposition news sites were down. The Moscow Echo is popular among the liberal opposition although it is owned by state gas giant Gazprom.

After the close of polls on Sunday, the Moscow Echo website was working again but the Golos website was still inaccessible.

The rest is up for you to read via AFP. I’m not the only one to think that this is the kind of thing that could come out of any political conspiracy thriller, right?

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