VIDEO HUB blog

Our good friend Ethan has done it again, drawing the connection between a recent viral meme, anti-censorship, and human rights in an article on World Changing.

A 16 digit number used as a key to decrypt HD-DVDs became the center of an online revolt against internet censorship yesterday, when it was posted on several blogs, and attempts to stop its proliferation only led to increased popularity.

My interest in the situation has less to do with DVD hacking and more to do with the question of how sensitive information can spread on the Internet. The spread of the number is something of a perfect storm. Many of the techno-libertarians who populate sites like Digg have no great sympathy for digital rights management or the DMCA. The clandestine information - a 16 digit number - is really small, and can be spread through numerous different methods. (As cryptographers have observed, it’s much easier to stop the spread of the video files, which are gigabytes in size, that targeting less that a kilobyte of information…)

Guess video will still be a problem for the foreseeable future.

Posted by Bryan Nunez at 05:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We received and email from our friend, Charles of blip.tv alerting us to a situation in Mexico. A person working with Alive in Mexico (the same folks who started Alive in Baghdad) was injured while covering demonstrations. We've tried to put them in touch with some of our contacts, but they could use some help putting together some guidelines on safety measures about how they can more safely do their work. If you have any suggestions, let them know.

[Editor’s note: One of our correspondents, Yazmín Nuñez was injured by police in Mexico City on Tuesday, the 27th of March, while covering a demonstration concerning the ISSSTE (Instituto al Servico de la Seguridad Social de los Trabajadores del Estado) for more information read about the demonstrations here.. English is coming as soon as possible, if you would like to offer translation skills, please be in touch.]

To the general public:
On March 27, 2007, the reporter and camerawoman Yazmin Nuñez H. was beaten by the riot police of the Mexico City police department as she was covering the demonstration against changes in the Social Security law. Lacerations on her waist, neck, left ear and other parts of her body were caused by the kicks and blows of uniformed police. They show a total lack of respect for the journalism practiced by our compañera and for the news media that she serves as a correspondent, including aliveinmexico.org internet television for the United States, the independent newspaper Machetearte, and the media coop libertasanticorpTV.

After the attack, other reporters and photographers came to her rescue and were able to pull her out of the police encirclement, where her press credentials and 800 pesos were taken from her.

Our work is based on freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of thought, and the right of the society to communicate and stay informed. We demand respect for our work as journalists and are hereby publishing this denunciation to register our opposition to the dreadful treatment of the press and innocent citizens. We cannot allow violence against reporters to be a constant, appalling custom in the country.

Posted by Bryan Nunez at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I ran across this story about "crowdhacking" - ways in which people try to game systems like eBay, Digg, and de.lico.us to promote stories, or gain higher feedback ratings. According to the article, these systems are all susceptible to manipulation, which has implications to the Hub once these tactics become more widespread. We should definitely keep an eye on this trend.

Posted by Bryan Nunez at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I recently reconnected with Dan McQuillan, the web manager for Amnesty International. We were both on a panel on human rights at the NetSquared conference last year. Anyway, Dan has a blog called, internetartizans that has a whole bunch of cool stuff human rights and internet technology. It's definitely worth checking out.

This post is particularly interesting since he covers a few ways in which people at existing social networking sites like MySpace, and Facebook are protecting themselves from search engine tracking, "adveillance" to use his term.

Track me not is a Firefox extension that obfuscates your search queries to make it harder for Google or Yahoo to profile you, but I'm totally gonna use Fake Your Space (it appears to be down), which "allows unpopular people on MySpace, Facebook and Consumating to buy hot friends. For just $.99 per month, you can buy a good-looking friend who will leave 2 comments on your profile every week".

As someone with no friends on any of the aforementioned sites, $.99 a month sounds very reasonable for even average looking friends.

Posted by Bryan Nunez at 05:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From Slashdot.

FM Reader writes
"After a controversial mock-up video reportedly submitted by a Greek member about Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, Turkish courts ordered the national ISPs to ban the online video service, YouTube. YouTube hostnames are currently redirected at the DNS level to a page that announces the court order."

What interesting about this? One offensive video has resulted in the Turkish government banning YouTube from the entire country.

Posted by Bryan Nunez at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you have been following the developments of the Hub (no longer Video Hub) over the past months, you will know that safety and security of users and the people portrayed in the media is a very big concern of ours. It is one of the main reasons if not THE reason why we did not choose to simply build our Hub on YouTube or similar platforms.

HRW's 2007 World Report has a great essay on internet censorship and surveillance Technology as a Restraint: Internet Censorship and Surveillance.

Not only do we have to be concerned about our site being blocked, but increased surveillance and data collection make maintaining a user's identity even more critical.

Posted by Tina Gongsakdi at 04:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Happy New Year. It's been awhile since the last entry, but better late than never I guess.

A lot has happened in the last year with user generated content culminating with Time Magazine's Person of the Year being "You." In particular, video from camera phones has gotten a lot of press attention with the notable examples of a student at UCLA being tasered by campus security and the execution of Saddam Hussein.

This article from ABC News is about how video surveillance cameras were used to capture a serial killer in Philadelphia. Watching footage from around 50 surveillance cameras around the city, police were able to piece together the direction and eventual location of the killer.

There is an interesting debate happening on Slashdot regarding the pros and cons of the panopticon, primarily concerns over privacy, transparency, and accountability - who controls the camera. Given these two trends - widespread use of cellphone video and the increasing sophistication of ubiquitous surveillance cameras - I think the "Participatory Panopticon" becomes even more important.

Posted by Bryan Nunez at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Released just this Dec 1st, psiphon is a human rights software project developed by the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies that allows citizens in uncensored countries to provide unfettered access to the Net through their home computers to friends and family members who live behind firewalls of states that censor.

If you are in a censored country, you'll need to access a psiphon node in an unrestricted country. Check out the tutorial for how to get started. Seems like the bottleneck will be getting access to an unrestricted node. Right now, you have to do it through the psiphon forum and personal message. The forum seems to be filled with people in China wanting access to wikipedia.

Posted by Tina Gongsakdi at 11:22 AM | 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)

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)