HANDBOOK
FOR
BLOGGERS
AND
CYBER-DISSIDENTS
REPORTERS
WITHOUT BORDERS
SEPTEMBER
2005
ISBN
: 2-915536-36-8
©
2005 Reporters Without Borders
"You
have been told that,
even like a chain, you
are as weak as the weakest link.
"This
is but half the truth. You are also as strong
as your strongest link...
"And
behold I have found that which is greater than
wisdom.
"It
is a flame spirit in you ever gathering more of
itself,...
"...And in this lies my honour and my reward, -That
whenever I come to the fountain to drink I
find the living water itself thirsty;
"And
It Drinks Me While I Drink It."
Kahlil
Gibran, The
Prophet
|
CONTENTS
E X P A N D E D
C O N T E N T S
BLOGGERS,
THE
NEW HERALDS OF
FREE
EXPRESSION
By
Julien
Pain
Blogs
get
people
excited. Or
else they disturb and worry them. Some people distrust
them. Others see them as the vanguard of
a new information revolution. One
thing’s
for sure: they’re rocking the
foundations of the media in countries as
different as
the United States, China and Iran.
It’s
too
soon to really know what to think of blogs.
We’ve been reading newspapers, watching
TV
and listening to the radio for decades
now and we’ve learned how to immediately tell
what’s news
and what’s comment, to
distinguish a tabloid “human interest” magazine from a
serious
one and an entertainment programme from a
documentary.
We
don’t
have such antennae to figure out blogs.
These “online diaries” are even more varied than
the mainstream media and it’s hard to
know which of them is a news site, which a
personal forum
or one that does serious
investigation or one that’s presenting junk evidence.
It’s
difficult to separate the wheat
from the chaff.
Some bloggers
will
gradually develop their own ethical standards, to become more credible
and win
public confidence. But the Internet is
still full of unreliable information and people exchanging
insults. A blog
gives everyone, regardless of education or technical skill, the chance
to
publish material. This means boring or
disgusting blogs will spring up as fast as
good
and
interesting ones.
But blogging
is a
powerful tool of freedom of expression that has enthused millions of
ordinary
people. Passive consumers of information
have become energetic participants in a
new kind of
journalism – what US blog
pioneer Dan Gillmor calls “grassroots
journalism … by
the people,
for the people” (see chapter on
“What
ethics should bloggers
have?”).
Bloggers are
often the
only real
journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or
under
pressure. Only they provide independent
news, at the risk of displeasing the government
and
sometimes courting arrest. Plenty
of bloggers have been hounded or thrown
in
prison. One of the contributors to this
handbook, Arash Sigarchi,
was sentenced to
14 years in
jail for posting several messages
online that criticised the Iranian regime.
His story
illustrates how some bloggers
see what they do as a duty and a necessity, not just a hobby.
They feel
they are the eyes and ears of
thousands of other Internet users.
Bloggers need to be
anonymous when
they are putting out information that risks their safety.
The cyber-police are watching and have
become expert at tracking down
“troublemakers.” This
handbook
gives advice on how to post material
without revealing who you are
(“How to blog
anonymously,” by Ethan
Zuckerman). It’s best of course to have the
technical
skills
to be anonymous online, but
following a few simple rules can sometimes do
the trick.
This advice is of course not for
those (terrorists, racketeers or pedophiles) who
use the
Internet to commit crimes. The
handbook is simply to help bloggers
encountering opposition
because of what they write to maintain
their freedom of expression.
However,
the
main problem for a blogger, even under a
repressive regime, isn’t security. It’s
about
getting the blog
known, finding an audience. A blog without
any
readers won’t worry
the
powers-that-be, but what’s the point of
it? This handbook makes technical suggestions
to
make sure a blog
gets picked up by the major search-engines (the article
by Olivier
Andrieu), and
gives some more “journalistic” tips about this (“What
really makes a
blog
shine,” by Mark
Glaser).
Some
bloggers face the
problem of filtering. Most authoritarian regimes now have the technical
means
to censor the Internet. In Cuba or Vietnam, you won’t be
able to
access websites
that criticise
the government or expose corruption or talk about human rights abuses.
So-called “illegal” and “subversive”
content is automatically blocked by filters. But all bloggers need free
access to all sites and to the blogosphere
or the
content of their blogs will become
irrelevant.
The
second part
of the handbook is about ways to get
round filtering (“Technical
Ways to Get Around Censorship,”
by Nart
Villeneuve).
With a bit of common-sense, perseverance and especially
by
picking the right tools, any blogger
should be able to overcome censorship.
The
handbook has
technical advice and tips about
how to set up a good blog. But a successful
one
is harder to ensure. To stand out
in the crowd, you must be original and post news
or opinions
neglected by the mainstream
media. In some countries, bloggers are
mainly
worried
about staying out of jail. In
others, they try to establish their credibility as a source
of
reliable information. Not all bloggers
have the same problems, but all of them, in their
different
ways, are on the front line in the
fight for freedom of expression.
D
E F I N I T I O N
A
“BLOG” (OR
“WEBLOG”) IS A PERSONAL WEBSITE :
- containing
mostly news (“posts”).
- in
the form of
a diary (most recent posts at the
top of the page),
with most of the posts also arranged in
categories.
- set up using a
specially-designed interactive
tool.
- usually
created and run by a single person,
sometimes anonymously.
A
BLOG'S POSTS :
- are usually
text (including external links),
sometimes with pictures and,
more and more often, sound and video.
- can be
commented on by visitors.
- are archived
on the blog
and can been accessed there indefinitely.
SO A BLOG IS MUCH
LIKE A “PERSONAL WEBPAGE,
EXCEPT THAT IT :
- is easier to
set up and maintain and so much
more active and more frequently
updated.
- encourages a
more open and personal style and
franker viewpoints.
- greatly
encourages discussion with visitors and
other bloggers.
- sets a
standard worldwide format for blogs,
involving similar methods
(two or three-column layout, comments on posts and
RSS (Really Simple Syndication)
feed.
T
E R M I N O L O G Y
THE
LANGUAGE OF BLOGGING
RSS
(REALLY SIMPLE
SYNDICATION)
A way
of
handling the latest items posted on a
website, especially suited for blogs because it
alerts users whenever their favourite blogs
are updated. It can also “syndicate”
content by allowing other websites
(simply and automatically) to reproduce
all or part of a site’s content.
Spreading
fast, especially on media websites.
RSS
AGGREGATOR
Software
or online service allowing a blogger to read an RSS
feed,
especially the latest
posts on his favourite
blogs. Also called
a reader, or feedreader.
RSS
FEED
The
file containing a blog’s
latest posts. It is read
by an RSS aggregator/reader and shows
at once when a blog
has been updated.
TRACKBACK
A
way that websites can communicate automatically
by alerting each other that an item
posted on a blog
refers to a previous item.
WIKI
From
the Hawaiian word “wikiwiki”
(quick). A
website that can be easily and quickly updated
by any visitor. The word has also come
to mean the tools used to create a wiki (wiki
engines). Blogs and wikis
have some
similarities but are quite different.
BLOG
Short
for Weblog. A
website that contains written
material, links or photos being posted
all the time, usually by one individual, on a personal basis.
(TO)
BLOG
Run
a blog or post
material on one.
BLOGGER
Person
who runs a blog.
BLOGOSPHERE
All
blogs, or the blogging
community.
BLOGROLL
List
of external links appearing on a blog, often
links to other blogs
and usually in a column
on the homepage. Often amounts to a “sub-community” of bloggers
who are friends.
BLOGWARE
Software
used to run a blog.
COMMENT
SPAM
Like
e-mail spam. Robot
“spambots” flood a blog
with advertising
in the form of bogus comments.
A serious problem that requires bloggers and blog platforms to have
tools to
exclude some users or ban some addresses
in comments.
CONTENT SYNDICATION
How
a site’s author or administrator makes all
or part of its content available for posting on
another website.
MOBLOG
Contraction
of “mobile blog.”
A blog that can
be updated remotely from anywhere, such
as by phone or a digital assistant.
PERMALINK
Contraction
of “permanent link.” Web address
of each item posted on a blog. A handy
way of permanently bookmarking
a post,
even after it has been archived by the blog from which it
originated.
PHOTOBLOG
A
blog mostly containing
photos, posted constantly
and chronologically.
PODCASTING
Contraction
of “iPod”
and “broadcasting.” Posting
audio and video material on a blog and its RSS
feed, for digital players.
POST
An
item posted on a blog.
Can be a message or
news, or just a photo or a link. Usually a
short item, including external links on which visitors
can comment.
CHOOSING
THE
BEST TOOL
Blogs
owe a
lot
to the growth of dynamic publishing
tools that greatly simplify the business of updating websites.
A
tool for use with a blog
must provide a user-friendly interface (easily accessible through an
Web navigator) and dynamically manage its
content, with such things as archives and searches.
A blog has two Internet
addresses that don’t change after it’s been set up:
- It's address
for
public access.
- It's administrative
address, protected by a password belonging to the person who runs it.
You
can set up a blog by
either joining a blog community or using a
blog tool with your own
server.
BLOG
COMMUNITIES
(See “How to set up and
run a blog:
the Civiblog system”)
Setting up a blog in an
existing community usually takes just a few minutes. You pick a
user-name
and password and with a few clicks the blog
is up and running. Some communities charge,
some don’t.
This
method is best if you want to set up just a
“view only” blog. It doesn’t cost much (at
most
a few euros a month) and is straightforward
and quick and you benefit from the traffic the
community generates or from it being already
well-known.
But
snags include often limited options for layout
and sophisticated features, as well as community-run
ads and the risk of the community
closing.
USING
BLOG TOOLS
These
are programmes
that are installed on a server, using scripts to run the site
automatically
and a database to store posted
material. Once installed, it operates through a standard online
navigator. No special
expertise, such as using HTML, is needed to
set up and run a blog,
but installing and configuring it is sometimes tricky (setting access
criteria,
creating a database and arranging FTP
loading).
This
solution is for people already familiar with blogs
and has the advantage that it entirely belongs
to you and you can therefore adapt,
configure and alter it whenever you want.
But
it does require some technical skill, is also
more exposed (to spam comments) and you
have to store the contents yourself.
HOW
TO CHOOSE A BLOG COMMUNITY ?
It’s
not always easy to move from one blog
community to another, so it’s important to make
a good choice in the first place.
Before
choosing one, consider these points:
OTHER
BLOGS IN A COMMUNITY
Some
communities group Internet users according to
interests or age. Have a look at
several dozen other blogs
in a community to see if it has a “typical” group.
WHAT
THE BLOG LOOKS LIKE
Though
the choice is often small, communities
(platforms) usually have a fair range
of colours, fonts
and home-page layouts to choose from. You can get a good
idea of the possibilities there too by
looking at some of the community’s sites
at random. Many free-of-charge communities
require all blogs to carry ads on
all pages. Also check options for the blog’s
address, which could be
- http://myblog.thecommunity.com,
- http://www.thecommunity.com/myblog,
or
- http://www.thecommunity.com/mynumber.
FEATURES
ON OFFER
Check these to see if
you’ll be able to redesign
the blog, bring in other contributors,
post images or sound, post things by
phone or restrict access (totally
or partially) to registered users. Also
find out if posted material can be easily
forwarded to another community and if you
can insert paid ads to make money.
HIDDEN
COSTS
Some
communities are free but have to be paid for
after a certain point, especially
according to the amount of data stored
and the bandwidth used.
Check
this
beforehand.
MAJOR
BLOG TOOLS
pointblog.com
aims to highlight the meaning and extent of this key modern internet
revolution. The site is for beginners, experienced users, or just
visitors and consists of a blog and several independent sections. It is
run by the firm Pointblog SARL, co-founded and headed by
Christophe Ginisty and Cyril Fiévet
my
blog
GETTING
GOING AND KEEPING UP TO DATE
HOW
TO SET UP AND RUN
A
BLOG
A
blog is
much
easier
to maintain
and update than a normal website. Blog
platforms (or servers) have slightly different
posting methods, but the principles are
the same. This article aims to help users of Civiblog,
a platform used by members
of civil society everywhere, but the
advice applies to all such servers. Civiblog uses
the Blogware
platform that the firm Tucows has provided
free of
charge.
First
let’s look at some of the things that’ve
made blogging so popular.
An
important technical key to the “blogosphere”
is RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. An
RSS item is an XML (eXtensible
Markup Language) file automatically generated by a blog and that
another website
or blog can link to. When you “syndicate”
an RSS
feed, it puts
the headings of the posts on the blog into
your news reader (in mail programmes
such as Outlook
or Thunderbird) or directly onto
your website or personal blog. When a
blog is updated,
the
RSS feed
is too, so information spreads very quickly and automatically.
Bloggers have to
master
this
technology to efficiently pass on material.
The
other technical key to blogging
is “trackbacks,” which show the origin of blog material and
are used by most platforms.
When
a posted item is based on or taken from
another blog, a trackback
can be added to it
to automatically notify and enable the site in
question to list all the sites that have reproduced
or commented on its posts. This sounds
complicated but it’s really very simple and
rewarding, as it’s always nice to know that
someone has mentioned your own material. It’s
also very useful for getting material more
widely known and generating discussion between
blogs.
So
take the time to get familiar with this technology
when you set up your own blog.
THE
CIVIBLOG
HOMEPAGE
CiviBlog's Homepage is
at www.civiblog.org.
The RSS
feed is on the right and is automatically updated whenever a community
member-site posts a new message.
SIGNING UP
You have to
register before you set up a blog. Most blog
platforms make it very simple. Civiblog
requires just basic details,
but has to check that the blogs it hosts are
genuine civil
society groups and not
just personal blogs
for family or friends. It takes about 24 hours from sign-up for a blog
to appear
online. Access codes needed to launch the blog
are
e-mailed to the blogger.
ADMINISTRATION
LOG-IN
A
blog has a “front end”
(the page where visitors
go) and a “back end,” from where it’s
updated, monitored and run and which is
accessed with the user-name and password you
get when you sign up.
THE
DASHBOARD
Most
blogs have a
“dashboard,” where you can
see at a glance everything happening on
the blog, including the latest posts, comments
and trackbacks.
You can access all
the blog’s features
from here and change how
it looks, increase bandwidth, edit old
posts and manage your users and their permissions,
such as their right to post comments.
Full
CiviBlog
Control Panel
HOW
TO
POST
One
of the big
differences between a blog and a normal web page is
that it’s easier to update a blog. Most platforms allow you to type
posts in
plain text without bothering about layout.
With newer ones such as Civiblog, you can change
fonts,
sizes and colours and insert
links and
pictures.
You post
something by: |
|
1.
Logging in.
|
2. Clicking on
“post.” |
3. Giving your
post a name and typing the content in, text, images, links, etc. |
|
4. Format the text by
using the interface. Preview and re-edit as necessary.
|
|
5. Giving the
post a category (so it can be
grouped with similar ones) or creating a new category.
|
| 6.
Clicking on
“save” at the bottom of the page. |
Now
You can go to
myblogname.civiblog.org
and see it.
|
That’s all. With
a bit of experience, you can
start using other features such as trackbacks,
pings and keywords.
TRACKBACKS
It’s easy to add
a trackback
to your post.You just add the
permanent URL of the site you’re
referencing in the right-hand box marked “trackback
URLs
to notify” and the trackback will
automatically be sent
to the site when you
save the post.
RSS
SYNDICATION
Syndicating the
RSS feed of another website or blog is also
very
easy:
1.
Log n to the
“back end” of the blog.
2. Click on “favourites.”
3. Click on “RSS
Headline Components.”
4. Follow the
instructions and insert the URL (ending in .xml,
.rdf or
sometimes .py or .php) of the
RSS feed you want to syndicate.
5. Give the feed
a name and click on “add feed.”
6. Now the feed
is created, insert it into the blog’s layout.
7. Click on
“look and feel.”
8. Click on
“layout.”
9. Click on
“RSS: your feed” (“your feed” being the name
you gave it in step 5) and drag the
feed over to the column where you want
it to appear.
10. Click on
“save” at the bottom of the
page and that’s
it.
Summary: Adding an RSS Feed
|
1. Log n to the
“back end” of the blog.
|
|
2. Click on
“favourites.”
|
|
3. Click on “RSS
Headline Components.”
|
|
4. Follow the
instructions and insert the URL (ending in .xml,
.rdf or
sometimes .py or .php) of the
RSS feed you want to syndicate.
|
|
5. Give the feed
a name and click on “add feed.”
|
|
6. Now the feed
is created, insert it into the blog’s layout.
|
|
7. Click on
“look and feel.”
|
|
8. Click on "Layout."
|
9. Click on
“RSS: your feed” (“your feed” being the name
you gave it in step 5) and drag the
feed over to the column where you want
it to appear.
|
|
10. Click on
“save” at the bottom of the
page and that’s
it.
|
A
FEW RESOURCE SITES
Some of the many
sites that explain the
intricacies of blogging:
O N L I N E P R I N
C I P L E S
The people
were hungry in the streets
and the
police were after them
SHOULD
BLOGGERS HAVE?
Not
all bloggers
do journalism. Most do not. But when they do, they should be
ethical.
Does this mean
they must subscribe to some kind of
ethical code? Not necessarily.
The professional
journalism world is awash in
ethics codes. Some are longer than the United States
Constitution, trying to anticipate
every possible breach. Others are short and succinct,
offering more positive guidance. The
cyber-journalist Website has adapted for bloggers an ethics code
(http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/000215.php)
from the Society of
Professional Journalists, an American
group. It is a solid and worthy effort.
All ethics codes
are created for one essential
purpose: to instill trust. If a reader (or viewer or listener)
cannot trust the report, there is
usually little reason to bother in the first place. The
exception,
of course, is looking at material
that is known to be unethical, as much for instructional
purposes – we can learn a great deal
from watching unethical people's behavior – as to
gain true knowledge.
For me, ethics
is about something quite simple:
honor. Within that word, however, is a great deal of
territory. But unless we act with
honor we cannot expect people's trust.
In American
journalism, trust is often associated
with a standard we call “objectivity” – the idea that an
article should offer balance and
nuance, giving the reader the chance to make up his or her
own mind. I believe objectivity is a
worthy but unattainable goal, because we all bring our
own biases to everything we do.
In a world of
new journalism, where we shift from
a lecture to much more of a conversation, ethical
journalism depends less on codes of ethics
than the values and principles that are a foundation for
honorable journalism.
There are
pillars of good journalism:
thoroughness, accuracy, fairness,
transparency and independence.
The lines
separating them are not always clear.
They are open to wide interpretation, and are therefore
loaded with nuance in themselves.
But I think they are a useful way to approach ethical
journalism, and they are notably
easier to achieve in an online setting. Let's look at
each.
THOROUGHNESS
When I was a
reporter and, later, a columnist, my
first goal was to learn as much as I could.
After all,
gathering facts and opinions is the
foundation of reporting. I liked it best when
I felt I had
left 95 percent of what I'd learned
out of the final piece. The best reporters
I know always
want to make one more call, check
with one more source. (The last question
I ask at all
interviews is, “Who else should I
talk with about this?”
Today,
thoroughness means more than asking
questions of the people in our address
books, real or
virtual. It means, whenever
possible, asking our readers for their input, as
I did when I
wrote a book on grassroots journalism
in 2004 (and as other authors are
beginning to do
in theirs). Competitive pressures
tend to make this a rare request, but I'm
convinced that
more journalists will adopt it.
ACCURACY
Be factual.
Say what you
don't know, not just what you do. (If
the reader/listener/viewer does know
what you don't,
you've just invited him/her to
fill you in.)
Accuracy means
correcting what you get wrong, and
doing it promptly. This is much easier
online, where we
can mitigate or at least limit
the damage from our errors for new readers.
This one is as
difficult, in practice, as accuracy
is simple. Fairness is often in the eye of the
beholder. But
even here I think a few principles
may universally apply.
Fairness means,
among other things, listening to
different viewpoints, and incorporating
them into the
journalism. It does not mean
parroting lies or distortions to achieve that lazy
equivalence that
leads some journalists to get
opposing quotes when the facts overwhelmingly
support one side.
Fairness is also
about letting people respond when
they believe you are wrong, even if you
do not agree.
Again, this is much easier online
than in a print publication, much less a
broadcast.
Ultimately,
fairness emerges from a state of mind.
We should be aware of what drives us,
and always be
willing to listen to those who
disagree. The first rule of having a conversation
is to listen –
and I know I learn more from people
who think I'm wrong than from those who agree with
me.
TRANSPARENCY
Disclosure is
gaining currency as an addition to
journalism. It's easier said than done, of course.
No one can plausibly
argue with the idea that
journalists need to disclose certain things, such as
financial conflicts of interest. But to
what extent? Should journalists of all kinds be expected to make
their lives open books? How open?
Personal biases,
even unconscious ones, affect the
journalism as well. I'm an American, brought up in
with certain beliefs that many folks
in other lands (and some in the United States) flatly
reject. I need to be aware of the
things I take for granted, and periodically challenge some
of them, as I do my work.
Another way to
be transparent is how we present a
story. We should link to source material as much as possible,
bolstering what we tell
people with close-to-the-ground facts and data. (Maybe
this is part of accuracy or
thoroughness, but it seems to fit here, too.)
Honorable
journalism means following the story
where it leads. When media are consolidated into a few big companies or
are under the thumb of
governments, this cannot happen. It is simple to
be independent online. Just start
a blog. But no one should imagine that the same pressures
from businesses and governments
will not apply when a blogger tries to make a living at
his or her new trade.
Jeff Jarvis, a
prominent American blogger
(buzzmachine.com), adds several
other ideals. Bloggers must value the
ethic of
the conversation. He notes what for me is a bottom line of this new
world: that conversation leads to understanding.
In a
conversation, the first rule is to listen.
Ethics requires listening, because it is how we learn.
Dan
Gillmor
is
founder
of Grassroots Media Inc., a
company aimed at enabling grassroots
journalism and expanding its reach.
Its first
site is Bayosphere.com in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is
author of “We the Media: Grassroots
Journalism by the People, for the
People”
(O'Reilly Media, 2004).
His blog:
http://bayosphere.com/blog/dangillmor
U
S E F U L T I P S
GETTING
YOUR BLOG
PICKED UP
BY
SEARCH-ENGINES
Blogs
are
websites themselves, so they’re picked up
by search-engines like
Google, Yahoo! Search
or MSN
Search. To be successful, a blog has to
get good
visibility on
their results pages through major
keywords. So a site has to be
designed from
the start to react to the mechanical
classification criteria these engines use.
Blogs have several
built-in
characteristics that get them often picked up by search-engines,
well-listed and
placed in a prominent position on
results pages.
- Because they
are personal diaries (at least at
the beginning), they usually have a lot of
text which helps
them get picked up.
Search-engines don’t pick up sites with a lot of
graphics or
Flash animations but not much text.
- Each “post”
usually occupies a single page,
accessible through a “permalink” and dealing
with a single
subject, and is much more often
picked up by search-engines than long
pages about many
different topics (such as
archives or a blog homepage).
The heading of
the post (State Vandalism in Nepal) occurs not
just in the
page URL but
also in the
heading of the document, as follows :
So the post
heading has been added after the blog’s
name, which appears alone on the
blog’s homepage
(http://freenepal.blogspot.com).
The presence of
descriptive keywords in the page
headings
(the content of
the <TITLE> tag in HTML
language) and in the
URLs of these
documents are key criteria for
search-engines,
so it’s very
important to choose post headings
carefully to
ensure they get
picked up.
- Links are
automatically created, especially to
archives, and
are text (see
examples on the right of the Radio
Free Nepal
pages).
This is very
good for getting picked up because
the text
content of the
links (called “anchors”) is key to
the relevance
of pages the
links point to from the
search-engines. So in the
example here,
the presence of the words “State
Vandalism in
Nepal” in the first
link or
“Radio Free Nepal” in the 9th boosts the relevance of the page
indicated by the
link for these terms. Also, the
page with these links (the clickable text
is
detected as
important by search-engines) and the
page indicated by them will be considered
relevant.
Blogs have many
inbuilt
advantages to get them picked up frequently. Once a search-engine
has “found” the blog,
either by it being submitted manually or by search-engine “spiders”
following links,
a blog
will have much more chance than a standard website of being displayed
prominently because of its natural
advantages. But you should try to increase
this visibility
by going a bit further.
Here are some
tips on how to do this, using major
keywords drawn from the topic of your blog.
1.
Focus on
technology that helps getting
picked up
.
If your site
isn’t yet online, be careful what
technology (such as Blogger, Dotclear,
BlogSpirit, Joueb
and many others) you use to put it there. Choose the one that includes
the maximum
details for getting picked up:
- The heading of
the post must be fully reproduced
in the page heading (the <TITLE> tag)
as well as in
its URL (which isn’t always done,
since in the address some tools truncate the
post heading
after a certain number of
characters).
- Creation of “permalinks”
(links to a page containing a single post) must be possible.
- The technology
chosen must allow you to do as
much as possible in the design and
personalisation of your site,
such as
using your own graphics and personal style-sheets. You must learn
how to do as many technical things
as possible so you can use the maximum number of
factors to help the site get picked up.
To check all
these points, have a look at sites
using the technology you’re considering (you
can always find
a big enough sample there) and see
how they’re displayed. You’ll learn
quite a lot this
way.
2. Choose the
best headings for your posts
.
This is very
important. The heading of your post
will be reproduced in the heading of the
single pages
displaying your posts, in their URLs
and in the text of links that point to them
– three key
places for search-engines. So the post
headings must contain, in a few words,
the most
important terms, to allow them to be
picked up. Avoid headings such as “Well
said!”,
“Welcome!”, or “Great!”
The heading should
describe or sum up in less than five
words what can
be found in the post that follows.
Think of the words you’d like a search engine
to pick up from
it and put them in the heading.
Not so easy, perhaps, but very
effective.
3.
Provide the
text
.
Search-engines
love text, so provide it for them.
You can post all the photos you want as long
as they go with
text. Try to make each post at
least 200 words long so it’ll have a good chance
of being easily
spotted by search-engines.
Also
avoid having several very different topics
in the same
post, as search-engines don’t like
that.
The golden rule is one
topic, one post.
4. Pay
attention
to the first paragraph of
your posts
.
The position of
important words in the text is
also crucial. Take great care with your first
paragraph. If
you want to be picked up with the
words “release hostages,” for example,
put them among
the first 50 in the post.
The same
goes for all the keywords you choose.
A page with them
at the beginning always gets
better search-engine results than if they’re
at the end (all
other things being equal). Stress
these words, by putting them in bold for
example. This
signals to the search-engine that
they’re important.
5. Avoid
duplicate content in a post .
All
search-engines have ways to detect duplicate
content and if two pages are over-similar,
only one of them
will be spotted and the other
rarely displayed on a results page. Google,
for example,
displays this message:
(( In order to
show you the most relevant results,
we have omitted some entries very similar
to those already
displayed. If you like, you can
repeat the search with the omitted results
included. ))
This often
happens with blogs,
as the pages containing each post can appear very similar.
For example, if
you have an identical introduction
on each page, either put it at the bottom
or just on the
home page, so as to make all your
pages very different from each other.
6.
Don’t
give
your blog
a title that’s too long.
The best title
(the content of the tag
<TITLE>) for search-engines is between 5 and 10
words long, not
counting “stop words” such as
“the” or “and.” The page heading of a blog
usually has two
parts:
- The general
title of the blog
- A repeat of
the heading of the post.
So as not to
exceed 10 words in the general
heading of pages presenting each post, you
should use no
more than five words for the general
title of the blog and five for the heading
of the post.
That’s not very much, but being
concise as well as informative is one of
the keys to
getting picked up easily by
search-engines.
If you can (not
all technologies allow you to do
it), put the
heading of the post at the top
and the general
title of the blog
afterwards, rather than the other way round.
7.
Syndicate your
blog.
Most
blog tools
allow you
to create an “XML thread” or “RSS feed” with which users can pick
up your
posts in suitable software format.
You can offer this facility on your blog
(it
only
takes a few
minutes to install). You’ll not
only get more visitors but on Yahoo!, it’ll be
indicated
prominently as shown: (( View as XML )).
So
make use of
this.
8.
Keep your
links updated.
Links
are very
important for search-engines
because they allow them to compile a popularity
rating
(called PageRank
by Google) of web pages.
So
build up the number of links to
your
blog by:
- Inserting it
in directories (see below).
- Looking for
“cousin sites” that aren’t rivals
but offer material on the same topic.
Exchanging
links
between blogs
in the same area of interest should be sought as quickly
as
possible
(this is quite frequently done and
approved of in the blogging community,
which
is another
advantage of blogs).
Blogs are also well-suited for this, as the
margin is
often
empty and
they can be posted there.
FEATURING
IN
TOPIC DIRECTORIES
Featuring
in
general-interest search-engines (such
as Google, MSN, Yahoo! and Exalead)
and
directories
(such as Yahoo! Directory and Open
Directory) is very important but
getting
featured
by topic is too because it:
- generates more
focused visitors.
- increases the
number of links to your blog, which is
good for your popularity.
- gets you known
by other blog
publishers who might want to exchange links
with
similar
sites.
Among the many
search tools (search-engines and
directories) that pick up blogs, are:
A bigger list is
at :
Also have a look
at the directories of each
technology provider, such as :
CONCLUSION
A blog has all
the
elements for getting easily picked up by search-engines. With the tips
given here, you
should get very good results and
increase your blog’s visibility. So off you
go – and
remember that “content
is king.”
Olivier
Andrieu
is a
freelance Internet consultant specialising
in getting
sites picked up by search-engines.
He
also runs the
website www.abondance.com.
Make
oneself
stand out
WHAT
REALLY MAKES
A BLOG SHINE
By
Mark Glaser
A UNIQUE AND
PERSONAL VOICE
KEEP
IT CURRENT
CONNECT WITH AND EMPOWER READERS
TELL TRUTH TO POWER
AUTHOR
BIO
In the billions
and billions of words posted by the
millions of blogs worldwide, what makes one
particular blog
stand out from the teeming mass? What puts the blog writer
into a
special class, makes readers return day after day and brings accolades
from the media?
It’s connection.
Successful bloggers
are those who connect with their readers, whether 10 or 10,000
people, by entertaining or enlightening
them. Many people like to draw boundaries between bloggers
and
other writers (journalists, novelists, marketers) but their goals are
similar:
grab people by the collar and don't
let go.
Some of the bloggers
writing in this handbook – Bahrain's Chan'ad
Bahraini, Hong Kong's Yan
Sham-Shackleton
and Iran's Arash
Sigarchi – blog
in
countries where the government is
watching
their words very carefully. And the
world is watching them as well, to learn about stories
the press in their countries dare
not tell. In these places, freedom of speech and freedom of
the press are in danger, and bloggers’
voices online are an important link to the reality
on the streets of their towns. The
photos they take and the stories they tell are vital.
But what makes
these and other noteworthy blogs shine?
Here are some of their main attributes, the
things that set them apart from
all those millions of other blogs.
A UNIQUE AND
PERSONAL VOICE
The best
bloggers
talk
in their own voice, celebrate their unique identity and tell the
stories that are
real to them. Weblogs
come from the idea of an online journal, a personal journal, so it's
important to remember that
journaling is not like academic writing, not like impersonal
writing for a wire service. Chan'ad
Bahraini is the pseudonym of an Asian blogger located in the
mainly Arab country of Bahrain, giving him an
unusual
perspective on events there. Yan
Sham-Shackleton
is a performance artist who has lived all over
the world and helped run a
protest against China blocking the TypePad
blog sites
– after
several years earlier
herself helping the Chinese
authorities to filter the Net.
The biggest
problem with the vast majority of blogs is
that they are stale. Because most people are not
paid to blog,
it takes a while to integrate blogging
into their
daily routine. Many
people
start to blog,
try it out, and then never have the time to update it. To be
successful, bloggers must keep
writing posts on
a regular basis and stay up on the topics that interest them,
including current affairs. That
doesn't mean they have to post 12 times every day, but a
few weeks off can kill a blog's audience.
CONNECT WITH AND
EMPOWER READERS
One of the
distinguishing features of blogs is
interactivity. There are many ways to engage your readers,
involve them in the conversation and
utilize their feedback. You could run an online poll,
or give them your e-mail address,
or just enable comments under each posting.
Jeff Ooi
was
threatened
by the Malaysian authorities because of a comment made by one of his
readers. Rather than take all comments
off his blog, Ooi
decided
to moderate comments to make
sure readers stayed on topic and
would stand by their words. He also started up a
Chinese-language blog
called “The Ferryman” as a way to build a bridge between the Malaysian
and Chinese blogospheres.
While many blogs
include
commentary, some also include original old-fashioned reporting.There's
no right
way to do it, but having either
original reporting or an original angle on a story helps set
your blog
apart. Chan'ad Bahraini offered photos and
audio of
protests in Bahrain when an
activist was
jailed in November 2004. And blogger Arash
Sigarchi was arrested in
Iran and sentenced
to 14 years
in prison for criticizing the hard-line regime’s arrests of other
journalists. He was later freed
after paying a fine, but his case is under appeal. The key
is that these bloggers
and so many others have spoken truth to power, and had the
courage to stand up as a collective blogosphere
to authorities that would rather
hide the
truth.
PERSONAL
ACCOUNTS
P
E R S O N A L A C C
O U N T
GERMANY
“WE
PROMOTE CIVIL AND
HUMAN RIGHTS”
By
Markus Beckedahl
At the end
of the
1990s, when I was 20, I became an
activist and lobbyist for a free and open
information society. With some
friends, I founded the digital rights NGO
“network new media.” For five years we
have been promoting civil and human rights
in the digital sphere. We organise
conferences and are engaged in a range of
campaigns and NGO networks. For example,
we coordinate the “German Civil Society
Coordination Group to the WSIS” and devote
a lot of energy to preparation for the World Summit on the
Information Society
(WSIS).
In the first
years of my political engagement I
was primarily using mailing lists in networks. I sent out some
5,000 news articles and
announcements about netpolitics. But these
lists were reaching a
small and static number of users. Blogs,
on the other hand, are open and transparent and
offer many more opportunities to
share my knowledge and report about my work.
My first blog
started in
2002 in the first phase of the WSIS.
I came to the UN PrepCom
in Geneva equipped only
with my
sleeping bag and a notebook. I needed an infrastructure to report
quickly without having to use HTML. In
the past, it often took me too much time to publish news
with the overhead of HTML. I wrote
about my impressions doing politics at UN-level in a
blog
called “Backpacking to world politics”. That was my first blog.
I started my
most recent blog,
netzpolitik.org, in spring 2004. I tried a range of applications before
settling
on Wordpress,
a free software with a huge community behind it. Weblogs offer me fast
and convenient content generating,
editing and publishing. Most important for me is an
interface allowing focus on the
essential work – writing text instead of wasting time on HTML
markup. I want easy-to-use interfaces
to gather and compile information, write it up and
then click one button to publish.
All of this greatly simplifies my work. Also appealing is the
combined “push-pull” technology.
Most of my readers subscribe to the RSS feed and
follow my articles in feed readers.
Others find me using web browsers or search-engines.
Being part of
several political communities, I try
to collect and deliver all news of importance in
netzpolitik.org: About Civil and Human Rights,
the Open Source World, Free and Open Access to
Knowledge, an inclusive information
society and balance in the field of copyright. Free speech and
freedom of expression are
crucially influenced by copyright law and digital rights
management. But few people understand these
are important issues, so I'm raising awareness to
help citizens defend their rights.
Civil rights are in danger worldwide, including Germany. Greater
security measures
go along with more and more surveillance, but so far the public is
hardly aware that this implies a
loss of freedom.
Free software
(such as the operating system Linux)
offers a great potential to convey and incorporate
freedom of expression, pluralism and
sustainability in the digital age. Of course all my computers
run on Linux. I also write about
new developments in free software and about their
political dimension and explain how
first-time users can use these systems.
I closely follow
the growth of the online
encyclopedia Wikipedia, as well
as creative commons (CC) licences.
My content is offered under a CC licence
and I
actively encourage copying and
circulating my work for non-commercial
purposes, when quoted as source.
Another
important issue is how the Internet can be
used productively by civil society organisations and
campaigns. I
used to work as a project leader
and consultant for political communication on
the Internet and eCampaigning and eDemocracy have
an extra category in the blog. I analyse
free tools for collaboration and activism and focus
on the various aspects of
social software, how to collectively
and socially generate knowledge with wider coverage.
In
netzpolitik.org, I also collect
information and
data about forthcoming conferences, lectures, and
meetings about the information
society. I report from conferences and give my views on
them. Each day there is a news review
with lots of hyperlinks and I comment on the
development of new laws and point out NGO
activity in these areas. My blog
continuously develops into a
node within German-speaking civil
society and networks, providing material to
large numbers of social multipliers. I
also ask blogging friends to write about key issues as
well as spreading the news faster. I
use my RSS news reader to compile topics
for the
review very quickly. In the first
10 months, I managed to publish more than 800
articles
just with a little help from friends.
To
my surprise,
an average 2,500 people read my blog every
day. I get nice feedback especially
from
younger people who I encourage to
start their own blog. Fortunately
Germany has laws to
protect
freedom of speech. No-one will send me to prison for
criticising
the
government. I admire the courage of people who live under dictatorships
and
risk their
lives updating their blogs.
Markus
Beckedahl,
28,
runs is executive-manager of “newthinking
communications,” an agency for open
source
technologies and strategies, and
co-founder and chairman of the German digital rights NGO
Netzwerk Neue Medien. His blog
is: www.netzpolitik.org
P
E R S O N A L A C C
O U N T
BAHRAIN
“WE’VE BROKEN THE
GOVERNMENT’S NEWS MONOPOLY”
I
set up my blog
for two
main reasons: (i) it's fun to write without
any
formal restrictions,
deadlines, or requirements, and (ii)
to try to contribute to and encourage the
discussion of topics in Bahrain that rarely get
proper
treatment in the local
mainstream media.
Currently, Bahrain's
only TV and
radio
stations are run directly by the government, so there is no
reporting or discussion of issues that
are even distantly related to the local political situation. All
of the local newspapers are
privately-owned, so they enjoy relatively more freedom
than the broadcast media. Yet even in
the written press, the situation is not much better
because editors do not dare to openly
criticize certain influential individuals, such as members
of the government, or the royal
family (particularly the king and his uncle the prime
minister).
The Internet
however provides a means for
individuals to freely express their opinions in public, without
facing the scrutiny of the government. Although the Bahraini government
does have a
history of monitoring and blocking
political websites, it seems to have become more relaxed in
the past one or two years, though
the situation has deteriorated recently. Moreover, the
ease with which someone can set up a
website and write anonymously (like myself) makes it
difficult for the government to
take any action against the writers.
So for these
reasons I felt there was a real need
to have free and frank discussions on all issues
(including politics) somewhere – especially
as the country attempts to make a transition to democracy –
and the Internet was the obvious
choice for where I could share and discuss my
opinions. I was encouraged to see that Mahmood
(www.mahmood.tv), the pioneer of
Bahraini bloggers,
had been blogging for about a year prior
to my start,
without any issues with
the government.
One of the main
aims of my blog
has been to discuss and analyze events in Bahrain. But because of the
limited amount of first-hand
information available, I've been trying to do some
pseudo-journalism myself. This means that
whenever possible I try to personally attend events
(especially protest demonstrations)
and then write about them on my blog and provide
photographs.
There are now
several bloggers
in Bahrain and the effect
of this has
been quite positive. A space has been
created where a wide range of
topics are discussed with honesty. I have certainly
learned a great deal of information from
the other Bahraini blogs that I would never have been
able to learn anywhere else. And
this community is not only online, as many of the Bahrain bloggers
meet up once a month to discuss in person the various issues that we
blog
about.
However, most of
the online activity in Bahrain takes place at
the many
Arabic-language online
discussion forums that have been around for
much longer (e.g. bahrainonline.org).
Blogging has not yet
caught on as a
mainstream phenomenon in Bahrain, however our sites are more
and more assuming the role of
“bridge blogs”" (as defined by Hossein Derakshan:
http://hoder.com/weblog/archives/013982.shtml).
Because most bloggers
in Bahrain write in
English, we are
able to communicate (in both directions) with people around the
world, so they look to us as a source
of information about what is “really” happening in Bahrain.
So for example,
when the three moderators of
Bahrainonline.org were arrested
in February 2005,
we wrote about it on our blogs so the news
of this spread around the world even
faster than it did within Bahrain. Reporters
Without Borders
had issued a statement about
the case within a day of the
arrests. I believe that all the international attention that
was generated probably played some
role in the government's eventual decision to
release the three a couple weeks
later. More generally, our blogs have
broken the monopoly of
the government in communicating
news about Bahrain to the outside world.
Generally, bloggers
in Bahrain have not faced
any
repercussions from the government regarding what
we write, but this has been
changing since the start of this year. As noted, three moderators
of an online discussion forum
were arrested in February for messages posted that
supposedly “incited hatred towards the
government”. One of the moderators, Ali Abdulemam,
also
maintained his own blog. Also, in April,
the
government announced it would now
oblige all website owners to register
with the ministry of information or face legal action.
This shows the government still does
not fully understand the Internet (and blogs) and does not
know how to
handle the situation when it feels threatened by online writers.
Originally from
southeast Asia, Chan'ad Bahraini is now
living in Bahrain, where he has
set up his blog http://chanad.weblogs.us.
He chooses to remain
anonymous.
P
E R S O N A L A C C
O U N T
USA
“NOW
I CAN WRITE WHAT
I THINK”
By
Jay Rosen
When I
started
asking around about how to do a weblog, I
got many kinds of answers. The one
piece of advice everyone gave
was: you must write in short posts. That's
the style, some said. That's what
works, said others. And, most suspicious of
all, that's what busy, Web-cruising
readers expect. They don't have time for your long and
thoughtful analysis, I was told. By
everyone.
This made me
suspicious. I didn't set out to write
long, 2000-word posts; but that is what happened as I
tried to turn my ideas into posts
that said something others weren't saying, and got some
notice. (And I can do short, when I
want to). I set out to be unrestricted: free to figure out
for myself what works, what PressThink
wants to be.
“People don't
have time for...” reasoning was
meaningless to me, and I didn't trust it. That kind of advice
would restrict my freedom to write
what I think, but the whole purpose in starting PressThink
was
liberation: “Wow, now I have my own magazine. Now I can write what I
think.”
My interest was users who did have
time for depth, in whatever number they may prove to
exist, ocean to ocean, post to post.
My approach was:
this is my magazine, PressThink... If you
like it, return. In a tiny and abstract way,
perhaps, my blog
is part of the media marketplace, competing for eyeballs with game
shows,
football, and re-runs of Law and
Order. But not really. PressThink, a free citizen in a
voluntary nation, doesn't have to
behave like a market actor. Thus my experiment in long form
blogging.
One has to
remember that the Web is good for many
opposite things. For quick hitting information. For
clicking across a field. For talk
and interaction. It's also a depth finder, a memory device,
an instant library, a filter. Not
to use a weblog for extended analysis because most
users won't pick that option is Web
dumb, but media smart. But I am not the media!
What's strange is that I try to write
short, snappy things, but they always turn into long ones.
A certain number of readers show
up to complain about it (“too many words spent on
the wrong subject!” would be
typical) and that gets amusing after a while.
Every good blog
asks the
Web a question at the start: is there any demand out there for an
original...
for me? But you have to do the blog for a
while before you find out what it is supposed to be.
The title PressThink
derives from terms like “group think,” but the group is the press. The
title is also
short for press thinking or
doctrine, the philosophy journalists live by – one might say the
religion of the press. These are
subjects that interest me. Press think is what I do myself, as
a critic and writer. I'm also
engaged in it when I operate my blog.
The idea is to
lift the press think part from
passing events that involve the press. And then examine it, or
get others to do the same. So that
is what the title means. 
The blog is
"about" press think;
it's also a contraption for making
more press think. I think some bloggers
don't put enough
thought into the title of their blog. In
my case, not until I had the right title was I ready to start
my weblog.
I try to leave
ideologically-charged press
critique to others – individuals and organizations – that do it
eagerly, do it well. PressThink is not a
media watch site, although I have
written about
media-watchers. PressThink
is not a “bias” hunter, in the usual sense, but I have written about
bias-hunting. I don't support George
Bush, but I do write about his press think. As I
wrote in the introduction to my weblog: “I
try to discover the consequences in the world that
result from having the kind of
press we do.”
Someone once
asked me if I have a blogging “method.” I
read the press, watch the news, click around in
my blogroll,
and hunt for something juicy, current, interesting. Then I collect
links, and start
writing. Or someone e-mails me
something and it leads to a post. Often something
happens and I know my readers will want
to know what I think about it, so I have to do a
post. What I have instead of a firm
method is a kind of style sheet, which has self-imposed
instructions for how to do a PressThink
post.
In a typical PressThink
post like this one, “Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die”... (http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2005/03/29/nwsp_dwn.html):
There are five
fields that get filled in: the
title, the subtitle, the essay, the “after matter” (with notes,
reactions
and links) and the comments. Each
requires of me a different kind of writing. 
The title
condenses what the post is about, and
arrests attention. The subheading explains the argument,
previewing the “story” in the essay.
The essay is an essay – usually 1,500 to 2,500 words –
but with 20 to 30 links, which
are a gesture unto themselves. The “after” section edits
and tracks the wider discussion in
the blog sphere, including reactions to my post. The
comments begin the dialogue.
A successful PressThink
post is when all five parts talk to each other as they are read against
one
another. A PressThink
entry is not “done” until the after matter, trackbacks
and comments come
in, which sometimes takes more than
a week. That's one cycle in the turning of a weblog. When
it
works (always a hit and miss thing), the post at some point turns into
a forum on
the subject that occasioned the
post – and the forum is what “thinks.” Of course, I didn't
know about this stylesheet and the posting
logic it enforces until after I
had stumbled on it
through trial and error. That's why
you have to do your weblog for a while before you know
how to do it well.
Before I started
PressThink
I had to pass all my ideas about journalism and journalists through the
very
gatekeepers in the press I was
writing about. But now that I have my own magazine I don't
have to do that, and the
gatekeepers come to my blog and read what I think. That's a
big difference. I finally have
intellectual freedom.
Jay
Rosen
teaches journalism at New York University, where has been
on the
faculty since 1986. From 1999 to
2005 he served as chair of the
Department. He lives in New York City. Rosen is the author of
PressThink,
a weblog
about journalism and its ordeals
(www.pressthink.org), which he
introduced in
September 2003:
http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink
P
E R S O N A L A C C
O U N T
HONG KONG
“I
KEPT MY PROMISE TO
THOSE WHO DIED”
It is 12:23
am, in the early
morning of
June 4.
Today is the 16th
anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre
in Beijing. When the event
happened
in 1989 I was sitting in
a tunnel outside the Xinhua News Agency
office in Hong Kong where hunger
strikers had set up. We were
supporting the students in China. We wanted democracy for
them and for ourselves. We no longer
wanted to be colonial subjects of Britain and we did not
want to be
subjects of the Communist Party either. We wanted to be free.
About two, maybe
three hours later, I heard the
first shots coming through the radio, followed by the
sound of singing, screaming and
tanks reverberating though the walls, and we looked at
each other and saw tears streaming
down our faces.
We all know now
that China will use tanks
against
those who seek democracy, but until then we did not.
I think it was at that moment
that Glutter was born in my head, when I heard the
ending of the 1989 Democratic Movement
on the radio, in a tunnel, with bright fluorescent
lights. I was 15.
If not at that
moment, it was soon afterwards. I
would make promises only young women with no
experience in the world could make with as
little doubt as I did : “I will not
forget. I promise to remember forever. 
I will live my life better and for all of us because I am
alive and you are no longer. I won’t
let this happen again. I will remind the world for you,
the students of Tiananmen Square. My Heroes. My
Big
Brothers and Sisters.”
I made those
promises in haste, in fear, in
naivety. It never occurred to me how something like that was to
be achieved or if it was even
possible. I only knew that it sounded right, and all the
adults were yelling those things out
of loudspeakers.
It is only
tonight that I’m thinking that all this
writing, all the photos and artwork I have done in the name of
democracy, the cyber-protest
I
organized, the interviews I agreed to, and the stories I
published in the name of free speech
are not only because I fervently believe in it but also
because it is a way to placate my
subconscious. Blogging allows me to
keep my promises to the dead.
I write this
because I think people should know
that’s why I have managed to
create Glutter,
not because I
followed any rules, or copied anybody
else. Not because I wanted
attention or wanted to make a name. I
often prefer it b
est when it is quiet
and will let the blog die a little
when I feel there is too much
attention focused on it because then I can just write what I
want, and tell the story that needs
to be told in the way I like without pressure.
My advice to
those interested in starting a blog is:
don’t listen to anyone except yourself. Don’t read
anyone else’s blog
and try to emulate it. Don’t sit down with a list of “musts” and try to
achieve it. I broke so many rules
because I didn’t know there were any and I did just fine.
All you need to
create a blog
is the will to start. All you need to
keep one going is a will to record
what you have to say. Each of us
experienced a moment of political
awakening, a trigger that made us understand a kind of
injustice that needed to be fixed.
Otherwise you would not be an activist with an idea to
create something. Let that
realization guide you. I hope you can convey enough of your
conviction to remind and inspire
others to fight for change. That’s all the wisdom I can
impart tonight.
It is now 2:33am. I can
hear
gunshots. Put,
put, put. I hear them every year at this time. I was 15. Probably
too young to have experienced the
events the way I did. But others were too young to die.
Yan
Sham-Shackleton
wants you to know she spent six weeks writing six versions of this
article
where she tried to
record all she knows about blogging until
she realized the beauty of the medium is
that you can be
yourself. On her blog,
glutter.org, she talks about art
as
well as politics. Her outspokenness
and
stands in favour of true
democracy in Hong Kong mean that she
is regularly
censored inside China.
P
E R S O N A L A C C
O U N T
IRAN
“WE
CAN WRITE FREELY
IN BLOGS”
Today
we understand
Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “the
world is a global village” better
than he did. The invisible lines
of the Internet mean that if something happens in Asia, the Americas,
Europe or a remote
island off Africa, we
will get to know
about it.
For years
journalism has been faced with
restrictions, but these can now be removed by technology.
I am a
journalist in a country where restrictions
prevent me from doing my job. In addition to “inter-organizational”
factors that exist in
most media of the world, “out-of-organization” elements such as
legal restrictions, the influence
of government and individuals, onesided
support of news
resources, pressure groups and
owners of capital have greater
influence than
in advanced countries. So I have to
think about the independence of my
country and its
reflection in true news and my
analysis of news. One of my solutions for
breaking through
the hindrances was a blog.
We can freely
write in blogs.
Since they do not involve printing or expressing news in
audio-visual
media, writing in them provides news
and points of views more quickly.
Blogs can be seen as
small news
or comment agencies where the writer is both a
correspondent
and editor-in-chief.
Some
say blogs
should
focus less on news. People like to record their daily activities
there. These
amateur writers have fewer readers,
often just friends and relatives.
But the blogs of
noted
journalists and artists, and political, economic, social and sports
personalities,
even if they just write about their
daily lives, are noticed because of their
news value and
fame. These people have a lot of
subjects to write about and attract readers.
I believe each blog
attracts its own readers depending on their interests, so no
restriction
is required on blog
writing.
I have chosen
two methods for blog
writing. In the first, I express unofficially (colloquially)
my views on
current issues. In the second, I write
news, analyses, interviews, reports, or
essays. So I can
have both groups of readers:
those who want to know what I am doing
these days and
those who want me to express my
views more precisely as a journalist,
writer and poet.
A blog as an
on-line
media provides the writer with an opportunity to have the frank views
and criticism of
readers and reply to them or
improve himself. In this close relationship
with the
readers, the blogger
has the opportunity to guide his reader directly with his
views and write
the things that readers enjoy
more.
As I have
already mentioned, if you want to print
a book, poem, story, or even newspaper
or magazine in Iran, you have to
obtain
permission from the authorities. Very many
writers and
journalists are affected by this.
But if you want
to publish a story, poem or essay
in a newspaper or magazine, it will be
censored. So
many Iranian writers publish their
views in blogs, at less cost and they are
not forced to
censor themselves. So the
government, as in China and elsewhere,
restricts
Internet use.
Internet
journalism could advance freedom of
expression and wider viewpoints. Although
I have been
convicted by Iranian courts, I have
not lost hope and I am sure that in coming
years the rulers
of my country will have to
respect the free flow of information and
expression
freedom.
Journalist and blogger
Arash Sigarchi
was born in 1978,
during the revolution that eventually
overthrew the
Shah, and began doing journalism in
1993, aged only 15. When reformist
President
Mohammad Khatami
was elected in 1997, he joined the reformist press. After this
media was shut
down in April 2000, he went to live
in northern Iran, where he
edited a 12-page
daily paper, Gilan
Emrouz (now Gilan).
He
began blogging
in
2001 on a collective blog called Gileh
Mard
(“The Man from Gilan”).
In
2002, he started
up his personal web site, Panjereh Eltehab(“The Window of
Hope”) (www.sigarchi.com).
In
early 2005,
he was held for two months by the
information and security ministry and then sentenced
to 14 years in
prison. He is free pending an
appeal.
P
E R S O N A L A C C
O U N T
NEPAL
“WE
TELL THE OUTSIDE
WORLD WHAT’S HAPPENING”
February 1,
2005.
Nepal's King Gyanendra
took over the power which was informed to
general public via a television
speech. After the speech was concluded, I
wanted to know the international
reactions of the move and tried to open
the dial-up connection. But it said
there is no phone line attached. I
understood that the phone line has
been cut off. In an attempt to quash any possible outflow
of information criticizing his
move, the King has ordered the army not only to lock up
the ISPs but also to stop
telecommunication services.
During that
time, people were talking about all
sorts of consequences – some of them praising the
move. At my newspaper office,
everybody was foreseeing a glum future with the army
personnel invading into the
television newsroom to censor. I thought at that time it
would be appropriate to note down the
daily events and people's thought as a diary. I
did that on my computer.
On February 8,
basic telecommunication services
and internet services resumed. I was asked by many to
explain what had happened in Nepal through emails.
At the
time, I thought my
diary would best explain the
situation here. Some friends at United States of America suggested me
to
blog the diary in back dates. Since I was a
bit novice in blogging matters, they
set up the
site and entered the entries for me. It was decided that I would
remain anonymous and ask other
friends to write on blogs anonymously, which would save
us from possible harassment and
prison.
Heavy censorship
in earlier days in media and free
flow of information on RFN gave the popularity
to the site, with Blogger.com
recommending a visit. My friends in USA did their best
to popularize the site. Within
weeks, it was pretty much popular.
The decision to
start RFN was taken so that people
around the world can understand how individuals
are feeling about the King's
direct rule. Under heavy censorship, media would be forced
to write what the King wants and
would be all but insufficient to represent people's true
voices. RFN despite being an effort
of an individual with entries from a few people would
best represent the common voices
without the censorship and fear of harassment.
Earlier entries
in RFN were mostly diary type
daily event describers. Later entries are more thoughtful
and analysis of various events. In
the political situation of Nepal where the King has
assumed direct power bypassing the
people's choices, RFN is much more relevant because
it carries the thoughts of a
common person.
What actually I
thrive for is democracy in the
country because I believe that's the only way where the
country will prosper and my career
as journalist would carry meanings. Writing under
censorship is something like
drinking coffee without sugar – there is no taste. As
journalists we come to know many things
that never made to the papers like one that was
published in RFN - the King acquiring
personal properties in an inappropriate way. Many
journalists knew that, criticized that,
laughed at the King but couldn't write it.
The other
purpose RFN served was to spread Nepal's situation
among many
people around the
world. Nepal's situation
could have
gone unheard of by many thousands of people if there
hadn't been RFN. This I think is
good for making conscience among the world population
to think about the country.
Electronic
advancement has given so much for our
society. I write freely without fear because I
believe the way I am doing the blogging,
writing them and emailing them to a friend in US
to post, is not traceable without
some heavy measure. When democracy will return to
my country giving us 'air to
breathe freely' I will be proud of myself as I would feel I
have contributed a little for that.
Many questioned
me through the email what is the
credibility of the posts. I told them a mere name
can't be a measure of credibility. I
didn't want to publish name because until democracy
dawns in Nepal, the situation
can go even
further wrong and I could be forced into
prison for blogging.
I do not fear prison but I want to continue RFN to provide
information about Nepal to the world. I
also told
them I would give them my name when the
ordeal of the King's rule will be
over.
Until then,
thank you to all for your support,
Radio Free Nepal
is a blog
that defies King Gyanendra's direct asumption of power and censorship
of media. Working
for restoration of democracy, RFN
is a site that carries firsthand information about Nepal to the world.
Its
contributors post anonymously as there is a threat from the authorities.
U
S E F U
L T I P S
HOW
TO BLOG
ANONYMOUSLY
This
is a quick
technical guide to anonymous blogging that
tries to approach the problem from the
angle of a government whistleblower in a country with a
less-than-transparent
government. It's not intended for cypherpunks,
but for people
in developing
nations who are worried about their
safety and want to take practical steps
to protect their
privacy.
The Electronic
Frontier Foundation's guide, “How
to Blog Safely”
(http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Anonymity/blog-anonymously.php),
also offers some very
good advice on
this.
SOMMAIRE
INTRODUCING SARAH
Sarah works in a
government office as an
accountant. She becomes aware that her boss,
the deputy
minister, is stealing large amounts of
money from the government. She wants
to let the world
know that a crime is taking place,
but she's worried about losing her job. If she reports
the matter to the minister (if she
could ever get an appointment!), she might
get fired. She
calls a reporter at the local newspaper, but he says he can't run a
story without
lots more
information and documents proving her
claims.
So Sarah decides
to put up a weblog
to tell the world what she knows about what's
happening in the
ministry. To protect herself, she
wants to make sure no one can find out
who she is,
based on her blog
posts. She needs to blog anonymously.
There are two
major ways she can get caught when
trying to blog anonymously. One is if
she reveals her
identity through the content she
posts – for instance, if she says: "I'm the
assistant chief
compliance accountant to the
deputy minister of mines," there's a good chance that
someone reading her blog is going to
figure out who she is pretty quickly.
The other way
Sarah can get caught is if someone
can determine her identity from information
provided by
their web browsers or email programs.
Every computer attached to
the internet has
– or shares – an address called
an IP address - it's a series of four numbers from
0-255, separated by dots – for
instance: 213.24.124.38. When Sarah uses
her web browser
to make a comment on the minister's blog, the IP address she was
using is
included on
her post.
With a little
work, the minister's computer
technicians may be able to trace Sarah's
identity from
this IP address. If Sarah is using a computer at home, dialing into an
Internet
service
provider, the ISP likely has records of
which IP address was assigned to which telephone number
at a specific time. In some
countries, the minister might need a
subpoena to
obtain these records; in others (especially ones where the ISP is owned
by
the government),
the ISP might give out this
information very easily, and Sarah might find herself in hot
water.
There are a
number of ways Sarah can hide her
identity when using the Internet. As a
general rule,
the more secure she wants to be, the more work she needs to do to hide
her
identity. Sarah
- and anyone else hoping to blog
anonymously – needs to consider just how paranoid she
wants to be before deciding how
hard she wants to work to protect her identity.
As you will see,
some of the strategies for
protecting identity online require a great
deal of
technical knowledge and work.
STEP ONE
-
PSEUDONYMS
One easy way
Sarah can hide her identity is to use
a free webmail account and free blog
host outside her
native country. (Using a paid
account for either email or webhosting is a
poor idea, as
the payment will link the account to
a credit card, a checking account or Paypal account that
could be
easily linked to Sarah.)
She can create a new
identity –
a pseudonym –
when she signs up for these
accounts, and when the minister finds her
blog, he'll
discover
that it
belongs to “A. N. Ymous”, with the email
address
anonymous.whistleblower@hotmail.com.
Some providers
of free webmail
accounts:
Some providers
of free weblog
hosting:
Blogsome
- free WordPress
blogs
Blogger
Seo Blog
Here's the
problem with this strategy. When Sarah
signs up for an email service or a
weblog, the
webserver
she's accessing logs her IP address. If that IP address can be traced
to her - if
she's using her computer at home or
her computer at work – and if the email
or weblog
company
is
forced to release that information, she could be found.
It's not a
simple
matter to get
most web service companies to reveal
this information – to get Hotmail,
for instance, to
reveal the IP Sarah used to sign
up for her account, the minister would
likely need to
issue a subpoena, probably in
cooperation with a US law enforcement
agency. But
Sarah may not want to take the risk of
being found if her government can persuade
her email and
weblog host to reveal her identity.
STEP TWO
- PUBLIC
COMPUTERS
One extra step
Sarah could take to hide her
identity is to begin using computers to make
her blogposts
that are
used by lots of other people. Rather than setting up her webmail
and weblog
accounts from
her home or work computer, Sarah could set them up from a computer in a
cybercafé,
library or university computer lab. When the minister traces the
IP used to post
a comment or item, he'll find the
post was made from a cybercafé, where
any number of
people might have been using the
computers.
There are flaws
in this strategy as well. If the cybercafé
or computer lab keeps track of who is using what
computer at what time, Sarah's
identity could be compromised. She shouldn't try to post in
the middle of the night when she's
the only person in the computer lab –
the geek on duty
is likely to remember who she is.
And she should change cybercafés
often. If the
minister discovers that all the whistleblower's posts are coming from
“Joe's
Beer and Bits”on
Main Street, he might stake
someone
out to watch the cybercafé and
see who's
posting to blogs
in the hope of catching Sarah.
STEP
THREE -
ANONYMOUS PROXIES
Sarah's
getting
sick of walking to Joe's cybercafé every
time she wants to post to her blog.
With some help
from the neighborhood geek, she
sets up her computer to access the web
through an
anonymous proxy. Now, when she uses her
webmail and weblog services, she'll leave
behind the IP address of the proxy
server, not the address of her home
machine... which
will make it very hard for the
minister to find her.
First, she finds
a list of proxy servers online,
by searching for “proxy server” on Google.
She picks a
proxy server from the publicproxyservers.com list, choosing a site
marked
“high
anonymity”. She writes down the IP address
of the proxy and the port listed on the
proxy list.
Some reliable
lists of public proxies:
Then she opens
the “preferences” section of her
web browser. Under “general”, “network”
or “security”
(usually), she finds an option to
set up a proxy to access the Internet.
(On the Firefox
browser,
this option is found under Preferences – General – Connection
Settings.)
She turns on
“manual proxy configuration”, enters
the IP address of the proxy server and
port into the
fields for HTTP proxy and SSL proxy
and saves her settings. She restarts her
browser and
starts surfing the web.
She notices that
her connection to the web seems a
bit slower. That's because every page
she requests
from a webserver
takes a detour. Instead of connecting directly to
hotmail.com, she
connects to the proxy, which then
connects to Hotmail. When Hotmail sends a page to
her, it goes to the proxy first,
then to her. She also notices she has some
trouble
accessing websites, especially those that want her to log in. But at
least her IP isn't
being recorded
by her weblog
provider.
A fun experiment
with proxies: Visit noreply.org,
a popular remailer website. The site will
greet you by
telling you what IP address you're
coming from: “Hello pool-151-203-182-212.wma.east.verizon.net
151.203.182.212, pleased
to meet you.”
Now go to
anonymizer.com, a web service that
allows you to view (some) web pages through an
anonymous proxy. In the box on the top
right of the anonymizer page,
enter the URL
for http://www.noreply.org (or
just
click this link - [http://anon.free.anonymizer.com/http://www.noreply.org].)
You'll
note that noreply.org now thinks you're
coming from
vortex.anonymizer.com.
(Anonymizer is a
nice way to test proxies without needing to
change your browser settings, but it
won't work with most sophisticated web
services, like
webmail
or weblogging servers.)
Finally, follow
the instruction above to set up your
web browser to use an anonymous
proxy and then
visit noreply.org to see where it
thinks you're coming from.
Alas, proxies
aren't perfect either. If the
country Sarah lives in has restrictive Internet laws,
many websurfers
may be
using proxies to access sites blocked by the government. The
government may
respond by ordering certain popular
proxies to be blocked. Surfers move to new
proxies, the government blocks those
proxies, and so the circle continues.
All this can
become very time-consuming.
Sarah has
another problem if she's one of very few
people in the country using a proxy.
If the comments
on her blog
can be traced to a single proxy server, and if the minister can
access logs from
all the ISPs within a country, he
might be able to discover that Sarah's computer was one
of the very few that accessed a
specific proxy server. He can't demonstrate
that Sarah used
the proxy to post to a weblog server, but
he might conclude that
the fact that
the proxy was used to make a weblog post
and that she was one of the few people in the
nation to use that proxy constituted
evidence that she made the post. Sarah would do well to
use proxies that are popular locally and to switch proxies often.
STEP
FOUR - THIS
TIME IT'S PERSONAL
Sarah starts to
wonder what happens if the proxy
servers she's using get compromised. What if the
minister convinces the operator of a
proxy server - either through legal means
or bribery - to
keep records and see whether
anyone from his country is using the proxy, and what sites
they're using? She's relying on the
proxy administrator to protect her, and
she doesn't even
know who the administrator is.
Though the proxy administrator may not even know she's
running a proxy – proxies are
often left open by accident.
Sarah has
friends in Canada - a country
less likely to
censor the Internet than Sarah's own
country - who
might be willing to help her maintain her blog while protecting her
identity.
Sarah phones her
friend and asks him to set up
“Circumventor” on his system. Circumventor is
one of dozens of proxy servers a
user can set up to allow people to use
his computer as
a proxy.
Sarah's friend
Jim downloads Circumventor
(http://www.peacefire.org/circumventor/simple-circumventor-instructions.html)
from Peacefire.org and
installs it
on his
Windows system.
It's not an easy
install - he
needs to install Perl on his system,
then
install OpenSA,
then
Circumventor. And he
now needs to keep his computer connected to the
Internet
constantly, so that Sarah can use it as a
proxy without previously asking him to
turn it on. He
gets the software set up, calls
Sarah's cellphone and gives her a URL she
can
start using to
surf the web through his proxy, or
post to her blog. This is especially
convenient,
because Sarah
can use the proxy from home or from
a cybercafé, and doesn't
have to make any
changes on her system.
While Sarah's
very grateful for Jim's help,
there's a major problem with the arrangement.
Jim's computer –
which runs Windows – reboots
quite often. Whenever it does, his ISP
assigns a new IP
address to the machine. Each time
this happens, the proxy stops working
for Sarah. Jim
needs to contact Sarah again and
tell her the new IP that Circumventor
is associated
with. This rapidly gets expensive
and frustrating. Sarah also worries that, if
she uses any one
IP address too long, her ISP may
succumb to government pressure and
start blocking
it.
STEP
FIVE
- ONION
ROUTING THROUGH TOR
Jim suggests
that Sarah experiment with Tor, a
relatively new system that provides a high
degree of
anonymity for websurfing.
Onion routing takes the idea of proxy servers – a
computer that
acts on your behalf – to a new level
of complexity. Each request made through an onion
routing network goes through two
to 20 additional computers, making
it hard to trace
what computer originated a request.
Each step of the
Onion Routing chain is encrypted,
making it harder for the government
of Sarah's
country to trace her posts.
Furthermore, each
computer in the
chain only
knows its
nearest neighbors. In other words,
router B knows that it got a request for a web page
from router A,
and that it's supposed to pass the
request on to router C. But the
request itself
is encrypted - router B doesn't actually know what page Sarah is
requesting,
or what router
will finally request the page from
the webserver.
Given the
complexity of the technology, Sarah is
pleasantly surprised to discover how easy
it is to install
Tor
(http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/tor-doc-win32.html),
an onion routing
system. She
downloads an installer which installs Tor
on her system, then downloads and
installs
Privoxy,
a
proxy that works with Tor and has the
pleasant side
benefit of removing
most of the ads
from the web pages
Sarah views.
After installing
the software and restarting her
machine, Sarah checks noreply.org and
discovers that
she is, in fact, successfully “cloaked” by the Tor system – noreply.org
thinks
she's logging on
from Harvard University.
She reloads,
and now noreply thinks she's in Germany. From
this she
concludes
that Tor is changing her identity from
request to
request, helping
to protect her privacy.
This has some
odd consequences. When she uses Google
through Tor, it keeps
switching
language on her.
One search, it's in English – another, Japanese. Then German, Danish
and Dutch, all
in the course of a few minutes.
Sarah welcomes the opportunity to learn
some new
languages, but she's concerned about some
other consequences. Sarah likes
to contribute to
Wikipedia,
but discovers that Wikipedia blocks her
attempts to
edit articles
when she's using
Tor.
Tor
also seems to
have some of
the same problems Sarah was having with other proxies. Her
surfing
slows down quite a bit, as compared to
surfing the web without a proxy – she
finds that she
ends up using Tor
only when she's accessing sensitive content or posting to her blog. And
she's
once again tied to her home computer, since she can't install Tor on a
public
machine very easily.
Most worrisome,
though, she discovers that Tor sometimes
stops working. Evidently, her
ISP is starting
to block some Tor
routers – when Tor tries to use a blocked
router, she
can
wait for minutes
at a time, but doesn't get the web page
she's requested.
STEP SIX
-
MIXMASTER, INVISIBLOG AND GPG
Surely there's a
solution to the blogging problem that
doesn't involve a proxy server, even
one as
sophisticated as Tor.
After spending
quite a long time with the local
geek, she explores a new option: Invisibloghttp://www.invisiblog.com/).
Run by an anonymous
group of Australians called
vigilant.tv, it’s a site
designed for
and by the truly paranoid. You can't post to Invisiblog
via
the web, as you
do with most blog
servers. You post to it using specially formatted email, sent through
the
MixMaster
remailer system, signed cryptographically.
It took Sarah a
few tries to understand that last
sentence. Eventually, she set up GPG
(http://www.gnupg.org/)
- the GNU implementation
of Pretty Good Privacy, a public-key encryption
system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography).
In two
sentences: Public-key encryption is a
technique that allows her to send messages to a person that
only she can read, without her
needing to share a secret key with you that
would let you
read messages other people send to her.
Public key encryption also allows people to “sign”
documents with a digital
signature that is almost impossible to forge.
She generates a keypair
that she will use to post to the blog – by
signing a
post with her “private
key”,
the blog
server will be able to use her “public key” to check that a post is
coming from her,
and then put it on the blog. (see also the
chapter on “How to ensure e-mail is truly
private”)
She then sets up
MixMaster,
a mailing system designed to obscure the origins of an email message.
MixMaster
uses
a chain of anonymous remailers – computer
programs
that strip all
identifying
information off an email and send
it to its destination – to send email messages with a high
degree of anonymity. By using a chain
of 2 to 20 remailers, the message is very difficult
to trace, even if one or more of
the remailers is “compromised” and is
recording sender
information. She has to “build” MixMaster
by compiling its source code, a project that requires a
great deal of geek assistance.
She sends a
first MixMaster
message to Invisiblog, which includes her
public key. Invisiblog uses this to
set up a new blog, with the catchy name
“invisiblog.com/ac4589d7001ac238”
- the long string is the last 16
bytes of her GPG key. Then she sends future posts to
invisiblog,
by writing a text message, signing it with her public key and sending
it via
MixMaster.
It's not nearly
as fast as her old style of blogging. The
misdirection of MixMaster
mailers means
that it
takes anywhere from two hours to two
days for her message to reach the servers. And she
has to be very careful about
looking at the blog – if she looks at it
too often, her
IP
address will appear in the blog's log
frequently, signaling that she's likely to be the blog
author. But
she's reassured by the fact that the owners of Invisiblog
have no idea
who she is.
The main problem
with the Invisiblog
system is the fact that it's incredibly difficult for most people to
use.
Most people find GPG a challenge to
set up, and have difficulty understanding the complexities
of public and private keys. More
user-friendly crypto tools, like Ciphire, have been set up
to help the less geeky of us, but even
they can be tricky to use. As a result, very few
people – including those who
might really need it – use encryption for most of their
email.
MixMaster is a
true
technical
challenge for most users. Windows users can use an early DOS version of
the program by downloading it here:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/mixmaster/mix204b46.zip?download.
I downloaded and tested it, and it doesn't appear to
work... or perhaps my email is still
being remailed back and forth between remailers.
Anyone
wanting
to use the
newer version, or wanting to use the program on Linux or Mac, needs to
be able to compile the program themselves, a task beyond many expert
users. It's
possible that Invisiblog
would become more useful if it accepted messages from web-accessible
remailers,
like riot.eu.org but for now, I can't
see it as being particularly helpful for the
people who need it most.
There are other
problems with strong encryption in
repressive countries. If Sarah's computer is
seized by the government and her private key is found, it would
constitute strong
evidence
that Sarah had authored the
controversial blog posts. And, in countries where encryption
is not widely used, simply
sending out MixMaster messages – mail messages wrapped
in strong encryption – might be enough to cause Sarah's Internet
activity to be
watched closely.
(
HOW
MUCH
ANONYMITY IS ENOUGH? HOW MUCH HASSLE
IS TOO MUCH?
Is Sarah's
solution – learning enough about
cryptography and software to use MixMaster
– your
solution?
Or is some combination of steps 1-5
enough to let you blog anonymously? There's no
single answer. Any path towards
anonymity needs to consider local conditions, your own
technical competence and your level of
paranoia. If you’re worried that what you're posting
could put you at risk and you're
capable of installing it, posting to a blog through Tor is a
very
good idea.
And
remember not
to sign your blog
posts with your real name !
Ethan Zuckerman
is a fellow at the Berkman
Center for Internet and
Society at Harvard Law School
where
his research
focuses
on the relationship between
citizen journalism and conventional
media, especially in the
developing world.
He's a
founder and former director of Geekcorps, a non-profit
organization
that focuses on technology training in the
developing world, and was one of the founders of
webhosting
company Tripod.
U S E F U
L T I P S
TECHNICAL
WAYS
TO GET
ROUND CENSORSHIP
By
Nart Villeneuve
CONTENTS
CONCLUSION
INTERNET
CONTENT
FILTERING
Filtering
technology allows controls to be placed
on access to Internet content. Although
the initial
focus of such technology was on the
individual level – allowing
parents to
restrict children’s access to
inappropriate content – filtering technology is
now being widely
deployed at institutional and
national level. Control over access to
Internet content
is becoming a priority for a
number of institutional actors including
schools,
libraries and corporations. Increasingly,
filtering technology is being deployed at
national level.
Access to specific Internet
content is being blocked for entire populations,
often with
little accountability.
Content
filtering technologies rely on list-based
blocking, often in conjunction with
blocking
techniques that use keyword matching, to
dynamically block Internet content.
Lists of domain
names and URLs are compiled and
categorized then loaded into filtering software which
can be configured to block only
certain categories. When users try to
access a web
page, the filtering software checks
its list database and blocks access to any
web page on that
list. If keyword blocking is
enabled, the software will check each web
page (the
domain, URL path and/or body content of
the requested page) and dynamically block
access to the
web page if any of the banned
keywords are present.
Filtering
systems are prone to two inherent flaws:
over-blocking and under-blocking. They
often block
access to wrongly classified content
and often do not block all access to the
content they
intend to block. But the key issue is
the secrecy surrounding the creation of
lists of
websites that are blocked by filtering
technologies. Although there are some open
source lists
(focusing mostly on pornography),
commercial filtering lists and lists deployed
at national
level are secret. Commercial lists of
categorized domains and URLs are the
intellectual
property of their manufacturers and
not made public. Despite the fact that
some filtering
software manufacturers make online
URL checkers available, the block lists
as a whole are
secret and unavailable for
independent scrutiny and analysis.
Often countries
will build on commercial filtering
technology lists adding specific websites
pertinent to
their respective countries. Blocked
sites most often include opposition political
parties or
newspapers, human rights organizations,
international news organizations and
content critical
of the government. Most countries
focus on local language content, as
opposed to
English sites, and increasingly target
interactive discussion sites such as web
blogs and web
forums.
CIRCUMVENTION
TECHNOLOGIES
In response to
state-directed Internet filtering
and monitoring regimes, many forms of
circumvention
technologies have emerged to allow
users to bypass filtering restrictions.
There are
numerous projects to develop
technologies that would enable citizens and civil
society networks
to secure themselves against, or
work around, Internet censorship and
surveillance.
These tools as are referred to as
“circumvention technologies.” In general,
circumvention
technologies work by routing a
user’s request from a country that implemented
filtering
through an intermediary machine that is
not blocked by the filtering regime.
This computer
then retrieves the requested content
for the censored user and transmits
the content back
to the user. Sometimes, these
technologies may be specifically designed
for a particular
filtering situation or customized
for a specific country. Other times, users
may simply adapt
existing technologies for
circumvention purposes even though that may
not be the
original purpose of the technology.
Some of these
technologies are developed by
private companies, others by ad-hoc
groups of
hackers and activists. They range from
small, simple scripts and programs to
highly-developed
peer-to-peer network protocols.
Given the range of the technologies
involved it is
necessary for potential users to be
able to weigh the strengths and weaknesses
of specific
techniques and technologies so as to choose the appropriate
circumvention technologies
that suit their needs.
There are two
users of circumvention technologies:
the circumvention provider and the
circumvention
user. The circumvention provider
installs software on a computer in a nonfiltered
location and
makes this service available to those
who access the Internet from a censored
location. Thus successful circumvention
relies on meeting the specific needs of both users.
This paper aims
to inform users who have made the
decision to use circumvention
technologies of
the available options and how to
assess which is best suited to the specific
needs of the
user. This is done by determining the
needs and capacity of the users involved
– those using as
well as those running the
circumvention technology – while balancing the
appropriate
level of security with the technologies’ usability by the end-user.
Effective,
secure, and
stable circumvention is achieved by
matching the right technology with the
right user.
DETERMINING NEEDS
AND CAPACITY
Circumvention
technologies often target different
types of users with varying resources
and levels of
expertise. What may work well in one
scenario may not be the best option
in another. When
choosing a circumvention
technology it is important for the potential Circumvention
provider and user to ask these
questions :
- Where is the
primary point of Internet access for
the expected user(s) and what will they be using it
for?
- What is the
level of technical expertise? (for the
circumvention provider and the user).
- What is the
availability of trusted out-of-country
contacts for the end-user?
- What is the
level of expected penalty if the user
is caught using circumvention technology ?
- Does the
end-user properly understand the
potential security risks of using the specific circumvention
technology?
NUMBER
OF USERS
AND AVAILABLE BANDWIDTH
The
circumvention provider needs to estimate the
number of users the circumvention
technology is
intended for and balance that with
the available bandwidth. The end-user
must also take
into account their bandwidth as
circumvention technology will slow their
Internet use.
People
interested in running public proxies need
to consider that their circumventor may
be used by
persons who are not in censored locations. For example, circumventors
may
be used to
download entire movies which will use a
lot of bandwidth. Therefore you may wish to restrict
access to your circumventor or
how much total bandwidth you’d like to
circumventor to
be restricted to. Different available technologies provide some or all
of
these options.
PRIMARY
POINT OF
ACCESS AND USE
There
will be
varying options of applicable
circumvention technologies depending on
where the
end-users access the Internet and what
services they need to run through the
circumvention
system. For example, users who
access the Internet from public computers
or Internet
cafés may not be able to install any
software and will be restricted to web-based
solutions.
Others may want to use applications
besides Web browsing (HTTP), such as email
(SMTP) and file
transfers (FTP), and thus may want
to install software on their computer
workstation and
to tweak their computer's
settings. Of course, this requires a certain
level of
technical skill on the part of that user.
LEVEL
OF
TECHNICAL EXPERTISE
The
greater the
level of technical expertise (and
limited number of users) the more circumvention
options
increase. The barriers to non-technical
users include the installation and
set-up process
as well as any configuration
changes or extra steps that must be taken when actually
using the circumvention technology.
This applies to both the circumvention
provider and the
end-user. The incorrect use of
circumvention technology may put users
at avoidable
risk.
AVAILABILITY
OF
TRUSTED CONTACTS
End-users
can
greatly enhance their circumvention
options if they know and trust persons
outside their
country. If a user does not have a
trusted contact then their options are limited
to publicly
available systems and if the user can
locate these systems so can those implementing
the filtering
and blocking. With a trusted contact
the end-user can consult with
the
circumvention provider to find a solution that
meets their specific needs and can be
kept private to
avoid detection. Successful,
long-term and stable circumvention is greatly
enhanced by
having a trusted contact in a
non-filtered location.
THE
EXPECTED
PENALTY
It is
extremely
important to know the penalty
users face if they are caught using circumvention
technology.
Depending on the severity, options
will vary. If the legal environment is lax and
the expected
penalty low, users can choose from a
variety of options which, while effective
at
circumvention, are not very secure. If the
environment is extremely dangerous, care
must be taken to
implement technologies that are
both discreet and secure. Some may even be used with a
legitimate cover story or other
forms of obfuscation.
SECURITY
RISKS
Too often users
are encouraged to use
circumvention technology without being properly
informed of the
potential security risks, which can be minimized by deploying the right
technology in
the right place and used correctly
by the end-user.
WEB-BASED
CIRCUMVENTORS
Web-based
circumventors are special web pages that
contain a web form that allows users
to simply submit
a URL and have the web-based
circumventor retrieve the content of the
requested web
page and display it to the user.
There is no connection between the user
and the
requested website,
and the
circumventor transparently
proxies the
request allowing
to user to
browse
blocked websites
seamlessly.
Web-based
circumventors
also re-write
the links in the
requested web
page to point
back through the
circumventor
itself so that
the user can
continue web
surfing normally.
When using a
web-based
circumventor,
the end-user
does not have to
install any
software or
change any of
their browser
settings. All the
end-user has to
do is visit the
URL of the
circumventor,
enter the URL
they wish to
visit in the
form located on
the circumventor
page and
press the submit
button.
(Web-based
circumventors
may look
different from one
another but the
basic functionality
is the same).
Thus no
level of
expertise is required
and it can be
used from any
point of access.
Advantages :
- Web-based
circumvention systems are easy to use
and no software needs to be installed at the
end-user
level.
- Public web-based
circumvention services are
available to users who do not have a trusted contact in
an
unfiltered location.
- Private
web-based circumvention systems can be
customized to meet the specific circumvention needs to
users
and are less likely to be found by
the filtering authorities.
Disadvantages
:
- Web-based
circumvention systems are often
restricted to web traffic (HTTP) and may not be
accessible by
encrypted access (SSL).
- Web
services (such as web-based email) that require
authentication may not be fully
functional.
- Public
web-based
circumvention services are
generally well known and may already be blocked.
Most of
these services are already
blocked by commercial filtering software.
- Private
web-based circumvention systems require
that a user have a contact in an unfiltered location.
Ideally, the two parties must be able to
communicate in some way that isn't easily monitored.
