The World's Technology Podcast (WTP 249) starts off with updates on two stories we've been following closely in recent weeks, Iran and China. First, an update on the use of social media tools in the wake of post-election violence in Iran. Twitter might be enabling the flow on information into and out of the country, but can you trust what you're reading? Cyrus Farivar explores that question. Also, the Chinese delay a plan to require every PC sold in China to come loaded with a piece of Internet-filtering software called Green Dam, Youth Escort. Human rights groups have criticized the software, and so too have security experts who say it's so full of holes that hackers could turn China into one huge zombie computer network.
Oh, that cute little cuddly bunny! Surely he or she wouldn't want to control what you're allowed to see online, right? Well, this is a screenshot from a little piece of Windows software called Green Dam Youth Escort. As of July 1, everyWindows PC sold in China will have to have this piece of software installed on it. According to Chinese officials, the software is designed to protect Chinese youth from "pornography and violent content" online. In the past, that's generally been a smokescreen for a major new push to curtail Internet freedom in China. As China web-watcher Rebecca McKinnon notes in this week's Technology Podcast (WTP 246): "[Green Dam Youth Escort] takes censorship down to the level of the individual computer." But already there are reports that the software is vulnerable to hack attacks.
Fighting between the Pakistani Army and Taliban forces in the Swat Valley has created nothing short of a humanitarian disaster. More than two million people have been forced to flee their homes, becoming what the aid business calls Internally Displaced Persons, or IDPs. United Nations groups such as the World Food Program have been on the ground for weeks now, trying to get aid to where it is most needed. Those groups can't get that done without modern, secure communications. And that means two-way radios, laptops, GPS, and satellite data uplinks. And that's where people like Dane Novarlic come in. He's an emergency response coordinator for the World Food Program. He and his team go into areas affected by natural disasters and wars, and help aid groups get connected to each other, and to the rest of the world.
This week's edition of The World's Technology Podcast (WTP 238) leads with a story on two recent reports concerning China and the Internet. The first, as you can see from graphic, is called Tracking GhostNet. It was researched and written by an outfit called the Information Warfare Monitor. This is a complementary effort to something I've written about before on the blog: the OpenNet Initiative(ONI). The people behind ONI started the Information Warfare Monitor (IWM) to do more extensive looks at what happens when nations, companies, and other entities go on the cyber-offensive. In this case, GhostNet refers to a massive south and south-east Asian cyber-espionage ring discovered by IWM researchers. More than 1,000 computers in more than 100 countries were targeted. And not just any computers. We're talking embassies, diplomatic missions, human rights groups and the like. And while it looks like Chinese computers were involved, you'll hear how hard (and illegal) it is to prove the Chinese government is behind it (something Beijing whole-heartedly denies). We have an extended interview with Ronald Deibert, one of the principal investigators on the project.
The other report is, admittedly, only partly about China and the Internet. The US-based rights group Freedom House has spent the last two years running a pilot project to monitor and gauge to overall level of Internet freedom in some 15 countries, ranging from Cuba to South Africa, from the United Kingdom to Iran. The result is Freedom on the Net. It ties into the story above because, perhaps not surprisingly, China earns a "not free" ranking from Freedom House when it comes to what the Chinese people can and can't access, what they can and can't say, online. I speak with Karin Karlekar, managing editor of the Freedom on the Net project.
As promised, we also have the second half of our interview Andrew Lih, author of The Wikipedia Revolution. You can read more about that from last week's post. At the end of the interview, I have some questions for him about Wikipedia and its history of being blocked, and now unblocked (at least most of it) in China.
And we end with a segment dedicated to all you Do-It-Yourself tech lovers out there. Make Magazine's been running Maker Faire since 2006. The Faires are true celebrations of personal creativity and craftiness: a solar-powered chariot pulled by an Arnold Schwarzenegger robot, anyone? Now, the party has moved across the big pond, to Britain. Listen in to hear how Maker Faire tranlates into Geordie (it was held in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne) and all those other lovely dialects of the Queen's English. Good fun!
Also, big thanks to all you Twitter and Facebook followers who put shame aside and sent in your selections for the "What was the first song/album/band I listened to on a Sony Walkman?" question. The soundtrack to this week's podcast, for better of worse, is yours.
Apple's been navigating some rougher waters these days, at least from a public relations point of view. Here at The World, we've been tracking some that have international angles to them. There was news today that the Brits have put a stop to a TV advertisement Apple was running for the iPhone 3G in the UK, claiming that the ad was "misleading" when it claimed that "all the parts of the Internet are on the iPhone." Not so, said consumers, considering the iPhone doesn't come with Flash or Java, programs that, it was argued, were essential for accessing "all the parts of the Internet." The ad is not allowed to run anymore in its current form. Apple had no comment.
In China, Apple's iTunes is running into trouble over the on-again, off-again availability of an album called Songs for Tibet. Some are crying foul, saying Apple is bowing to the whims of the Chinese government when it comes to censoring material that deals with human rights issues the Chinese find, well, troublesome. Apple says -- wait for it -- "no comment."
And now, let's talk about "iPhone Girl," pictured. Her story manages to combine Apple, China and Britain -- not to mention Taiwan -- all in one strange package. See, here's how it seems to shake down. A gentleman in Kingston-Upon-Hull in Britain unboxed his new iPhone 3G, hooked it up to iTunes, and...whoops, there were already three pictures on the phone! Yep, of the girl above. The new iPhone owner was intrigued, and so he uploaded the photos to a popular Mac website and forum.
Is this normal, he asked, for iPhones to come preloaded with photos of the people who presumably assembled them?
In true Internet fashion, iPhone Girl became something of an item almost immediately. Responses and questions flooded into the site. Who is she? Where is she from? Does she still have a job?
"She is so fired," read one post on the site.
Well, we still don't know who she is. But she works (no, she hasn't been fired) for a Taiwan-based contractor called Foxconn, which has an iPhone assembly facility in Shenzen, China. An unidentified spokesman for Foxconn also told a local newspaper in China that the photos were most likely test photos, left on the phone "accidentally."
But in the wake of the Olympics controversy over the lip-synching of the Chinese national anthem during the opening ceremonies by a young girl deemed "prettier" than the girl who actually sang the song, I think the discerning journalist has to ask...is "iPhone Girl" nothing but a stand-in for the woman who really put the phone together?
World of Warcraft and other Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) sure do look exciting (see screen grab of Battle Ready Cat Thingy with Large Sword and Big Fangs at right). And WoW is exciting. I should know, as I've wasted a fair amount of my life parked in front of a computer, fighting off the Horde, etc.
But here's the thing. MMORPGs usually make you pay your dues. You have to spend a lot, and I mean *A LOT* of time building up skills, powers, armies, wealth, etc. Unless, of course, you're willing to pay someone to do all the repetitive, boring tasks needed to create a killer character. In that case, well, you need to find a gold farmer, someone who literally will do all the grunt work for you (or set up a 'bot to do it)...for a price. And yes, there are "sweatshops" which are run to combine all of the virtual gold and valuables accrued by groups of these farmers.
And according to a new study just released by Richard Heeks of the Development Informatics Group at the University of Manchester in England, there are hundreds of thousands of these virtual farmers at work all over the world, mostly in developing countries. And, according to Heeks, the business is growing rapidly. He estimates the global market in gold farming is about half a billion dollars.
Let me just remind you -- those are real dollars, not virtual ones.
All this despite the fact that such buying and selling of virtual goods and services is against the terms of agreement many a player agrees to when they delve into a MMORPG, and that there have been quite a few attempted crackdowns on the practice worldwide.
Rest assured that as more and more of the world gets broadband, there will be more and more poor farmers who will seek to get paid to sit at Internet-connected computers and go for the in-game gold. Heeks estimates that China (where maybe 80 percent of the gold farmers are based) has about 400,000 people employed in gold farming. The average wage? Maybe around 150 dollars a month.
And you thought your IT job sucked...
Ah, and the headline, yes. It's a riff on a tune called "Mining for Gold" by Canadian singer/songwriter James Gordon, covered to fine effect by the Cowboy Junkies.
The Associated Press is running an interesting item today. Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA) says the Federal Bureau of Investigation has found that some of the Congressman's computers have been compromised. Well, more than compromised. "Hacked," in the media-tainted meaning (follow the previous link and read how we've tainted it), by "sources working out of China."
Wolf, who believes he was targeted because of he often attacks what he calls China's "abysmal human rights record," said that four of his government computers were hacked. The FBI is giving no details about what information these "sources working out of China" might have been able to access. Wolf, in an interview with the AP, claimed that similar incidents have occurred in the past, and that those attacks too originated in China.
Wolf today said the hacks started in August 2006, but that unnamed sources inside the government have asked him not to speak about it.
And he went on to speculate a bit: "If it's been done in the House, don't you think that they're doing the same thing in the Senate?"
The problem there is the "they're." Who is the "they?" The Chinese People's Liberation Army? Young Chinese hot-shot hackers who either a) are doing this for nationalistic reasons, or b) being paid by the Chinese government, or c) both? Or could it be someone outside of China who is simply using Chinese computers to launch attacks?
Experts say that even with serious sleuthing skills, it's hard to track down the real perpetrators of these kinds of attacks. To give you an idea of how complicated this can get, and quickly, take a listen to this radio piece I did a while back on purported Chinese hack attacks against Darfur activist groups.
All of this is going on at the same time the FBI is investigating another incident involving the Chinese and computers. This incident involves a laptop that Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez took with him on a trip to China. U.S. authorities think the Chinese might have copied the contents of that laptop, and used the information to tap into Commerce Department computers. It's a charge that the Chinese flatly deny.
It's certainly not the first time the Chinese have been accused of
targeting American government computers. Back in September, U.S.
officials accused the People's Liberation Army of hacking Pentagon computers.
For his part, Representative Wolf was to call for Congressional hearings into these matters, and to introduce a resolution that would "help ensure protection for all House computers and information systems."
Update: Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ) claims his computer systems were hacked into in 2006 and 2007 as well. Here's a radio piece I did that moves the original post forward a bit. My favorite part -- when the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokesman says, "China is a developing country...do you really think we have this kind of advanced technology?" Priceless.
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