Now you too can protest in Cuba… virtually

Babalu blog/ By Alberto de la Cruz

Via Pedazos de la Isla:

Website allows users to virtually protest in Havana, #Cuba

Are you a Cuban living on the outside- or perhaps someone from another nationality- who has wanted to participate in a protest on the island? Now, a new initiative gives you the chance to fulfill this wish…at least virtually.
The German-based human rights organization known as The International Society of Human Rights, or Internationale Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte (IGFM), launched a new campaign dubbed “UnSilence“, which uses an online platform to allow people throughout the world to join protests in countries under totalitarian regimes which violate the human rights of their citizens.  On the website, there are countries such as Iran, North Korea, and also Cuba.
To take part in the virtual protest in Havana, it’s simple.  First, visit the site at http://www.unsilence.de/. Once in the website, an introductory video will being with images of civic protests for freedom throughout the world- mainly of the recent Arab Spring.  After the introduction, a global map will appear, which you could “navigate” with your mouse to select a country where there is a demonstration taking place.  Once Cuba is clicked, users will be taken to Havana, where citizens have taken to the streets in the Civic Plaza, right in front of an image of Che Guevara.

Continue reading HERE >>

¿Cuánto espacio físico ocupa Internet?

Microsiervos

En What If de XKCD, ¿Cuánto espacio físico ocupa Internet?

Una forma de calcular cuánto espacio físico ocupa la información almacenada en internet es comprobar cuándo espacio de almacenamiento hemos comprado los seres humanos. Se fabrican alrededor de 650 millones de discos duros cada año. Si gran parte de ellos son unidades de 3,5" suponen un volumen de unos 8 litros de discos duros fabricados cada segundo.
Esto significa que los últimos años de producción de discos duros — que gracias al incremento de su capacidad representan una gran parte de la capacidad de almacenamiento global — apenas darían para rellenar un petrolero.
Así que, por esta regla, internet es más pequeña que un petrolero.

Vale, esta forma de calcularlo, por eliminación, un poco rara; y vale que internet no sólo son discos duros. Pero ahí queda el dato, y cualquier otro cálculo más aproximado — o en su defecto más ingenioso — será bienvenido.

Babbage: A lucrative accident

EconomistMagazine

In this week's programme: a drone-powered internet of things, Facebook under fire and the twentieth anniversary of the text message.

Government Surveillance on Citizens Rising

Nic Halverson 

As the inferno of the David Petraeus scandal continues to burn, the latest Google Transparency Report shows government surveillance is starting to heat up.

"This is the sixth time we’ve released this data, and one trend has become clear: Government surveillance is on the rise," Dorothy Chou, Senior Policy Analyst, explains on Google's blog.

Between January and June of this year governments from around the world filed 20,939 requests with Google to access data on 34,614 accounts. According to company data, during that same time frame last year, governments made 15,744 requests on 25,342 accounts.  More >>

What Petraeus affair reveals about your emails

WND/ Steve Elwart*

gawker.com

“Hell has no wrath like a woman scorned.” The saying took on a new meaning, with wrath being source of the “Petraeus-gate” that started when a general’s mistress believed he was cheating her.

The fact that Jill Kelley, a friend of the Petraeus family, received what she felt were threatening emails was apparently enough to bring the FBI into the case, prodded along by an agent-friend of the recipient.

The FBI started the investigation under the authority of the 1986 United States Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). The act allows for “government entities” to acquire a warrant to access email records less than 180 days old “if there is reasonable cause to believe a crime has been committed.” For email older than six months, a federal agency only needs to get a subpoena signed by a federal prosecutor, not a judge, to obtain the messages.

Because of the wording of the law, Americans have fewer privacy protections for their electronic emails than would for those same messages than if they were printed out and stuck in a drawer.

In the eyes of the law, email kept on an individual’s hard drive in their home computer has the same protection as one’s personal papers, which require a search warrant. Emails stored on a remote server “in the cloud” do not have the same protection.

The writers of the law also did not envision the cloud. Email stored in the cloud has the same legal protection as documents in a public warehouse: the government can obtain them with a simple subpoena; no court procedure is required.

To make things really confusing, the government’s interpretation of the ECPA was rejected by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal appellate court that covers the western United States, including California, and the home to many online email companies and the servers that host their messages. As a result, the DOJ advises “Agents outside of the Ninth Circuit can therefore obtain such email (and other stored electronic or wire communications in ‘electronic storage’ more than 180 days) using a subpoena…” but reminds agents in the Ninth Circuit to get a warrant.

Cloud email servers use the power of many different servers across the Internet. It does not reside in one place. Mail services such as those offered by Google (gmail) will store email messages (from your inbox, draft, and deleted folders) long after you have forgotten them. FBI and other investigating agencies routinely gain access to electronic inboxes and information about email accounts offered by Google, and other Internet mail providers.

The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal report that Jill Kelley contacted the FBI about “five to ten” anonymous emails that started in May and reportedly warned Kelley to “stay away” from an unnamed man. In the resulting investigation, the FBI discovered electronic paper trail eventually led to an “anonymous” account that was used by Paula Broadwell and her husband.

In examining this and other accounts, agents uncovered sexually explicit emails that Broadwell exchanged with another party who also used what has been reported to be a Gmail account. Eventually, investigators were able to determine that the other party was CIA Director David Petraeus using an assumed name.

While it hasn’t been specified exactly how the FBI were able to track the emails back to Broadwell, anyone with knowledge of how email works can make an intelligent assessment.

Petraeus and Broadwell used anonymous accounts with fake names that they set up for the purpose of their illicit affair. While they knew enough to cover some of their tracks, they weren’t sophisticated enough to take sufficient steps to completely protect their identity.

There are some services, such as Tor Project that can hinder tracing attempts. Other services such as Hotspot Shield and LogMeIn Hamachi can create a virtual private network to help preserve privacy. But this system is not fool-proof. Many of these services still use U.S. based servers that may have logs that can be read by investigating agencies or hackers.

Any email messages that are sent leave a trail. Many email services contain hidden codes called “metadata” that will contain the IP address of the sender’s computer’s internet connection device called a “router.” Other services, such as Gmail, will only include the IP address and Internet name of the servers that pass along the email.

The FBI spent weeks tracing the route these messages took. The FBI cross-referenced the IP addresses of the email’s origins against hotel guest lists, looking for common names. The messages were traced back not only to the Broadwell home, but also to the hotels where she was staying while sending some of the messages. (The travel patterns revealed by the emails coincided with her travel to promote her biography of Petraeus.)

The FBI could also request email data from the email service without the knowledge of the user. In fact, the email service is prohibited by law in notifying the user that the records were accessed.

Google is routinely approached by investigating agencies for email information. In fact, they issue what they call a “Transparency Report” every six months, to provide users with statistics about government requests for data and takedowns. For the period of January to June 2012, Google fulfilled 35,000 government requests for email information, 16,000 from the United States alone. How many of these requests were accompanied by a warrant is never disclosed.

Armed with the metadata and information from the email service, the FBI now had Broadwell’s name and in the course of the investigation uncovered another disturbing element, the possibility that classified information was being sent to Broadwell, who is also a reporter.

Federal prosecutors now had the probable cause they needed to request a warrant to monitor Broadwell’s other email accounts. Through this warrant they were able to determine that Broadwell and another person had set up a private email account to exchange messages.

A little more digging uncovered that fact that anonymous person Broadwell was communicating with was Petraeus.

(In a bizarre twist, another Army general, John Allen, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, was also caught up in the investigation, being suspected of exchanging 20,000 to 30,000 pages of potentially inappropriate communications with Jill Kelley, the woman who sparked the investigation in the first place.)

The investigators also discovered that Broadwell and Petraeus had used a technique that is common among terrorist organizations and organized crime. They used the oft-neglected draft folder.

In this technique, one person will write a message and rather than send the message, they will save it to their draft folder. The other person will then log into the account, usually through a web browser and read the message in the folder.

Ironically, storing emails in a draft folder, rather than an inbox, may make it easier for the government to intercept their communications. This is because the Department of Justice has argued that emails in the “draft” or “sent mail” folder are not in “electronic storage” (as defined by the Stored Communications Act), and thus not deserving of warrant protection. Instead, the government has argued it should be able to get such messages with just subpoena rather than a warrant.

Some of the techniques the FBI user to track down Broadwell, Gen. Petraeus and later, Gen. Allen can also be utilized by any computer user.

For example, for a Gmail account, a person can see this metadata by doing the following:

1. Log into the Gmail account and open a message.
2. In the upper right corner of the message, next to the “reply” button, click on the “down” button.
3. Then click on the “Show original” selection.
4. A new window will open showing all the data that was hidden in the message.

A guide is available to download that will give instructions for looking at metadata for 19 different type of email accounts.

With this metadata, the IP address of the sender can be determined and then use an IP address locator such as WhatIsMyIPAddress to find out the ISP where the email account is registered as well as its geographic location. This is good information to have if a computer user is getting attacked by multiple spam messages coming from one sender.

It is also interesting to look up your own email address to see what information is available on you.

So far, the results of the investigation are varied: the distinguished military careers of two long-serving servicemen are effectively ended, three marriages damaged, perhaps irreparably, and the insecurity of our electronic communication has been exposed.

Congress is supposed to be looking into the antiquated communications law, but don’t hold your breath. The Justice Department has warned that updating that telephone-modem-era law would have an “adverse impact” on investigations. The White House, for its part, does not seem to be in a hurry to secure an individual’s rights against having their privacy violated.

Interestingly, in congressional testimony, James A. Baker, associate deputy attorney general for the Department of Justice, has suggested that people’s online privacy is enhanced if the government has easier access to private data. “By authorizing law enforcement officers to obtain evidence from communications providers, ECPA enables the government to investigate and prosecute hackers, identity thieves, and other online criminals. Pursuant to ECPA, the government obtains evidence critical to prosecuting these privacy-related crimes.”

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said, “With the explosion of cloud computing, social networking sites, and other new technologies, determining how best to bring this privacy law into the digital age will be one of Congress’s greatest challenges.”

That email invisibility cloak many Americans think they have is full of holes.

--------------------------------

* Steve Elwart, P.E., Ph.D., is the executive research analyst with the Koinonia Institute and a subject matter expert for the Department of Homeland Security.

Petraeus Affair Teaches Us About Online Surveillance

Tom Simonite

The FBI methods used to reveal the CIA director's affair are relevant to all Web users.

When the FBI started investigating harassing emails sent to a resident of Tampa Bay that organized parties for a local Air Force base, it soon became a much broader investigation that led to the uncovering of an affair between CIA director David Petraeus and his biographer Paula Broadwell. Now reports of how the FBI uncovered a series of online email accounts and figured out who was using them have revealed things about digital surveillance that will surprise many Web users, and even tidbits that have impressed experts. Here are five things we’ve learned so far:

• No judge-issued warrant is needed for authorities to ask a company for your emails or other electronic communication records that are six months old or more. That’s thanks to the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which says that a federal prosecutor’s subpoena is enough. Privacy activists have long campaigned for this to change. Leading civil liberties lawyer Kevin Bankston today suggested the Petraeus affair could help those efforts by raising awareness of the current law.
• Communicating by saving draft emails in an online account for someone else to log in and see – as Petraeus and Broadwell did – doesn’t help escape surveillance. This tactic long-used by activists and terrorists, including “shoe bomber” Richard Reid in 2001, prevents emails lodging in personal accounts and other places. But the FBI or law enforcement can easily ask a provider to reveal the IP addresses people used to log into an account. Those IP addresses can be matched to physical locations, and to people's known addresses and movements.
• IP addresses can be used to pinpoint people very precisely, providing a crucial match between online and offline life. The WSJ reports that the FBI figured out it was Broadwell operating pseudonymous email accounts by matching IP addresses from emails they sent to particular hotels. Those matched with particular hotels and the dates she stayed in them on a book tour.
• Yahoo Mail and Microsoft’s Outlook make it extra easy for investigators to find out the IP address an email originated from – and hence where an email was sent from. When emails are sent extra data goes along with them known as “headers” containing technical data. In the case of Yahoo Mail and Outlook that includes the IP address of the connection used to send an email, so investigators don't need to subpoena a mail provider to trace its origin. It’s not known if Broadwell used Yahoo accounts in the events surrounding the Petraeus affair, but she’s known to have used the service before thanks to leaks by nebulous activist group Anonymous of account information from defense contractor Stratfor.

• Email and other services hosted online make life relatively easy for investigators. Google and other online providers have legitimate reasons to log which IP addresses log into accounts and when, for example to detect hacking attempts and keep their software running smoothly. But that data hangs around, and investigators aren't shy about asking for it. Google today published new figures on government requests for its data that show U.S. authorities tapped the company 26 percent more in the first half of 2012 than they did in the second half of 2011, a total of 7969 requests of which 90 percent were complied with.

The U.S. Government's Growing Appetite for Google Users' Data

Searching suspects: Data Google holds on its users is increasingly being requested by - and given to - law enforcement and government agencies.

Tom Simonite

U.S. government and law enforcement agencies are increasingly asking Google to hand over data on its customers to help with investigations.

The search and ads company today released figures revealing that it was asked to hand over user data 7,969 times by US agencies in the first six months of 2012 - an increase of 26 percent over the previous six months. That continues a long established trend in the figures released in Google's twice-yearly transparency report and charted above. The 7,969 requests asked for data from a total of 16,281 user accounts, and ninety percent of the requests were complied with.

Google is unusual amongst Web companies in that it shares information about the number of such requests it receives. Social network Facebook is likely subject to a similarly high volume, for example, but does not disclose any information on their number or origin. Google started reporting the number of requests for its data in 2009, and the number of affected accounts in 2011. Since January 2011, U.S. authorities have requested data pertaining to a total of 39,581 accounts.

Law enforcement and government agencies see Google and other companies as valuable sources of data that can help with criminal and intelligence investigations, such as the one that led to the resignation of CIA director David Petraeus last week. Knowing what a person searched for, who they emailed, and which IP address they logged in from can provide evidence of a person's motivations, movements and much more.

Some privacy activists say that the ease with which U.S. authorities can extract information on users from Google and other companies suggests changes in the law, and company policies are needed to protect innocent users against the risk of unnecessary surveillance. Data can only be handed over by a company if it exists, and some campaigners think companies such as Google should reduce how long they retain some information. For example, Google currently stores search query details for 9 months before anonymizing them, a period some argue is too long. The main target of legal campaigning about data access is against the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which allows government and law enforcement to obtain data from Internet companies without a warrant if it is at least 6 months old.
-----------------------------------
But worldwide:

theatlantic.com

Google: 'Government Surveillance Is on the Rise' >>

China's Internet firms spin a web of opportunities

ReutersVideo

Nov. 14 - Chinese Internet firms are mixing online gaming, shopping and social media into their business models as competition ramps up, to cater to a massive -- and diverse -- user base. Tara Joseph reports.

How to disappear from the Internet forever

lifehacker.com.au

On Five "easy" steps

Step 1: Delete your social network accounts

Step 2: Remove unwanted search results

Step 3: Get rid of background check, criminal, and public record results

Step 4: Remove any usernames attached to an email address with your name

Step 5: Stay off search engines without going offline by remaining anonymous  

Details with  Thorin Klosowski >>

On Eve Of CPC Congress, China Examines Its Digital Image – Analysis

Eurasia review/ B. Raman

What the people think of their leadership and government will be increasingly reflected not in the traditional print and TV media, but in the digital media and in the blogs and micro-blogs of the digital world. The digital image of China in the international net community will increasingly influence governmental and non-governmental perceptions of China. Future prejudices of China will be born not in the columns of the print media and in the radio and TV reports, but in the mushrooming blogs and micro-blogs of the digital world. It is important for leaders and policy-makers to pay attention to what is being discussed in the digital world and to be able to interact with the digital world. Future stability will depend not only on what happens in the real world, but also on what happens in the digital world.

These are some of the features of the world of the 18th Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) being highlighted by the analysts of the prelude to the Congress which is starting at Beijing on November 8,2012. An article by Dennis Pamlin of 21st New Frontiers, a consultancy organization in Sweden, carried by the “China Daily” on November 2,2012, says:

“In the coming years China’s image will be increasingly shaped in a connected world, a world in which people will not only be passive consumers of information, many of them will be active providers of information through different social media. In a connected world people will trust their social networks more than traditional media, and the social networks with the most trust will create a virtual image of China.

“This digital image of China will be determined by the images, stories, comments, blogs and videos posted online, rather than through the print media, television and radio. So China must pay attention to its “digital twin”.

“In a connected world it is no longer enough to do good things and tell people about them, it is also necessary to engage in dialogue with people around the world. If China does not engage in these dialogues, its digital twin will end up distorted.

“We are rapidly moving into a hyper-connected society where transparency and enormous amounts of information are creating new opportunities and new challenges. In order to overcome the challenges and seize the opportunities it is important that China, and those with an understanding of China, explore new ways to encourage dialogue so that its digital twin is not shaped to suit others’ agendas.”

According to the “China Daily”, on November 1,2012, many party functionaries opened their own micro-blogs in their real names and started interacting directly with party cadres and people. One of those who has thus started interacting is Yu Zhengsheng, Secretary of the Shanfghai Municipal Committee of the CPC and a member of the CPC Politbureau, who is being tipped to join the new Standing Committee of the Politbureau as one of its seven members.

In a message posted on his micro-blog, he said: “It is the responsibility, instead of the power, that the official position gives to us. We’re not special. We cannot be above the law. Assuming the responsibility of serving the people is the key of an official’s work.” According to the “China Daily”, this is not the first time he is directly interacting through the web with party cadres and the general public. He has been doing it before.

Zhang Qingli, secretary of the Hebei Provincial Committee of the CPC, said in his microblog: “We should provide a chance for people who have a desire to work, a stage for people with working capabilities, and important posts for those who have had achievements before. What we should do is to encourage diligent officials, criticize the ones who can only deliver lip service, and deal with those who create disorder on our team. We cannot arrange idle positions and feed idlers. The key is to implement what we say in conferences and write on documents.”

Zhang Baoshun, secretary of the Anhui Provincial Committee of the CPC, microblogged: “Officials at all levels should be modest and close to the public. Our posts and power are not for showing off. We’d better have more closeness to residents and avoid bureaucracy. As for fact-finding trips to grassroots areas, high-level officials should not ask people to accompany them. Instead, we should dispense with all unnecessary formalities, and not burden and disturb local people.”

The China Daily has quoted Zhou Xiaopeng, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Sina, an online microblogging service, as saying that though many Chinese officials and governmental departments began to use micro blogs to interact with netizens two years ago, “it is only now that so many high-level officials interact with Web users via a popular online platform.”

In addition to encouraging the party functionaries and officials to use the social media sites for direct and continuous interactions with party cadres and the public, the Chinese Government has also been closely monitoring the use of these sites by foreign embassies in Beijing for digital interactions with the people in order to influence their perceptions.

The “China Daily” reported on November 3,2012:

“The micro blogs have become an important platform for foreign governments to promote public diplomacy in China and pose an increasing influence on China’s Internet, said the first research report on foreign governments’ micro blogs in China, which was released on Friday. ( November 2) More >>

From Burson-Marsteller: This infographic from BM has almost covered every popular social media platforms in China. We would like to analyze it from 3 aspects. The first one is time, according to it’s presentation, we can see that Chinese netizens totally spend 32 hours/month staying online, 41% of the time is on Weibo & SNS, 23% is on watching videos and 10% is on e-commerce sites like Taobao. The second one is function, the infographic tells us that in China 385M netizens are IM users (among which 90% should be Tencent QQ users); and the most used function is search which seems to be dominated by Baidu. The third one is way of access, till now in China there are 910M mobile users, 200M smart phones and 80M 3G users and this number, like the infographic said, will increase exponentially and the result will be like this: in the coming future, netizens will use mobile to access internet, but not computers.

Loads.in: ¿En cuánto tiempo carga realmente tu página web?

Microsiervos

Uno de esos servicios prácticos y con un mnemónico fácil de recordar: Loads.in calcula en cuánto tiempo carga tu web; basta usar/guardar una dirección del tipo microsiervos.loads.in para que al llamarla realice el cálculo.

El resultado es del tipo realista, mostrando pantallazos a diversos intervalos de tiempo con las imágenes que los usuarios ven en realidad. También se puede cambiar el navegador usado en la prueba (Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Firefox) y el lugar desde el que se realiza la prueba (Estados Unidos, Europa, Sudamérica, etc) aunque eso funciona más bien regulero para España por lo que he visto.

Bonus interesante: la gráfica en cascada (waterfall) que detalla todas las llamadas y tiempos necesarios para cargar cada objeto de la página, en su orden correspondiente.

Online spying threatens Canada's national security

OpenMedia.ca/ Lindsey Pinto

huffingtonpost.ca

An access-to-information request from The Globe and Mail has revealed that Canada’s Communications Security Establishment has concerns about our nation’s network security. Specifically, the documents show that Huawei Technologies—a Chinese company that has become the world’s leading maker of telecom equipment—has been the subject of national security concerns.

With all these security worries in the air, it seems strange that Ottawa should continue to consider a bill that could leave Canadians’ personal data less secure. Online spying bill C-30—a contentious piece of legislation that has provoked the ire of Canada’s privacy commissioners, legal experts, and wider public—could, if passed, lead to the creation of giant, unsecure registries of every Internet user’s personal data.

Introduced in the House of Commons earlier this year, Bill C-30 would require telecom providers in Canada to monitor user data, and be prepared to hand over personal information to authorities without a warrant or judicial oversight.

This on its own creates security risks: for C-30 to work, ISPs must implement and maintain both the technology and the personnel required to give authorities real-time, simultaneous access to transmissions in the form specified by law enforcement. This could also mean that telecom companies would be responsible for breaking data encryptions to facilitate use of the gathered information. This would be both expensive (note: the costs will be passed down to Canadians) and would create a security risk, as our personal data would pass through more and more people and systems vulnerable to cyber-attacks and other breaches.

With the advent of increased foreign control over Canada’s networks (i.e. one of the briefing notes uncovered by The Globe urges caution and asserts that Canada “can’t feasibly block foreign technology”) it seems reckless to consider a bill that would weaken Canadians’ control over private data. Huawei is already doing business with Canadian wireless providers, including big telecom companies Bell and Telus.

Would you feel safer under the online spying bill?

Silencios cubanos/ Leonardo Padura

El Nuevo Dia.com/

evidenciascubanas.blogspot.com

Por la llamada “intranet” cubana, compuesta por varios sitios y un sistema que da acceso de correo electrónico sin comunicación a Internet, han circulado en las últimas semanas la caricatura del hombre que se presenta en las oficinas de inmigración pretendiendo que le validen el pasaporte para viajar “por la libre” al extranjero. Pero el cubano de la caricatura no conseguirá su propósito pues, en realidad, ha sido víctima de la suma de una esperanza y de una confusión: la esperanza de que la anunciada reforma de la ley migratoria cubana al fin había sido ejecutada, como varias veces lo ha anunciado el gobierno de la isla, y la confusión de la palabra “sal” (el común cloruro sódico) con la acción de “salir”…

Como parte de la llamada “actualización del modelo económico cubano” emprendido por el actual gobierno presidido por Raúl Castro, se ha contemplado la probabilidad de una “flexibilización” de las condiciones que se le exigen a la mayoría de los cubanos para viajar. Aunque la flexibilización ha sido anunciada como una modificación “con reservas”, es decir, cambios parciales y no totales, lo cual equivaldrá (supongo) a ciudadanos que sí podrán viajar y otros que no, su puesta en práctica se ha visto dilatada.

Un reflejo de esa preocupación por migrar ha sido también el grupo de cartas circuladas por esa misma “intranet”, a partir de la que escribiera el director de una importante revista socio-cultural a un hipotético pero muy abundante joven cubano que quiere emigrar, la cual ha sido respondida por cartas de jóvenes concretos que han emigrado, que quieren emigrar y hasta que no quieren emigrar, en las que estos miembros de las más recientes generaciones exponen los diversos argumentos e inconformidades que los han llevado, los llevarán o pudieran llevarlos a abandonar el país.

El hecho de que la circulación de estas cartas y caricaturas se produzca por la “intranet” cubana sigue siendo el resultado de la dificultad o imposibilidad que representa para la mayoría de los habitantes del país el acceso a Internet.

Lo complicado en la situación actual es que se supone que desde hace meses debería estar operativo el cable de fibra óptica tendido desde Venezuela hasta Cuba, el cual multiplicaría por varios miles la capacidad y velocidad de las conexiones a la red. Pero del estado de ese cable, o de la decisión gubernamental de cómo será o sería su utilización, tampoco se ha comentado nada en los medios oficiales. Como si el cable, más que tendido en el mar, hubiese sido devorado por el mar.

Mientras, a propósito de la nueva ley de aduanas, vigente desde el pasado 3 de septiembre, que limita o encarece la capacidad de importación de los viajeros o de los bultos enviados por mensajería desde el extranjero, tampoco se ha hablado demasiado, a no ser para comentar que las nuevas medidas agilizarán los trámites aduaneros.

Sin embargo, muchas personas consideran que la ley los afectará de muy concretas maneras, pues casi todo lo que antes importaban a precios más bajos, ahora se encarecerá cuando tenga que ser pagado en moneda fuerte, es decir, una moneda a la cual tiene muy difícil o ningún acceso la mayor parte de la población de un país en donde el salario promedio es de 440 pesos (unos 16 euros) y el kilogramo de lo importado o recibido por encima de las cotas ahora establecidas, puede ser cobrado a 9 euros el kilo.

Igual silencio ronda alrededor de la nueva ley tributaria aprobada por el parlamento cubano hace unos dos meses y de la cual ni siquiera los funcionarios de las oficinas tributarias tienen una idea clara de su contenido, pues ha sido ratificada pero aun no publicada.

No es casual, en este ambiente de silencios oficiales con respecto a leyes, medidas, inversiones que afectan a la mayoría de la población cubana y de las cuales solo nos llegan rumores, que un sociólogo del país haya puesto a circular por esa misma “intranet” un comentario en que él califica a la prensa oficial de la isla de deficiente, esquemática, secretista e insípida (en lo cual coincide con un juicio emitido por el mismo presidente Raúl Castro).

Lo curioso es que por esa misma vía digital local, otras voces se alcen para considerar que quienes escriben sobre los problemas del país, le hacen el juego al “enemigo”. Esta reivindicación de la actitud de trincheras y el lenguaje de guerra, que llega a la acusación de mercenarismo, procura descalificar cualquier inconformidad por parte de quienes (a mi juicio) tienen el derecho, cuando menos, de sentirse inconformes, y, si pueden, expresar mínimamente los motivos de su insatisfacción con los modos en que se aplican (o no se aplican, o se dilatan) las reglas de juego con que debemos convivir todos los que, por la razón que fuere, hemos decidido “no emigrar” y pensamos que deberíamos tener derecho a estar mejor informados sobre lo que mucho nos concierne… Aunque sea por la “intranet”.

Cryptoparty: privacy goes viral

RTAmerica

Don Tapscott on The Theory of Wikinomics: Rethinking Civilization for an Age of Networked Intelligence

By AspenInstitute

Just Be Evil: The unauthorized history of Google

corbettreport

Twitter CEO: Don't Worry About Our Business

ForaTv

‘Big data’ from social media, elsewhere online redefines trend-watching

WP/ By Ariana Eunjung Cha

From a trading desk in London, Paul Hawtin monitors the fire hose of more than 340 million Twitter posts flying around the world each day to try to assess the collective mood of the populace.

The computer program he uses generates a global sentiment score from 1 to 50 based on how pessimistic or optimistic people seem to be from their online conversations. Hawtin, chief executive of Derwent Capital Markets, buys and trades millions of dollars of stocks for private investors based on that number: When everyone appears happy, he generally buys. When anxiety runs high, he sells short. 

Hawtin has seen a gain of more than 7 percent in the first quarter of this year, and his method shows the advantage individuals, companies and governments are gaining as they take hold of the unprecedented amount of data online. Traders such as Hawtin say analyzing mathematical trends on the Web delivers insights and news faster than traditional investment approaches.

The explosion in the use of Google, Facebook, Twitter and other services has resulted in the generation of some 2.5 quintillion bytes each day, according to IBM.

“Big data,” as it has been dubbed by researchers, has become so valuable that the World Economic Forum, in a report published last year, deemed it a new class of economic asset, like oil.

“Business boundaries are being redrawn,” the report said. Companies with the ability to mine the data are becoming the most powerful, it added.

While the human brain cannot comprehend that much information at once, advances in computer power and analytics have made it possible for machines to tease out patterns in topics of conversation, calling habits, purchasing trends, use of language, popularity of sports, spread of disease and other expressions of daily life.

“This is changing the world in a big way. It enables us to watch changes in society in real time and make decisions in a way we haven’t been able to ever before,” said Gary King, a social science professor at Harvard University and a co-founder of Crimson Hexagon, a data analysis firm based in Boston.

The Obama campaign employs rows of people manning computers that monitor Twitter sentiment about the candidates in key states. Google scientists are working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track the spread of flu around the world by analyzing what people are typing in to search. And the United Nations is measuring inflation through computers that analyze the price of bread advertised in online supermarkets across Latin America.

Many questions about big data remain unanswered. Concerns are being raised about personal privacy and how consumers can ensure that their information is being used fairly. Some worry that savvy technologists could use Twitter or Google to create false trends and manipulate markets.

Even so, sociologists, software engineers, economists, policy analysts and others in nearly every field are jumping into the fray. And nowhere has big data been as transformative as it has been in finance. More >>

The third industrial revolution begins: 3D printers

EconomistMagazine

In Cuba , mystery shrouds fate of Internet cable

HAVANA –  It was all sunshine, smiles and celebratory speeches as officials marked the arrival of an undersea fiber-optic cable they promised would end Cuba's Internet isolation and boost web capacity 3,000-fold. Even a retired Fidel Castro had hailed the dawn of a new cyber-age on the island.

More than a year after the February 2011 ceremony on Siboney Beach in eastern Cuba, and 10 months after the system was supposed to have gone online, the government never mentions the cable anymore, and Internet here remains the slowest in the hemisphere. People talk quietly about embezzlement torpedoing the project and the arrest of more than a half-dozen senior telecom officials.

Perhaps most maddening, nobody has explained what happened to the much-ballyhooed $70 million project.

"They did some photo-op ... and then that scandal came out, and then it just disappeared from human consciousness," said Larry Press, a professor of information systems at California State University, Dominguez Hills, who studies Cuba, referring to foreign media reports and whispers by diplomats that several executives at state phone company Etecsa and the two senior officials in the Telecommunications Ministry were arrested last year.

The cable was strung from Venezuela with the help of key ally Hugo Chavez. Government officials said from the start that the bandwidth boon would be prioritized for hospitals, universities and other usage deemed in service of the common good; the legions of Cubans with little or no access to the Internet from their homes would have to wait.

But a dozen employees of public institutions interviewed by The Associated Press said they have seen no noticeable improvement in their work connections. If anything, they say, download speeds have even gotten a little slower.

Going online in Cuba will try the patience of anyone who's ever had a taste of high-speed DSL connections.

The problem is that connection speeds here are still Web 1.0, while the world has moved on to fancier, bandwidth-hogging platforms like Flash. YouTube is irrelevant on Cuban dial-up, and barely useable on the rare broadband connections. Want to watch the latest episode of "Mad Men?" At 3-5 kilobytes-per-second dial-up transfer speeds, a 500-megabyte video file would theoretically take somewhere between 28 and 46 hours to download from iTunes.

Artists and photographers say it's nearly impossible to view others' work online. People swap digital pictures in person on memory sticks rather than simply sending them as email attachments. Students have difficulty accessing research databases.

One doctor in Havana said she only has access to Cuba's domestic intranet, a bare-bones internal network of island-hosted sites that also lets users get email. Moreover, her institution recently began cracking down on the few who do have full Internet access, ordering them not to use sites like Facebook under threat of punishment.

"I had high hopes, great expectations for the cable. ... For me, doing a postgraduate degree, (the intranet) is no good. It's too basic and poor for our needs," she said. "They haven't given us any explanation."

She and the others spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of getting into trouble with their state employers.

Multiple attempts to get Cuban and Venezuelan government officials to comment were unsuccessful.

The Venezuela branch of Paris-based Alcatel-Lucent, which was contracted to lay the cable, referred questions to the Cuban-Venezuelan joint venture Telecomunicaciones Gran Caribe, where an official said he would need approval from Venezuela's science and technology ministry to talk about the project. The ministry did not respond to requests to interview officials.

Diplomats in Havana privately tell consistent stories of reported corner-cutting on the project that let corrupt officials skim millions of dollars from its budget.

A senior French official told AP that Alcatel had upheld its part of the contract and whatever problems exist must be on land with the network it was meant to be attached to.

"The cable must be connected to something or it won't work," said the official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the politically sensitive project.

The lack of transparency is not unusual for Cuba, where all media is state-run and tightly controlled. But it flies in the face of Fidel Castro's own enthusiastic words about the cable and the transformational power of the Internet.

"Secrets are over. ... We are facing the most powerful weapon that has ever existed, which is communication," Castro told Mexican daily La Jornada in an August 2010 interview in which he hailed the coming cable.

While some hold out hope that faster Internet has merely been delayed, others interpret the government's long silence as a sign Cuba's broadband dreams will be the latest grand pronouncement to end in disappointment.

"I have no expectations for the cable," said Marlene Blanco, a 25-year-old independent worker. "Nothing is going to change for ordinary Cubans. So why talk about it?"

According to government statistics, 16 percent of islanders were online in some capacity in 2011, mostly through work or school, and often just to the intranet. The National Statistics Office said last year that just 2.9 percent reported having direct Internet access, though outside experts estimate the real figure is likely 5 to 10 percent accounting for black market sales of dial-up minutes. For a variety of reasons including the 50-year-old U.S. economic embargo, Cuba is the last country in the Western Hemisphere to get a fiber-optic connection to the outside world, and has relied instead on costly and slow satellite linkups.

Some speculate that the Internet-fueled Arab Spring revolts, which began months before the cable's arrival in Cuba, could have altered the government's plan or at least made officials rethink the wisdom of making it widely available.

"They're afraid of it. They don't want a 'Cuban Spring,' so to speak," Press said.

President Raul Castro's administration has warned of a supposed plot by enemies in the United States to wage a "cyberwar" to destabilize the Communist-run government. In 2011, a Cuban court sentenced U.S. subcontractor Alan Gross to 15 years after convicting him of crimes against the state for importing restricted communications equipment that he insists was only meant to help the island's Jewish community gain better Internet access.

The official silence over the fiber-optic cable has given rise to other rumors: that the cable is operational but being used selectively. A pro-government blogger known as Yohandry Fontana wrote at the end of 2011 that people who attended a closed forum on social networks reported it was working fine.

"Here's a brief summary: 1. The cable has no problem, it is working. 2. Public Internet spaces will open on the island. 3. Costs for public connection will go down. Note: I am seeking more information," Fontana said.

Cuban-born economist Arturo Lopez-Levy said Havana has badly bungled the whole affair, and if it's true that corruption killed the cable, officials should "make heads roll over the scandal" and give an open accounting of what went wrong.

"The Cuban government failure to achieve this goal is one of the worst-managed situations," said Lopez-Levy, a lecturer at the University of Denver, "aggravated by an even worse public relations fiasco to address it."

___

Associated Press writers Peter Orsi, Paul Haven and Anne-Marie Garcia in Havana contributed to this report.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/05/21/in-cuba-mystery-shrouds-fate-internet-cable/#ixzz1vXcaQjKX