reworld.org

While discussing historical patterns in censorship of the Internet with my colleague Danny O’Brien, we started looking at the Google trend data for censorship-related searches. What we found was a striking seasonal pattern in searches for the word “censorship” compared to other related terms:

 censorship   filtering    censored  

What on earth was going on? Why is censorship discussed so much more at some times of year than others? We kicked around various theories, tried various control searches, and wondered why censorship is less of an issue during (northern) summer. Finally, Danny came up with a persuasive explanation: the pattern is driven by students in the northern hemisphere doing research for class essays. That explains the strong drops during the long summer holidays and the briefer Christmas break. The theory is supported by a comparison to another typical assignment topic:

 censorship   filtering   censored   capital punishment

We finally launched Switzerland last week. Switzerland is a project I’ve been working on at EFF for a number of months. It’s a system for detecting modification or forgery of Internet traffic. It involves as server and a circle of clients who connect to that server. Any packets exchanged between the clients will be tested to make sure they arrive in the same form that they were sent. It’s currently an alpha command-line tool (it should get fancier and more stable over time), but network engineers and Python programmers may find it interesting or useful already. The project is GPLed and currently being developed at sourceforge

Whilst driving around Auckland, New Zealand, I was a little surprised to see Vodafone pasting boingboing’s URL across huge billboards. What the hell?



(slightly gimped to compensate for a lot of glaring sunlight)

Perhaps it’s just a cunning scheme to get their ad campaign boingboinged….

I’m also posting from time to time on another site called Science That Matters. It’s a kind of meta-journal or review of scientific articles. The idea there is to dig up really exciting pieces of research from any field — the kind of science that has serious implications for the way we should all understand the world we live in. All too often, that research is missed or ignored by the world of policy. We hope to change that, even just a little. Send us your suggestions!