data mining of Second Life and World of Warcarft

mtadros

Here is what I found on Bill Moyers’ site:

Rick Karr on Internet Surveillance

Congress is still deadlocked over the Bush Administration’s efforts to listen in to phone calls and read emails without search warrants. The sticking point is whether or not to allow private citizens to sue telecom conglomerates, the huge firms that provide most of us with phone and internet service – and helped the Administration spy on us. Now, the Administration wants to try to spy on Americans in another way. My colleague Rick Karr has this to bring you up to speed.
-Bill Moyers

And view the video

The project is called Project Reynard, and the report may be downloaded here in pdf format.

Terrorist avatars bewaaaaaaare of the big bad wolf Reynard [incidentally, he IS a wolf].

human rights in virtual worlds

mtadros

Nothing wrong with bragging every once in a blue moon, right?

So once again Virtual Activism – my nonprofit organization – is at the forefront of technology in the Arab World. We have been the first to go on the web, we had the first blog in the entire Arab World, the first to have a Wiki, and now the first to be a nonprofit in a virtual world, namely Second Life.

Now I have an Education and Human Rights Center which is part of a sim but hopefully will expand beyond that. Here are some images:

So why is this important? Well the center is expanding into providing a visual tour of human rights violation and providing knowledge and information on human rights abuses worldwide. It will draw heavily on several world reports on human rights as well as on local human rights reports. The visual tour provides an experiential and immersive education to those who will visit it. It will also provide videos and other information on such violations, as well as monthly discussions and meetings. The center is still undergoing construction and I will be announcing meetings shortly.

If you are already on second life, you might want to visit the center at this slurl:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Odessa Captivating/191/216/21/?title=Odessa Captivating

On the same sim, a little at a distance from the Center is a replica of the St. Catherine’s Monastery from the
Sinai, Egypt.

Enjoy.

on wikileaks

mtadros

Wikileaks is a place for whistle-blowers of all nationalities and walks of life may go and post their information anonymously. Here is what they say of themselves:

Wikileaks is developing an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis. Our primary interests are in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we expect to be of assistance to peoples of all countries who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations. We aim for maximum political impact..

They are true to their word. They succeeded in raising the ire of Swiss Banks by publishing internal documents that show that they deal with money laundering. The banks filed suite to shut down the website in the US, and a court ruled in the banks’ favour. However, there is an appeal process and it remains to be seen what will transpire.

youtube stopped for 45 minutes

mtadros

This is amazing and unbelievable. When Pakistan decided to block youtube this past week because of it contains contenyoutube.jpgt it deemed offensive [in particular the infamous cartoons of the Prophet], it ended up blocking youtube from the entire world. One of its ISPs rerouted youtube into a ‘black hole’.  It amounted to a denial of service attack – albeit unintentional.

Here is a technical analysis of how this happened link 

What does this tell us about the status of the internet? that it is so fragile, it is scary.

buzz words

mtadros

blogtopia – blogistan – moblog – converging technologies – mashups – locative media – social media – social networking – micro blogging – socialmedia metrics – semantic web