I gave a talk in Washington DC a few weeks ago, and had a strange realization – with a change of political administration, I know a whole lot more folks than I used to in my nation’s capital. Two old friends showed up to my talk, both people I know from Berkman Center events and ongoing debates over domestic and international internet policy. As I fielded increasingly thorny questions from the two of them, I realized that their questions had an edge to them. They weren’t the theoretical questions I’m used to getting in an academic context – they were the sorts of practical policy questions that come from people who are making policy decisions every day. It’s a surprise for me to have friends working on issues I care about in government, a pleasant one, and it’s forcing me to sharpen my thinking so I can offer advice that has a chance of actually being implemented.

With this in mind, I’m thrilled to learn that my friend Andrew McLaughlin is heading to the White House, where the New York Times reports he’ll be serving as deputy Chief Technology Officer, reporting to Aneesh Chopra, Virgina’s former secretary of technology. Andrew has been at Google for the past several years, as Google’s head of public policy and government affairs. In explaining what he did for Google, Andrew often described himself as “Google’s secretary of state” – as Google tried to figure out how to react to Chinese demands to censor content or Thailand’s decision to block access to YouTube, he was the guy on the ground negotiating with authorities in other countries. As David Weinberger notes in a post about Andrew’s new role, “You may disagree with his policy recommendations on, say, Google’s presence in China or how to handle Turkey’s desire to block YouTube videos that mock Mustafa Kemal Ataturk but if you have a chance to hear Andrew talk about such issues, you will come away impressed by his knowledge, his seriousness, his vision, and his empathy.”

I’d echo that. I’d also point out that the Obama administration is gaining someone who understands the Internet in a deep, profound way. I’ve had the pleasure of teaching classes with Andrew and helping design policy prescriptions with him – we’ve written educational articles together that still get used at Berkman despite their age, primarily because Andrew’s descriptions of the “internet elves” (ICANN, IETF, IANA and others) is a hugely useful introduction to anyone trying to figure out how the net is actually governed. Before Google, Andrew was the founding CFO of ICANN, the internet body responsible for the domain name system. In a city known for people who think the internet is a series of tubes, it’s good to know we’ve got someone in a position of authority who deeply understands how the net actually works and who is personally committed to an open, generative internet.

• Wikipedia bans Church of Scientology %u2022 The Register
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  Evgeny Morozov warns that Wikipedia banning edits from Scientology's IPs is a) ineffective and b) a very bad precedent. Interested to hear more on the story, especially Wikimedia's perspective and logic
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  BeijingToday article on "grassroots translation" (aka social translation, volunteer translation, distributed human translation) efforts in China, with a focus on yeeyan.com
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• circ09's Documents | Scribd
  Archive of papers from the 2009 China Internet Research Conference, including Hal and my (now very old) paper on internet circumvention tools
  (tags: china research academia papers data circumvention censorship media freespeech internet)
• Annals of Medicine: The Cost Conundrum: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
  Provocative piece by Atul Gawande that argues that the problem with the US medical system is doctor incentives – to the extent that doctors are encouraged to run tests and procedures that profit them, rather than collaborating in teams to decide appropriate care, costs increase and patients suffer.
  (tags: healthcare insurance cost usa uspolitics medicine collaboration economics unintended)

I’ve written in the past about my friend and colleague John Kelly’s excellent work visualising connections in different blogospheres. His best known research is on the Persian-language blogosphere, where his analysis of linking behavior showed clusters around liberal and conservative politics, but also around poetry. Subsequent analyses have seen clustering around different factors. Russian blogs appear to cluster around platforms – Livejournal users link primarily to other Livejournal users, and so the Russian “blogosphere” is a mess of disconnected communities. The Arabic blogosphere clusters based on location, rather than on interest – Egyptians tend to link to Egyptians, Saudis to Saudis.

The Chinese internet, Kelly tells us, has a complex and hybrid form. It has aspects of clustering via platform, but there are also “trading zones”, where people group by interest and mix content across platforms. He’s looking at techniques of “attentive clustering”, joining people together based on sites they’re paying attention to, rather than on direct links to one another. The research is in an early state, but it looks like Kelly’s techniques will be able to release some interesting information.

Roger Dingledine of Tor offers some insights into his unique and exciting platform for censorship circumvention and anonymity. He reminds us that it’s free software – you’re encouraged to build your own Tor network, though you might have a hard time replicating the 1500 active relays and 200,000 users he’s got on his network. Tor has the most users in China, followed by the US and Germany.

Tor is now a “real live 501c3″ non-profit organization, and it’s been funded by an amazing variety of organizations: the US Department of Defense, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Voice of America, Human Rights Watch and Google. Speaking to all these funders requires using different language. “When I talk to Walmart, I talk about communications security. Talking to my family, I mention privacy tools. To the military, it’s ‘traffic-analysis resistant communications networks’. It’s the same tool, but I phrase it in terms of the characteristics people care about.”

All these users, Roger reminds us, are needed to keep the network robust and anonymous. Good cryptography isn’t sufficient to provide anonymity – you need to disguise who’s talking to whom, which means Tor benefits from being a network used by privacy freaks, online gambling fans and human rights activists. “Nobody tries to break crypto anymore – they just do social network analysis, find the hub, then break into your house.” Tor helps with one aspect of this problem – it disguises a great deal of communication between people who could otherwise be linked via traffic analysis. On the other hand, Roger remembers a training he and I gave a few years back, where our clients explained were being surveiled both electronically and in the physical world, with parabolic microphones intercepting conversations. Online security can only take you so far.

Roger notes that groups like Tor can help control the pace of the censorship and circumvention arms race. The more publicity tools get, the more likely they are to get blocked – Roger’s very interested in building a tool that’s useful for Chinese internet users, but not aiming at overthrowing or somehow overcoming the Chinese government, because that’s almost guaranteed to make the tool a target for blocking and censorship.

Zhang Lei, the founder of Chinese translation community Yeeyan, starts his talk with a story about his last name. While Zhang is the world’s most popular last name, it’s generally considered exotic in the US, and most Americans can’t pronounce it correctly (“Jong”, not “Zang” or “Zeng”.) He sees this as an illustration of the difficulties people have in understanding one another when separated by barriers of language.

While 18-20% of world’s internet users are Chinese, it’s unlikely that Chinese is as well represented linguistically on the net. Zhang points out that there’s really no accurate data on what languages are represented online – he references an old and probably bad cite on Wikipedia that suggests that 80% of web content is in English, followed by German and Japanese. If this is true, there’s a massive imbalance between users and the content available to them. A simple experiment confirms this suspicion. A search for “breast cancer” on Google reveals 38 million pages – a search for the Chinese equivalent yields only 6 million, and the quality of content is much lower.

Machine translation isn’t a satisfactory solution. A simple paragraph of text, translated from English into Chinese via cutting edge technology, yield about one third readable text, two thirds gibberish. There’s a ton of content that would be worth translating from English to Chinese, and we’re not going to be able to do it automatically.

Zhang’s project, Yeeyan.com, wants to be “wikipedia for translation”. His community involves 8,000 volunteer translators, who’ve created 40,000 translations. The community includes 80,000 participants, who are able to comment on or improve translations. Perhaps the most exciting new project is a collaboration with The Guardian, to translate the newspaper into Chinese on a regular basis, producing an official, sanctioned edition – this is an interesting contrast to ECOTeam, which translates The Economist via an informal understanding with the publisher.

The motivation for Zhang’s project is to build understanding across gaps of language. He explains that terms can mean something very different, even in translation: “The term ‘conservative’ in relation to economic policy means ‘anti-freemarket, pro-government control’ – the opposite of what it means in the US.” These misunderstandings get in the way of dialog and understanding. In 2008, we saw major understanding gaps built on language gaps, centered on Tibet and Chinese nationalism. “I can’t solve these problems, but I can translate,” Zhang tells us. “Translation is the first step and a must to bridge the divide.”

Isaac Mao has been blogging since 2002, and he’d be the first to tell you that blogging has changed how he sees the world. His work now is on developing a theory called “shareism”, based on the idea that humans are inclined to share with one another, but that cultural barriers have emerged to restrict sharing, and that losses and absences in our society arise, in part, from our failure to share. Isaac sees the hierarchical system of Chinese society, and several thousands of years of history of top-down control, as providing an especially challenging environment for shareism.

Chinese people, he believes, are being separated into two groups – those who are connected and those who are disconnected. Bloggers spend a lot of time sharing, subscribing to other bloggers, and connecting with one another. They have more authentic relationships to one another, he believes, based on their willingness to share and connect. The unconnected are influenced primarily by mainstream media – the connected can influence each other, can access information that’s hidden from the unconnected and circumvent censorship. Ideally, they’ll connect via social media, access important information, and share information with the unconnected people, empowering them. “This could be the hope and the future of the Chinese community.”

It’s not reasonable to posit the elimination of China’s hierarchical systems – it needs to be replaced with something, and Isaac believes the sorts of connection he’s talking about could offer that necessary structure. He sees this change already happening in small ways – communities that have access to alternative media stop being as dependent on highly controlled mainstream media. As attention switches to these new spaces, business and political leaders need to pay attention to these new spaces, as do foreign journalists. He notes that journalists covering China are now paying close attention to bloggers, not just to established media sources.

Liao Hang Teng of the Oxford Internet Institute is interested in ways that Chinese internet authorities are mediating between chaos and control. He introduces us to two terms – zhi and luan 亂. Zhi means “order, governance, control or cure”, while luan means “disorder, instability and chaos”. People in China talk about history in terms of periods of zhi or luan, Liao tells us, whether periods of time were chaotic or ordered.

Beijing has been replacing the luan of the internet with the zhi of control, he tells us. A 2007 study suggests that 80% of Chinese users prefer control of the internet, and prefer that the government do it. There’s a sense that “too much freedom leads to luan”, like the 1989 Tiananmen protests, or like Taiwan’s government.

Liao suggests we stop thinking about the Great Firewall and think instead about Great Dams and Great Canals. What we’re seeing is “zoning technology versus dynamic order” – a decision to open free speech zones, much as “free-speech zones” are becoming unfortunately common at US protests. “Freedom is being introduced as a special exception permitted by Beijing.”

An example of a controlled speech zone is Baidu Baike, a participatory encyclopedia introduced as an alternative to the Chinese-language Wikipedia. William Chang, technology officer of Baidu, suggested that it makes sense that Chinese users wouldn’t want to use “a service based out there” – “It’s very natural for China to make its own projects.”

While Baidu Baike has grown sharply, it hasn’t caught up with Chinese Wikipedia. Liao sees it as a failed experiment, because it hasn’t managed to embrace the diversity of the Chinese wikipedia. He uses outlinks from the sites and the language sets represented as a proxy for linguistic diversity, and sees much less diversity in the Baidu project. He also notes that Baidu got the “grass mud horse” incident wrong, reporting on it as an animal, while the Chinese Wikipedia understood that it was a complex parody and statement about free speech.

Referring back to the 2007 survey that showed enthusiasm for government control, Liao wonders if there’s a missing option – perhaps control of the internet should be in the hands of the internet community or of civil society.

My friend and colleague Rebecca MacKinnon reports on her recent paper published in First Monday on blog censorship. She notes that in talking about censorship in China, we need to consider both censorship of sites outside the firewall (i.e., the blocking of Human Rights Watch inside China) as well as censorship inside the firewall, the censorship of content on domestic commercial websites, the takedown of domestically hosted websites and the shutdown of data centers.

Rebecca has studied the mechanisms used to censor on sites within China, and notes some early work she did with Human Rights Watch, which suggests that corporate censorship wasn’t uniform, wich meant that companies were making choices, acting in reaction to government demands, but offering their own interpretations. Nart Villeneuve at Citizen Lab followed up on this work, and was able to discover different levels of filtering between Baidu, which censored a great deal, and Yahoo, MSN and Google which censored less (they’re listed in order of decreasing censorship.)

Because the Great Firewall is so effective at blocking access to blogging platforms, most Chinese users publish on domestic platforms. Her recent research demonstrates that there’s incredible variation in what can and cannot be published on these platforms. Using excerpts from Chinese blogs and Xinhua news reports, she tested 108 potentially sensitive texts on 15 different platforms. Filtering differed wildly – one platform filtered 60 of 108 texts, while one filtered only one, and there’s a wide spread of results in between those extremes.

She outlines five ways content is blocked from publication:
- The platform simply refuses certain sensitive posts
- Posts are held for moderation, and never appear
- Posts are visible to the authors, but never to the public
- Posts are published, but removed within 24 hours
- Posted, but sensitive words are replaced with asterisks – Blogbus, for instance, blocks out all mentions of Hu Jintao, even in Xinhua articles.

One filtering method was only used by Microsoft’s Windows Live service – sensitive articles could be published and would be seen in Hong Kong or the US, but MSN geofiltered to ensure posts couldn’t be read from within China.

Rebecca tells us that very sensitive texts, like a provocative Bao Tong essay, were either not censored at all, or censored by very few platforms. She believes that the censorship method tends to overfocus on certain words, while very controversial texts might get through if written in “official language”.

Why is there such variation in platforms? We’ve only got theories, she tells us – it might have to do with relationships between certain editors and government officials. It’s going to require more study… and it’s important to do this study because this form of filtering is deeply important to Chinese users and may represent a pattern of censorship we’re likely to see in the rest of the world, not just in China.

Dave Lyons has been studying “the Golden Shield project“, which he argues may be one of the world’s great misunderstood efforts. Essays by American commentators on the project – an effort to bring computers and databases to the Chinese police force – portray it as “Police State 2.0” (Naomi Klein) or as “too creepy to bear repeating”, as James Fallows writes. Lyons thinks these authors are badly misunderstanding what’s being implemented and what it means for China.

The focus of the Golden Shield project is on bringing computers to the police, from the lowest provincial levels, up to the Ministry of Public Security, and developing eight databases: population management, criminal records, fugitives, driver’s licenses, stolen vehicles, stolen property, national security, and border control. Some of those sound pretty sinister, while others are the sorts of databases we expect police to have. Lyons has focused on the “population management” database – described as “the dragon’s head of Golden Shield” – which tracks hukou registration (a registration of your city of residence) and the “second generation” national ID card, which features an RFID chip. Most of the country has moved to this new card, which stores a great deal of personal data.

Lyons points out that forgery is a serious problem in China. It’s possible to buy fake cards quite easily – indeed, in Mission Impossible 3, a single frame of the film features a piece of graffiti advertising the services of a ban jun, a forger, with a phone number. This was sufficiently provocative that the film was never screened in China… but it circulated widely via pirate DVDs. As a result, the ban jun advertised on the wall needed to change his phone number – he got so many calls that it got in the way of his business, weeding out the merely curious from potential customers. More ambitious forgers have been known to advertise by scrawling their numbers on police cars. So while the idea of a database that tracks all Chinese people is very scary, the reality may be a lot less so. “The biggest project of the golden shield has to do with accurately identifying citizens”, which can lead towards service delivery and accurate statistics, much like the census in the US.

Another part of the Golden Shield is a video surveillance system, using CCTV. He shows us a picture of a surveillance center in Shenyang, which looks pretty intimidating. He points out that the name for this project is sometimes translated as “Skynet”, which hearkens back to the evil computer in the Terminator movies. But a second surveillance room is a photo of Chicago’s “Operation Virtual Shield”. Lyons wonders whether what we’re seeing is China catching up with how the rest of the world does law enforcement, not breaking new ground. He notes that the most frightening tech in facial recognition isn’t used in China – it’s used in Las Vegas casinos to weed out hustlers and card sharks.

Finally, Lyons suggests that we misunderstand if we connect the Golden Shield to internet censorship – while there are at least a dozen organizations involved with internet censorship, Skynet is focused much more closely to the ground.

Lyons’s talk receives a great deal of commentary from the audience, including Chinese scholars sharing their experience of how casually regulations are enforced. One talks about visiting a Chinese cybercafe without a registration card – the cybercafe administrator simply swiped her in with his own card.

Sarah Cook of Freedom House wonders if Lyons is being fair in comparing surveillance in Chicago to that in Beijing, given that residents in Chicago have legal protections they can rely on which are denied to Chinese citizens – Lyons concedes her point. But there’s another message here – simply understanding security practices based on what systems are in place is insufficient – you’ve got to look at how those systems are embedded in societies and how they’re actually carried out.

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  Fiji's miilitary government detains and harasses bloggers. Great examples of a repressive government trying to silence alternative media via competing publications and punitive arrests.
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(I’m at the 7th China Internet Research Conference at the Annenberg School of Communications. Information on participating is here.)

The second session at the China Internet Research conference is a roundtable on the Global Network Initiative, an association of academic institutions, corporations and nonprofit institutions working on a set of best practices for corporations to follow in engaging with governments on online freedom of expression issues. Hosted by my colleague Rebecca MacKinnon, the round table includes Colin Maclay from the Berkman Center, Leslie Harris from the Center for Democracy and Technology, Bob Boorstin representing Google, internet entrepreneur Isaac Mao, and Ang Pen Hwa from Nanyang Technical University.

Rebecca explains that the GNI is a result, in part, of hearings in US Congress about actions by US corporations in China, emerging in part in reaction to Yahoo’s role in the arrest of Chinese journalist Shi Tao. Corporations wanted advice on best practices working in nations that don’t respect rights of free speech, and NGOs wanted to ensure that companies worked to protect human rights. This created a sense of common interest, which has allowed the companies to meet on common ground and discuss strategies.

Boorstin acknowledges that being the representative of a large US corporation at a Chinese internet conference can be “like being the fire hydrant at a dog show”. He explains that Google has much less leverage in China than most people think – if Google threatened to leave, he says, “The Chinese government would say, ‘Bye bye’”. Their market share is small compared to Baidu’s – 22% versus 70% market share – and Boorstin argues that they’ve got less influence than larger Chinese companies would have.

Without disagreeing with him, Isaac Mao points out that his open letter to Google (published over two years ago, and never responded to by Google…) was directed because Google has such a strong reputation for being socially progressive – he hoped Google would choose to do the right thing and engage in China in a way that explicitly promoted freedom of expression.

Ang suggests that GNI not try to get the US first ammendment adopted around the world. Instead, it’s important to celebrate a best practice – immunizing a provider from third-party liability. In other words, individuals are responsible for their speech, not companies. Without this limitation on liability, it’s virtually impossible to run book reviews on Amazon or maintain a site like Trip Advisor. It’s not unreasonable, he argues, to expect regulation of offline media to creep into regulation of online media, but this single principle makes a great deal of free expression possible. Colin Maclay questions whether we want to regulate the internet like media, or like free expression, pointing out that online expression is very different from traditional media: it’s cheap, unlicensed, and yet still persistent, having an impact even after a takedown order.

Leslie Harris responds to criticism that the GNI doesn’t include small companies or non-US companies – it’s based primarily around Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. “When we started, we wondered whether we could get these three companies to sit in a room together… and the answer was initially ‘no’.” In other words, it’s required a great deal of work to get as far as the initiative has gone so far – we may need to be patient in expecting the group to extend any time soon.

Rebecca calls on Michael Anti, reminding us that his blog, hosted on Microsoft’s MSN Spaces (now Windows Live) was censored in 2005, not by China but by the company. He offers the observation that Chinese users are offering “a quiet acceptance of some compromise – without some compromise, we know we’ll lose these key services.” But he suggests that these companies formalize a bargain with their Chinese users: “We want companies to udnerstand that when they do business in China, it’s exchange – we exchange part of our freedom to support you. You should have some special group to help civil society as an exchange for us ignoring your compromise with the government.”

Harris fields a question about whether the US Congress has a seat at the table of GNI. “They’re at the table, but not as a welcome guest,” she quips. While Congress isn’t represented at the table, pressure from congressional committees helped bring participants to the table, and it might require EU pressure for European companies to participate as well.

In response to a question about whether GNI serves as a “fig leaf” for corporations, Boorstin points out that Google added a notice at the bottom of their Chinese search results making clear that filtering is taking place – other engines have caught up and provided a similar notice. “What’s under the figleaf: pretty much the three Ts, and one F – there’s more than that, but I think most Chinese users know what material they can’t get.” (That would be Tibet, Taiwan, Tienenman and Falun Gong, for those not following the Chinese internet closely…)

Isaac Mao and Ang Pen Hwa field a question about setting up an initiative like the GFI in Asia, with Asian stakeholders. Isaac believes GNI could be localized to Asia, because there’s a “cultural history of controlling culture” which leads to attempts to control the internet too closely. This, in turn, means that Asian companies are facing the sorts of pressures that brought US governments to the GFI table. Ang tells us he’s hoping to set up a “committee of internet experts” – “it’ll be like the EFF, but you can’t use the word ‘Freedom’ in Singapore without being misunderstood.” Support for the initiative is more likely to come from small businesses and academia in Singapore, he believes, not from civil society.

I’m at the 2009 Chinese Internet Research Conference at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. My colleague Hal Roberts and I are presenting some of our research on circumvention tools this afternoon, and I’m enjoying the chance to catch up on research in a field I don’t know a ton about – the Chinese internet. The conference is organized in part by my good friend Lokman Tsui, who apparently hasn’t slept in weeks.

Michael Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School, points out that study of the Chinese internet reminds us that “the internet means very different things in very different settings.” Studying the Internet in China means moving back and forth between understanding the medium itself and understanding the cultures and economic and political settings in which it is placed. The conference, which focuses on the Chinese internet and civil society, includes talks on the public sphere and deliberation, censorship, surveillance, civil society, women and minorities, panics, nationalism and grassroot cultures. Delli Carpini warns us, “Let’s not pretend we understand the internet in the US on these issues” – we’re still figuring out how these online spaces work everywhere in the world.

Min Jiang of UNC Charlotte used to work for CCTV in Beijing, so she’s well positioned to study Chinese media, propoganda and citizen participation. In a talk titled, “Spaces of Authoritarian Deliberation”, she explains that we need to moderate our understanding of the Chinese internet. It’s not a controlled space punctuated by bursts of protest, as usually portrayed in the Western media. Nor is it the emerging deliberative public sphere as Chinese authorities like to claim – it’s somewhere in between.

The online space in China is huge, with 298 million internet users. 2/3rds of these users are under 30, and lots of them are bloggers. (She uses the figure of 162 million, which seems very high to me, but would be interesting to see the number sourced.) 700 million Chinese have mobile phones, and 117 have phones with internet access. This, she suggests, creates an unprecedenced ability for users to engage in collective action.

There’s an impression, she suggests, that “if we bring down the great firewall, China will be free” – in truth, it’s a lot more compicated. China’s not as simple as a repressive dictatorship – it’s a complex authoritarian state, evolving over time, especially in online spaces. She offers the example of a comment by Jackie Chan in a public forum: “We Chinese need to be controlled.” Chan was offered the opportunity to respond, saying “I was quoted out of context.” Chinese netizens didn’t buy it – some suggested that perhaps Chan should be sent to North Korea to see what it’s like to be controlled. “Modern authoritianism is deliberative – it listens and responds to the people.”

She looks closely at four kinds of spaces:

Central propoganda spaces, where the government controls the message. Despite the control of these spaces, there’s a surprising amount of open discussion, including complaints posted about local government and discussions of issues like the global financial crisis.

Government-controlled commercial spaces are even more lively – while the spaces are centered on topics like music, news and messaging, there’s a great deal of discussion on political topics. When these spaces get too frisky, they can get shut down until they tone down – some spaces, after being shut down, reopen overseas. They’re emerging as increasingly important spaces to discuss public issues.

A small number of new spaces are emerging as civic forums. They’re sometimes explicitly focused on defending rights. As a result, these sites are generally asked to register their presence with the government. But other civic spaces are emerging, sometimes on sites like a Facebook clone – these are platforms for self-organizing.

Finally, she considers international deliberative spaces, a category that ranges from international media sites like China Radio International and CCTV online, which try to shape the image of China online, to spaces built by overseas bloggers and translators, like the ECOTeam (which translates The Economist into Chinese), or groups that translate entertainment content like Desperate Housewives.

The open questions Min Jiang is interested in focus on how we can engage emergent civil society in China, engage with reformist bureacrats, and engage the digital generation.

Yuan Le presents a paper that she and Boxu Yang at Peking University developed from studying two Chinese bulletin board communities – Qiangguo Forum and
Maoyan Kanfren Forum. The former is a long-established forum, online since 1999, and seen as an officially sanctioned space. The latter is more associated with the right. Yuan and Yang develop a sophisticated political model that divides Chinese political culture into “old left”, “new left”, “nationalist” and “neoconfucian”. They’re interested in studying what debates emerge between these groups – some are ideological questions, while others are debates over the language used, particularly between old Marxist language and more modern language of the social sciences.

Analyzing 398 threads and 1243 replies, handcoding posts for political opinion, the researchers discovered a clear left/right break between the two studied forums. They also saw evidence of very different agendas between the spaces – on Qiangguo, conversations often centered on issues of social welfare, while discussions of liberal democracy and individual freedom dominated on Maoyan Kanfren.

Sarah Cook of Freedom House presents their recent report, Freedom on the Net. It’s an attempt to rank fifteen countries in terms of internet freedom, using 19 indicators in three thematic areas: obstacles to access, limits on content and violation of user rights.

China comes up as “not free” under the Freedom House methodology, grouped with Cuba, Tunisia and Iran. She posits a paradox – China is aggresively embracing the internet, and is one of six countries they considered where internet penetration has recently doubled, but there’s sophisticated and multi-layered apparatus of control.

Cook points out that there are several phenomena which are unique to China, including strong pre-publication controls (which Rebecca MacKinnon has studied at length). Other controls, like paid manipulators of public opinion, like the 50 cent party, are seen in other venues like Russia and Tunisia.

Freedom House uses a similar points-based methodology to score press freedom, and Cook compares press and online freedom. While there’s not a large difference in highly-controled countries, there is a big gap in partially free countries – there’s more freedom online, though Cook worries that gap is closing.

(I’m not especially thrilled with Freedom House’s decision to try to rank internet freedom on a single hundred-point scale. Comparing Tunisia and China, which have utterly different filtering methodologies and social implications, feels like comparing apples and oranges to me. And trying to correlate two indexes which both measure factors that are very hard to quantify strikes me as potentially very misleading. Then again, I’ve worked closely with colleages at the OpenNet Initiative, and feel like the Freedom House work doesn’t add much to the work they’ve done over the past several years.)

It’s the third sumo tournament of the year, the Natsu Basho, held at Ryogoku Kokugikan in Tokyo, and 13 days into the contest, the good and bad of contemporary sumo are on display. The good: both Yokozuna – Asashoryu and Hakuho – are at the top of their game, and my man, Harumafuji – formerly Ama – is kicking ass and taking names. The bad: they’ve got no competition.

Yokozuna are supposed to be dominant – you’re not allowed to assume that rank unless you’re good enough that you can win nearly every match you compete in. Hakuho is currently 13-0, having snuck past Harumafuji earlier today, and unless he loses to Asashoryu on the final day, he’s likely to complete a second consecutive zensho-yusho (perfect tournament.) The video below shows Hakuho’s last tournament, where he destroys fifteen progressively tougher opponents over the course of two weeks – it’s an excellent intro to sumo at the highest levels, practiced by a yokozuna with stunning power and technique. (Hakuho is on the right in all these bouts, dressed in black. For the several matches, he’s fighting lower-ranked rikishi – for the last half dozen, he’s fighting ozeki, and finally Asashoryu, the other yokozuna – you’ll see the matches get longer and far more difficult.)

But ozeki are supposed to be pretty dominant, too. You generally can’t be promoted to sumo’s second-highest rank without thirty wins over three consecutive tournaments, which suggests that you should be capable of ten wins in any given tournament. Ozeki who have losing records in two successive tournaments are stripped of their rank and reduced to Sekiwake – most retire from the sport rather than face this dishonor.

Chiyotaikai, who’s been ozeki for ten years, is facing demotion for the (record) 13th time in his career. He’s weak, injured, and struggling with diabetes, and it would be a good thing for him and for the sport if he retired. Of course, he’s telling the press he plans to remain fighting, even if relegated. The disturbing thing? At 6-7, he might just stave off elimination one more time – his fellow ozeki, who he fights the next two days, may be inclined to ease up in matches against him.

With the exception of Harumafuji, the other ozeki aren’t making real strong showings either. Kaio, who’s almost as decrepit as Chiyotaikai, is 8-5, as is the often impressive Bulgarian Kotooshu. Kotomitsuki hasn’t yet guaranteed himself a winning record at 7-6, and none of these four have been a serious threat throughout the tournament. And so we’ve got three strong, relatively small, Mongolian wrestlers setting the base, and a whole lot of mediocrity throughout the rest of the ranks.

It’s not news that sumo is having trouble attracting new athletes in Japan. The horrific training death of seventeen year-old Takashi Saito (who was beaten to death by training mates on the instruction of his stablemaster, to correct his “vague attitude” about sumo… which the Japan Sumo Association covered up as a death from heart failure… which was finally prosecuted as manslaughter) has certainly not helped attract new converts. In the meantime, sumo is gaining global popularity, not just in Mongolia, but in countries like Bulgaria, where Kotooshu’s success is driving young people to try the sport.

The JSA continues to restrict the number of foreigners who can compete in the sport, despite a strong pipeline of new talent from Mongolia and increasingly from Russia and eastern Europe. I can’t help reading the expulsion of Roho, Hakurozan and Wakanoho – three talented rikishi from Ossetia – for marijuana posession and positive drug tests as having a subtext: it’s another way to keep some of the gaijin off the dohyo.

In the meantime, Kotooshu, the lanky Bulgarian ozeki who’s become popular both in Japan and in his home country, announced that he’ll be marrying a Japanese woman who he’s been dating for five years. Like Kyukutenho, a Mongolian sekiwake who became a Japanese citizen and is now in line to become the head of the Oshima stable, Kotooshu is changing sumo the slow way, diversifying Japanese society and helping broaden and open one of Japan’s most traditional institutions.

I’m following this tournament via CiberSumo – yep, in the cosmopolitan world that is sumo, the best coverage at the moment is put together by Spaniards. They have a small, but excellent, video library that’s very much worth your time. And like SumoTalk, they run a virtual sumo league.

• Data.gov
  Nifty datasets from the US government. Time to start mashing up that data, I suppose.
  (tags: politics data web2.0 visualization statistics openaccess transparency database government resource)
• IEEE Spectrum: The Million Dollar Programming Prize
  Interesting insights into the Netflix challenge from the team currently in the lead, including a basic overview of some of the techniques being used by successful teams.
  (tags: information learning netflix datamining recommendation filtering math)

High on the New York Times’s list of most emailed stories is a feature on Sriracha sauce, the rooster-labeled, green-topped, hot, sweet and transcendent condiment that, in my book, signifies good things to come when I see it on a restaurant table or in a friend’s kitchen. The sauce – which I always thought was Vietnamese – is an interesting mongrel: it’s the creation of an ethnically-Chinese refugee from Vietnam, invented in Los Angeles as a pan-Asian chili sauce. And I’m far from the only devotee – the article quotes from top chefs who swear by the stuff and from drunken customers calling the factory to sing its praises.

I try to take a week off from work before Christmas and grab some leisure time in the kitchen, cooking for the holidays and to make gifts for friends and family. One of my favorite creations this year was a batch of Sriracha-laced salt caramels. As a diabetic, I can’t really eat candy, so was looking to make a candy that was satisfying enought to my tastes that I could eat a tiny piece and be happy for hours. These didn’t turn out nearly as strong as I’d intended, but my candy-eating friends and family tell me that they’re quite addictive.

Ingredients:
- 1 cup heavy cream
- 4 tablespoons (half a stick) of butter
- 2-3 tablespoons of Sriracha chili sauce
- teaspoon of salt, preferably sea salt

Mix those four ingredients in a saucepan, bring to a boil, remove from heat and cover.

- 1 1/2 cups white sugar (not confectioner’s sugar, which has corn starch in it)
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 1/4 cup of water

Mix these ingredients in a pan that you’re willing to damage. (If you’re careful, you won’t, but candy is tricky business.) Heat over medium heat, stirring like a madman. You’re trying to dissolve all the sugar into a heavy syrup. Once you’ve got that syrup and it’s boiling, stop stirring and start swirling the pan instead. (Once you’re boiling sugar, it’s very easy to cause the solution to crystalize into a hard, unusable mess – one of the easiest ways to screw this up is to introduce sugar crystals from a dirty spoon. If you do crystalize, add water to the sugar and start again by disolving into a syrup…)

Using a candy thermometer, raise the temperature to the “firm ball” stage, around 245-250F. Pour in the cream mixture and stir hard to combine ingredients. Heat, stirring, until temperature is back at 245-250F. Pour the mixture out onto a baking sheet lined with wax paper or parchement. Let cool for about an hour, then cut caramel into small squares or rectangles. Wrap caramels in wax paper – they keep for months.

And no, Sriracha-flavored caramels aren’t an authentic manifestation of Vietnamese or Thai culture… but then again, neither is Sriracha sauce. To hell with authenticity – eat what tastes good.