Quotulatiousness

January 29, 2012

EFF says “Keep Twitter Honest”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:47

The Electronic Frontier Foundation explains the facts about Twitter’s recent announcement that it will be able to remove Tweets on a country-by-country basis:

Yesterday, Twitter announced in a blog post that it was launching a system that would allow the company to take down content on a country-by-country basis, as opposed to taking it down across the Twitter system. The Internet immediately exploded with allegations of censorship, conspiracy theories about Twitter’s Saudi investors and automated content filtering, and calls for a January 28 protest. One thing is clear: there is widespread confusion over Twitter’s new policy and what its implications are for freedom of expression all over the world.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Twitter already takes down some tweets and has done so for years. All of the other commercial platforms that we’re aware of remove content, at a minimum, in response to valid court orders. Twitter removes some tweets because they are deemed to be abuse or spam, while others are removed in compliance with court orders or DMCA notifications. Until now, when Twitter has taken down content, it has had to do so globally. So for example, if Twitter had received a court order to take down a tweet that is defamatory to Ataturk — which is illegal under Turkish law — the only way it could comply would be to take it down for everybody. Now Twitter has the capability to take down the tweet for people with IP addresses that indicate that they are in Turkey and leave it up everywhere else. Right now, we can expect Twitter to comply with court orders from countries where they have offices and employees, a list that includes the United Kingdom, Ireland, Japan, and soon Germany.

Twitter’s increasing need to remove content comes as a byproduct of its growth into new countries, with different laws that they must follow or risk that their local employees will be arrested or held in contempt, or similar sanctions. By opening offices and moving employees into other countries, Twitter increases the risks to its commitment to freedom of expression. Like all companies (and all people) Twitter is bound by the laws of the countries in which it operates, which results both in more laws to comply with and also laws that inevitably contradict one another.

Coffee may help in weight loss (but your gallon-sized hippy-dippy frappy latté certainly won’t)

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:30

A brief news item at 680news.com:

New research has found coffee may have many health benefits, including moderate weight loss.

James O’Keefe, a cardiologist with St. Lukes medical system, says a review of some of the largest studies on coffee consumption found it contains anti-oxidants which are widely believed to be good for your health.

He added that, despite the fact that coffee has been shown to increase blood pressure and heart rate, the caffeine can actually aid in the prevention or delay of Type 2 diabetes.

Compounds in your morning cup of joe can increase insulin and reduce inflammation, as well we increasing your metabolism at the cost of no calories.

Just for the folks who think coffee is something you pay $5.00 plus tax for at your local Starbucks: this is the no-cream, no-sugar, no-syrup, no-whipped-cream, no-sprinkles hot beverage you don’t need to buy in imaginatively named cup sizes.

Thanks for the memories, oligomers

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:21

A recent discovery at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research may indicate fruitful directions for further research on memory loss:

Memories in our brains are maintained by connections between neurons called “synapses.” But how do these synapses stay strong and keep memories alive for decades? Neuroscientists at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research have discovered a major clue from a study in fruit flies: Hardy, self-copying clusters or oligomers of a synapse protein are an essential ingredient for the formation of long-term memory.

The finding supports a surprising new theory about memory, and may have a profound impact on explaining other oligomer-linked functions and diseases in the brain, including Alzheimer’s disease and prion diseases.

“Self-sustaining populations of oligomers located at synapses may be the key to the long-term synaptic changes that underlie memory; in fact, our finding hints that oligomers play a wider role in the brain than has been thought,” says Kausik Si, Ph.D., an associate investigator at the Stowers Institute, and senior author of the new study, which is published in the January 27, 2012 online issue of the journal Cell.

China and the censorship state

Filed under: China, Government, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:02

Rebecca MacKinnon in the National Post on the ways and means of ensuring “harmony” in China’s corner of the internet:

In fall 2009, I sat in a large auditorium festooned with red banners and watched as Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, China’s dominant search engine, paraded onstage with executives from 19 other companies to receive the “China Internet Self-Discipline Award.” Officials from the quasi-governmental Internet Society of China praised them for fostering “harmonious and healthy Internet development.” In the Chinese regulatory context, “healthy” is a euphemism for “porn-free” and “crime-free.” “Harmonious” implies prevention of activity that would provoke social or political disharmony.

China’s censorship system is complex and multilayered. The outer layer is generally known as the “great firewall” of China, through which hundreds of thousands of websites are blocked from view on the Chinese Internet. What this system means in practice is that when one goes online from an ordinary commercial Internet connection inside China and tries to visit a website such as hrw.org, the website belonging to Human Rights Watch, the web browser shows an error message saying, “This page cannot be found.” This blocking is easily accomplished because the global Internet connects to the Chinese Internet through only eight “gateways,” which are easily “filtered.” At each gateway, as well as among all the different Internet service providers within China, Internet routers — the devices that move the data back and forth between different computer networks — are all configured to block long lists of website addresses and politically sensitive keywords.

These blocks can be circumvented by people who know how to use anti-censorship software tools. It is impossible to conduct accurate usage surveys, but it is believed likely that hundreds of thousands of Chinese Internet users deploy these tools to access Twitter and Facebook every day. Yet researchers estimate that out of China’s 500 million Internet users, only about 1% or so (a number somewhere in the single-digit millions — still a large number of people but not enough percentage-wise to shape majority public opinion) use these tools to get around censorship, either because most do not know how or because they lack sufficient interest in, or awareness of, what exists on the other side of the “great firewall.”

Step aside, Ottawa: London may have “Frost Fairs” on the Thames in future

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Europe, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:48

The Thames River used to freeze over solidly enough that temporary buildings could be erected on the ice. Northern Europe may be facing those kinds of cold winter temperatures in the future:

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.

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