This link has been bookmarked by 99 people . It was first bookmarked on 29 Mar 2008, by someone privately.
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22 Mar 12
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Cute cats are collateral damage when governments block sites.
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If you want to prevent your users from accessing online content, you’ve got four basic options. You can block keywords, block URLs, pollu
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e your DNS or block IPs. It’s surprisingly hard to block keywords – you need to open and examine all the packets crossing your network. China does a bit of this, but mostly blocks keywords within URLs – it’s prohibitively expensive to examine every packet for an entire nation and check against a blocklist
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My colleagues at the Open Net Initiative began documenting net censorship a bit more than five years ago. At that point, Saudi Arabia and China were censoring widely. Now at least two dozen nations censor the net regularly, and more may be participating in “event-based filtering”,
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It probably meant that Alaa spent much more time in jail than he otherwise would have, but it also may have meant that he was safer than if he’d been anonymous in prison.
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My conclusion from this: good advice for the advocate in a web 2.0 age – “Don’t speak. Point.” (Bruno Giussani explains what I mean by that phrase far more eloquently than I ever have.)
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It’s fine to build tools for activists, but even better to build tools for folks who don’t know they’re activists yet.
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, tools like Martus or FrontlineSMS.
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Twitter is far from the perfect tool – it’s centralized and easily blocked. But it’s also used for lots of dumb purposes, which means it passes the cute cats test. L
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the most relevant Chinese censorship takes place within Chinese Web 2.0 companies – including US companies operating servers in China. There’s an incredible wealth of Web 2.0 startups in China.
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The term “harmonized” became so popular that it became blocked. So Chinese bloggers began to refer to their blogs as having been “river crabbed”. T
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he watches are a pun on “the three represents“, a political philosophy put forward by Jiang Zemin. This is also a commonly blocked term, so has been rewritten as “wears three watches”… which explains the oddly dressed river crab.
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China’s censorship genius is that they’ve found a way to let people have their cute cats and have censorship as well. While China will block sites like Human Rights Watch, they won’t block domestic Web 2.0 sites, and hence the collateral damage from blocking banal content doesn’t draw non-activists to become aware of activist issues.
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23 Dec 11
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But while advocates try to raise the price of censorship for governments, smart governments are raising the price for noncompliance for Web 2.0 companies.
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I’d offer the hypothesis that any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media – it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work. Activism is a stronger test – if activists are using your tools, it’s a pretty good indication that your tools are useful and usable.
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27 Feb 11
Liz Ixercf @ethanz's cute cat theory http://bit.ly/s5bMO MT @gregorydjohnsen pics from Sanaa #Yemen - my fav is cat protesting http://bit.ly/eCavPA
– dan mcquillan (danmcquillan) http://twitter.com/danmcquillan/status/41816346203262976 -
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Alex Jones"any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism"
politics technology culture activism web censorship internet
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03 Mar 09
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Jon GabrielWeb 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.
Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.politics funny socialsoftware blog culture interesting activism censorship
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Simon GWeb 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.
Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats. -
01 Mar 09
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Jim CrawfordAWESOME discussion of how things spread on the Web and global censorship.
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29 Sep 08
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Sheryl A. McCoybasic indicators of freedom of expression on the web; suggestions for uses by activitists
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Tom Hemingwaybasic indicators of freedom of expression on the web; suggestions for uses by activitists
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20 Mar 08
dan mcquillancouple of nice twitter-activism examples, Belarussian parody site, Skype voice chatrooms as pirate radio, folk in MMOGs shouting IP addresses of proxy servers.
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17 Mar 08
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15 Mar 08
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Arabica RobustaWith web 2.0, we’ve embarced the idea that people are going to share pictures of their cats, and now we build sophisticated tools to make that easier to do. as a result, we’re creating a wealth of tech that’s extremely helpful for activists.
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Nancy WhiteGreat post by Ethan Z re Web 2.0
web2.0 change conversation culture technologyforcommunity KS-Workshop cp2w2
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14 Mar 08
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The Cute Cat Theory Talk at ETech Filed under: Blogs and bloggers, Developing world, ETech2008, Geekery, Human Rights/Free Speech — Ethan @ 11:29 am I’d forgotten just how much fun ETech is. Not only are the talks some of the most creative and innovative you can hear in the tech community, the room full of people is one of the most congenial, smart and funny you’re likely to encounter anywhere. Tim O’Reilly won’t come out and say that it’s his favorite conference, but he’s willing to declare it the most important that his organization puts on. I was only able to be in San Diego for one of the days of the conference - long enough to catch several excellent talks, but briefly enough that I’m relying on Ryan Singel of Wired to catch talks that I’m very sorry to miss: Larry Lessig’s plans to change congress; Quinn Norton, who’s now thinking about hacking her brain as well as her body; Joel Selanikio’s celebration of the mobile phone as a tool for transforming Africa. Singel did an excellent job with my talk as well, The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism. I was grateful to have the excuse to explore at more length some of the ideas I’ve been writing about for the past year, and was gratified that the talk was well received. There were several requests for me to post the slides - that’s not really realistic, as they were 100MB and rather video-rich - what I’m going to do instead is post my notes, a bunch of links and a few of the slides. This won’t be an accurate picture of what I said - it’s more likely to be a picture of what I meant to say. Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers. Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.
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The Cute Cat Theory Talk at ETech Filed under: Blogs and bloggers, Developing world, ETech2008, Geekery, Human Rights/Free Speech — Ethan @ 11:29 am I’d forgotten just how much fun ETech is. Not only are the talks some of the most creative and innovative you can hear in the tech community, the room full of people is one of the most congenial, smart and funny you’re likely to encounter anywhere. Tim O’Reilly won’t come out and say that it’s his favorite conference, but he’s willing to declare it the most important that his organization puts on. I was only able to be in San Diego for one of the days of the conference - long enough to catch several excellent talks, but briefly enough that I’m relying on Ryan Singel of Wired to catch talks that I’m very sorry to miss: Larry Lessig’s plans to change congress; Quinn Norton, who’s now thinking about hacking her brain as well as her body; Joel Selanikio’s celebration of the mobile phone as a tool for transforming Africa. Singel did an excellent job with my talk as well, The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism. I was grateful to have the excuse to explore at more length some of the ideas I’ve been writing about for the past year, and was gratified that the talk was well received. There were several requests for me to post the slides - that’s not really realistic, as they were 100MB and rather video-rich - what I’m going to do instead is post my notes, a bunch of links and a few of the slides. This won’t be an accurate picture of what I said - it’s more likely to be a picture of what I meant to say. Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers. Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.
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13 Mar 08
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12 Mar 08
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pirkkaaunolaWeb 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers. Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.
activism web2.0 internet politics technology censorship ugc hacks
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11 Mar 08
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10 Mar 08
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Lynne BEvery time you force a government to block a web 2.0 site - cutting off people's access to cute cats - you spend political capital. Our job as online advocates is to raise that cost of censorship as high as possible.
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