openDNS - seems to be a decent way of content filtering

last night i met someone from www.openDns.com (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDNS). As the name says, they offer a free/open Doman Name resolver and what i thought was quite interesting: they allow for community based (crowdsourced) filtering by categories.

I just signed up for their service to test it. Here is how it works and some reflections:

You select the network you want to have filtered by either choosing one of the categories or doing a custom category filter:

• High - Protects against all adult-related sites, illegal activity, social networking sites, video sharing sites, and general time-wasters.
• Moderate - Protects against all adult-related sites and illegal activity.
• Low -Protects against pornography and phishing.
• Minimal- Protects against phishing attacks.
• None - Nothing blocked.
• Custom - Choose the categories you want to block.

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in their category list they have some pretty strange themes to filter like "Educational Institutions", "search engines" as well as really broad ones like "news & media"

once you selected the "evil" content you dont want your children, roomates or workers to see all you have to do is active the filter and no-one in your IP/network will be able to access these pages. In fact you can define custom messages/pages to be displayed for the different blocked categories.

I am not 100% sure how the system works though. I played around with it and e.g. didn't see a reason why weeklygripe.co.uk or even more strange http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ was tagged (to be decided for blocking) as hate & discrimination. In fact i didn't think any of the sites in that category were reasonably tagged.

In their defense it has to be said that from the 5,399,836 sites submitted only 1,034,372 are aproved for blocking right now.

here are some relevant answers from their FAQs

• What Do I Do If A Domain Is Tagged Incorrectly?

If an undecided domain is tagged incorrectly, vote No.

If a decided domain is tagged incorrectly, go to the domain detail page and click the "Flag for review" link.

Community moderators will review all reports.

• Who are the moderators?

Moderators are a mix of OpenDNS employees and trusted community members. Moderators are identified throughout the community by a badge .

**And they invite applications to become a moderator from the community.


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so here are my 2 cents worth of thoughts about this approach

A) I think the way the decisions about blocking are made should be described clearer (who has the final say?) and a wikipedia like discussion page would also be helpful

B) having that said, i think it is a rather transparent, community driven and therefore commendable approach

C) it would add substantial value if there was a "suggested warning" category -- so say nazi propaganda gets flagged and a warning page is displayed when a user tries to enter, but if s/he descides s/he wants to see the page there is a link to enter

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Interestingly Prof. David Casacuberta and myself had envisioned a relatively similar service in our 2007 article "Do we need new rights in Cyberspace? Privacy and the Need for an Internet Bill of Rights ", presented at the GigaNet Symposium 2007 and published in Enrahonar 40/41

Allow me to quote:

"Lets imagine the institution managing the cyber address assignment includes meta-information regarding the content of the information and service provided. This would enable, for example, the classification of content to be only appropriate for mature users as well as the insertion of a informative page advising the user of the quality of the content. This upstream page would also allow for public discourse and collective assessment of content provided at the site. This way there is no enforcement of particular axiological dispositions in the form of restraining the freedom of expression but vulgar and extremist content would be classified and debated."

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Lastly i looked and it seems quite easy/possible to "hack" (=circumvent) the openDNS system. You can go to the sites IP directly, or you can use a proxy server.

Also it seems that openDNS finds pretty interesting (value added) services to complement their core functionality. For example you/the admin can define shortcuts to point to urls; so you can define that the word "mail" points to your webmail etc.

I would be interested what you think about their system. For me it is clear that openDNS is operating in a space that is very relevant to internet governance so i would like to invite them to join our efforts and discussions; and if possible come to the IGF so we can work with them "in real life".

Fotos:: Climbing the Chief:: Squamish - BC Canada

just came back from a really nice climbing trip in canada. Here are some impressions:

Schooling is the best way to fight terror & under development

What i stated in the title is no news, but it is always encouraging to see someone really making a difference and putting theory to practice: Enter Greg Mortenson

Greg is a mountaineer who "climbed Pakistan’s K2, the world’s second highest mountain in the Karakoram range.

While recovering from the climb in a village called Korphe, Mortenson met a group of children sitting in the dirt writing with sticks in the sand, and made a promise to help them build a school.

From that rash promise, grew a remarkable humanitarian campaign, in which Mortenson has dedicated his life to promote education, especially for girls, in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

As of 2009, Mortenson has established over 90 schools in rural and often volatile regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, which provide education to over 34,000 children, including 24,000 girls, where few education opportunities existed before."

Chapeau - it is a reminder that we can all really make a difference if we choose to do so!

Greg has written a book about his venture - read about it @ www.threecupsoftea.com

Values in (technology) Design

I had a very productive meeting with Eddan Katz from the Electronic Fountier Foundation last Thursday. At the end of our conversation we found out that we both have a passion philosophy (of technology) and he recommended me the work on values in (technology) design done at the Center for Science, Technology & Society at Santa Clara University and e.g. by Helen Nissenbaum (Professor @ New York University) as well as Batya Friedman (Professor @ University of Washington).

On my travels up to Vancouver/Squamish i had some time to review their work and i really really like it. It is a super interesting approach to getting Human Rights included into technology planing and policy development.

Please if you know of similar approaches or other peoples work in this area please comment or contact me directly. I am especially interested in cultural differences in technology use & design.
Thanks in advance!

Emotions ~> Values ~> Rights - An Inspiring TED talk

Jonathan Harris wants to make sense of the emotional world of the Web:







also the two projects sites are interesting

http://www.wefeelfine.org/

Universe, which explores the notions of modern mythology and contemporary constellations.
http://universe.daylife.com/ -- background: http://universe.daylife.com/statement.html


this made me think of Neil Postman's "grand narratives" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Education)

In the second part of the book, Postman proposes 5 narratives as possible alternatives to the current ones:

• "Spaceship Earth" (the notion of humans as stewards of the planet)
• "The Fallen Angel" (a view of history and the advancement of knowledge as a series of errors and corrections)
• "The American Experiment" (the story of America as a great experiment and as a center of continuous argument)
• "The Laws of Diversity" (the view that difference contributes to increased vitality and excellence, and, ultimately, to a sense of unity)
• "The Word Weavers/The World Makers" (the understanding that the world is created through language — through definitions, questions, and metaphors)

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basically i would suggest to frame our "human rights online" story as a complementary (sub)narrative of this kind. something like "one free and fair global (online) community" what do you think?

Google's Data Libertation Front

I just learned that there is a Google code team working to enable users to extract their data (email, contacts, blog-posts, etc.) and move it between different services. That would put the users in the driving seat regarding data ownership and increase competition on data security and privacy.

Here are the Goals of the Data Liberation Front as stated:

• Liberate data across web services.
• Make that data portable across cooperating web services.
• Allow users to own their own data which is submitted to the Cloud.
• Do anything else to allow users to have fine-grained, easy access, and control of their data.

This is pretty much along the lines of what Eric Schmitt was saying back in 2006:

We build a very good targeting engine and a lot of business success has come from that. We run the company around the users–so as long as we are respecting the rights of end users and make sure we don’t do anything against their interest, we are fine,” Schmidt said. He noted that history has shown that the downfall of companies can be doing things for their own self interest. “We would never trap user data,” (ZDnet interview, bold added)

Really looking forward to learn more about this initiative!

You can follow them on twitter: http://twitter.com/dataliberation

Slack-Lining [watch out HIGHLY ADDICTIVE]

it seemed 1000% impossible, but then i tried and it was instant fun; and then it became my new obsession: Slack-lining is a thoroughly fascinating, meditative sport of balancing on a super-easy-to-setup sort-of tight rope ;-)

I guess it's most easily explained by a little video we shot next to my current home in palo alto. I am still very very beginner but who cares it was fun from the very first second i tried ;-)




So believe it or not I have already summoned basically everybody who met me over the last couple of weeks onto the slack-line and so far (a) they all had fun and (b) everybody was able to balance for at least a couple of seconds after about a 30 min session. IT'S REALLY RELATIVELY EASY. I am not saying it's easy, but the learning curve is just amazing. The first time feels impossible, but then with every second you spend on the line your body learns.
And that is a very interesting feature, it's not cognitive or intellectual learning it is only your body that learns to balance.
It is one of the most pure feelings of Flow (see wikipedia entry for psychological state of flow) i have ever experienced in my life. It is really just amazing and certainly more exciting than participating in a beard competition ;-)

It is pretty amazing what people do on these slack-lines. Watch e.g. this guy doing a back-loop landed on the freakin line:



But the real professionals are without a doubt the circus artists:





Here is another pretty crazy video Aye just send me: Dean Potter BaseLining (basejumping of a high-line that your balance on)

Best Firefox Plugins

i have quite a number of firefox plug-ins installed, but really the ones that adds most value are

Googlepedia This very simple plugin adds a wikipedia search to all your google searches and displays the wikipedia page to the right of your google results.

Search Cloudlet - which adds a tag-cloud displaying the most used words on top of your google searches. The clue is that you can either increase the importance of the terms in cloud or exclude them from the search.

And last but definitely not least i installed AdBlock Plus, which actually really eliminates a big percentage of the banners and ad-words on websites all over the net (e.g. spiegel.de and google)
http://adblockplus.org/en/

What are your most useful plugins?

Best of Amsterdam [Travel Recommendations]

Last weekend I had the pleasure of meeting with Howard in Amsterdam and I would like to recommend you the places I really liked:

www.canvasopde7e.nl/ - has a really nice roof terrace overlooking Amsterdam, really good food and it turns into a club at night

P96.nl is one of the very few houseboat cafes

Trouw Club - really good music - mixed and bouncing crowd - i liked shakin' that boody again ;-)

Jordino.nl - has the best choclate/pralines i have had in my life - period

Saunadeco.nl - is a supernice art deco spa - i did not have the time to go but Howard went and really likes it

and last but not least we took a pretty nice boat ride on our private little party barge. Marcel runs the business and he can be reached under bootvaren@gmail.com or 0642302209 (he also has a really nice little houseboat for rent)

OK hope this works for you next time you are in amsterdam!