Why haven’t we heard more about this?

Obama signe un décret controversé sur le contrôle d’Internet en cas de catastrophe http://t.co/k77uRyZy

July 11, 2012 11:59 am via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@lemondefr

Le Monde

French words often are in similar form to their English counterparts, so you probably can make out the meaning here: this has to do with retaining control of the Internet in the event of some “catastrophe.” Specifically, President Obama signed a new Executive Order on the subject, back on July 10.

The Order is labeled “controversial” in that tweet, but I became aware of it in the first place only from that source and have not been able to find much additional discussion elsewhere. The President basically reshuffled the responsibilities assigned to various federal agencies should either some natural disaster or national security menace arise that threatens US communications. Such criticism as there is has focused on the Order’s section 5.2, which seems to give the Secretary of Homeland Security the power to seize and control private communications networks, e.g. the Internet.

This Le Monde article does provide a link to the tech-site The Verge, which was one media source that did mention this new Executive Order and critique it; you can go there for further explanation in English.

Those entrusted with supervising the Internet have in recent times made explicit efforts to keep it from being an exclusively Western/English/Latin alphabet phenomenon, resulting earlier this year in the acceptance of Cyrillic (e.g. Russian) and even Arabic words as Internet addresses, or URLs. Now the Süddeutsche Zeitung informs us (The “ß” becomes even sharper) that German has achieved its own mini-triumph for Internet inclusiveness: from 16 November a new character to be allowed in URLs will be the “ß” or “Eszett,” an historical letter in the German language that traditionally has denoted a double-s.

Ah, but note that “traditionally,” that “historical”: nowadays the ß is actually not used so much, ever since the spelling-reform agreed to in 1996 (implemented over the following ten years) that sharply restricted its approved cases for use. In olden days you would be sure to see it all the time when reading German if only for daß, which is the German “that” or “which,” i.e. the subordinate-clause conjunction (e.g. “I would have to conclude that . . .”), but all that you see anymore these days is of course dass instead. Often you don’t see it in Straße, or “street,” even when used as part of a street-name; and, indeed, in this same article announcing that one can use it in URLs the letter in question is barely used it all unless in direct reference to the “ß” itself: otherwise I find only a heißt and a ließe, and then a größten in the caption to the (rather irrelevant) accompanying illustration.

Well OK, I also found it somewhere else: in the “www.scheißhoppenheim.de” sort of URL which the piece’s author, Hermann Unterstöger, facetiously suggests it will now be possible to register. That word-construction is based upon Scheiße – a word proudly featuring its very-own “ß” but otherwise not very nice or polite; I assume its similarity to the corresponding English profanity allows me to decline giving you its meaning outright. But you have to wonder about the many other things German delegates to ICANN (in charge of internet addresses and protocol generally) should be addressing themselves to, instead of this barely-useful development which seems to offer scope to the flowering of the creative talents only of German dirty-words specialists.

One key factor affecting the entire ongoing Eurocrisis was known to cognoscenti as “NRW” – short for Nordrhein-Westfalen, the German state whose local elections on May 9 did much to influence both the nature and timing of Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel’s response to the grave threat to the euro and even the EU arising from the Greek financial problems. That is well and good, but those same NRW elections at the same time had another rather different significance for a separate voting bloc, one not necessarily so interested in the mere potential for collapse of the common European currency. These citizens are overwhelmingly young and male; they usually converse in Java and C++ as easily as in their native German; and they vote for the German Pirate Party, whose disappointing results in that same ballot saw its share of the overall vote drop to 1.5% from the full 2% share it had enjoyed during last Fall’s nationwide election.

You might recall that this political organization, like all the off-shoots of the original Pirate Party in Sweden, takes for its purpose advocacy mainly for Internet-related issues such as copyright reform, digital civil rights, and the prevention of Internet censorship. Philip Kuhn of Die Welt recently sat down with party leader Jens Seipenbusch for a brief interview in the wake of those poor electoral results. (more…)

In case you haven’t heard – maybe you’ve just been too busy with your status updates – Facebook has come under considerable fire lately for its apparent loose attitude towards security and users’ privacy. Maybe you also haven’t heard about the four NYU students who managed in a relative flash to raise tens of thousands of dollars for their project to create an open-source alternative to Facebook called “Diaspora*.” (Yes, with that asterix at the end; further information about their project here.)

But here at EuroSavant our job is to inform you of things that you may not have heard about from the Eurosphere. So had you heard that your great-uncle in Germany also doesn’t want you using Facebook? Well OK, maybe he’s not really your great-uncle, he just looks like he should be, as you will realize if you surf to the recent interview with him in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, whose rather sensationalist title I have borrowed for the title of this post out of similarly sensationalist motivations. Actually, he’s probably someone worth listening to even more than any great-uncle in Germany: he’s Ernst Pöppel, renowned professor of psychology at the University of Munich. (more…)

OK, the report I caught about this is from the Dutch press (specifically, the Algemeen Dagblad – I don’t routinely cover the Swedish press due to language incapability). But it’s an instructive tale nonetheless: after some guy had announced (anonymously) on an Internet forum site his intention to head to the KTH Royal Institute of Technology (a state technical university located in Stockholm) and kill as many people as he could find there, police managed to track him down and arrest him before any harm could be done.

How instructive? First of all, this sort of thing is not supposed to happen in a place like Sweden, due to the much stricter gun-control there, but mainly because of what people assume is a more non-violent culture that doesn’t lend itself to that sort of thing. (Although one shouldn’t forget how Swedish prime minister Olof Palme was gunned down on a Stockholm street back in 1986, in a murder that is unsolved to this day.) Secondly, the authorities did manage to track the proto-perpetrator down – even behind the veil of supposed Internet anonymity – and detain him before he could actually perpetrate. What does this say about how genuine this supposed “anonymity” on the Internet actually is – and how genuine should it ultimately be allowed to be, when lives are on the line? Thirdly: Were lives truly on the line? How can anyone tell whether the suspect really meant to do what he declared he intended to do? That must still be unsure – you commit a crime only by doing it, not by only thinking it or even announcing it. (The latter probably constitutes a crime in itself, but of a different sort and one calling for nowhere near as much punishment as actually killing.)

Anyway: in the final analysis we seem to have here in Sweden one pole of a spectrum whose other pole is Seung-Hui Cho and 32 people shot at Virginia Tech. Where do you, and the society where you live, want to be on that spectrum? “At the pole of the Swedish incident that was prevented in time” may not truly be the answer, given the injury to privacy rights that was an important part of that episode.

Unbelievable. Sometimes an article’s headline and lede simply say it all. From De Standaard:

Gamers’ baby dies of starvation
SUWON – A South Korean couple let their three-month-old daughter starve while together they were busy raising a virtual daughter on-line.

The villain of this particular piece was Second Life (yes, I’ve included a link to it there for you – for goodness’ sake, be careful!), which essentially is an on-line virtual world where you create your own character (“avatar”) and then wander around interacting with other avatars and doing various other things. Well, OK, I think we can agree that the actual villains were the parents, named Kim Yoo-chul and Choi Mi-sun, who the article says were given to spending up to 12 hours daily down at the local Internet café, living their “second lives” – which apparently included a virtual daughter – and in the meantime simply leaving their real-life daughter back home by herself.

Until the day when they came back home and found that daugher dead – of starvation (and also dehydration, of course), according to the autopsy. The two parents are now under arrest, and have sworn off playing any more Second Life – so they say.

South Korea is said to be the world’s most “wired” land, with the most operational high-speed DSL connections per-capita*. But maybe this isn’t always such a good thing – the Standaard article also mentions at the end another South Korean 28-year-old dude who recently died after playing Starcraft (yes, I’ve included a link to it there for you – for goodness’ sake, be careful!) for 50 hours straight, without eating or drinking.

*Of course, the parents here did not happen to have one of those many DSL connections at home, but had to go to the Internet café. One therefore wonders whether this tale could have had a somewhat happier ending had they been able to afford a home connection (you know, rousing themselves away from the computer to the child’s screams of hunger) – that Wikipedia article says it’s easy to sign up there for 100 mbps (!) downstream for less than the equivalent of $50.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: I’m afraid the link to the original De Standaard article provided in this post no longer works – see my UPDATE at the end of this later blogpost if you want further discussion.

FURTHER UPDATE: Never mind, the De Standaard permalinks are back. Sorry, I don’t know what happened, I just know that for a while they were dead.

From the German website Telepolis and blogger Harald Taglinger we get The Internet in figures, a blog entry whose main attraction is its link to a very informative, data-filled (and English-language) map of the world-wide Internet as of last year. I’ll cut out the middleman for you: a thumbnail is below, which you can click to enlarge in a separate window/tab:












Among the points Taglinger picks out for mention in his accompanying text: P2P takes up 25% of global Internet traffic (or did in 2008; it might be an even-higher percentage now); India + Japan + China already make up about one-third of the world’s Internet users; and Portuguese (because of Brazil) is coming on strong as a website-language, already surpassing German and gaining on Japanese.

Good news from the German pressetext website: On-line addiction – China stops electro-shock therapy. The Chinese (meaning, of course, from the People’s Republic) have for a while now been alarmed at the epidemic of Internet-addiction that has been plaguing their citizens, which scourge should be no surprise in view of the fact that the number of Chinese Internet users now exceeds even the total US population. As you might imagine, this overwhelmingly afflicts the young, and yes, the Chinese authorities’ solution has mainly been some electro-shock therapy, which to this observer does seem both rather harsh and questionable on sheer grounds of effectiveness (unless it’s just a matter of pure deterrence: “We catch you playing World of Warcraft again and its the electrodes for you!”). Indeed, according to this report the Chinese take this method one step further: “patients” must also get on their knees before their parents for “therapy” and are allowed to speak of nothing else other than their determination to beat their addiction.

Now the Health Ministry has announce this sort of “treatment” will be stopped. Ironically enough (and, frankly, also implausibly), it is supposedly doing so due to a huge wave of protest against the practice that has welled up over the Internet, of which a crucial component is expressions of doubts from actual psychology experts that such extreme methods really work at all. That’s also the opinion here of Bernd Dillinger, who is involved with an Austrian anti-Internet-addiction treatment site, the Institute for the Prevention of Online Addiction, who states “That they try in China to cure online-addicts with electro-shocks is completely incomprehensible to me personally. Such a procedure is in fact only possible in totalitarian states, among us it would be unthinkable.”

So what is appropriate treatment? Well, they’re still trying to come up with one that can be generally accepted, but at this point experts can already agree that the problem should be treated in a “value-less” way, i.e. assigning no blame, and that attractive alternative activities should be brought forward to engage the patient’s leisure-time. Naturally, this is not only a problem among the Chinese; estimates of how many Internet-addicts there are in German-speaking countries are still imprecise, but Dillinger assesses the total at around 1.5% to 3% of all Internet users.

UPDATE: Here’s a new report from the AP: yes, they’ve stopped the electro-shock therapy to treat Internet addiction in China, but people are dying at their “boot camp”-style treatment camps nonetheless!

If you’re into peer-to-peer downloading of large files (e.g. movies, music) from the Internet, you know already know all about it; if you’re not, here’s a quick summary. The most popular program for doing so is called BitTorrent, and for quite some time The Pirate Bay, a site based in Sweden, was the most popular place to go to get the files you might be interested in (you know, like Hollywood movies still in general public release – or even yet to embark upon public release). Naturally, The Pirate Bay came under some considerable legal pressure for its activities, until this past spring the main personnel behind it were sentenced to jail and to the payment of a hefty SEK 30 million fine. (They are appealing the verdict.) In the meantime, the Swedish advertising company Global Gaming Factory X AB has announced its intention to buy The Pirate Bay next month and give it a “new business model” that makes the site’s activities strictly legal. In the meantime, though, some of the people behind The Pirate Bay have formed The Pirate Party – with chapters not just in Sweden but other countries as well – to advance their free-file-sharing political views, which already won one seat in the European Parliament in the early-June elections.

The (eventual) metamorphosis of The Pirate Bay to legality is especially good news for the French government, which has been busy since the beginning of the year trying to come up with legal measures to pass to outlaw the sort of free downloading of copyrighted commercial material that The Pirate Bay did so much to facilitate. After modifying their legislation to meet the objections from France’s Constitutional Court, which had first thrown it out, the French Senate has recently passed it, so that it is close to becoming law. It would empower a state agency – called Hadopi – to detect this sort of activity and, if two warnings to desist are ignored, pass on to French judges information about the offense for them to assign penalties, including fines, jail, and disconnection from the Net.

Ah, but can anyone ever stop truly determined Internet “pirates”? Le Monde reporter Maël Inizan now reports on another site now arising like a phoenix from The Pirate Bay’s ashes to save the cause of free downloading (Illegal downloading: a new site takes up the torch of The Pirate Bay). (more…)

As we get very close to Christmas, much of the press that I monitor is getting rather insular, if not downright silly. (Like how about the photos of six famous Czechs and their born-in-2003 babies on the very front page of today’s Mladá fronta dnes (PDF format)?) I guess this is the time of year when nothing much is supposed to happen – at least now that there aren’t that many naughty Communists around, who invaded Afghanistan and then Vietnam in successive Christmas seasons back in the 1970s.

At least it’s also the season for looking back at the preceding year and ahead at what’s to come, something at least potentially of interest to those outside of a given paper’s immediate readership. Germany’s Die Zeit is always a good bet for engaging general-interest content; what caught my eye in its latest issue was Return of the Dot-coms?. Get your business plans ready: “The technology-crash is over, and the Internet is becoming a goldmine again,” writer Thomas Fischermann announces in the article’s lead-in. (more…)

I know that I owe you a survey of Austrian reaction to the election in California of the “Governator,” but hold on. (Actually, by this point that’s probably the entry above this one; you’ve already read it.) While working on the French-press entry, I discovered serendipitously this great article in Le Monde about Baghdad residents finally being able to use the Internet. It’s entitled In the Internet Cafés, Baghdadis Discover the Joys of “Chat,” Erotic Sites, and “Real Life”, and yes, the whole thing brings to mind adolescents discovering sex. (more…)