May 31

Missing bits

By Stefano Buliani WWW No Comments »

Amnesty international is promoting an online petition at this URL http://irrepressible.info to protest against the world wide web censorship. A practice that is becoming alarmingly popular these days.

Freedom of speech and expression is one of the fundamental human rights. It is also endorsed by the first amendment of the US constitution.

The mention of the US constitution is not casual. First of all because almost all of the internet giants that accepted Chinese government’s policies for web content filtering are American. And last but not least because today the Supreme Court scaled back protections for government workers who blow the whistle on official misconduct.

“Justices said the 20 million public employees do not have free-speech protections for what they say as part of their jobs.”
So, for example, it is going to be virtuaally impossible for a policeman to report a corruption case inside his/her department.

But lets go back to the main theme, web censorship.
This issue has gained great visibility recently because of the indiscriminate way Chinese government has been repressing web-masters and bloggers.
I was, in fact, all set and ready to begin a big rant about the Chinese government when I decided to do some homework.
What I discovered and what most people don’t know is that China is just the top of the iceberg, and what a huge iceberg it must be to have China at its top.

Wikipedia provides us with a full list of the countries that are restricting their citizens’ access to the web. The list is available at the bottom of this article.

We could protest in some way against those limitations but most regrettably men is a cunning animal.
If we can’t get to our prey in a way we find another.
Knowing that directly limiting the freedom of people would cause distress the most slippery of our race-mates have found that an information can be retouched before it reaches its final consumer. Us.

The most blatant case of the arbitrary editing happened in 2005. US congressmen were directly modifying their pages on Wikipedia unluckily forgetting to mention the facts that might have caused some nuisances to the electorate (Like anyone would ever believe that the US congress is composed by a bunch of jolly good chaps).

As I said men are cunning, however, not all of them are slippery. And lets face it, every story needs a hero.

Our hero in this particular story is Oxblood Ruffin. Canadian, leader of the group called hackerism which has been working on software solutions to circumvent censorship on the web.
The outcome of said group’s work are two software:

  1. Camera/Shy – A software that was unveiled some years ago at the “Hackers on planet earth” conference in New York which hides encrypted messages inside gif images.
    Said Oxblood Ruffin “Camera/Shy is a first small step in sharing the privilege of free speech”.
  2. Six/Four – This application, which is clearly named after the date of the tragic events of Tiananmen Square when the Chinese government cracked down democracy protests on the 4th of June 1989, allows its users to create a private network, much like p2p works. These networks are, of course, unaccessible from the outside.

I believe we ought to thank this hackers group at the very least for having made a stand and having tried to help those of us to whom the freedom of speech has been denied.

In the meanwhile all we can hope for is that Amnesty international’s petition will have the desired effect and that the US government will change its position on the matter.

George Washington once said: “If freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter”.

Data from wikipedia:

  • Morocco, as of March 2006 had blocked access to many blogging sites, such as LiveJournal.
  • Tunisia has blocked thousands of websites (such as pornography, mail, and translation services) and peer-to-peer and FTP transfer. This filtering is performed using a transparent proxy and port blocking.
  • Pakistan has blocked access to websites critical of the government. Currently, the goverment has blocked blogs hosted on blogspot.com
  • The United Arab Emirates forcibly censors the internet using Secure Computing’s solution. The nation’s sole ISP Etisalat bans pornography, politically sensitive material, and anything against the moral values of the UAE.
  • Denmarks biggest internet service provider TDC A/S launched a DNS-based child pornography filter on October 18, 2005 in cooperation with the state police department and Save the Children, a charity organisation. Since then, all major providers have joined and as of May 2006, 98% of the Danish internet users are restricted by the filter. [1]. The filter caused some controversy in march 2006, when a legal sexsite named bizar.dk was caught in the filter, sparking discussion about the reliability, accuracy and credibility of the filter. [2]. MySpace was blocked from the months during the Cartoon Controversy, to prevent Denmark citizens from being lured by terrorists. Other countries may censor the Internet for political reasons
  • Burma maintains the restrictive Myanmar Wide Web.
  • The People’s Republic of China has set up systems for Internet censorship that are collectively known as the Great Firewall of China.
  • Cuba has made Internet usage illegal without a permit. For the most part only medical doctors can get permits, making the neighbourhood doctor the place to go to send e-mail to family abroad, but the Cuban government has been trying to restrict this.
  • French courts demanded Yahoo! block Nazi material in the case LICRA vs. Yahoo. The case is currently on appeal for an en banc rehearing.
  • The Maldives has prosecuted citizens for publishing articles critical of the Government on the internet.
  • In Singapore, 3 people were arrested and charged with sedition for posting racist comments on the Internet, of which two have been sentenced to imprisonment.
  • South Korea has ordered its internet service providers not to allow access to various sites it considers too sympathetic to North Korea.
  • Syria has banned websites for political reasons and arrested people accessing them.
  • Significant efforts have been made in Thailand to oppose sites that are representing illegal activities. Activities such as gambling, drug usage and pornography are strictly banned, using DNS control in Thailand and, more effectively, a transparent proxy.This makes the website appear to be inaccessible. Also, the government has banned sites that discuss circumventing internet censorship.
  • The United States of America enacted in 1996 the Communications Decency Act, which severely restricted online speech that could potentially be seen by a minor – which, it was argued, was most of online speech. Free speech advocates, however, managed to have most of the act overturned by the courts. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act criminalizes the discussion and dissemination of technology that could be used to circumvent copyright protection mechanisms, and makes it easier to act against alleged copyright infringement on the Internet. Other forms of censorship:

  • In Brazil, the state of São Paulo was the first state to enact an act requiring cybercafés to keep a user’s list with address, full name, date of birth, phone number, and an identity card number. [3]
  • Italy bans the use of foreign bookmakers over the internet by mandating certain edits to DNS host files of Italian ISPs. [4] [5]
  • United Kingdom, the new Home Office Minister Vernon Croaker set a deadline of the end of 2007 for all ISPs to implement a “Cleanfeed”-style network level content blocking platform. Currently, the only web sites ISPs are expected to block access to are sites the Internet Watch Foundation has identified as containing images of child abuse. However such a platform is capable of blocking access to any web site added to the list (at least, to the extent that the implementation is effective), making it a simple matter to change this policy in future. The Home Office has previously indicated that it has considered requiring ISPs to block access to articles on the web deemed to be “glorifying terrorism”, within the meaning of the new Terrorism Act 2006.
May 29

Somewhere something went terribly wrong…

By Stefano Buliani Technology 1 Comment »

As the title says somewhere something went wrong. That “somewhere” can be located in time rather then in space, the early 80s to be precise, when Apple computer met its first big competitor in the consumer computer market: IBM.
IBM equipped its computer with the first version of DOS (Disk Operating System) which was licensed by Microsoft at a ridiculously small price. The first challenge for Apple and its first mistake; it didn’t even try to compete with Microsoft’s prices. Also it was over-confident of its OS superiority. This was of course, until they noticed that they were inexorably loosing market share.

Apple not only lost the battle, it didn’t even bother to present itself on the battlefield. This was because of a series of mistakes that drew most of its customer base away before it could even begin to try to impress them. Last but not least the Apple III computer which tended to overheat and eventually melt itself due to the fact of Steve Jobs’ assertion that fans were “inelegant” and his decision not to put one in said machine.

After what can only be defined as the flaming [non]success of the Apple III, the company decided to work with Xerox and shortly afterward released the Apple Lisa, the first computer with a graphical user interface a mouse and almost all the amenities we now consider part of a computer.
Obviously Apple felt this was big news. Unfortunately the market didn’t agree and it wasn’t exactly inclined to spend the very large sum of more than 10000$ a computer.

Following the less-than-successful Lisa, Apple released the first Mac and launched it with the famous super-bowl Ridley Scott’s advertisement in 1984.
The Mac managed to become a strong brand despite its limitations, biggest of all a closed architecture. Things began looking bright again for Apple.
To quote Bill Gates:
“To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different, it takes something that’s really new and really captures people’s imagination and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.”
“The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC,” so said Bill Gates in BusinessWeek (November 26, 1984).

Regrettably, however, in 1985 Microsoft decided that it could have had its say on the matter and released the first version of Windows.
What a sad moment in history this was. It is one of those instants that you’d gladly omit from the film of bygone days (such as when your parents catch you smoking for that first time!)

By the time Apple reacted to the news (reaction which turned out to be a lawsuit against Microsoft and nothing actually useful) and attempted to snatch back its market share, the IBM PC had been reverse engineered and cheaper clones of the computer, also running windows, started brainwashing mankind and lowering its expectations as to how a computer should operate.
Steve Jobs left the company because of an internal dispute and Apple appeared destined for demise.

A funny fact is that Jobs and Wozniak decided to call their company Apple because their main competitor at the time was Atari and the word Apple comes before Atari alphabetically and thus also in the phone book. Alas the world and people minds seldom work in alphabetical order (And those neat minds that actually do so tend to become deranged earlier than other “ordinary” people).

Now we have a somewhere and a something that went wrong, and as much as it pains me to admit this it wasn’t Microsoft or IBM’s fault.
Everything that happened to Apple was a consequence of its own mistakes.

Lets now jump to the open-minded-multimedia-filled-rather-more-evolved 21st century. Apple is not dead. Quite the contrary. It’s very much alive and well, and very thriving.
Steve Jobs is back and the record losses Apple suffered throughout the 90s were reversed and the company has finally started producing the top of the line systems we were used to see it release in the beginning. It is also most profitable once more.

The hardware is remarkably good.

However it is something you could get in any computer store if you’re prepared to spend that amount of money.

The design, on the other hand, is one of the many strengths of Apple computers, for not only are they smooth and stylish but also highly usable.
Apple has also reinvented the music market on the net. Its iTunes was a really fruitful and profitable step against piracy. This is something all the major record labels have been unable to achieve in their pursuit in prosecuting music pirates.

However, the real splash came in 2001, Apple unveiled its new operative system, Mac OS X. Based on Jobs’ NeXTstep it married the stability and reliability of a Unix system with the ease of use and the graphical interface which Apple has always been renowned for. In my opinion it is also a work of art, something that will finally make a difference in the long-lasting skirmish between the two computer giants.

Apple’s attacking with ‘the tiger’ (or as it were with its entire feline family) and Microsoft’s defending with its ill tempered koalas. Windows XP, though being a huge step ahead compared to its forebears is still not up to the challenge Apple is presenting.

I never cease to be amazed by the fact that users have been reclining for so long on Windows bed of nails that they have eventually become convinced that it really is comfortable.
And don’t tell me that Macs have still a closed architecture whereas PCs are configurable to your whims because the switch to a Unix-based system opened Apple doors to the open-source community which gladly accepted the invitation and regardless of how I’d rather use Apple “closed” software than spend time answering stupid question my PC asks just to give me a suspiciously soft feeling that I’m configuring the address book and not wasting hours of my time.

I’ve been using a Mac for three years now and I never felt like going back to PCs and Windows. I know for a fact that many Mac users and pc-to-mac-switchers agree with me.
As it happens Apple market share has been getting considerably bigger each year lately. Be that as it may I still feel Apple is not getting the attention and the commends it deserves for the software and hardware it’s been producing.

Now I could go on enumerating all the noticeable technical features included in Mac OS X like pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection; but few of the readers would understand and follow such a geeky locution. Hence I’ll just point out all the incredible front-end and usability properties:

Starting with the amazing-looking Aqua interface. Exposé, a window management system that gives you easy access to any opened application.
The Dashboard with its seldom-useful-but-cool-nonetheless Widgets and the Spotlight desktop search system, a metadata search engine which helps you find any kind of document on your computer in a matter of seconds.
These are components that can really change the way you interact with a computer. And considerably improve the quality of your life by decidedly lowering your computer-induced stress.

Not yet satisfied with such an impressive list of technologies which sets Mac OS X two steps ahead of the direct competitor (Windows) Apple is preparing to launch the latest version of its OS in late 2006 or early 2007. It will incorporate a garbage collection system that’ll help keep the system memory clean thus making your computer even more stable.

Hopefully with the transition to Intel processors the price of Apple hardware will decrease and companies will stop turning the blind eye towards Macs thus increasing Apple visibility on the market.

After 5 years of great achievements I think this company deserves a bit more consideration.

“What’s an Intel chip doing in a Mac? A whole lot more than it’s ever done in a PC.”

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