Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
More #TOR and #iranelection
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/23/2009 - 19:32Well, it was bound to happen. It appears as if someone was using Bittorrent over TOR to copy copyrighted material through my gateway. Yesterday afternoon, I received two emails from Slicehost. They both started:
We have received a notice pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) from Bay TSP regarding certain content appearing at the above-referenced website (the “Website”). This company alleges that material posted on your company’s website infringes on their copyright. Please remove the content claimed to be infringing from the Website and confirm to me in writing that you have done so by 8:00 A.M. Central Time, Thursday, June 25, 2009. If the allegedly infringing content is not removed and/or I have not received your written confirmation by that time, Rackspace will suspend network access to the server(s) hosting the Website.
Please note that you may provide a counter notification, stating that the posted material is not infringing the alleged copyright, in accordance with the provisions of 17 U.S.C. §512(g)(3) to Rackspace’s designated agent:
I responded using the Response template for Tor relay maintainer to ISP that was written by the Electronic Freedom Foundation. The gist of the response is that there is no infringing material posted on the website, and it just appears that way because of the way TOR works as a conduit.
Slicehost responded:
Unfortunately, as you have stated your intention to take no action over this incident we have had no choice but to suspend your account. Please do note that running a TOR is not against our ToS, however, seeding and sharing copyright material is.
Unfortunately, I never received that email until after my account had been suspended. I contacted support and they re-sent the email. I responded pointing out that I am not seeding or sharing copyright material, so there is no action, other than shutting down TOR that I can take.
Slicehost responded:
I reactivated your account for the time being. In other cases similar to yours, we have had customers block the ports being abused through the torrent service. We need some way of ensuring that copy written material is not being served from your slice. Regardless of where the content is hosted, Bay TSP and Warner Bros. were able to download their material through your IP address. You need to find a way of blocking these from happening again. Please update this ticket with your plan of action. I need to know that this issue has been resolved and we will receive no further complaints.
Based on this, I followed the advice of Chris Brunner on Why You Shouldn’t Run BitTorrent Over Tor and disabled the most common BitTorrent ports. Ideologically, I’m a little uncomfortable with this. While BitTorrent is often used for illegal copying of music or movies, it can also be used to copy important open source software which could be used in promoting democracy and free speech.
From a practical stand point, if what I have to do is shut down the most common BitTorrent ports to be able to keep TOR up, so be it. In addition, it may allow me to keep TOR active for longer periods without using up too much bandwidth. Yet there is another concern here. While this is likely to significantly limit the chances of someone illegally copying content, as long as you run TOR or any sort of proxy, people will be able to access copyrighted material.
This is why one section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is so important. The EFF letter puts it this way:
The "takedown notice" provisions do not apply when an ISP merely acts as a conduit. Instead, the "conduit" safe harbor of DMCA 512(a) has different and less burdensome requirements, as the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals held in RIAA v. Verizon (see http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/RIAA_v_Verizon/opinion-20031219.pdf) and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed in RIAA v. Charter (see http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/Charter/033802P.pdf).
TOR acts merely as a conduit. In light of this, I believe that Slicehost was incorrect when they suggested that the access of copyrighted material via TOR was a violation of their Terms of Service. However, one of the problems with Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policies is that there is normally no due process or recourse available to clients of a hosting service when a dispute occurs.
In light of this, I will do whatever I can to keep TOR up and running in a manner that is acceptable to those in charge of AUP at Rackspace and Slicehost.
Yet why am I running TOR anyway? Friends have been asking me that, and I thought the best starting place to explain this is to look at recent blog post on the TOR Blog. In Measuring Tor and Iran they note that prior to the disputed election in Iran, there were normally less than 200 TOR clients in the Iranian IP space. Since the election and the ensuing turmoil, this has rapidly climbed to around 1000 TOR clients.
I believe this illustrates why TOR is so important, especially now. Related to this is NedaNet. Regular readers of my blog will already know the story of Neda Soltani, twenty-six year old Iranian woman whose death has caught the attention of the world.
NedaNet’s “mission is to help the Iranian people by setting up networks of proxy severs, anonymizers, and any other appropriate technologies that can enable them to communicate and organize — a network beyond the censorship or control of the Iranian regime.”
I would appreciate thoughts and suggestions from everyone on best ways of helping keep the Internet open in all countries. In particular, if anyone who has run into issues with the TOR and hosting services, especially if it involves BitTorrent, I would love to hear how it has been dealt with in your situations. I have also contacted counsel at the Electronic Freedom Foundation to get any guidance they can provide.
INJA KOJAST INJA IRAN AST SARZAMINE MANO TO
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 06/19/2009 - 20:51
#followfriday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 06/19/2009 - 12:30#iranelection What more can I say? This is the one thing to be following right now. Shout outs to friends in the States who are closely following things in Iran with me, especially @jodmentum
It is also Juneteenth. Shout outs to @raynetoday and @ConnecticutMan1 who are also celebrating Juneteenth today.
Final comments. On Wednesday, there was a great discussion on the #editorchat hashtag on Twitter. @TimOBrienNYT raised an interesting question about the relationship between traditional journalism and Twitter, which I joined in on. Others that joined the discussion included @KatPowers @WpgGirl @lauriemeisel @wmduke @LisaGemini @kbeninato and @saulcarlin It was great to hear from Saul, a Wesleyan alum doing well for himself in DC.
What Do You Get from Social Media? Ice Cream, Strawberries, Concerts and Transparency
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 06/18/2009 - 09:06Plenty of people have written blog posts about why they blog. It might be to make money, to stay in touch with family and friends, to convince other people of certain opinions, or, the writer’s answer, because they must. However, not a lot seems to be written about why people read other people’s blogs. A comment on a blog post yesterday made me stop and think about this a little bit more.
In response to my blog post, Sky of Blue, and Sea of Green – The New Normal #iranelection, Maria from Maria Michelle's Furkids and Animal Rescue commented about how my post had gotten her thinking about how our lives change.
I believe I first came across Maria’s blog through EntreCard. EntreCard is a site where you can list your blog and find other participating blogs. You have a card that you display on your site, and you drop your card on other participating sites. One of the biggest criticisms of EntreCard is that people ‘drop and run’. They find the place to drop their card, and move on without looking closely at the site they’ve visited. I’ll admit that I often just skim a page before moving on.
Looking at the statistics on my site, the average EntreCard visitor spends 38 seconds on my site, and I suspect that is higher than for many people because my site is slow at loading. 95% of them look at the site and move on without looking at anything else and 60% of them are people that have visited my site.
With that, it is tempting to abandon EntreCard if all you are looking for is more (and perhaps better) traffic. Yet my recent blog post has gotten Maria thinking, and her Monday Grump Tests often bring a smile to my face, so I thought I’d explore a little bit more what I get out of what I read in social media.
A friend in a neighboring town last year tweeted about Rich Farm Ice Cream Shop in Oxford, CT which has become a favorite place to get ice cream for our family. It think it was either from him, or from someone that he introduced me to online that I learn that They Might Be Giants was putting on a free concert on the New Haven Green, which I attended with my family.
Then, today, I read someone’s blog post about going strawberry picking. (I apologize for not remembering the blog and providing a link. If you think it was your blog, leave me a comment). It seems like every August we end up talking about how it would have been great to have gone strawberry picking, but we didn’t think about it until after the season was over. Well, at least here in Connecticut, it is peak strawberry picking season, and if we can get a decent day and people are healthy enough, we will visit one of the local strawberry fields.
So, one important theme is getting more closely connected with things going on around us. I like it when social media helps me do that.
Another important theme is getting better information. Hopefully, some of my blog posts, whether they be about local school board meetings, bills being considered at the State Capitol, or developments in Iran will help people be a little better informed, and again, a little more involved. I know that my technology related posts get a lot of traffic and I hope that they help others figure out how to solve some technological problem. I know that other people’s posts about how they solved technical problems has often helped me immensely.
With that, I would like to highlight a few different blog posts and other sites that help share information that I think it is important to help get out. First, I want to point to a blog post on DailyKos. I am much less involved with DailyKos than I used to be for a large variety of reasons, but I think Adam Siegel posts, Michele's Snapping Some Peas captures a wonderful mix of the local action, especially in the gardens, as it relates to the national stage.
Over on the Sunlight Foundation blog, Clay Johnson has a great blog post about how they are going to bid Recovery.gov.
We together-- not just we meaning The Sunlight Foundation-- are going to bid on redoing Recovery.gov to learn more about the process of government contracting, and to try and build what is perhaps the biggest federal transparency-related website.
I learned about this from Steven Clift at e-democracy.org and think it is a wonderful idea. I hope I can find some time to join the discussion about that idea.
Taking transparency even further, I received an email from Talking Points Memo about how they, together with Pro Publica and the New York Times, have received a Knight Foundation Grant to start documentcloud.org which “will make original source documents easy to find, share, read and collaborate on, anywhere on the Web”. Another very interesting project, that might fit very nicely with the Sunlight Foundation project.
So, these are a few things that I’ve gotten from social media recently. What do you get from social media? I’m especially interested in finding out from everyone on EntreCard or Adgitize that visits my site and then moves on.
Sky of Blue, and Sea of Green – The New Normal #iranelection
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 06/17/2009 - 16:57In the first days of a crisis, everything is new. People scurry around, not sure how to react; what the right thing to do is. Yet slowly, the crisis becomes routine. People learn to cope. The visit to the hospital becomes a regular, normal occurrence. The expectation of things changing soon remains, but you recognize that you will probably do the same thing tomorrow that you did yesterday.
It seems as if this applies not only when a loved one fights some horrible illness, but can also apply to a nation fighting a horrible illness. Today, on twitter, a person tweeted, “The Sea of Green will continue tomorrow and every day until election is declared void”. The sea of green has become the new normal.
My scanning of the #iranelection tweets has become more routine. I recognize things to look for. Themes recur. The picture of the day is
The discussion started off talking about the Iranian Soccer team wearing green wristbands. There were talks about which cleric was saying what, which generals or military forces are planning what. This is supplemented by rumors about Montazeri withdrawing his support of Khamenei and possible meeting of the Assembly of Experts.
Others are settling into their patterns as well. The Guardian has its live coverage of the Iranian Uprising, and people on Twitter are asking, “Are CNN and the networks just reading twitter, facebook, and youtube for me? They're going the way of the newspaper.”
Personally, I think the Guardian, CNN, and the networks are doing more than just reading Twitter. They are gathering out the most important points and putting them into context. For people that have time to read Twitter constantly and investigate what is being said, the traditional news outlets aren’t adding much. But most people don’t have that sort of time or inclination, and the news outlets are reaching beyond the most engaged.
I remember what was called the Iranian Hostage Crisis in the United States. The television stations would run their nightly reports of Day 49, or whichever day it was. Interestingly enough, this was tied to the freezing of all Iranian Assets held in the United States, something a friend of mine at the State Department is still dealing with thirty years later.
MediaBistro has provided a great profile of the ‘kid’ at the State Department who contacted Twitter. Clay Shirky shares his thoughts about the use of Twitter over on the TEDBlog.
People talk about the role of the United States and President Obama’s remarks. We can argue about whether or not one Iranian leader is really substantially different from another. One person on Twitter commented, “People of Iran, most of us here in America are supporting you so your government will be more pro-iranian, not pro-american”
Perhaps this takes us to where the real difference is. The underlying issue is whether or not a leader will respect the will and freedom of the people being governed. Will the leader order troops to shoot people who disagree with him? Will he round up dissidents? Will he try to shut down access to the media?
There is also some good levity on Twitter and the joke du jour is this item on eBay.
With the rhythm Iranian uprising taking shape, I need to re-evaluate how it fits into the rest of the rhythm of my blog. I like to write about a large array of topics but the Iranian uprising has been taking up a lot of my writing focus. Do you find these posts interesting? Helpful? Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.
