- Hacking for Human Rights: Open Video Conference and Open Subtitles Design Summit About a week ago WITNESS participated in it's first "hack day " at the 2010 Open Video Conference here in New York. Several hours (and pizzas) later, we came up with this:
- Your Ideas on Human Rights and Free Expression on YouTube This is the fourth in an occasional blog series about human rights video, written by Steve Grove, Head of News & Politics at YouTube, and Sameer Padania, former Hub Manager at WITNESS, cross-posted from YouTube’s blog. As always, we welcome your comments and feedback.
- What do you think about human rights (and your rights) online? Government police shutting down farmer’s protests in China. A tobacco company employing under-age workers in Kazakhstan. Iranian merchants striking to protest tax increases in Tehran.
- Does The Number have a lesson for human rights activists? Our good friend Ethan has done it again, drawing the connection between a recent viral meme, anti-censorship, and human rights in an article on World Changing. A 16 digit number used as a key to decrypt HD-DVDs became the center of an online revolt against internet censorship yesterday, when it was posted on several blogs, […]
- Alive in Mexico Correspondent Injured by Police We received and email from our friend, Charles of blip.tv alerting us to a situation in Mexico. A person working with Alive in Mexico (the same folks who started Alive in Baghdad) was injured while covering demonstrations. We’ve tried to put them in touch with some of our contacts, but they could use some help […]
- Herding the Mob I ran across this story about “crowdhacking” – ways in which people try to game systems like eBay, Digg, and de.lico.us to promote stories, or gain higher feedback ratings. According to the article, these systems are all susceptible to manipulation, which has implications to the Hub once these tactics become more widespread. We should definitely […]
- Privacy and Social Networking Sites I recently reconnected with Dan McQuillan, the web manager for Amnesty International. We were both on a panel on human rights at the NetSquared conference last year. Anyway, Dan has a blog called, internetartizans that has a whole bunch of cool stuff human rights and internet technology. It’s definitely worth checking out. This post is […]
- Turkey Blocks YouTube From Slashdot. FM Reader writes “After a controversial mock-up video reportedly submitted by a Greek member about Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, Turkish courts ordered the national ISPs to ban the online video service, YouTube. YouTube hostnames are currently redirected at the DNS level to a page that announces the court order.” […]
- HRW’s essay: Technology as a Restraint: Internet Censorship and Surveillance If you have been following the developments of the Hub (no longer Video Hub) over the past months, you will know that safety and security of users and the people portrayed in the media is a very big concern of ours. It is one of the main reasons if not THE reason why we did […]
- Panopticon Catches a Killer Happy New Year. It’s been awhile since the last entry, but better late than never I guess. A lot has happened in the last year with user generated content culminating with Time Magazine’s Person of the Year being “You.” In particular, video from camera phones has gotten a lot of press attention with the notable […]
- Psiphon – A way around censored sites? Released just this Dec 1st, psiphon is a human rights software project developed by the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies that allows citizens in uncensored countries to provide unfettered access to the Net through their home computers to friends and family members who live behind firewalls of states that censor. If […]
- Human Rights Watch Report on Internet Censorship Human Rights Watch recently published a report on Internet Censorship in China. The report gives details about how corporations like Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, and Skype are cooperating with the Chinese government censorship efforts. It also gives some good background on the “Great Firewall of China,” which refers to the way in which the Chinese government […]
- China Making Sure That User Generated Content Is Officially Registered Content First Another good post from unmediated originally from techdirt: China has a long history of being a bureaucratic society — and it seems they’re really learned how to apply that bureaucracy to the internet. They have tens of thousands of people monitoring the internet, for example. However, they’re really going to ridiculous extremes in trying to […]