VIDEO HUB blog

Last night we went to a screening of "Blogumentary", by Chuck Olsen. Shot between the years of 2002 to 2004, it provides a great overview of the blogosphere, its impact on society and the colorful people who inhibit this world.

Afew things that I really stayed with me as I walked home were the words "We are the media" which were emblazoned into my brained (helped by the large red letters and unconventional font use). We are taking back the power. I think this raises an issue that keeps coming up over and over again in these gatherings. If 'we' are the media...who is 'we' The blogosphere seem to be dominated by a particular segment of society. Yes we are hearing more voices, but whose voice is it that we are really hearing? If you look at the list of people interviewed for the film, you will get a sense of what I mean...or simply try walking into a gathering of these 'bloggers' and look around.

Posted by Tina Gongsakdi at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The most emailed article on todays online version of the New York Times is called "Web Surfing in Public Places is a Way to Court Trouble." Although geared at business travelers who are often talking about business or conducting it in very public spaces such as airport gates and business centers at hotels, there are relevant tips for human rights workers and projects like the Video Hub which deal with sensitive material.

Relevant tips include: Being aware of how secure a network is that you might be working on; not giving out sensitive information over non secure networks (including credit card information but also information in documents that are un-encrypted) ;using encrypting software (again the article is referring mostly to business correspondence or financial information- but this is certainly part of the dicussion we've been having at WITNESS with respect to those who might upload video content to the Video Hub from places where governments might be monitoring their activity and where their safety and security may be jeapordized.)

Posted by Matisse Bustos at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Human Rights Watch recently published a report on Internet Censorship in China. The report gives details about how corporations like Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, and Skype are cooperating with the Chinese government censorship efforts. It also gives some good background on the "Great Firewall of China," which refers to the way in which the Chinese government controls the movement of information on the internet both going in and coming out of the country.

Since we should expect the Hub to be blocked in China, we should probably read up on the subject.

Recommendations from HRW:

To activists, human rights groups, nongovernmental organizations, charitable foundations, and other groups concerned with promoting global freedom of speech online

* Work in concert with socially responsible businesses to develop technologies that will maximize privacy, ensure anonymity, and enable Internet users around the globe to circumvent Internet censorship, filtering, and blocking.
* Conduct independent research and documentation of the ways in which companies are or are not complying with legislation and/or codes of conduct.
* Provide clearing houses of information through which users can better inform themselves about the ways in which the products and services they use may be limiting their universally recognized right to free speech and privacy.

Link to the full HRW report.
Link to a PDF of the HRW report.

The Internet Censorship Explorer (ICE) gives a good summary as well additional information and analysis:

Human Rights Watch has released a report on Internet censorship. It particularly focuses on the role U.S. corporations in censorsing their products in order to enter the Chinese market. The report’s title, “Race to the Bottom”, sums up the situation quite well.

Read the full ICE article here.

Posted by Bryan Nunez at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Another good post from unmediated originally from techdirt:

China has a long history of being a bureaucratic society -- and it seems they're really learned how to apply that bureaucracy to the internet. They have tens of thousands of people monitoring the internet, for example. However, they're really going to ridiculous extremes in trying to slow down the production of non-approved content. A year ago, we mentioned that they wanted every website to register with the government. Earlier this year, they wanted everyone who ran an email server to register as well. The latest, then, really isn't too surprising. With the rapid rise in popularity of online video sites, the Chinese government is now planning to require every user-created video to first be "approved" before it can be posted online. Considering the pace at which people add videos to sites like YouTube and Google Video, this sounds like a nearly impossible task if you actually want people to generate content. Of course, that's the point. They don't want people to generate their own content, because they might produce content the government doesn't like.

Posted by Bryan Nunez at 05:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Thanks again to the folks at unmediated for pointing out this review from lightreading comparing video sharing sites, something I've been meaning to do for a long time.

Here are the results:

1) Blip.tv
2) VideoEgg
3) Dailymotion
4) YouTube
5) Veoh
6) Google Video
7) Grouper
8) Jumpcut
9) AOL
10) Eyespot

Posted by Bryan Nunez at 06:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a follow up to my last post about imprisoned video blogger, Josh Wolf.

CNET's interview with Josh Wolf, a video blogger who is Federal prison for refusing to hand over footage he shot during a G8 protest held San Francisco in July 2005. An SFPD police car was damaged during the protest and because the SFPD receives Federal Anti-Terrorism funding, the case is being considered in Federal rather than California State court, thus bypassing the California Shield law which protect journalist from naming their sources.

In the interview, Wolf talks about being careful about what footage he showed on his video blog. I think in this sense, it bears some similarities to what we are asking of participants in the Video Hub.

From the interview:

When I went in and began documenting this movement, I gave my word to numerous people that I would only publish what my discretion allowed and beyond that would not turn over additional material. So they are sources in a different sort of way than the Judith Miller case, but there still is an element of protecting sources and also protecting people's right to privacy and freedoms of association.

Posted by Bryan Nunez at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There was an interesting article in today's New York Times about how important cellphones are in Iraq, not just for communication, but as a tool for self expression. Iraqis use their cellphones to pass around viral videos that poke fun at the Iraqi government, the US military, and energy shortages among other things.

Here's how cellphones are being used in a Human Rights context:

For human rights workers in Iraq, cellphones play a darker role. Omar al-Jabouri, who heads the human rights office for the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party, said he often received pictures of men tortured or killed by death squads, many of them taken with the cellphones of witnesses or the victims’ relatives. At bombings, Iraqis are often seen recording the carnage in pictures or short videos.

Cellphone technology seems to be relatively affordable:

The prices the phones command are rather high for Iraq, of course. But with a booming aftermarket in cellphones, people can sell their old ones for nearly the original price and move up to a fancier model. Service is relatively cheap, with most people relying on $10 and $20 prepaid cards rather than the more expensive monthly plans.

Posted by Bryan Nunez at 02:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today our friends at unmediated posted a story about Josh Wolf, a video blogger who shot some footage of the G8 protests in San Francisco last year which he posted to his blog.

Now that footage is being subpoenaed by the Federal Government, and since Wolf has refused to turn over the tapes he was placed into Federal Custody on August 3rd.

This situatation is somewhat troubling since some of the footage we expect people to submit to the Video Hub may contain video that might be of interest to governments. The Federal Government has requested all the footage that hasn't been made public, presumably in order to identify individuals from the protests.

The post from unmediated is here.

Here is a link to the story in Time.com.

Posted by Bryan Nunez at 02:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

JD Lasica from OurMedia had an interesting post about a "spoof" of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth. Turns out that Republican PR firms are "users" too.

Is this something we should expect on the Video Hub as well?

Posted by Bryan Nunez at 01:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was thinking, maybe a good way to see what might happen w/ the Video Hub is to check out what's going on on existing sites, like YouTube and Google Video. Doing a quick search on human rights, came up with the following links.

Salvor at YouTube Salvor blogs about sex worker exploitation in Spain.
Video 1
Video 2

alekhwa has video about torture and poverty Bahrain.

Video blog by Andy Carvin about Egyptian blogger Alaa Ahmed Seif Al-Islam. (It's interesting to note that although Andy is well known as a video blogger and human rights advocate, this particular video has only been viewed 40 times on YouTube. I assume most people interested in Alaa watched the video on Andy's own site.)

Video Hub: Already Here?

Here's a link to "Darfur Destroyed" on buzznet.com which shows the sort of thing that will hopefully be happening on the Video Hub.

Posted by Bryan Nunez at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week, Bryan and I had a call with Erik Sundelof, a fellow of the Reuters Digital Vision Program at Stanford University in California. Erik had set up a test page for WITNESS on his inTheFieldOnline.net site. After a short registration process,users can send images, video and text straight from a cell phone. It was quite impressive although it was still a test site. Thefact that certain parts of the interface were not in English made things a tad confusing for non-swedish speaking folks. Erik had to cut the call short as "CNN" was on the line.

Anyways, here's an article about Erik's other project. Presumably this is what CNN was calling about....

Cell phones: A new tool in the war-zone blogosphere
Empowering technology also raises safety, credibility issues
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/08/01/newblogs/index.html

Although the immediacy of being able to send media through a cellphone is extremely attractive, it is currently one of the least secure ways to send information. Especially if you are registered in a system that stores your number. A group of ITP students (Freeformed.org) who are also working on a mobile uplaod project had the interesting idea of using a 'phone relay'. If you want to remain anonymous, you send your media to a relay which would then resend it without storing any of your data. Now if we can set up local relays...that would solve the long distance calls. Apparently it cost Bryan 30$ to send a video from his phone....

As for our test page. If any of you folks are travelling, we would love to get some test results from people abroad. Check out our test page at: http://www.inthefieldonline.net/witness/

http://www.inthefieldonline.net/witness/

Posted by Tina Gongsakdi at 04:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Looking around to see what sort of things exist to help keep mobile uploading of video secure, I ran across this article from OhGizmo about a GSM phone that uses 1024 bit Diffie-Helman encryption. I don't know anything about encryption protocol, but it sure sounds impressive. While this phone doesn't protect the user's identity it is a step in the right direction as it protects data from being intercepted during transmission.

Here's a phone from Italy that attempts to hide the caller's identity through a combination of anonymous sim cards and changing the phones unique ID number (IMEI) each time a new sim card is used.

Posted by Bryan Nunez at 01:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)