Daily Archives: June 24, 2013

Censorship and controlling ideas in the classroom: Dr. Yvonne Chiu at TEDxHongKongED
Can too much information too soon actually be harmful to students? Is there some value to censoring ideas in the classroom? If so, what does censorship mean ...

By: TEDxTalks

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Censorship and controlling ideas in the classroom: Dr. Yvonne Chiu at TEDxHongKongED - Video

The impulse to protect our children is universal and for so long now filtering or blocking certain Internet sites has been a part of that. There are strong justifications for this, of course. While the Internet is a valuable tool for both information and communication, there is much that it offers is of no value to anyone and considerable potential harm. Why would we want our children or anyone for that matter to be exposed to sites that could confuse them morally or make them potential victims of stalking or exploitation? There are horror stories told worldwide about young people who have become the victims of cyber bullying, which in some extreme cases has cost them their lives. Can we not reap the benefits of Internet technology without allowing these potentially devastating influences? The problem is not with the concept of protecting our children because, of course, that is our job but in the fact that our attempts at protection may come at the cost of a canny ability to navigate todays technological world, which for better or for worse we have entered. Two decades ago, the idea that practically every school child would have easy access to a mobile phone with all the features of a powerful computer and media outlet would have seemed laughable. Today this is a reality. Sometimes it seems that children are actually the most adept at using new technology! Have you ever noticed how youth under the age of 20 seldom need to consult a manual to operate their smart devices? They just pick them up and seem to know instantly what to do with them. They have, potentially, more power to connect and find information than any other generation of young people has ever had. In light of this, our attempts to control that information are clumsy and backward. Given that the tide of information is not only at our door but has engulfed us, starting with the young generation, would it not be best if we tried to ensure that they know how to swim? The energy that they may even now be spending in devising ways to overcome firewalls may better be devoted to finding their way in the sea of information. Given that all cell phones now come with photo and digital capabilities, it is time for young people to develop their own sense and discretion about what information they choose to share and with whom. Similarly, viewing content of a questionable moral or political nature will not corrupt people who have their own strong values and sense of identity, but they must be taught these values in the context of all that they may encounter. Shelter them too much, and they will not have the capacity to deal with the influx of information that will, I believe, inevitably make its way to them, by legal means or otherwise. We did not ask to be born in this time when the Internet permeates our lives as a largely lawless and ungovernable frontier. But since we are living in these times and our children will never know a world without Internet technology, we have to get to know the lay of the land and develop our own defenses. I believe that this is best done on the level of the individual or family, as government censorship is clumsy, heavy-handed and unable to move with the times. By learning to protect ourselves and our children on an individual level, we can come out of it stronger and as better informed citizens of our country, our world and our time.

Email: saudipulse@arabnews.com

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Net censorship may backfire counterproductive

Internet security expert publishes first evidence that Iran uses internet throttling to prevent the spread of information during periods of public unrest

One of the growing concerns for human rights campaigners is the increasing evidence of internet censorship in many repressive regimes around the world. During the Arab spring, for example, Egyptian leaders switched off the internet in an attempt to prevent activists organising protests or communicating with the outside world. The Syrian leadership appears to have done a similar thing on several occasions during the current civil war.

But in Iran, the government is pioneering a more insidious but just as powerful form of censorship. Instead of shutting down internet access, the government appears to be dramatically slowing its performance during periods of unrest. In February 2010, for example, the technology news website, The Next Web, recorded this effect in a story with the headline : The Internet In Iran Is Crawling, Conveniently, Right Before Planned Protests.

So-called internet throttling has numerous advantages over a complete shutdown since it constrains protests while allowing vital communications to continue. It is also difficult to distinguish from ordinary disruptions. The result is that throttling is much less likely to lead to widespread condemnation.

An interesting question is how to detect internet throttling when it occurs. Today, the internet security expert, Collin Anderson, shows how publicly-available data clearly reveals suspicious periods of internet slowing in Iran and how this can be distinguished from ordinary slowing caused by high traffic, equipment failure and so on.

The data that makes this possible comes from the Measurement Lab, a non-partisan organisation that distributes open software for measuring internet performance. M-Lab has developed a widely used network diagnostic tool that measures performance by sending a ten second burst of data as fast as possible through a newly opened connection.

Since 2009, M-Lab has conducted some 200,000 connection tests per day, collecting over 700 Terabytes of data in the process. This is data from all over the world and is publicly available for anybody study.

Andersons analysis focuses on the data gathered from Iran since 2010. He says the results clearly show evidence of internet slowing on several occasions. We find two significant and extended periods of potential throttling within our dataset, occuring November 30 2011- August15 2012 and October 4 - November22 2012, he says. During the first of these periods, download throughput dropped by 77 per cent and in the second it dropped by 69 per cent.

Both of these occasions coincide with periods of unrest in Iran. During the winter of 2011, for example, two former presidential candidates were held under house arrest because of their reformist activities, triggering condemnation within Iran. In October 2012, there were widespread currency protests.

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First Evidence Of Iranian Internet Throttling as a Form of Censorship