industryterm:internet

The Gnawing Anxiety of Having an Algorithm as a Boss - Bloomberg
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-26/the-gnawing-anxiety-of-having-an-algorithm-as-a-boss

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I recently got the internet in my apartment fixed, and my technician had an unusual request. I’d get an automated call after he left asking me how satisfied I was with the service, he explained, and he wanted me to rate him 9 out of 10. I asked why, and he said there was a glitch with the system that recorded any 10 rating as a 1, and it was important for him to keep his rating up.

Since then, a couple of people have told me that technicians working for the company have been making this exact request for at least two years. A representative for Spectrum, my internet provider, said they were worrying over nothing. The company had moved away from the 10-point rating system, he said, adding that customer feedback isn’t “tied to individual technicians’ compensation.”

But even if the Spectrum glitch exists only in the lore of cable repairmen, the anxiety it’s causing them is telling. Increasingly, workers are impacted by automated decision-making systems, which also affects people who read the news, or apply for loans, or shop in stores. It only makes sense that they’d try to bend those systems to their advantage.

There exist at least two separate academic papers with the title “Folk Theories of Social Feeds,” detailing how Facebook users divine what its algorithm wants, then try to use those theories to their advantage.

People with algorithms for bosses have particular incentive to push back. Last month, a local television station in Washington covered Uber drivers who conspire to turn off their apps simultaneously in order to trick its system into raising prices.

Alex Rosenblat, the author of Uberland, told me that these acts of digital disobedience are essentially futile in the long run. Technology centralizes power and information in a way that overwhelms mere humans. “You might think you’re manipulating the system,” she says, but in reality “you’re working really hard to keep up with a system that is constantly experimenting on you.”

Compared to pricing algorithms, customer ratings of the type that worried my repairman should be fairly straightforward. Presumably it’s just a matter of gathering data and calculating an average. But online ratings are a questionable way to judge people even if the data they’re based on are pristine—and they probably aren’t. Academics have shown that customer ratings reflect racial biases. Complaints about a product or service can be interpreted as commentary about the person who provided it, rather than the service itself. And companies like Uber require drivers to maintain such high ratings that, in effect, any review that isn’t maximally ecstatic is a request for punitive measures.

#Travail #Surveillance #Algorithme #Stress #Société_contrôle

View from Nowhere. Is it the press’s job to create a community that transcends borders?

A few years ago, on a plane somewhere between Singapore and Dubai, I read Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983). I was traveling to report on the global market for passports—how the ultrawealthy can legally buy citizenship or residence virtually anywhere they like, even as 10 million stateless people languish, unrecognized by any country. In the process, I was trying to wrap my head around why national identity meant so much to so many, yet so little to my passport-peddling sources. Their world was the very image of Steve Bannon’s globalist nightmare: where you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too many passports.

Anderson didn’t address the sale of citizenship, which only took off in earnest in the past decade; he did argue that nations, nationalism, and nationality are about as organic as Cheez Whiz. The idea of a nation, he writes, is a capitalist chimera. It is a collective sense of identity processed, shelf-stabilized, and packaged before being disseminated, for a considerable profit, to a mass audience in the form of printed books, news, and stories. He calls this “print-capitalism.”

Per Anderson, after the printing press was invented, nearly 600 years ago, enterprising booksellers began publishing the Bible in local vernacular languages (as opposed to the elitist Latin), “set[ting] the stage for the modern nation” by allowing ordinary citizens to participate in the same conversations as the upper classes. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the proliferation (and popularity) of daily newspapers further collapsed time and space, creating an “extraordinary mass ceremony” of reading the same things at the same moment.

“An American will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his 240,000,000–odd fellow Americans,” Anderson wrote. “He has no idea of what they are up to at any one time.” But with the knowledge that others are reading the same news, “he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity.”

Should the press be playing a role in shaping not national identities, but transnational ones—a sense that we’re all in it together?

Of course, national presses enabled more explicit efforts by the state itself to shape identity. After the US entered World War I, for instance, President Woodrow Wilson set out to make Americans more patriotic through his US Committee on Public Information. Its efforts included roping influential mainstream journalists into advocating American-style democracy by presenting US involvement in the war in a positive light, or simply by referring to Germans as “Huns.” The committee also monitored papers produced by minorities to make sure they supported the war effort not as Indians, Italians, or Greeks, but as Americans. Five Irish-American papers were banned, and the German-American press, reacting to negative stereotypes, encouraged readers to buy US bonds to support the war effort.

The US media played an analogous role in selling the public on the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But ever since then, in the digital economy, its influence on the national consciousness has waned. Imagined Communities was published seven years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, twenty-two years before Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, and a couple of decades before the internet upended print-capitalism as the world knew it (one of Anderson’s footnotes is telling, if quaint: “We still have no giant multinationals in the world of publishing”).

Since Trump—a self-described nationalist—became a real contender for the US presidency, many news organizations have taken to looking inward: consider the running obsession with the president’s tweets, for instance, or the nonstop White House palace intrigue (which the president invites readily).

Meanwhile, the unprofitability of local and regional papers has contributed to the erosion of civics, which, down the line, makes it easier for billionaires to opt out of old “imagined communities” and join new ones based on class and wealth, not citizenship. And given the challenges humanity faces—climate change, mass migration, corporate hegemony, and our relationships to new technologies—even if national papers did make everyone feel like they shared the same narrative, a renewed sense of national pride would prove impotent in fighting world-historic threats that know no borders.

Should the press, then, be playing an analogous role in shaping not national identities, but transnational ones—a sense that we’re all in it together? If it was so important in shaping national identity, can it do so on a global scale?

Like my passport-buying subjects, I am what Theresa May, the former British prime minister, might call a “citizen of nowhere.” I was born in one place to parents from another, grew up in a third, and have lived and traveled all over. That informs my perspective: I want deeply for there to be a truly cosmopolitan press corps, untethered from national allegiances, regional biases, class divisions, and the remnants of colonial exploitation. I know that’s utopian; the international working class is hardly a lucrative demographic against which publishers can sell ads. But we seem to be living in a time of considerable upheaval and opportunity. Just as the decline of religiously and imperially organized societies paved the way for national alternatives, then perhaps today there is a chance to transcend countries’ boundaries, too.

Does the US media help create a sense of national identity? If nationalism means putting the interests of one nation—and what its citizens are interested in—before more universal concerns, then yes. Most journalists working for American papers, websites, and TV write in English with a national audience (or regional time zone) in mind, which affects how we pitch, source, frame, and illustrate a story—which, in turn, influences our readers, their country’s politics, and, down the line, the world. But a news peg isn’t an ideological form of nationalism so much as a practical or methodological one. The US press feeds off of more pernicious nationalisms, too: Donald Trump’s false theory about Barack Obama being “secretly” Kenyan, disseminated by the likes of Fox and The Daily Caller, comes to mind.

That isn’t to say that global news outlets don’t exist in the US. When coaxing subscribers, the Financial Times, whose front page often includes references to a dozen different countries, openly appeals to their cosmopolitanism. “Be a global citizen. Become an FT Subscriber,” read a recent banner ad, alongside a collage featuring the American, Chinese, Japanese, Australian, and European Union flags (though stories like the recent “beginner’s guide to buying a private island” might tell us something about what kind of global citizen they’re appealing to).

“I don’t think we try to shape anyone’s identity at all,” Gillian Tett, the paper’s managing editor for the US, says. “We recognize two things: that the world is more interconnected today than it’s ever been, and that these connections are complex and quite opaque. We think it’s critical to try to illuminate them.”

For Tett, who has a PhD in social anthropology, money serves as a “neutral, technocratic” starting point through which to understand—and tie together—the world. “Most newspapers today tend to start with an interest in politics or events, and that inevitably leads you to succumb to tribalism, however hard you try [not to],” Tett explains. “If you look at the world through money—how is money going around the world, who’s making and losing it and why?—out of that you lead to political, cultural, foreign-policy stories.”

Tett’s comments again brought to mind Imagined Communities: Anderson notes that, in 18th-century Caracas, newspapers “began essentially as appendages of the market,” providing commercial news about ships coming in, commodity prices, and colonial appointments, as well as a proto–Vows section for the upper crust to hate-read in their carriages. “The newspaper of Caracas quite naturally, and even apolitically, created an imagined community among a specific assemblage of fellow-readers, to whom these ships, brides, bishops, and prices belonged,” he wrote. “In time, of course, it was only to be expected that political elements would enter in.”

Yesterday’s aristocracy is today’s passport-buying, globe-trotting one percent. The passport brokers I got to know also pitched clients with the very same promise of “global citizenship” (it sounds less louche than “buy a new passport”)—by taking out ads in the Financial Times. Theirs is exactly the kind of neoliberal “globalism” that nationalist politicians like Trump have won elections denouncing (often hypocritically) as wanting “the globe to do well, frankly, not caring about our country so much.” Isn’t upper-crust glibness about borders, boundaries, and the value of national citizenship part of what helped give us this reactionary nativism in the first place?

“I suspect what’s been going on with Brexit and maybe Trump and other populist movements [is that] people. . . see ‘global’ as a threat to local communities and businesses rather than something to be welcomed,” Tett says. “But if you’re an FT reader, you see it as benign or descriptive.”

Among the largest news organizations in the world is Reuters, with more than 3,000 journalists and photographers in 120 countries. It is part of Thomson Reuters, a truly global firm. Reuters does not take its mandate lightly: a friend who works there recently sent me a job posting for an editor in Gdynia, which, Google clarified for me, is a city in the Pomeranian Voivodeship of Poland.

Reuters journalists cover everything from club sports to international tax evasion. They’re outsourcing quick hits about corporate earnings to Bangalore, assembling teams on multiple continents to tackle a big investigation, shedding or shuffling staff under corporate reorganizations. Perhaps unsurprisingly, “more than half our business is serving financial customers,” Stephen Adler, the editor in chief, tells me. “That has little to do with what country you’re from. It’s about information: a central-bank action in Europe or Japan may be just as important as everything else.”

Institutionally, “it’s really important and useful that we don’t have one national HQ,” Adler adds. “That’s the difference between a global news organization and one with a foreign desk. For us, nothing is foreign.” That approach won Reuters this year’s international Pulitzer Prize for uncovering the mass murder of the Rohingya in Myanmar (two of the reporters were imprisoned as a result, and since freed); it also comes through especially sharply in daily financial stories: comprehensive, if dry, compendiums of who-what-where-when-why that recognize the global impact of national stories, and vice versa. A recent roundup of stock movements included references to the US Fed, China trade talks, Brexit, monetary policy around the world, and the price of gold.

Adler has led the newsroom since 2011, and a lot has changed in the world. (I worked at Reuters between 2011 and 2013, first as Adler’s researcher and later as a reporter; Adler is the chair of CJR’s board.) Shortly after Trump’s election, Adler wrote a memo affirming the organization’s commitment to being fair, honest, and resourceful. He now feels more strongly than ever about judiciously avoiding biases—including national ones. “Our ideology and discipline around putting personal feelings and nationality aside has been really helpful, because when you think about how powerful local feelings are—revolutions, the Arab Spring—we want you writing objectively and dispassionately.”

The delivery of stories in a casual, illustrated, highly readable form is in some ways more crucial to developing an audience than subject matter.

Whether global stories can push communities to develop transnationally in a meaningful way is a harder question to answer; it seems to impugn our collective aptitude for reacting to problems of a global nature in a rational way. Reuters’s decision not to fetishize Trump hasn’t led to a drop-off in US coverage—its reporters have been especially strong on immigration and trade policy, not to mention the effects of the new administration on the global economy—but its stories aren’t exactly clickbait, which means ordinary Americans might not encounter them at the top of their feed. In other words, having a global perspective doesn’t necessarily translate to more eyeballs.

What’s more, Reuters doesn’t solve the audience-class problem: whether readers are getting dispatches in partner newspapers like The New York Times or through the organization’s Eikon terminal, they tend to be the sort of person “who does transnational business, travels a good deal, is connected through work and media, has friends in different places, cares about what’s going on in different places,” Adler says. “That’s a pretty large cohort of people who have reason to care what’s going on in other places.”

There are ways to unite readers without centering coverage on money or the markets. For a generation of readers around the world, the common ground is technology: the internet. “We didn’t pick our audience,” Ben Smith, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed, tells me over the phone. “Our audience picked us.” He defines his readers as a cohort aged 18–35 “who are on the internet and who broadly care about human rights, global politics, and feminism and gay rights in particular.”

To serve them, BuzzFeed recently published a damning investigative report into the World Wildlife Fund’s arming of militias in natural reserves; a (not uncontroversial) series on Trump’s business dealings abroad; early exposés of China’s detention of Uighur citizens; and reports on child abuse in Australia. Climate—“the central challenge for every newsroom in the world”—has been harder to pin down. “We don’t feel anyone has cracked it. But the shift from abstract scientific [stories] to coverage of fires in California, it’s a huge change—it makes it more concrete,” Smith says. (My husband is a reporter for BuzzFeed.)

The delivery of these stories in a casual, illustrated, highly readable form is in some ways more crucial to developing an audience than subject matter. “The global political financial elites have had a common language ever since it was French,” Smith says. “There is now a universal language of internet culture, [and] that. . . is how our stuff translates so well between cultures and audiences.” This isn’t a form of digital Esperanto, Smith insists; the point isn’t to flatten the differences between countries or regions so much as to serve as a “container” in which people from different regions, interest groups, and cultures can consume media through references they all understand.

BuzzFeed might not be setting out to shape its readers’ identities (I certainly can’t claim to feel a special bond with other people who found out they were Phoebes from the quiz “Your Sushi Order Will Reveal Which ‘Friends’ Character You’re Most Like”). An audience defined by its youth and its media consumption habits can be difficult to keep up with: platforms come and go, and young people don’t stay young forever. But if Anderson’s thesis still carries water, there must be something to speaking this language across cultures, space, and time. Call it “Web vernacular.”

In 2013, during one of the many recent and lengthy US government shutdowns, Joshua Keating, a journalist at Slate, began a series, “If It Happened There,” that imagined how the American media would view the shutdown if it were occurring in another country. “The typical signs of state failure aren’t evident on the streets of this sleepy capital city,” Keating opens. “Beret-wearing colonels have not yet taken to the airwaves to declare martial law. . . .But the pleasant autumn weather disguises a government teetering on the brink.”

It goes on; you get the idea. Keating’s series, which was inspired by his having to read “many, many headlines from around the world” while working at Foreign Policy, is a clever journalistic illustration of what sociologists call “methodological nationalism”: the bias that gets inadvertently baked into work and words. In the Middle East, it’s sectarian or ethnic strife; in the Midwest, it’s a trigger-happy cop and a kid in a hoodie.

His send-ups hit a nerve. “It was huge—it was by far the most popular thing I’ve done at Slate,” Keating says. “I don’t think that it was a shocking realization to anyone that this kind of language can be a problem, but sometimes pointing it out can be helpful. If the series did anything, it made people stop and be conscious of how. . . our inherent biases and perspectives will inform how we cover the world.”

Curiously, living under an openly nationalist administration has changed the way America—or at the very least, a significant part of the American press corps—sees itself. The press is a de facto opposition party, not because it tries to be, but because the administration paints it that way. And that gives reporters the experience of working in a place much more hostile than the US without setting foot outside the country.

Keating has “semi-retired” the series as a result of the broad awareness among American reporters that it is, in fact, happening here. “It didn’t feel too novel to say [Trump was] acting like a foreign dictator,” he says. “That was what the real news coverage was doing.”

Keating, who traveled to Somaliland, Kurdistan, and Abkhazia to report his book Invisible Countries (2018), still thinks the fastest and most effective way to form an international perspective is to live abroad. At the same time, not being bound to a strong national identity “can make it hard to understand particular concerns of the people you’re writing about,” he says. It might be obvious, but there is no one perfect way to be internationally minded.

Alan Rusbridger—the former editor of The Guardian who oversaw the paper’s Edward Snowden coverage and is now the principal at Lady Margaret Hall, a college at Oxford University—recognizes the journalistic and even moral merits of approaching news in a non-national way: “I think of journalism as a public service, and I do think there’s a link between journalism at its best and the betterment of individual lives and societies,” he says. But he doesn’t have an easy formula for how to do that, because truly cosmopolitan journalism requires both top-down editorial philosophies—not using certain phrasings or framings that position foreigners as “others”—and bottom-up efforts by individual writers to read widely and be continuously aware of how their work might be read by people thousands of miles away.

Yes, the starting point is a nationally defined press, not a decentralized network, but working jointly helps pool scarce resources and challenge national or local biases.

Rusbridger sees potential in collaborations across newsrooms, countries, and continents. Yes, the starting point is a nationally defined press, not a decentralized network; but working jointly helps pool scarce resources and challenge national or local biases. It also wields power. “One of the reasons we reported Snowden with the Times in New York was to use global protections of human rights and free speech and be able to appeal to a global audience of readers and lawyers,” Rusbridger recalls. “We thought, ‘We’re pretty sure nation-states will come at us over this, and the only way to do it is harness ourselves to the US First Amendment not available to us anywhere else.’”

In employing these tactics, the press positions itself in opposition to the nation-state. The same strategy could be seen behind the rollout of the Panama and Paradise Papers (not to mention the aggressive tax dodging detailed therein). “I think journalists and activists and citizens on the progressive wing of politics are thinking creatively about how global forces can work to their advantage,” Rusbridger says.

But he thinks it all starts locally, with correspondents who have fluency in the language, culture, and politics of the places they cover, people who are members of the communities they write about. That isn’t a traditional foreign-correspondent experience (nor indeed that of UN employees, NGO workers, or other expats). The silver lining of publishing companies’ shrinking budgets might be that cost cutting pushes newsrooms to draw from local talent, rather than send established writers around. What you gain—a cosmopolitanism that works from the bottom up—can help dispel accusations of media elitism. That’s the first step to creating new imagined communities.

Anderson’s work has inspired many an academic, but media executives? Not so much. Rob Wijnberg is an exception: he founded the (now beleaguered) Correspondent in the Netherlands in 2013 with Anderson’s ideas in mind. In fact, when we speak, he brings the name up unprompted.

“You have to transcend this notion that you can understand the world through the national point of view,” he says. “The question is, What replacement do we have for it? Simply saying we have to transcend borders or have an international view isn’t enough, because you have to replace the imagined community you’re leaving behind with another one.”

For Wijnberg, who was a philosophy student before he became a journalist, this meant radically reinventing the very structures of the news business: avoiding covering “current events” just because they happened, and thinking instead of what we might call eventful currents—the political, social, and economic developments that affect us all. It meant decoupling reporting from national news cycles, and getting readers to become paying “members” instead of relying on advertisements.

This, he hoped, would help create a readership not based on wealth, class, nationality, or location, but on borderless, universal concerns. “We try to see our members. . . as part of a group or knowledge community, where the thing they share is the knowledge they have about a specific structural subject matter,” be it climate, inequality, or migration, Wijnberg says. “I think democracy and politics answers more to media than the other way around, so if you change the way media covers the world you change a lot.”

That approach worked well in the Netherlands: his team raised 1.7 million euros in 2013, and grew to include 60,000 members. A few years later, Wijnberg and his colleagues decided to expand into the US, and with the help of NYU’s Jay Rosen, an early supporter, they made it onto Trevor Noah’s Daily Show to pitch their idea.

The Correspondent raised more than $2.5 million from nearly 50,000 members—a great success, by any measure. But in March, things started to get hairy, with the publication abruptly pulling the plug on opening a US newsroom and announcing that staff would edit stories reported from the US from the original Amsterdam office instead. Many of the reasons behind this are mundane: visas, high rent, relocation costs. And reporters would still be reporting from, and on, the States. But supporters felt blindsided, calling the operation a scam.

Today, Wijnberg reflects that he should have controlled the messaging better, and not promised to hire and operate from New York until he was certain that he could. He also wonders why it matters.

“It’s not saying people who think it matters are wrong,” he explains. “But if the whole idea of this kind of geography and why it’s there is a construct, and you’re trying to think about transcending it, the very notion of Where are you based? is secondary. The whole point is not to be based anywhere.”

Still: “The view from everywhere—the natural opposite—is just as real,” Wijnberg concedes. “You can’t be everywhere. You have to be somewhere.”

And that’s the rub: for all of nationalism’s ills, it does instill in its subjects what Anderson calls a “deep, horizontal comradeship” that, while imagined, blossoms thanks to a confluence of forces. It can’t be replicated supranationally overnight. The challenge for a cosmopolitan journalism, then, is to dream up new forms of belonging that look forward, not backward—without discarding the imagined communities we have.

That’s hard; so hard that it more frequently provokes a retrenchment, not an expansion, of solidarity. But it’s not impossible. And our collective futures almost certainly depend on it.

▻https://www.cjr.org/special_report/view-from-nowhere.php
#journalisme #nationalisme #Etat-nation #communauté_nationale #communauté_internationale #frontières #presse #médias

#DOAJ (#Directory_of_Open_Access_Journals)

DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. DOAJ is independent. All funding is via donations, 40% of which comes from sponsors and 60% from members and publisher members. All DOAJ services are free of charge including being indexed in DOAJ. All data is freely available.

▻https://doaj.org
#liste #OA #open_access #édition_scientifique #université #revues #revues_scientifiques

Must we decolonise #Open_Access? Perspectives from Francophone Africa

A long read featuring the recent work of Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou and Florence Piron, on how a truly open and inclusive ‘Open Access’ movement must include those at the periphery

I recently watched the recording of the fantastic Diversity, Equity and Inclusion session at OpenCon, and I was struck by the general theme of how ‘openness’ isn’t necessarily the force for equality that we perhaps think it is, and how issues of power, exploitation, and hierarchy means that it should be understood differently according to the context in which it is applied. In the session, Denisse Albornoz used the expression of ‘situated openness’ to describe how our Northern conception of openness should not be forced on anyone or any group – it needs to be understood first in individual contexts of historical injustices and post-colonial power structures.

What stood out for me most in this session, however, (because it related most to my work) was Cameroonian Thomas Mboa’s presentation, which talked about the ‘neo-colonial face of open access’. The presentation employed some very striking critical terms such as ‘cognitive injustice’ and ‘epistemic alienation’ to Open Access.

I’ve always known that the Open Access movement was far from perfect, but at least it’s moving global science publishing in the right direction, right? Can working towards free access and sharing of research really be ‘neo-colonial’ and lead to ‘alienation’ for users of research in the Global South? And if this really is the case, how can we ‘decolonise’ open access?

Thomas didn’t get much time to expand on some of the themes he presented, so I got in contact to see if he had covered these ideas elsewhere, and fortunately he has, through his participation in ‘Projet SOHA’ . This is a research-action project that’s been working on open science, empowerment and cognitive justice in French-speaking Africa and Haiti from 2015-17. He provided me with links to four publications written in French by himself and his colleagues from the project – Florence Piron (Université Laval, Quebec, Canada), Antonin Benoît Diouf (Senegal), and Marie Sophie Dibounje Madiba (Cameroon), and many others.

These articles are a goldmine of provocative ideas and perspectives on Open Access from the Global South, which should challenge all of us in the English-speaking academic publishing community. Therefore, I decided to share some excerpts and extended quotes from these articles below, in amongst some general comments from my (admittedly limited) experience of working with researchers in the Global South.

The quotes are taken from the following book and articles, which I recommend reading in full (these are easily translatable using the free tool Google Translate Web, which correctly translated around 95% of the text).

Chapter 2 – ‘Les injustices cognitives en Afrique subsaharienne : réflexions sur les causes et les moyens de lutte’ – Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou (2016), in Piron, Dibounje Madiba et Regulus 2016 (below)
Justice cognitive, libre accès et savoirs locaux – Collective book edited by Florence Piron, Marie Sophie Dibounje Madiba and Samuel Regulus (2016) (CC-BY) ▻https://scienceetbiencommun.pressbooks.pub/justicecognitive1
Qui sait ? Le libre accès en Afrique et en Haïti – Florence Piron (2017) (CC-BY) (Soon to be published in English in Forthcoming Open Divide. Critical Studies of Open Access (Herb & Schöpfel ed), Litwinbooks
Le libre accès vu d’Afrique francophone subsaharienne – Florence Piron, Antonin Benoît Diouf, Marie Sophie Dibounje Madiba, Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou, Zoé Aubierge Ouangré, Djossè Roméo Tessy, Hamissou Rhissa Achaffert, Anderson Pierre and Zakari Lire (2017) (CC-BY-NC-SA)
Une autre science est possible. Récit d’une utopie concrète dans la Francophonie (le projet SOHA) – Revue Possibles, 2016 (CC-BY)

Piron et al’s (2017) article starts with a stinging critique of those of us in our Northern scholarly publishing community cliques, and our never-ending open access debates over technicalities:

“… there are many debates in this community, including on the place of open licenses in open access (is an article really in open access if it is not freely reusable in addition to being freely accessible?), on the legitimacy of the fees charged to authors by certain journals choosing open access, on the quality and evaluation of open access journals, on the very format of the journal as the main vehicle for the dissemination of scientific articles or on the type of documents to be included in institutional or thematic open archives (only peer-reviewed articles or any document related to scientific work?).

Viewed from Sub-Saharan Francophone Africa, these debates may seem very strange, if not incomprehensible. Above all, they appear very localized: they are debates of rich countries, of countries of the North, where basic questions such as the regular payment of a reasonable salary to academics, the existence of public funding for research, access to the web, electricity, well-stocked libraries and comfortable and safe workplaces have long been settled.” Piron et al. (2017)

… and their critique gets more and more scathing from here for the Open Access movement. OA advocates – tighten your seatbelts – you are not going to find this a comfortable ride.

“… a conception of open access that is limited to the legal and technical questions of the accessibility of science without thinking about the relationship between center and periphery can become a source of epistemic alienation and neocolonialism in the South”. Piron et al. (2017)

“Is open access the solution to the documented shortcomings of these African universities and, in doing so, a crucial means of getting scientific research off the ground? I would like to show that this is not the case, and to suggest that open access can instead become a neo-colonial tool by reinforcing the cognitive injustices that prevent African researchers from fully deploying their research capacities in the service of the community and sustainable local development of their country.” Piron (2017)

Ouch. To understand these concepts of ‘cognitive injustice’ and ‘epistemic alienation’, it helps to understand this ‘world system’ and the power relationship between the centre and the periphery. This is based on Wallerstein’s (1996) model, which Thomas featured in his OpenCon slides:

http://journalologik.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/thomas-768x432.png

“… a world-system whose market unit is the scientific publication circulating between many instances of high economic value, including universities, research centers, science policies, journals and an oligopoly of for-profit scientific publishers (Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon, 2015).” Piron et al. (2017)

“… we believe that science, far from being universal, has been historically globalized. Inspiring us, like Keim (2010) and a few others (Polanco, 1990), from Wallerstein’s (1996) theory, we consider that it constitutes a world-system whose market unit is the scientific publication. Produced mainly in the North, this merchandise obeys standards and practices that are defined by the ‘center’ of the system, namely the main commercial scientific publishers (Larivière, Haustein, & Mongeon, 2015), and their university partners are the US and British universities dominating the so-called world rankings. The semi-periphery is constituted by all the other countries of the North or emerging from the South which revolve around this center, adopting the English language in science and conforming to the model LMD (license, master, doctorate) imposed since the Bologna process to all the universities of the world with the aim of “normalizing” and standardizing the functioning of this world-system. The periphery then refers to all the countries that are excluded from this system, which produce no or very few scientific publications or whose research work is invisible, but to whom the LMD model has also been imposed (Charlier, Croché, & Ndoye 2009, Hountondji 2001)”. Piron et al. (2017)

So, the continuing bias and global focus towards the powerful ‘center’ of the world-system leads to the epistemic alienation of those on the periphery, manifesting in a ‘spiritual colonisation’:

“… this attitude that drives us to want to think about local problems with Western perspective is a colonial legacy to which many African citizens hang like a ball.” Mboa (2016).

So where does Open Access fit in with this world-system?

“… if open access is to facilitate and accelerate the access of scientists from the South to Northern science without looking into the visibility of knowledge of the South, it helps to redouble their alienation epistemic without contributing to their emancipation. Indeed, by making the work of the center of the world-system of science even more accessible, open access maximizes their impact on the periphery and reinforces their use as a theoretical reference or as a normative model, to the detriment of local epistemologies.” Piron et al. (2017)

Rethinking Northern perspectives

This should be an eye-opening analysis for those of us who assumed that access to research knowledge in the North could only be a good thing for the South. Perhaps we need to examine the arrogance behind our narrow worldview, and consider more deeply the power at the heart of such a one-way knowledge exchange. Many of us might find this difficult, as:

“The idea that open access may have the effects of neocolonialism is incomprehensible to people blind to epistemological diversity, who reduce the proclaimed universalism of Western science to the impoverished model of the standards imposed by the Web of Science model. For these people, the invisibility of a publication in their numerical reference space (located in the center of the world-system) is equivalent to its non-existence. The idea that valid and relevant knowledge can exist in another form and independently of the world-system that fascinates them is unthinkable.” Piron et al. (2017)

Having spent a little time at scholarly publishing events in the Global North, I can attest that the mindset described above is common. There are kind thoughts (and a few breadcrumbs thrown in the form of grants and fellowships) towards those on the periphery, but it is very much in the mindset of helping those from the Global South ‘catch up’. Our mindset is very much as Piron describes here:

“If one sticks to the positivist view that “science” is universal – even if its “essence” is symbolized by the American magazine Science – then indeed African science, that is to say in Africa, is late, and we need to help it develop so that it looks more and more like the North”. Piron (2017)

And whilst in the North we may have a lot of respect for different cultural perspectives, genuine reciprocal exchanges of research knowledge are rare. We are supremely confident that our highly-developed scientific publishing model deserves to be at the centre of our system. This can lead to selective blindness about the rigorousness of our science and our indexed journals, in spite of the steady drip drip drip of reports of biased peer review, data fraud and other ethical violations in ‘high-impact’ Northern journals, exposed in places like retraction watch.

North/South research collaborations are rarely equitable – southern partners often complain of being used as data-gatherers rather than intellectual equals and partners in research projects, even when the research is being carried out in their own country.

“These [Northern] partners inevitably guide the problems and the methodological and epistemological choices of African researchers towards the only model they know and value, the one born at the center of the world-system of science – without questioning whether this model is relevant to Africa and its challenges”. Piron et al (2017).

These issues of inequity in collaborative relationships and publication practices seem inextricably linked, which is not surprising when the ultimate end goal of research is publishing papers in Northern journals, rather than actually solving Southern development challenges.

“In this context, open access may appear as a neocolonial tool, as it facilitates access by Southern researchers to Northern science without ensuring reciprocity. In doing so, it redoubles the epistemic alienation of these researchers instead of contributing to the emancipation of the knowledge created in the universities of the South by releasing them from their extraversion. Indeed, by making the work produced in the center of the world-system even more accessible, free access maximizes their impact on the periphery and reinforces their use as a theoretical reference or as a normative model, to the detriment of local epistemologies, which generates situations absurd as, for example, the use of a theoretical framework related to wage labor in the Paris region to analyze the work of women in northern Mali” Piron (2017)

“The resulting consequences are, in particular, the teachers of the Southern countries who quote and read only writers from the North and impose them on their students and the libraries of our universities who do everything to subscribe to Western scholarly journals while they do not deal with our problems. (Mboa Nkoudou, 2016 )”

This is also a striking example:

“It is very sad to note that geographers in Ouagadougou are more familiar with European work on the Sahel than those at the Higher Institute of Sahel in Maroua, Cameroon.” Piron (2017)

The lack of equity in research knowledge exchange and collaboration is also caused by another one-way North to South flow: funding. Research in the South is often dependent on foreign funding. Big Northern donors and funders therefore set the standards and agendas in research, and in how the entire research funding system works. Southern partners rarely get to set the agenda, and researchers rarely get to develop the research questions that guide the research. They have to learn to jump through administrative hoops to become credible in the eyes of the Northern donor (for more information see ‘Who drives research in developing countries?‘).

Southern institutions are also compelled, via league tables such as the World Unviersity Rankings, to play the same game as institutions in the North. Institutions are ranked against each other according to criteria set in the North, one of which is citations (of course, only citations between journals in the Web of Science or Scopus, which is overwhelmingly Northern). And so to stay ‘competitive’, Southern institutions need their researchers to publish in Northern journals with Northern language and agendas.
Northern agendas and local innovation

Whilst it is tempting to think that the issues and criticism described above is mostly a problem for the social sciences and humanities, there are also real issues in the ‘hard’ sciences – perhaps not so much in their epistemological foundations – but in very practical issues of Northern research agendas. For example, Northern research, being based in Europe and the US, is overwhelmingly biased towards white people, in diversity of leadership, diversity of researchers, and most importantly in the whiteness of clinical trial subjects. This is problematic because different ethnic populations have different genetic makeups and differences due to geography, that mean they respond differently to treatments (see here, here and here). Are African and Asian researchers informed of this when they read research from so-called ‘international’ journals?

Furthermore, these Northern agendas can also mean that research focuses on drugs, equipment and treatments that are simply not suitable for developing country contexts. I was reminded of a discussion comment recently made by a Pakistani surgeon on the Northern bias of systematic reviews:

“There is a definite bias in this approach as almost all of the guidelines and systematic reviews are based on the research carried out in high income countries and the findings and the recommendations have little relevance to the patients, health care system and many a time serve no purpose to the millions of patients based in low resourced countries. e.g. I routinely used Phenol blocks for spasticity management for my patients which were abandoned two decades ago in the West. Results are great, and the patients can afford this Rs 200 phenol instead of Rs 15,000 Botox vial. But, unfortunately, I am unable to locate a single systematic review on the efficacy of phenol as all published research in the last decade was only on the use of Botox in the management of spasticity.” Farooq Rathore (HIFA mailing list, 2016).

Similarly, I’ve read research papers from the South that report on innovative approaches to medical treatments and other problems that utilise lower-cost equipment and methodologies (in fact, as is argued here, research in low-resource environments can often be more efficient and innovative, containing many lessons we, in the North, could learn from). This point is also made by Piron et al:

“… the production of technical and social innovations is rich in Sub-Saharan French-speaking Africa, as evidenced by the high number of articles on this subject in the Sci-Dev magazine, specializing in science for development, or in the ecofin site, an economic information agency turned towards Africa. But these are mostly local innovations that mobilize local resources and often recycled materials to, for example, introduce electricity into a village, better irrigate fields or offer lighting after sunset. The aim of these innovations is to contribute to local development and not to the development of international markets, unlike innovations designed in the North which, while targeting the countries of the South, remain highly marketable – just think of milk powder or GMO seeds. The issue of open access to scientific publications is a very secondary issue for local innovators in such a context”. (Piron et al. 2016)

These examples of innovation aside, there are many cases where the ‘epistemic alienation’ described above leads to ‘the exclusion or contempt of local knowledge’ (Mboa, 2016), even amongst researchers in the global South.

“In fact, Western culture abundantly relayed in the media and textbooks is shown to be superior to other cultures. This situation is pushing Africans to multiply their efforts to reach the ideal of life of the “white”. This situation seems to block their ability to think locally, or even to be reactive. Thus, faced with a given situation specific to the African context, many are those who first draw on the resources of Western thinking to propose elements of answers.” Mboa (2016)

Free and open access as ‘showcasing products’

The Research4Life (R4L) programme also comes in for criticism from Piron et al. which will come as a shock to Northern publishing people who often use the ‘… but they’ve got Research4Life’ line when faced with evidence of global research inequalities.

“… while pretending to charitably provide university libraries in the Global South with free access to pre-defined packages of paid journals from the North, this program, set up by for-profit scientific publishers, maintains the dependence of these libraries, limits their understanding of the true network of open access publications and, above all, improves the market for the products sold by these publishers.” Piron et al (2017)

“… this program encourages the continued reliance of these libraries on an external program, designed in the North and showcasing Northern products, while it may disappear as soon as this philanthropic desire is exhausted or as soon as trading partners will not find any more benefits.”

Whilst I still think R4L is a great initiative (I know many researchers in the Global South who are very appreciative of the programme), it’s difficult to disagree with the conclusion that:

‘… this program mainly improves the opportunities of Northern publishers without contributing to the sustainable empowerment of university libraries in the South … this charity seems very hypocritical, let alone arbitrary, since it can stop at any time.” Piron (2017)

Of course, the same could be said of Article Processing Charge (APC) waivers for developing country authors. Waivers are currently offered by the majority of journals from the big publishers (provided according to the same HINARI list of countries provided by Research4Life), although sometimes you have to dig deep into the terms and conditions pages to find them. Waivers are good for publishers to showcase their corporate social responsibility and provide diversity of authorship. However, they are unsustainable – this charity is unlikely to last forever, especially as they rely on the pool of Southern authors being relatively limited. It should also be noted that developing countries with the most active, growing researcher communities such as Nigeria, South Africa and India do not qualify for either R4L access or APC waivers.

Speaking of APCs, something I observe regularly amongst Southern researchers is a confusion over the ‘Gold’ OA author-pays model, and this too is noted:

“In northern countries, many researchers, especially in STEM (Björk and Solomon, 2012) [ 7 ], believe (wrongly) that open access now means “publication fees charged to authors” … this commercial innovation appears to be paying off, as these costs appear to be natural to researchers.” Piron (2017)

This also appears to be paying off in the Global South – authors seem resigned to pay some kind of charge to publish, and it is common to have to point out to authors that over two-thirds of OA journals and 99% of subscription journals do not charge to publish (although, the rise of ‘predatory’ journals may have magnified this misunderstanding that pay-to-publish is the norm).

It may be tempting to think of these inequalities as an unfortunate historical accident, and that our attempts to help the Global South ‘catch up’ are just a little clumsy and patronising. However, Piron argues that this is no mere accident, but the result of colonial exploitation that still resonates in existing power structures today:

“Open access is then easily seen as a means of catching up, at least filling gaps in libraries and often outdated teaching […] Africa is considered as lagging behind the modern world, which would explain its underdevelopment, to summarize this sadly hegemonic conception of north-south relations. By charity, Northern countries then feel obliged to help, which feeds the entire industry surrounding development aid [….] this model of delay, violently imposed by the West on the rest of the world through colonization, has been used to justify the economic and cognitive exploitation (Connell, 2014) of colonized continents without which modernity could not have prospered.” Piron (2017)

To build the path or take the path?

Of course, the authors do admit that access to Northern research has a role to play in the Global South, provided the access is situated in local contexts:

“… African science should be an African knowledge, rooted in African contexts, that uses African epistemologies to answer African questions, while also using other knowledge from all over the world, including Western ones, if they are relevant locally.” Piron (2017)

However, the practical reality of Open Access for Southern researchers is often overstated. There is a crucial distinction between making content ‘open’ and providing the means to access that content. As Piron et al. 2017 say:

“To put a publication in open access: is it, to build the path (technical or legal) that leads to it, or is it to make it possible for people to take this path? This distinction is crucial to understand the difference in meaning of open access between the center and the periphery of the world-system of science, although only an awareness of the conditions of scientific research in the Southern countries makes it possible to visualize it, to perceive it.”

This crucial difference between availability and accessibility has also been explained by Anne Powell on Scholarly Kitchen. There are many complex barriers to ‘free’ and ‘open’ content actually being accessed and used. The most obvious of these barriers is internet connectivity, but librarian training, language and digital literacy also feature significantly:

“Finding relevant open access articles on the web requires digital skills that, as we have seen, are rare among Haitian and African students for whom the web sometimes comes via Facebook … Remember that it is almost always when they arrive at university that these students first touch a computer. The catching up is fast, but many reflexes acquired since the primary school in the countries of the North must be developed before even being able to imagine that there are open access scientific texts on the web to make up for the lack of documents in the libraries. In the words of the Haitian student Anderson Pierre, “a large part of the students do not know the existence of these resources or do not have the digital skills to access and exploit them in order to advance their research project”. Piron (2017)

Barriers to local knowledge exchange

Unfortunately, this is made even more difficult by resistance and misunderstanding of the internet and digital tools from senior leadership in Africa:

“Social representations of the web, science and copyright also come into play, especially among older academics, a phenomenon that undermines the appropriation of digital technologies at the basis of open access in universities.” Piron et al. (2017)

“To this idea that knowledge resides only in printed books is added a representation of the web which also has an impact on the local resistance to open access: our fieldwork has allowed us to understand that, for many African senior academics, the web is incompatible with science because it contains only documents or sites that are of low quality, frivolous or entertaining. These people infer that science in open access on the web is of lower quality than printed science and are very surprised when they learn that most of the journals of the world-system of science exist only in dematerialized format. … Unfortunately, these resistances slow down the digitization and the web dissemination of African scientific works, perpetuating these absurd situations where the researchers of the same field in neighboring universities do not know what each other is doing”. Piron et al. (2017)

This complaint about in-country communication from researchers in the South can be common, but there are signs that open access can make a difference – as an example, in Sri Lanka, I’ve spoken to researchers who say that communicating research findings within the country has always been a problem, but the online portal Sri Lanka Journals Online (currently 77 open access Sri Lankan journals) has started to improve this situation. This project was many years in the making, and has involved training journal editors and librarians in loading online content and improving editorial practices for open access. The same, of course, could be said for African Journals Online, which has potential to facilitate sharing on a larger scale.

Arguably, some forms of institutional resistance to openness in the Global South have a neocolonial influence – universities have largely borrowed and even intensified the Northern ‘publish or perish’ mantra which focuses the academic rewards system almost entirely on journal publications, often in northern-indexed journals, rather than on impact on real world development.

“The system of higher education and research in force in many African countries remains a remnant of colonization, perpetuated by the reproduction, year after year, of the same ideals and principles. This reproduction is assured not by the old colonizers but by our own political leaders who are perpetuating a system structured according to a classical partitioning that slows down any possible communication between researchers within the country or with the outside world, even worse between the university and the immediate environment. For the ruling class, the changes taking place in the world and the society’s needs seem to have no direct link to the university.” Mboa (2016)

Mboa calls this partitioning between researchers and outsiders as “a tight border between society and science”:

“African researchers are so attached to the ideal of neutrality of science and concern of its ‘purity’ that they consider contacts with ordinary citizens as ‘risks’ or threats and that they prefer to evolve in their ‘ivory tower’. On the other hand, ordinary citizens feel so diminished compared to researchers that to talk to them about their eventual involvement in research is a taboo subject …” Mboa (2016)

Uncolonising openness

So what is the answer to all these problems? Is it in building the skills of researchers and institutions or a complete change of philosophy?

“The colonial origin of African science (Mvé-Ondo, 2005) is certainly no stranger to this present subjugation of African science to northern research projects, nor to its tendency to imitate Western science without effort. Contextualization, particularly in the quasi-colonial structuring of sub-Saharan African universities (Fredua-Kwarteng, 2015) and in maintaining the use of a colonial language in university education. Considering this institutionalized epistemic alienation as yet another cognitive injustice, Mvé-Ondo wonders “how to move from a westernization of science to a truly shared science” (p.49) and calls for “epistemological mutation”, “rebirth”, modernizing “African science at the crossroads of local knowledge and northern science – perhaps echoing the call of Fanon (1962/2002) for a “new thinking” in the Third World countries, detached from European model, decolonized.” Piron et al. (2017)

For this to happen, open access must be about more than just access – but something much more holistic and equitable:

“Can decentralized, decolonised open access then contribute to creating more cognitive justice in global scientific production? Our answer is clear: yes, provided that it is not limited to the question of access for scientific and non-scientific readers to scientific publications. It must include the concern for origin, creation, local publishing and the desire to ensure equity between the accessibility of the publications of the center of the world system and that of knowledge from the periphery. It thus proposes to replace the normative universalism of globalized science with an inclusive universalism, open to the ecology of knowledges and capable of building an authentic knowledge commons (Gruson-Daniel, 2015; Le Crosnier, 2015), hospitable for the knowledge of the North and the South”. Piron et al. (2017)

Mboa sees the solution to this multifaceted problem in ‘open science’:

“[Cognitive injustice comes via] … endogenous causes (citizens and African leaders) and by exogenous causes (capitalism, colonization, the West). The knowledge of these causes allowed me to propose ways to prevent our downfall. Among these means, I convened open science as a tool available to our leaders and citizens for advancing cognitive justice. For although the causes are endogenous and exogenous, I believe that a wound heals from the inside outwards.” Mboa (2016).

Mboa explains how open science approaches can overcome some of these problems in this book chapter, but here he provides a short summary of the advantages of open science for African research:

“It’s a science that rejects the ivory tower and the separation between scientists and the rest of the population of the country. In short, it’s a science released from control by a universal capitalist standard, by hierarchical authority and by pre-established scientific classes. From this perspective, open science offers the following advantages:

it brings science closer to society;
it promotes fair and sustainable development;
it allows the expression of minority and / or marginalized groups, as well as their knowledge;
it promotes original, local and useful research in the country;
it facilitates access to a variety of scientific and technical information;
it is abundant, recent and up to date;
it develops digital skills;
it facilitates collaborative work;
it gives a better visibility to research work.

By aiming to benefit from these advantages, researchers and African students fight cognitive injustice. For this, open access science relies on open access, free licenses, free computing, and citizen science.” Mboa (2016).

But in order for open science to succeed, digital literacy must be rapidly improved to empower students and researchers in the South:

“Promoting inclusive access therefore requires engaging at the same time in a decolonial critique of the relationship between the center and the periphery and urging universities in the South to develop the digital literacy of their student or teacher members.” Piron et al. (2017)

It also requires improving production of scientific works (‘grey’ literature, as well as peer-reviewed papers) in the South for a two-way North/South conversation:

“Then, we propose to rethink the usual definition of open access to add the mandate to enhance the visibility of scientific work produced in universities in the South and thus contribute to greater cognitive justice in global scientific production.” Piron (2017)

And providing open access needs to be understood in context:

“… if we integrate the concern for the enhancement of the knowledge produced in the periphery and the awareness of all that hinders the creation of this knowledge, then open access can become a tool of cognitive justice at the service of the construction of an inclusive universalism peculiar to a just open science.” Piron, Diouf, Madiba (2017)

In summary then, we need to rethink the way that the global North seeks to support the South – a realignment of this relationship from mere access to empowerment through sustainable capacity building:

“Africa’s scientific development aid, if it is needed, should therefore be oriented much less towards immediate access to Northern publications and more to local development of tools and the strengthening of the digital skills of academics and librarians. These tools and skills would enable them not only to take advantage of open access databases, but also to digitize and put open access local scientific works in open archives, journals or research centers.” Piron (2017)

So what next?

Even if you disagree with many the above ideas, I hope that this has provided many of you with some food for thought. Open Access must surely be about more than just knowledge flow from North to South (or, for that matter the academy to the public, or well-funded researchers to poorly funded researchers). Those on the periphery must also be given a significant voice and a place at the table. For this to happen, many researchers (and their equivalents outside academia) need training and support in digital skills; some institutional barriers also need to be removed or overcome; and of course a few cherished, long-held ideas must be seriously challenged.

“These injustices denote anything that diminishes the capacity of academics in these countries to deploy the full potential of their intellectual talents, their knowledge and their capacity for scientific research to serve their country’s sustainable local development”. Piron et al., (2016).

What do you think…?

▻http://journalologik.uk/?p=149
#édition_scientifique #OA #open_access #Afrique #Afrique_francophone #décolonisation #post-colonialisme

Quelques organismes qui défendent le domaine publique en Allemagne et ailleurs

Commons und Konvivialismus – Das Commons-Institut
▻https://commons-institut.org/commons-und-konvivialismus

https://i0.wp.com/commons-institut.org/wp-content/uploads/cropped-Icon_M_Farbe.jpg?fit=512%2C512&ssl=1

Das »Konvivialistische Manifest« (2014 auf Deutsch erschienen) hat die globale Debatte um die Frage neu formatiert, wie wir das Zusammenleben angesichts von Klimakatastrophe und Finanzkrisen gestalten wollen und müssen. Die Beiträge des Bandes »Konvivialismus. Eine Debatte« (Hg. Frank Adloff und Volker M. Heins, erschienen im Transcript-Verlag) eröffnen nun die Diskussion um die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des Manifests im deutschsprachigen Raum: Wo liegen seine Stärken, wo die Schwächen? Was hieße es, eine konviviale Gesellschaft anzustreben – in Politik, Kultur, Zivilgesellschaft und Wirtschaft? Welche neuen Formen des Zusammenlebens sind wünschenswert und welche Chancen bestehen, sie durchzusetzen? Acht Mitglieder des Commons-Instituts haben einen Kommentar-Beitrag zu dem Diskussionsband geschrieben

Free software is a matter of liberty, not price — Free Software Foundation — working together for free software
▻https://www.fsf.org/about

https://static.fsf.org/common/img/logo-new.png

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom. We defend the rights of all software users.
As our society grows more dependent on computers, the software we run is of critical importance to securing the future of a free society. Free software is about having control over the technology we use in our homes, schools and businesses, where computers work for our individual and communal benefit, not for proprietary software companies or governments who might seek to restrict and monitor us. The Free Software Foundation exclusively uses free software to perform its work.

GNU und die Freie-Software-Bewegung
▻http://www.gnu.org/home.de.html

http://www.gnu.org/graphics/heckert_gnu.transp.small.png

GNU ist ein Betriebssystem, das Freie Software ist ‑ d. h. es respektiert die Freiheit der Nutzer. Das GNU-Betriebssystem besteht aus GNU-Paketen (Programme, die speziell vom GNU-Projekt freigegeben wurden) sowie von Dritten freigegebene Freie Software. Die Entwicklung von GNU ermöglichte es einen Rechner ohne Software benutzen zu können, die Ihre Freiheit mit Füßen treten würde.

Commons einfach erklärt - Hauptsache Commons
▻https://www.hauptsache-commons.de/home/commons-einfach-erkl%C3%A4rt

https://image.jimcdn.com/app/cms/image/transf/dimension=807x10000:format=png/path/sd38660f5c3d6912e/image/icf21ea3d1099e67b/version/1472539859/image.png

Die Haupt-Commons-Formel lautet:
∑[aD+nW] = bL

aD = anderes DENKEN
nW = neues WIRTSCHAFTEN
bL = besseres LEBEN

Das Handeln nach Commons-Prinzipien ermöglicht eine Gesellschaft ohne soziale Widersprüche oder ökonomische Krisen. Commons ersetzen die alten Strukturen. Sie bilden sich selbst organisierende Netzwerke aus, geeignet für Innovationen, da sie die kollektive Intelligenz für das Wohlergehen Aller nutzen.

Wildnis in Deutschland - Hauptsache Commons
▻https://www.hauptsache-commons.de/spezielles/wildnis-in-deutschland

Die Initiative „Wildnis in Deutschland“ wird von 18 Naturschutzorganisationen getragen. Die Beteiligten finden, dass es ’höchste Zeit für mehr Wildnis in Deutschland’ ist !

Sie unterstützen die Gründung von Nationalparks und die Schaffung von Wildnisgebieten und stärken die Öffentlichkeitsarbeit rund um das Thema Wildnis. Gemeinsam mit vielen Partnern und Initiativen sind sie aktiv für mehr faszinierende große Wildnisgebiete in Deutschland – für uns, unsere Kinder und Enkel.

Creativity & Innovation | Electronic Frontier Foundation
▻https://www.eff.org/issues/innovation

https://www.eff.org/sites/all/modules/custom/eff_library/images/eff-logo-stack-black.svg

Our digital future depends on our ability to access, use, and build on technology. A few media or political interests shouldn’t have unfair technological or legal advantages over the rest of us. Unfortunately, litigious copyright and patent owners can abuse the law to inhibit fair use and stifle competition. Internet service providers can give established content companies an advantage over startups and veto the choices you make in how to use the Internet. The Electronic Frontier Foundation fights against these unfair practices and defends digital creators, inventors, and ordinary technology users. We work to protect and strengthen fair use, innovation, open access, net neutrality, and your freedom to tinker.

In principle, intellectual property laws (or IP law, a catchall term for copyright, patents, and trademarks) should serve the public in a number of ways. Copyrights provide economic incentives for authors and artists to create and distribute new expressive works. Patents reward inventors for sharing new inventions with the public, granting them a temporary and limited monopoly on them in return for contributing to the public body of knowledge. Trademarks help protect customers by encouraging companies to make sure products match the quality standards the public expects.

#domaine_publique #creative_commons #convivialité #Allemagne

Renaud Epstein & station urbaner kulturen

(Feben Amara, Jochen Becker, Christian Hanussek, Eva Hertzsch, Adam Page) with Oliver Pohlisch and Birgit Schlieps

One day, one ZUP, one postcard (2014-…), 2018

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/kbrt94ul89pf031/IMG_8366-1.jpg?dl=0 https://dl.dropbox.com/s/6hiy70q8dcinrto/Berlin%20Hellersdorf.jpeg?dl=0

Wallpaper / Display cabinet
Collection station urbaner kulturen, Berlin-Hellersdorf

The sociologist Renaud Epstein’s project has first and foremost been an online format since its initiation in 2014: he posts a new postcard of large housing estates (Zones à Urbaniser par Priorité / ZUP) on his Twitter account every day. From a time when France dreamed of being modern and urban and believed in its architectural utopias, the ZUP postcards evoke at best a golden era, at worst a contemporary delusion.

▻https://www.dropbox.com/s/vte4ejv9wsumzyh/ARLES%202019-PRESS%20KIT-kl.pdf?dl=0

The Berlin collective station urbaner kulturen, based in the last big housing estate built in the GDR, has extracted sections from Epstein’s Twitter timeline in order to materialize the interaction between internet users and images. Their project «Going out of Circles / Kreise ziehen» presents a wider series of exhibitions that aims to create connections between the housing estates on the periphery of urban and economic centers, around Berlin and beyond.

A display case with original postcards next to the Twitter wallpaper emphasises the different readings of formats of communication.

Postcards – News from a Dream World
Musée départemental Arles Antique

1 July - 25 August / 10 - 18

Exhibition curators: Magali Nachtergael and Anne Reverseau

Eric Baudart & Thu-Van Tran (1972 et 1979), Fredi Casco (1967), Moyra Davey (1958), documentation céline duval (1974), Renaud Epstein & station urbane kulturen (1971 et créé en 2014), Jean Geiser (1848-1923), Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige (1969), Roc Herms (1978), Susan Hiller (1940-2019), John Hinde (1916-1997), Katia Kameli (1973), Aglaia Konrad (1960), Valérie Mréjen (1969), Martin Parr (1952), Mathieu Pernot (1970), Brenda Lou Schaub (1993), Stephen Shore (1947), John Stezaker (1948), Oriol Vilanova (1980), William Wegman (1943)

The postcard is the ultimate circulating picture, constantly subject to a sense of déjà-vu. Throughout the twentieth century, it went hand in hand with the bottling of the visible world, the rise of image globalization and mass tourism. Collectors, hoarders, retouchers and iconographers seize existing pictures to give them a new meaning, clarify their status or context.

By comparing this artistic vision with the making of postcards, this exhibition questions what they show and tell of the world, like a visual anthropology. What did they convey throughout the twentieth century, during their hour of glory? What vision of the world did they plant in the minds of their recipients, who got them from relatives and friends?

Both a symbol of our private and collective imagination, the postcard represents an illusion, always close to hand. It shows us a dream world in which can project ourselves, as in a desirable fiction story.

www.rencontres-arles.com/en/expositions/view/779/cartes-postales

▻https://archiv.ngbk.de/projekte/station-urbaner-kulturen-hellersdorf-seit-2014
▻https://www.ngbk.de/en/program/initiative-urbane-kulturen

#renaud_epstein #cartes_postales

Facebook Takes a Step Into Education Software - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/04/technology/facebook-education-initiative-aims-to-help-children-learn-at-their-own-pace

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/09/04/business/04FACEBOOK/04FACEBOOK-facebookJumbo.jpg

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook, which transformed communication with its social networking service, now wants to make a similar impact on education.

The Silicon Valley company announced on Thursday that it was working with a local charter school network, Summit Public Schools, to develop software that schools can use to help children learn at their own pace. The project has been championed by Mark Zucker

berg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, and one of his top lieutenants, Chris Cox.

“We’ve seen that there’s an opportunity to help apply our skills to the future of education, and we all wanted to find a way to help make an impact by doing what we do best — building software,” Mr. Cox wrote in a blog post announcing the initiative.❞

“It’s really driven by this idea that we want to put learning in the hands of kids and the control back in the hands of kids,” Ms. Tavenner said in a telephone interview. The software, she said, allows students to work with teachers to create tailored lessons and projects. Teachers can also administer individualized quizzes that the software can grade and track.

The platform, which is separate from the Facebook social network, is now being used by nine Summit schools and about 20 others. Ultimately, Ms. Tavenner said, “our motivation is to share it with everyone and anyone who wants it,” including other charters and public school districts. The software would be free for all users.

Like Internet.org, Facebook’s latest education initiative is not quite philanthropy and not quite business. The company owns the rights to the contributions it makes to Summit’s original software and could use that to eventually enter the education software business.

Mike Sego, the Facebook engineering director running the Summit software project, said making money was not an immediate goal. “Whenever I ask Mark, ‘Do I need to think of this as business?’ he always pushes back and says, ‘That shouldn’t be a priority right now. We should just continue making this better.’ ”

#Facebook #Education #Summit

Netblocks suit les interruptions de services sur internet au Venezuela, concomitantes aux interventions de Juan Guaidó. Ici, les coupures au moment du coup d’état raté du 30 avril.

Internet services restricted in Venezuela amid uprising - NetBlocks
▻https://netblocks.org/reports/internet-services-restricted-in-venezuela-amid-military-uprising-xAG4RGBz

Network data shows that Venezuela’s state-run internet provider ABA CANTV (AS8048) has restricted access to Twitter, Periscope, YouTube, Facebook and several other services after Juan Guaidó used Twitter to announce the final phase of Operation Freedom from the perimeter of a military base in La Carlota. The project, which has reportedly gained the support of defectors from the military, has the stated goal of reinstating democratic establishments in Venezuela.

Access to each of the services remains intermittently available as the restrictions do not appear to be 100% effective, matching the patterns of network outage observed in previous nationwide censorship incidents.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D5ZVOjPXsAA3zWT.jpg

With WhatsApp servers already unstable, Telegram messenger’s web interface and website have become fully unreachable for users of Venezuela’s state-run internet provider as of 21:00 UTC (17:00 VET). The two applications have been used extensively by Venezuelans to keep track of the situation in the country. Telegram includes blocking countermeasures which can allow the mobile version of the app to continue working:

https://netblocks.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2019/04/telegram-block-venezuela-2019-04-30.png

Internet access was finally restored towards the end of Tuesday, 20 minutes prior to a live-streamed speech by Nicolás Maduro:
▻https://twitter.com/netblocks/status/1123402465007874049/photo/1

Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an Elegant Weapon From a More Civilized Age to Slay Today’s Monopolies | Electronic Frontier Foundation
▻https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

https://www.eff.org/files/banner_library/interoperable-2.png

Voici ce que le mouvement pour le logiciel libre peut apprendre des tactiques des concurrents de Microsoft - si vous ne pouvez pas gagner contre les géants, profitez d’eux.

Today, Apple is one of the largest, most profitable companies on Earth, but in the early 2000s, the company was fighting for its life. Microsoft’s Windows operating system was ascendant, and Microsoft leveraged its dominance to ensure that every Windows user relied on its Microsoft Office suite (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc). Apple users—a small minority of computer users—who wanted to exchange documents with the much larger world of Windows users were dependent on Microsoft’s Office for the Macintosh operating system (which worked inconsistently with Windows Office documents, with unexpected behaviors like corrupting documents so they were no longer readable, or partially/incorrectly displaying parts of exchanged documents). Alternatively, Apple users could ask Windows users to export their Office documents to an “interoperable” file format like Rich Text Format (for text), or Comma-Separated Values (for spreadsheets). These, too, were inconsistent and error-prone, interpreted in different ways by different programs on both Mac and Windows systems.

Apple could have begged Microsoft to improve its Macintosh offerings, or they could have begged the company to standardize its flagship products at a standards body like OASIS or ISO. But Microsoft had little motive to do such a thing: its Office products were a tremendous competitive advantage, and despite the fact that Apple was too small to be a real threat, Microsoft had a well-deserved reputation for going to enormous lengths to snuff out potential competitors, including both Macintosh computers and computers running the GNU/Linux operating system.

Apple did not rely on Microsoft’s goodwill and generosity: instead, it relied on reverse-engineering. After its 2002 “Switch” ad campaign—which begged potential Apple customers to ignore the “myths” about how hard it was to integrate Macs into Windows workflows—it intensified work on its iWork productivity suite, which launched in 2005, incorporating a word-processor (Pages), a spreadsheet (Numbers) and a presentation program (Keynote). These were feature-rich applications in their own right, with many innovations that leapfrogged the incumbent Microsoft tools, but this superiority would still not have been sufficient to ensure the adoption of iWork, because the world’s greatest spreadsheets are of no use if everyone you need to work with can’t open them.

What made iWork a success—and helped re-launch Apple—was the fact that Pages could open and save most Word files; Numbers could open and save most Excel files; and Keynote could open and save most PowerPoint presentations. Apple did not attain this compatibility through Microsoft’s cooperation: it attained it despite Microsoft’s noncooperation. Apple didn’t just make an “interoperable” product that worked with an existing product in the market: they made an adversarially interoperable product whose compatibility was wrested from the incumbent, through diligent reverse-engineering and reimplementation. What’s more, Apple committed to maintaining that interoperability, even though Microsoft continued to update its products in ways that temporarily undermined the ability of Apple customers to exchange documents with Microsoft customers, paying engineers to unbreak everything that Microsoft’s maneuvers broke. Apple’s persistence paid off: over time, Microsoft’s customers became dependent on compatibility with Apple customers, and they would complain if Microsoft changed its Office products in ways that broke their cross-platform workflow.

Since Pages’ launch, document interoperability has stabilized, with multiple parties entering the market, including Google’s cloud-based Docs offerings, and the free/open alternatives from LibreOffice. The convergence on this standard was not undertaken with the blessing of the dominant player: rather, it came about despite Microsoft’s opposition. Docs are not just interoperable, they’re adversarially interoperable: each has its own file format, but each can read Microsoft’s file format.

The document wars are just one of many key junctures in which adversarial interoperability made a dominant player vulnerable to new entrants:

Hayes modems
Usenet’s alt.* hierarchy
Supercard’s compatibility with Hypercard
Search engines’ web-crawlers
Servers of every kind, which routinely impersonate PCs, printers, and other devices

Scratch the surface of most Big Tech giants and you’ll find an adversarial interoperability story: Facebook grew by making a tool that let its users stay in touch with MySpace users; Google products from search to Docs and beyond depend on adversarial interoperability layers; Amazon’s cloud is full of virtual machines pretending to be discrete CPUs, impersonating real computers so well that the programs running within them have no idea that they’re trapped in the Matrix.

Adversarial interoperability converts market dominance from an unassailable asset to a liability. Once Facebook could give new users the ability to stay in touch with MySpace friends, then every message those Facebook users sent back to MySpace—with a footer advertising Facebook’s superiority—became a recruiting tool for more Facebook users. MySpace served Facebook as a reservoir of conveniently organized potential users that could be easily reached with a compelling pitch about why they should switch.

Today, Facebook is posting 30-54% annual year-on-year revenue growth and boasts 2.3 billion users, many of whom are deeply unhappy with the service, but who are stuck within its confines because their friends are there (and vice-versa).

A company making billions and growing by double-digits with 2.3 billion unhappy customers should be every investor’s white whale, but instead, Facebook and its associated businesses are known as “the kill zone” in investment circles.

Facebook’s advantage is in “network effects”: the idea that Facebook increases in value with every user who joins it (because more users increase the likelihood that the person you’re looking for is on Facebook). But adversarial interoperability could allow new market entrants to arrogate those network effects to themselves, by allowing their users to remain in contact with Facebook friends even after they’ve left Facebook.

This kind of adversarial interoperability goes beyond the sort of thing envisioned by “data portability,” which usually refers to tools that allow users to make a one-off export of all their data, which they can take with them to rival services. Data portability is important, but it is no substitute for the ability to have ongoing access to a service that you’re in the process of migrating away from.

Big Tech platforms leverage both their users’ behavioral data and the ability to lock their users into “walled gardens” to drive incredible growth and profits. The customers for these systems are treated as though they have entered into a negotiated contract with the companies, trading privacy for service, or vendor lock-in for some kind of subsidy or convenience. And when Big Tech lobbies against privacy regulations and anti-walled-garden measures like Right to Repair legislation, they say that their customers negotiated a deal in which they surrendered their personal information to be plundered and sold, or their freedom to buy service and parts on the open market.

But it’s obvious that no such negotiation has taken place. Your browser invisibly and silently hemorrhages your personal information as you move about the web; you paid for your phone or printer and should have the right to decide whose ink or apps go into them.

Adversarial interoperability is the consumer’s bargaining chip in these coercive “negotiations.” More than a quarter of Internet users have installed ad-blockers, making it the biggest consumer revolt in human history. These users are making counteroffers: the platforms say, “We want all of your data in exchange for this service,” and their users say, “How about none?” Now we have a negotiation!

Or think of the iPhone owners who patronize independent service centers instead of using Apple’s service: Apple’s opening bid is “You only ever get your stuff fixed from us, at a price we set,” and the owners of Apple devices say, “Hard pass.” Now it’s up to Apple to make a counteroffer. We’ll know it’s a fair one if iPhone owners decide to patronize Apple’s service centers.

This is what a competitive market looks like. In the absence of competitive offerings from rival firms, consumers make counteroffers by other means.

There is good reason to want to see a reinvigorated approach to competition in America, but it’s important to remember that competition is enabled or constrained not just by mergers and acquisitions. Companies can use a whole package of laws to attain and maintain dominance, to the detriment of the public interest.

Today, consumers and toolsmiths confront a thicket of laws and rules that stand between them and technological self-determination. To change that, we need to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, , patent law, and other rules and laws. Adversarial interoperability is in the history of every tech giant that rules today, and if it was good enough for them in the past, it’s good enough for the companies that will topple them in the future.

#adversarial_Interoperability #logiciel_libre #disruption

David Foster Wallace - The Dangers Of Internet & Media Addiction
▻https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/david-foster-wallace-the-dangers-of-internet-and-media-addiction

Decades ago, David Foster Wallace foresaw the problems that technology, media, and entertainment would cause for this generation. We now live in the internet/information age, where technology and...

The woman fighting back against India’s rape culture

When a man tried to rape #Usha_Vishwakarma she decided to fight back by setting up self-defence classes for women and girls.

At first, people accused her of being a sex worker. But now she runs an award-winning organisation and has won the community’s respect.

▻https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-48474708/the-woman-fighting-back-against-india-s-rape-culture
#Inde #résistance #femmes #culture_du_viol

We monitor and challenge internet censorship in China | GreatFire.org
▻https://en.greatfire.org

GreatFire Apps

FreeBrowser
►https://freebrowser.org
FreeBrowser is the only browser that allows Chinese internet users to directly access uncensored news. 40% of our users have never used a circumvention tool before.

FreeBooks
▻https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.greatfire.freebook
In an effort to crackdown on freedom of speech, the Chinese authorities have kidnapped and “disappeared” book publishers. FreeBooks fights back by making it easy for readers in China to get their hands on uncensored e-books and audio books, helping to inform and educate those who want to learn more.

GreatFire Websites

FreeBrowser StartPage
▻http://startpage.freebrowser.org/zh
We have directed Chinese internet users more than 13 million times to censored news stories about government corruption, politics, scandals and other “sensitive” information.

FreeWeChat
▻https://freewechat.com
No other website restores and republishes censored information from WeChat, China’s ubiquitous and most popular application. Our dataset grows larger each and every day and provides a real-time and accurate litmus test of the information that the Chinese authorities find most threatening.

FreeWeibo
▻https://freeweibo.com
We mimic the look and feel of the real Weibo website, but instead of presenting a “harmonized” version of the popular social media network, we restore and integrate censored and deleted posts (currently numbering more than 300,000), so that Chinese can access a real-time view of the real discussions that are taking place online in China.

FreeBrowser.org
►https://freebrowser.org
Promotes FreeBrowser.

Circumvention Central
▻https://cc.greatfire.org
No other website tests the speed and stability of free and paid circumvention tools from China. We provide an unbiased, data-driven view of what is working and what is not so that Chinese can make informed decisions when choosing a circumvention tool.

GreatFire Analyzer
▻https://greatfire.org/analyzer
No other website has accumulated as much data as we have around the blocking of websites and keywords. We make ourselves available to the media and have been quoted in thousands of news stories.

GreatFire.org
▻https://greatfire.org
This website.

GitHub Wiki
▻https://github.com/greatfire/wiki
Our GitHub wiki enables our users in China to download our apps directly without circumventing.

applecensorship.com
▻https://applecensorship.com

About Us

We are an anonymous organization based in China. We launched our first project in 2011 in an effort to help bring transparency to online censorship in China. Now we focus on helping Chinese to freely access information. Apart from being widely discussed in most major mass media, GreatFire has also been the subject of a number of academic papers from various research institutions. FreeWeibo.com won the 2013 Deutsche Welle “Best Of Online Activism” award in the “Best Innovation” category. In 2016, GreatFire won a Digital Activism fellowship from Index on Censorship.

#Chine #censure #vie_privée #surveillance

Taxi Industry Leaders Got Rich. Drivers Paid the Price. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/nyregion/newyorktoday/nyc-news-taxi-medallions.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/05/21/nyregion/21nytoday01/21nytoday01-facebookJumbo.jpg

In the past year and a half, eight professional drivers, including three taxi medallion owners, have died by suicide. Since 2016, 950 taxi drivers have filed for bankruptcy. And as of Monday, a city task force created last year to study the taxi industry had no members.

The Times published an investigation this week into what caused financial ruin for so many drivers.

Industry disrupters like Uber and Lyft have drawn lots of attention, but the real problem was that lenders made reckless loans as regulators looked on, my colleague Brian M. Rosenthal reported. The loans generated huge profits for lenders, as well as for city coffers.

The practices were similar to those that led to the housing market crash and global financial crisis of 2008. They also created what one analyst called “modern-day indentured servitude.”

Here are five takeaways from Mr. Rosenthal’s investigation.

[Read Part 1 of the investigation: How reckless loans devastated a generation of taxi drivers.]

Uber and Lyft did not cause the crisis in New York City’s yellow taxi industry

The taxi medallion bubble burst in 2014. Uber entered the city in 2011, and Lyft in 2014.

The internet-based ride-hailing companies may have hastened the crisis, but virtually all of the hundreds of industry veterans interviewed for the investigation said the industry would have collapsed regardless because of inflated medallion prices and risky lending practices.

City data shows that 97 percent of yellow cab rides start in central Manhattan, or at the airports, where Uber and Lyft are less popular.

On a per-cab basis, each taxi’s revenue has decreased by about 10 percent since Uber entered New York, according to the city’s data.

Taxi industry leaders artificially inflated the price of taxi medallions

To drive a yellow taxi in the city, you need a medallion.

After years of stability, medallion prices soared from $200,000 in 2002 to more than $1 million in 2014. Some industry leaders have admitted to intentionally causing prices to spike. During that time, revenue generated by taxis barely changed.

Taxi industry leaders steered drivers into reckless loans

From 2002 through 2014, about 4,000 people signed loans to buy taxi medallions.

Drivers borrowed up to $1 million, often without a down payment, according to financial documents. Many were required to repay their loans within three years, which was practically impossible, forcing them to extend the terms of their loans at inflated interest rates.

Hundreds of drivers signed interest-only loans requiring them to forfeit legal rights and indefinitely give up almost every dollar they earned.

You can imagine the toll: Some borrowed even more money, and a few, facing financial and other pressures, died by suicide.

[Read Part 2: How top officials counted money while drivers were trapped in loans.]

Lenders protected themselves by selling those loans

People who made risky taxi loans protected themselves by selling the loans to other institutions.

At the market’s height, the six nonprofit credit unions most involved in the industry sold about $3 billion in medallion loans to 122 other credit unions, according to financial disclosure forms.

Officials ignored years of warning signs

In 2010, a city employee wrote a report showing that cabbies weren’t making enough to support their loans.

In 2014, state inspectors gave a presentation to officials in Albany.

Earlier this year, Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker, shut the committee overseeing the industry, saying it had completed most of its work.

The state attorney general’s office said yesterday that it had opened an inquiry into the lending practices, while Mayor de Blasio ordered a city investigation into the brokers who helped arrange loans.

#USA #New_York #Taxi #Betrug #Ausbeutung

Orange’s Sea Cable Repair Fleet Looks Beyond Investment Boom
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-24/orange-s-sea-cable-repair-fleet-looks-beyond-investment-boom

https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iN4VGLD1mY8M/v2/740x-1.jpg

• Phone carrier assessing opportunities in offshore wind sector
• France sees strategic interest in marine cable expertise

For decades, ships owned by French phone carrier Orange SA have traveled the world’s oceans, installing and fixing the undersea cables that carry internet traffic from one continent to another.

The fleet of six run by Orange Marine is now looking to diversify, even with the biggest investment boom for the infrastructure since the 1990s. Instead of creating more business, the new high-capacity lines being financed by the tech giants are expected to put older cables out of service, meaning less work for the seaborne repairmen.

One cable that started up last year highlights the issue. The line, running from the U.S. state of Virginia to Sopelana, Spain, accounts for half the capacity of the dozen or so trans-Atlantic cables. Known as Marea, the 6,600-kilometer (4,101-mile) link owned by Facebook Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Telefonica SA’s Telxius offers the fastest data transmission speeds in the world.

Jean-Luc Vuillemin, who oversees Orange Marine, sees potential opportunities in servicing offshore wind turbines, he said in an interview on the Pierre de Fermat, a 100-meter ship named after the 17th-century mathematician and docked at the Brest port in northwest France.

“The ecosystem is pretty favorable right now but this may change in the future,” Vuillemin said. “You need to diversify when the business is in order, so we’re thinking about the next steps.”

Orange Marine is a small yet profitable business for France’s dominant phone carrier, generating about 100 million euros ($112 million) of annual sales out of Orange’s roughly 41 billion euros of revenue. But it’s considered a strategic asset by the company, whose largest shareholder is the French state.

Being able to quickly repair cables can be crucial in an emergency, as Algeria experienced in 2015 when a link between Annaba in the country’s northeast and Marseille in southern France was cut by an anchor, disrupting internet service in the North African nation for almost a week.

Together, Orange Marine and its France-based competitor at Nokia Oyj, Alcatel Submarine Networks, own about one-quarter of the 40 or so ships focused on subsea cables globally, Vuillemin said.

“Our Western economies are increasingly dependent on these subsea cables. Orange Marine provides strategic autonomy. It’s a matter of sovereignty,” he said.

At least 186 EU ISPs use deep-packet inspection to shape traffic, break net neutrality
▻https://www.zdnet.com/article/186-eu-isps-use-deep-packet-inspection-to-shape-traffic-break-net-neutrality

NGOs, academics warn about DPI’s impact on user privacy, that net neutrality might be watered down in the EU. Despite net neutrality regulation being in effect in the EU since 2016, European internet service providers are already breaking the rules and shaping traffic, according to a conglomerate of NGOs, academics, and private companies. Earlier this week, this group — made up of 45 entities from 15 countries — has sent an open letter to EU authorities expressing concerns about European (...)

#Deep_Packet_Inspection_(DPI) #neutralité #profiling #surveillance #web #EDRi

##Deep_Packet_Inspection__DPI_ ##neutralité

https://zdnet2.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2017/12/14/8ee9b2ad-929a-4c45-a6fb-44349c2e3ee8/thumbnail/770x578/61cf257f95e763ece526f704a62f5061/net-neutrality.jpg

James Charles, Tati Westbrook, and the Future of Beauty YouTube | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/james-charles-tati-westbrook-youtube-loyalty

https://media.wired.com/photos/5cdb3fd901925250f404c428/191:100/pass/Culture_Feature+art%20-%20Beauty%20YouTuber%20Feud%20-%20644711460%20-%201147423607.jpg

Over the past week, beauty YouTuber James Charles has been accused of betrayal, Coachella-based snobbery, and promotion of the wrong hair vitamin. He has been pronounced “canceled” by a jury of YouTube gossip channels, the shady Snapchat comments of his beauty guru peers, and, bluntly, by the hashtag #jamescharlesiscanceled. As punishment, culture-conscious former fans are setting their James Charles-branded makeup on fire. In the court of internet culture, destruction of property is a sentence—not a crime.

On TikTok, the preferred social media platform of many Youths, setting James Charles’ merchandize ablaze has become its own meme, in much the same way destroying Gillette razors and Nike sneakers became online phenomenons when customers became disgruntled with those companies’ actions. From a strictly monetary point of view, it’s a rather poor form of protest—the only wallet they’re hurting is their own, and often the meme just becomes a form of free advertising for the person or organization they’re attempting to smear. But while these scandals and the memes they’ve spawned are deeply embroiled in internet capitalism, they’re not actually about money.

Loyalty politics have consumed influencer culture. The spark of this scandal—the end of Charles’ friendship with Westbrook—is ultimately a matter of betrayal, and many fans are reacting as though Charles’ alleged misconduct is a betrayal of them personally. Part of that is the result of internet capitalism: young, savvy fans like Charles’ know that their loyal viewership is ultimately what gives Charles his influence and therefore pays his bills. Just like Westbrook, fans have given Charles both money and (money-making) time, and he hasn’t upheld his side of the contract.

What’s curious, though, is how little that contract has to do with what Charles is actually selling: makeup and beauty advice. These days, subscribing to James Charles doesn’t just mean you like his makeup looks, it means you endorse him as a person and condone his behavior online and off. People take the influencers you follow as a kind of character reference, and an indicator of your politics. For other influencers, failure to sever ties after a cancellation is an internet culture faux pas that can create a scandal of its own, which is why influencers from Jeffree Star to the Kardashians have unfollowed Charles on social media, and why internet sleuths bothered to check whether they had in the first place. That anxiousness has bled over to fans. It’s not enough to quietly unsubscribe. You have to publicly set any evidence of your former allegiances aflame.

#Influenceurs #Beauté #Culture_numérique #Meme_culture

BDS = Beautiful, Diverse, Sensational: Israel fights Eurovision boycott campaign using Google ads
The new PR campaign attempts to counter BDS by putting up ads that use the same acronym but lead to a website exalting Israel
Reuters - May 10, 2019 5:46 PM
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-fights-eurovision-boycott-campaign-using-google-ads-1.7220938

https://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.7220960.1557500059!/image/1628628735.jpg_gen/derivatives/headline_1200x630/1628628735.jpg

Israel has launched a PR campaign to counter calls for a boycott of the upcoming Eurovision Song Contest final in Tel Aviv, using Google ads which refer to the boycott but lead to a glossy website extolling Israel.

The international boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) movement dismissed the tactic as “crude propaganda”.

BDS has called on artists, music fans and broadcasters to avoid the 2019 contest, arguing that it amounts to “whitewashing” Israel’s policies towards Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel calls international boycotts discriminatory and anti-Semitic.

Internet advertisements on Google featuring the words “boycott” and “Eurovision” encourage searchers to click on a link that, in fact, leads them to a pro-Israel website which - in a play on the BDS initials - extols Israel as “Beautiful, Diverse, Sensational”.

#BDS

China working on data privacy law but enforcement is a stumbling block | South China Morning Post
▻https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3008844/china-working-data-privacy-law-enforcement-stumbling-block

En Chine des scientifiques s’inquiètent de la collection de données sans limites et des abus possibles par le gouvernment et des acteurs privés. Au niveau politique on essaye d’introduire des lois protégeant les données et la vie privée. D’après l’article les véritables problèmes se poseront lors de l’implémentation d’une nouvelle législation en la matière.

Echo Xie 5 May, 2019 - Biometric data in particular needs to be protected from abuse from the state and businesses, analysts say
Country is expected to have 626 million surveillance cameras fitted with facial recognition software by 2020

In what is seen as a major step to protect citizens’ personal information, especially their biometric data, from abuse, China’s legislators are drafting a new law to safeguard data privacy, according to industry observers – but enforcement remains a major concern.

“China’s private data protection law will be released and implemented soon, because of the fast development of technology, and the huge demand in society,” Zeng Liaoyuan, associate professor at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, said in an interview .

Technology is rapidly changing life in China but relevant regulations had yet to catch up, Zeng said.

Artificial intelligence and its many applications constitute a major component of China’s national plan. In 2017, the “Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan” called for the country to become the world leader in AI innovation by 2030.

Biometrics authentication is used in computer science as an identification or access control. It includes fingerprinting, face recognition, DNA, iris recognition, palm prints and other methods.

In particular, the use of biometric data has grown exponentially in key areas: scanning users’ fingerprints or face to pay bills, to apply for social security qualification and even to repay loans. But the lack of an overarching law lets companies gain access to vast quantities of an individual’s personal data, a practice that has raised privacy concerns.

During the “two sessions” last month, National People’s Congress spokesman Zhang Yesui said the authorities had hastened the drafting of a law to protect personal data, but did not say when it would be completed or enacted.

One important focus, analysts say, is ensuring that the state does not abuse its power when collecting and using private data, considering the mass surveillance systems installed in China.

“This is a big problem in China,” said Liu Deliang, a law professor at Beijing Normal University. “Because it’s about regulating the government’s abuse of power, so it’s not only a law issue but a constitutional issue.”

The Chinese government is a major collector and user of privacy data. According to IHS Markit, a London-based market research firm, China had 176 million surveillance cameras in operation in 2016 and the number was set to reach 626 million by 2020.

In any proposed law, the misuse of data should be clearly defined and even the government should bear legal responsibility for its misuse, Liu said.

“We can have legislation to prevent the government from misusing private data but the hard thing is how to enforce it.”

Especially crucial, legal experts say, is privacy protection for biometric data.

“Compared with other private data, biometrics has its uniqueness. It could post long-term risk and seriousness of consequence,” said Wu Shenkuo, an associate law professor at Beijing Normal University.

“Therefore, we need to pay more attention to the scope and limitations of collecting and using biometrics.”

Yi Tong, a lawmaker from Beijing, filed a proposal concerning biometrics legislation at the National People’s Congress session last month.

“Once private biometric data is leaked, it’s a lifetime leak and it will put the users’ private data security into greater uncertainty, which might lead to a series of risks,” the proposal said.

Yi suggested clarifying the boundary between state power and private rights, and strengthening the management of companies.

In terms of governance, Wu said China should specify the qualifications entities must have before they can collect, use and process private biometric data. He also said the law should identify which regulatory agencies would certify companies’ information.

There was a need to restrict government behaviour when collecting private data, he said, and suggested some form of compensation for those whose data was misused.

“Private data collection at the government level might involve the need for the public interest,” he said. “In this case, in addition to ensuring the legal procedure, the damage to personal interests should be compensated.”

Still, data leaks, or overcollecting, is common in China.

A survey released by the China Consumers Association in August showed that more than 85 per cent of respondents had suffered some sort of data leak, such as their cellphone numbers being sold to spammers or their bank accounts being stolen.

Another report by the association in November found that of the 100 apps it investigated, 91 had problems with overcollecting private data.

One of them, MeituPic, an image editing software program, was criticised for collecting too much biometric data.

The report also cited Ant Financial Services, the operator of the Alipay online payments service, for the way it collects private data, which it said was incompatible with the national standard. Ant Financial is an affiliate of Alibaba Group, which owns the South China Morning Post.

In January last year, Ant Financial had to apologise publicly for automatically signing up users for a social credit programme without obtaining their consent.

“When a company asks for a user’s private data, it’s unscrupulous, because we don’t have a law to limit their behaviour,” Zeng said.

“Also it’s about business competition. Every company wants to hold its customers, and one way is to collect their information as much as possible.”

Tencent and Alibaba, China’s two largest internet companies, did not respond to requests for comment about the pending legislation.

#Chine #droit #vie_privée #surveillance #politique

The Terrifying Potential of the 5G Network | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/the-terrifying-potential-of-the-5g-network

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5cc0bd2cd8527f31de9666c3/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/Halpern-5G.jpg

Two words explain the difference between our current wireless networks and 5G: speed and latency. 5G—if you believe the hype—is expected to be up to a hundred times faster. (A two-hour movie could be downloaded in less than four seconds.) That speed will reduce, and possibly eliminate, the delay—the latency—between instructing a computer to perform a command and its execution. This, again, if you believe the hype, will lead to a whole new Internet of Things, where everything from toasters to dog collars to dialysis pumps to running shoes will be connected. Remote robotic surgery will be routine, the military will develop hypersonic weapons, and autonomous vehicles will cruise safely along smart highways. The claims are extravagant, and the stakes are high. One estimate projects that 5G will pump twelve trillion dollars into the global economy by 2035, and add twenty-two million new jobs in the United States alone. This 5G world, we are told, will usher in a fourth industrial revolution.

A totally connected world will also be especially susceptible to cyberattacks. Even before the introduction of 5G networks, hackers have breached the control center of a municipal dam system, stopped an Internet-connected car as it travelled down an interstate, and sabotaged home appliances. Ransomware, malware, crypto-jacking, identity theft, and data breaches have become so common that more Americans are afraid of cybercrime than they are of becoming a victim of violent crime. Adding more devices to the online universe is destined to create more opportunities for disruption. “5G is not just for refrigerators,” Spalding said. “It’s farm implements, it’s airplanes, it’s all kinds of different things that can actually kill people or that allow someone to reach into the network and direct those things to do what they want them to do. It’s a completely different threat that we’ve never experienced before.”

Spalding’s solution, he told me, was to build the 5G network from scratch, incorporating cyber defenses into its design.

There are very good reasons to keep a company that appears to be beholden to a government with a documented history of industrial cyber espionage, international data theft, and domestic spying out of global digital networks. But banning Huawei hardware will not secure those networks. Even in the absence of Huawei equipment, systems still may rely on software developed in China, and software can be reprogrammed remotely by malicious actors. And every device connected to the fifth-generation Internet will likely remain susceptible to hacking. According to James Baker, the former F.B.I. general counsel who runs the national-security program at the R Street Institute, “There’s a concern that those devices that are connected to the 5G network are not going to be very secure from a cyber perspective. That presents a huge vulnerability for the system, because those devices can be turned into bots, for example, and you can have a massive botnet that can be used to attack different parts of the network.”

This past January, Tom Wheeler, who was the F.C.C. chairman during the Obama Administration, published an Op-Ed in the New York Times titled “If 5G Is So Important, Why Isn’t It Secure?” The Trump Administration had walked away from security efforts begun during Wheeler’s tenure at the F.C.C.; most notably, in recent negotiations over international standards, the U.S. eliminated a requirement that the technical specifications of 5G include cyber defense. “For the first time in history,” Wheeler wrote, “cybersecurity was being required as a forethought in the design of a new network standard—until the Trump F.C.C. repealed it.” The agency also rejected the notion that companies building and running American digital networks were responsible for overseeing their security. This might have been expected, but the current F.C.C. does not consider cybersecurity to be a part of its domain, either. “I certainly did when we were in office,” Wheeler told me. “But the Republicans who were on the commission at that point in time, and are still there, one being the chairman, opposed those activities as being overly regulatory.”

Opening up new spectrum is crucial to achieving the super-fast speeds promised by 5G. Most American carriers are planning to migrate their services to a higher part of the spectrum, where the bands are big and broad and allow for colossal rivers of data to flow through them. (Some carriers are also working with lower-spectrum frequencies, where the speeds will not be as fast but likely more reliable.) Until recently, these high-frequency bands, which are called millimetre waves, were not available for Internet transmission, but advances in antenna technology have made it possible, at least in theory. In practice, millimetre waves are finicky: they can only travel short distances—about a thousand feet—and are impeded by walls, foliage, human bodies, and, apparently, rain.

Deploying millions of wireless relays so close to one another and, therefore, to our bodies has elicited its own concerns. Two years ago, a hundred and eighty scientists and doctors from thirty-six countries appealed to the European Union for a moratorium on 5G adoption until the effects of the expected increase in low-level radiation were studied. In February, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, took both the F.C.C. and F.D.A. to task for pushing ahead with 5G without assessing its health risks. “We’re kind of flying blind here,” he concluded. A system built on millions of cell relays, antennas, and sensors also offers previously unthinkable surveillance potential. Telecom companies already sell location data to marketers, and law enforcement has used similar data to track protesters. 5G will catalogue exactly where someone has come from, where they are going, and what they are doing. “To give one made-up example,” Steve Bellovin, a computer-science professor at Columbia University, told the Wall Street Journal, “might a pollution sensor detect cigarette smoke or vaping, while a Bluetooth receiver picks up the identities of nearby phones? Insurance companies might be interested.” Paired with facial recognition and artificial intelligence, the data streams and location capabilities of 5G will make anonymity a historical artifact.

To accommodate these limitations, 5G cellular relays will have to be installed inside buildings and on every city block, at least. Cell relays mounted on thirteen million utility poles, for example, will deliver 5G speeds to just over half of the American population, and cost around four hundred billion dollars to install. Rural communities will be out of luck—too many trees, too few people—despite the F.C.C.’s recently announced Rural Digital Opportunity Fund.

Deploying millions of wireless relays so close to one another and, therefore, to our bodies has elicited its own concerns. Two years ago, a hundred and eighty scientists and doctors from thirty-six countries appealed to the European Union for a moratorium on 5G adoption until the effects of the expected increase in low-level radiation were studied. In February, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, took both the F.C.C. and F.D.A. to task for pushing ahead with 5G without assessing its health risks. “We’re kind of flying blind here,” he concluded. A system built on millions of cell relays, antennas, and sensors also offers previously unthinkable surveillance potential. Telecom companies already sell location data to marketers, and law enforcement has used similar data to track protesters. 5G will catalogue exactly where someone has come from, where they are going, and what they are doing. “To give one made-up example,” Steve Bellovin, a computer-science professor at Columbia University, told the Wall Street Journal, “might a pollution sensor detect cigarette smoke or vaping, while a Bluetooth receiver picks up the identities of nearby phones? Insurance companies might be interested.” Paired with facial recognition and artificial intelligence, the data streams and location capabilities of 5G will make anonymity a historical artifact.

#Surveillance #Santé #5G #Cybersécurité

How healthy is the internet? — The Internet Health Report 2019 — The Internet Health Report 2019
▻https://internethealthreport.org/2019?
Plein de bonnes questions ...

... you will not be getting a simple yes or no answer.

As you may have gathered, this publication is neither a country-level index nor a doomsday clock. We invite you to join us in assessing what it means for the internet to be healthy, and to participate in setting an agenda for how we can work together to create an internet that truly puts people first.

Our intention with this compilation of research, interviews and analysis (designed with input from hundreds of readers in collaboration with over 200 experts) is to show that while the worldwide consequences of getting things wrong with the internet could be huge – for peace and security, for political and individual freedoms, for human equality – the problems are never so great that nothing can be done. More people than you imagine are working to make the internet healthier, and getting things right, by applying their skills, creativity, and even personal bravery, to business, technology, activism, policy and regulation, education and community development.

This annual report is a call to action to recognize the things that are having an impact on the internet today through research and analysis, and to embrace the notion that we as humans can change how we make money, govern societies, and interact with one another online.

#internet #technologie #politique

How the utopian vision of Web 3.0 clashes with reality
▻https://hackernoon.com/how-the-utopian-vision-of-web-3-0-clashes-with-reality-60a8dfb2fb3b?sour

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The internet as we know it is broken. Google and Facebook have created data silos in which we have lost control over our information. You’ve heard that story a dozen times. But according to the people working on Web 3.0 they are able to fix all of that.Web 3.0 was proposed as the next evolutionary stage the internet might enter. In the early 90ies the first internet browser marks the beginning of the world wide web. Back then people were only able to access static websites without any interactive content — pretty boring from today’s perspective. However, people would often self host the data they are sharing and thus have more control about what they share with whom. The downside was that this made publishing content on the internet only accessible to those who possessed the right (...)

#blockchain #hackernoon-top-story #web-utopia #web3 #privacy

How To Boost Your Business With Residential Proxies : 5 Real-life Use Cases
▻https://hackernoon.com/how-to-boost-your-business-with-residential-proxies-5-real-life-use-case

Image credit: UnsplashMasking your IP address might be useful in a range of situations from accessing blocked content to bypassing anti-bot systems implemented by search engines and other online services. Here are several ways of organizing proxies:Residential #proxy — IP addresses that are assigned to homeowners by the ISP are called residential. These addresses are flagged in regional internet registries. Residential proxies provided by services like Infatica use such IP addresses because all requests that are sent via them are indistinguishable from those generated by regular users.Data center proxy — Such proxies are not connected to the ISP, while addresses are assigned by hosting providers who’ve purchased large pools of IP addresses.Shared proxy — In this case a proxy can be used by (...)

#privacy #seo #private-proxies #residential-proxies

Top green #mining projects
▻https://hackernoon.com/top-green-mining-projects-a3127a88f8b1?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4

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Top Green Mining Crypto ProjectsThe advantage of bubbles, when they pop, is that they make it possible to do a big spring cleaning. And, on the side of the mining services provider, we can say that the purge was severe.Why that?Let’s go back a few months ago…- The sector has been the target of many scams (it has been highly targeted, as have been the exchange and #blockchain projects). - The price of cryptocurrencies has fallen sharply, making unprofitable most of the mines that had been built in a hurry, with machines that are not very efficient and use a huge amount of energy.- Mining has been criticized in all major media for its impact on the climate, has been hijacked by Javascript hacks on contaminated sites to unknowingly mine using the computers of the Internet users.- Etc.In (...)

#cryptocurrency #ethereum

#dns 101
▻https://hackernoon.com/dns-101-fdcbdbe9ccf6?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*eudhAwCgF58Wj7Ur96dIQA.jpeg

▻https://medium.com/media/a0a23c93ed5dce1af090260ec69339f5/hrefJon Christensen and Chris Hickman of Kelsus teach a primer on the domain name system (DNS) and explain what happens when someone types a URL (i.e., Internet link) into a browser. They demystify the flow process to help you understand how DNS works and the mechanics involved.Some of the highlights of the show include:What is DNS? Fundamental past and present protocol for Internet; connection is made via friendly Internet Protocol (IP) address to identify and map servers within a networkDNS and IP address offer scalability through levels of hierarchy (.com, .net, .org)DNS servers act as authoritative source for domain names they own and manage; servers can host multiple zones and levels to segment URL namespaceBenefits of DNS: (...)

#elastic-container-service #tech-podcasts #dns-podcast #aws

#pewdiepie leaves #youtube to Stream Exclusively on #blockchain
▻https://hackernoon.com/pewdiepie-leaves-youtube-to-stream-exclusively-on-blockchain-352cc707dda

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The no 1 most subscribed youtuber, Pewdiepie, announces that he will exclusively stream on #dlive, a video streaming site running on blockchain. On April 9th, both he and Dlive announced via youtube and twitter that the partnership will commence with the first stream set for April 14th.Youtube is starting to realise they aren’t the only person in the room anymore. For many years they have had the monopoly on the video sharing industry online. In November 2006, youtube became a subsidiary of google further consolidating the stronghold of the internet giants. We have seen time and time again, anyone who becomes successful and could be seen as a competitor is either shut down or bought out by groups like google and amazon. No longer will this occur with such a crippling effect.With the (...)

#blockchain-adoption