geekosystem

Well, PETA has invented a ludicrous thing to be outraged over, so it must be Wednesday. This week, it's Ubisoft's upcoming Assassin's Creed IV that has the animal rights group all in a tizzy over portrayals of whaling in the game. Or rather, what might potentially be portrayals of whaling in the game, since the game isn't out yet, and all we know about the game's latest maritime installment is that at some point, the protagonist is on a ship and sees a whale. This, according to PETA, makes the game developers whale hating monsters who are worse than 1,000 Stalins, presumably because having any other reaction to it would require the folks at PETA to actually think about a reasoned response for like two minutes.

Yesterday, thousands turned out across over 200 European cities to protests the Anti-Counterfeiting Trademark Agreement or ACTA. Like SOPA and PIPA in the U.S., ACTA (among other things) aims to create tougher penalties and grant broad new powers to law enforcement to stop the transmission of copyrighted works over the Internet. With the European Parliament poised to vote on ACTA in June, it's yet unknown what effect these protests will have.

With the Internet successfully protesting both SOPA and PIPA, supported by blackouts from popular sites like Wikipedia and reddit, Europe is calling for similar aid in the fight against ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trademark Agreement. Access, an organization that believes "political participation and the realization of human rights in the 21st century is increasingly dependent on access to the internet and other forms of technology," has been promoting February 11 as the day to protest ACTA, in the hopes that it'll have a similar effect that the SOPA and PIPA protests had.

If you're a person who feels the need to use something right when it turns out you can't, or you're the type of person that must know everything about everything when it comes up in conversation, then the Wikipedia SOPA protest blackout is probably an obnoxious inconvenience, though it is happening in the name of all that is good. Fortunately for Wikipedia enthusiasts who can't live without learning all they can about Bruce Willis and his studio albums, Wikipedia is still accessible during its blackout protest. Head on past the break to find out how.

Along with a few other prominent sites, Wikipedia and reddit to name a couple, Google has come out in protest of SOPA. Though they didn't take the blackout route like Wikipedia and reddit, which would've brought the Internet to something that would amount to a near-complete halt, Google displayed their feelings about SOPA with a tasteful Google Doodle, a simple black censor bar covering the iconic Google logo.

In protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, a nefarious act that tries to censor the Internet without actually showing much understanding of said Internet in the first place, reddit, one of the most popular social news aggregation currently on the very same Internet, will black itself out next week. Redditors may not know what to do with themselves, but on January 18, a week from today, from 8 AM to 8 PM EST, reddit will be blacked out in protest.

Instead of the normal reddit feed, the site will display a "simple message" regarding how the SOPA and PIPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit itself.

Not content with simply cutting off Internet access to the entire country, the Syrian government has allegedly banned iPhone. The move comes after months of anti-government protests and a brutal response from the Syrian authority which have reportedly left thousands dead and put the country on the brink of civil war. The ban has been enacted presumably to prevent photos and video of government abuses from leaking out of the country, which has already banned foreign journalists.

The graph to the left, as The Next Web has pointed out was generated by Google's Transparency Report tool, shows that Syrian Internet traffic has flatlined over the past few hours, and Al Jazeera's liveblog has confirmed that the Syrian government has completely cut off the Internet due to protests -- a common move recently in the Middle East. The Internet has been disconnected -- 3G, dial-up and DSL -- due to anti-government uprisings that have been happening as early as January of this year.

Several weeks ago, shortly after the protests in Libya began in earnest, the Libyan government brought down that country's internet access. It was restored shortly thereafter, but service was interrupted again today and has remained down for over 12 hours. According to Rik Ferguson from security company Trend Micro, todays shut down was different from before.  From The New Scientist:

"In Egypt they stopped broadcasting the routes in to the country," [...] Libya took the same approach on 19 February, making changes in a system called the border gateway protocol (BGP) to remove all routes in to the country, but the outage only lasted 6 hours. This latest disconnect is different. "It looks like the routes are still being broadcast, but the traffic doesn't get a response at all. If you send something to Libya, you don't get an answer,"

This latest suspension of communications comes on the heels of battles throughout Libya, and the seizure of hidden weapons caches by anti-government forces. The situation in the country is, clearly, about as erratic as its eccentric leader Colonel Muammar Muhammad al-Gaddafi. With the eyes of the world on Libya, hopefully the disconnection of the entire country does not signal worse things to come. (via The New Scientist, image via Renesys)

In the past two months, the world has on multiple occasions seen governments preventing their populaces from accessing the Internet during times of existential political crisis. It's not hard to characterize the Egyptian and Libyan use of an Internet blackout as a direct attack against the groups that sought and still to topple their political leaders, as the protestors in those countries relied on web-based platforms to organize their protests and inform the world of their plight. But Shervin Pishevar hopes to end any further restriction of Internet traffic with his OpenMesh project. On its website, OpenMesh says that the will "find the best of breed Open Source Technologies and to build partnerships with existing technologies that would allow us to create a private citizen owned communications infrastructure." In short, OpenMesh aims to give individuals the tools to remain connected with each other and the world at large without relying on the existing communications infrastructure, that, as demonstrated in the recent unrest in the middle-east, are quite vulnerable. OpenMesh would create an independent, ad-hoc, user-based network that would be far more robust and out of the hands of anyone -- government or otherwise -- that would seek to restrict communications.

Though the Libyan protests have become far, far bloodier than the Egyptian protests earlier this month, the Libyan government has taken another page from the Egyptian playbook and is reportedly sending out text messages en masse to supporters. The messages apparently encourage the protesting Libyans to end their general strike, and return to work. In a crowd-sourcing twist, the recipients of the messages are promised phone credits if they forward the messages. Alive in Libya, a website that transcribes and translates voice messages from Libyans, posts the following transcript that describes the messages.

They’re sending messages for us to go back to work. And they’re sending messages saying to take care of our children and not to let them participate in this war. [...]  Messages from the government, the general popular committee: “Please go back to work.” Arabic: The general popular committee asks all citizens in the public and private sector to go back to work and living their life normally from today.” So the government is asking people to go back to work, but as I told you I don’t think that will be possible in weeks. There’s so much destruction in the city.

This seems an unusual choice by the Libyan government, who earlier shut down, and then restored the country's internet access. In general, the Libyan government has taken a militaristic response rather than one of information control that the Egyptian government seemed to favor. It is impossible to say what this action, if true, says about the state of the Libyan government. Though I must admit to taking some relief seeing an appeal sent out via cellphones, rather than machine gun fire from the back of trucks. (via SmartMobs, image via Wikipedia)

As the wave of anti-government sentiment continues to spread across the Middle East, protests in Libya took a strange turn last night when the L.A. Times reported that the Internet was down across the country. Dozens have been killed in Libya since the protests began, and the loss of communications stoked fears of a deadly crackdown. But within just six hours, Internet communication was restored. It is unclear whether this suspension of online access was simply a test of the country's ability to do so, or if Libyan leaders bowed to international pressure to restore communications. However, social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook are still suspended. This mysterious suspension and restoration of communication comes quick on the heels of similar actions during the recent uprising in Egypt, which toppled the reigning government. The events in Libya may indicate a move against suspending total Internet access during a time of unrest, as such actions did little to hamper Egyptian protests. In fact, the Egyptian government's communications crackdown drew further international attention and condemnation. Though the intent behind the shut down can only be guessed at, it underlines the Internet's growing role in the political life of countries. Moreover, the difficulty nations face when they try to impose control over internet communications. This is a brave new world, and hopefully we've seen the last of Internet killswitches. (Image and story Via The Next Web)

In a video uploaded to YouTube yesterday, President Barack Obama touched not only on the Egyptian protests, but on the importance of social media as a part of a universal right to free speech. In a question submitted to YouTube, the President was asked what he thought of the Egyptian crackdown on internet communications. "It is very important that people have mechanisms in order to express legitimate grievances." Referring to his State of the Union speech, the president continued saying that, "there are certain core values that we believe in as Americans that we believe are universal: freedom of speech, freedom of expression...people being able to use social networking or any other mechanisms to communicate with each other and to express their concerns."

Since Tuesday, Egyptians have taken to the streets to protest the government of sitting President Mohamed Hosni Mubarak, and the Internet has played a key role in organizing them. Through postings on Twitter and Facebook, protest organizers urged Egyptians to come out in a show of support against the current government, urging others to join them.