What would I say? Something you think when posting on social media sites, when offering up your opinion about something in the news, and now, the name of an app that emerged from HackPrinceton just a few days ago. So popular the server intermittently goes down, forcing you to access a cached copy of the site or not be able to post automatically to facebook (instead screenshotting the page to share), it was created by Pawel, Vicky, Ugne, Daniel, Harvey, Edward, Alex, and Baxter.| thisisimportant.net
Tianyu Fang researched a long and detailed essay called Whose Domain Is It?, detailing the politics of the Internet’s domain names, especially the country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) that you might not realize are actually associated with countries. The unexpectedly popular ccTLDs can operate like a tourism effort, at least in terms of generating unexpected revenue for small countries: Domain sales are generating revenue for Anguilla’s government. Per Cate’s estimate, the domain reg...| Borders on This is important
Most of the Internet is held together by best practices and good intentions, and WHOIS servers are one of those. One security company was investigating vulnerabilities in WHOIS and got a whole lot more than they bargained for: Each TLD (the bit at the end of the domain), you see, has a separate WHOIS server, and there’s no real standard to locating them - the only ‘real’ method being examining a textual list published by IANA. This list denotes the hostname of a server for each TLD, whi...| Borders on This is important
The UK will give sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius: Half a century or more after the UK relinquished control over almost all its global empire, it has finally agreed to hand over one of the very last pieces. It has done so reluctantly, perhaps, but also peacefully and legally. The Chagos Islands are also known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, to which the .io ccTLD is assigned. Given that the UK is relinquishing control of the islands to Mauritius, there will no longer be a Bri...| Borders on This is important
As the music industry moves away from downloads and toward building streaming platforms, international sovereignty becomes more of a barrier to people listening to music and discussing it with others, because they don’t have access to the same music on the same platforms. As Sean Michaels points out in The Morning News several years ago: one of the undocumented glitches in the current internet is all its asymmetrical licensing rules. I can’t use Spotify in Canada (yet). Whenever I’m abl...| Borders on This is important
Some countries have trendy ccTLDs, and startups buy in to their domain space. Vox Media has more details: Even very small countries get ccTLDs. Here’s a close-up of the area around Australia and the many small island nations that have their own domain names. Some of these countries realized that they could make a lot of money if they opened their domains to foreigners. The result: popular websites like last.fm (.fm is the domain of the Federated States of Micronesia) and twitch.tv (.tv is t...| Borders on This is important
It isn’t really possible to search the “global web” today. You can, however, try to use Google to search the web of another country by manually manipulating the ccTLD in the URL to divert your search to a different country service than the country you are located in. But starting recently, that’s no longer possible. Betanews points out that Google makes it harder to search for results from other countries: Google has announced that it will now always serve up results that are relevan...| Borders on This is important
Iran and Russia are becoming Internet provider nexuses to other countries. Dyn Research wrote about shifts in 2013 that led states in the Persian Gulf to seek out additional Internet providers. Sometimes, it takes a real disaster to create something genuinely new. March 2013 was a month of disasters in the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and East African Internet, with major submarine cable cuts affecting SMW3, SMW4, IMEWE, EIG, SEACOM, and TE-North. One of the “genuinely new” Internet traff...| Borders on This is important
Romania is selling IPv4 addresses to make money, but how did they get so many in the first place? ComputerWorld explores How Romania’s patchwork Internet helped spawn an IP address industry. The roots of the Romanian IP address trade lie in the country’s peculiar Internet history. When commercial Internet service began in Romania around 2000, it was totally unplanned and unregulated. People started ISPs by pulling cables from one house to the next. As the IPv6 transition and adoption is ...| Borders on This is important
Dyn Research interrogates the notion that the Internet is decentralized by looking at the actual state of infrastructure and routing resilience around the world. What did they find? The key to the Internet’s survival is the Internet’s decentralization — and it’s not uniform across the world. In some countries, international access to data and telecommunications services is heavily regulated. There may be only one or two companies who hold official licenses to carry voice and Internet ...| Borders on This is important
Per Al Jazeera, 95% of the world’s languages continue to be unrepresented online. The real problem is a digital architecture that forces people to operate on the terms of another culture, unable to continue the development of their own. The architecture of the web influences the languages and cultures interacting with it: He rightly homes in on the invisible underpinnings that enable us to use a language online, such as input methods, OS support (on a range of devices, in countless applicat...| Borders on This is important
Motherboard says The Internet Is Killing Most Languages: The great flat, globalized world of the internet operates pretty much as a monoculture, Kornai says. Only about 250 languages can be called well-established online, and another 140 are borderline. Of the 7,000 languages still alive, perhaps 2,500 will survive, in the classical sense, for another century, and many fewer will make it on to the internet. Globalization of the world and the web could lead to homogenization of the languages ...| Borders on This is important
Is homogenization of language on the web an instantiation of totalitarianism? Boston Review on Herta Müller’s Language of Resistance: Since language plays such an important part in the construction of the self, when the state subjects you to constant acts of linguistic aggression, whether you realize it or not, your sense of who you are and of your place in the world are seriously affected. Your language is not just something you use, but an essential part of what you are. For this reason...| Borders on This is important
In 2010, Irina Shklovski and David M. Struthers wrote an excellent article on Kazakh national identity and its reflection through top-level domain name choices. The article is titled: Of States and Borders on the Internet: The Role of Domain Name Extensions in Expressions of Nationalism Online in Kazakhstan and the Oxford Internet Institute makes a PDF available. The space on the internet is easily traversable and state boundaries in the form of domain extensions can be crossed with no mor...| Borders on This is important
Theorizing the Web 2014 included a panel on World Wide Web(s): Theorizing the Non-Western Web. The participants, from the program, follow: Presider / Jillet Sarah Sam @JilletSarahSam Hashmod / Alice Samson @theclubinternet Panelists: David Peter Simon | @davidpetersimon | The Do-Gooder Industrial Complex? Jason Q. Ng | @jasonqng | Fit for Public Display: Rethinking censorship via a comparison of Chinese Wikipedia with Hudong and Baidu Baike Tolu Odumosu | @todumosu | Phoning the Web:...| Borders on This is important
The Atlantic, The Myth of a Borderless Internet. Political borders are re-enshrined on the web in a literal and metaphorical sense. Just like the cartographers of yore, multinational corporations—particularly Internet companies—play a role in defining and shaping political boundaries for the public’s consumption. This rise of huge, international corporations online has torn away at the Emerald Curtain that once obscured the variety of geopolitical boundaries that exist in the world, m...| Borders on This is important
Lawfare blog covers an interesting case that attempts to answer the question Are Top-level Domains Property? On December 28 [2015], the Justice Department filed an amicus brief in Weinstein v. Islamic Republic of Iran, a case pending before the D.C. Circuit. At issue is whether country-code top-level domains are the property of those countries’ foreign governments. Does a country’s government own the country-code top level domain that represents that country? DOJ argues first that ccTLD...| Borders on This is important
Search could be moving to images, in which case the languages may not play such a large part if images dominate web searches. Fast Company goes Inside Baidu’s Plan To Beat Google By Taking Search Out Of The Text Era In many cases, text-based search is not ideal for finding information. For instance, if you’re out shopping and spot a handbag you might like, it is far better to take a picture than to try and describe it in words. The same is often true if you see a flower or animal species ...| Borders on This is important
Political and legal borders interact to create a potentially balkanized future internet. Time Magazine says The Future of the Internet is Balkanization and Borders. Rousseff’s plan to create walled-off, national Intranets followed reports that the United States has been surveilling Rousseff’s email, intercepting internal government communications, and spying on the country’s national oil company, so it was somewhat understandable. But her move could lead to a powerful backlash against ...| Borders on This is important
Chance the Rapper has a new fashion line full of clothing that celebrates Barack Obama’s presidency: https://www.thankuobama.us/ With obvious references to Obama (the king Obama t-shirt) and some more oblique ones (a jersey with 44, because he was the 44th president), it’s only appropriate that the URL contains some symbolism. He put the site up on thankuobama.us, indicating twofold: Us as is “us” as in, we the people thank him for being our president. But also Us as in US, as in USA,...| Borders on This is important
Model View Culture confronts “The App You’ve Never Heard Of”: Exploring Western Bias in Tech Media. It is flabbergasting that LINE–an app that beats out Messenger and WhatsApp in Thailand and Indonesia–or WeChat or even Alibaba would ever be so baldly described as “little-known.” Little known to Americans or Europeans? Perhaps, since they were not part of the original target market. But “little known” to millions of people in Asia? Certainly not. This pattern reflects the ...| Borders on This is important
The less infrastructure investments and diversity of connections that a country has to the Internet, the more control they can exert over the country’s overall connectivity. Most countries have gradually moved towards increased diversity in their Internet infrastructure over the last decade, especially as it concerns international connectivity to the global Internet. However, some countries remain at severe risk of Internet disconnection, with only one or two providers at their “internati...| Borders on This is important
Catalonia has its own top level domain, .cat. Not a vanity domain, this TLD provides an element of national identity in a region of Spain that has sought independence for many years. In the wake of the referendum, the office of the TLD registry was raided and computers seized. As reported by Internet News: The Guardia Civil officers entered the .cat registry’s offices around 9am local time this morning and have seized all computers in the domain registry’s offices in downtown Barcelona. T...| Borders on This is important
Google is working on improving translation to the point where we have a universal language translator. In the Smithsonian Magazine, Kissing Language Barriers Goodbye: “One thing that surprises people when we talk about Translate is our team doesn’t have any linguists on it,” Estelle says. “We’ve launched 71 languages, and I would say our team doesn’t know how to speak the vast majority of them. A human translator is not going to be able to learn all these terms and things as fast...| Borders on This is important
The web is sometimes spoken of as a borderless place. Through the ~magic~ of technology, the internet, the “decentralized” web, borders would be eliminated and the world would become truly flat. I’ll share links as part of this series that reinforce and challenge that notion. Linguistic borders, reinforced by lack of multilingualism yet challenged by machine translation successes. Geographic borders, reinforced by internet infrastructure yet challenged by novel methods of providing inte...| Borders on This is important
From awhile back, Brian Krebs talks to three researchers at U-M about their ZMap tool. An efficient and comprehensive way to scan the Internet, they’ve recently built a search engine called Censys that searches across their daily data collections from the ZMap scans. From Krebs' interview with the researchers (Zakir Durumeric, Eric Wustrow, and J. Alex Halderman): “What we were able to find was by taking the data from these scans and actually doing vulnerability notifications to everybo...| thisisimportant.net
I’ve recently started sewing again. After learning how in home economics in junior high school, I decided to pick it up again in order to have an offline hobby with more tangible results (like baking, but longer-lasting). Sewing has changed in the last twenty years, and a fabric wholesaler has witnessed the changes in his own warehouse. Christopher Higgins owns Globe-tex, a crammed-to-the-gills warehouse in Montreal that’s open to the public.| thisisimportant.net