things I am appreciating today

From David Weinberger’s “Copyright’s Creative Disincentive”:

It takes culture. It takes culture to build culture.

Whether it’s Walt Disney recycling the Brothers Grimm, Stephen King doing variations on a theme of Bram Stoker, or James Joyce mashing Homer up with, well, everything, there’s no innovation that isn’t a reworking of what’s already there. An innovative work without cultural roots would be literally unintelligible. So, incentives that require overly-strict restrictions on our use of cultural works directly diminish the innovativeness of that culture.

The facts are in front of us, in overwhelming abundance. The signature works of our new age are direct slaps in the face of our old assumptions about incentives. Wikipedia was created by unpaid volunteers, some of whom put in so much time that their marriages suffer. Flickr has more beautiful photos than you could look at it in a lifetime. Every sixty seconds, people upload twenty hours (72,000 seconds) of video to YouTube — the equivalent of 86,000 full-length Hollywood movies being released every week. For free. The entire Bible has been translated into LOLcat (“Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.”) by anonymous, unpaid contributors, and while that might not be your cup of tea — it is mine — it is without dispute a remarkably creative undertaking.

From Amanda French’s “Imagine a National Digital Library: I Wonder If We Can”:

…the Korean dibrary [digital library] is not just about fancy physical spaces or symbolic cartoon characters: it’s very much about providing a whole set of national library services for Korea. In September 2009, just a few months after the dibrary first opened, Korean law was altered in order to give Korean dibrarians the authority to collect and indeed responsibility for collecting Korean data from the open web. Certain kinds of data were legally required to be deposited in the national digital library so as to enable not only preservation but also “the production and distribution of alternative materials for the disabled.” Now centrally coordinated by the National Digital Library of Korea are all kinds of digital services, from training programs to inter-library loan. The dibrary is even charged with creating a “one card system that gives access to 699 public libraries nationwide,” a system scheduled to go live in 2012. And once Korea has fully nationalized as many library materials and services as it can, it’s apparently not going to stop there: last summer a meeting was held to plan a China-Japan-Korea Digital Library, an Asian digital library or portal modeled after The European Library project. To me it sounds like the second step toward the single digital library filed contentedly away in the humming systems of the starship Enterprise, waiting to be addressed with a question: “Computer . . .”

From Joachim Buwembo’s editorial in The East African, “Uganda’s runaway vote price inflation has economists baffled”:

In 2001, instead of paying heavily for votes, you could reduce the votes of your candidate’s opponent by killing off some of his voters.

The more subtle methods used could include driving an army truck through a crowd of his supporters.

In 2006, things could get a bit more direct and you could fire a sub-machinegun into a crowd of the supporters of your candidate’s rival in broad daylight in the capital city.

But come 2011, things have become more humane and it is market forces that are determining the direction of flow of votes.

Global Voices Uganda: Bloggers Apprehensive as Voters Go to the Polls

Unfortunately, the cautious optimism surrounding Uganda’s elections on Friday seems to be more “optimism that Kampala won’t break out in riots” rather than “optimism that corruption might not prevail.” Ndesanjo Macha has an excellent roundup of Ugandans on Twitter at GV; my post on the elections is also up:

Ugandans go to the polls on Friday for the country’s second round of multiparty elections since current president Yoweri Museveni took power in 1986. The mood among both Ugandans on Twitter and the blogosphere is apprehensive.

Read the full post»

GV Uganda: Gay Rights Activist Found Murdered

This is heartbreaking. My thoughts are with David’s friends and family, and with the Ugandan GLBT community as a whole.

Ugandan gay rights activist David Kato was found murdered yesterday, just weeks after winning a court case against a local newspaper that had called for Ugandans to “hang” homosexuals.

…

Uganda has been in the news for gay rights issues since October 2009, when Member of Parliament David Bahati tabled a bill that would provide for life imprisonment or the death penalty for not only homosexuals but also anyone found to be supporting or promoting gay rights.

The proposed bill has stirred up considerable anti-gay sentiments in Uganda, including the publication by local newspaper Rolling Stone [no relation to Rolling Stone Magazine] of a list of 100 suspected homosexuals and their addresses. Kato was on the list, and his face was on the paper’s front page.

Read the full post on Global Voices Online »

Lunch at Berkman: DDoS Attacks Against Independent Media and Human Rights Sites

Liveblogging Hal Roberts, Ethan Zuckerman and Jillian York’s presentation on Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Against Independent Media and Human Rights Sites at the Berkman Center. Please excuse misrepresentation, misinterpretation, typos and general stupidity.

*****

Hal begins by outlining the history of denial of service attacks, which “have been around as long as the Internet.” The rise of botnets allowed for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, in which the attacks are coming from multiple places at the same time. Early botnets were controlled by IRC; these days, many are operated through Twitter accounts.

Ethan points out that we’re seeing a rise in botnets being used to attack each other. One of the largest Internet outages of all time — 9 hours long, in China — was caused by a botnet-fueled “turf war” between two online gaming providers.

(Interesting factoid: early DDoS defense systems grew from the needs of online gambling sites that were being attacked, who operate in a gray area and may not want to ask authorities for help defending against attacks.)

Arbor’s ATLAS, which tracks DDoS attacks worldwide, estimates that 500-1500 attacks happen per day. Hal & Ethan believe that ATLAS “only sees the big ones,” meaning the 500-1500 number is a gross underestimate.

DDoS attacks comprise a wide variety of approaches: slowloris attacks overwhelm machines by slowing down their response rates to requests, while random incessant searches require a server to repeatedly execute database calls, using up all available resources. These two examples are application attacks that essentially “crash the box” (affect a single server). Network attacks that involve volunteers, bots, and/or amplifiers work by “clogging the pipe,” or slowing down the the flow of traffic, for example by requesting huge amounts of data that flood a server.

People who face DDoS attacks have several options. One is to obtain a better machine with a higher capacity to handle requests. Another option is to rent servers online in order to add resources only when they’re needed. Packet filtering can block malicious traffic (assuming it can be identified); scrubbing involves having a data center filter packets for you. Source mitigation and dynamic rerouting are used when the network is flooded. At that point, packet filtering and scrubbing is impractical. Both tactics involve preventing that flood of traffic from arriving, whether by stopping it in its tracks or by sending it somewhere else.

All of these tactics are problematic in some way: they’re expensive (scrubbing can cost $40,000-50,000 per month), they require considerable advance planning or high-level connections, or they’re tricky to execute (the “dark arts” of DDoS defense).

“All of this is background,” Hal says. Their specific research question involves independent media and human rights sites — what kinds of DDoS attacks are used against them, and how often? How can they defend themselves?

Hal describes a “paradox” of DDoS attacks: overall, the defenses are working pretty well. Huge sites — Google, the New York Times, Facebook — are attacked often, but they manage to stay online. This is because these sites are located close to the core of the network, where around 75% of ISPs are able respond to DDoS attacks in less than an hour, making DDoS attacks a “manageable problem.” The sites at the edge of the network are much more vulnerable, and they’re also much more likely to be attacked.

Ethan describes the case of Viet Tan, which is under DDoS attacks almost constantly — to the extent that when they put up a new web service, it is attacked within hours. As a result, Viet Tan has shifted many of their new campaigns to Blogger (blogspot.com) blogs.

Viet Tan is struggling in particular because they’re not only experiencing DDoS attacks. They also face filtering at the national level, from a government who wants to prevent people in Vietnam from accessing their site. Ethan says that 81% of sites in the study that had experienced a DDoS attack have also experienced intrusion, filtering, or another form of attack. In the case of Viet Tan, the site was being attacked unknowingly by its target audience, many of whom were using a corrupted Vietnamese keyboard driver that allowed their computers to be used as part of a botnet attack.

One of the big problems for sites that are DDoS-ed is that their ISPs may jettison them in order to protect other sites on the same server. Of the sites in the study, 55% of sites that were attacked were shut down by their ISP, while only 36% were successfully defended by their ISP.

An attack against Irrawaddy, a Burmese activist site hosted in Thailand, essentially caused all of Thailand to go offline. In response, Irrawaddy’s ISP asked it to move elsewhere. This year, they were attacked again with a larger attack. They were on a stronger ISP that may have been able to protect them, but they hadn’t paid for the necessary level of protection and were again shut down.

Hal and Ethan suggest that a system of social insurance is happening online, at least with larger sites — everything is starting to cost a little bit more, with the extra cost subsidizing the sites that are attacked. The problem with this is that small Internet sites aren’t protected because they’re not in the core.

Hal and Ethan wonder whether someone should build dedicated human rights hosting to protect these sites from attacks. The problem with this is that it collects all these sites into a single location, meaning any company that hosted a group of these sites would be a major target for DDoS attacks. Devising a fair pricing system in this case is tricky.

Ethan raises the issue of intermediary censorship — the constant threat that your hosting company may shut your site down for any reason (e.g., when Amazon shut down Wikileaks). This is a problem of Internet architecture, he says, and there are two solutions: building an alternative, peer-based architecture, or creating a consumer movement that puts sufficient pressure on hosting companies not to take sites down.

What Hal and Ethan ended up recommending to these sites is to have a back-up plan; to minimize dynamic pages; to have robust mirroring, monitoring and failover; to consider hosting on Blogger or a similar large site; and to avoid using the cheapest hosting provider.

Within some communities, Ethan says, a person or group emerges that is the technical contact. This person or group advocates for sites that are under attack. These “tech leaders” are connected to one another and to companies in the core that want to help. The problem is that this isn’t a particularly scaleable model — a better chain needs to be established, so that problems can escalate through a team of local experts up to larger entities. In the meantime, it’s essential to increase organized public pressure on private companies not to act as intermediary censors, but rather to support these sites.