On passing through the immigration control at the airport in Tehran, she was asked by the officers if she has a Facebook account. When she said “no”, the officers pulled up a laptop and searched for her name on Facebook. They found her account and noted down the names of her Facebook friends.

This is very disturbing. For once, it means that the Iranian authorities are paying very close attention to what’s going on Facebook and Twitter (which, in my opinion, also explains why they decided not to take those web-sites down entirely — they are useful tools of intelligence gathering).

… we have to be fully prepared to be quizzed about any online trace that we have left

… this reveals that some of the spontaneous online activism we witnessed in the last few weeks — with Americans re-tweeting the posts published by those in Tehran — may eventually have very dire consequences, as Iranians would need to explain how exactly they are connected to foreigners that follow them on Twitter

We’ll hear more of this. Karl, chalk one up for opacity.

Via Carl Nordlund and the fabulous SOCNET list. I love you guys.

The Internet of Things is the second issue in the series of Network Notebooks. It’s a critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID by Rob van Kranenburg. Rob examines what impact RFID and other systems, will have on our cities and our wider society. He currently works at Waag Society as program leader for the Public Domain and wrote earlier an article about this topic in the Waag magazine and is the co-founder of the DIFR Network. The notebook features an introduction by journalist and writer Sean Dodson.

… Rob van Kranenburg outlines his vision of the future. He tells of his early encounters with the kind of location-based technologies that will soon become commonplace, and what they may mean for us all. He explores the emergence of the “internet of things”, tracing us through its origins in the mundane back-end world of the international supply chain to the domestic applications that already exist in an embryonic stage. He also explains how the adoption of he technologies of the City Control is not inevitable, nor something that we must kindly accept nor sleepwalk into. In van Kranenburg’s account of the creation of the international network of Bricolabs, he also suggests how each of us can help contribute to building technologies of trust and empower ourselves in the age of mass surveillance and ambient technologies.

There’s a launch party in October, if you happen to be in Amsterdam. Kudos to Léon & Loes for the great design.

As you may imagine from my writing lately (here, here), the word “Bricolabs” caught my attention. From their site:

A distributed network for global and local development of generic infrastructures incrementally developed by communities.

A global platform to investigate the new loop of open content, software, and hardware for community applications, bringing people together with new technologies and distributed connectivity, unlike the dominant focus of IT industry on security, surveillance, and monopoly of information and infrastructures.

You can go to the Institute of Network Cultures blog to download a copy and learn more

about it.

Via Karl.

Jonathan Torgovnik’s photographs of children born of rape during the Rwandan genocide. By Mia Fineman, Slate Magazine
Powerful article about a photo series, focusing on the children of rape in Rwanda. The mothers photographed had been raped by Hutu militamen during the genocide, and the photographer interviewed them away from their children, then photographed the two together. A powerful reminder of consequences of war that continue a generation after a conflict ends.

I read the article and looked through the photos and testimonies. This part confused me:

(The subjects’ names have been changed to protect their identities. While the women want the world to know what happened to them, they hope to protect themselves and their children from the censure of their own communities.)

What about their faces? These photos are online for everyone to see. The book is on Amazon.com. Doesn’t this assume that Rwandans cannot access this article and these images? Or that they have no friends or relatives in other countries with better access?

I know that there are issues with connectivity Rwanda (starting with unreliable electricity). I know there’s a language barrier. I know that digital literacy is low. But I also know that the number of Internet users and shared access points (telecentres, libraries, internet cafes, etc.) is growing. Since 2000, the number of Internet users in Rwanda has grown from 5,000 to 100,000.

After working with telecentre.org, meeting folks from across the continent, and visiting grassroots telecentres, I see what’s possible and never ever assume that what I post online won’t be seen by all.

We are connected. Ethan and Paul Barera both attended the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis in 2005. Since 2004, Paul’s been running the Nyamata telecentre, in Rwanda’s Bugesera District — one of areas hardest hit by the genocide (out of a population of 62,000, only 2,000 survived, mostly women and children). Paul provides a range of community services, from IT literacy training for adults and kids to computer maintenance and repair. In April 2008 he ran a three-day workshop for women survivors, focusing on how to create and manage a business and access microfinancing.

We are connected. Changing names is not enough to protect these women and their children. When we produce content like this we have to assume that everyone can see it. Including these children, soon young adults, some of whom may read that their mothers love and cherish them, despite the circumstances of their conception. Others whom may read “I never loved this child” — so disturbing.

Milgram gave volunteers the task of forwarding a letter to a stranger by sending it to friends or acquaintances that might be one step closer to the target. Milgram measured how many hops there were between the sender and the end recipient, and found it to be, on average, 5.2. (The term “six degrees of separation” was coined later by playwright John Guare.)

In 2000, inspired by Milgram’s work, Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell University, in New York, created a mathematical model for routing information across any kind of network. Kleinberg says that he drew from the fact that Milgram “demonstrated not just that short paths were present in large social networks, but that people — operating without a global view of the network — could efficiently find them.”

… the work of Kleinberg and others can be applied to real-world networks and, specifically, could be used to design a protocol that allows routers to keep track of less information about a network, thereby reducing congestion.

The key lies in identifying “hidden” bits of information that could help routers decide where to send a packet, Boguñá says. The people in Milgram’s experiment used such information to figure out how to forward their letters. Instead of passing them on to a random friend, they identified criteria, such as a person’s profession, that meant that they might be a step closer to the intended recipient. The work of Boguñá and his colleagues focuses on identifying and exploiting hidden information on other kinds of networks. In the case of Internet routing, the physical location of a router or the type of information it last handled could provide useful clues for forwarding information toward a final destination without knowing the complete structure of the network.

I like this idea being part of the flow (the solution) even if you can’t see the bigger picture.

The guide was very hard to write. Kept getting blocked. It’s so much easier to write here. And I noticed that when I moved it from the document to a series of blog posts I felt freer to insert my voice and my ideas flowed better. Maybe I should write blogs first. I also found that I did not like writing for paper (it’s meant to be published in the Telecentre Magazine). I love books and newspapers and magazines but I kept wanting to put in links and was annoyed when I could not.

For now the guide exists as a document and a series of blogs, so people can post comments that I can use to keep improving it. But I actually think it should be a wiki. Project for another day.

The report was prepared for the Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. You can download it from Skye’s blog.

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