Responses to the London Riots

This Won’t End Well: Speaking before parliament, UK PM David Cameron said he has ordered an inquiry into the possibility of banning users from social networks such as Twitter and Facebook if it is determined that they are planning to engage in criminal behavior. “Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill,” Cameron said. “And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them. So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.” Cameron added that he asked the police “if they need any other new powers.”

Home Secretary Theresa May will hold meetings with representatives from Facebbok, Twitter, and RIM to discuss their role in preventing future riots. “All of them should think about their responsibility and about taking down those images,” Cameron said in reference to Facebook and Twitter posts he believes could incite further unrest.

In related news:

Among the post-riot measures to be enacted in Britain, Reuters reports, will be controls on face coverings and the possible use of the army to suppress future disturbances. Britain will crack down on gangs and may call in army support if this week's riots are repeated, Prime Minister David Cameron said on Thursday, saying he would not allow a "culture of fear" to exist on the streets. The government will also give the police powers to demand people remove face coverings after many looters who ransacked shops during riots in London and other English cities this week wore masks to avoid being identified.

For what criminal activities (such as looting) is the appropriate response to demand someone remove a mask, instead of being arresting for the crime?

The Guardian has full details on Prime Minister David Cameron's report today in Parliament:

Instant messaging services will be reviewed. "We are working with the Police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality," he said.

The police will have new powers to order people to remove facemasks. "On facemasks, currently [the police] can only remove these in a specific geographical location and for a limited time," Cameron said. "So I can announce today that we are going to give the police the discretion to remove face coverings under any circumstances where there is reasonable suspicion that they are related to criminal activity."

Curfew powers will be reviewed. "On dealing with crowds, we are also looking at the use of existing dispersal powers and whether any wider power of curfew is necessary," he said.

Obviously the use of social media can only be used for evil, never for good. One of the most pernicious uses of social media and the internet is this horrific example:

Help Wanted of the Day: 89-year-old Aaron Biber has been cutting hair in Tottenham for decades. Last year, Aaron lost his wife. This year, he lost his business. Rioters ransacked his barbershop, smashed windows, and stole hairdryers. “I will probably have to close because I haven’t got insurance and I can’t afford the repairs,” Aaron says. “Not so fast,” responds the Internet. A website has been launched to help Aaron fix his shop. So far nearly £17,000 have been donated.

Bastards.

So here are some of the measures being proposed in response to the riots:

Cameron says Army could be called in if riots are repeated

Police are handed powers to unmask the wild rioters

Inquiry under way into how to clamp down on social media

There'll be talks with ex-US police chief about tackling gangs

Cameron shrugs off Labour's plea for police cuts U-turn

Prime Minister: 'This is a time for our country to pull together'

Labour leader Ed Miliband calls for full, independent inquiry

Calling on councils to use their powers to evict offenders from social houses;

Ministers looking into whether wider powers of curfew are needed;

A £20million fund to help high street firms affected by riots;

Businesses very badly hit will be allowed to defer tax payments;

Councils permitted to grant business rate relief;

Bellwin Scheme of emergency support to councils enacted;

£10million recovery scheme to help town halls in clean-up;

Government to meet immediate costs of housing families left homeless;

Gang injunctions scheme to be extended across the UK;

Ministerial group to prepare an action plan on gang culture.

No soul-searching into the reasons behind the riots.

UPDATE: "Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organized via social media. Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them. So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these Web sites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”
—Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain addressing Parliament during a special debate on the UK riots.

• Britain considers mask ban; may use army if unrest continues

Earthquake turns TV networks into print

via Doc Seals Weblog

An 8.9-magnitude earthquake that struck Japan yesterday, and a tsunami is spreading, right now, across the Pacific ocean. Thus we have much news that is best consumed live and uncooked. Here’s mine, right now:

Not many of us carry radios in our pockets any more. Small portable TVs became passé decades ago. Smartphones, tablets and other portable Net-connected devices are now the closest things we have to universal receivers and transmitters of live news. They’re what we have in our pockets, purses and carry-bags.

The quake is coming to be called the 2011 Sendai Earthquake and Tsunami, and your best portable media to keep up with it are these:

1. Al Jazeera English, for continuous live TV coverage (interrupted by war coverage from Libya)
2. Twitter, for continuous brief reports and pointage to sources
3. Wikipedia, for a continuously updated static page called 2011 Sendai Earthquake and Tsunami, with links to authoritative sources

I just looked at ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN, CBC and BBC online, and all have recorded reports. None have live coverage on the Net. They are, after all, TV networks; and all TV networks are prevented from broadcasting live on the Net, either by commercial arrangements with cable and satellite TV distributors, or by laws that exclude viewing from IP addresses outside of national boundaries.

Television has become almost entirely an entertainment system, rather than a news one. Yes, news matters to TV networks, but it’s gravy. Mostly they’re entertainment businesses that also do news. This is even true (though to a lesser degree) for CNN.

At NBC.com, you won’t find that anything newsworthy has happened. The website is a bunch of promos for TV shows. Same with CBS.com, Fox.com and ABC.com. Each has news departments, of course, which you’ll find, for example, at Foxnews.com (which is currently broken, at least for me). Like CNN and BBC, these have have many written and recorded reports, but no live coverage (that you can get outside the U.K, anyway, in the case of BBC). Thus TV on the Net is no different than print media such as the New York Times. None. Hey, the Times has video reports too.

NPR has the same problem. You don’t get live radio from them. Still, you do get live radio from nearly all its member stations. Not true for TV. Lots of TV stations have iPhone, iPad and Android apps, but none feature live network video feeds, again because the networks don’t want anything going “over the top” (of the cable system) through Net-connected devices. This is a dumb stance, in the long run, which gets much shorter with each major breaking news story.

Here’s the take-away: emergencies such as wars and earthquakes demonstrate a simple and permanent fact of media life: that the Net is the new TV and the new radio, because it has subsumed both. It would be best for both TV and radio to normalize to the Net and quit protecting their old distribution systems.

Another angle: the Live Web has finally branched off the Static Web (as I wrote about in Linux Journal, back in 2005), and is fast becoming our primary means for viewing and listening to news. To borrow a geologic metaphor, the vast tectonic plates of TV and radio are being subsumed along their leading edges by the Live Web. Thus today’s wars and earthquakes are tectonic events for media old and new. The mountain ranges and civilizations that will build up along the new margins will be on the Live Web’s plate, not the old TV, radio and print plates.

A plug… Those worried about how to pay for the change should support the VRM community’s development of EmanciPay. We believe the best consumers of media will become the best customers of media only by means that the consumers themselves control. For free media that’s worth more than nothing (as earthquake and war coverage certainly are), the pricing gun needs to be in the hands of the customer, not just the vendor (all of which have their own different ways of being paid, or no means at all). We need a single standard way that users can say “I like that and want to pay for it, and here’s how I’m going to do that.” Which is what EmanciPay proposes. The demand side needs its own ways and means, and those cannot (and should not) be provided only by the supply side, or it will continue to be fractured into a billion silos. (That number is a rough estimate of commercial sites on the Web.) More about all this in another post soon. (It’s at the front of my mind right now, because some of us will be meeting to talk about it here in Austin at SXSW.)

Meanwhile, back to your irregularly unscheduled programs.

From Doc Seals Weblog http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/

Japan: text, not voice, serves as communication lifeline in quake aftermath

by Xeni Jardin

CNET reports on how the people of Japan are coping with overloaded (and carrier-restricted) cellphone networks, after today's catastrophic quake: they're turning to text messaging, and "social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Mixi." The carriers are "limiting voice calls on congested networks, with NTT DoCoMo restricting up to 80 percent of voice calls, especially in Tokyo and in northeast Japan, where 30-foot tsunami waves caused extensive damage." Anecdotal tweets describe people lining up to use payphones in Japan, with some people not knowing how they work.

Sukey: an anti-kettling app for student demonstrators in London

by Cory Doctorow at 2:01 AM Friday, Jan 28, 2011

The creators of the Google Maps mashup used to track and avoid police and kettling during student protests in London have now released a suite of apps called Sukey that automates the process, simplifying the preservation of the fundamental right to protest while still opening a line for dialogue between protestors and the authorities (the app has a function that allows the police to message demonstrators and explain what they are trying to accomplish):

Sukey is our name for a set of applications designed to keep you protected and informed during protests. When you see something interesting, you tell us. When we're confident that something has actually happened, we tell you.

If you have a smartphone with a good web browser, you can look at a really cool compass-thing we call "Roar". If you don't, you can use our SMS update service we call "Growl". Have a look at our guide to getting involved for more information on how to do this stuff.

You can get more details in our executive summary (we call it that because it sounds a bit formal... but its contents are good and informative). You might be able to extract something from our official press release too.

Sukey brings together in-house code (fuelled by many late nights), resources like Google Maps and open-source software like SwiftRiver. Thank you, thank you, thank you for sharing the workload.

Sukey (Thanks, Ben!)

Men most guilty of text discrimination

By Greg Thom Herald Sun January 25, 2011 9:27AM

Men really, really care about your grammar. Fact. Source: The Sunday Telegraph

PURISTS may believe SMS text messaging is killing the English language, but good grammar, it seems, is unlikely to go out of style.

The Herald Sun reports new research into the nation's texting habits has revealed more than half of all Australians dislike receiving truncated SMS that include abbreviations. Men are less tolerant than women of shorthand texting, with 40 per cent preferring proper spelling compared to 32 per cent of their gender opposites. Topping the list of irritating missives are "totes" (short for "totally"), "4COL" (for crying out loud) and "wut" (what). More than half of men (56 per cent) are more likely to find them silly or unnecessary compared to 37 per cent of women. Despite the findings, Australians love affair with texting continues to grow at an astonishing rate.

More than one in 10 of us send more than 10 SMS every day.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, 18 to 24-year-olds are the most avid texters, pumping out as many as of 40 SMS every weekend. Just because some SMS abbreviations are given the thumbs down however, doesn't mean others don't hit the right note. The top five most regularly used SMS abbreviations include "lol" (laugh out loud); "b4" (before); "omg" (oh my god); "gr8" (great) and "fyi" (for your information).

When it comes to firing off a text message, it seems we are not all the same. Researchers have categorised SMS users into five groups ranging from practical texters who use the technology for no-nonsense tasks such as reminding a spouse to pick up some milk, to textaholics whose mobiles run their lives. Telstra consumer executive Director Rebekah O'Flaherty said customers sent more than nine billion SMSes in 2009/2010. "Whether we're in the office, at home or on the move, SMS is an indispensable way for Australians to communicate, with Telstra's research suggesting setting up social outings, getting a message out en-masse and trying to avoid confrontation being the main drivers,'' she said.

The study also revealed:

ALMOST half of all Australians sleep with their mobile phone either on or right next to their bed every night.

MORE than three quarters of seniors aged 65 years and over send an SMS on a daily basis, with five per cent firing off up to 10 texts on the weekend.

The five groups of texters identified by Telstra in the survey were:

1. Practi Texter: Sends a handful of SMSes each day, mainly for practical purposes, such as reminding their partner to pick up milk or confirm a time to catch up with friends.

2. Straight shooter: Friends and family are lucky to ever receive a text message from a straight shooter and if they do, it's likely to contain a one-word answer such as "yes" or "no".

3. Textaholic: Always texting, even if it's to let someone know they've just left them a voicemail or to remind them to return an earlier SMS.

4. Silent Texter: Known to pull out the mobile phone and start texting whenever there is a lull in conversation. Hates awkward silences.

5. Mass Texter: Love sending an SMS to multiple people at once.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/technology/men-most-guilty-of-text-discrimination/story-e6frfro0-1225994065100#ixzz1C6pwmq60