Rewired State goes teen and scores

Work for peanuts team by Julia Chandler

Public Strategy has a great and comprehensive post on Young Rewired State- Dame Emma Mulqueeny's baby held over the weekend at UK Google HQ.

Two projects leapt out for me:

'Blab to Betty - confidential unpatronising sexual health advice'

Something like this is sorely needed as sex ed is rather notoriously bad in the UK - it's one of the reasons we have such high teenage pregnancy rates. But also for young lesbians and gays sourcing advice and education online isn't good enough because censorware often blocks access via schools and libraries and if you're monitored at home you don't want to be surfing advice, community or sex ed websites. So a text (? post doesn't give details) service could help fill a gap in provision.

'Blog-o-tics taking Bills plus blog search searched for emotive terms to create overall attitude score'

This rang bells for me and then I remembered I'd seen something which sounded similar in the 2008 US Election: Virtual Vantage Points monitoring of blog reaction.

These split the blogosphere into conservatives and liberals and picked up on text mentions in each. The idea from Young Rewired State sounds like taking this further.

I'd pulled out Text clouds from them for March 17 to see reaction to Obama's big speech on race.

Another group it reminded me of was what 6 Consulting (formerly from Cambridge) do in social media monitoring.

Neither of these ideas won anything but I can definitely see a space for both.

No, you cannot look at the naked pigs

Image by inju via Flickr

I have posted numerous times about the 'issues' with web filters. Their side-effects and their lack of evolution (despite manufacturer claims).

So the news that China was softening its requirement that all new computers come loaded with a censorware program called (honestly, something lost in the translation) Green Dam Youth Escort because of over-blocking comes as no surprise.

While the government claims that the software is aimed only at blocking violence and pornography, it has emerged that it also blocks discussion of homosexuality and other non-pornographic gay content. It had even been found to block pictures of pigs, mistaking the image for naked human skin.

It must be progress, China-wise, that they feel the need to respond to such inanities!

Amusing, but this is exactly the same scenario which school web administrators find themselves in in the UK all the time - having to decide whether to unblock something (think gay, sex education, abortion, history of Nazis) the machine has decided is damaging.

Despite what they tell you, the people selling this stuff know that it is possible to get around it. However they also know, like the regime in China, that for most people it works. Censorware works.

And that's the problem with censorware, anywhere. Unless it is democratically controlled it is privatised or state-controlled censorship.

Let amazonfail be a warning

The casual dropping of LGBT titles from Amazon's rankings, sales charts and hence search (and hence visibility) was explicity done to make it more 'family friendly'.

This is clear from their customer services department's initial response:

"In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude 'adult' material from appearing in some searches and bestseller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature," explained "Ashlyn D" from Amazon's member services department.

The politics of this are a bit mad. Amazon has to appeal across the board or it loses a huge customer base. It's also a global company and 'family friendly' does not mean the same here as it does to certain sections of the USA.

They've obviously realised the mistake but the response is telling:

When contacted by the Guardian, an Amazon spokeswoman said that there was "a glitch in our systems and it's being fixed". However, the company refused to elaborate on why that move was made, or how the filter to choose which books were excluded was applied.

The problem is both the filter and the secrecy behind it.

In the Guardian's story one author reports how his memoir was called 'adult' in February; this attitude isn't a new one for Amazon. In a comment on Zoe Margolis' piece an academic author says that her book was listed by Google with another name attached. Google promised to remove it a year ago and it hasn't happened.

Filters will always have 'glitches' but they are almost universally privatised. There's no law or licensing body or any democratic control over them.

As I've written about, this means that, with filters in place, access to knowledge - most concernedly for children - is often barred thanks to both 'glitches' and privatisation rather than public decided morality.

As a knowledgeable adult, I can still find my way around online barriers (though this might change and could change so we end up with a 'national filter' like the Australian government wants, whose breach means breaking the law), but for the less knowledgeable they won't know and for children it takes some guts to stand up and ask 'why is this blocked?'

We need much more debate about who manges filters and why and how the heck we've ended up with a (largely) American bunch of companies deciding what we and especially our kids can and cannot see.

Australian web censorship exposed

Wikileaks has published a list of the websites on the Australian government's blacklist. Those which would be blocked by national-level filtering as well as made illegal for any Australian website to link to.

According to Slashdot, it is possible to rip a version of the list from Race River's Integard - the filtering software that does it. The Wikileaks list appears to be a few months out of date, and doesn't exactly match the leaked list (which isn't that surprising - sites are being blocked and unblocked on a regular basis), but there's enough crossover to demonstrate that the government's claim that the list is inaccurate is obfuscation. This is a genuine copy of the list, just not a current one.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

While the blacklist published on Wikileaks includes a large number of child pornography sites and other illegal material, most of the websites listed have no obvious connection to child pornography.

It includes various online gambling sites, as well as Christian and other religious sites. A Queensland dentist and a tour operator also appear on the list.

The list also contains satanic websites and gay and straight porn sites, as well as euthanasia sites.

This is exactly what is bound to happen when a machine makes up these lists: so called 'collateral damage'.

Wikileaks said censorship systems, whatever their original intent, were invariably corrupted into anti-democratic behaviour.

It cited the Thailand censorship list, saying that like Labor's proposed filter scheme, it was originally proposed as a mechanism to prevent child pornography.

But Wikileaks said that in January, the Thai system was used to censor reporting about the case of Australian author Harry Nicolaides who was recently released from a Thai prison after pleading guilty to criticising the Thai royal family.

Wikileaks said research showed that such blacklists were dangerous to "above ground" activities such as political discourse and had little effect on the production of child pornography.

Although no one has yet advocated such national-level filtering in the UK it may well be only a matter of time as we seem to have a history of adopting Australian policy examples. This is if Labor in Australia can get the law through - a key right-wing independent Senator has become opposed since learning that fetus images on anti-abortion websites would be blocked.

Unfortunately we do already have an effectively national-level blocking system - the Internet Watch Foundation - which is not subject to democratic intervention and empowered through moral panic. So maybe we're further down the Australian line than many, including liberty campaigners, seem to realise.

• Web censorship and 'collateral damage'
• What's the point of the IWF?

Web censorship and 'collateral damage'

Attended the Cambridge programme of the Convention on Modern Liberties at the weekend, particularly as an Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) spokesperson was at a forum on internet censorship.

The session was videoed.

Turned out that the IWF woman had little to contribute but heard some interesting stuff from Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon, from Birkbeck.

She works with sex offenders and said that there is evidence of harm resulting from viewing extreme material. She also pointed out the obvious - that the existence of the web has facilitated pedophiles in two ways: finding each other and grooming children.

This led her to believe that internet regulation should not be entirely dismissed. But she also pointed to the cost of exagerrating the threat to children.

She slammed the government's approach, saying that we end up with law that achieves nothing largely because of reactions to moral panics created by the press and a lack of consultation. It did not help that because funding is being withdrawn from research into the behaviour of sexual predators, she claimed, 'evidence-based' regulation is made harder. She also said that politicisation of the police had a role, as they are pushing MPs into viewing the worst images to which they predictably react with 'something must be done!'.

There are vested interests and there is official incompetence, she said.

Her answer was to have independent, open regulation, staffed by people who are "fit to do the job". And to not diminish the role of parents.

I contributed at the forum about the role of commercial filters. From when I submitted evidence to the Australian Senate in 1999 to now their role and their development has stayed the same: they are a commercial form of censorship sold to assuage parental and commercial fear. 'You must buy this otherwise you'll be sued', 'buy this or workers will waste time', 'buy our software to protect children'.

Yet as in 1999, there are groups of children who suffer as a result of their implementation.

For example, a 12 year old girl who has been raped may find access to online information blocked: at school, in the library and at home.

LGBT youth continually report this:

Well I tried to do some research today, and my searches for gay rights, lgbt rights, homophobic bullying, and similar were all blocked.

Even websites like Pink News were all blocked. I find this ridiculous, after all how can a student try to find help and support online, or do research, when these sites are blocked.

I have also seen PinkNews blocked by a local council's filter.

Although websites can be unblocked, what are the chances of a teenager struggling with isolation actually asking for this?

Dr Brooks-Gordon, following my contribution, said that one of impacts of the government's kneejerk and badly designed regulation of so-called 'extreme pornography' could be that a teenage transsexual could not see images of sex-change surgery, even with parental supervision.

This sort of un-thought-through 'collateral damage' or 'over-blocking' is one of the reasons why national-level filtering was just blocked in the Australian Senate. A right-wing anti-abortion Senator voted against it because it would mean the blocking of images of aborted fetuses.

In their promotion of filters the IWF describes such blocking of rape or gay youth sites as "an acceptable level of success".

Ofcom fail to mention over blocking in their promotion of filters, although the Byron report to its credit does. Ofcom is proposing a 'Kitemark' scheme for filters. I would certainly like to see this take into account over-aggressive marketing.

The solution I came up with in that 1999 report was a 'whitelist'. This would ensure that no products sold in the UK blocked sites like www.queeryouth.org.uk and most importantly kids using public resources (schools and libraries) would have access to online resources of educational and personal value and not randomly see them blocked.

This is also the solution taken up by the Australian State of New South Wales (NSW), where all filtering is done 'in-house'. And because it is done by a government body, the Department of Education, it is more open to lobbying and how it operates is more accessible to change.

Their attitude is summed up by their chief information officer, Stephen Wilson, facing criticism on blocking of web 2.0 tools:

"We want to make it pleasant and we don't want someone surfing the internet and getting a lot of blocks for the wrong reasons. We want them to be blocked for the right reasons."

The NSW operation isn't perfect - they block Google Docs because it's "in direct competition to MS Office" - but it's a damn sight easier to influence and more accountable than a US-based corporation.

What's the point of the IWF?

Rory Cellan-Jones reports on a small ISP which is challenging the Internet Watch Foundation's anti-paedophiles methods.

This is their idea of a black list, compiled from reports by the public, which ISPs are asked to use, somehow 'protecting children online'. The blacklist onto which a Wikipedia page found itself and was then withdraw after a justified uproar.

Zen Internet, a small Rochdale-based ISP, Rory reports, "has not yet implemented IWF's recommended system because we have concerns over its effectiveness. Our Managing Director, Richard Tang, is going to meet Peter Robbins the Chief Executive of the IWF to discuss these concerns."

Rory also says that children's charities are pressuring for the few ISPs who don't automatically follow the IWF's line to be forced to do so.

He quotes an IWF critic, Dr Richard Clayton:

"Everybody thinks they've done something by blocking this stuff but in practice it makes very little difference to who sees it and it's quite expensive."

The Wikipedia episode just highlighted what webbies already know - the blacklist is just a waste of time.

Why? Because most of this material is held abroad and the IWF is ineffective about getting it removed.

But it would obviously suit government to give into the children's charities and pressure ISPs because they would be 'seen to be doing something'. But the material and the pedophile networks exist on the 'dark net', a place you're unlikely to inadvertently stumble on. Those distributing it aren't going to have it in places where law enforcement might easily find it.

So this beggars the question which I made during the Wikipedia episode: 'what is the proven value of the IWF?'

What - exactly - are they achieving?

If you're trying to stop criminality and the exploitation of children, why aren't the police funded to do the job? Where else do you see amateurs, like the IWF, being presented - and being funded - as our best hope to 'protect children' ?

I think it's time for webbies to really step up and demand the government stops faffing about and that the IWF funding spent on this pointless blacklist goes to specialist police who can really challenge the distributors of material that exploits children.

• Past post, Privatised censorship and actually protecting children

POSTSCRIPT

Comment from another small ISP on Rory's blog, nailing the IWF's dodgy business interest:

1) They only provide a list of Child abuse Images hosted outside the UK. They issue takedown notices to anyone hosting this content in the UK but this has an interesting side effect, see later.

2) This list contains only a few thousand http urls - nothing more and an insignificant fraction of the amount of website urls in the world.

3) They don't provide any technology to enable this filtering, they leave the technical implementation to the ISP

4) They refuse to allow an open source implementation of the filtering because of concerns that it would allow the list to become public.

5) They charge a minimum of 5000 pounds per year for access to the list (going up to 20k+ for people who want to use the IWF approved branding etc).

6) There is no oversight on what goes on to this list, we only have the word of the IWF that it contains Child Abuse Images that infringe the appropriate laws. No ISP is going to risk looking at the sites on the list to check. There is nothing to stop them from adding sites critical of the IWF to the list, or for the scope of the list to be increased to block other types of sites.

7) The preferred method of blocking is to pretend the file could not be found and not to draw attention to the IWF list.

From this you can see that you are paying a significant sum for the list plus have to then spend additional cash and resources on a filtering system which then only blocks a tiny fraction of sites and adds overhead to every single page request.

....

* If you don't block these images you are supporting Child Abuse - How would your boss feel if we told him you supported Child Abuse (Direct quote from an IWF "saleswomen")

Postscript: IWF give up

IWF statement regarding Wikipedia webpage

Following representations from Wikipedia, IWF invoked its Appeals Procedure and has given careful consideration to the issues involved in this case. The procedure is now complete and has confirmed that the image in question is potentially in breach of the Protection of Children Act 1978. However, the IWF Board has today (9 December 2008) considered these findings and the contextual issues involved in this specific case and, in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list.

Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted abroad, will not be added to the list. Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted in the UK will be assessed in line with IWF procedures.

IWF’s overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect. We regret the unintended consequences for Wikipedia and its users. Wikipedia have been informed of the outcome of this procedure and IWF Board’s subsequent decision.

Postscript: IWF row back

Is this 'extreme pornography'?

There was some sense of a rowback yesterday and today it's happened:

The Internet Watch Foundation [IWF] says it is still reconsidering whether its ban should remain on the image of a young girl used on the Scorpions' album Virgin Killer, after that ban prevented a number of British users accessing Wikipedia.

A spokeswoman for the IWF said that to her knowledge it was the first time in its decade-long history that any image or page banned by the IWF had been reassessed, and the first time that any page or image on Wikipedia had been banned. The IWF normally bans more than 10,000 images and associated web pages every year.

Here's Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales saying "C'mon! Do your wurst!" (And sounding a mite ignorant of their exact legal position).

And the IWF leader paddling furiously:



And I feel sorry for this poor mite! He's in over his head but trying, trying to do the right thing.

And a good comment from out-law underlining my critique of Wikipedia's libertarianistic bent:

Web hosts must not wait for an image to be declared unlawful by a court when they receive a complaint, albeit only a court can declare an image unlawful. If they wait, there is every chance that the declaration will come at their own trial.

Wales told Channel Four:

How do we draw up a boundary line that allows both routine internet expression and not pedophilia? The Internet Watch Foundation's system has been in operation for a number of years. Is it out of date?

Gonna help, Jimmy?

So what next?

This is really, purely a technocognisenti furore, despite its brief reign as top read story on news.bbc.co.uk. Although I can imagine the Mail et al bent out of shape trying to take it all in. Grey is the colour rather than back'n'white. The Rebekkah Wade's of this world are now a wee bit lost.

But it's truly much simpler. Simply put: what does the IWF actually do to combat online child abuse? If that scourge has moved on from their simplistic techniques, what use are they?

I still doubt that much will be made of this point but the answer is simple: resource those who can excise these bastards from the net. Amateurism is a waste of time.

Is Britain capable? From January IWF, the charity, will be assessing 'extreme images' on behalf of the government (they already assess 'race hate', bet you didn't know that). Having read of a woman who asked of her local plod whether a 'borderline' image (now's there's a truly British tradition) was 'illegal' - she was referred on to the IWF then the Ministry, no one could give her a 'straight' answer - I have not much hope. The borderline' image is at the top of the post.

Privatised censorship and actually protecting children

NB: in about fifteen hours since this screenshot another 370,000 have viewed the page.

Today's furore over the Wikipedia block by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has already done its job: the IWF has rowed back and will (hopefully) face much scrutiny of its operation.

Mere moralistic calls when faced with the 'collateral damage' to Wikipedia (UK users blocked from editing it due to an inept process) and the availability of the image in numerous other places clearly haven't and won't work. In fact they've created 'the Streisand effect' yet again - thousands more viewing something 'they' don't want you to see.

No doubt someone will try this line but faced with a Wikipedia editor on Radio 4's Today this morning, the IWF spokesperson could only sound flustered and annoyed - and more than a little technically lost.

For me, this episode highlights the issue with privatising censorship which I've written about before (tagged posts). The IWF may be a charity but their decisions, like those of the companies which manufacture filtering software, take place away from any process which can be effectively challenged by you or I. They're unaccountable.

They have four staff 'trained by police' who have five URLs an hour (and probably hundreds more after this episode) to review. Much like YouTube etc. this will result in many 'false positives' and my second point about 'censorware' regimes such as this.

'Over-blocking' is what happens with software filters and it happens with badly thought through systems like IWF's. 'Over-blocking' causes collateral damage, often to those who won't know what's going on or have the resources to do something. The classic example is blocking of vital sex education information to teens and educational materials to teens and the rest of us. Art censorship is another by-product.

Two comments, one from The Register and another from the Wikipedia editors thread show how this happens:

I'm a member of the EFF, FSF, Liberty and Amnesty International, and a founding member of the Open Rights Group as well. (I mention this not by way of boasting, but to demonstrate that I'm not one of the knee-jerk, Daily Mail-reading, "hang teh peedos!!1" brigade; and incidentally that's also why I'm posting anon on this occasion.[1]) ... the reason for filtering images like this; the notion that (a) paedophiles will use them for sexual gratification, and that (b) men (or more likely adolescents) in the early stages of sexual development may get imprinted with a sexual response to the image, such that they become in effect paedophiliac themselves.

~~~~~

Hey guys. I work for a company in the UK which contracts to the police to forensically process computers in child protection cases ... I can tell you now that this image is *not* classified as CP (the IWF are mislead somewhere along the line). The image would be classed (on the UK Copine scale) as "Relevant" - which means alone would not allow for a conviction on CP charges but it indicative of intent. Viewing images like this in a non-sexual context (such as this article) or as *part of the arts* (music cover) is not classed as an offence.

Further more: the original image is NOT CP because it is covered by "for artistic purposes" (whereby the image makes a statement as part of a work of artistic merit) - it is extremely possible that the photograph of the cover is similarly classed. Plus I also believe there is a little used classification of "for informational merit" where the image can be justified as educational or informational (for example a text book on human development etc.).

Summary: this image is legally not a problem.

Pro-smoking early C20th poster

If you want to see truly 'problematic' images which most definitely are art and definitely meant to be 'problematic' check out Balthus (on Wikipedia). Collected by Picasso, Balthus had societal approval in spades but wouldn't pass an IWF harassed staffer:

Prime Ministers and rock stars alike attended the funeral of Balthus. Bono, lead-singer of U2, sang for the hundreds of mourners at the funeral, including the President of France, the Prince Sadruddhin Aga Khan, supermodel Elle McPherson, and Cartier-Bresson.

Or Nan Goldin's work, found legal after being seized from Baltic Modern Art gallery, Gateshead.

It is not good enough to have 'police trained' staff essentially randomly blocking images following the 'just-in-case' line of the the first commentator from The Register.

The IWF's original statement on the Wikipedia block makes crystal clear that they will over-block (my emphasis):

The specific URL (individual webpage) was then added to the list provided to ISPs and other companies in the online sector to protect their customers from inadvertent exposure to a potentially illegal indecent image of a child.

Another comment on The Register shows the pointlessness of their URL blocking staff and the actual need for real police, funded properly, to track down actual child abuse images and those who distribute them:

I have had dealings with the IWF before. A couple of years ago I came across a fellow trading child porno on a torrent site. I wrote to the IWF and the Met in London and included IP addresses and all info I could muster. RESULT: TOTAL DISINTEREST! The met wrote back saying inform the IWF and the IWF wrote back saying tell the police. I got the feeling that unless the target was easy nobody bothers.

IWF cannot pass on a URL in a torrent case to ISPs to add to their list (because there is no URL), therefore they are useless against actual child abuse. The police, apparently, cannot take action because they are underfunded/don't have the staff.

Blocking URLs as IWF seem to be spending at least four salaries on doing is mere sticking plaster and just not doing anything about actual child abuse. Hopefully this episode will see much closer societal examination of what they actually do.

Wikipedia don't come out of this well either.

They have discussed the image themselves before and it was interesting to note on their editor's thread one lonely editor trying to get internal work done on a policy about such images. He faced nothing but rants from libertarians and comparisons about hosting such images with those of Muhammed and adult 'erotic images'.

Postscript: in email discussion the following points have come up:

I wrote recently - and actually clumsily - about how Jacqui Smith's anti-prostitution drive would side-swipe gay men. Actually it will side-swipe fellow women (I'm drafting a follow up).

One of the things I pointed out was how they'd just defunded an anti-trafficking unit.

Another prostitution law is really about ideologically "removing the demand" (Smith's said as much) and as equally ineffective in stopping real trafficking as the IWF's actions are in stopping real child abuse. With the IWF, it's also about being seen to do something rather than actually doing it. Remember, this is an ISP-funded body set up to stop criticism and regulation.

In one fell swoop the major source for the world's spam (and a child porn host) was recently taken down. This is the sort of action which actually combats online child abuse - how well-funded is that work?

How is the IWF's true effectiveness being judged? How much has been wasted on IWF? This should be part of the accountability, which is clearly missing and no-one has the guts to ask.

• Postscript: IWF row back

Scrapbook clips catch up

I've been repeatably hearing a bizarre (to my ears) ad running on the Olbermann netcast - Kraft 'natural, 2% milk' cheese with ... drumroll ... "no added growth hormone". Only in America?

I shouldn't mock. We have crap food here too. But something called Velveeta, which "doesn't need to be refrigerated after opening"???

Google has launched a Elections Video Search gadget which use speech recognition.

Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find.

+ Google kills the Google bomb :{

Hah (sorry, shouldn't laugh).

A disgruntled city computer engineer has virtually commandeered San Francisco's new multimillion-dollar computer network, altering it to deny access to top administrators even as he sits in jail on $5 million bail.

US 'Department of Homeland Security' is seriously suggesting that airline passengers wear 'security bracelets' which would deliver taser-like shocks if they 'fail to comply' - seriously.

Here's another shock horror story in 'the war against tourism':

And it wasn't enough for another woman to show TSA agents nipple rings that set off a metal detector. The agents forced her to take them out.

Mandi Hamlin said, "I had to get pliers and pull it apart."

In Chicago, people like Robert Perry are subjected to exhaustive security checks. He was patted down, his wheel chair was examined and his hands were swabbed, all in public view in a see-through room at the security checkpoint. Perry, 71, is not alone

"It's humiliation," Perry said.

Perry was also taken to a see-through room by a TSA agent when his artificial knee set off the metal detector.

"He yelled at me to get the belt off. 'I told you to get the belt off.' So I took the belt off. He ran his hands down over and pulled the pants down, they went down around my ankle," Perry said.

At that point, Perry was standing in his underwear in public view. He asked to see a supervisor. That made things worse.

Tracey Ullman has a great character, Chanel Monticello, taking da piss outta this shit.

Delightful story about how Karl Rove, aka 'Bush's brain', threatened a webbie:

If he does not "'take the fall' for election fraud in Ohio".

No wonder they're losing online, who'd want to work for them?

Computing magazine had a good-news story about the NHS IT project - the biggest non-military IT project in the world - focusing on Homerton Hospital. All great, practical, working properly, stuff. Pity that a/ it's not easily found on the web and b/ Labour is making nothing of it.

eGov: New figures from NWEGG shows that:

A ‘self-serviced’ web transaction is 24 times less costly than a telephone transaction and 46 times less costly than a face - to - face transaction.

According to the Daily Mail (FCS):

Ministers had so far failed to put sex education on a statutory footing in the national curriculum.

AND

Attempts to search for advice on school computers were often frustrated by filters which block sites containing sexual words.

New York Times piece on the challenges of being a Tekkie in Kenya:

Consider Wilfred Mworia, a 22-year-old engineering student and freelance code writer in Nairobi, Kenya. In the four weeks leading up to Apple’s much-anticipated release of a new iPhone on July 11, Mr. Mworia created an application for the phone that shows where events in Nairobi are happening and allows people to add details about them.

Mr. Mworia’s desire to develop an application for the iPhone is not unusual: many designers around the world are writing programs for the device. But his location posed some daunting obstacles: the iPhone doesn’t work in Nairobi, and Mr. Mworia doesn’t even own one. He wrote his program on an iPhone simulator.

Here's good CRM for you. From an email:

We couldn't help but notice that it's been a while since you've visited Current.com, and it's bumming us out.

If you have a moment, we'd love to hear from you about your experience on Current.com, what did or didn’t work for you, and how we could make things more enticing for you in the future.

Lincolnshire is truly pioneering with eGov. Apart from the ads they are:

As part of their “Accessibility tested by humans” strategy, Lincolnshire’s website will be tested every 3 months by a panel of disabled users with disabilities ranging from cerebral palsy through to dyslexia. Results will then be published on Lincolnshire’s website for anyone to see.

I completely agree with this more 'social' attitude to accessibility.

Here's Whitehall's approach:

The draft had threatened to switch off non-compliant websites altogether, warning: "websites which fail to meet the mandated level of conformance shall be subject to the withdrawal process for .gov.uk domain names". The final guidance issues a similar warning, but using the softer formula 'may be at risk' instead of 'shall be subject to': "Government website owners are reminded to follow the conditions of use for a .gov.uk name (Registering .gov.uk domain names (TG114)). Websites which fail to meet the .gov.uk accessibility requirements may be at risk of having their domain name withdrawn".

Monbiot point:

A few weeks ago the writer Mark Lynas found a counter-intuitive revelation buried in the small print of an ICM survey. The number of people in social classes D and E who thought the government should prioritise the environment over the economy was higher (56%) than the proportion in classes A and B (47%). It is counter-intuitive only because a vast and well-funded denial industry has spent years persuading us that environmentalism is a middle-class caprice

How guardian.co.uk stays atop the pile:

In the past two months, we have started to combine search engine optimisation - talking to the news desk on the paper about SEO-friendly headlines and underlining SEO with our subs desk [on the website] - with our marketing and pay-per-click activity. If you do two to three small things at one time that can be very significant.

Etre (newsletter only) had a great post about 'cognitive illusions', relating this to usability. Citing Bruce Tognazzi from 1989 it notes that:

1) Users consistently report that using the keyboard is faster than using the mouse.

2) The stopwatch consistently proves that using the mouse is faster than using the keyboard.

This illusion reveals a much more important learning: Users' perception of reality and reality itself are not the same thing - which means that you should always verify their claims through research. You should also take pains to validate your own intuitions, because even when you're certain of something, you can still be very wrong.

Etre's blog had an interesting post about a new ATM interface for Wells Fargo. ATMs are thirty years old - proving that usability is an ongoing and never-ending process.

Dave Briggs is running an event in Peterborough relating the ReadWriteWeb to the needs of local government. Check it out.

Featuring case studies from both local and central government, practical exercises to learn more about how social media could be used within a local authority context and plenty of time for networking and chats over coffee.

eGov AU on why UK lgov sites are better than Australian ones. Unfortunately he cites Redbridge :{

Information ain't free. After a long break with no email, I had a notification about a citation of that suicide and the internet BMJ article (which I went to work on). But of course I couldn't read it because JAMA's medical research is behind a paywall.

That's cleared some clips :}

Just this to add - from the online journo Michael J Totten: The Truth About Russia in Georgia:

He raised his hand as if to say stop.

“That was the formal start of the war,” he said. “Because of the peace agreement they had, nobody was allowed to have guns bigger than 80mm. Okay, so that's the formal start of the war. It wasn't the attack on Tskhinvali. Now stop me.”

“Okay,” I said. “All the reports I've read say Saakashvili started the war.”

“I'm not yet on the 7th,” he said. “I'm on the 6th.”

“Okay,” I said. He had given this explanation to reporters before, and he knew exactly what I was thinking.

“Saakashvili is accused of starting this war on the 7th,” he said.

“Right,” I said. “But that sounds like complete bs to me if what you say is true.”

Thomas Goltz nodded.

Excessive brand protection

I was forced this week to consult the 2012 brand guidelines. Don't ask. They've created the right degree of paranoia at ground level, so I'm forced to read through pages of this nonsense for fear of their lawyers.

Reading through, it's all about protecting those Big Corps putting at least £50m in. Not one word encouraging support. And given the curtailment of government funding, 2012 is going to be thoroughly 'branded' by these Big Corps like the handover event was, with VISA everywhere.

So much for support of small business. And look out for yet more stories over the next four years of some piddling community event or even novel being sued for daring to use the word 'Olympics'.

Tucked away in those 2012 brand guidelines (and this is the ones for 'non-commercial' use!) is the following hilarity, something I'd thought ditched long ago due to its plain ridiculousness:

"Linking to the London 2012 website
If you wish to link to our website, you can do so using our special 'link to us' buttons."

Just to repeat (sigh, I'm having flashbacks), no you don't need anyone's permission to link.

And those buttons themselves? Terrible. No logo whatsoever. And surrounded by stifling legalese, which is as far away from true net marketing as you can get.

It is precisely at this micro-level where 2012 fails online. According to them, it's all about poor schmucks taking some shine from them rather than adding your support or encouragement. That's the basis on which they engage. Add to this their blogs which aren't part of the blogosphere, the ongoing accessibility fiasco and - online - 2012 seems tokenistic and way over controlled.

Not 'webbie' IOW. But maybe that's their aim.

It's all about 'protecting the brand' rather than encouraging engagement and - frankly - gives more than a wiff of 2012 being all about Big Corps and control and not about the sort of democratic engagement which the ideals claim.



Surprising? No. One of the stifled stories of the Beijing Games is how Nike, a £50m investor, has set the Chinese 'security' hounds on some poor f**k who dared to post about one of their 'investments':

An anonymous internet user, claiming to be close to Nike, had written a web post in which they suggested Nike had forced Liu [the great Chinese athletic hope] to pull out because he wasn't going to win, and that would compromise the firm's investment in him. Your basic internet conspiracy, but the corporation's response was as swift as it was staggering. They announced: "We have immediately asked relevant government departments to investigate those that started the rumour."

This is how Big Corps behave. Plus can you imagine them asking exactly the same of UK 'government departments' - and getting what they want? I can.

And that logo in the top right of this post? So sue me. I've read the guidelines. I think it says I'm allowed. But even if it didn't. How very dare you!

Another UK blogger censored

Sensing a theme?

Matt Wardman has alerted me to the story of Phil Groom, who is yet another blogger being censored for free speech in the UK (where's that Bill of Rights?)

Phil used to work for the SPCK chain of Christian bookshops, which is owned by people not some benevolent, holy authority, and they appear to be behaving as many 'owners' do - i.e. like pigs towards the staff.

The Brewers then started screwing people’s contracts around, trying to impose new terms of employment that didn’t comply with UK employment law. They also started to narrow down the range of stock and stopped paying their suppliers.

Phil has been blogging about this and, like with Arsenal's suitor, The Brewers then started throwing the legal letters around.

Always a giveaway when there's something to hide.

Dave Walker and myself had each been independently reporting on the story on our websites and this year I set up a separate, dedicated blog to allow for more focused reporting and discussions. Unfortunately the Brewers didn’t like people talking about the way they were running things etc so they decided to try and nail us down by sending out ‘Cease and Desist’ (C&D) messages threatening legal action if we didn’t take down our websites.

Now there's a very obvious irony in me defending Christian bookshop workers right to whinge but ... what's that Voltaire line again? (Or was it actually Evelyn Beatrice Hall).

Scrapbook clips catch up

Make your own at whatever.wecanbelievein.com

lastfm has a new design which I'm slowly getting used to. It appears to have a couple - that's all - new features, but they're useful. Techcrunch thinks it's buggy. The Times nails the business model, which is rather good, boasting the "'smartest' ads on the web".

An example of the new "smart" adverts displays an image of a mobile phone handset which changes according to what the Last.fm user is doing. For instance, if someone is listening to Bon Jovi, the phone would appear to start playing a Bon Jovi track, showing off its MP3 player.

Hotel chains will be able to tap into a Last.fm user's list of favourite artists and display adverts for hotels in cities where those artists have upcoming gigs. Train companies, similarly, will be able to advertise services running to other music-based events that may be of interest to the user.

iphonic madness? Behold: "I Am Rich," a $999.99 app from Armin Heinrich, which just displays a red gem on the phone's screen — nothing else.



directgov is soon to launch a tellmeonce tool, which has some designs leaking out here. PSF has the story noting that it's the much-anticipated 'Citizens Account'.

Here we see the Citizen's Account is split into two sections, the first showing an inbox of messages from government departments, and a second listing the user's relationships with given individuals.

A further page shows how the user manages these relationships. An explanatory states: 'Please note that most relationships need to be created by having a face-to-face interview with an officer at the Department for Work and Pensions'.

North East Connects, a consortium of local councils, has raised urgent and serious concerns about councils' readiness for NI 14 (measuring avoidable contact). It says:

Avoidable contact' figure which councils need to report to CLG [Whitehall], and which will be published nationally, is 'relatively meaningless', despite it underpinning one of the Government's two key progress measures for service transformation.

When parliament wanted "improved design and navigation" and "simpler presentation" of bills and a "greatly improved" search engine it cost £3,644,000. But to show us our MPs speaking in the house cost virtually nothing, because MySociety volunteers did it. Sheesh.

The Tiananmen Massacre Map (PDF)

Smart of China to parade an earthquake victim in the opening ceremony. In Schezuan, parents whose kids died in collapsed, shoddily built government schools (where schools for kids of officials didn't collape) are being repressed from protesting.



Yu Tingyun, left, lost his daughter, Yang, in the May earthquake in southwest China, and Huang Lianfen, right, lost a nephew. Ms. Huang holds an agreement that Chinese officials want parents to sign, saying they will not hold protests about collapsed schools.

avaaz.org's latest campaign is the Olympic Handshake.

The handshake began with the Dalai Lama, passing through the streets of London, now it's gone online where all of us can join in -- help the handshake travel toward Beijing, where our message will be delivered through a big Olympic media campaign before the closing ceremonies. Join the handshake, and see yourself and others as it goes around the globe!

art.com has a set of stunning exhibits. Here's one, a kinetic sculpture, which seems terribly early 80s to me ...



Anyone using a filter, created by US technology company SonicWall, which gives employers the option to block access to websites simply because they “promote or cater to gay and lesbian lifestyles” could be breaking the law. Here's one UK school using them.

SonicWall’s Anna Wright declined to say if the company would warn its UK customers they could be unwittingly breaking the law by using the gay-blocking setting.

Wired's great take on those photoshopped Iranian missiles.



Matthew Inman's great take on the 'state of the web, summer 2008'.




Quote of the week:

"These brainstorming meetings at Guantanamo produced animated discussion," writes Sands. "'Who has the glassy eyes?" Beaver asked herself as she surveyed the men around the room, thirty or more of them. She was invariably the only woman in the room, keeping control of the boys. The younger men would get excited, agitated, even: "You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas" [reported Beaver]. A wan smile crossed Beaver's face: "And I said to myself, you know what, I don't have a dick to get hard, I can stay detached."' [Sands, p 63]

From Naomi Wolf, Sex Crimes in the White House.

Welsh Assemby sacks blogger

I wonder if the new social media code for civil servants has any effect and or meaning in a devolved authority? His blog is now 'by invitation only'.

Sacked blogger’s taking case to tribunal

Jul 9 2008 by Martin Shipton, Western Mail

AN Assembly Government civil servant who was sacked for running a political blog is taking his case to an Employment Tribunal.

Last night a former AM who himself is a regular blogger said he found the decision to dismiss the civil servant “heavy handed”.

The former Assembly Government employee, whose real name has not been disclosed but who ran a blog called Christopher Glamorganshire, provided what readers saw as a neutral running commentary on last year’s coalition negotiations involving Labour and Plaid Cymru.

An Assembly Government spokesman said: “This issue regards a former Welsh Assembly Government employee who was dismissed for activities related to the Glamorganshire Blog that contravened the Civil Service Code. The case went to the Civil Service Appeals Board, which we won, and it is listed for Employment Tribunal in Cardiff later this year.”

It is understood the elements of the Civil Service Code regarded by the Assembly Government as relevant to the case come under sections headed “integrity” and “rights and responsibilities”.

Under integrity, the relevant clauses read: “You must always act in a way that is professional and that deserves and retains the confidence of all those with whom you have dealings,” and: “You must not misuse your official position, for example by using information acquired in the course of your official duties to further your private interests or those of others.”

Under rights and responsibilities, the clause considered to have been broken states: “This Code is part of the contractual relationship between you and your employer. It sets out the high standards of behaviour expected of you which follow from your position in public and national life as a civil servant. You can take pride in living up to these values.”

Last night former Conservative AM Glyn Davies, a regular blogger, said: “The Christopher Glamorganshire blog was on my list of ‘my favourites’. It seemed to me to be written in a sensible and rational manner.

“Clearly, if his contract of employment said he was not allowed to blog, he doesn’t have much of a case.

“But if it is simply a question of supposedly contravening the code, I think sacking him is very harsh and heavy handed.”

He added: “This all smacks of the heavy hand of the state.”

Postscript: Matt Wardman has an extensive report and backgrounder. He says:

The approach is slightly out of kilter in a country where only this week Hazel Blears was talking about giving more leeway for Council Officers to participate in the political process.

He also has a comment from Christopher Glamorgan:

A thousand apologies!

It is very kind of you to notice, but I am afraid that the blog has had to be taken ‘offline’ for the time being. I am still an avid reader of other blogs and am chomping at the bit as I type.

Hopefully normal service will resume very soon ;>D

And the reaction from a leading Welsh political blogger, Miss Wagstaff (whose blog is apparently blocked on Assembly government computers).

This all seems unfair to me, but best of luck to you 'Christopher'. Like any large organisation, the Assembly Government will - without a shadow of doubt - put their whole legal team behind the case, and solicitors are costly, so I fear that you'll need more than fair play, luck, and common sense on your side.

Is there a witchhunt? There's a story here saying that he is the fourth blogger sacked by the Assembly government. And this comment:

I can't remember a post by Christopher that was either reveling or controversial, certainly nothing that would appear to justify his dismissal from public service.

As well as this one:

The Welsh Assembly Government recently allowed a member of staff to resign after being found guilty in court of sexually harrassing a colleague.

The man in question was even allowed to stay in the workplace while an investigation was underway.

This post give a further suggestion of a witchhunt, saying that he was a Conservative. Conservative Welsh MP David Jones weighs in here.

What the new social media code for civil servants does not cover is if civil servants have any right to an opinion and how this tallies with 'freedom of expression' rights. Perhaps that is too big a can of worms to open but since 'civil servants' is sometimes taken to mean all public servants (and not just employees of parliaments or ministers) of which there are millions, perhaps this case should be taken up as a chance to add some more definition here?

Postscript: Are the Mail trawling for another blogging civilserf story? Matt Wardman notes the Christopher Glamorganshire sacking story cut and paste Promotional Tour

Postscript: Ian Cuddy at PSF noticed something I managed to miss (ahem) - that blogcatalog has the first lines archived of Christopher's posts. An example:

"I'm off early as I am the boss even though there is a big "issue" developing. You will stay here and work late as you are not senior enough to enjoy a work-life balance. Also used by senior managers as a way of sounding PC..."

The description Christopher offered of his blog is:

"Wales, the Welsh, politics, humour, general philosophical commentary, and gossip... Oh! and the professional bloggers down the Bay (but spare a thought for the Kingdom that is United for we are joined at the hip and rightly so)"

Ian also discovered his Blogger profile which reads: "Will today be a nine-to-five lunch break interrupted by an hour of work or will something substantial fall on my desk?"

As well as according to Wikipedia (which must be true), Christopher is "currently a philosophy student of the University of Wales, Lampeter" and trying to create a Wikipedia entry for Assembly Members and other Welsh politicians.

Yet more searching uncovers Christopher commenting and linking to his blog on the BBC Wales political blog, a flavour of who he may have pissed off

Scrapbook clips catch up

According to the German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media (BITKOM:

More and more German citizens use the Internet to performing authorities courses. 43 percent of Germans in 2007, electronic services of public administration claimed.

And the UK is slipping down the rankings (p. excuse translation).

Putting a spanner in the gears of the drive to council web ads, Accessible banner adverts, from the RNIB.

Jack Pickard says Better Connected: Sigh - Here we go again…

Perchance, I agrees. Forsooth I said ..

There are methods for discovering what terms people use ‘in the street’, that’s how people spend money with search marketing.

One reviewer doesn’t constitute testing best practice, there are well-developed methods used elsewhere which enumerate the issues with this.

The central theme being a disconnection to web best practice.

I am sure that professionals in such areas would find these methods odd.

Webcredible has issued a highly related report 'Local Council Websites: Good, But No Cigar'. PDF download and fairly damning.

Usability will undoubtedly prove to be a key factor in the success of the online channel, particularly when it comes to transactional support for key user services. Compared to last year’s average score of just 45.5%, this year’s sample has performed a lot better against our guidelines. However, there is still significant scope for improvement

Tops for Webcredible? Dan Champion's old stamping ground: Clackmannanshire.

New blog for your Reader: blindaccessjournal.

Business leaders call for accessible technology

"The business case for accessible technology is compelling. IT that is accessible for disabled people is easier for everyone to use and improves everyone's productivity.

"Indeed, it's estimated that over 60 per cent of the workforce would be more efficient were they to use existing accessibility features."

HMRC chief operating officer Steve Lamey said: "We want to raise the profile of the business case for having a disability competent IT sector, not just to suppliers but to every chief information officer in Europe.

Microsoft is lining up Senior PC for the UK. "The PC will come with simplified software for email, word processing as well as managing prescriptions, finances, travel planning and photographs." Age Concern and Help the Aged are the co-conspirators.

HT to Headstar for breaking the walled garden - they have Gerry McGovern starring at an upcoming function.

theconnectedrepublic.org is a new community space, developed by Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group. The aim is to create a space where people with ideas can meet, share their thinking and link up with each other. The site is open to anyone who wants to get involved. They want this to be a user-led, user-dominated space :}

• PDF White paper - The Connected Republic 2.0: New Possibilities & New Value for the Public Sector

The Cabinet Office has set up a competition for people to develop their own mash-ups from public sector information, according to Kable.

Actually it's Minister Watson. Praise where praise due.

Great primer from Jack Aaronson at ClickZ on new developments in ecommerce producing A Widget World?

Companies like Citibank should hop on this bandwagon and create true mini ATM interfaces that allow users to perform various banking transactions via the iPhone. The iPhone interface would need to operate more like an ATM and less like a Web site (which is how existing online banking tools are designed).

Authoritarian Governments Can Lock Up Bloggers, But Not Outwit Them

What do Barbra Streisand and the Tunisian president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, have in common? They both tried to block material they dislike from appearing on the internet. And they were both spectacularly unsuccessful.

CIA collaborates online

Although people do not generally think of the spy agency as an information-sharing organization, that's an important function of the CIA. And like executives of news organizations, [it's] feeling pressure to make content accessible to an audience that now expects to stay connected from any location.

"People don't always sit at their desks," he said. "If we are really going to be successful, we need to get information to our customers whenever, wherever…by whatever means necessary."

Fowler said the WIRe, which has been online in its current form for less than two years, includes several Web 2.0 tools from text and video to social bookmarks and Really Simple Syndication feeds. "We are really trying to push the envelope," Fowler said.

Content is published seven days a week, and Fowler was awarded the Intelligence Medal of Merit in 2007 for his work on the unique, user-driven format of the publication. The WIRe's newspaper-like interface, which reflects editorial decisions about what should go above the fold, is released six times weekly, he said.

In a sense, Fowler added, the product is like a wire service but more scholarly in style. Reports combine field intelligence, open-source information and analysis.

Fowler said the goal is to use various online tools to make the reports more interlinked for the customer, and there's an opportunity for readers to comment on a particular article and follow links to other, related articles.

The collaborative tools "are a means to an end," he said.

Latest PEW Internet & American Life Project survey says 46% Of Americans Partake In Politics Online. A. Lot.

McCain appears to have, finally, hit a NetNerve with an online appeal for more drilling.

BBC: Supermarket of the future.

It's all about the mobiles. But I find the robot scares me.

Al-Qaeda's Growing Online Offensive

Every three or four days, on average, a new video or audio from one of al-Qaeda's commanders is released online by as-Sahab, the terrorist network's in-house propaganda studio. Even as its masters dodge a global manhunt, as-Sahab produces documentary-quality films, iPod files and cellphone videos. Last year it released 97 original videos, a sixfold increase from 2005.

Jakob has been bizzy:

The 1% of websites that don't suck can be made even better by strengthening exceptional user performance, eliminating miscues, and targeting company-wide use and unmet needs.

Different traffic sources imply different reasons for why visitors might immediately leave your site. Design to keep deep-link followers engaged through additional pageviews.

More wisdom.

It's unfair to blame Google for the facts of information foraging. The easier it is to get around an information space, the earlier people will leave any one location and surf to the next beckoning hit. That's a fact, and Google is just designing the best product it can.

If we didn't have Google, it would be Yahoo and Live Search that were making us stupid, even though maybe they wouldn't make us quite as stupid, because they would make it a little harder to find the next promising place to go, and thus make people dig a bit deeper at each site.

Also, I have observed the same reading behavior in user research since 1997 (the year before Google was founded) so it's definitely not Google's fault that the very nature of the Web makes users treat individual websites contemptuously. Yes, the behavior is stronger now, with more people that ever using search and diving into sites for very short dips, but fundamentally it's the same style of behavior.

After all, I talked about the importance of designing and writing for search long before Google, and the guidelines are pretty much the same. It's simply become more important to follow them.

The guilty party is not Google, it's the Web.

And, from salesforce.com numbers:

Remember that IE7 was released in October 2006: 20 months ago.

Thus, the UPTAKE SPEED is slightly less than 2% per month (in terms of IE users upgrading from the old version to the new one).

Ten years ago, in 1998, I noted that the uptake speed for new browser versions was 1% per week. Thus, users are now twice as conservative as they used to be.

Here's a usability tip: it never ends. ATMs are over 30 years old but they're still up for improvement.

Study Ranks Twenty Best Country Portals: Singapore, Argentina, Costa Rica Take Top Spots

The study is from this guy, but I haven't been able to find the actual study ;[ The portals are great though. Google them.

Personal Democracy Forum 2008.

Absolutely heaps of good stuff. Barely. Scratched. Surface. Also check this tag.

John Edwards' surprise appearance:



Google redefining 'community standards'?

In a novel approach, the defense in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbors have broader interests than they might have thought.

Very neat idea: non-stop trains:



Line of the week from BBC Radio News: "there's been an 18% reduction in the carbon dioxide Prince Charles produces"

And an added extra, from Chris Kelly:

What if Obama spent the next week calling McCain Dracula?

No offense, right?

He wouldn't really be calling him a macabre horny corpse that only sunlight can stop. He'd just be kidding around. About his energy policy.

And to mention that I've been rated "8.0 in the Society category of Blogged.com". Sorry Amy Liu, no link for you. No 'benefit' sold ;{

More dangers of filters

This one comes at you sideways.

In addition to blocking traffic from websites they don’t like, it looks like the web-geniuses behind the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow site have a few other tricks up their sleeves, such as automatically replacing any use of the word “gay” with the word “homosexual” in any of the AP stories they run … leading to instances in which proper names are reformatted to meet their ridiculous standard, such as this article about sprinter Tyson Gay winning the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials in which he is renamed “Tyson Homosexual”.

Tee hee ;]

Panicking politicians and caustic censorship

HT: Nick Booth

I was having issues posting this response to Nick's request [Is the British Government planning a new department of Digital Cleaners?] for 'more detail' on how Culture Secretary Andy Burnham's call for censorship a la TV of YouTube etc. (mainly YouTube) gives me the deja vus.

I lived through the Australian conservative government's equally knee-jerk reaction to a moral panic around these issues in the late nineties.

They, similarly, proposed that the Aussie equivalent of Ofcom become involved and, unlike here, the equivalent of Ofcom salivated at the thought (the power! the power!).

What they ended up instituting was a national filtering system with opt-outs which mirrored what Saudi Arabia and China do. Is this what Andy wants? Or maybe he'd like something like the Thais insisted on, upset as they were at 'derogatory' portrayals of their King on - guess what - YouTube!?

Anyway, if you want to read up on the history of this in Australia, the activists on this in Oz are EFA and the Censorware Project.

• I wrote a submission for the Australian Senate which I wrote about (and the background to) in a post last year.
• This submission is still online [PDF]!
• I also wrote more generally about filters here.