Ghiasi.org

http://www.mcgilldaily.com/article/3171-wikileaks-web-site-gives-whistleblowers

Wikileaks web site gives whistleblowers a voice
By Marzieh Ghiasi
Monday, April 7th, 2008

Sasha Plotnikova / The McGill Daily

Unjust organizations around the world face a new threat: anonymity. A new web site called Wikileaks­ makes whistleblowers untraceable, so that they can leak documents without fear of being caught. The site follows the format of Wikipedia, allowing anyone to create a new document page, and providing space for public discussions and analyses of documents. The founders of the project are anonymous, and the locations of the web site’s servers are unknown, with speculations ranging from abandoned U.S. nuclear weapons bases to bunkers in sub-Saharan Africa.

Although peer-to-peer file sharing and anonymous personal web sites have given people a way to leak sensitive information in the past, whistleblowers have run high risks of being discovered, because information travel routes can often be easily traced. Wikileaks overcomes this problem by using advanced cryptographic techniques and an internet protocol called the Onion Router.

Frédéric Mégret, a Law professor at McGill and the Canada research chair in the Law of Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, explains that punishment has been a major concern of potential whistleblowers.

“Some people give information only to the extent that [their identity] remains confidential because they would otherwise put themselves at strong risk.”

For whistleblowers, the risk of being discovered can be extreme. Mordechai Vanunu, a nuclear technician, has spent 18 years prison in Israel, much of it in solitary confinement, due to what he revealed about the existence of an Israeli nuclear weapons program in 1986. Dr. Mégret says that the ease and anonymity of Wikileaks could greatly increase the number of people willing to leak information.
Read the rest of this entry »

http://www.mcgilldaily.com/view.php?aid=6929

Net neutrality threatened by market forces
By Marzieh Ghiasi
Monday, January 28th, 2008

Massive websites like Amazon may one day be able to pay for more information roadspace than smaller sites.

David Pullmer / The McGill Daily

As most people won’t wait more than four seconds for a page to load, the speed of delivery on the net has become more important than ever. In recent years, this need for speed has pitted companies that provide Internet services against web sites who want as much traffic as possible. What is at stake is net neutrality – the current state of affairs in which users can access Internet sites with equal speed, regardless of whether the site is eBay or mcgill.ca.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) act as the intermediary information carriers between users and web sites. In recent years, in what has become largely a battle of revenues, ISPs have sought to implant tiered network infrastructure and charge web sites – or content providers – for services.

Large content providers, such as Yahoo!, eBay, and Google, receive much of their revenues from new applications and advertising. Their wealth depends in large part on the masses of visitors to their site. Dr. Muthucumaru Maheswaran, a computer science professor at McGill, explains that the ISPs, who make it possible for sites like eBay to have so many visitors, want a piece of the revenue pie.

“The people who actually make the networks are anxious because they’re not sharing that wealth,” he said.
Read the rest of this entry »

I just wanted to say, for the love of all that is good and holy… people please update your browsers*. please.

This goes out to those people who are still using Internet Explorer 5.5/6.0. Theoretically every piece of code should be compatible with every browser. Fortunately, since Microsoft finally decided to comply with web standards, designers no longer have to tear their hair out while spending hours modifying something that already works in all major browsers… just because older IE browsers don’t render code properly. Unfortunately, the news hasn’t caught on and a sizable portion of people are still using these party killers.

It only takes a few minutes (or seconds in some cases) to update. But in turn you get better security, get to enjoy actual web-design… and possibly make a programmer’s life span a few days longer.

*or better yet convert to Firefox, but that would be indoctrination.

If you haven’t heard about this already you will definitely will within the next few days. The past few weeks Google has been unrolling new technology left and right. The most exciting debute, though, belongs to Street View, part of the Google maps suit, and something which will likely be integrated into Google Earth soon. The name of the feature is pretty self-explanatory. Essentially by selecting “street view” on the map, you are given the option to zoom in to one of several cities (currently the feature is available for five cities in the US) and take a ride in the streets, viewing a 360° view of your selected location.

This has been done in the past, both by private and governmental organizations and the pictures are readily available online if you look hard enough for them. Google itself, in fact, has contracted several companies specializing in street photography. (View some of their work) However, what I think is exciting about Google integerating this feature into their service is thier ability to take a currently existing technology, take it to the next level, and make it available to the mass population. Additionally, I think that being able to view the world on the street level in Google maps and Earth was an inevitable next step.
Read the rest of this entry »

I wanted to share the links to some online artists whose works I enjoy tremendously. Each of these individuals, with their unique styles and influences, seems to be breaking barriers in artistic creativity.

Popaganda, The Art and Crimes of Ron English
http://www.popaganda.com/
Ron English

From his site: “Born in Dallas, Texas 1966, Ron English ‘paints, infiltrates, reinvents and satirizes modern culture and its mainstream visual iconography on canvas, in song, and directly onto hundreds of pirated billboards. English exists spiritually somewhere between a cartoon Abbie Hoffman and a grown-up, real-life Bart Simpson, delivering a steady stream of customized imagery laden with strong sociopolitical undertones, adolescent boy humor, subversive media savvy, and Dali-meets-Disney technique. Dedicated to finding the sublime in the everyday and breaking the momentum of the didactic approach to art and life, English offers up an alternative universe where nothing is sacred, everything is subverted, and there is always room for a little good-natured fun.’ ”

*Take a look at Bombing Begins in 5 Minutes, a reinvention of Picasso’s Guernica.

The Monster Engine
http://www.themonsterengine.com/
David DeVries

In his own words: “I’ve loved art from the time I was a little kid– especially comic books. When I got older, I actually got a chance to draw my childhood heroes– and got paid to boot. It was a dream come true. I was asked to paint spiderman swinging over New York and Wolverine slashing robots with his unbreakable claws. My job was to make these heroes real for all the people who loved them. It wasn’t easy but I learned to make them colorful, detailed and full of action. Comics, however, weren’t the only thing I painted– I also painted monsters for Universal Studios, but those monsters weren’t as cool as the ones I saw lurking in my niece’s sketches. It was then, at age 33, that I decided to take all the lessons about color, action and detail and apply them to little kid’s drawings. It made me remember my childhood and also realize that no matter how old I became I could always see things like a child.”

The Optic Nerve
http://www.theopticnerve.com/
Katie Miranda

In her own words: “I’m American, I’m Jewish. I live and work in the West Bank, occupied Palestine where I teach art to kids, draw cartoons for the Palestine Times, paint murals, perform a circus routine for detained Palestinians at checkpoints, train volunteers in non-violent resistance and crisis intervention and generally try my best to stick it to tha man. No the Palestinians haven’t slit my throat, no they don’t hate Americans, no one has tried to push me into the sea yet. I’m also an artist and I draw and paint the life here… Five years ago I made my first trip to Israel. I worked on a kibbutz in the northern Galilee for three months where I learned and lived the Israeli side of the story. Now I am learning and living the Palestinian side. Anyone who comes to the conclusion that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is two equal sides squabbling over a piece of land is profoundly mistaken.”

* Take a look at her moving collection Postcards from Palestine.

Meet the World
http://www.brazilianartists.net/home/flags/index.htm
Icaro Doria

and finally, take a look at this.

The Puzzle

After seven years of reading absurd newsreports and bad reporting, three relatively short sentences in a caption of a set of images “Unseen Iran” ticked me off. Here’s the byproduct which I happily forwarded not two minutes ago to those responsible– hopefully I won’t groan about this five days from now. Meh.

Picture Stories ( ss_060302_iran ) a systematic problem?

Dear sir or madam,

I just wanted to inform you that as a regular subscriber to your news, recently I have noticed a marked degradation in the quality of the reporting on your site. This is specially pertaining to stories that I have read on Iran which seem infused with not only bias but factual inaccuracies, poor research, and poor narration, qualities which I would expect a reputed source such as yourself would not ascribe to.

A few minutes ago I stumbled upon the following infuriating caption in one of your pictures “Iranian girls celebrate after winning a softball game in Tehran in March 2005. Softball is relatively new sport in Iran and has become extremely popular with young women. Women rarely play sports because of difficulties presented by the hijab, or veil, they wear. Women are banned from attending many men’s sporting events.”

Reading this I could not help but contemplate whether the writer and/or editor who has chosen to plant this caption beside the image has the slightest idea about the condition of women in Iran, or whether they malevolently and willfully chose to spread ignorance and blatant misinformation.

For one, softball is NOT a relatively new sport in Iran, certainly it has not enjoyed as much popularity among Iranian young women such as games like volleyball, basketball and football (soccer) in the past two decades, however in terms of a sport, and it certainly has existed and has been well-played. Iranian sports and Iranian culture has not been as ‘isolated’ from a global influence as the wording in this caption and others on the site seems to suggest. Secondly, your claims that women are banned from attending “many men’s sporting events” are questionable at best. As I recall, and a short Google search reveals, other western news media sources have reported that there have been reports of women beings prohibited from attending certain games in Iran’s national/international football (soccer) arenas, however, reports also follow-up with recent reversals or speculated reversals on these discriminatory policies. Meanwhile, the fact stands that though not all, women freely attend many national sporting events. It seems however that your agency deems it necessary to propagate outdated, questionable and partial information as completely valid…

What I found most infuriating, perhaps, is the comment on the ‘fact’ that women in Iran “rarely play sports” due to difficulties presented by the hijab. Your statement is disputed by even the most basic statistics coming out of Iran. In Iran women are extremely active in the arenas of sports and academics, with national medals and top honors in rallying (equivalent in popularity to the NASCAR sports event in the United States) and many other sports being awarded to women. In academics, considering the fact that today in higher education women in Iran hold a portion larger than 50% of the populace of students in natural sciences and engineering, with a significant portion of women in professorship and tenure positions compared to the West, I would even say that in some respects Iranian women are faring better than their Western counterparts. Women do play sports in Iran, at prestigious and competitive levels as opposed to what your ‘enlightened’ writer has suggested. As with many other women in the Muslim world, some mandated by their personal choice and others by governmental policy, Iranian women wear the hijab, consisting of a head covering, as well as non-revealing clothing in tournaments and competitions. However, in contrast to what your writer has suggested to readers (who unfortunately may not know better) Iranian women take part in sports rather than “rarely play sports” and actively take part and hold prestigious positions in other activities within Iranian society ranging from academia to politics to the arts.

I hope that in the future your agency chooses a more responsible and factual approach to reporting because I sincerely doubt that I am the only individual left dissatisfied and disappointed. Until then, you have lost the trust of this single reader.