Archive for the ‘Internet Media’ Category

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The backlash against the pimp of Jidda ends with the crack of a whip; Yemenis making movies

Friday, October 9th, 2009

Just as a quick update for those wondering the fate of Mazen Abdul Jawad, the Saudi who spoke openly about his escapades on an LBC program over the summer: A Saudi court has sentenced the divorced father of four to five years in prison and 1,000 lashes–for violating the Kingdom’s law against “publicizing vice.” Video of the segment here (knowledge of Arabic helps … but you can get the gist, I think, from the visuals):

In other visual media news, the Yemen Embassy is participating in the Arabian Sights: Contemporary Arab Cinema (starting tonight in D.C., dear readers), with the very first Yemeni-produced movie, according to the press releases/the amazing trailer:

“Yemen’s first locally produced film, An intriguing and compelling plot, An exploration to the price of terrorism”

I’m not exactly sure what the plot will be, but based on the trailer, if you know what Allahu Akbar means, you can get by without knowing Arabic. I’m also left wondering; does first locally-produced film really just mean first government-funded propaganda feature-length propaganda piece? Interesting timing, with the Yemeni government confirming yesterday that “hundreds” of soldiers have been wounded and killed in the fighting against the Houthi in the northern region of Sa’ada.

(HT: BT for the Jawad update.)

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Tabbouleh Song

Friday, July 24th, 2009

DC residents got spammed a Friday not so long ago with links to a fellow named Remy, and his darling rap about how (not) gangsta Arlington County is.

Well, fear not … he’s gotten an even better tune. I have watched this video so many times I’ve lost count. It will be stuck in your head for days. You have been warned.

(P.S. The preceding post’s title is taken from this, which reminded me of it’s cherished existence)

UPDATE: Belated hat-tip to RAG

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Michael Jackson and the Gulf

Friday, June 26th, 2009

The fifth to last paragraph in a three page nytimes obit:

After his trial, Mr. Jackson largely left the United States for Bahrain, the island nation in the Persian Gulf, where he was the guest of Sheik Abdullah, a son of the ruler of the country, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa. Mr. Jackson would never return to live at his ranch. Instead he remained in Bahrain, Dubai and Ireland for the next several years, managing his increasingly unstable finances. He remained an avid shopper, however, and was spotted at shopping malls in the black robes and veils traditionally worn by Bahraini women.

Apparently his relationship with the Sheikh soon soured, after a few business deals gone wrong. The Sheikh sued Jackson for $7  million dollars and settled out of court.

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The Last Boy Scouts

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

Saudi Arabia recently donated $3 million to the World Scout Foundation. Also, “The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) recently signed a historic agreement with the Saudi Arabian Boy Scouts Association to participate in a youth and leader exchange program to further promote understanding of different cultures.” Which seems pretty necessary according to a top nytimes article today, about what the Explorer-Scouts are up to in the good ol’ USA:

In a competition in Arizona that he did not oversee, Deputy Lowenthal said, one role-player wore traditional Arab dress. “If we’re looking at 9/11 and what a Middle Eastern terrorist would be like,” he said, “then maybe your role-player would look like that. I don’t know, would you call that politically incorrect?”

Yes, I would. Particularly because the 9/11 hijackers, just to use the same exact example Deputy Lowenthal cites, looked like Western businessmen. You know, perhaps we should institutionalize racial profiling and racial discrimination. Or just expel/ban all Arabs from America, just to be safe. And have 14 year olds learning how to use coercive violence against illegal immigrants.

The Explorers program, a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that began 60 years ago, is training thousands of young people in skills used to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence — an intense ratcheting up of one of the group’s longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as police officers and firefighters. …

The training, which leaders say is not intended to be applied outside the simulated Explorer setting, can involve chasing down illegal border crossers as well as more dangerous situations that include facing down terrorists and taking out “active shooters,” like those who bring gunfire and death to college campuses. In a simulation here of a raid on a marijuana field, several Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous lookout.

“Put him on his face and put a knee in his back,” a Border Patrol agent explained. “I guarantee that he’ll shut up.” …

Cathy Noriego, also 16, said she was attracted by the guns. The group uses compressed-air guns — known as airsoft guns, which fire tiny plastic pellets — in the training exercises, and sometimes they shoot real guns on a closed range.

“I like shooting them,” Cathy said. “I like the sound they make. It gets me excited.”

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Happy reading, #1: Because this is the internet

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

I’m in the midst of finals, so I’ll just scrape a little and direct you on to a couple of good stories.

The first is about internet censorship. The piece is extensively reported, and has a really nice arc. Did you know that the Falun Gong is the primary spender behind efforts to evade censorship worldwide? If you did, check it out anyway, here.

The Iranian government, more than almost any other, censors what citizens can read online, using elaborate technology to block millions of Web sites offering news, commentary, videos, music and, until recently, Facebook and YouTube. Search for “women” in Persian and you’re told, “Dear Subscriber, access to this site is not possible.”

Last July, on popular sites that offer free downloads of various software, an escape hatch appeared. The computer program allowed Iranian Internet users to evade government censorship.

College students discovered the key first, then spread it through e-mail messages and file-sharing. By late autumn more than 400,000 Iranians were surfing the uncensored Web.

The software was created not by Iranians, but by Chinese computer experts volunteering for the Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that has beem suppressed by the Chinese government since 1999. They maintain a series of computers in data centers around the world to route Web users’ requests around censors’ firewalls.

(more…)

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Twitter 8

Saturday, April 11th, 2009

To summarize the series on Twitter: mblogging (mlogging? mobloggin’?) is ridiculous.

Unless of course, you live in Moldova, and want to organize against the government.

A crowd of more than 10,000 young Moldovans materialized seemingly out of nowhere on Tuesday to protest against Moldova’s Communist leadership, ransacking government buildings and clashing with the police.

The sea of young people reflected the deep generation gap that has developed in Moldova, and the protesters used their generation’s tools, gathering the crowd by enlisting text-messaging, Facebook and Twitter, the social messaging network.

The protesters created their own searchable tag on Twitter, rallying Moldovans to join and propelling events in this small former Soviet state onto a Twitter list of newly popular topics, so people around the world could keep track.

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Twitter 7

Saturday, April 11th, 2009

If you tire over this debate between myself and a more cynical version of myself, feel free to interject in the comments section. In the meantime, I continue to rationalize and search for support that microblogging is the worst word since eliding the “we” in weblog. Oops.

To vast swaths of the population, though, Twitter is inscrutable: Wait a minute—you want me to keep a perpetual log of my boring life for all the world to see? What if I just spend my free time watching Golden Girls?

In other words, it’s hard for many to shake the feeling that Twitter is a waste of time. It’s not only Luddites who feel this way; in the last few months, a surprising number of people in the tech industry—people who fancy themselves the earliest of early adopters—have mentioned to me that they have a hard time wrapping their heads around the service. Many float the idea that Twitter is little more than an overhyped, media-driven sensation.

Is Twitter a fad? It’s certainly received more than 140 characters of love from the press recently; everywhere you look, someone in the news is tweeting. But the people on TV rarely seem to address something very basic: What’s the point of tweeting? And should you do it? I get variations on this question often from readers. Let’s say you’re a moderately tech-savvy person who takes well to new forms of gabbing—you’ve got an easy facility with blogs, you log in to Facebook when you need it, you text, you IM, and perhaps you even talk to your friends through Skype. Is it time for you to jump into microblogging, too? Would you be missing out on some important cultural touchstone if you sat out this round of techno-innovation?

The short answer: Eh, go ahead and give it a try if you like, but there’s nothing lame about waiting to see whether Twitter pans out.

There are so many “in other words” and “the short answer” in this relatively short article that I feel like Farhad is just boosting his word count. Though to be fair, I probably would too if I got paid to do this.

And really? Golden Girls?

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Give me… uh… scraping? Or give me death!

Monday, March 2nd, 2009
A hyperbolic representation of the threat posed by copyright lawsuits

A hyperbolic representation of the threat posed by copyright lawsuits

This blog may not exist soon.

Well, that’s a near given, provided the lifespan of the average blog. But a pressing threat is on the horizon!

News organizations are stepping up lawsuits against bloggers and other net aggregators:

Generally, the excerpts have been considered legal, and for years they have been welcomed by major media companies, which were happy to receive links and pass-along traffic from the swarm of Web sites that regurgitate their news and information.

But some media executives are growing concerned that the increasingly popular curators of the Web that are taking large pieces of the original work — a practice sometimes called scraping — are shaving away potential readers and profiting from the content.

So that right there might be illegal.

This all goes back to the dispute over fair-use (see: Shepherd Fairey v. the Associated Press):

The legal disputes are emblematic of a larger question that has emerged from the Internet’s link economy. The editors of many Web sites, including ones operated by the Times Company, post excerpts from competitors’ content from time to time. At what point does excerpting from an article become illegal copying?

Courts have not provided much of an answer. In the United States, the copyright law provides a four-point definition of fair use, which takes into consideration the purpose (commercial vs. educational) and the substantiality of the excerpt.

But editors in search of a legal word limit are sorely disappointed. Even before the Internet, lawyers lamented that the fair use factors “didn’t map well onto real life,” said Mr. Ardia, whose Citizen Media Law Project is part of the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School. “New modes of creation, reuse, mixing and mash-ups made possible by digital technologies and the Internet have made it even more clear that Congress’s attempt to define fair use is woefully inadequate.”

Right. But I think I’m safe: Fair use protects publishers of things like book reviews for quoting paragaphs of an author’s style.

In my legal defense, I’m reviewing newspaper articles, and the journalism and thought behind them.

Scrapers of the world, unite!

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Twitter… 6?

Saturday, February 28th, 2009

From Slate’s debate-o-matic, presenting the rhetoric for each side in an argument:

Oh, please, no more: At least with the hula hoop fad, someone was getting exercise. I prefer to talk to my real friends and have real experiences. Isn’t this the complete fulfillment of Aldous Huxley’s vision in Brave New World? We’re amusing ourselves to death. One day we’re going to wake up and every Twitter post will simply be, “Me, me, me, me.” Outside will be a howling wilderness of shriveled civilization bereft of ideas and reason.

Relax. You’re killing a fly with a shotgun. Nothing limited to 140 characters can do as much harm as you’re suggesting. Plus, Shaq tweets!

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Twitter 5

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

David Pogue of the nytimes finds out what Twitter is for!

He searched “twitter tips for beginners,” and came up with a ridiculous number of advice lists–all contradictory.

My confusion continued until, at a conference, I met Evan Williams, chief executive and co-founder of Twitter. I told him about all the rules, all the advice, all the “you’re not doing it right” gripers. I told him that the technology was exciting, but that all the naysayers and rule-makers were dampening my enthusiasm.

He shook his head apologetically — clearly, he’s heard all this before — and told me the truth about Twitter: that they’re all wrong.

Or, put another way, that they’re all right.

Twitter, in other words, is precisely what you want it to be. It can be a business tool, a teenage time-killer, a research assistant, a news source — whatever. There are no rules, or at least none that apply equally well to everyone.

In fact, Mr. Williams said that a huge chunk of Twitter lore, etiquette and even terminology has sprouted up from Twitter users without any input from the company. For example, the people came up with the term “tweets” (what everyone calls the messages). The crowd began referring to fellow Twitterers by name like this: @pogue. Soon, that notation became a standard shorthand that the Twitter software now recognizes. The masses also came up with conventions like “RT,” meaning re-tweet — you’re passing along what someone else said on Twitter.

So Twitter is both everything and nothing. A koan? blah blah blah… okay, this is what the almighty Pogue does:

I’ve finally harnessed Twitter’s power for my own nefarious ends. I pass on jokes. I share little thoughts that don’t merit a full blog or article post.

If Twitter is both everything and nothing, his thoughts may also be partly not thoughts. Perhaps better left not shared?

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