User:Francg/expub/thesis/thesis-outline-draft-09.11.17

Thesis Outline

09.11.17

What do I intend to research?

Media control + centralization:

Twitter shift from 1.0 to 2.0:
- from RSS to API: (from neutrality to control)?
- What is the difference between v1.0 and v2.0?
- Which are the reasons for it? Were there any concerns on privacy?
- Ego-system

APIs:
--> it is a tool of control and centralization
- API involves a signed agreement and personal data
- Why websites don't seem to use RSS feeds anymore?
- What is the benefit of using APIs if news update can't be followed?
- Will RSS technology be back even stronger than before?
- Before, the Internet could link to things without permission.

October 1st:

This part focuses on the events of the 1st of October, when a group of computer scientists and hackers made possible a registered universal census system, while struggling against power state. This research would point issues such as network censorship, online surveillance, tracking tools, cloning IPs, anonymity, freedom of speech, how a state can make Google, Amazon, Twitter or Facebook shut down applications, close websites, remove accounts or groups, etc aimed to inform about a referendum, which regardless its non juridic validity or recognition, it ended up happening.

Julian Assange, on Twitter: “The world's first internet war has begun, in Catalonia, as the people and government use it to organize an independence referendum on Sunday and Spanish intelligence attacks, freezing telecommunications links, occupying telecoms buildings, censors 100s of sites, protocols etc.”
Assange’s postcard on Twitter >>

campaign manifesto: “Let’s sweep away capitalism, the patriarchy, corruption and the monarchy. Let’s decide our own future, let’s disobey unjust laws to build a free, independent and socialist republic,” before unveiling CUP’s campaign poster. CUP referendum poster (left) and Viktor Deni’s “Comrade Lenin cleans the world of evil

Why?

What do we want to achieve with it? What is it the scope?

Online surveillance & Network Censorship vs Hacking tools for democracy:

Interview, October 1st (Vilaweb journal)
“Ahead, against you, you had the cybersecurity experts in Spain ... - Yes. But we could disrupt the efforts of all the technical and intelligence services of the transatlantic. Thanks to Tor, Signal, to phones purchased abroad, to Linux and free software, and even to Bitcoin ... Oh! And all the work and imagination of a few hackers we gave everything to make it possible.”
“-Immediately, the state reacted, when the government announced the universal census.
-The censorship of the state was present, at all times. The domain name closed it in less than fifteen minutes, even closing all the IPs - all! - of a well-known European provider ..., which affected thousands of services that had nothing to do with the referendum, indiscriminate censorship in pure state. But every time they attacked us, we responded. For each IP they closed, my colleagues opened two more. They had already planned this...”
“- There was no way to dodge these attacks?"
"- I have to confess one thing, we had the code that made transparent and automatic the change of IP ... but we did not have time to integrate it.”

Cyberattacks on Free Elections (Max Plank magazine)

“Elections must be secret, free and secure. Secret means that nobody finds out how a voter voted. For an election to be truly free, voters must also not have any record of how they voted.”
“In November 2016, WikiLeaks published 90 gigabytes of data (2,420 documents) from the Bundestag hack in early 2015”
“However, as a result of the internet, social media and platforms such as WikiLeaks, the number of information providers has dramatically in creased, and traditional journalistic ethics and truthfulness are often left by the wayside. It’s difficult for traditional media and experts, or even state agencies, to make corrections and evaluations.”
“Ultimately, each citizen must decide for themselves what they believe and what they don’t. Only one thing can help here: education.”

Catalan government bypass IPFS (blog article)

- Hacking tools used? Specs.
- Collaborations: in form of interviews, contribute with opinions, feedback, ideas for the project and then apply it to the thesis?

Article 155:
Spanish Constitution
--> States that any largely autonomous community must fulfill its obligations to the Spanish state, otehrwise having its institutions and dependencies taken away. - It's used to normalize a juridic situation by taking over information medias, educational institutions, as well as controlling information exposure, shutting down social media twitter accounts, websites of politicians, cultural organizations, etc. - Weapon for control + centralization - Does it creates political prisoners?

Information exchange:

- We live in a world of big data
- The Internet has become the defining medium for information exchange in the modern world, and the unprecedented success of new web publishing platforms such as those associated with social media has confirmed its dominance as the main information exchange platform for the foreseeable future. But how do you conduct an online investigation when so much of the Internet isn't even indexed by search engines? Accessing and using the information that's freely available online is about more than just relying on the first page of Google results.
- In times of sociopolitical conflict, online medias can exceed our capacity for processing and understanding so much generated information. News on the web can be edited quickly as new facts arrive, meaning information is quickly updated, re-written or corrected, although sometimes its content can be modified for different purposes. Online journalism often use their website as text processors for writing their first drafts, which allows them to quickly publish a story in nearly real time. It is possible that the only version of an article we ever read, gets shared across quickly, while more versions of this same article have been updated. Given such case it would be useful to be able to observe how information morphs or shifts in time to better understand them. Currently we live in a mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education and mass entertainment society that is simultaneously functioning as a weapon for mass misinformation, ranging from useful to inaccurate or unverified content. How do big amounts of data affect users? How does this behavior pattern is reflected on the public opinion?

Mobile Journalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_journalism (also backpack journalism) It is an emerging form of new media storytelling where reporters use portable electronic devices with network connectivity to gather, edit and distribute news from his or her community.
- Fast information, everybody can be a reporter and distribute news in social medias.
- Burum, Ivo (2016). Democratizing Journalism through Mobile Media: The Mojo Revolution (Routledge Research in Journalism). New York & London: Taylor and Francis.
- Adornato, Anthony (2017). Mobile and Social Media Journalism: A Practical Guide. Los Angeles and London: SAGE/CQ Press.

- Maldito Bulo: http://maldita.es/comunidad/maldito/bulo/
- Verify-Sy: http://www.verify-sy.com/en
- Twitter doubled number of characters for posting

How:

Tools for decentralization:

Here I explain which tools I am experimenting with in my project, what can it be achieved from it:
- Tools: RSS feed, diffengine, scrapy, beautifulsoup, ttrss, shell scripting, Linux OS, document classification with MongoDB, Tor browser, Raspberry Pi.
- What can be achieved: scraping specific info, crossing paywalls, stream information change from websites using RSS technology (or not), archiving, updating, live-posting documents, etc.
- Examine the relevance of cyber geography and how to get round its limitations
- Consider deep web social media platforms and platform-specific search tool
- What can be further improved?