For as ubiquitous as connectivity has become and how reliant we’ve grown on it, the Internet is still a digital jungle where hackers easily steal sensitive information from the ill-equipped and where the iron-fisted tactics of totalitarian regimes bent on controlling what their subjects can access are common. So instead of mucking around in public networks, just avoid them. Use a VPN instead. More »
Even though we’re living in 2013 and can stream entire seasons of TV shows in between banking and sending work emails on our phone alone, sending data around the world is not exactly an easy feat. The internet exists how it does today thanks to the help of cables sunk deep into the world’s oceans. A new, gorgeous map details the world’s submarine cables as they appear in 2013, and shows us where the underwater internet is headed in the future.
As manic as LTE adoption has been in the US, it could be triggering a full-fledged generational rift in Japan. NTT is cutting prices for fiber-to-the-home internet access by as much as 34 percent in the midst of falling landline subscriptions, and Australia’s Delimiter hears from unofficial sources at the provider that the cuts may be in response to youth being enamored with 4G on their phones. The tipsters believe that many of the younger set are picking one expensive LTE plan, even with data caps, instead of paying for two services; a price drop would be an attempt to keep at least a few of these wireless rebels onboard. Take the assertions with a grain of salt when there’s no official statements to match, but there’s no doubt that 4G demand is booming when NTT’s own DoCoMo just landed its 7 millionth Xi contract. We only wish American wired and wireless carriers would be so accommodating of our temptation to cut the cord.
Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Networking, Internet, Mobile
For all the optimism — much of it well-placed — about the Internet and social tools like Twitter and Facebook helping to create revolutions in the Middle East, there is a corresponding tide of repression, censorship and surveillance by governments aimed at the Internet and the freedoms it allows. A new UNESCO report looks at the scope of these efforts and the emerging effort to create a form of “digital rights” that can counter-balance the attempts of repressive governments to shut down free speech on the Internet. Meanwhile, both Iran and Syria have upped the ante in their attempts to blockade the web.
Iran wants to create a “national Internet”
Iran, which shut down almost 70 percent of its Internet during the demonstrations in that country in 2009, has stepped up its efforts to wall off dissent: according to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal , Iranian authorities are said to be considering a “national Internet” plan that could disconnect that country from the Internet and confine users to an authorized and government-controlled version. The government is also said to be working on its own computer operating system that would replace Windows and presumably make it easier to build censorship into the computers that citizens use.
The UNESCO report, which is entitled “Freedom of Connection – Freedom of Expression: The Changing Legal and Regulatory Ecology Shaping the Internet,” (the full PDF version is available here) is an analysis of existing research into how governments around the world are trying to limit use of the Internet by dissidents, and also how they are using the web — including social media such as Facebook — to monitor and crack down on dissent. The organization also said it hopes that the report prompts more protection and support for Internet use and freedom of speech as an essential human right:
Freedom of expression is not an inevitable outcome of technological innovation. It can be diminished or reinforced by the design of technologies, policies and practices – sometimes far removed from freedom of expression. This synthesis points out the need to focus systematic research on this wider ecology shaping the future of expression in the digital age.
The report notes that Internet use has found legal and government protection in a number of jurisdictions, including France — where the French Constitutional Council ruled that the freedom to access “public online communication services” was a basic human right (although that country still went forward with a “three strikes” law to prevent piracy) — and Finland, which last year became the first country to make broadband Internet a fundamental human right (Costa Rica’s highest court has also ruled that the Internet is a fundamental right and mandated the government to provide universal access).
At the same time, however, many governments have also adopted new tools of censorship and surveillance, including “deep-packet inspection” and various methods of filtering, the report says, as well as IP blocking — which countries such as China use to prevent users from accessing certain websites. The UNESCO study even notes that authorities in Western nations, including the United States, have used social networks to monitor and then apprehend citizens, including one case in which a G-20 protester was arrested for being part of a group that posted messages on Twitter:
One arrest made at a Pittsburgh motel by Pennsylvania State Police was of a 41 year old New York social worker, named Elliot Madison, for being part of a group that posted messages on the micro-blogging service Twitter that were designed to help protesters at the G-20 summit “avoid apprehension after a lawful order to disperse.”
But the biggest trend the report describes is the increasing determination by repressive governments in countries like Iran and Syria to both shut down dissent online — in some cases by shutting off Internet access completely — and to monitor and track their own citizens. The Egyptian authorities did both of these things during the revolution in that country earlier this year, although their attempts ultimately failed and President Hosni Mubarak was desposed (the former dictator has since been fined by an Egyptian court for his attempts to shut down the Internet).
The UNESCO report also describes some of the initiatives that both public advocacy groups and governments have been making to fight back against these repressive regimes, including the OpenNet Initiative, which is a joint venture between the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard that tracks and catalogues filtering and censorship by governments around the world.
More than anything, the picture that UNESCO paints is of global arms race — but instead of guns and tanks, the weapons are computers and hackers and Internet-tracking tools, and increasingly social networking sites as well.
Why can’t our refrigerator fire off an urgent email when the milk has gone lumpy? And the toilet paper dispenser warn us it’s empty – before we sit down? And when will our microwaves run BitTorrent? EUREKA, the European R&D network, knows how badly you crave networked objects, and rather than mock you, it's moving to help. To that end, it has developed small, inexpensive, battery-powered sensors able to link everything from consumer electronics to environmental monitors to factory robots – creating the much-anticipated "Internet of Things." But unlike the over-hyped RFID, it’s technology you’d actually use. Instead of knowing whether your keys are indeed on the RFID reader, the network could gently remind you that you left them in your car, which is now 100 miles away with someone else at the wheel, but, luckily for you, low on gas. Gaze into the so-called future of things with EUREKA’s press release, conveniently embedded after the jump.