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New Delhi: After a spate of attacks on a number of Indian websites and a ground protest event on June 9, that evoked lukewarm response, hactivist group Anonymous Operation India has chosen the Right to Information Act (RTI) as the latest tool in their battle against Internet censorship.

Anonymous India is urging Indian citizens to file RTI applications to seek information regarding the correspondence of public servants with Google, Facebook or other websites on content censorship. Anonymous India says they will collate the information and use it "in even more powerful ways." But did not venture upon further details.

This phase called 'Operation RTI Engaged' is a part of many initiatives planned by the hacker collective in their effort to force the Government of India rethink its Internet censorship strategy.

This phase called 'Operation RTI Engaged' is part of many initiatives planned by the hacker collective.

Full text of Anonymous Operation India's letter to the citizens of India

ANONYMOUS OPERATION INDIA

PHASE II - OPERATION RTI ENGAGED - #OpRTI

June 12, 2012

Dear Citizens of India,

We are Anonymous. We are engaged in a fight with your government to fight their evil schemes of gaining control of our internet. We will not allow this. We will not allow those who do not understand the internet to mangle our rights in their futile attempts at the impossible. Content on the internet cannot be wiped out for those who want to see it and content on the internet must not be made to fit the idea of agreeable for a few powerful people.

See original here:
Anonymous India to use RTI to fight censorship

Summary: Everyone knows a 404 Web status messages means you can reach the Web server, but it cant find the page youre looking for. In these days of Internet censorship, a new HTTP Web status message, 451, has been proposed for pages and sites blocked by censorship.

TIm Bray thinks you should know when censorship is blocking you from a Web site.

Back in the early days of the Web, we set up Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) status messages to let people know what was going on with a Web server. Today, we still use 401 error messages for pages youre not authorized to see, 403 pages for pages you cant see even with authentication, and the ever popular 404 for Web pages that cant be found. Now, with the rise of Internet censorship, Tim Bray is proposing a new HTTP code: 451, for Web servers and pages that are being censored,

Bray, a leading Google Android developer and co-creator of one of the first Web search engines, Open Text and XML, has proposed to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) that code 451 be used for, when resource access is denied for legal reasons. This allows server operators to operate with greater transparency in circumstances where issues of law or public policy affect their operation. This transparency may be beneficial both to these operators and to end users.

Formally, this would be:

451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons

This status code indicates that the server is subject to legal restrictions which prevent it servicing the request.

Since such restrictions typically apply to all operators in a legal jurisdiction, the server in question may or may not be an origin server. The restrictions typically most directly affect the operations of ISPs and search engines.

Responses using this status code SHOULD include an explanation, in the response body, of the details of the legal restriction; which legal authority is imposing it, and what class of resources it applies to.

The name of this code, Bray notes in passing comes from the late Ray Bradburys classic science-fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. In it, Firemen no longer fight fires, but start them to burn books. The title comes from the ignition point for paper.

Originally posted here:
451: Web censorship status code

Media affects us in interesting and not always straightfoward ways. Image: Flickr/mike@bensalem cc license

Usually when scientists wonder if something affects something else, they set up a randomized control trial some people get stuff and some people get not stuff and then they watch with bated breath and spreadsheets to see how these two groups differ. But you cant exactly prescribe a long-term course of more, less or even different media (for one thing, people who stick to the program are just too naturally different from those who wont to make any results meaningful). And so instead of randomized control trials, scientists are increasingly turning to natural experiments to explore things like long-term media consumption that you cant approximate in the lab or prescribe in life. These natural experiments just happen to split people into stuff and not stuff groups, without researchers doing the splitting.

One of the pioneers of this approach is UCSD economist Gordon Dahl. I interviewed Dahl about one of his natural experiments the data-driven observation that an unexpected home-team football loss leads to a spike in domestic violence in the teams home city for my book, Brain Trust. A recent review by Dahl in the journal Family Relations uses the natural experiments to discover how media affects families.

For example, Dahl points to a study showing that due to the happenstance of Indonesias topography, some villages have better TV signal strength than others. Independent of how far these villages were from major cities, or any other factor the researchers could imagine, citizens of cities with better TV signals had less involvement in community organizations. The papers somewhat doomsday title is Do Television and Radio Destroy Social Capital?

On the flip side, take a similar study of 180 villages in India researchers watched as some of these villages got cable television for the first time. And as cities got this digital view of the wider world, acceptance of domestic violence decreased, women experienced more autonomy and the be-cabled villages had lower fertility rates than their otherwise equal but de-cabled counterparts. This papers decidedly more upbeat title is Cable Television Raises Womens Status in India.

So the amount of media we consume certainly affects us in interesting and not always straightforward ways. But what about the content of the media we watch?

Well, in 2005 the Brazilian network Rede Globo produced nearly all of the countrys soap operas. But some parts of the country had Rede Globo and others didnt. Dahl points to a study showing that as communities got soap operas, their rates of divorce rose and their rates of fertility dropped. Children born in Rede Globo communities were much more likely to share characters names. And those dropping fertility rates? While they dropped among all young women in the viewing demographic, they dropped most among women closest in age to the soap operas main characters any given year.

So how does media exposure affect families in the United States? To answer that question, Dahl points to a recent study that looked at the intelligence of kids as television became available in U.S. counties in the 1940s and 1950s. Due to the random introduction of television, some kids had more years of exposure than others like a serendipitous randomized control trial, some kids got stuff and some kids got not stuff and there was no measurable difference between the groups except for stuff, which in this case was TV.

As youd expect it turned out that TV rots kids brains.

Actually thats not true at all. Dahl writes that, each additional year of childhood exposure to television increased test scores during adolescence by 0.02 percent of a standard deviation.

More here:
Natural Experiments Show Media's Effects on Families

SiriusXM has filed a request with the FCC, asking the Commission to reject Liberty Media's latest attempt for approval of control over the satcaster. According to The Wall Street Journal, yesterday SiriusXM asked the FCC to once again reject a filing from John Malone's company, which asked theCommission on May 31to reconsider its original rejection of the plan to take control of the company by gradually acquiring a majority of its stock.

In its filing yesterday, SiriusXM said Liberty's filing "attempts to create the impression that Liberty Media has firmly committed itself to take control of Sirius XM. However, it provides no specific proposal on how or when Liberty Media intends to do so." According to the WSJ, SiriusXM added thatLiberty's petition "offers nothing more than a refined menu of options for how Liberty Media might assume control of Sirius."

The filing continues, saying that Liberty"still has not stated definitively that it will convert its" preferred stock, initiate a proxy contest or buy more stock in the open market. "Liberty Media's inaction speaks louder than its words," SiriusXM concluded.

Read the original post:
SiriusXM Asks FCC To Reject Liberty Media Takeover Request

As weve mentioned a number of times, Twitter has been gradually tip-toeing further and further into the media business for some time now. It has already become a real-time newswire for many, a source of breaking news and commentary on live events, and now with the launch of curated hashtag pages like the one it launched late last week for a NASCAR event it is showing signs of becoming a full-fledged editorial operation. It may not be hiring investigative reporters, but the areas of overlap between what it does and what media companies do is growing, and so is its attractiveness to the advertisers that media entities desperately need to hang onto.

The NASCAR page may not seem like anything to be concerned about, since it appears to be just a typical grouping of tweets collected by hashtag. But there is editorial control behind it as well as algorithms, with an editor choosing which messages including photos, videos and commentary from NASCAR insiders were highlighted during the event, and which streamed by unacknowledged. And Twitter has made it clear that this kind of effort is not aimed primarily at brands (although it almost certainly will involve them at some point) but is intended for events. In other words, for the news.

Its easy to imagine a similar page constructed around a revolution in Libya, or an earthquake in Japan, or virtually any other news event. Would that be something that media companies could use to their advantage, or a competing service, or both? In some ways, it could be a much better, crowd-sourced version of Google News. Twitters efforts have at least one editor for a mainstream media outlet concerned for his job, and that of others like him in a blog post, Ross Neumann of Reuters says:

Twitter revolutionized journalism once before, and news organizations responded with the social media editor. Now it seems that the social media editor, the reaction to disruption, could be a victim of it.

Is Twitter trying to put media companies out of business, or even social-media editors? Probably not, at least not directly. But in a way, its formal intentions dont really even matter it could easily wind up doing so by accident, in the same way that Craig Newmark accidentally decimated one of the main cash cows of the media industry when he disrupted the classified advertising business. That wasnt his intention at all, but he accomplished it nevertheless.

Twitter clearly sees itself as a partner for media companies, which is probably part of the reason that CEO Dick Costolo often denies that the company is a media entity at all. And theres no question that using Twitter has been a boon for the media it allows reporters and writers to reach a much broader audience, it enables them to build their personal brand through direct engagement with readers, and so on. And new hires like editor Mark Luckie describe their jobs as helping media companies do that better:

@knash99 @AnnaTarkov I'll come up w/creative ways journalists use the platform, increase engagement and elevate Twitter use in newsrooms.

Thats all well and good, but there comes a point where a partner can start to look like a competitor if you tilt your head the right way, and I would argue that Twitter is nearing that point. Facebook is also a partner for media companies who use it to host their comments, or have brand pages there, or rely on the social network to promote their work through frictionless sharing apps. But at times it can seem as much like competition particularly for users attention as it does a partner.

Thats part of what I think blogging pioneer Dave Winer means when he warns that media companies should not see Twitter as their friend. To the extent that Twitter is offering news consumers of all kinds access to the information they want regardless of whether that information consists of user-generated content or links to other media outlets it is a competitor. And to the extent that it can offer better curation or aggregation or filtering or targeting of that content, it will win.

And that kind of targeting isnt just a threat to the information-management or journalistic aspects of the traditional media industry, as is every other digital-native media source such as The Huffington Post or Buzzfeed. It is also an arrow that is directed at the heart of the financial underpinnings of the traditional media business namely, advertising.

Link:
Why traditional media should be afraid of Twitter