Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is one of the Mideast leaders who isn't reacting to the social media pointed in his direction with a knee-jerk ban. Instead, he is rolling his Facebook pageout as a platform for crowdsourcing his cabinet.
Dr. Fayyad dismissed his old cabinet on February 14, in the wake of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. He is obliged to appoint a new cabinet in less than six weeks, so he's reached out to the young people to ask them to be a part of the process.
Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who had an important role in Egypt's recent uprising, has used a product of his company to help sketch out the direction of the country's future. Ghonim has started a Google Moderator page for Egypt.
Entitled, "Egypt 2.0, what does we need? What are our dreams?!" the page has 35,000 users so far. Together, they have listed more than 45,300 ideas.
The "Day of Rage" washed over the Gulf nation of Bahrain yesterday. It has not abated. With two people killed by the police even those who weren't big supporters are starting to feel the original protesters' rage.
Fadhel Ali Almatrook was killed by a short-range shotgun blast by a police officer. The other's name and situation are not yet known, but Bahrain's leader, Sheikh Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa, apologized for "the death of our two sons."
Today, after three weeks of intense protest, after a whole generation was mobilized, Egypt's president Hosni Mubarak has resigned from 30 years of one-man rule. By all accounts joy was general over the whole of Egypt.
Mubarak, like Tunisia's Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, tried various stalling methods, including the latest, handing off "most" of his power to his newly appointed vice president, Omar Suleiman. But none of it worked. The people of Egypt were done with him.
What's the tech connection? WHO ON EARTH CARES!?
The notion of the distant, uninvolved and uninvested nerd has taken a well deserved beating in the last few years. But archetypes have an amazing tenancity, even when they've outgrown their value. I wonder if the notion of the empathy-free computer weirdo will survive the Egyptian uprising.
Geeks have helped cut off Egyptians get back online and remain witnesses during a trying time; they've arranged crowdsourced translations of tweets sent in via another geeky guerrilla tool; and now, one of them has single-handedly resuscitated a flagging uprising.
Although attacks by governments against their own people using the Internet get more press, warfare between countries has been spreading online for some time. Most of the instances that have come to light have been viruses designed to stop, or slow down, activities in another country that the attacking country feels threatened by, or spying operations.
The United States, like most governments, has developed teams and tools to wage Web warfare. But not all the tools are what we would normally think of as offensive weapons. The U.S. military, it turns out, can force a country that has disconnected itself from the Internet back online.
In an earlier post, our French editor, Fabrice Epelboin, detailed his discovery that the crew that had harassed our French edition's Facebook page, was in fact a squad of Tunisian Internet cops.
These days, official groups and allied militia, frequently attack dissidents. It has now happened in Egypt. The most important Facebook page for the protests is being flooded with abusive comments and criticism.
This morning a startup in Washington, D.C. launched its website. What's the news? The website is a .gov, not a .com, and the startup is a government agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 established the agency last year. Republican lawmakers have been highly critical of the powers given to the new consumer bureau, which they say could stifle growth in the financial industry. They're expected to hold hearings about its future in the coming months. But the CFPB's head, Elizabeth Warren, is wasting no time in getting her agency up and running. Today's launch marks the beginning of a countdown to when many elements of the new bureau go into action on July 21.
Egypt casts a tall shadow and this last week's protests have captured the world's attention. But it is far from the only country to take heart from Tunisia's revolution and go out into the streets. Yemen has called for tomorrow, February 3, to be its own "Day of Rage."
In conjunction with local online news site YemenPortal, polymath activist group MidEast Youth, probably best known for the Free Kareem campaign (they did, eventually), has launched an English and an Arabic version of its Crowdvoice software and website to capture information about tomorrow's protests in Yemen.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of protesters, and by-standers, have been seized by police in Egypt in the past days. Perhaps the most high-profile arrest in the high-tech world is that of Wael Ghonim, head of marketing for Google in the Middle East and North Africa.
Ghonim was apparently seized on Thursday. The last anyone heard from him was a tweet in which he explained how people were communicating, using "proxy servers."
