Mutant Palm

There’s an article in Wired about Microsoft’s Chief Software Officer Ray Ozzie, who in the 70s was part of the PLATO project, which inspired him to create Lotus Notes. From Wikipedia: “PLATO was the first (circa 1960, on ILLIAC I) generalized computer assisted instruction system. It was widely used starting in the early 1970s, with more than 1000 terminals worldwide. PLATO was originally built by the University of Illinois and ran in four decades, offering elementary through university coursework to UIUC students, local schools, and more than a dozen universities.” PLATO was bought in 1976 by Control Data Corporation, whose founder William C. Norris believed that PLATO would not only be profitable, but would be able to solve various social ills through computerized education. CDC expanded PLATO across the world. In the 1980s, there was even a PLATO cartridge for the Atari Computer (designed by China-born Vincent Wu) that offered access to “200,000 hours of coursework”.

PLATO had email, IM and group chat in 1973 before there were even BBSes, and perhaps more astonishing, “Any competent PLATO programmer can quickly hack together a simple chat program that lets two users exchange typed one-line messages. PLATO’s architecture makes this trivial.” Funny enough, the “Notes” proto-email program was meant to be a bug reporting system, but ironically a bug, people not talking about bugs, ended up a feature.

Probably the most interesting part so far is this, unfortunately unsourced, section of the Wikipedia entry on PLATO in South Africa:

There were several other installations at educational institutions in South Africa, among them Madadeni College in the Madadeni township just outside of Newcastle.

This was perhaps the most unusual PLATO installation anywhere. Madadeni had about 1,000 students, all of them black and 99.5% of Zulu ancestry. The college was one of 10 teacher preparation institutions in kwaZulu, most of them much smaller. In many ways Madadeni was very primitive. None of the classrooms had electricity and there was only one telephone for the whole college, which one had to crank for several minutes before an operator might come on the line. So an air-conditioned, carpeted room with 16 computer terminals was a stark contrast to the rest of the college. At times the only way a person could communicate with the outside world was through PLATO term-talk.

For many of the Madadeni students, most of whom came from very rural areas, the PLATO terminal was the first time they encountered any kind of electronic technology. (Many of the first year students had never seen a flush toilet before.) There initially was skepticism that these technologically-illiterate students could effectively use PLATO, but those concerns were not borne out. Within an hour or less most students were using the system proficiently, mostly to learn math and science skills, although a lesson that taught keyboarding skills was one of the most popular. A few students even used on-line resources to learn TUTOR, the PLATO programming language, and a few wrote lessons on the system in the Zulu language.

I found some of the sources, though: this section appears to be copied, more or less, from an article by Owen Gaeda, a PLATO developer who taught PLATO in Madadeni Teachers College for two years. Wired has another article from a PLATO reunion in 1997, where it mentions Brian L. Dear has been researching a book called PLATO People since 1985. I hope he finishes it soon. In the meantime, there’s a PLATO emulator system on the Web called Cyber1.

Bonus: The ANC used Commodore 64s to encrypt messages and play them to a tape recorder with an acoustic coupler modem. The receiver would record the playback with another tape recorder over the phone, then play it for their computer. The digital sound of resistance.

Last year, Ryan McLaughlin at DaoByDesign came up with a plugin called Censortive, which replaces sensitive keywords in Wordpress blog posts with image equivalents, thereby avoiding keyword blocks like those mentioned in the last post. At the time, though, Chinese language support was problematic. But since then, some good open source Chinese font packages have been developed. Two that work are Wen Quan Yi (文泉驿) and Fireflysung (螢火飛點陣字型). There are a couple of other fonts here that might work as well. Instructions for installing Censortive are here.

The next step, of course, is making the list of keywords. Censortive works by assigning codewords to the words you want to replace, so that the actual words are not present in the html either (otherwise it wouldn’t really work). Unfortunately, that means that spreading a common set of codewords would probably work for a while, but if it were really successful the censors would begin scanning for the codewords. Let ‘em.

So we need to make a list. Here’s some places to start gathering words:

1. The keyword list to a javascript that several sites host that claims to see how many “banned words” are in a webpage. The list seems a bit suspect, but worth searching in.
2. Here’s a Google Doc of the banned words used in the Tom Online version of Skype.
3. The ChinaSMACK Internet slang glossary may be useful.
4. And here’s the Wikipedia list of censored words.
5. This list from Roland Soong seems to still have some oomph after four years.

I would note that only ESWN’s page is blocked (for me), the rest aren’t, though maybe  the Google Docs one would be if it weren’t SSL.

So tell all your Chinese blogger friends they can now replace bad words with pictures thanks to this plugin.

Flickr image courtesy of Net Efekt.

The People’s Security Bureau in Shenzhen has told blogger Zuola couldn’t leave the country to attend the Deutsche Welle Blog Competition (where he would be a judge) because he’s a “may threaten state security” (“可能危害国家安全”). Then his twitter page got blocked by the Net Nanny, along with fellow activist bloggers Amoiist and Wenyunchao. The rest of Twitter remained accessible, and precision Twitter blocks haven’t been seen before*. You can read more about Zuola’s background and what his refused entry might mean over at Rebecca MacKinnon’s blog, which is also blocked, and has been for a while. Or rather, all subdomains of “blogs.com”, which hosts Rebecca’s blog, were blocked for quite a while. Now it’s just her. The same used to be true of all “typepad.com” subdomains. Now it’s just Letters From China that’s blocked, and McClathy newspapers Beijing correspondent Tim Johnson is unscathed. Blogspot was blocked on and off for ages, and is currently available - but not the GFW blog. Even Livejournal is fully available now. I don’t know if anyone is being blocked there, because frankly, it was blocked for so long I don’t think anyone in China still posts there except this guy, who has written about Zuola and the GFW, but perhaps the censors also assumed no one uses Livejournal.

So now at Twitter, Blogspot, Typepad and Blogs.com, blanket blocks have been replaced with precision blocks on blogs with “politically sensitive” content (all the examples above). If the blanket blocks are really going away for good, this is a good thing for three reasons:

1) The government is giving up on carpet blocking whole net neighborhoods, which is pretty heavy handed.

2) It opens up outside blogging platforms that don’t have an in-house censor shop to Chinese users.

3) It may sound weird, but it’s actually a good thing that it targets specific people, because we know who they are. In order to work, censorship has to keep alot of things vague and fuzzy, like what specifically can’t be said, what will happen if you say it, and who is saying it. When whole blog platforms were blocked, it was hard to know why. People often speculated that one blog said something that wasn’t looked favorably upon, and so the whole domain got harmonized. Now we don’t have to guess.

It’s not clear whether the precision blocks are based on keywords or the domain in some cases, but it seems likely that the latest Twitter blocks are not keyword based, simply because alot of people are retweeting Zuola and they aren’t getting blocked. Likewise Letters From China got a personal block a while ago, and there’s good reason to expect Rebecca got one of those.

Now I’d like to mention one of those little mysteries of the Net Nanny that I’d like to solve. For a while now I’ve noticed that quite a very random looking assortment of comic book and scifi related blogs are blocked. They all have their own domains and none seem to have ever had anything to say about China whatsoever. Do the censors have a problem with steampunk, speculative fiction and graphic artists? Or is still more bad aim?

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*use “https” and you’ll get through. The goes for mutantpalm.org as well. You’ll just have to accept my unvalidated security certificate, because I’m not going to pay for one.

Flickr Image Courtesy of Shizhao.