Google Street View fleet prowls Paris

The Guardian blogs this morning picked up on the news that Google will soon be launching the Street View version of its maps service in Europe, and predicts law suits in countries with strict privacy laws, such as France, despite Google's intention to pixelate all faces. They may well be right - identifiable data goes beyond a person's face; and one also wonders how the British courts will react in the aftermath of the Court of Appeal ruling on the JK Rowling toddler photos.

Pictures of the Google fleet filming Paris have been published here and elsewhere. So if you see a black Opel/Vauxhall Astra with a large camera on its roof approaching, smile 'cos you're on not-so candid camera...

Human Rights Search Engine Launched

A new search engine has been launched specialising in human rights sites. Called 'hurisearch', the engine has spidered over 2 million pages on specific human rights sites (mainly NGOs and academic institutions) and - from the quick spin I've given it - seems to deliver pretty good results. For example a search on'blasphemy' delivered mostly highly relevant academic and NGO papers on the subject, as well as fairly up-to-date reports of cases. Compare this with the Google result, which is very different (the specialised resources are found way below wikipedia (not to be knocked, but still), some seemingly random blogs and on-line dictionary results).
The inteligent user/researcher would use both, depending on the kind of results you are looking for.

In Firefox, you can set hurisearch as the default search engine for the location bar by typing about:config in the location bar, then enter 'keyword' as the filter and set the keyword.url value to "http://hurisearch.nidelven-it.no/search/search.jsp?query= " (without the quotation marks).

US Act to regulate Yahoo and co. in China reintroduced

U.S. congressman Chris Smith has announced that he will reintroduce legislation which aims to promote free expression and the free flow of information on the Internet by preventing U.S. companies from aiding regimes who restrict access to the Internet.

See here for a pretty good and thoughtful post on it (although I don't necessary agree with it!).

Persian Impediment

A new campaign against internet censorship in Iran has been started: see here.

According to the campaign organisers, "[a]s new and revolutionary mediums of communication and expression become available, The Islamic Republic Of Iran invests greater amounts of resources in an attempt to silence, repress and suppress.

ARTICLE 19 is launching a campaign against internet censorship, and in support of freedom of expression and freedom to impart information on the internet in Iran.

the campaign aims to

• strengthen the legal and regulatory framework of freedom of expression and media freedom on the internet in Iran; and
• facilitate discussion on systematic online censorship"

French court rules GM maize locations are Top Secret, must be removed from Google Maps

Greenpeace France Ordered to remove information about GE field locations

Marmande, France — If you fly over the south of France you might be tempted to believe that aliens have landed with a huge crop circle appearing in a field of maize. But the aliens aren't from a distant galaxy; it's Genetically Engineered (GE) maize from the laboratory of Monsanto -- that the French government says you have no right to know about.

A French court has ordered Greenpeace France to remove a webpage featuring a Google Map showing the location of commercial GE maize fields in France -- despite an EU law which says the government should make the information available to the public.

So today we have responded by carving a giant 'X' crop circle into one of the GE maize fields in question, marking the spot of the GE maize field that is now censored from Greenpeace Frances' webpage.

"As we are now forbidden to publish these maps of GE maize on our webpage, we have gone into the fields and marked the field for real," said Arnaud Apoteker, of Greenpeace France.

The EU law says that member states are obliged to maintain public registers in order to inform their citizens about the locations of GE fields. But the French Government is dragging its heels in making the EU's directive into national law, depriving its citizens of vital information to protect against the risk of GE contamination of conventional and organic food.

If you are German, you can find out the locations of GE crops easily by looking on government websites, if you are French however, you are kept in the dark.

"By publishing secret locations of fields of GE maize, Greenpeace is defending the right to know and say 'no' to the environmental and health risks associated with GE Organisms," said Geert Ritsema of Greenpeace International.

France is not the only country where the growing of GE organisms is shrouded in secrecy. The Spanish government has so far refused to publish the locations of GE fields. The dramatic consequences of this policy became clear in April of this year when Enric Navarro, an organic farmer, burned his crop of maize which had become contaminated with GE rather than sell the contaminated maize to his customers.

Our recent report 'Impossible Coexistence' showed that in nearly 20 percent of the investigated cases, neighbouring conventional and organic maize fields in Spain are contaminated by GE organisms, without farmers and consumers even knowing about it.

the secret map... (click here for more detail)

Internet Governance Forum - Highs and Lows

Today is wrap-up day at the Internet Governance Forum. I've been following and trying to participate in the forum via the official and IGF community websites, with mixed results (as I blogged yesterday, the site has been up and down, and I only got a few questions to the floor). The chair is summing up the results right now, so why don't I take this opportunity to highlight a few memorable events and moments.

First things first: any international forum at which a senior Microsoft executive admits that perhaps it is time to pack up and leave China must be considered successful. Fred Tipson is quoted on the BBC website as saying that "[t]hings are getting bad ... and perhaps we have to look again at our presence there ... We have to decide if the persecuting of bloggers reaches a point that it's unacceptable to do business there ... We try to define those levels and the trends are not good there at the moment ... It's a moving target." This on the heels of a highly critical Human Rights Watch report - which however distinguished between the apparently relatively considerate efforts of Microsoft and Google on the one hand, and the 'complete sell-out' of Yahoo! on the other - and governmental efforts in the west to outlaw corporate involvement in censorship abroad.

And, credit where credit's due, the Forum has successfully brought together a truly disparate group of business, government and civil society representatives in an on-going forum for discussion on a huge range of issues relevant to internet governance. So the objective of creating 'dynamic coalitions' may well have been achieved. I hope some of the momentum created in Athens will be carried forward and implemented through concrete action, for example by Microsoft and co. taking their responsibilities a bit more seriously and staying out of the business of censorship.

But did it achieve enough? Well, yes and no. No because it didn't actually do anything. And no because many of the sessions (workshops and main) rehashed old themes of access and content restrictions, how bad China is (although the governmental rep saying "we do not have restriction at all" was pretty hilarious - more discussion of that here and here), that corporates should not get involved in censorship and how much child porn and porn generally there is on the net. No new themes came up, no new approaches to break the eternal deadlock appeared. Pessimists might say that it was all a big role play: civil society played its part by criticising censorship, the corporates played theirs by denying any really serious complicity in human rights abuses, and China said that any restrictions imposed were to protect the tourists (okay, so I hadn't heard that one before!). But the IGF does not actually have the power to make any binding decisions (other than deciding that their next meeting will be at Copacabana beach) and it is probably unfair to expect it to solve anything overnight. So to criticise it for not 'doing' anything would be unfair. I'm an optimist and I declare that something has been achieved. People were brought together and ideas were shared. Microsoft and Cisco sat around the table with Amnesty and ARTICLE 19. A commitment to carry forward this discussion over the next couple of years was made. And - as I said at the start of this post - the corporates moved a step closer to admitting that perhaps they need to look at their involvement in internet censorship again. Now that's actually fairly important.

Scroogle Scraper

Wikipedia describe Scroogle (.org, not to be confused with the .com porn site) as "a screen-scraping proxy for the Google search engine that circumvents Google's tracking of user activity via cookies and/or IP address. The site also allows users to perform Google searches without receiving Google advertisements. A Yahoo scraper is included. There is support for 28 languages, and Mozilla offers a Scroogle plugin for the Firefox search bar. Scroogle is operated by Google critic Daniel Brandt, who also runs the Google Watch website. Google tried to block the site, but the creator found methods to get around the block."

The service has apparently been around for years, and there seems to have been intermittent warfare with Google, but as of today, it works. There's even a Firefox 2 plugin for it. I've been trying it for a few days now and it seems to work fine. No access to the Google cache, but that makes sense (I think).

Why use it? Me, on the principle that it ain't none of Google's business what I search for - they've got it enough of my private data as it is (what with my Gmail account and now this blog...). Imagine Google committing the same mistake as AOL and releasing a whole bunch of identifiable user data to the world. My Muppet Show fixation would be immediately obvious, alongside my obsessive compulsive monthly urge to Google myself (when oh when will I finally manage to knock my blasted namesakes off the top spot in Google...).