A Beijing entrepreneur, discussing restaurant choices with his fiancée over their cellphones last week, quoted Queen Gertrude’s response to Hamlet: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” The second time he said the word “protest,” her phone cut off.
via China Tightens Electronic Censorship – NYTimes.com.
I’ve had a few personal examples to back this up. You cannot do technology work in China without giving the Chinese government a censorship hook. -Don
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Tags: censorship, China, privacy, telecom companies |
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| Posted: 3/24/11 9:00 am UTC by djp3 Add Your Comment | |
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One of the major telecom companies in Japan, KDDI, released a web app called IS Parade (?) that turns your twitter account into a parade. A parade in which your followers, follow you. It is a fun visualization to play with. I recorded a low-res sample below. They also have a strangely addictive abstract interactive visualization on their product homepage, located here.
Found via DATAVISUALIZATION.CH
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Tags: interactive visualization, interface, japan, KDDI, telecom companies, twitter, visualization |
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| Posted: 6/4/10 4:44 pm UTC by djp3 Make the First Comment | |
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Photo courtesy of Flickr:GAIN USA
Below is an excerpt from an interesting article about the race to restore network connectivity in Haiti. A few interesting points: There is one undersea cable out of Haiti. Because of that ISPs were already using satellite. First responders brought network with them. The effort now is on expanding access to net to everyone.
“Late last week, the Geneva-based International Telecommunications Union dispatched engineers to assess the damage to telecom infrastructure along with 100 satellite terminals—and the personnel to operate them—in an effort to help coordinate rescue efforts. According to a press release, “ITU will also set up a Qualcomm Deployable Base Station (QDBS), a reliable, responsive and complete cellular system designed to enable vital wireless communications aimed at strengthening response and recovery mechanisms in a disaster zone.”
Read more:
IEEE Spectrum
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Tags: article, Haiti, ICT4D, IEEE, infrastructure, telecom companies |
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| Posted: 1/21/10 9:14 am UTC by djp3 Make the First Comment | |
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Photo courtesy of paulworthington
Congratulations to Informatics faculty members Don Patterson and Susan Sim, and former Informatics grad student Tosin Aiyelokun on having their paper,
‘Overcoming Blind Spots in Interaction Design: A Case Study in Designing for African AIDS Orphan Care Communities’ accepted to the Journal of Information Technologies & International Development.
Abstract: “The process of designing technological systems for the developing world is a challenging task. In a project that we undertook in the summer of 2007 using an iterative design process, we attempted to develop delay-tolerant networking technology on mobile phones to support workers at AIDS orphanages in Zambia and South Africa. Despite extensive preparations and research, we found that conditions on the ground were radically different from what we had anticipated, and we had to quickly re-group and redefine our strategic goals. This experience made us realize that, for this type of design, resiliency and contingency planning were the most valuable tools in our interaction design toolbox. In response to changing conditions, we rapidly prototyped a different mobile telephony application called Nomatic*AID that provides a feedback loop among donors, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and field workers. In this paper, we reflect on the redirection of our work once we reached our field site and our resulting acceptance of design blind spots. We present lessons we learned to help practitioners meet their goals in the presence of considerable and obvious design distance.”
Get a copy of this paper here: http://itidjournal.org/itid/article/view/424/192
Congratulations Don, Susan and Tosin!
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Tags: Africa, AIDS, children, design, Donald J. Patterson, HCI, Health Care, ICT4D, NGO, paper published, Susan Sim, telecom companies, Tosin Aiyelokun |
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| Posted: 12/18/09 4:22 pm UTC by djp3 Make the First Comment | |
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Zoinks!
“Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers’ (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.
The evidence documenting this surveillance program comes in the form of an audio recording of Sprint’s Manager of Electronic Surveillance, who described it during a panel discussion at a wiretapping and interception industry conference, held in Washington DC in October of 2009.”
Source:
slight paranoia: 8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight
I think the thing that makes this noteworthy is the portal. If such a thing really does exist, then it lowers the barrier to getting cell-phone based location on people to such a degree that the potential for abuse is much higher. The next barrier that would make abuse easier would be if the portal simultaneously sourced from multiple carriers besides Sprint.
I have a curious feeling that this will result in more bizarre social behavior than it will in violations of civil liberties: Now off-duty cops will be showing up at all of the same clubs as Paris Hilton, information about Tiger Woods’ latest travels will be leaked to TMZ, and important people will stop owning phones and opt to use their assistant’s phones instead.
The Grameen phone ladies are coming to the U.S., but for very different reasons.
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Tags: mobile phone, surveillance, telecom companies |
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| Posted: 12/1/09 2:09 pm UTC by djp3 Add Your Comment | |
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