Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices – Page 55

2010/08/212010/08/23

Google Watch: Google is the only source, “Do Not Track Me” List, WSJ “What They Know” Series

Civil Society, Commerce, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Government, Mobile, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Privacy, Technologies

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has a requirement to provide a secured, hosted environment that provides web-based access to geospatial visualization services and Open Geospatial Consortium complaint web service interfaces. The Schedule of Supplies/Services provides for the period of performance from 20 September 2010 through 19 September 2011 and two 12-month option years.

This acquisition is for Commercial Geospatial Visualization Services for NGA. Google is the only source that can meet the Government's requirement for worldwide access, unlimited processing, and Open Geospatial Consortium complaint web service interfaces. See Full National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Release
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“Do Not Track Me” gains traction in Washington

by John M. Simpson (Aug 15, 2010)
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“What They Know” Series by the Wall Street Journal

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A comment on the Google wi-fi/wi-spy issue:

“Most of my sources say that Google and Facebook have been bankrolled by the NSA and CIA vendors and they are in complete collusion with each other. I believe Americans will live to regret their participation with Facebook and Google.” –Glen Woodfin (source)

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Related:
+ 2009 Arnold Google: The Digital Gutenberg (also: The Google Legacy, Google 2.0: The Calculating Predator)
+ Inside Google
+ Google = King of Malware
+ Journal: Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring
+ Street views privacy issue
+ Time For Google to Grow Up: Open Wi-Fi Privacy Mistake Must Be The Last (EFF.org)
+ Seriously? Eric Schmidt Thinks There Should Be No Anonymity Online? (Forbes – Aug 11, 2010)
+ EFF Warns of Untrustworthy SSL, Undetectable Surveillance (Aug 16, 2010)
+ Google CEO: Young web users will need to escape online posts (Aug 20, 2010)

2010/08/19

Opening Beijing’s Seven Secrets

02 China, 07 Other Atrocities, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Open Government, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

Waiting for Wikileaks: Beijing's Seven Secrets

by Perry Link (Aug 18, 2010)

While people in the US and elsewhere have been reacting to the release by Wikileaks of classified US documents on the Afghan War, Chinese bloggers have been discussing the event in parallel with another in their own country. On July 21 in Beijing, four days before Wikileaks published its documents, Chinese President Hu Jintao convened a high-level meeting to discuss ways to prevent leaks from the archives of the Communist Party of China.

In emails, tweets, and web postings, Chinese bloggers, both inside China and overseas, began listing key episodes in recent Chinese history that have remained shrouded in mystery and for which they would love to see archives opened:

1. The famine during the Great Leap Forward in 1959-62. Somewhere between 20 and 50 million people died because of bad policy, not “bad weather.” What exactly happened? What policies caused the famine and what policies suppressed information on it? How much grain was in state granaries while people starved? Is it true that Mao sold grain to the Soviet Union during those years in order to buy nuclear weapons?

Continue reading “Opening Beijing's Seven Secrets”

2010/08/182010/12/25

Worth a Look: CrowdMap (Beta)

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Augmented Reality, Citizen-Centered, Collective Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Earth Intelligence, Geospatial, Historic Contributions, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), International Aid, IO Mapping, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Maps, Methods & Process, microfinancing, Mobile, Officers Call, Open Government, Policy, Reform, Research resources, Technologies, Tools, Worth A Look

Crowdmap (Liquida)

Crowdmap allows you to…

+ Collect information from cell phones, news and the web.
+ Aggregate that information into a single platform.
+ Visualize it on a map and timeline.

Crowdmap is designed and built by the people behind Ushahidi, a platform that was originally built to crowdsource crisis information. As the platform has evolved, so have its uses. Crowdmap allows you to set up your own deployment of Ushahidi without having to install it on your own web server.

Reference: How to Use Twitter to Build Intelligence

Journal: Tech ‘has changed foreign policy’

Continue reading “Worth a Look: CrowdMap (Beta)”

2010/08/162010/08/17

Worth a Look: Clay Shirky on Cognitive Surplus & Crisis Mapping

Augmented Reality, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), International Aid, IO Sense-Making, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Maps, Methods & Process, Policies, Tools, Worth A Look

About this talk

Clay Shirky looks at “cognitive surplus” — the shared, online work we do with our spare brain cycles. While we're busy editing Wikipedia, posting to Ushahidi (and yes, making LOLcats), we're building a better, more cooperative world. TED Video of Talk.

About Clay Sharpey

Clay Shirky believes that new technologies enabling loose collaboration — and taking advantage of “spare” brainpower — will change the way society works. Learn more.

Core Point: Over a trillion hours a year in cognitive surplus–Internet and media tools are shifting all of us from consumption to production. We like to create; we like to share. Now we can.

Recommended by Dr. Kent Myers. His additional commentary:

This talk gets at something that could go into the proposal for Virtual Systemic Inquiry (VSI). I need to emphasize that the VSI products have civic value. That motivates participation, but we also need to make it a little more obvious and easy how to participate, in order that generosity can flow more readily from more people. That's what I was trying to get at by making projects more standardized and quick. Software can let that flow, as Shirky says. The process and products should probably be pretty in some way too, like IDEO (also LOL cats).

2010/08/062010/08/06

Twitter & SMS Used to Help Election in Kenya

07 Other Atrocities, Civil Society, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Geospatial, Mobile, Peace Intelligence, Technologies

source article

How Twitter saved Kenya's election

Thu Aug 5, 2010

New York – Once again, social media has played a central role in a national election. During Kenya's recent ballot initiative to adopt a new constitution, citizens used Twitter, along with Facebook and a new breed of monitoring technology, to help eliminate the voter intimidation, bombings, and deadly violence that marred the struggling African country's disastrous 2008 election. Here, a quick guide:

How was social media used to monitor the election?
Voters reported any intimidation issues at the polls by posting Twitter messages with the hashtag #uchaguzi (the Kiswahili word for “election”), or sending SMS messages to a specially designated number. A group of volunteers tracked the messages and alerted local officials when necessary.

Besides Twitter, what other technologies were used?
A Kenyan-developed platform called Uchaguzi helped aggregate all reported problems, documenting incidents by location and type (security issues, hate speech, ballot issues) so that anyone with Internet access could get a quick overview on the Uchaguzi site. It's very new for Kenyans, Uchaguzi's Charles Kithika tells The Christian Science Monitor, to see that problems are being reported and investigated, effectively “discouraging” troublemakers.

Continue reading “Twitter & SMS Used to Help Election in Kenya”

2010/07/292010/07/29

Bringing Martin Luther King to China (and back)

01 Poverty, 02 China, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, Civil Society, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Government, Videos/Movies/Documentaries

Gandhi’s movement for non-violent social change challenged America. Can Martin Luther King, Jr. do the same for China?

Bringing King to China is a documentary film about culture, race and human rights. The film takes Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream of equality and peace to China—and then brings it back to the U.S. It's the story of a young American teacher in Beijing, whose failed protests against the Iraq war inspire her to produce a play in Chinese about Martin Luther King, Jr. Her journey begins after worldwide demonstrations fail to stop the invasion of Iraq and she learns (mistakenly) that her father, an ABC journalist covering the war, has been killed by a suicide bomber.