WGBH News: Technology

Tweeting To Electoral Victory In China? Maybe Not

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 19:26:00 GMT

Liu Ping's phone is tapped. She's followed by men in black cars. Her electricity was cut off. And she was detained and held incommunicado in a hotel for four days.

Her crime? Trying to run for election to the local People's Congress in her hometown of Xinyu in China's southeastern Jiangxi province.

Her case has unleashed an electoral battle, which is being played out over Twitter — or, at least, its Chinese equivalent, Weibo. Today, 200 million Chinese are microblogging, and as local elections take place, a record number are using this platform to run campaigns as independent candidates. The official reaction has been swift and — in many cases — forceful.

More than 2 million lawmakers are being chosen at local levels in elections now under way across the nation. These elections take place every five years, and non-Communist Party members are allowed to stand.

But in Liu's case, her record of labor activism, sparked by being laid off after three decades at a state-run steel factory, means the odds may have been stacked against her. At first, no one would even tell her where to pick up the nomination form for days. She did manage to submit one at the last minute, but in vain.

"When the preliminary candidates were announced, my name was illegally kicked off the list," she says ruefully. "They told me, 'It is an election under the leadership of the Communist Party, not an election in the United States.' "

When she went to the local election office in person to ask why she hadn't been allowed to stand, she says she was told, "You want to be a people's deputy? You should be a prostitute." She cried on the way home.

But she still wanted to stand, this time as a write-in candidate. All along, she had been using Weibo to publicize her candidacy and the tactics used against her.

Five days before the election, police turned off her electricity. Two days later, they raided her house. The next day, she says, security officials took her to a hotel, confiscated her phone and held her there until after the poll was over.

Despite failing to stand, she still hasn't given up hope.

"The power of a single person is insignificant because we have been deceived for so long. But if other people dare to stand up, a day will come when we will see hope," Liu says.

Independent Candidates' Uphill Struggle

Her experience unleashed a wave of candidacies, with more than 100 people announcing campaigns on Weibo. Xu Yan, a candidate from the eastern city of Hangzhou, is even uploading campaign videos online.

But he too, like many others, is using the relative freedom of Weibo to document the harassment he has suffered. In his case, he quit his job after his employer was put under pressure by the tax, commercial and labor bureaus. Each candidate needs 10 nominations to stand in these elections, and many report that their nominators have been placed under pressure.

Liu Ping is not the only unsuccessful candidate so far. In Panyu, in southern China's Guangdong province, the founder of a grass-roots foundation, Liang Shuxin, also failed to make it on the ballot sheets after local authorities announced new guidelines only permitting female, non-Communist Party members to stand for election.

He is male and a Communist Party member, and although the restriction was removed the following day, he was not on the preliminary candidate list.

There have been signals the government will not tolerate candidates outside its control. One unnamed official told the state mouthpiece, the People's Daily, that there was no such phenomenon as an "independent candidate," as these are not recognized by law.

Internet Provides Soapbox, Protection

Yao Bo, for one, is undeterred. He's a writer, better known by his Weibo handle, Wuyuesanren. He wants to change the system from within.

"The process of democratizing China needs to take one step forward," he says, arguing that China's system of local assemblies is, in essence, not that different from a Western parliamentary system. "We do not want a revolution again, so there must be something that can replace revolution."

Yao says he feels protected by the 237,000 followers of his microblog. He sees the microblog as a soapbox, and a way of sourcing campaign help.

"I can find people who will nominate me online. I can find lawyers, volunteers, people who will design my election material, people who will print it and people who will canvass for me," he says.

He's hoping to stand in Beijing, where he believes the authorities have to play by the rules, and so far, he hasn't been harassed. He's already warned what action he'll take if he is, writing on his microblog: "I am announcing here that if anybody gives trouble to my nominators, I'll ask them to make recordings of it and upload it. If they want to play dirty in the dark, I'll let them see ultraviolet rays."

'A Single Spark Can Start A Prairie Fire'

Elsewhere, several candidates have already been disqualified for various reasons, and others have pulled out before the polls, under pressure.

Sheng Hong, a liberal intellectual from the Unirule Institute of Economics, who has been involved in independent election campaigns since the 1980s, describes the electoral trend as "regressive." He fears that the way local authorities are disregarding their own electoral regulations to disqualify candidates is part of a larger trend, signaling that the central government has lost control of local authorities.

"This is an extremely serious problem now, which I call the collapse of constitutionalism," he says. "Local officials are increasingly lacking in restraint; they abuse their powers and violate citizens' rights, and the central government seems to do nothing to restrain them."

Nonetheless, the woman who sparked this, Liu Ping, believes that in her case, the strategy of crushing her candidacy has backfired.

"They failed, and they failed badly. Excluding me from the election worked in my favor. A single spark can start a prairie fire, and the more they persecute me, the more resistance there will be," she says.

Local election timetables vary around the country, with polls set to run until the end of the year. But as yet, none of the Weibo candidates has been elected. The experience of past independent candidates shows that even if they were to be elected, their real impact on policymaking would be limited.

But the fact that their fate is a hot topic online shows a growing thirst for public participation in politics, and any government suppression of that will come at its own peril. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

How Do U.S. Solar Companies Compare To China's?

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A Teenager's Photo That Helped Inspire Libya's Revolt

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 16:18:00 GMT

Over the course of Libya's six-month revolution, activists took thousands of photos to document their struggle against the Gadhafi regime. At the very beginning, on the day activists planned to launch the revolution, there was one photo that stood out — and it captured the imagination of people around the world wishing for the fall of Moammar Gadhafi.

The photo has no official name, but one word can easily summarize it: Defiance. It depicts a young woman dressed in a black hijab, her head tilted downward. In her hands she holds a green banner covered in capital letters — a quotation from early 20th-century Libyan freedom fighter Omar Muhktar:

WE WILL NOT SURRENDER WE WILL WIN OR WE WILL DIE THIS IS NOT THE END! YOU WILL FIGHT US + YOU WILL FIGHT THE GENERATIONS THAT FOLLOW US UNTIL LIBYA IS FREE!

The photograph was taken by Zehra Tajouri, a 19-year-old Libyan whose family fled the country when she was six because of her father's opposition to the Gadhafi government. They bounced around more than half a dozen countries during her childhood because her family was so worried that the Libyan government would go after them. "When the Gadhafi regime is looking for you, every Libyan knows that you run," she told me in an email interview. "So that's what my family did." She's currently a college student in China.

Tajouri took the photo on Feb. 16, 2011, the day after the first protests broke out in Libya. It also happened to be the first official day of the revolution, as promoted by activists on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere.

Her goal, she explained, was to show her friends on Facebook that something big was about to happen in Libya, a country that few of them knew anything about. "I wanted people's attention," Tajouri said. "I wanted the statement 'We will not give up' etched into their mind."

"I wanted to make it personal," she added. "I could have taken the picture without a model, but I realized that with the model, it made the words matter instead of just being random statistics."

Her sister volunteered to model. Tajouri went about the process of scrawling her rallying cry on the flag. "I wanted to deface the Ghadafi flag," she explained. "I wanted people to see that it wasn't a flag — it was a useless piece of cloth and should be treated as such. I wanted people to know that this flag didn't represent me or anything I respected. ... I wanted to erase any meaning this flag held before. I even chose to write the message with a broken eyeliner pencil because in my eyes, it didn't deserve to look neat."

"I wanted people to look it at and see how that the flag itself is ugly but how the words on it were beautiful."

When the time came to take the picture, she instructed her sister to lower her head. "The reason her head is down is that I was scared," Tajouri said. "I specifically told her to look down. I was worried that if the revolution didn't work out, we'd never be able to go back into Libya. None of my sisters would; we all look alike. And even with her head down like that, I was still worried."

Even after taking the photo, she hesitated before posting it online. "I remember contemplating several times if I even should put it up, because my blog is public," she said. "However in the end, it was my sister who convinced me by saying, 'If the revolution doesn't work out, would you really even want to go back?' "

Eventually she uploaded the photo to Facebook and her blog. "I wasn't hoping to accomplish anything," Tajouri continued. "I just wanted to inform my friends and blog readers about what was happening. I grew up knowing about Gadhafi crimes, but the outside world didn't."

Within a matter of hours, her photo began to spread across the Internet. People shared it on Facebook; Libyans and non-Libyans alike used it as their Twitter avatars. It was the first photograph of the revolution to go viral.

"The response I got was not what I expected at all," Tajouri explained. "The next day I received dozens of messages from people all over the world saying how they supported our fight for freedom and how they didn't know that this was happening — how they were shocked they hadn't heard about it before."

For some people, it seemed, one thing that made the photo so compelling was that it depicted a Libyan woman engaged in a political protest. Throughout Libyan history, Tajouri noted, "women weren't really known for being the face of revolutions or change or anything of the sort, so when they saw this, it was a sign of determination and bravery. 'A woman went out and did this; a woman wasn't afraid of the Gaddafi regime.' And when you see someone who you've always viewed as weaker standing fearless, well I guess that brings out the bravery in some people."

Despite the fact that her photo was one of the first to capture the heart and soul of the Libyan protest movement, Tajouri doesn't feel that she played a role in the revolution. "I'm a young woman who took a picture," she said. "There are people who lost their lives for this revolution and they remain nameless. I'm honored that people love the picture and saw it as a sign of bravery, but really, what I did was insignificant in my eyes. I wish I could do more."

Now that Tripoli has fallen and Gadhafi is on the run, Tajouri is contemplating a possible return to her homeland. "I would love to return to Libya; I want to see it," she said. "I wish I could go now! I want to see how happy it is. ... My friends who went to visit now keep telling me about how the pictures are nothing compared to the feeling. I want to experience the feeling."

Andy Carvin (@acarvin on Twitter) leads NPR's social media strategy and is NPR's primary voice on Twitter, and Facebook. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

Comcast Offers A Digital Lifeline To The Disconnected

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:44:00 GMT

Comcast, the nation's largest cable operator, has launched a new program aimed at reducing the digital divide, or the gap between high- and low-income communities in Internet accessibility and digital literacy.

The company says low-income families will now be able to get a fast Internet connection for $9.95 per month; the question now is whether the effort can overcome the many barriers that keep the poor from getting online.

Comcast announced the program, called "Internet Essentials," at a splashy event in the company's hometown of Philadelphia. Mayor Michael Nutter showed up along with city and state education officials as a sign that this program is aimed at an important problem: improving school performance.

The program will offer a big discount to low-income families, says Comcast Vice President David Cohen. Basic high-speed Internet, which normally would cost around $50 per month, will be available for the $9.95 rate.

To be eligible, families must have a child who qualifies for the free school lunch program — that means an income of less than $25,000 a year for a family of three. Because Internet access doesn't do much good without a computer, Comcast is also offering coupons that will allow these families to buy a basic PC for $150.

Will The Offer Stand?

Many customers have been offered cable deals that looked good at first, but disappeared in a few months. So Cohen bent over backwards to say that this program is for real.

"It is a permanent price, not a promotional price," he said. "You don't have to buy any other Comcast service to be eligible for that price."

Comcast is not doing this solely out of the goodness of its corporate heart. The company promised to come up with just such a plan in exchange for government approval of its merger with NBCUniversal earlier this year.

The question now is whether low income families will sign up. John Horrigan, who worked with the FCC on its National Broadband Plan, says that in surveys, non-users say that price is a big barrier, "but they also cited other reasons, such as digital skills, [and] lack of awareness of relevant content online."

That's why Horrigan, now with a political advocacy group called TechNet, says Comcast will have to do more than drop the price.

"You also have to offer additional support services, so that these families become sustainable broadband adopters," he says.

Comcast says it's offering digital literacy kits that will explain the basics, like setting up e-mail and preventing kids from accessing indecent content. Consumer groups will be watching to see whether the company keeps up this kind of support, and whether Comcast continues to offer this price, which is supposed to be good for as long as a family has a child that qualifies for free lunch.

Potential Effect On Student Achievement

The link between technology and school achievement is fairly complicated, so it will be hard to tie the Internet Essentials plan to test scores.

Educator Eric Leslie of the KIPP Philadelphia Charter School says Internet access is key to his school's most important goal: getting kids to college.

"To have that financial aid access information [and] to know your different options for college, you have to be able to navigate the Internet and have that access, and not be afraid of it," Leslie says.

While this could be an important step toward bridging the digital divide, it doesn't help customers outside Comcast's footprint, or those who don't have a child qualifying for a free lunch. Consumer groups say there's still little competition for broadband in many markets, so many would-be users must pay what their local phone or cable company demands, or remain disconnected. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

Will Patent Reform Bill Help Or Hurt Inventors?

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:00:00 GMT

'Move An Asteroid' Competition May Help Protect Planet

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 17:00:00 GMT

Yahoo Must Search For A Clear Focus, Analysts Say

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 04:01:00 GMT

Yahoo's future is up in the air. Earlier this week, the Internet company's board of directors ousted its chief executive officer, Carol Bartz, who was hired two years ago to try to revitalize Yahoo.

Though it is still very profitable, Yahoo has been losing its relevance, and it is less clear where the company is headed.

Gregory Thune, an industrial designer in San Francisco, not far from the company's Sunnyvale campus, represents one of Yahoo's biggest problems: He's never once used Yahoo.

"I think I mistakenly landed on the Yahoo page maybe once in the last 10 years," Thune says. "But I get through my life and I answer the questions that I need to answer, and I search things ... without them. I don't even kind of know what they do anymore, honestly. I don't know what their main focus is."

And that, in a nutshell, is Yahoo's challenge.

A Quirky, Profitable Brand

Yahoo is tremendously old by Internet standards. It started 17 years ago, doing Web searches, and evolved into an online portal — a central place for accessing email, news and instant messages. Later, the company ventured into online entertainment.

Yahoo is an acronym. According to its official history, it stands for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle." The name, like its corporate brand, was quirky by design. For a time, it advertised itself on television using what came to be a familiar yodel jingle.

The branding worked. The company is very profitable and generates more than $6 billion in annual revenue.

To this day, Yahoo has a gigantic Internet audience. According to comScore, a company that tracks Web traffic, Yahoo's monthly U.S. audience is still bigger than that of Microsoft or Facebook.

But it's slipping by other measures. Compared with three years ago, users spend less time on Yahoo sites, while time spent using Google and Facebook has increased.

Losing Sight Of Search

Analysts say Yahoo started to lose momentum when it took its focus off of search.

Tim Bajarin, a tech-industry analyst and futurist, says Yahoo tried to become a media company, a field where the competition was fierce and the money was not as good. Meanwhile, the company let other opportunities slip by.

If Yahoo wants a promising future, Bajarin says, it needs to find a leader who can help the company get back on track with what matters, and can make money.

"Whoever they bring in at this point, I believe, has to understand the new world of advertising and the new world of mobile, because that's where it's all headed," he says.

Bajarin says there are some things Yahoo still does well. It's still No. 2 in display ads that it serves up on other websites. Its finance, news and sports content sites are also very popular.

But if the company were to try to sell itself, it's not clear who would buy it.

Three years ago, Microsoft offered a hefty $45 billion to buy Yahoo. The deal fell through. Now, Yahoo is worth far less than half what Microsoft offered, and the two companies forged a search partnership that effectively gave Microsoft everything it wanted from Yahoo anyway.

Still, with a market value of $17 billion, the company is a pricey takeover target, which is why there is also talk that the company might break up into smaller pieces and sell off its Asian assets — including its share in Chinese search giant Alibaba and Yahoo Japan.

Yahoo said in its press release that the company is "evaluating possibilities and opportunities" but declined a request for additional comment. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

For Software Developers, A Bounty Of Opportunity

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 18:01:00 GMT

As people across the country suffer from long-term unemployment, the tech industry is experiencing a shortage of qualified workers. Particularly in software development, employers are waging bidding wars over a tightening supply.

Take the case of Mike Champion. He and his wife, Sandra, live in the Boston suburbs with their 9-month-old daughter, Molly.

When the couple found out they were going to have another mouth to feed, Champion had just started working as a software developer at a small startup company — the type of early-stage, risky venture that often fails and goes out of business. But he wasn't worried about getting a pink slip.

"The market, especially right now, is really hot. A lot of folks are looking for people, and so I felt very comfortable that if I needed to do a job search on short notice that I'd have a lot of options," Champion says.

The number of job options for software engineers surprised Ben Johnson, who graduated from college this spring with a computer science degree. He remembers going to a job fair in Boston.

"Everyone in the room wanted to talk to me," he recalls. "It wasn't like, 'What interviews will I get?' It was 'What interviews do I want to have and take?'"

Johnson chose a job at a small company that writes applications for iPhones and other smartphones. He's not making quite as much as his friends, who are getting $70,000 to $80,000 salaries straight out of school. But he's not complaining.

"I have a job, and I'm paid to do it, all day, and it's awesome," he says.

It's not so awesome, however, if you're paying those salaries.

"It'd be awesome to get developers at 50 percent of the price. The reality is that's not the market," says Dharmesh Shah, founder of an online marketing firm called Hubspot.

Shah says he's doing everything he can to attract software engineers — paying top salaries, making the workplace as fun as possible, including, he says, "the requisite startup beer fridge, Ping-Pong table and foosball table."

But it hasn't been enough. Hubspot still has almost a dozen software jobs posted right now. So it's offering a bounty for new hires.

"If you're out there and you know someone who would make a really good Hubspot employee, we're willing to pay you really good money — $10,000 — in order to refer that person to Hubspot," Shah says.

Those referrals, high salaries and amenities are all costs that consumers end up paying. Shah says the other downside to this tight labor market is not being able to staff projects.

"We've got 50 times more ideas, really good ideas that our customers would love that people are asking for, that just never make the cut simply because we're resource-constrained," he says.

The main reason for the tight labor market is growing demand. As the number of apps grows, so, too, does the need for software. Andrew Bartels of Forrester Research says the hot market for developers is bound to cool off. But he says the field will continue to grow, as software plays a bigger role in our lives.

"For example, [software] in refrigerators, that's tracking and monitoring what goes out so you can prepare a shopping list. Or software that's showing up in medicine cabinets. Those are not places you'd normally expect to see software," he says.

And writing that software will be somebody's job. [Copyright 2011 WBUR]

WikiLeaks Now Victim Of Its Own Leak

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 09:38:00 GMT

The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, once said his mission was not simply to divulge secrets, but to make sure the release of that information actually made a difference.

He shared his trove of diplomatic cables with The New York Times, the Guardian in London, and other news organizations so they could draw the world's attention to the most important parts.

But that approach has now collapsed. The entire WikiLeaks collection, consisting of a quarter-million diplomatic files, is now out in raw form on the Internet. They are unfiltered, unanalyzed and unedited. No names of diplomats or secret sources have been removed.

The release was apparently inadvertent, but the backlash has been swift and harsh. WikiLeaks, which gained worldwide fame for publicizing U.S. government secrets, is once again the target of intense criticism. But this time, it's not just the U.S. government and others who wanted to keep those documents private. Even former WikiLeaks supporters are criticizing the organization for sloppy security.

This is not what WikiLeaks or its partners wanted.

"Our relationship with WikiLeaks was based on the agreement that we would be allowed to redact these things and nothing would be published that hadn't been carefully redacted for reasons of personal safety," says David Leigh of the Guardian newspaper, one of the editors who negotiated with Assange. "We're extremely upset that Assange, on his own responsibility, has now published everything."

But Assange and WikiLeaks blame the Guardian, and Leigh in particular. They say Leigh, in a book about WikiLeaks, divulged a password needed to unlock all the documents.

Leigh says that's nonsense, and other WikiLeaks news partners issued a joint statement with the Guardian, highlighting WikiLeaks' own failure to safeguard its files.

Even the alleged leaker of the diplomatic cables, U.S. Pfc. Bradley Manning, is now down on WikiLeaks, it seems. Bradley is in a military prison, but his support network said Friday that any source who provides secret information has the right to expect that that information will be "handled with care."

Journalism professor C.W. Anderson of the City University of New York says the WikiLeaks model involved collaboration among three groups: people with inside information, like Manning; computer activists with the skills to manage big dumps of data; and news organizations eager to make use of the leaks. But those relationships have now fractured.

"Former WikiLeaks people are fighting all the time, so that relationship is deeply damaged. The relationship with the traditional media organization is certainly damaged beyond repair," he says. "The whole thing is just such a mess."

Nor, says Anderson, are potential leakers likely to want to work with WikiLeaks in the future.

"If I had a very nervous person, who had secret documents I wanted to share, and I looked at what was going on, I would not come near them with a 10-foot pole," he says.

Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, notes that the leaking of government secrets is not an everyday phenomenon.

"It depends on the existence and the willingness of an individual with access to significant information to break ranks and disclose that information," he says. "If Bradley Manning was the source of these cables, it seems there's only one source of that caliber, and Bradley Manning is not going to be disclosing any more in the near future."

Yet WikiLeaks has already made its mark, and Anderson says the entire episode reflects the way information is now gathered, stored and shared.

"I think the idea that leaks are going to occur in gigabytes of data, piped through anonymous servers — the horse is out of the barn — I don't think we'll ever go back to the old way," he says. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

With Starz Announcement, Netflix Takes A Hit

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 19:00:00 GMT