Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

Tag: Internet Philosophy (Page 13 of 39)

A simple idea to help the pro-democracy movement in #Egypt: Publish

7 February 2011 / / 2 Comments

Tahrir Square – “The biggest think-tank in the Middle East”

In the Western world, there is much hand-wringing over just how our people and governments can help the people of Egypt get a better government.  Since we are viewed as part of the problem, any interventions (either supporting the Mubarak regime, or condemining it more forcefully) will likely make matters worse.  So for now, we hear slightly patronising platitudes about how the Egyptian people “must decide for themselves” followed by cautionary tales of radical Islam in the very next breath.
There is one way in which Western nations – or rather, the people civil society groups in those nations – could help the pro-democracy groups, and that is by publishing their message.  With communications still slow and unreliable in Egypt itself, the messages of What They Actually Want are patchy, stilted, and vulnerable to pro-Mubarak spin.
In Tahrir Square, just over one hour ago, Mostafa Hussein sends out the following message:

Tahrir square is the biggest brainstorming & think-tank in the middle east and possible the world now. #egypt #jan25

Well then: how about the people of Europe and North America, with their unrivalled and unfettered communications network, publish the preliminary findings of this new think-tank?
I do not mean “Let’s publish thoughts of Egyptian journalists and analysts” or “thoughts of Arab writers” or “eye witness accounts of what is happening”.   I mean, why not publish the debates and discussions of those in the square right now.
Now, I actually think that a book is the right medium for this.  Something that has been formally published and can exist in printed form has a certain authority and weight (literally and metaphorically) that these ideas need.  TV interviews and news reports are two-a-penny and far too transient, as are blogs, YouTube Channels and Twitter feeds.  A book on the otherhand – even a short book – can step outside the river of news and become something more tangible and influential.  It will be something other than the charter of the Muslim Brotherhood, that everyone can point to as an alternative to Mubarak and his henchmen.
With the new digital inventions at our fingertips, there are no technical barriers to doing this.  Initiatives like The Benjamin Franklin Project have shown that the free tools on the Internet are all that is required to gather and publish news and views.  And the means to pull content together are already in operation down on Tahrir Square.  Lulu.com allows you to publish a proper book, with an ISBN and a listing on Amazon, almost on a whim.
So, how about a British or American civil society group offers to spend until the end of this week managing the project, and undertakes to publish the book, in English, to an international audience.  I am thinking of a projects of the scope of The New Liberal Arts project – short essays.  I reckon think tanks like Demos, or the Fabian Society have the capacity to pull this off… or maybe a forward think news organisation like OpenDemocracy, The Guardian, or The Atlantic?

Update

A couple of PEN members may be putting this together with their contacts in Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon and Libya!  Get in touch via the comments if you would like to help.

#Egypt, The Most Important Data Nexus on the Planet

4 February 2011 / / 1 Comment

Amid all the uncertainty and violence happening in Egypt, I was struck by a story from Alexandria.  Youths have been organising to protect Bibliotheca Alexanadrina, ‘The New Library of Alexandria’.

The young people organized themselves into groups that directed traffic, protected neighborhoods and guarded public buildings of value such as the Egyptian Museum and the Library of Alexandria.  They are collaborating with the army.  This makeshift arrangement is in place until full public order returns.
The library is safe thanks to Egypt’s youth, whether they be the staff of the Library or the representatives of the demonstrators, who are joining us in guarding the building from potential vandals and looters.

A major early move by the Egyptian government was to ‘flick the switch’ and choke Internet communications.  In the short term this has clearly given Mubarak and his cohort the upper-hand, by keeping the pro-democracy groups divided and chaotic.  However, the short-term gain might weaken them in the future.  As the the freelancer journalist Ashraf Khalil just tweeted from Cairo:

Told Nile TV that the main economic damage to #egypt is from Net shutdown (estimated $90 mill) and images of violence scaring away tourists

The stories of the Library and the net shut-down recall an old Wired article by Neal Stephenson, where he traces the paths of fibre-optic cables around the world (I actually mentioned it last December when discussing Wikileaks). Stephenson’s travels take him to Egypt, where a major new communications cable is being landed in Alexandria, at a most historic location:

If you turn your back on the equipment through which the world’s bits are swirling, open one of the windows, wind up, and throw a stone pretty hard, you can just about bonk that used book peddler on the head. Because this place, soon to be the most important data nexus on the planet, happens to be constructed virtually on top of the ruins of the Great Library of Alexandria.

Just one more reason why we are all bound up in Egypt’s fate.  Let’s hope that the people who marshalled to protect their museums, are the ones to prevail.

Global Culture vs International Culture

6 January 2011 / / 0 Comments

International departures at Gardermoen Airport, Oslo. Photo by Yrstrly.

International departures at Gardermoen Airport, Oslo. Photo by Yrstrly.


And now for some semantics.  David at Minority Report muses the problem of net nuetrality, and highlights a post over at Confused of Calcutta on the ‘un-national’, a word borrowed from a William Stafford poem.  JP contrasts concepts like ‘global’ with apparent synonyms like ‘international’ and its derivatives.  The former has an implied statelessness, the absence of a nation, whereas the latter implies that the thing we are describing (a person, or an organisation) does have one or more nations of origin, a liable jurisdiction that can control and curtail their activities.
This chimes with Jay Rosen’s description of Wikileaks as the first ‘Stateless’ news organisation, an idea he expanded on in a recent edition of his Rebooting the News podcast (#76, I think), making the same point that ‘global’ and ‘international’ are not necessarily the same thing.  In the context of net neutrality and cyber-dissidence, a ‘global’ organisation, with no final country of origin, is better protected against interference and attack, than an ‘international’ organisation which nevertheless has a home nation. Rosen recommends that Wikileaks adopts a similar model to Greenpeace, Amnesty, and PEN, with national organisations/chapters in many countries.
My thoughts naturally turn to multi-culture and how these terms might be applied in that area.  When cultural phenomenons, and pieces of art and cultural expression, become popular in many countries, are they international or global (in the senses described above).  I would say that musicians like Elvis Presley, The Beatles (bigger, for a time, than Jesus) and Michael Jackson are all international.  In each case, their music is a product of a particular time and place – regardless of where their fans are located, or where they play their concerts.
However, I think cultural phenomenons like Islam or Football are clearly global.  As they exist now, they seem to be a product of the human race as a whole, even if their origins can be pin-pointed accurately to a single country.  You could even include things like World of Warcraft, and the graffiti aesthetic in that list, but not Les Misérables.  What about LOLcats?

On Passwords and Privacy

15 December 2010 / / 2 Comments

The popular Gawker/Lifehacker network was hacked this week, compromising tens of thousands of passwords.  This news provides an excuse for a couple of paragraphs of boastful geekery in the fascinating area of password management.
I spend a lot of my day roaming the Internet and the various services it has to offer, both for work and personal matters. In many cases, I operate an organisational and personal account (for example, @englishpen and @robertsharp59 on Twitter).  Logging in and out of the various accounts can be a drag, but I’ve recently started using the Sxipper password management tool for Firefox.  Browsers already have the capacity to remember your passwrods of course, but usually only one-per-site.  Sxipper stores all the possible options and let’s me choose.  A Godsend.
This transition has allowed me to become a little more rigourous in managing personal privacy.  Prompted by this salutary tale from Cory Doctorow, I decided that I would create unique passwords for new websites I sign-up for.

I carefully tapped in my password, clicked the login button, and then felt my stomach do a slow flip-flop as I saw the URL that my browser was contacting with the login info: http://twitter.scamsite.com … And that’s when I realized that I’d been phished. And it was bad. Because I’d signed up for Twitter years ago, when Ev Williams, Twitter’s co-founder sent me an invite to the initial beta. I’d used a password that I used for all kinds of sites, back before I started strictly using long, random strings that I couldn’t remember for passwords.  …  What’s more, Twitter isn’t the only place where I used my “low-security” password that has turned into a high-security context, which means that hijackers could conceivably break into lots of interesting places with that information.

The recent Gawker breach only reinforces Cory’s advice to use a different password for each site.  Back in the day, before my laptop was stolen, I would use the same password for all websites, as (I guess) most people continue to do.  It was only after the theft that I began to diversify, and only in recent months I have gone the whole random hog and started to use opaque strings. To do this with ease, I have bookmarked PC Tools Random Password Generator.
JR Rapael at the PC World blog has an interesting article on all this: Gawker Hack Exposes Ridiculous Password Habits.  Apparently “12345” is the most common password, followed closely by “password”, obviously.  If those combinations feel a little too close to home, it would be wise to make some changes to your own online life, ASAP.

The Seams of Our Society Are Exposed Tonight

9 December 2010 / / 3 Comments

We live in interesting times. As I write there are protesters kettled by police on Westminster Bridge, and burning portaloos in Parliament Square. The army are deployed in Edinburgh, clearing the effects of the worst snow for 40 years. Meanwhile, an ‘info war’ is being waged on the largest financial services companies in the world by a disparate group of hacktivists. Digital technology allows us to watch all these crises unfold in realtime.
In my twitter stream all these stories are spliced together. This makes them seem like different scenes in a single master-narrative.
All these events are compelling because they show just how tenuous our human systems are. Visa and MasterCard should be reliable to the point of invisibility – instead we are reminded that they can turn off our credit on a political whim. The food supply into our cities should be consistent and unbroken, not severed by a bit of snow. And our shopping districts should not erupt into blazing vandalism in an instant.
These confusions expose the thin seams of our society. I do not think they will break, for tonight at least. But the strain is obvious.

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