Rojo

Cory Doctorow: China has unblocked Wikipedia. Wikipedia refused to censor itself to appease totalitarian Beijing, but China unblocked it anyway. China needs Wikipedia and Chinese net-users would access it using circumvention tools -- the block on Wikipedia made Chinese Wikipedia users into automatic dissidents.

If only Google, Microsoft and Yahoo had the same courage as Wikipedia, the same confidence that their search-engines were valuable enough to be indispensible.

Wikipedia reported on its site that it had received word from multiple users in the country on Chinese-forums.com that the site had been restored. The most recent blocking was the third such outage reported by Wikipedia.

Link (Thanks, Coop!)

 

War has wiped out about 655,000 Iraqis since the U.S.-led invasion, a study finds. "Since March 2003, an additional 2.5 percent of Iraq's population have died above what would have occurred without conflict," the survey said.

 

For 21 years, Tom Brokaw was the anchor of the NBC Nightly News -- a tenure which saw some dramatic shifts in how people consume media. I saw him speak yesterday, and he talked a bit about when he started in the business; how there where just a couple middle-aged white guys giving news about what was happening on the eastern seaboard. Over those years, reporting the news got more complex, more diverse, and more democratic.

Someone from the audience asked about how the blogosphere has changed the way the nightly news is considered. Brokaw answered unsurprisingly, saying that he believed people were capable of taking a more active role in discerning the trustworthiness of amateur media. But he also talked about the fear that rippled through his newsroom as his contemporary on CBS News, Dan Rather, was being taken down by a thousand passionate blogging fact-checkers. "It cost him his job -- his whole career, really," Brokaw said.

And that's the intriguing part. It's not that the blogosphere is going to remake media in it's image. It's only marginally interesting that Boing-Boing gets more traffic than the Chicago Sun-Times. Those blogs may be the ones grabbing headlines, but there is only a handful of people in that rarified air. No, what's interesting is the way collective blogging is affecting the traditional sources of news in subtle but important ways.

The open source software community often quotes the Linus Law. "With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." That is, having multiple people poring over your lines of code is an excellent way find errors. It's not like a thousand people are collaboratively writing database software, but all those people are looking over the shoulders of the few who are.

Blogs are doing that to media. Enough eyeballs are proving it trivially easy to point out shoddy reporting. Dan Rather may have been an early, high-profile prototype, but there are increasingly frequent case studies. Reuters faced this in the Hezbollah Photoshop scandal (examples here and here); countless Apple blogs endlessly debate every scrap of evidence leaked from that company while traditional Macintosh publications whither.

How these organizations respond may very well point to their future success. Will they see these legion bloggers as adversaries? (Think of how Microsoft "competes" with Linux.) Or will they find inspiration in, say, the Digg model, harnessing countless tiny points of participation to harness the collective intelligence of their audience and feeding it back into their product?

Just a hunch, but I'd bet on the latter.

 

 

Russ has an awesome MAKE controller kit project! He writes - "I use four screens, and sometimes lose my cursor. No more! I have Obi-WanQui-Gon to point the way for me. Using the Makezine Controller, a small X program, OSC, and a pair of servo motors, I have a real-life cursor. The X program tracks the cursor, and ten times a second, sends an OSC (Open Sound Control) command using sendOSC to the controller..." - Link.

Related:

• MAKE Controller kit (resources)... - Link.
• Want to make a robot that can draw images for you? The MAKE Drawbot was made using the controller kit! - Link.
• MAKE controller kit (order one today!) - Link.

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It's stuff like this:

In Arizona, about 21,000 voter registration applications were rejected because of inadequate proof of citizenship, required under a 2004 law. Most who were affected lacked up-to-date driver's licenses, birth certificates or passports.

A federal appellate court blocked enforcement of the law -- which also requires voters to show ID at the polls -- last week, four days before the registration deadline. "We're looking at an enormous disparate impact on people of color," says Linda Brown, executive director of the Arizona Advocacy Network.

In Florida, a law setting up new requirements for independent groups that register voters prompted the League of Women Voters to suspend registration drives for five months until a court intervened. In that period, the league could have registered thousands of people, The registration deadline is Tuesday. "You've just got to assume it's going to have an impact," says Dianne Wheatley-Giliotti, the league's state president.

In Ohio, a law that made paid workers liable for the validity of the registrations they collect caused several groups to stop signing up voters for two months this summer. By the time courts intervened, the opportunity had been lost for thousands of registrations.

The group ACORN, which advocates for low-income families, wanted to sign up 138,000 Ohioans this year; now it will settle for 100,000. "Those were really the critical months," head organizer Katy Gall says. "In past years, we've met or exceeded our goals."

In Ohio, tens if not hundreds of thousands of voters were disenfranchised. The Conyers report is quite depressing, yet none of it had anything to do with electronic voting machines. It was stuff like inaccurate felon lists, not enough machines in urban districts forcing people to wait in line for up to 8 hours to vote, while in conservative-leaning suburbs, voters were in and out in 15 minutes, thugs outside of polling places, Republican poll observers making bullshit challenges to slow down the lines, ensuring that absentee ballots going to Dem-leaning areas were "lost", and so on.

The fight for voting integrity is a big one, and is much bigger than electronic machines.