As computer companies race to control the emerging market in developing countries, children and educators are feeling the benefits. Both Intel and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organisation are developing low cost, durable computers to import to developing nations for use in schools.

OLPC is aiming to mass distribute its £50 laptops in early 2007 directly through government initiatives. The computer is designed to run on less than 2 watts of energy a day, which means it can be powered via hand crank or foot pedal. It will contain a 7 inch screen and will use wifi wireless connection that can link up with all other lap tops in range.

Intel is set to send 300,000 of its low-cost laptops to Mexico by the end of 2006. Its $400 model “Eduwise” enables students to take tests, watch presentations and interact with their teachers using its wireless connection.

While the idea of providing low cost laptops for poor nations is laudable, the question is whether the computers will remain affordable after the software and maintence costs add up over the computers’ lifespan.

Still, the competition to invent cost-efficient laptops for the classroom will help level the technological playing field for children in schools that may not otherwise be able to afford such tools. If these initatives succeed, it will benefit children by increasing their means of education and communication with the world.

US based bloggers have the same rights to protect sources’ identities as offline journalists do, according to a new ruling by a Californian state appeals court. The case focused on Apple Computer’s attempt to identify individuals who leaked information about a new company secret to journalistic blogging web sites, including AppleInsider and PowerPage.

In the ruling, the judges said, “We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish ‘legitimate’ from ‘illegitimate’ news. Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment. . .”

Bloggers advocates Electronic Frontier Foundation hail the decision as a strong step toward earning the protection afforded to offline media.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International has launched a campaign to raise awareness about internet repression. Irrepressible.info is concerned about cases in China, Vietnam, Tunisia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria where bloggers are imprisoned for criticizing the government and calling for wider press freedoms and democracy. It also highlights companies like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft that have complied with government censorship in China.

One might find it sadly obvious that chatrooms users are more likely to receive abusive messages from all sorts of people if they have a female pseudonym but a recent study by the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering went a bit further. They discovered that chatroom participants with female usernames received 25 times more threatening and/or sexually explicit private messages than those with male or ambiguous usernames.

The study focused on internet relay chat or IRC chatrooms, which are among the most popular chat services but offer widely varying levels of user security. The researchers, Robert Meyer and Michel Cukier logged into various chatrooms under female, male and neutral/ambiguous usernames, and counted the number of times they were contacted and tracked the contents of those messages.

Using bots to act as chatroom users (one very talkative, one silent and one moderately talkative) they found out that female usernames, on average, received 163 malicious private messages a day in the study.

The research stresses that the bots are not behind most malicious messages. Cukier notes: “The extra attention the female usernames received and the nature of the messages indicate that male, human users specifically targeted female users”.

Melanie Killen, professor of human development at UM’s College of Education and associate director of the Center for Children, Relationships and Culture commented: “Gender stereotypes and gender-targeted messages are very prevalent in internet chat rooms. Some people use the protected anonymity of the internet to send provocative messages, often basing their assumptions about the recipient of the messages on very little information”. Adding, “Parents should be very concerned, but they are closing their eyes to it because they don’t know how to deal with it.”

The whole study “Assessing the Attack Threat due to IRC Channels” can be downloaded on the website of Michel Cukier.

City Zone, a collaboration between West Yorkshire Police and Dubit, is a new online game for school age children encouraging better citizenship.

So far the game has two zones to explore and players are given missions to complete within each. On the way they get to make decisions for the council, such as how to improve graffiti, problems with gangs and homlessness. The subject matter may seem a little worthy but the execution makes up for that - think Animal Crossing meets our own Fantasy Health Minister and you’re getting there.

Temped? Go on, have a go.

The full length “phone” movie “Nocturnes pour le Roi de Rome”, directed by the French director Jean-Charles Fitoussi will be presented this week at the Cannes Fim Festival, in the “New Technologies” section.

Since their apparition on the market less than three years ago, 300 million videophones have been sold. Besides the memories they can immortalize, these new tools have quickly become the omnipresent witnesses of various catastrophes over the globe.

The spontaneity and the feeling of authenticity of the images obtained give them, certain would say, a greater credibility. This notably contributes to the success of the new brainless trend “happy slapping” (thank you Jackass!), now counterbalanced with the flourishing of posh “arty” pocket films.

A greater number of film festivals dedicated to the genre are appearing to celebrate this kind of creative re-appropriation of the videophone technology. From San Franciso to Berlin, an underground scene is taking life: micromovies, minimovies, microcinema, mobile devices or mobile visuals.

Accessible to both experienced and less experienced artists, the Pocket Film Festival in Paris is one the first to celebrate this medium. Last autumn, in its first guise, 6,000 people went to attend the big screen projections of daily chronicals, satirist fictions or purely esthetical subjects, entirely filmed with mobile phones.

The second Pocket Film Festival, organized by the French organisation Forum des Images in association with the mobile phone company SFR, will take place in Paris in October at the Pompidou Centre, where directors, of any experience, will compete for three days.

Ah New York parks! Sunshine, trees, joggers… and soon free internet access.
Central Park and a number of the Big Apple’s other public parks are urged to become public internet hubs for this summer when the city parks begin offering free wireless net access, the city government announced last Tuesday.

New York has already rolled out free wireless connection in other selected areas and eventually all major parks in the city will offer coverage.

“We expect Central Park to be launched in July, and the rest of the parks in he late summer”, the Department of Parks and Recreations was quoted by the AFP as saying. Among the green spaces chosen for free internet access will be Union Square, Washington Square, Flushing Meadows and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.

While New York’s effort is limited to its parks, it is expected to have a huge impact, given the number of parks across the five boroughs and the density of the neighborhoods surrounding them. In many instances, residents and businesses near city parks are likely to be able to tap into the services.

On the same note, last month, the mayors of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, and San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, signed a “digital sister cities” pact to foster collaboration between technology entrepreneurs. Delanoë said the San Francisco visit provided ideas for what his city government should be looking for in providing wireless computer service.

Internet is in the air…

Thanks to Tom Armitage of Infovore for kindly sending these into us. They’re licensed under the “Attribution” Creative Commons license, which means we/you can use them for commercial purposes and edit them as you see fit, as long as he is credited whenever they’re published.

The leading science fiction author, online commentator, and radical environmental campaigner Bruce Sterling - he of the Dead Media Project, Wired magazine, Veridian Design, and many successful novels and lectures! - gave an inspired and inspiring talk to a captivated audience last night.

As part of this year’s New Media Awards , the event took place at the Grouse & Claret pub near Victoria.

Co-founder of the “cyberpunk” school of science fiction and co-author (with William Gibson) of The Difference Engine, Bruce is also the head of The Viridian Design Movement set up to tackle climate change as “a design and engineering problem […] a cultural problem and a problem of artistic sensibility”.

Bruce talked for about 45 minutes before answering a series of questions from the audience.
He riffed through a wide range of topics but more particularly discussed the latest web developments, focussing on Tim O’Reilly’s theory of the architecture of participation and Web 2.0 (a second generation of services available on the World Wide Web that lets people collaborate and share information online).

He explained how we are really living in a time when “smart people on the ground” are able to “effect change”, really and truly, and made the comment that Web 2.0 was an effort by “alpha geeks” to wrest control of the web back.

One of the main thrusts of his talk was about applying internet concepts like sorting and searching to the real world by creating links between real-world items and virtual counterparts. So you would never lose your keys again because you could easily Google them!

You can listen to the talk and the following questions and answers as two podcasts here.

PS. Bruce has a new non-fiction book out, called Shaping Things, where he discusses these issues and many more.

Other blog posts on this event:
Bruce Sterling in London
Stealing the revolution 2.0
45-minutes
Web 2.0
The Wikipedia Pool Party
Buzzwords
Flickr
GFE
Sum-up
Bruce Sterling
Technical Support Evolves
Tom Morris
Cyber Files
Battleship Quinquireme
Bruce Sterling in Belgravia
Audio from Bruce Sterling (see update)
Bruce Sterling in London
Bruce Sterling on Web 2.0
Bruce Sterling Podcasts
Bruce Sterling in London

If pentagon officials, intelligence reports and news agencies are to be believed, “the makers of video combat games have unwittingly become part of a global propaganda campaign by Islamic militants to exhort Muslim youths to take up arms against the United States.”

Reuters last week broke the news that the private firm Science Applications International (SAIC) had located fundamentalist recruiting material and presented it to the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in Congress. SAIC has a $7 million contract with the US Department of Defence to monitor militant websites and radical behaviour on the web.

SAIC presented a version of the popular Electronic Arts game Battlefield 2, which, they said, had been heavily modified by tech-savvy fundamentalists to create a version which allows Islamic militant heroes hunt down and kill American troops, to be used as a training tool for jihadists. Pentagon official Dan Devlin is quoted as saying: “What we have seen is that when any video game comes out [al Qaeda] will modify it and change the game for their needs.”

The Reuters report, the tone of which was predictably outraged, was picked up a number of news outlets including Fox News and the Washington Post.

Children as young as 7, we learn from the article, can play the games which are digitally re-mastered to include soundbites of American televangelists making disparaging remarks about Islam. Added also are Bush’s 2001 comments “This crusade, the war on terrorism, is going to take a while”. Naturally the juxtaposition of image and sound speaks for itself: the implication that the United States is waging a crusade against Islam in order to control Middle Eastern oil carries a clear propaganda message that Muslims should take arms to defend themselves.

To be fair, the United States itself uses a combat game called America’s Army to recruit young people, so it is not unreasonable they suspect al Qaeda of employing similar tactics. But online discussions reveal a different side to the story. If Reuters had dug a little deeper they would have found out that Congress had, in fact been, misled.

What the Select Committee had been shown was in fact a fan-film (gamsters can record their games and make short films from the footage), created in December 2005 by a 25 year-old based in Holland. The film is one of hundreds and has been available on the Planet Battlefield discussion forum for months. It contains no self-made modifications which would allow militants to use it as a recruiting tool and is seen by its creator and the gaming community as a bit of fun.

The footage opens with a line from Trey Parker, a character from the highly satirical movie from the makers of South Park; Team America: World Police. Online gamers and bloggers hardly seem to be able to believe that the film has been mistaken for terrorist material. One comments: “I’ve watched the video. I can say, with no doubt, if a person though this video was a terrorist training/ recruiting video they should be put in an asylum. I understand the technology gap that exists between generation, but this is ludicrous!”

What the US government doesn’t seem to realise, says another, is that people have been playing at terrorists for years on CounterStrike. “Anyone who doesn’t realise that has been living in a cave.”

The gamester who created the footage in question agrees. He is Samir aka Sonic Jihad (a name taken from the album of an American rap artist) and lives in Holland. In an interview with GamePolitics.com he said: “What’s wonderful about this game is that there are no politics at all. There is no good or bad, there are no evildoers. You can choose a side you want and enjoy the game. That’s not the case with America’s Army, a game that was meant to recruit people.”

While SAIC and the newspapers are protesting about modifications to combat games, peace activist James de Lappe is modifying the US Military’s online recruitment game, America’s Army, to protest about the war.

De Lappe logs on as “dead-in-iraq” and using the game’s inbuilt text option, individually announces the name, rank and date of death of each 2000 plus US military personnel who have met their deaths in Iraq. The information appears at the top of the screen before his character is shot dead by the potential recruits.

Moderators of the online game, presumably US military recruiters, reply to his text by typing: Dead-in-iraq will you shut the **** up, but De Lappe will not be silenced and the protest continues.

Despite the efforts made by cinema studios and the entertainment industry, piracy is still growing. Hollywood is said to lose $6.1 billion per year to the pirates. But the fight against counterfeit DVDs has a very special new weapon: dogs.

Lucky and Flo, two black Labradors, have become the first DVD sniffer dogs. They have been trained over an eight-month period to locate DVDs that might be located in parcels and envelopes, as well as discs hidden among other goods.

For their first major live test, Lucky and Flo were put to work at FedEx’s UK hub at Stansted and were immediately successful in identifying packages and parcels containing DVDs for destinations in the UK. In this particular case all the shipments were legitimate but it proved beyond doubt that the dogs are a force to be reckoned with.

Lucky and Flo will be on patrol around Stansted Airport this summer: you’d be barking mad to fight this pair.