Amid news of a stepped-up Internet clampdown in China, we’ve learned that artist and blogger Ai Weiwei, whom Utne Reader called “China’s most radical dissident” in our recent international issue, has again provoked the ire of Chinese authorities. The Art Newspaper reports that Ai’s popular blog on Sina.com was yanked off the web last month, and several recent incidents indicate that he’s being closely watched.

It’s no secret that Ai is a thorn in the side of the regime, but the Art Newspaper implies that his most recent critique of the government may have hit an especially sensitive nerve:

Ai Weiwei has been running a campaign documenting the death of schoolchildren in the Sichuan earthquake of May 2008, alleging that the number of fatalities was due to local officials siphoning money from school building costs.

Ai has launched another blog at blog.aiweiwei.com, where he has promised to republish his investigations into the Sichuan disaster. Visit China Digital Times and China Geeks to find occasional translations of, and reports about, his blog entries.

Source: The Art Newspaper, China Digital Times, China Geeks

Image by Hafenbar, licensed under Creative Commons.

 Alt Wire  is a digest of spoon-fed inspiration curated by our favorite editors, journalists, artists, and visionaries. Today's guest is Believer editor Andrew Leland.

I first used an internet search engine around 1994, when as a 13-year-old I had a dial-up Internet connection and my own home page, "Uncle Andy's Giggle Shack," which featured SNL- and Simpsons-derived jokes, done up in rudimentary HTML. This was pre-Google, of course, but once I'd gotten the hang of using Webcrawler or Lycos or whatever engine I was using, I began performing what I immediately recognized were impressionistic internet searches. This is to say: rather than searching for relatively utilitarian subjects such as "Tutankhamun," or "Matt Groening biography," I'd feed the Internet strings like "feast of sadness, whispered pumice vampire, jiggles milk" or whatever shards of language I happened to be "feeling" at the time (and as a 13-year-old, as now, these emotional, surrealistic phrases regularly surf into my consciousness—usually on a board carved from hormones).

And then I'd delight in seeing what the rowdy, teeming, brand-new World Wide Web could spit back. (In this sense, the experience resembled a psychedelic, doors-blown-off version of chatting with Eliza, the early "interactive" Freudian psychoanalysis bot.) Most of the hits my impressionistic searches returned would be pages, usually hosted by computer science departments at large research universities, that simply listed (for some arcane database-related reason) every word in Webster's. These pages were interesting enough (at least knowing they existed, and wondering why), but if I refined my search a little, down to just, say, "feast of sadness, whispered pumice," then real strange treasures would wash ashore. These usually came in the form of fan fiction (I recently discovered, for example, the wealth of online erotic fan fiction devoted to Xena: Warrior Princess), full texts of inscrutable books, and heated discussion boards for topics I'd never otherwise have the pleasure of running across—places where text accumulates in eccentric formations.

Bio: Andrew Leland is the managing editor of The Believer and founding editor of Uncle Andy's Giggle Shack, which we would link to if we could.

It turns out there’s still a couple things humans can do that computers can’t—like decipher those online security checks: “squiggly, distorted letters that look like a cross between a Rorschach test and a four-year-old’s signature—a CAPTCHA, as computer scientists call them.” Computers also can’t decode scanned pages of antiquated texts with blurry, misaligned fonts, or outdated words.  So a computer scientist from Guatemala, Luis von Ahn, transformed many of those seemingly useless CAPTCHAs into a fruitful endeavor.  

The Walrus explains: “Now a growing number of websites, from e-commerce (Ticketmaster) to social networking (Facebook) to blogging (Wordpress), have implemented the precocious professor’s new tool, dubbed reCAPTCHA. If you’ve visited those sites, your squiggly-letter-reading ability has been harnessed for a massive project that aims to scan and make freely available every out-of-copyright book in the world, by deciphering words from old texts that have stumped scanning software.”

“The service is supplied free to any website that wants it, and in addition to helping decipher books scanned for the Internet Archive, reCAPTCHA has been recruited to assist in the digitization of the entire archive of the New York Times back to 1851…The pursuit of such public goods, von Ahn hopes, will deflect any resentment from his human scanners. ‘We could do other things, like digitizing cheques,’ he notes. ‘But banks already make enough money.’”

Source: The Walrus

Image by vlima.com licensed under Creative Commons   

Further solidifying Google move towards total world dominance, Australia's newspaper the Age reports that scientists recently discovered hundreds of new species, including new birds, insects, and monkeys, using Google Earth.

The location of the find on Mount Mabu, Mozambique, was originally singled out for a possible conservation project, but researchers decided to take a closer look when they saw previously unexplored patches of vegetation. You can see the gorgeous photos on the Guardian website.

Image courtesy of  marcbel , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

When television broadcasting goes all-digital in February, a range of old TV frequencies known as “white space” will be up for grabs, and technology pioneers like Google’s Larry Page have been lobbying the FCC to dedicate that spectrum to free internet and other public communication.

But the National Association of Broadcasters, mobile phone companies, and other entities who stand to profit from private, pay-based communication have been fighting white space liberation.

Until last week, that is, when the FCC ruled to open white space to unlicensed use (pdf), scoring a huge victory for Page’s camp. This essentially means that online communication will be faster and available to more people, especially rural and low-income users. It will also likely result in cheaper offerings from internet, cable, and cell phone service providers as competition in those markets intensifies.

Jeff Jarvis outlines these and other benefits of public white space at his blog BuzzMachine. (“Note this historic moment,” he writes. “I’m praising the FCC.”) He argues that the internet is no longer a merely a privilege, but a right: “Access to the internet—and open, broadband internet that is neither censored nor filtered by government or business—should be seen, similarly, as a necessity and thus a right. Just as we judge nations by their literacy, we should now judge them by their connectedness.”

Jarvis also does a good job of explaining white space and its benefits in non-wonky terms, focusing on the ways it will benefit education, government, and society at large.

Image courtesy of rvaphotodude, licensed by Creative Commons.

Want some help with your math homework, free of charge? Or maybe you need a refresher course without reenrolling in school. Open Culture points to a series of online video lectures on calculus by Princeton lecturer Adrian Banner, author of The Calculus Lifesaver: All the Tools You Need to Excel at Calculus.

Banner’s videos join the growing ranks of educational multimedia resources on the web, like the free audiobook site LibriVox and the online lectures via iTunes U. Once you've graduated beyond those, the Boston Globe suggests Fora.tv, Bigthink.com, Edge.org, and any one of the lectures from the Technology Entertainment Design (TED) conference.

The new website Intent.com is like the Huffington Post of the metaphysical realm, offering an online repository of mindful living writing. Started by Mallika Chopra, an entrepreneur and Deepak Chopra’s daughter, the site’s brand represents an amorphous mélange of business motivation, self-help, and Eastern spirituality. The site breaks down into the squishy categories of Health, Relationships, Success, Balance, Causes, Planet, and Spirit.

As the cornerstone of Intent.com, bloggers state their intent (“To laugh out loud every day!”, “Not to over indulge in candy or booze tonight!”, “To recognize and share the presence of life’s magic”) and users can register to add their own intents or to affirm others.

The site isn’t simply an unmitigated orgy of loving-kindness, however. Yesterday, Deepak Chopar posted an overtly political video blog about John McCain entitled, “War Hero or War Criminal, Who Decides?” In fact, there’s a generous dose of political content, most of it pro-Obama and against California’s Prop-8. There are also the sorts of diverting anecdotal pieces that wouldn’t be out of place at Slate, Salon, or, well, HuffPo.

Every new communication method is marked by the technology's first message sent. Colin Barras at the New Scientist rounded up the first messages broadcast with various devices, including the 8,500-year-old Chinese tortoise shells (“woman … eye … window”), Samuel Morse’s “a patient waiter is no loser” telegram in 1838, and “Merry Christmas,” the first text message in 1992.

New Scientist invites readers to submit their predictions for the next communications revolution: “What will be the next communication medium to change the world? And what would your first, historic message be?” One submission will be chosen to win a six-month subscription to the magazine.

I’ll get the ball rolling with my submissions:

1) A banner towed by an airplane bearing a message in LOL speak: “Oh hai! Im up in ur airspace, decorating ur sky!”
2) Subliminal messages embedded in presidential debates: “Attention Joe the Plumber: You are being exploited as a talking point.”
3) Hundred-mile-high lettering etched into the moon’s surface with dynamite: “I Am Writing On the Moon with Dynamite.”

Image by Bill Bradford, licensed by Creative Commons.

Information overload, data-security anxiety, and a feeling of queasiness about our culture’s proliferation of nonsense are inextricable parts of the human condition in the Google Age, according to Geert Lovink writing for Eurozine.

The impact of the modern “society of the query,” according to Lovnik, has caused people to forget the “art of asking the right question.” If we don’t know what information we’re looking for, we’ll never find it. No search engine (now matter how advanced) is going to help us find the right questions.

The Google society has also created an overwhelming accumulation of “data trash.” The problem is that if we’re too overwhelmed by data, we’ll have no time for serendipity—the equally lost art of stumbling upon good ideas. Lovnik summarizes his points, writing:

For the time being we will remain obsessed with the diminishing quality of the answers to our queries – and not with the underlying problem, namely the poor quality of our education and the diminishing ability to think in a critical way…What is necessary is a reappropriation of time. At the moment there is simply not enough of it to stroll around like a flaneur. … Stop searching. Start questioning. Rather than trying to defend ourselves against ‘information glut,’ we can approach this situation creatively as the opportunity to invent new forms appropriate for our information-rich world.

(Thanks, 3 Quarks Daily.)

Image by Juancho, licensed by Creative Commons.

Twitter isn't the only new website that's changing the party conventions. This week’s gala also has the distinction of being the first Demcoratic National Convention of the YouTube era. Throngs of delegates, protestors, and journalists (professional or otherwise), armed with video cameras, are descending on Denver and swarming the Pepsi Center in hopes of capturing a politician’s gaffe, a protestor’s stunt, or a police officer’s unwarranted action.

The footage is already piling up: There's a Fox News crew accosted by angry protestors, a clash between anti- and pro-abortion rights advocates, and disgruntled protestors being corralled by police (though the inclusion of the word “RIOT” in the clip’s title might be overselling the scuffle). There’s also an interview with Hillary Clinton supporters—not quite as formidable as the media would have us believe—reasoning that their candidate still has a chance of clinching the nomination.

Inside the convention itself, small gatherings and speeches that might get passed over by national networks are being captured by the video sharing site. These include a standout speech by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) at a breakfast meeting. Also inside the walls of the convention center, a video meme is growing in strength as conventioneers shoot “I Nominate Barack Obama Because…” clips at the YouTube booth in the lobby. 

For busy people who missed the live television broadcasts, YouTube is also a good place to find clips from network coverage of the convention, such as Ted Kennedy’s opening-night speech. Though interested viewers should watch these clips now, since they clearly violate copyright laws.

Image courtesy of jonsson, licensed by Creative Commons.

For more of Utne.com’s ongoing coverage of the Democratic National Convention, click here.

Because the Internet inspires encyclopedic research and archiving, it’s no surprise that online repositories like Wikipedia and Usenet have rendered no nugget of knowledge too arcane to be exhaustively catalogued by geeks in every field. This is especially true of music, where mp3s and file-sharing networks have allowed songs and albums to be stored and traded by collectors and connoisseurs.

Now some enterprising music archivists have created the Whitburn Project, an astoundingly ambitious endeavor 10 years in the making whose aim is nothing less than the total documentation of every popular song since the 1890s. It’s more than just a listing of pop charts—release date, label, chart position, duration, etc.—all arrayed in a huge 22-megabyte Excel spreadsheet. It’s also a Usenet-based audio archive collecting audio files of every song. That’s several illegal terabytes of more than 37,000 mp3s.

The value of this information to music critics and scholars is limited only by their imaginations. Andy Baio, who wrote about the Whitburn Project on his blog, published a fun analysis of one-hit wonders and chart longevity based on the data, and made a graph showing how the average length of a pop song has fluctuated over the decades. Meanwhile, the video blog Grabb.it has performed the valuable service of reminding those of us in the MTV Generation what videos we were watching instead of the news when, for example, the Challenger exploded.

This isn’t the first project of its kind (though it's far and away the most audacious). There’s the fun little site that tells you what song was No. 1 on the day you were born. (I’m not sure what cosmic significance there is to mine, which happens to be “Afternoon Delight” by the Starland Vocal Band.) Incomplete release data is available on Wikipedia’s Year in Music pages. And Billboard, which owns the rights to chart data, makes it available to the public on a very limited basis, with full charts accessible for a fee.

Which raises the question of legality: The Whitburn Project is breaking copyright laws by making proprietary Billboard chart data available without permission. (This is why the aforementioned blogs, and now this one, won’t post actual links to the project.) But it’s all easily available via Usenet (the pertinent newsgroups are listed in WFMU’s blog entry), so music geeks—and I mean that in the most flattering sense possible, being one myself—should check out this staggering mass of data while it’s still available.

(Thanks, Brendan.)

Image by stevecadman, licensed by Creative Commons. 

In light of US Cellular’s new policy of email-free Fridays, reported by NPR, the tech/productivity blog Lifehacker asked its readers if they could forego email for one day each week. Since the site’s readers are undoubtedly among the most connected people on the planet, most of the answers in the comments section fall somewhere between “Only with great difficulty,” to “No. I am addicted.” These individual accounts square nicely with societal trends: the past decade has seen Internet addiction emerge as an acknowledged problem, with the establishment of recovery programs and treatment centers. 

I’m pretty sure I’m not an addict (then again, denial is one symptom of addiction … ) but I do know that going email-free for a whole day would be a struggle. Email and other online communication has a way of flooding my waking hours until I’m unable to sit still with a book or magazine—or even another live human being—for more than a few minutes before wondering if I have any new messages.

Testimonials from self-described email addicts are available on the tech website ClickZ, including some suggestions for breaking the habit. Not surprisingly, the first step is getting the hell away from your computer and, if you have an email-enabled cellphone or PDA, leaving it behind while you go somewhere else—ideally, into the great outdoors. That's easier said than done, and only the half the battle: the other half is managing to enjoy this email-free time without obsessing over the news, assignments, requests, and social communication piling up in your absence.

Image by  Al Abut , licensed by  Creative Commons . 

The Dog Poop Girl got famous when her dog pooped on the subway and she neglected to clean it up. The Star Wars Kid made it big after he filmed himself reenacting a light saber fight from the movie Star Wars. These normally mundane activities would have been quickly forgotten, were it not for the promotional power of the internet. After a cell phone photo of the Dog Poop Girl and a video of the Star Wars Kid were found on the web, these two people’s places in pop culture lore were enshrined forever.

Using examples like these, Daniel Solove, an associate professor at the George Washington University Law School, explores the balance between the right to privacy and the freedom of speech in his new book The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. After reviewing his book for the January-February issue of Utne Reader had a few questions I wanted to ask him. To read the entire book for free, click here, and listen to the podcast by clicking on the "Listen Here" link below.

—Bennett Gordon

 The Future of Privacy: Listen Here

The internet has a problem. In fact, it has many problems. Media reformers fear an encroaching corporate takeover, temperance advocates lament the abundance of pornography, and my computer has spyware. In the latest issue of the Boston Review, Jonathan Zittrain writes that spam, spyware, and other kinds of computer malware could get so bad that consumers will give up the “generative” qualities that made the internet great. Instead of adaptable and corruptible personal computers—able to generate new applications, both good and bad—Zittrain writes that the future of the internet could be more closed, less adaptable, and more like a kitchen appliance than a tool for creation.

As evidence of this locked-down future, Zittrain, the author of the newly released book The Future of the Internet, cites a very cool but very inadaptable gadget: the iPhone. Users can’t download new applications to the iPhone without Apple’s approval. In fact, if people try to change the iPhone too much, Apple has threatened to turn their phones into $400 paperweights dubbed the “iBrick.” The wild popularity of the iPhone, according to Zittrain, proves that consumers want more locked-down products to avoid the scary world of spammers and bad code.

The problem with this argument is that it’s wrong. Zittrain uses hyperbole and bad psychology to exaggerate the threat posed by spam. In a response to Zittrain’s essay, also in the Boston Review, Richard Stallman cites the fact that 25 percent of iPhones have been altered and unlocked. That means at least one fourth of iPhone users have bought the product in spite of how locked down it is, not because of it.

Hidden inside Zittrain’s essay lies one idea that’s nothing short of dangerous: He suggests turning over greater control to AT&T, Verizon, and other telecommunications companies. He writes, “Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can also reasonably be asked or required to help” in the fight against spam. That would mean turning over more control to the telecom companies, and allowing them to discriminate between good users and bad users. If history is any guide, ISPs don’t always use their power and control for the good of the internet.

The argument for turning over control to the ISPs sounds a lot like the Bush Administration’s argument for the “War on Terror”: There are bad people out to get you, so you should trust the people in charge. Zittrain uses the word “generative” like many use “freedom”: the freedom to create new programs and new code. The spammers want to take away your freedom, so let the ISPs protect you.

Zittrain even advocates a nightmare scenario for media reform advocates. He writes, “code might be divided into first- and second-class status, with second-class, unapproved software allowed to perform only certain minimal tasks on the machine.” This sounds suspiciously like the “tiered internet” many fear is the end of net neutrality.

“Bad code is an inevitable side effect of generativity,” Zittrain writes. And on this note, he’s right. Spam and malware will always be with us, just as bad people will always want to do bad things. The solution, however, shouldn’t involve turning over control to Verizon and AT&T. Spyware, spam, and malware need to be dealt with. Just leave the telecoms out.

—Bennett Gordon

Image adapted from photos by Dylan Oliphant and David Monniaux, licensed under Creative Commons.

Do you agree? Disagree? Discuss this story in the Utne Salons.

At one point in the adult entertainment industry’s sordid history, the Internet was considered the greatest thing since the videocassette. The first time some enterprising entrepreneur uploaded a risqué photo must have been like the moment when two lovers with equally shady pasts finally met and, well, fell in love. Now, some ick-flick traders are saying the Internet and DIY porn are killing the industry, according to an article in Halifax, Nova Scotia alternative weekly the Coast. And some of their claims sound eerily similar to those coming out of the print media sector. Amateur porn may be the adult biz’s version of blogging and citizen journalism, and studio-produced porn may go the way of the newspaper, some old-school porn producers fear. The fact that the newspaper hasn’t yet gone the way of the newspaper shouldn’t affect these doomsday predictions. Not in an industry where Paris Hilton can “accidentally” become one of its most successful practitioners.

—Morgan Winters

Bloggers and Internet news-digesters write so extensively about the success of online media—and potential for more success, and capability to accomplish blistering successification—that it’s more than I can reasonably be expected to appreciate. Occasionally, I proclaim that I’ll stop reading anything online altogether and declare, with fist-swirling certainty: “If I see one more blog, I’m going to blog all over my blog.” This probably just reinforces the notion that I’ve read too much online media analysis. (Also, I’m totally blogging about blogging on this blog right now, man. I must be approaching that point of cessation.)

And then I exhale. Writing for the Times Online, Jonathan Weber breaks down the still-vibrant profitability of print media vis-à-vis Internet media. As he reports, local magazines and newspapers—i.e., those in “Anytown, USA”—still generate more ad revenue than their online homes because local print sources remain more visible and desirable to their constituent markets. Simply put, ad revenue is still persistently print-oriented.

Weber also notes that newspapers have not, in general, become unprofitable. Rather, they are no longer “extremely profitable,” as they were following fifty years’ worth of media consolidation that left U.S. metropolitan areas large and small with one newspaper instead of three or four. Weber’s own online magazine, NewWest.Net, is set to launch as a print venture in “a few weeks,” and he anticipates that it will out-earn the website for at least the next two or three years.

By the time online-media revenue catches up to print, things will have changed considerably: I'm thinking we’ll all be curled up in homes constructed with recycled newspaper in updated Hoovervilles, synchronizing our cerebral implants as our bodies absorb the all-encompassing contents of the Internet.

—Michael Rowe 

Image by Richard Saunders, licensed under Creative Commons.

Before the Internet, millions of office workers missed out on the luxury of playing the game Dolphin Olympics 2 on a quiet Thursday afternoon, instead coasting to the day's end in a fog of boredom. Before the Internet, conversations would fall into a confused silence when people should have been quoting interesting facts they’d gleaned from Neatorama, yet could not. But now that the Internet hovers over our every waking hour like a mildly benevolent elf, office employees can amuse themselves while pretending to work, friends can compete over who has memorized the more perfect morsel of knowledge, and our lives—if we can navigate the rich riches of the web well enough—are wholly satisfied. But the Internet is a sprawling place. You need some sort of a guide to all the weird stuff out there. Where could you find one of those?

At the Internet technology blog ReadWriteWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick has posted a handy, customizable guide to finding weird stuff on the web. What you get at the end of the process—hopefully—is a single RSS feed of blogs that you’ll think are neat (in Kirkpatrick’s case, a collection of weird hunting blogs). And then you can compete with your friends over who knows the most facts about your favorite cat meme, just like the cool kids.

—Brendan Mackie

  Photo by allspice1, licensed under Creative Commons.

Intimate details of peoples’ lives are freely available through the magic of Google. Many people post their names, email and street addresses, phone numbers, and photos to the internet, without much thought about it. According to a survey released last month by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 60 percent of internet users aren’t worried about how much of their personal information is available online.

Teenagers and children are often accused of being too cavalier with the details of their lives, but the survey suggests that adults are even more open with their personal information. Among people with visible profiles on social networking sites, such as MySpace or Facebook, the study reports that teens “make more conservative choices with respect to visibility” than their adult counterparts. A full 61 percent of adults don’t try to limit how much information is available about them online, and only 38 percent said that they have taken action to limit that information.  

“Of course, what amuses me is that adults are saying one thing and doing another,” writes social networking guru Danah Boyd on her blog. Adults are telling children to protect themselves online, and then not protecting their own information. That kind of “do as I say, not as I do” attitude could hinder a meaningful and nuanced view of privacy in both children and adults.

—Bennett Gordon

When future archeologists maneuver their space-chariots over the smoldering ruins of our long-dead cities, they will discover—like broken shards of pottery suggesting our fallen civilization—the Internet. What cultural icon will stand as testament to our generation’s lives? I think it will be something to do with cats.

Cats. The Internet really likes cats (or “kittehs,” as they’ve come to be known).

 Internet denizens have come up with thousands of creative riffs on the primate’s simple appreciation for the feline: there’s the near-protean permutations of the humble lolcat, chatty cats and ceiling fan cats, and even cats in sinks. To honor the year in which the cat finally took over the world wide web, Neatorama has posted a roundup: The Year In Cats. The basic joke behind these “cat memes” is at first nearly impenetrable. But once you get it, you’ll be giggling to yourself for minutes, and your friends—whose inboxes you will soon flood with cute kitty pictures—will stop being your friends.

—Brendan Mackie

Photo by Rachel Pumroy.

With so much information available on the internet, many people stick to websites they agree with. Liberals tend to read liberal blogs, and conservatives read conservative ones. Techies interact with other techies, and artists with other artists. If you want to see the new Michael Moore movie, Amazon.com or Netflix can suggest dozens of other anti-war, anti-corporate films. People can spend a lifetime surfing the web, and never have to confront a dissenting point of view.

This kind of filtering and self-selecting isn’t new, but it’s getting more extreme. “As a result of the Internet,” University of Chicago professor Cass R. Sunstein writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education, “we live increasingly in an era of enclaves and niches — much of it voluntary, much of it produced by those who think they know, and often do know, what we're likely to like.” These niches reinforce similar points of view, creating what Sunstein calls “enclave extremism.”

Extremism isn’t always a bad thing, according to Sunstein. Abolitionists and civil-rights activists were extremists in their time. Problems arise when the reinforced point of view is wrong. Global-warming deniers can find plenty of “evidence” on the internet that environmentalism is a fraud. Sunstein writes that a lack of dissent can also lead to “mutual suspicion, unjustified rage, and social fragmentation” if left unchecked.

—Bennett Gordon

Internet pornography featuring minors, a business reporter making secret payments, and... the New York Times? In 2005 the Times ran a front-page story exposing the hidden world of webcam porn artists. It followed one boy who, with a webcam in his bedroom, became an underage internet porn star before spiraling into a morass of drug abuse and depravity. In New York Magazine, David France uncovers the sordid story behind this story. Controversy buzzes over the question of why Kurt Eichenwald, the Times reporter who broke the story, paid Berry up to $2,000 while posing as a fan—without telling his editors. Eichenwald has since left the Times, and feels hounded both by marauding journalists and a secret, shadowy gang of electronically-connected pedophiles. Check out the whole story and its tawdry details.

—Brendan Mackie