Accept no substitutes

Month: November 2004 (Page 2 of 2)

International Internet Censorship

I’m to talk to a class in International Journalism about Censorship on the Net on Wednesday. My plan is to talk about some specific instances and how they have played out. I’m not going back to the Scientology supression of USENET and of the anonymous remailers, but I may mention that. Here are the topics that I’m thinking of just now:

Is there anything I’m leaving out? Burma? err I guess I meant Myanmar. And don’t forget Wikipedia!

Technical solutions

Resources

Not on Our Air

This morning the NPR show Morning Edition aired a show about the 1970 racially motivated murder in Oxford, NC documented in Tim Tyson’s book, Blood Done Sign My Name. The show didn’t run in NC’s largest and broadest NPR market, our own WUNC. Instead, WUNC took a fundraising break during the one segment that most directly reported on the history and life of North Carolina and in particular the listeners in Oxford.

WUNC does need to raise money, but missing this story is unexcusable.

What makes the story so powerful is that Juan Williams and Tim Tyson recorded large parts of the story while standing in the exact same physical locations where the events took place in 1970: The driveway where young Tim stood tossing a basketball when he heard of the murder from a playmate. The store where the confrontation began. The exact scene of the murder. The grave of Henry “Dickie” Marrow the victim.

I have a particular, if loose, connection to this story as I mentioned earlier on this blog.

This is the the book that Jonathan Yardley writing in the Washington Post called “A candid account of an ugly episode in the last days of Jim Crow North Carolina.”

Read it soon and listen to the show at the link above.

UPDATE: WUNC did air the story this morning at 7:45. I understand they got a few phone calls and some email which brought the omission to their attention. In announcing the segment, Keith Weston (Hi, Keith) said that a segment on “Blood Done Sign My Name” had been aired also on the locally produced State of Things show. I thought I may have heard that some months back but I can’t find it in the Archives. Going through the Archives did bring back memories of some very good shows though.

UPDATE: State of Things producer (and excellent poet) Susan Davis says that SOT did a full hour about the Oxford murder on May 24, 2004. The Archive doesn’t go back that far tho. Susan says she’ll send me a CD of the show. I will try to write a bit about it once I get it.

Internet and Journalism to Jordanians

This morning I did a talk about “Internet and Journalism” (in PDF about 10 pages) to visiting Jordanian journalists as part of The Role of Print Media in Forging Press Freedoms: An Exchange Program Between Jordanian and American Journalists program through the University Center for International Studies and the School of Journalism and the Center for Defending Freedom of Journalists in Amman, Jordan.
It was my first time using Keynote as a presentation platform and it worked fine. I’m not sure how it compares to PowerPoint since I don’t use PPT, but it’s not that different than doing WWW pages really. Of course I tend to give pretty vanilla presentations as far as the slides go — no sounds, waddling ducks, video, etc. Even then I do and did tend to break out of the show to go to a WWW site to illustrate my points.
I spent most of my talk going on about Dan Gillmor’s We the Media book. The idea here is to give the visitors a good reference to take home which they may read at their own pace and translate as slowly or as fast as needed.
Listening to me if you at not an English listener poses several problems: I speak too quickly, I have a Southen accent, I slur words on top of that, I often overuse technical and slangy jargon. Other than that I am a perfect speaker.
My slides can be gotten from the link above in PDF format, but I particularly want to get down the measures of social capital for blogs that I’ve been thinking of lately (after hearing some comments from Fred) which are not in the slides.

  1. Is the blog updated regularly? If so more social capital.
  2. Are there a lot of comments? The more the more SC.
  3. Are the comments mostly intelligent and on-topic?
  4. Does the blog have a high Technorati ranking? Crosspostings, references, etc.
  5. And the final and acid test:

    1. Does the blog have at least one “open thread”?
    2. And does that thread have a lot of intelligent comments?

WXYC panel follow up

Important things first, the Bandwidth CD (23 songs and 1 historic commentary on webcasting from DRS-3 in Switzerland) is available for bittorrent downloading at http://torrent.ibiblio.org/. Thanks to John Reunning and Tim Ross.
The whole panel was broadcast and webcast on WXYC thanks to Fred Stutzman and the very special and very necessary help from Brian Russell. Brian’s mikes and DAT recorder stepped in when the Carolina Union didn’t show with the equipment that Fred needed and had asked for. If you heard the panel on air or on web, it’s Brian and Fred who made it real.

Bret Dougherty did a topnotch job of keeping us all talking and mostly on topic. John Streck of NCSU’s CENTAUR Lab did his best to keep me honest about how IPv6 works and what it has to offer. He was a good sport and a great resource speaking on the tech side of networking and more. David and Michael reminded me what fun it was to work with them. Both are passionate, wise and often intentionally funny. The audience was great too with good questions. PJ Disclafani of WXYC pulled the whole celebration together well. Nice to see friendly faces including Ruby Sinreich of Orange Politics.org, animated animator Eric Knisley of HellCar and Mickey Death fame plus nice people in David’s entourage too numerous and too nice to name here.

UPDATE: Fred and Max did a great job of digitizing the panel from Brian’s tapes and have it online!

Why did I post about IPv6?

Jeopardy answer

Because it’s part of the 10th anniversary of the first webcast which was done by David McConville and Michael Shoffner with some help from Jonathan Magid and Chris Columb and some advice from me.
WXYC lists the events for the fun filled weekend on their website which includes:

  • Tomorrow (Saturday night) a big party at the Local 506 featuring Jett Rink, Spectac, the Moaners, eNtet, Billy Sugarfix, and more cake.
  • Sunday 11/7 there will be a panel discussion on the history and future of internet radio in room 3203 of the Student Union from 3pm-5pm. There will be pastries, but no cake. Featuring Michael, David and me.

Both these events will be broadcast live and webcast as well.

Watch the WXYC site for a revamp of the site and a CD download of great music. Prepare your bittorrent clients now!

What, How and Why of IPv6

[still working on this, but if you have additions or corrections please please let me know]

ibiblio, along with The North Carolina Networking Initiative (NCNI), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) and the CENTAUR Lab at NC State University’s Centennial Campus, has a project to make WXYC and WCPE available using IPv6 and on Internet2.

What is IPv6?

The way computers talk to each other on the Internet is by a protocol called IP (or Internet Protocol). Many of the computers use an older version of IP called IPv4, or Internet Protocol version 4. IPv4 is now nearly twenty years old.

The latest and greatest, we’ll talk more about the differences in Why, is IPv6. IPv6 is available on some but not all ISPs and campuses.

Next you need to configure your computer with an IPv6 address and Router.

On MacOS X, you can set this up in Systems Preferences, by selecting Network. Then choosing TCP/IP. Then clicking on “Configure IPv6…” Most people will only need to select automatic configuration at this point. There is a very nice picture on the Apple site. You might also be interested in the Mac VLC Media Player which will allow you to play various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network..

Linux users should look at The Linux Documentation Projects’ IPv6 How To. Linux kernels version 2.2 and above ship with an IPv6 implementation built in.

Windows users should refer to the IPv6.org guide. WinXP comes with IPv6. See also Microsoft’s IPv6 Research Center.

Two sites will help you see if you have IPv6 working. Kame’s turtle will start dancing once you are doing IPv6 and SixXS will tell you a lot about your compter’s set up. Both are very good IPv6 technical resources.

Now select a station and format from the URLS below and you’ll be listening (if your ISP or campus supports IPv6).

WCPE – The Classical Station

WXYC – The Best in College Radio and the first station webcast on the Internet.

Why use IPv6?

For two very good future reasons.

First as the Internet connects more and more devices — computers, phones, PDAs, microwave ovens, music players, etc. –, it needs more and more addresses. Right now we have 0.0.0.0 through 254.254.254.254. But these are not enough. IPv6 will give the Internet more addresses and allow it to keep growing.

Secondly IPv6 promises greatly enhanced support for Quality of Service and for security. For Quality of Service, IPv6 does less retransmition and pays more attention to time. You should, in time, get better listening and better security.

For more about the case for IPv6, see the IPv6 Working Group and IPv6 Operations aka v6ops information from the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Diebold in Ohio

Could it be that one reason that the Kerry folks aren’t conceding Ohio (yet) is that there is another story waiting there to be told? Voting machine maker Ohio-based Diebold has been all over the news for the past year drawing the attention of the SEC and of Ohio papers ever since Diebold Inc. Chairman and Chief Executive Walden O’Dell “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president” in an August 2003 fund-raising letter.

As computer security folks have noticed — and this concerns me much more –, Diebold’s other side has been to attack those who point out flaws in the voting machine integrity. In doing so, Diebold was found to have strongly overreached their copyright monopoly rights and was fined $125K. So even without the questionable political ethics, Diebold voting machines cast a shadow on the elections this year and possibly in the future. This last is reason for concern for both Republicans and Democrats as security flaws can be exploited by partisons and/or criminals with or without political affiliation.
If this long recount gives us a more open and more secure method of electronic voting, the wait and investigation will be worth it in securing democracy’s future. Verified Voting Foundation and Electronic Frontier Foundation are among the organizations on the case. And the country that invented secret ballots knows how to get eVoting done right.

More eVoting news in Wired.

UPDATE: Slashdot has this story on the subject “Blackboxvoting.org Raises Vote-Audit FOIA Request”

UPDATE: eVoting loses votes in North Carolina!

UPDATE: WISH-TV questions Indiana votes in interview with ES&S — the company formerly headed by surprise Senator Hagel of Nebraska. Among the nuggets in the interview: ” An investigation by the Palm Beach Post revealed ES&S had a secret agreement to kick back a percentage of its profits to the Florida Association of Counties.” and “The investigation also found that the lobbyist representing both ES&S and the Florida Association of Counties was Sandra Mortham, a former Florida secretary of state and former running mate of Gov. Jeb Bush.”

UPDATE: Bush gets 4,258 votes out of only 638 votes cast in Ohio precinct AP reports. Machines from Election Systems & Software Inc. aka ES&S are responsible.

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