From ethical and personal freedom’s point of view, internet censorship is the worst adoptable policy for a Country and this would be enough for engaging a fight against it. Ethic and freedom, anyway, are just the fingertip of the censorship’s impacts on a Society. Indeed, thanks to VPNs, OpenDNS and proxy servers the censorship can be bypassed and contents can be easily reached by users, reducing the problem of information access. The heaviest impact is related to the business and, especially, in the internet business strategy. A user using a Proxy or a VPN is able to reach and use a content, but his/her identity is twisted by the IP and user agent’s info transmitted by the browser once she/he reaches the websites. You can ask yourself “How could it impact my business? His/her reaching is more important than his/her surfing profile”. The answer is quite simple: your website stats are false and you’re no more able to understand who is your target audience and which is your target market. Censorship wastes the online advertising investments Normally online advertising tools, even Google Adwords, show ads recognizing some elements from your connections such as the IP Address. For instance, try to connect to a website with your real IP address and then through a VPN. You can see that the shown advertisements will be different according the network you are using. That means that someone is paying to show you ads created for a target that you are not. They are wasting their money because you are using a VPN to avoid a censorship. What if you are that advertiser? Censorship affects your website analytics Since YouTube and Twitter has been banned in Turkey, the number of VPN connections are increasingly gone up. One of my projects, targeted to Italian speaking Turks aims to reach this segment especially in Turkey. Comparing the Country Source before and after the banning, I registered a different distribution that let me supposing an increasing use of VPN software. The number of sessions from Turkey were used to be about 50% of totals. In March Twitter and YouTube have been banned, the incoming session from Turkey went down to 23,9% in April from the 44% in February. Looking at other countries, I observed that visits from UK, Switzerland and UK grew up. Especially UK in April generated more than 2% of total visits when it was used to represent the 0.7% in previous months. Furthermore looking at “New Visits”, the 80% of UK visitors were New Visitors in February. The percentage fell down to 28% in April, showing that more and more users virtually connected from UK has been becoming returning visitors. Censorship generates uncertainty and…
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I want to apologize you, World, for the drama/comedy you have been seing since last 20 years from Italy. Sure, you could use what you’ve been seing to produce tons of fictions with a lot of new italian cliché but probably you’ll be forced to pay for the rights and for on-line distribution, if you want to distrubute it to the italian market, you’ll probably and rightly choose to not supply the italian market with this new contents. So we’ll never know it and Italians shall continue to perceive themself as the best population in the world. When I say Italians, I don’t mean the wide population. There’s a part of them having a “limited strategic view” and working hard to try to improve the cultural and economic environment, feeling and knowing that actually Italy is a part of a most enlarged world and it can still have a key role in this networked-map. They are those “conservatives” and “foreign lovers” thinking that a WebTax is a way to kill the digital business, that the incentive to the pressed publishing but not to the digital one will reduce the markets only to the big publishers. Pay attention. Those Italians are the ones you share the office with in London, Shangai, New York, Berlin, Melbourne, Istanbul. More, those are the ones that probably are still in Italy but they can’t break the silence wall even if they are called by Government to set the development program and the Government, day by day, disattends their advices writing norms and laws going in the opposite direction. Those Italians are the one that everyday are fighting against a system that is more oriented to “destroy the enemy” than to “make the future”; to create the way to conserve privileges than to help the economy. These people (we) are Italians, you’re favourite fiction characters aren’t.
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So it seems that a large part of digital music history will be archived from December. AOL decided to shut down the WinAmp Project because, I suppose, it’s no mor profitable. So I’m going to ask: Why AOL doesn’t make a donation to Opensource Community in order to mantain the project? Ask Aol to donate WinAmp Project to Opensource Community using the tag #SaveWinAmp! You can address the request via Twitter to @AOL account. Update: you can sign up the petition at change.org: http://www.change.org/en-AU/petitions/aol-keep-winamp-alive-or-let-it-go-open-source
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The events of Gezi Parki last June saw the Turkish government to take hard line positions against the “anti-government propaganda” on social media, leading to multiple arrests in several cities in addition to Istanbul, the center of the protests. The Government tried also to obtain, with little success , information from Twitter and Facebook users’ profiles (see “Twitter says NO to the turkish government ” ) and proposed draft legislation aimed at implementing a greater control over the social channels usage. Something , however, has changed in recent months . In September, the Turkish media broke the news that the ruling moderate Islamic party (AKP) has created a team of 6,000 experts in order to set the agenda, lead the trending topic and check the criticism on social media. In his article for Al -Monitor , the Turkish journalist Emre Kizilkaya , who is also the chairman at the Turkish National Committee of the International Press Institute in Vienna, reports the results of the investigation he conducted (see AKP ‘s social meda wars ). As measured by Kizilkaya , at present the task force commissioned by the AKP would actually moving only in its infancy and the numbers of the “experts ” would be much lower than stated . Despite the Anatolian Agency overs the presence of 4 groups of pro -government activists , there are few true influencer pro-government . One of these is the group Wake Up Attack who runs a Facebook page with 5,000 fans and four Twitter accounts in four different languages with more than 12,000 followers . Through their own accounts, Wake Up Attack spreads infographics that “(target) those who criticize the government labeling them as (foreign) agents or terrorists.” From an operational point of view , the groups use the hashtag # AK ( abbreviation of the party) and # ekip (a turkish term to indicate team) to aggregate and connect the tweet. The investigation shows also a close relationship between the account and the party organs which , although not confirmed , it seems to be the direct promoter of these initiatives. It seems, therefore , that Erdoğan and the AKP are preparing to occupy not only the traditional media , but also social media on which , in view of the elections of 2014 , could play a leading role. *originally edited in Italian and published on Pionero.it
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La Fantascienza (in tutte le sue declinazioni, dalla letteratura al cinema) è sempre stato un modo per esorcizzare le paure ed i problemi sociali. Nella serie classica di Star Trek, ad esempio, si poneva la questione dell’integrazione sociale. Sull’Enterprise c’erano una afro-americana, un cinese, un russo, uno scozzese ed il bacio tra James T. Kirk e Uhura creò non poche polemiche allora. Non solo, la lotta con i Klingon era la rappresentazione della guerra fredda tra USA e URSS, così come molti episodi erano l’espediente per parlare di problemi come l’alcolismo, la droga, la corruzione politica. Nelle rappresentazioni contemporanee, Il Potere Politico e le Lobby economiche sono il nuovo nemico il cui obiettivo è conservare lo status quo attraverso uno stretto controllo sociale. Nell’era del mondo connesso, la Privacy viene ufficialmente sacrificata per garantire la sicurezza sociale. Ma questo è solo lo specchietto per le allodole. In realtà, il vero obiettivo è quello di mantenere il controllo ed evitare rivolte sociali che porterebbero a una destabilizzazione del potere. Le produzioni non main-stream stanno ponendo un’ampia attenzione a questo aspetto. Corti, tra Privacy e Controllo PLURALITY – In un futuro prossimo, New York è attraversata da un social network automatizzato in cui tutte le attività (apertura dell’auto, pagamenti, assistenza sanitaria, locazione) sono associati al proprio DNA. SIGHT è un progetto di laurea dell’Accademia delle Arti di Bezaleal. Immagina un mondo in cui applicazioni ispirate a Google Glass, che nella rappresentazione diventano lenti a contatto, sono ovunque. Evidenzia a pieno il rischio di una invasione della rete nelle relazioni interpersonali. MEMORIZE – Nel 2027 ogni persona ha impiantato un chip di memorizzazione in grado di registrare qualsiasi cosa si veda e viene utilizzato dalla polizia per combattere il crimine. POSTHUMAN – Ambientato in un futuro di spionaggio, assassini e di scienza avanzata fuori controllo, il film segue un hacker ed il suo cane mentre aiutano una misteriosa donna a liberare l’ultima cavia di un laboratorio di test ESP.
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