Blog of Wade Making Connexions

Internet Censorship, Coming, Like It or Not

Governments like control. All centralized media has been censored by Government in some form. James Joyce’s Ulysses was banned in both UK and US until the 1930’s. Book burning is an old practice. Most recently made popular by Hitler in 1933. Radio, TV, movies, and games are all censored through national ratings panels. Beyond that, 6 companies control almost the entire mainstream broadcast media. Pushing their own agendas and self-censorship is what any corporation trying to maximize it’s profits is going to peruse.

It’s in this climate, with this history, that democratic and communist¹ countries are beginning to enforce internet censorship.

The Great Firewall of China blocks any content outside of the government’s vision/propaganda model.

The UK blocked wikipedia due to a cd cover.

Thailand has a list of over 50,000 sites blocked. This ranges from YouTube videos, and mirrors of the videos. To Hillary Clinton and Charile Chaplin.

Burma during the 2007 protests for democracy ‘turned off’ the internet to stop media from reporting about the public murdering of monks and protesters.

Germany recently passed a federal law in relation to filtering “child pornography” on the internet.

New Zealand has the Guilt Upon Accusation law ‘Section 92A’ that calls for internet disconnection based on accusations of copyright infringement without a trial and without any evidence held up to court scrutiny.

Iran, after the recent election fraud blocked access to Facebook and other social networks to try and stop coordination of protesters.

Australia is in the process of implementing a mandatory nation-wide filter, called a clean feed, that works on a black-list system. Meant to block only child pornography, but ‘over-blocks’ up to 7.8% of the time, as well as ‘under-blocking’ up to 13%.

Governments around the world regardless of their political background, see internet filtering as a viable option. I see very little point in fighting them on this point. They have censored every prior broadcast medium, and 8 there’s different countries above implementing some for of internet censorship. The battle to stop internet censorship is lost.

I think we need to advance to the next stage of the battle. I think we need to start working on attractive looking packages for those-who-cannot-help-themselves. We don’t agree with censorship, but it appears we aren’t able to stop it being implemented by proving it’s wrong. What we can do is prove it’s without merit and easily circumvented.

A nicely looking package should be equal parts education and technology based. The OpenDNS model of add-value 3rd party free public service (DNS) could work wonderfully. In our case, it maybe DNS as well as proxy. Couple that with a tiered/paid access model giving faster speeds to those who want it, and there’s economic incentives.

The above ‘package’ works on filtered content. Thing is, it doesn’t help if links/ports/sites are shutdown. It may not be possible to proxy through reduced pipes. This is a much harder problem to fix, as infrastructure must be connected to local houses, but also needs to uplink to something/someone not filtering; meaning using links outside the country.

I think we need to change or focus, and start preparing for the next stage of this battle. Scalable solutions are easily deployed. Working with/around link filtering is much harder. My hobby problem at the moment is enabling internet in places without solid local internet uplinks. I don’t have answers, this is just the beginning. Thoughts?

Cells, Self, and I

Over the past week or so, there’s been a bit of talk on twitter about cell regeneration and the Self that continues to exist. I’ve been reading The Post Corporate World, and happened to come across a page that hits this perfectly.

It points out that we are living proof that cooperation is a greater force than competition. Thanks to @wayupnorth for motivating me to post.

Each of us is a composite of more than 30 trillion individual living cells. Yet even these cells constitute less than half of our dry weight. The remainder consists of microorganisms, such as the enteric bacteria and yeasts of our gut that manufacture vitamins and help metabolize our food. These symbiotic creatures are as necessary to our survival and healthful function as our own cells. Each cell and microorganism in our body is an individual, self-directing entity, yet by joining together they are able as well to function as a single being with abilities far beyond those of its parts.

Throughout its life span, each organism constantly renews its physical structures through cell death and replacement. Ninety-eight percent of the atoms in our bodies are replaced each year. Yet the identity, function, and coherence of the body and its individual organs are self-maintained - suggesting that each cell, organ, and body possesses some degree of inner knowledge and awareness of both self and the larger whole of which it is a part. Yet the identity, function, and coherence of each organ and the body as a whole are actively self-maintained year after year. The same is true for all living organisms—powerful evidence that every living being possesses an inner knowledge and awareness of self…

Although the whole plant or animal may complete with its own kind or other species for its external energy sources, its internal cells and organs freely share their available internal energy stores as required to support the healthy function of the whole on which they all depend. When a special need arises, such as in the case of an illness, injury, or need to flee from a potential predator, the available resources are instantly directed to the appropriate cells. When our body’s energy reserves have been exhausted, muscle tissue will be broken down to supply energy to the brain and maintain basic metabolic processes until danger has passed and food may be sought to replenish them. It is perhaps the ultimate expression of life’s capacity for cooperative teamwork.

Doing It ‘Right’ With Twitter

There’s no one right or wrong way to use twitter. Here’s a few companies over in San Francisco who not only have a Twitter account, but use it well for both their customers, and themselves.

Local shop, health focused, Bi-rite, on Twitter
 

SF SPCA Business Cards, asking people to follow them
 

Others doing it right:-

• Creme Brulee Cart - posts time/locations on flickr, and then sells food out of a cart
• Epicenter Cafe - posts about news, food, drinks, events, coffee and more

I Could write more, but I think the pictures and links do a good enough job at explaining what’s going on….

Back Up OSX With Rsync

There’s a lot of costly backup applications for OSX, which are nothing more than flashy front-ends for the inbuilt OSX command, rsync. After having a few friend’s HDDs fail recently, it was time to finish my backup solution for a free automated remote backup.

To do this, I coupled rsync, a shell script, idisk, and cron. YMMV, but here we go;-


Gratuitous-ARP:~ wadem$ more backup.sh
sudo rsync -E -a -x -S --delete /Users/wadem/Documents/ /Volumes/wadeis/Documents/
sudo rsync -E -a -x -S --delete /Users/wadem/Sites/ /Volumes/wadeis/Sites/
sudo rsync -E -a -x -S --delete --exclude-from /Users/wadem/photo_noback.txt /Users/wadem/Pictures/ /Volumes/wadeis/Pictures/
Gratuitous-ARP:~ wadem$

backup ALL=NOPASSWD: /Users/wadem/backup.sh, /usr/bin/rsync


It is Good.