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A post from sw at the OpenNet Initiative blog looks at results of tests carried out during the first week of the Olympics and finds that while in fact not many websites have been unblocked for the Games, those that are can now be accessed all throughout Beijing and possibly even the country.

Those thin-skinned cyber-mobsters must have heatstroke; Chinese coach leads US women's volleyball team to victory against China and gets dissed by a chess grandmaster, then: The majority of the netizens disagreed with his view. The American team led by Lang Ping was received with warm cheers of “Coach Lang, we love you!” More confusion from Roland Soong at EastSouthWestNorth in Four Persons, Twenty Years

Nightrain from the East in Guanjia reported that between January and July, around 500 foreign capital enterprises were forced to close down in Dongguan because of deteriorating business condition.

Stop war on Iran informs us that demonstrators in different cities in the USA asked Bush administration not to attack Iran.

Yahoo mail website had removed Iran from the list of world countries in its signup page for several months. Kourosh Ziabari informs us that Yahoo mail added Iran again to the list.

According to[Fa] several bloggers including Akhbare Jahan, two student activists, Bahare Hedayat and Mohammad Hashemi,were released, after being in jail for more than one month. They were accused of acting against “national security”.

Tai Kok Tsui is an old district in Hong Kong and is now undergoing urban renewal (demolition of old buildings). Kursk spent a Sunday taking photos in order to record the old city landscape.

Immusoul said that he could not believe in Liu Xiang's explanation about his withdrawal yet, as there weren't any independent / third party evidence supporting his explanation yet. Moreover, up till, most of the decisions made during the Olympics were related with “interest”.

happy harthal 2 by challiyan

The following video uploaded by YouTube user peshaku shows irate commuters at the Angamali railway station in the southern Indian province of Kerala after they have been stranded due to a particular type of protest where workers cease operations. This phenomenon is called Harthal (Hartal) and it has become a constant problem in Kerala.

Back in February 22nd, blogger praveennair complained in Hartal the complementing factor of Kerala:

Well if you are a Keralite or are frequently in touch with Kerala, or your relative or friends live in Kerala then you may have heard many a times the word Hartal (Strike) from them. This term has been a prime element of Kerala, and sooner or later has some how been in news at least once in every two months. With so much of such hartals Kerala is also gaining a new name, the land of hartals.

The situation has become so grim that the lives of the normal man have been put to unrest every time such strikes get going.

There is a difference between a hartal, which is supposed to be non-violent, and bandhs, when strike-breakers can be attacked, as the website Harthal.com explains. On another blog, Hartal Watch, readers can be informed of when and where the following Hartals will take place.

Kerala Views' post Kerala to be paralysed for the nth time also shows impatience with yet another strike, and provides an alternative reason for the nation wide hartal:

After around 60 local and Statewide hartals this year, Kerala would be paralysed for another day as part of the nation-wide general strike.

This time, the organisers would not be content with blocking road traffic. They would picket trains in all districts through which a railway line passes.

None can dispute the right of workers to go on strike and the farmers to support such an action. However, the strike is obviously politically motiviated. Little doubt that it is being organised with an eye on the coming Lok Sabha elections.

More information on the motivation behind the strikes can be read at newindpress.com

Classes are suspended in north Philippines because of a strong storm, as twitted by amazingpig.

Going against the advice of the military council, Fiji leader Frank Bainimarama refuses to step down. Raw Fiji news also reported that the leader was disturbed by the resignation of his coup-hero Musharaff in Pakistan.

Tunisia: More than just censorship

Three more blogs have been blocked in Tunisia this week. These blogs, Mochagheb (Disturber) and Ennaqed (The Critic) and Place Mohamed Ali have all been particularly active in providing news of the struggle of The Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT), and especially about the latest social unrest in the southwestern phosphate mining region of Gafsa, where two people have been killed. One was shot dead by security forces and the other was electrocuted inside a local electric generator.

I asked the Tunisian blogger Ennaqed about the censorship of his blog in Tunisia. He said:

I think that the main reason of banning my blog is crossing the “red lines” that are constraining the media in Tunisia by talking about issues that are completely ignored by mainstream media. Last year, I was seriously engaged in covering the hunger strike of three Tunisian secondary school teachers who were expelled from their jobs for political reasons, and my blog was blocked temporarily. And like the rest of the Tunisian bloggers, I was blogging about the revolt in the mining region and recently about the prisoner swap between Israel and Hezbullah, and the remains of eight Tunisian men handed over by Israel. But, honestly, I think that the most direct reason for banning my blog might be my last blog post about the participation of an Israeli delegation in the 31st Congress of the International Geography Union (IGU) that is taking place in Tunisia. What I actually did is copy and re-post a press release about a group of Palestinian geographers who are boycotting the aforementioned conference because of Israeli participation.

On June 21 the censorship passed beyond all reason and banned the first and only podcasting Tunisian blog Radyoun (Radio) run by a group of Tunisian bloggers dedicated to discussing social and cultural topics. Apparently, the podcast debate about the sporadic protests in the poor mining region of Gasfa and about the freedom of expression led to the banning of the blog.

This is a non-comprehensive list of blocked blogs in Tunisia. Please keep in mind that the list does not include blocked websites:

1. Citizen Zouari‬, blog of Tunisian journalist and former political prisoner, Abdallah Zouari.
2. The Free Pen the blog of Tunisian journalist and former political prisoner, Slim Boukhdhir. In July 2007, this blog was also hacked and deleted.
3. ‫Mokhtar Yahyaoui‬, blog of a former Tunisian judge who was dismissed after publishing an open letter to President Ben Ali criticising the lack of independence of the judiciary.
4. Tunisia Watch, this blog is also run by Mokhtar Yahyaoui‬.
5. Astrubal
6. [fikra] blog of Tunisian activist and political refugee Sami Ben Gharbia.
7. Nawaat, popular group blog about news, politics, cyber-activism and Islamic reform.
8. Radyoun, the podcasting Tunisian blog.
9. Moaz Jmai. (this blog has been blocked in Tunisia where I'm writing this post)
10. Place Mohamed Ali (this blog has been blocked in Tunisia where I'm writing this post)
11. Sofiane Chourabi.
12. Nader.
13. Free Race.
14. Samsoum .
15. Tunisian Citizen.
16. For Gafsa.
17. Mochagheb.
18. Annaqued.
19. Zabbaleh.
20. Adam.
21. Moumni.
22. Free Word.

Attacks on video-sharing websites

Despite the fact that Tunisian authorities have permanently blocked access to both popular video-sharing websites Dailymotion and YouTube, on 3 September, 2007 and 2 November, 2007 respectively, Tunisian netizens have still managed to access these websites to either watch or share videos. And while the Tunisian government worked hard to ensure that the polished image of a “secular, modern and democratic” state would not be marred by any “negative” information disseminated by opponents on the web, Tunisian video activists and bloggers kept the spotlight on the Redeyef revolt exposing harsh repression and flooding both banned video-sharing websites Youtube and Dailymotion with footage of demonstrators, protesting against unemployment and nepotism, clashing with the police. And when the official media remained silent about the death of two demonstrators, videos of the victims, the wounded and the use of firearms against civilians, were smuggled out of Tunisia and posted on the video-sharing websites.

The anti-censorship campaigns

Interest in online censorship in Tunisia has never been higher since the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis in November 2005 when a hardcore group of Tunisian bloggers and activists supported by sympathizers, organized a successful online campaign around Yezzi Fock Ben Ali (Enough is enough, Ben Ali) a “Freedom of Expression in Mourning!” campaign, the entire field of the online battle for freedom of speech has changed. The transformation owes to the growing number of bloggers, video and Facebook activists who are walking down the path of digital activism that was gradually and patiently traced by the first pioneers of the Tunisian online free speech movement who brilliantly used web 2.0 tools (videos, mash-ups, photos, etc.) to protest the crackdown on online free speech.

Badges of Tunisian online anticensorship campaigns

There is a growing number of blog posts and comments talking and/or protesting censorship. According to the advanced search engine of the recently launched North African Blogs aggregator, Berberus (Beta), of the 274 blog posts containing the word “censure” (censorship), 165 are Tunisian.

And of the 256 comments containing the same word, 98 were left on Tunisian blogs.

Compared with other North African Internet users, Tunisian Netizens seem to be much more interested in censorship than their counterparts in Algeria and Morocco. This trend is confirmed by the following graphs, generated by Google Insights for Search:

Back to April 2007. Following the ban on Dailymotion, Tunisian bloggers and activists from Nawaat.org launched the “Unblock Dailymotion campaign” in order to draw public attention to the aggressive online censorship policy adopted by the Tunisian regime. Cybversion.org blog was created to protest the ban of the Dailymotion and has since evolved into a group blog documenting censorship, anti-censorship and digital activism in Tunisia.

Fifty-one Tunisian bloggers are now running a new anti-censorship blog campaign launched on June 20 that encourages the local blogsphere to republish posts from censored blogs as part of the campaign to sensitize the public to the issue of online free speech. The blog campaign has received a lot of media attention from the Arab world and has been featured on the official website of Al Jazeera and the Qatari “Al-Arab” newspaper.

Badges and a headline widgets that use the free Feed2JS service displaying headlines of the anti-censorship blog campaign have been designed to build community around the blogs and help Tunisian bloggers stay updated about newly published content.
July 1st, is now “I blog for freedom of expression” day which Tunisian bloggers celebrate by blogging about free speech and/or by displaying a badge. Meanwhile, from time to time, Tunisian bloggers carry out ad-hoc campaigns to protest the banning of specific blogs or websites like the Blank Post Day that has been organized twice: the first time on 25 December 2006 and the second on 25 December 2007.

Tunisian netizens bid farewell to Facebook

On the social networking websites, Facebook, several groups protesting online censorship in Tunisia have been created.The most important one has so far gathered more than 620 members. Other groups have been created requesting the ATI (The Tunisian Internet Agency, which oversees Web distribution in the country) not to block Facebeook, which, unfortunately, seems to be blocked since yesterday by at least two of the country’s largest ISPs (Globalnet and PlaNet), as reported by several Tunisian bloggers and Facebook groups who were faced yesterday with the famous Tunisian 404 block page that states that the requested Web site could not be found.

It's far more than just censorship

Blocking web 2.0 websites (Youtube, Dailymotion, Facebook) and barring access to local outspoken websites and blogs is the most obvious way of cracking down of the online free speech in Tunisia. It should be emphasized, however, that this is only one tool in the regime's hand. Tunisia has adapted to the web 2.0 revolution by developing a broader strategy composed of a wide range of instruments including:
Punishing and persecuting outspoken online writers, bloggers and dissidents:
Between 2001 and 2008 more than 12 people have been arrested and/or sentenced because of their online activities:

1. The seven cyber dissidents known as the Youth of Zarzis;
2. The cyber dissident Zouhair Yahyaoui;
3. The forum administrator Ramzi Bettibi, known as the Tunisian “prisoner of the Net;
4. The online writer and Human rights advocate Mohamed Abbou;
5. The online Journalist and blogger Slim Boukhdhir;
6. The journalist and blogger Mohamed Fourati;
7. And while the last prisoner of opinion, blogger and Internet journalist Slim Boukhdhir, has been released from jail on 21 July, the Tunisian human rights NGO, Freedom and Equity, reported that a 22-year old ICT Student, Mariam Zouaghi, has been arrested, on July 26th, 2008, for visiting banned websites.

Creating an atmosphere of fear:

As is the case of China, creating a strong atmosphere of fear and a climate of intimidation has led Tunisian citizen to in general adopt a low profile vis-a-vis freedom of expression. During the last 7 years, most internet users and bloggers were censoring themselves by avoiding to raise their voices to address political topics or write freely bypassing the strict state censorship. Only a handful of activists, cyber dissidents and bloggers, usually the same men, are leading the free speech movement on the Internet, going well beyond these limits and even organizing an online anti-propaganda machine to the official one.

Hacking of dissident websites and blogs:

Almost every single Tunisian opposition website and self-hosted blog has been the victim of one or more hacking incidents. While there is no solid evidence that the Tunisian regime is behind attempts to take down opponent websites, there is quite a strong feeling among Tunisian opposition figures that the government is carrying out cyber-attacks, given their frequency and the nature of the targeted websites and blogs.

Moncef Marzouki, one of Tunisia's most prominent human rights defenders (former President of the Tunisian League for Human Rights and leader of the banned opposition party Congrès Pour la République) openly accused the Tunisian regime of orchestrating and waging these destructive attacks against the opposition Web: “In a week my website was hacked four times (…) All of this, of course, happened simultaneously with the hacking of web based email accounts that the Tunisian police is carrying out against Human rights advocates and political opponents.“

Screenshots of hacked Tunisian websites

What we have seen more recently is that the attack on collective blog Nawaat.org (deleting of the database and ftp files) happened simultaneously with the hacking of the personal blogs and email accounts of the activists running Nawaat. According to a press release issued on 16 June, 2008, Reporters Without Borders stated that:

The Tunisian news and blog wesbite Nawaat (http://www.nawaat.org/) yesterday suffered its most serious hacker attack since its creation. Its database was erased and its home page was modified (see photo). Blogs by human rights activists Sami Ben Gharbia (http://www.kitab.nl/ ) and Astrubal (http://astrubal.nawaat.org/) were also affected. Their blogs continue to be inaccessible and their databases have been badly damaged. The websites have been restored although some dysfunction continues.

This is a non comprehensive list of blogs and websites targeted:

Filtering emails:

As reported earlier by Reporters Without Borders and some Tunisian NGOs, Tunisian human rights defenders are having trouble reading their emails on the three important web based mail clients: Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail:

Reporters Without Borders is also surprised by the problems Tunisian Internet users are having with their email. Messages sent to them by human rights organisations such as the International Association for Supporting Political Prisoners (AISPP), the Tunisnews website or Reporters Without Borders are illegible on arrival.

Several sources said the messages can be seen in the inbox and can be opened, but often there is nothing inside. Once opened, they disappear from the inbox. “It looks like badly concealed filtering,” a specialist said.

It is worth noting that the issue does not affect “fresh/new” webmail accounts and it only happens when you log in to these accounts from within Tunisia. I have personally run a test, from The Netherlands with Tunisian lawyer Abdel Wahab Maatar and Tunisian blogger, activist, and former political prisoner Abdallah Zouari. I logged into their email accounts and was able to read their emails normally. The content I saw displayed was not the same they were reading. Here are two screenshots of the test. The first is from The Netherlands where I'm base and the second from Tunisia:

So it seems the email accounts of some Tunisian Internet users are being monitored by Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) without their knowledge. DPI is a technology that has the ability to monitor the online activity and filter the traffic on the network by removing “unwanted” material from the actual body of received emails.

Recently, I asked Robert Guerra - a Toronto-base technologist who helps NGOs with data privacy, secure communications and information security about this. These are his comments:

At first glance, seems that there's some realtime interception of webmail and possibly other traffic is taking place. In a way, it looks like there's a network neutrality issue… Perhaps Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) is being used. If indeed DPI is taking place, it might be worthwhile to raise it on the numerous DPI discussions that are taking place. The discussion in Canada is quite active, one where activists could use the Tunisian example to help their case. (…) it might be that existing accounts have been compromised in some way. Should ask if the accounts that are being affected were accessed at public (ie. net cafe) pc's . if so, passwords might have been captured.

The REACTIVATE!! exhibition at the at the Espai d' Art Contemporani de Castelló, near Valencia (Spain), being an almost endless source of wonders i tried to cover last week (see REACTIVATE!! Part 1, Urban reanimations and the minimal intervention and REACTIVATE!! Part 2, Instant urbanism), i still have a last story in my magic bag to share with you:

Some of the projects presented in Castellon were commissioned by the contemporary art center to engage in a site-specific fashion with the theme of 'remodeled spaces and minimal interventions.'

The most poetical installation was created by ex.studio, two Barcelona-based Mexican architects Patricia Meneses and Iván Juárez with an impressive portfolio chock-full of projects that investigate and experiment with new ways of relating space with society.

Designed as minimal spaces for auto-reflexion, the Refugios Urbanos are 6 suspended semi-transparent pods that temporarily invade the building of the EACC and its public space.

Looking like chrysalids, the flexible structure can only contain one person. Its very delicate walls allow the inhabitant to enjoy privacy as well as a softly blurred view of the surrounding world.

Refugios Urbanos proposes new ways to inhabit and imagine space where people are both part and parcel of the city and isolated from it in order to better contemplate it.

A second project worth its weight in blog ink is María Navascues, Ramón Francos and Celia García's Atomish Garden

It all starts with the Pet Garden! At the opening of the Reactivate!! exhibition, visitors were invited to adopt a piece of garden. Each of them would take home a plant or plot of land to take care of it. Like real pets, owners can take them along for a walk in the street. They also require a lot of care and attention.

The flower pot comes with a code giving pet owners access to the Petgarden website that gives them all the necessary instruction to pamper their botanical pet. Besides, they can share with other woners the story, health news and adventure of the plant on a blog. Current technologies enable thus the various parts of this 'atomized garden' to form a community able to stay in virtual but close proximity.

All images courtesy of Espai d' Art Contemporani de Castelló.

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 4:50 PM)

I first came across the name of this extraordinary place in one of the BBC's Imagine-documentaries about German director Werner Herzog, who asked to be met in what he called one of his favorite places in Los Angeles, The Museum of Jurassic Technology. After locating it in Culver City, BBC's Alan Yentob remarks: "I begin to understand why Herzog likes it here. The exhibits in the museum cross the line between fact and fiction, between reality and imagination."

Front of the museum in Culver City, Los Angeles

The collections of the museum, which was founded in 1989 and is being curated by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Wilson, span over three little buildings and consist of pieces from about a dozen sub-collections which are often centered around a certain subject such as belief and knowledge or personalities like Athanasius Kircher and their work. But, unlike what one might expect of a technology museum, throughout all of the exhibits, the boundaries between history and fiction, magic and reason, narrative and scientific method are in fact completely fluid (and the curators pleasurably make no effort to make things more clear, even indulge in elaborate descriptions and allusions that make it even more mysterious).

Many of the pieces consist of wonderfully crafted models and often amazing analog visual tricks for superimposing images. As a result, the whole space turns into a magical wunderkammer like I've rarely seen it, and probably one of the most astonishing approaches to the culture of art and technology on the planet. A few examples from the collections:

Duck's Breath

Tell the Bees...Belief, Knowledge and Hypersymbolic Cognition, is one of the newest additions and reflects on the relationship between ancient beliefs and recipes and how some of them still bear importance today. Yet, the application of lithium for neurological illnesses sits right next to the practice of letting children breathe in the cold breath of a duck or goose.

An especially intriguing practice refers to bees, which were understood to be related to and a manifestation of the muse from which comes the bees alter identity of the muse's bird. And, the practice of telling of the bees of important events in the lives of the family has been for hundreds of years a widely observed practice and, although it varies somewhat among peoples, it is invariably a most elaborate ceremonial. The procedure is that as soon as a member of the family has breathed his or her last a younger member of the household, often a child, is told to visit the hives. and rattling a chain of small keys taps on the hive and whispers three times: "Little Brownies, little brownies, your mistress is dead."

The Conversion of St. Eustace at Mentorella

Another collection, titled The World is Bound with Secret Knots, is devoted to the life and work of 17th century Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, who dedicated himself to his parallel obsessions with magnetism, musicology, astronomy, archaeology, and linguistics, Kircher researched and compiled enormous amounts of data, invented innumerable optical, magnetic, and acoustic devices, composed music, poetry, and imaginative fiction. Created with the Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum in Hagen, Germany, the exhibit consist of many gorgeous pepper's ghost-style dioramas which illustrate Kircher's range of fascinations and inventions, especially in relation to his theory of magnetism being the invisible force that binds all the universe together.

Garden of Eden on Wheels

One part of the permanent exhibition focusses on Geoffrey Sonnabend, who in his three volume work Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter, departed from all previous memory research with the premise that memory is an illusion. Forgetting, he believed, not remembering is the inevitable outcome of all experience. Sonnabend believed that long term or "distant" memory was illusion, but similarly he questioned short term or "immediate" memory. On a number of occasions Sonnabend wrote that there is only experience and its decay, by which he meant to suggest that what we typically call short term memory is, in fact, our experiencing the decay of an experience.

The Sonnabend Model of Obliscience

Sonnabend believed that this phenomenon of true memory was our only connection to the past, if only the immediate past, and, as a result, he became obsessed with understanding the mechanisms of true memory by which experience decays. In an effort to illustrate his understanding of this process, Sonnabend, over the next several years, constructed an elaborate Model of Obliscence (or model of forgetting) which, in its simplest form, can be seen as the intersection of a plane and cone.

As with many pieces in this exhibition, it's practically impossible to find out whether Geoffrey Sonnabend even ever existed, but then again that's part of it all. As Herzog puts it: "Inventions [in every sense of the word] have a deeper reach, a deeper stratum of truth quite often than we'd like to admit. And that's the beauty of the museum here."

Many more photos here, and an interview with David Wilson.

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 4:47 PM)