Public Intelligence Blog

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The Innovation Journal

Volume 18 Issue 1, 2013
Special Issue on the Middle East
Edited by Alexander Dawoody, Marywood University, USA

Peer-Reviewed Papers:

2  The Challenge of Good Governance, by Michiel de Vries, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

3  Protecting the Internet from Dictators: Technical and Policy Solutions to Ensure Online Freedoms, by Warigia Bowman, University of Arkansans, USA and L. Jean Camp, University of Indiana, USA.

4  The Middle East and Learning from BRIC, by Alexander Dawoody, Marywood University, USA.

5  The Middle East in Suspended Animation: Defective Complex Adaptive Systems, by Samir Rihani, University of Liverpool, UK.

See remaining articles, book reviews.

BitTorrent Sync creates private, peer-to-peer Dropbox, no cloud required

No size limits, no cloud: Hands-on with BitTorrent’s new file syncing software.

BitTorrent today released folder syncing software that replicates files across multiple computers using the same peer-to-peer file sharing technology that powers BitTorrent clients.

The free BitTorrent Sync application is labeled as being in the alpha stage, so it’s not necessarily ready for prime-time, but it is publicly available for download and working as advertised on my home network.

BitTorrent, Inc. (yes, there is a legitimate company behind BitTorrent) took to its blog to announce the move from a pre-alpha, private program to the publicly available alpha. Additions since the private alpha include one-way synchronization, one-time secrets for sharing files with a friend or colleague, and the ability to exclude specific files and directories.

BitTorrent Sync provides “unlimited, secure file-syncing,” the company said. “You can use it for remote backup. Or, you can use it to transfer large folders of personal media between users and machines; editors and collaborators. It’s simple. It’s free. It’s the awesome power of P2P, applied to file-syncing.”

File transfers are encrypted, with private information never being stored on an external server or in the “cloud.”

“Since Sync is based on P2P and doesn’t require a pit-stop in the cloud, you can transfer files at the maximum speed supported by your network,” BitTorrent said. “BitTorrent Sync is specifically designed to handle large files, so you can sync original, high quality, uncompressed files.”

Read full article with multiple screen shots.

300 Million Talons…

IT, Security, and Power

Bruce Schneier & Jonathan Zittrain in conversation

April 4, 6:00pm ET
Langdell Hall South, 272 Kirkland and Ellis Classroom

From Bruce Schneier:

What I’ve Been Thinking About

I have been thinking about the Internet and power: how the Internet affects power, and how power affects the Internet. Increasingly, those in power are using information technology to increase their power. This has many facets, including the following:

1. Ubiquitous surveillance for both government and corporate purposes — aided by cloud computing, social networking, and Internet-enabled everything — resulting in a world without any real privacy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Michel Bauwens

Movement of the Day: Internet Defense League

Franco Iacomella, 26th June 2012

“Alexis Ohanian, the 29-year old founder of social news site Reddit, has partnered with the online advocacy group Fight for the Future to create what they’re calling the “Internet Defense League.” Ohanian describes the project, which they plan to officially launch next month, as a “Bat-Signal for the Internet.” Any website owner can sign up on the group’s website to add a bit of code to his or her site–or receive that code by email at the time of a certain campaign–that can be triggered in the case of a political crisis like SOPA, adding an activist call-to-action to all the sites involved, such as a widget or banner asking users to sign petitions, call lawmakers, or boycott companies.

“People who wish to be tapped can see, oh look, the Bat-Signal is up. Time to do something,” says Ohanian. “Whatever website you own, this is a way for you to be notified if something comes up and take some basic actions…If we aggregate everyone that’s doing it, the numbers start exploding.”

The embedded code on participating sites might do more than just display a mere banner ad, says Tiffiniy Cheng, co-director of Internet-focused political advocacy group Fight for the Future, and could even go as far as the blackout technique that Web activists used to successfully turn the tide against SOPA. “We’ll invent something at the time, and it will be some really unified and shocking action,” she says, hinting at techniques that would temporarily take over the entire appearance of willing sites. ”We’re creating the tools and the forms of protest that allow for viral organizing. That’s how the SOPA protests were able to get started and grow to the level they did.”

So far, Cheng says Reddit, imaging hosting site Imgur, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, viral content company Cheezburger Network, Mozilla and the non-profit Public Knowledge have all signed up. The group hopes that eventually thousands of sites–including those as small as a single user’s Tumblr page–will join the project.

Fight for the Future and Ohanian have both been focused most recently on defeating CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protect Act. The bill, originally designed to allow sharing of information between the private sector and government agencies like the National Security Agency for cybersecurity purposes, was amended just before being passed in the House last month to allow companies to hand over any user data they wish to the government without regard for existing privacy laws, for reasons as vague as preventing computer “crime,” or “the protection of individuals from the danger of death or serious bodily harm.” One of two Senate versions of the bill is expected to come up for a vote in early June.

Fight for the Future last week launched an anti-CISPA site, Privacy is Awesome, asking users to call their senators and demand meetings to discuss the bill. And Ohanian has spoken out against the legislation as well, asking investors not to buy shares of Facebook’s newly-public stock to protest the company’s support for CISPA.

But CISPA protests have yet to match the fever pitch of anti-SOPA and anti-PIPA protests in January that led to boycotts of SOPA-supporting Web host GoDaddy, attacks by Anonymous against the Recording Industry of Association of America and the Motion Picture Assocation of America, and the blackout protests that included sites as popular as Reddit and Wikipedia. Most of Silicon Valley continues to support CISPA, including Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Oracle and Symantec, with Google refusing to take a stand on either side of the issue.

Ohanian argues the challenge in maintaining political vigilance against laws that would harm the Internet is long-term endurance, rather than the ability to defeat any one piece of legislation.”You can only cry ‘Oh my gosh, they’re going to shut down the Internet’ so often,” he says. “We’ve scared [Congress] from doing anything as egregious as SOPA and PIPA again. But the new challenge is this endless series of smaller bills that try to unravel internet rights.”

The answer, Ohanian believes, is to foster a new level of engagement between Internet users and Congress that emphasizes digital rights and either educates ignorant lawmakers on Internet issues or helps to push them out of office. He cites an idea that he attributes to Cheezburger Network chief executive Ben Huh, that every Internet user should have their legislators’ phone numbers saved on their cell phone and ready to use on a regular basis.”

The $10 cell phone has arrived – and with it, economic opportunity

By Channtal Fleischfresser | March 18, 2013, 3:10 AM PDT

On a recent trip to Shenzhen, China, a group of MIT students discovered that you can buy a cell phone there for as little as $10. While the cost of mobile phones has continued to decrease over time, the fact that you can buy a gadget that can make phone calls and send text messages (and has a working battery) for that price is pretty astonishing. The head of MIT’s Media Lab, Joi Ito, reckons that these are likely the world’s cheapest phones.

A $10 price tag means that virtually anyone in the world can afford a mobile phone. Moreover, in parts of the world where basic phones are still more predominant than the “smart” variety gaining steam in the developed world, local infrastructure makes these gadgets more powerful than even smartphones in rich countries.

In Kenya, more than 30 percent of its GDP is fueled by M-Pesa, a mobile payments system that operates via text message. (See a video about M-Pesa here.) Though they may make life easier, smartphones in developed countries have not yet become anywhere near as important to driving economic growth.

Despite the rapid proliferation of smartphones in many countries, basic mobile phones still account for the majority of those used around the world. And given the tremendous economic possibilities for mobile payment systems to create economic growth, perhaps the most basic, cheapest cell phone might make it the world’s most useful.

Read the rest of this entry »

Got Crowd? BE the Force!

Dark, the Force is, in Washington DC.

Bill Moyers: Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly and Unfair

>Americans are getting bilked for second class internet access.

BILL MOYERS: You’ve heard me before quote one of my mentors who told his students that “news is what people want to keep hidden; everything else is publicity.” That’s why two books are rattling the cages of powerful people who would rather you not read them. Here’s the first one. Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age by Susan Crawford. Read it and you’ll understand why we Americans are paying much more for internet access than people in many other countries and getting much less in return. That, despite the fact that our very own academics and engineers, working with our very own Defense Department, invented the internet in the first place.

Amazon Page

EXTRACT (Susan CVrawford)

What’s happened is that these enormous telecommunications companies, Comcast and Time Warner on the wired side, Verizon and AT&T on the wireless side, have divided up markets, put themselves in the position where they’re subject to no competition and no oversight from any regulatory authority. And they’re charging us a lot for internet access and giving us second class access. This is a lot like the electrification story from the beginning of the 20th century.

. . . . . . . .

BILL MOYERS: In here you call it the digital divide. Describe that to me.

SUSAN CRAWFORD: Well, here’s the problem. For 19 million Americans, many in rural areas, you can’t get access to a high speed connection at any price, it’s just not there. For a third of Americans, they don’t subscribe often because it’s too expensive. So the rich are getting gouged, the poor are very often left out. And this means that we’re creating yet again two Americas and deepening inequality through this communications inequality.

Read full article (7 Screens)

Is a free nationwide WiFi network coming to the U.S.?

Tyler Falk, 4 February 2013

The United States government wants to make access to fast and free WiFi as easy as accessing public roads.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has proposed to free up digital infrastructure to allow free public access to WiFi — more powerful than what most people have in their homes — in most metropolitan areas and many rural areas, The Washington Post reports:

If approved by the FCC, the free networks would still take several years to set up. And, with no one actively managing them, con­nections could easily become jammed in major cities. But public WiFi could allow many consumers to make free calls from their mobile phones via the Internet. The frugal-minded could even use the service in their homes, allowing them to cut off expensive Internet bills.

To achieve this, the government would have to repurpose how airwaves are used. As the Post points out, that means local television stations and other broadcasters would have to sell some of their airwaves to the government. Whether companies are willing to make the sale is yet to be seen.

As you can imagine, support of the proposal is split between two major industries. On the one hand, the telecomm industry is lobbying the government to keep those airwaves in the hands of businesses.

Tech giants like Google and Microsoft, however, see a nationwide public WiFi network as a catalyst for innovation (and increased sales of their products). Though Google, at least, isn’t waiting for the government to act to offer free public WiFi. In New York City, the company recently launched free public WiFi in the Chelsea neighborhood.

But a free-for-all WiFi network? Politics will decide its fate.

Tech, telecom giants take sides as FCC proposes large public WiFi networks [Washington Post]