As the embattled government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to be trying to limit Internet access and communications in Iran, new kinds of social media are challenging those traditional levers of state media control and allowing Iranians to find novel ways around the restrictions.

Iranians are blogging, posting to Facebook and, most visibly, coordinating their protests on Twitter, the messaging service. Their activity has increased, not decreased, since the presidential elections on Friday and ensuing attempts by the government to restrict or censor their online communications.

On Twitter, reports and links to photos from a peaceful mass march through Tehran on Monday, along with accounts of street fighting and casualties around the country, have become the most popular topic on the service worldwide, according to Twitter’s published statistics.

A couple of Twitter feeds have become virtual media offices for the supporters of the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi. One feed, mousavi1388, (1388 is the year in the Persian calendar) is filled with news of protests and exhortations to keep up the fight, in Persian and English. It has more than 7,000 followers.

Mr. Moussavi’s fan group on Facebook has swelled to over 50,000 members, a significant increase since election day.

Labeling such seemingly spontaneous antigovernment demonstrations a “Twitter Revolution” has already become something of a cliché. That title was already given to the protests in Moldova in April.

But Twitter is aware of the power of its service. Acknowledging its role on the global stage, the San Francisco-based company said Monday that it was delaying a planned shutdown for maintenance for a day, citing “the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran.”

Twitter users are posting messages, known as tweets, with the term #IranElection, which allows users to search for all tweets on the subject. On Monday evening, Twitter was registering about 30 new posts a minute with that tag.

One read, “We have no national press coverage in Iran, everyone should help spread Moussavi’s message. One Person = One Broadcaster. #IranElection.”

The Twitter feed StopAhmadi calls itself the “Dedicated Twitter account for Moussavi supporters” and has more than 6,000 followers. It too sends visitors to the Flickr feed from the rally.

The feed Persiankiwi, which has more than 15,000 followers, sends users to a page in Persian that is hosted by Google and, in its only English text, says, “Due to widespread filters in Iran, please view this site to receive the latest news, letters and communications from Mir Hussein Moussavi.”

Some Twitter users were also going on the offensive. On Monday morning, an antigovernment activist using the Twitter account “DDOSIran” asked supporters to visit a Web site to participate in an online attack to try to crash government Web sites by overwhelming them with traffic.

By Monday afternoon, many of those sites were not accessible, though it was not clear if the attack was responsible — and the Twitter account behind the attack had been removed. A Twitter spokeswoman said the company had no connection to the deletion of the account.

The crackdown on communications began on election day, when text-messaging services were shut down in what opposition supporters said was an attempt to block one of their most important organizing tools. Over the weekend, cellphone transmissions and access to Facebook and some other Web sites were also blocked.

Iranians continued to report on Monday that they could not send text messages.

But it appears they are finding ways around Big Brother.

Many Twitter users have been sharing ways to evade government snooping, such as programming their Web browsers to contact a proxy — or an Internet server that relays their connection through another country.

Austin Heap, a 25 year old IT consultant in San Francisco, is running his own private proxies to help Iranians, and advertising them on Twitter. He said on Monday that his servers were providing the Internet connections for about 750 Iranians at any one moment.

“I think that cyber activism can be a way to empower people living under less than democratic governments around the world,” he said.

Global Internet Freedom Consortium, an Internet proxy service with ties to the banned Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, offers downloadable software to help evade censorship. It said its traffic from Iran had tripled in the last week.

Shiyu Zhou, founder of the organization, has no idea how links to the software spread within Iran. “In China we have sent mass e-mails, but nothing like in Iran,” he said. “The Iranian people actually found out by themselves and have passed this on by word of mouth.”

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School who is an expert on the Internet, said that Twitter was particularly resilient to censorship because it had so many ways to for its posts to originate — from a phone, a Web browser or specialized applications — and so many outlets for those posts to appear.

As each new home for this material becomes a new target for censorship, he said, a repressive system faces a game of whack-a-mole in blocking Internet address after Internet address carrying the subversive material.

“It is easy for Twitter feeds to be echoed everywhere else in the world,” he said. “The qualities that make Twitter seem and inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful.”


Source:http://www.nytimes.com

PARIS — The Universal Music Group and Virgin Media said on Monday that they had reached a deal that would offer consumers unlimited downloads as part of a partnership that steps up antipiracy enforcement.

Universal, the largest recording company in the world, said it would offer its entire catalog — which contains works by artists like Amy Winehouse and U2 — to customers of Virgin Media for a monthly subscription.

The music will be free from copy protection, a feature that distinguishes the service from most existing subscription offerings. The cost of the service, which will probably start by the end of the year, was not disclosed.

In return, Virgin Media, the British cable television and broadband provider, agreed to take steps to reduce piracy on its network, something that other broadband providers have resisted.

The measures could include temporary suspensions of offenders’ Internet connections, the company said.

For the recording industry, developing new digital business models is essential because pirated tracks account for 95 percent of online music, according to industry estimates.

The announcement pre-empts by a day the expected publication of the British government’s plan for the digital economy, including antipiracy proposals.

Britain wants copyright owners and Internet service providers to cooperate in the fight against piracy, and it welcomed the agreement between Virgin and Universal.

“Government has a role in creating the right legal and regulatory framework for rights and copyright,” said Stephen Carter, the British communications, technology and broadcast minister, in a statement. “However, the market will flourish through innovative commercial agreements between companies, and agreements such as this will help significantly in reducing any demand for piracy.”

Analysts said Virgin, which has more than seven million broadband customers, might have been willing to yield on copyright enforcement because it also produces and sells content via its cable television system, unlike many broadband providers, which simply serve as a conduit for content.

“This is a really high-stakes game,” said Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Forrester Research. “Universal and Virgin have come to the table with all they can offer.”

The entrepreneur Richard Branson owns a 6.5 percent stake in Virgin, whose shares are traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

Virgin said it was talking to the other three major music companies — Sony Music Entertainment, EMI and Warner Music Group — in an effort to include them in the new service.


Source:http://www.nytimes.com

BEIJING — A designer of censorship software that the Chinese government requires to be preinstalled on computers sold in China has been ordered to fix potential security breaches in the software, the newspaper China Daily reported Monday. The report was an indication that the government still supports use of the software despite heated debate over it.

The software, called Green Dam-Youth Escort, has come under attack by many computer users in China for both political and technical reasons. Critics say that although the Chinese government insists that the software will be used only to block access to pornography Web sites, the software’s actual use will be to block any site with content deemed politically objectionable, like the Tibet issue or the 1989 Tiananmen killings.

The government says all computers sold in China must have the software installed by July 1.

Some computer experts who have studied the software said last week that it was so flawed that it could allow hackers to monitor a user’s Internet activity, steal personal data or plant viruses. One expert, J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan, has posted on the Internet a report on Green Dam’s vulnerabilities.

Rather than agreeing to scrap the software altogether, the Chinese government has responded to the technical criticisms by ordering that the potential security breaches be eliminated.

“The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology told us to make the software safer as soon as a series of security vulnerabilities were found,” Zhang Chenmin, the general manager of Jinhui Computer System Engineering, which helped design the software, told China Daily.

Mr. Zhang admitted that the software had systemic flaws that would allow hackers to attack computers that used the program, “just like any other software of this type.”

Mr. Halderman said in an interview last week that it had only taken a few hours for him and his students to infiltrate a computer loaded with Green Dam and force it to crash. A skilled hacker could take over the computer to mine personal data or hitch it to other infected machines in a malevolent network known as a botnet, he added.

Debate about the software exploded on the Internet last week as Chinese Internet users increasingly learned about the software requirement issued by the ministry. China Daily reported Monday that surveys done by four of China’s most popular Web portals showed that four in five Internet users would not use the software or would have it uninstalled.

Early reports had indicated that the government might simply require Green Dam to be included on a CD packaged with new computers, so users would have the option to install it. But it became apparent last week that the government was insisting that all computer makers preinstall the software by July 1. Foreign computer makers learned of the directive just three weeks ago and have been asking the Chinese government to reconsider the rules.

Meanwhile, Solid Oak Software, a company based in Santa Barbara, Calif., has accused the designers of Green Dam of stealing programming code from software called Cybersitter that was developed by Solid Oak. Cybersitter is designed to block Web sites deemed to be pornographic, violent or offensive. Solid Oak says that some of the “blacklist” files used by Green Dam were originally developed for Cybersitter.

“I cannot deny that the two filters’ databases of blacklisted URL addresses might share similarities,” Mr. Zhang said in China Daily. “After all, they are all well-known international pornographic Web sites that all porn filters are meant to block. But we didn’t steal their programming code.”


Source:http://www.nytimes.com

Net neutrality is a phrase that means a lot of things to a lot of people. But here’s one important policy question that net neutrality rules may clarify: Can an Internet provider, which may also offer cable television service, deliberately slow down connections to Internet video sources, or ask the video companies to pay to have their programming carried?

That issue, bubbling under the surface in the United States, has emerged in Britain, where BT cut the transmission speed for some online video from 8 megabits per second to less than 1 megabit per second from 5 p.m. to midnight, according to an article in The Financial Times.

“We can’t give the content providers a completely free ride and continue to give customers the [service] they want at the price they expect,” John Petter, managing director of BT Retail’s consumer business, told the newspaper.

Internet television is a hot topic in Britain in part because the BBC has made a great deal of its programming available on its iPlayer service. Since the business model of the BBC is to collect taxes from British subjects, it doesn’t have the revenue concerns that face networks in the United States.

BT’s stated reason for the speed cut is the increasing cost of carrying online video. The cost landscape in Britain is a bit different than in the United States because regulations force a separation between the part of BT that owns the phone lines that reach to people’s homes and a separate unit that offers voice, data and video services to consumers. (The reason is that other companies can buy access to BT’s wires to offer consumers their own communications services.)

Still, the underlying economics, as I wrote about in the context of Time Warner’s plan to increase fees on heavy users, mean that expanding a network to handle lots of video is a real but unexceptional cost for an Internet provider.

There are two other motives that may well be at play: making more money and undercutting competition. Big Internet providers have long grumbled about providing “free” access to big sites.

Since it was started, the Internet has been built on a “meet in the middle” economic model. If the customer of my I.S.P. is using a Web site run by the customer of your I.S.P., we both pay to bring the traffic to someplace where our networks are connected. Each I.S.P. covers its costs and hopes to profit by charging its own customers.

BT argues that this arrangement is out of whack, and that providers of high-bandwidth video services should pay more for delivery of their content. There’s no immutable law of nature that says the Internet will always work the way it does now, but BT is implicitly proposing a rather radical change.

As for competition, BT offers BT Vision, video programs by way of a set-top box connected to its broadband service. The service had difficulty competing with BSkyB, the satellite broadcaster that dominates TV in Britain. Indeed, Dan Marks, the chief executive of BT Vision, recently resigned. When it was introduced in 2006, the service was projected to have three million subscribers by the end of 2010; it now has less than 500,000 subscribers.

How this will play out depends on competitors and regulators. The Independent followed up on The Financial Times report, saying that other Internet providers did plan to ask the BBC and other video providers for payment, but it did not quote them by name. Nonetheless, two of the three other large Internet providers also have significant video businesses to protect: Virgin Media is the largest cable company in the country, and BSkyB offers Internet service (reselling service over BT’s wires). So they may well be rooting on BT’s war with the BBC.

So far, Ofcom, the British telecom regulator, has been supportive of BT’s move and told The Independent it saw no reason to intervene in the market right now.

So far, the threat to cable TV in the United States from Internet video has been more theoretical than real. There is no sign yet, other than some anecdotal news reports and comments from early-adopter Bits readers, that many people are abandoning cable. But I’m sure the pressure will grow, and a cable or phone company may well find itself tempted to cut speeds or impose tolls on Hulu, YouTube and the rest.

Setting clear rules of the road for this issue could be a rather useful result of the net neutrality debate that President Obama has promised.


Source:http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com

As I’ve mentioned before, I have a somewhat generic Gmail address that people often accidentally type into Web forms. That’s how I found myself signed up for an account at MyMudSpace.com, the Web’s leading social network for people who like driving trucks through mud, also known as “mudding.” And that’s how I ended up getting a curious e-mail last week, one that no Web start-up should ever find itself in the position of having to send out. It was from Simon Maziarz of Jupiter, Fla., who runs MyMudSpace, and it is best appreciated in full:

From: MyMudspace.com
Date: Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 10:25 AM
Subject: URGENT NEWS

Dear Mymudspace friends, members, and new members,

As some of you may already know, there has been some major changes within the ranks of the Mymudspace.com management.

Effective 6-01-2009 Mr. John Jackson ( JohnF350 ), formally a partial owner of Mymudspace, will no longer share the responsibilities, or day to day functions of the business. After careful consideration and numerous attempts to correct the problems which Mr. Jackson helped to create, it has been found to be in the ” BEST INTEREST” of Mymudspace.com, to part ways and TERMINATE Mr. Jackson’s relationship to the website. Mr. Jackson has NO further direct involvement with Mymudspace.com, nor will he have any FUTURE involvement.

If you receive anything from Mr. Jackson via e-mail, be it known that Mymudspace does not share or support any of the opinions and/or implications in the content which he distributes. We also do not support any of his future actions or websites. Many of you may have foreseen this action coming, and its nothing new … but for those members who didn’t and have forged a friendship with Mr. Jackson, please understand, this is and was never a personal matter. This was a business decision which will better the website and keep Mymudspace moving forward in the years to come.

Friends, Mymudspace.com was born to connect the mud bogging community together. To allow people to forge friendships with other people of the same interests, and to show many folks what the world of mudding is really about. This is what Mymudspace is, and what we will continue to strive for, each and every time you log on to the site.

There’s a HUGE future for Mymudspace and its members. There will be many new and exciting contests coming up for Mymudspace. We at Mymudspace.com invite you to share the experiences with us!

If you have any questions, or concerns, please feel free to contact us.

Respectfully,

Simon and the Mymudspace.com staff

But wait, there’s more. Mr. Jackson gave his side of the story later in the day in a message he sent to members of We4×4.com, “an online social network designed for 4×4 enthusiasts of all varieties.” (This is another site I never actually joined. I don’t own a truck. Or a car.)

From: WE4X4.COM
Date: Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 7:46 PM
Subject: WE4X4.COM PLEASE READ

Hello,

This is John from WE4X4.COM

There has been a lot of confusion between this site and MyMudspace.com

I used to own half of MyMudspace.com along with Simon. We had many differences and finally came to a conclusion to solve the problem. I would start my own site and run it alone, and I would sell my 50% of MyMudspace so that he could run it.

My purpose for WE4X4.COM is to provide a serious, drama-free site for ANYTHING 4X4, not just mudding.

I certainly do not hate Simon, nor will try to feed into the drama that he is trying to cause, that is why I sold. I could no longer deal with the drama and the stress of it all. My purpose is clear,

To provide a fun place for 4×4 enthusiasts to meet and interact
To help local clubs, businesses, charities, and events
We are a family-oriented site. We even pass out balloons at our family events (See our pictures from Truck & Tractor Nationals).

If you have met me, or talk to anyone that has, you would know the real person that I am. If you have any questions, please email me at johnj@we4×4.com or contact me on my profile as “johnf350″

Thanks for reading,

John Jackson
WE4X4.COM

So what were the unspecified problems that Mr. Maziarz cited as the reason for the split? And why did he feel the need to warn members of MyMudSpace that they might be hearing from Mr. Jackson?

Mr. Maziarz said by phone that he needed to talk to his lawyer, then did not respond to e-mail messages seeking elaboration. But some Web searching indicates that Mr. Jackson started We4×4 on the side a few months back, and then on June 1 posted an ad seeking a freelance programmer to help him copy the records from the MyMudSpace member database to We4×4, giving his new site an instant membership boost and a healthy mailing list.

When asked via e-mail about his posting, which shows that he picked a programmer in India who offered to do the job for $20, Mr. Jackson quickly password-protected the page (the Google cache is here). And when asked if this transfer of member information might be a violation of MyMudSpace’s privacy policy, he said: “MyMudspace doesn’t have a privacy policy, or at least we didn’t before I sold.” (Actually there’s a boilerplate policy here.)

Who says the Web’s Wild West days are over?

Source:http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com

WASHINGTON — Millions of households will lose television reception next week when about 1,000 broadcasters around the nation shut off their analog signals and complete their conversion to digital programming, federal officials say

The government has spent more than $2 billion to ease the transition to digital television, and in the last few months has cut in half the number of households that are unprepared for the final conversion on June 12. But the latest survey by the Nielsen Company indicates that as of the end of May, more than 10 percent of the 114 million households that have television sets are either completely or partly unprepared.

Michael J. Copps, the acting head of the Federal Communications Commission, said that the people most likely to lose reception are society’s most vulnerable — lower-income families, the elderly, the handicapped and homes where little or no English is spoken. The transition will also hit inner-city and rural areas hardest, he said.

“We are much better prepared than we were in February, when the original transition was to have occurred, but there will nonetheless be significant disruptions,” Mr. Copps said in an interview. “In the past five months we’ve tried to accomplish what should have been done over the last four years.”

More than three million homes that do not subscribe to cable or satellite services are totally unprepared for the transition and will lose their reception, according to Nielsen. Another nine million homes that subscribe to cable or satellite services but that have spare television sets — typically in bedrooms and kitchens — that are not connected to any service are also expected to lose reception. The conversion does not affect cable or satellite distribution.

And officials say that millions more who thought they were prepared are likely to experience technical problems like poor reception or improperly connected antennas. Their problems arise because the way the digital signal travels is different from analog and can be more affected by topography, weather or even heavy auto traffic.

A list of 49 particularly vulnerable markets includes New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami, Boston and Dallas-Fort Worth. Officials said Puerto Rico is also among the most susceptible to problems, as it has the highest rate of households that receive their television signals over the air.

In the New York broadcasting market, 92,000 homes are completely unready for the transition and another 348,000 are partly unready, according to Nielsen. That represents almost 6 percent of households in the region.

Early this year, the administration persuaded Congress to postpone completion of the transition to June, from February, and to provide another $650 million, mostly for coupons for converter boxes, on top of the $1.5 billion that had already been spent by the Bush administration.

The Obama administration has enlisted dozens of groups, including AmeriCorps, the national volunteer organization, civil rights groups and even firefighters to help people install the converter boxes and antennas. The program is the most ambitious technology transition effort since the Clinton administration’s enormous Y2K program, which was set up to avert major software problems caused by the inability of computers to process data beginning on Jan. 1, 2000.

Concerned about a possible political reaction, President Obama issued a statement on Thursday urging consumers to take steps so they do not lose television reception. “We have worked hand in hand with state and local officials, broadcasters and community groups to educate and assist millions of Americans with the transition,” Mr. Obama said.

“I want to be clear: there will not be another delay,” the statement added.

Other officials said that the high number of households reflected the inclination of Americans to put things off.

“There are so many people who are always waiting until the last minute, whether it is college students doing term papers, or people filing taxes, or people like me who wait until Christmas Eve to do their shopping,” said the commerce secretary, Gary F. Locke, in an interview on Friday.

While applauding the government efforts, he said he was frustrated that the early public service announcements did not provide specific enough information about the problem.
“Earlier on we could have more crisply and clearly indicated who was affected by the switch,” he said. “I’ve been critical of the public service announcements that just say, ‘The switch is coming’ or ‘Are you ready?’ ”

He added: “Too many people don’t know the difference between digital and analog. I didn’t even know myself until a few months ago when my brother-in-law explained it to me.”

Analog technology transmits a video signal through an electronic impulse. Digital technology breaks the signal into 1’s and 0’s, allowing far more data to be transmitted through a far smaller amount of broadcast spectrum.

The transition has already been a huge windfall to television and equipment makers and retailers, as millions of consumers have had to buy digital television sets or converter boxes and special antennas for their old sets.

Shawn G. DuBravac, chief economist at the Consumer Electronics Association, said that sales of digital television sets were up 32 percent this year over the comparable period in 2008, even in the midst of a deep recession. Other officials at the association said the spike in sales was attributable to many factors, including declining prices and availability of more programs in digital, as well as the mandatory transition.

But consumer experts said that many households were buying more expensive television sets and equipment than they needed to continue to receive television signals. Polls by Consumer Reports found that many people were aware of the transition but were confused about how to navigate it, said Joel Kelsey, a policy analyst at Consumers Union.

Bracing for a wave of complaints, the Federal Communications Commission is preparing to fully staff a $40 million call center on Friday and through the weekend. The government will also continue to supply $40 coupons to households toward the purchase of converter boxes.

Officials advised consumers to rescan the channels of their television sets after the conversion was completed on Friday to make sure they were pulling in all the correct signals.

The conversion is the final step in a long-running plan for more efficient use of the broadcast spectrum. The plan took spectrum licenses from broadcasters, replacing them with other frequencies. It will reallocate some of the broadcasters’ former spectrum to public safety providers. Other frequencies were sold for billions of dollars, primarily to the large wireless telephone companies, whose demand for spectrum has risen with the proliferation of hand-held devices that can surf the Internet and send and receive e-mail.

Consumers seeking assistance on how to upgrade their television sets or on the availability of digital stations in their communities can go to www.dtv.gov or call the government hot line on the transition at 1-888-CALLFCC (1-888-225-5322).


Source:http://www.nytimes.com