Bloomberg reports that Siemens AG and its joint venture, Nokia Siemens Networks, has made it possible for Bahraini secret police to intercept and generate transcripts of text messages and other mobile communications made by protesters in that country's troubled version of the Arab Spring.

South Africa plans Blackberry eavesdropping. The South African government is talking about giving police access to Blackberry's encrypted messaging (BBM). AFP reported that Deputy Communications Minister Obed Bapela called the BBM a security risk, quoting the Sapa News Agency: "There is evidence that criminals are now using BBM to plan and execute crime. We want to review BBM like in the UK and Saudi Arabia."

UK PM's plan to ban social media dropped. Prime Minister David Cameron's knuckleheaded attempt to place the onus for last month's riots on social media has died the death it deserved. Our contention that the leadership of Cameron's government was walleyed about social media was something they wound up admitting.

WikiLeaks may be petering out. Peter Dorling, of the Sydney Morning Herald, who has followed the news surrounding Wikileaks and its Australian founder from the beginning, has published a fascinating, fair-minded story that theorizes an end to Wikileaks.

After accidentally allowing the publication of their remaining diplomatic cables - which, along with the publication of the password to those cables in a book by two Guardian reporters made them public - Dorling believes there is not much left for WikiLeaks to do. Their leak-submission function has not in fact functioned for a year and there does not seem to be another Bradley Manning hidden in the wings.

Fight over Libya's Internet. Six months after going dark, Libya's Internet connection to the world came back on briefly during the rebel surge that resulted in their control of most of the country. It's largely dark again and it may take a definitive end to hostilities before it is up to stay.

China tightens restrictions on microblogging, citizens react. "Chinese netizens are in an uproar," NTD reported. "Recent indications from the Chinese regime seem to point to tougher controls on popular mircroblogging services, such as Sina Weibo." State-run Xinhua News Agency, which acts as a mouthpiece for the rulers, criticized the site for its role in spreading what it calls false information. The "toxic rumors" Xinhua attacked included a train crash in Wenzhou. The outraged citizen response on microblogging sites, including Sina Weibo, forced corrupt and lazy authorities to act.

Uzbekistan creates a national Internet. The Central Asian tyranny has created its own version of a "halal Internet." Muloqot is intended "for the formation of high morals." In reality, it is about control of access to information and the means to disseminate argument and to cancel out the effects of social networks like Odnoklassniki and Facebook, where dissidents gather.

Kazakhastan bans Livejournal. After ordering all Kazakhstani websites use the .kz domain to be hosted on local servers, where they can be controlled by the government, the country's authorities have begun banning sites. The latest is early blog platform Livejournal. The excuse given was that the social network's "promote(s) terriorism and religious extremism and (contained) calls to acts of terrorism and the manufacture of explosive devices."

Egyptian blogger moved to prison hospital. Blogger and critic of the military, Maikel Nabil was the first Egyptian to be arrested by the military in post-Mubarak Egypt.

He declared a hunger strike to protest the injustice of his military trial and imprisonment and the continued meddling by the Egyptian armed forces into civilian life. Now, he has grown sick enough that he has been relocated to the prison's infirmary. He sickened "two days after he stopped drinking liquids on the eighth day of his hunger strike."

Mahmood Al-Yousif, the Bahraini "blogfather" who was arrested last week, was freed shortly thereafter due in part to pressure from the U.S. government.

Will the U.S. exert equal pressure to free a young lady whose fame is mostly as a poet? Will Bahrainis agitate for her release?

If anyone has a link to, or copy of, the poem that Ayat recited in Pearl Square on the 23rd of February, please share it with all of us in the comments.

American governmental transparency sites to be shuttered. It was reported that Data.gov and a number of related sites, started at the instruction of President Barak Obama to increase transparency in government, are going to be shut down due to budget constraints. Some groups are mounting challenges to those shut-downs.

China arrests its best-known artist. Ai Weiwei, a globally-regarded artist and the architect of the "Bird's Nest" stadium, was arrested this week by Chinese authorities. Ai is a blunt-talker and critic of the government. ReadWriteWeb founder, Richard MacManus, served on a panel last year with Ai and reports on the efforts to free him.

U.S. developing cell phone "panic button." The U.S. government is funding the development of an application that will allow pro-democracy activists to delete all incriminating evidence on their cell phones with a single click while sending out an alert to their fellow activists.

LiveJournal suffers DDOS attacks. For the past several weeks, LiveJournal, one of the earliest blogging hosts, has been suffering large-scale distributed denial of service attacks. The company says that the attacks have targeted a number of different users' journals, some of whom are political in nature. The service has a large number of Russian users, including its president, Dmitry Medvedev.

Ayat photo via Islamic Human Rights Commission

Among those affected is Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who began blogging on Russian-owned LiveJournal two years ago this month. "As an active LJ user, I believe the hackers' actions to be outrageous and illegal," Medvedev reportedly wrote in Russian on his blog this week. "Both the administration of the blog and law enforcement agencies must look into the matter."

"These attacks are insane," commented fiction writer and paid-account holder McGarryGirl78. "I'm glad you guys are doing everything you can but the frustration does start to get to me after a while. I know it's not your fault though so I just wish you luck on keeping the attackers at bay."

In its statement, the company urged users unable to access their journals to watch Twitter for updates. LiveJournal describes itself there as "blurring the lines between blogging and social networking... since '99." Built by now-Googler Brad Fitzpatrick 12 years ago next week, LiveJournal was acquired by SixApart six years ago and then bought by Russian media company SUP three years ago.

Cynics might shrug at the troubles of the no-longer dominant blogging/social networking service, but attacks against LiveJournal are attacks against the voices of people who choose to use that platform to publish and subscribe to the world. The ability for any everyday person to publish their thoughts and subscribe freely to their personal interests in the world is a precious historical anomaly.

Amazon traffic monitoring service Alexa says LiveJournal is the 72nd most-trafficked site on the Web, just behind the New York Times at number 71.

Related: Why a Day of Tumblr Down-Time Matters to the Web & to the World

After all, did you know who Cyxymu was when you woke up yesterday? Speaking to the Guardian earlier today, Cyxymu argued that the Russian government was directly responsible for these attacks against him, though while this makes for a good headline, chances are that the reality is far more prosaic.

Cyxymu on the Net: A Digital Refugee

These attacks, which affected some of the Internet's most popular sites, seem oddly out of proportion. On Twitter, Cyxymu had only about 600 friends earlier today - though that number is now up over 800 and growing as his name becomes more widely known. His main LiveJournal account only got between 1000 and 1500 unique visitors per day over the last few months (though Cyxymu moved from service to service, so it's hard to pinpoint exact numbers).

Evgeny Morozov currently offers the best discussion of who Cyxymu is and why he might have been the target of this attack. You can find his post on the Foreign Policy magazine's Net Effect blog (it's a long read, but worth it). Morozov describes Cyxymu as the first "digital refugee," who had already faced DDOS attacks on his LiveJournal and Wordpress.com blog last year. Morozov discounts the idea that Cyxymu will mostly profit from these attacks thanks to the Streisand effect and that his message will now be heard by far more people than before the attacks. We are not quite sure about that, however, especially given that Cyxymu has started to give media interviews now.

Was the Kremlin Behind these Attacks?

Given that Cyxymu already faced similar attacks in the past, it only makes sense to assume that these new attacks were also meant to silence or intimidate him (though clearly this never worked before). We do wonder, however, if this was really an attack launched by the Russian government. While the results of the attack were far-reaching, DDOS attacks are sadly nothing unusual on the net - and sometimes they are even used as a way to extort money from online businesses. It doesn't take a government to start a DDOS attack, and lots of spammers and hackers probably have the ability to launch an attack of this scale.

In his Guardian interview, Cyxymu says that the attack may have been "carried out by ordinary hackers but I'm certain the order came from the Russian government." Indeed, this is a possibility and it's still too early to really know. For the time being, though, we are not fully convinced yet that a government organization was really behind this attack.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.

To make matters worse, Facebook is also experiencing issues this morning, as many rebuffed Twitter users are now finding out when they go to post their status on the social networking site instead. The Facebook outage appears to be intermittent, though, and isn't affecting everyone. If you notice anything at all, it may be only that posting status updates and comments displays an error message. But simply clicking the post button again may force them through (at least that was my experience). The site also loads slowly at times and displays occasional "transport" errors.

Ironically, you can see several complaints on Twitter about this issue right now when doing a Twitter search with the keyword Facebook.

As a last resort, some users may turn to their LiveJournal blogs and attempt to update their mood to "sad" to reflect their feelings about this odd cyber-outage. Unfortunately, they'll be foiled there as well since LJ is down, too.

Some users are already spreading a rumor that this is some sort of social media attack by hackers, but it's more likely just a bizarre coincidence. Maybe the universe just wants us to actually get some work done today.

SUP, the Russian company that recently acquired LiveJournal, angered a substantial number of its users last week by instituting the policy before discussing it publicly and going against the advice of at least two members of the company's new high profile advisory committee.

LiveJournal is no stranger to controversy, it seems some fight between users and site administrators breaks out every month. It makes user relations at Facebook seem like a never-ending honeymoon. A "content strike" by LiveJournal users last week doesn't appear to have made an appreciable impact on site traffic due to being scheduled on the Friday before a major holiday. Thanks to Andrew Watson for bringing the strike, and thus the whole story, to our attention.

The new feature comparison page shows only Plus and Paid options; you can view the old feature comparison page, which details the now unavailable Basic accounts, via the Internet Archive. Current basic accounts will go unchanged but new users can no longer sign up for them.

Advisory Committee Reactions

The most recent policy change has angered at least two of the new advisory board members, however, including LiveJournal creator Brad Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick is now at Google and leads the cross-site platform effort OpenSocial works on Social Graph technologies there.

"The free users, while not paying, were extremely valuable because they produced the content that the paying users were there to consume," Fitzpatrick wrote in a LiveJournal entry last week. "You know, the whole network effect thing?...I advised against this (when I heard a rumor about it awhile back). I hadn't heard anything recently about it...SUP apparently sees no value in freeloaders not looking at ads, not paying, and oh wait... producing most the content for other members to read, other members who are looking at ads and paying for their accounts. Let's hope my permanent account is grandfathered."

Advisory board member and youth social networking scholar danah boyd reacted thusly in her own LJ entry:

"While offline this week, I learned that LJ has changed its account levels. Needless to say, Brad's pissed. I'm pissed. Not only because we both vehemently disagree with this change, but because they made such a change without consulting us. Or rather, we were both at a lunch a while back where they asked us what we thought and we both told them that this was the worst idea ever, although for different reasons. I had thought it had been tabled until I learned of this. After it had been posted...I pay for my account (and have for years), but most of my friends who read what I write have Basic Accounts. They produce very little but I would produce absolutely nothing if they weren't reading what I wrote. And then I wouldn't pay. And that's how it gets all entangled."

Those seem like strong and compelling arguments made by ostensibly trusted advisors to the company. boyd further asks her readers how they would suggest that SUP can further growth and monetization at LiveJournal if not by taking steps like this.

Advisor Esther Dyson has said publicly only that "I was not consulted about this in advance... and yes, I think I should have been."

Monetization is Hard

As analyst firm Gartner said in a recent report on AOL's acquisition of Bebo, the social networking landscape is one where "formerly explosive growth rates have slowed and monetization remains a challenge. But to the extent a social site is a platform, it has value." That Platform value seems unproven, however. MySpace seems to be printing money with display ads, despite Google's recent complaints that its search ads haven't been monetizing well on the site.

LiveJournal had served as an interesting alternative to dominant theories about monetizing social networking. Now that example is only half of what it was - it's still interesting that users are offered paid accounts ($20/year) in exchange for an ad free experience. Apparently the original LJ model wasn't monetizing well enough for SUP. That's a shame, because it sure was interesting.

The new Board is made up of an all-star cast. Copyright and corruption fighter Larry Lessig, tech pioneer Esther Dyson and brilliant social network analyst danah boyd make up the group, along with Brad Fitzpatrick, whose work has been key in the development of LiveJournal itself, OpenID, social graph theory and the Google-led OpenSocial. That's hot.

It has always been one of the leaders in innovation, but it's not been the cash-cow that other leading social networks have been. It's also faced more than its share of controversy, blatant breast-feeders had their avatars struck down (not without a fight) in May 2006 and a scorched-earth campaign against sex themed groups knocked some "legitimate literary discussion" off-site in May of 2007. You know what that means: danah boyd is going to be a key asset for LiveJournal, especially in the month of May.

Why is this an exciting announcement? Because a large, important social network just got some of the best minds on the web to engage with it in this formative time of social networking acceleration and change. That means LiveJournal is going to do some very cool things, if they take the Advisory Board as seriously as they should.

Readers unfamiliar with the work of these luminaries should check out their blogs and Wikipedia pages.

• danah boyd's blog, Wikipedia page and the most popular URLs tagged danahboyd on Del.icio.us


• Larry Lessig's blog, Wikipedia entry and Techmeme discussion this week on his decision not to run for US Congress. (Too busy with LiveJournal, just couldn't tell anyone yet.)


• Esther Dyson's blog, Wikipedia page and tweets about Dyson
]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/livejournal_filled_with_awesom.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/livejournal_filled_with_awesom.php Social Networks Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:58:40 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick