CyberPatrol software and how it filters

I tried the web filter software CyberPatrol which is supposed to be a market leader in the field in the U.S.

During the installation I chose "Home" user category ( Other being "School" , "Business" etc. ) and also chose the "Child" level filtering which is supposed to be the most intense filtering ( "Late teens" and other such categories are also available ). You can also restrict the users Web access by time of day and set the daily and weekly browse limits. All web activity will be recorded.

After installing it needed to reset the browser and start again. As I conducted the test late in the evening the program initially blocked all websites, by saying the following:

"
Access Restricted
User Profile:
Reason: Access to websites is denied at this time of day.
Category: None
Instant Override: Click here - Password Required
To change any of the filter settings please speak to your CyberPatrol Headquarters’ Administrator."

Then I customized my filter settings and took the Time Monitoring off from the Headquarters, using the user password.

After that I tried to read the website seks.ee and the following message came up:

Access Restricted
User Profile:
Reason: The website is inappropriate.
Category: Hacking & Spyware
Instant Override: Click here - Password Required

To change any of the filter settings please speak to your CyberPatrol Headquarters’ Administrator.

After that the rate.ee portal was tried. I entered the word "seks" into the user searc field and many users with photoes came out. The soft did not block the website although the
page had the word "seks" repeated more than ten times as well as the photos were displayed. As this is not a sex related site in essense but a dating site, it could be normal that the site was
not completely shut off. Then I went to the www.date.ee which also opened nicely while this is also a dating site.

Also tried Google. The regular web search with the word "seks" opened up nicely
http://www.google.ee/search?q=seks&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:et:official&client=firefox-a and the results were displayed but if I tried to search the Google images with the word "seks" - the Google site was blocked as well. Also - the regular search with the word "sex" in English language was blocked righ away. Go figure.

Estonias biggest portal delfi.ee is also considered not appropriate for children to see, the Cyberpatrol said that Delfi portal has some "bad links" on their site.

Digital Divide in Estonia

About the digital divide in Estonia.

The most cited research on the internet is the 2002 research paper conducted by EMOR and Praxis research organizations. The groups that use internet less are the older people, people with the lower education and people who live in Southern part of Estonia or North-Eastern part of Estonia, also ethnically Estonians are more active internet users than Russians in general.

Two years later a similar research was conducted by Factum. The western part of Estonia improved significantly in two years since then , while the regions that are populated with Russians did not improve significantly in time. The biggest growth in internet usage in two years came from the biggest cities which can be a result of the more severe competition between ISP-s.

In the biggest cities about 2/3 of the population used internet while in Southern Estonia and North-Eastern regions only slightly over 50% were internet users. This is probably not a big problem in terms of digital divide as there are “enough” connections in the rural areas and the higher net penetration is normal in the biggest cities.

These days there are also online services like Kõu – (www.kou.ee) that enable wireless internet connection basically in every location in Estonia. So the divide is more visible in terms of users age in Estonia and less regionally and there is not much that can be done about it. The initial Praxis research found that the non-users could start using the internet if they would have some financial benefit from it but the potential of financial benefit is also difficult to see among for the elderly.

Ubiquitous internet usage and Estonia , the 4 scenarios

The initial 4 scenarios that were proposed for Estonia for the year 2010 were the following:

1) "Militaristic information oasis" - "little angry country" (like the one in Middle East) with good technological progress but little openness and overall freedom. "Military Estonia".

2) "South Finland" - soft-spoken, well integrated into Europe (and decisively distanced from Russia), but with low innovation capacity. "Subcontractor Estonia" - perhaps the closest to current reality.

3) "The Ferryman" - well-developed, but fully transit-based economy. Innovation and ICT are only to serve the main goal and thus of inferior importance. "Merchant Estonia", which is quite alike to the 'Singapore' scenario of Himanen seen in a previous lecture.

4) "Grand Slam" - the best realisation of both geographical location (transit) and innovative and educational potential. "Innovation/ICT Estonia".

It can be said that “The Ferryman” scenario was cut off by the Russian government , the oil transit has mostly stopped and Russian government does not encourage the transit through Estonia in any way. It changed dramatically for the worse in 2007 when the notorious bronze soldier statue was removed from the center of Tallinn, angering many of the Russian population and the Russian government as well. Or was it vice versa – the anger of the local Russians created the need to remove the statue from the city center. Who knows.

As Ferryman did not work out at all – the Grand Slam is out of the question also. Grand Slam scenario seems to be possible with social cohesion and with the states active participation but as the prevailing political policy has been the ultra-liberal market economy the free-market forces have not turned out to be grand slam for the economy as a whole.

The current situation in Estonia is closest to the “South Finland” scenario – the country has distanced from Russia quite effectively , while the rest of the Europe and NATO are moving closer and closer to Russia and try to cooperate with Russian in any way possible ;) Germans even thought about selling their industrial giant Opel to Russians. The innovation capacity is really low compared to the Scandinavian countries , in terms of registered patents per person for example. This leaves out only simple sub-contracting work ( mostly to Scandinavia ) as the main trend in the society.

Inside Echelon

Duncan Campbell has written an overview of the secret surveillance system Echelon. He writes how the system was created for the interception of international communications and what are the technical capabilities of the system in modern times and how it is used today.

The first reports about Echelon in Europe reported that it can intercept in Europe all e-mail, telephone, and fax communications. The system is not that capable yet though. Also - Echelon is not capable to recognise the content of every speech message and telephone call. But the American and British-run network can access and process most of the worlds satellite communications.

The creation of Echelon also created some ethical issues related to the secrecy of th information and related to how much information should be collected about citizens after all. They collected information on over 40 countries, including the allies in the 1960-s. They also monitored the American celebrities who wer against the Vietnam war.

In 1991 one employee who worked for the system went public and told off the record that the British partner of the Echelon collects basically everything they are capable to intercept - every single telex ( actually illegally). Also they intercepted the embassies, all business deals and even birthday greetings.

"Commercial and economic intelligence is now a major part of the international sigint activity. Under a 1993 policy colloquially known as "levelling the playing field", the United States government under President Clinton established new trade and economic committees and told the NSA and CIA to act in support of US businesses in seeking contracts abroad. In the UK, GCHQ's enabling legislation from 1994 openly identifies one of its purposes as to promote "the economic well-being of the United Kingdom in relation to the actions or intentions of persons outside the British Islands".

This means that they can intercept the business communication all over the world for the benefit of their local corporations. So much about the free market economy, fair trade and information stealing...

Recently there have been reports that CIA has invested in a software company that is monitoring the social networks. In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA , invested in the fall of 2009 in Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement on using ”open source intelligence” — information that is publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of all the other media - blogs, radio, tv. The software program provides real-time feeds of what’s being said on social networks, based on a series of keywords. Then Visible “scores” each post as positive or nagative, mixed or neutral. It also finds out how influential a conversation or a portal user is. Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface.

If one could understand why it was necessary to start a project like Echelon in the cold war era - for national secutiry issues then it is more difficult to understand why they need to be monitoring the social networks. The other reason could be that CIA thinks that we have entered the era of information warfare where social networks can be used to influence the public opinion and to organize mass demonstrations. CIA being on the social network sites is not a secret interception any more - this is more like standing next to you all the time.

Applicability of nonmarket production and related strategies

Right next to the definition of econodfarf on everything2.com is the argument that Mozarts operas are not necessarily produced so that Mozart was financially motivated. On the other hand there are many famous composers who are creating operas "as a service" or because they got a client who proposed money for creating operas. So it can be said that it works both ways - sometimes the operas are created
by the composers because "they need money" and sometimes they create them for fun or because being a composer is their lifelong hobby, in addition to being a job.

I tend to think that same apllies to the online web services and industry as well, something that related to my occupations. Sometimes people do not know what they are creating in the beginning and what is the final features of the product that they are working on. The products in the web industry are sometimes so innovative that it is quite difficult to predict the market volume of the service or predict how "the creature" can be monetized later on. Latest example of such web products could be Twitter.com, also there I kind of remember that the first big search Youtube.com is trying to figure out even few years after the launch - how to monetize the beast.

Yahoo.com - also started for fun but later on turned out to be useful. Some day also Youtube and Twitter become profitable and find the ways to monetize their businesses.

The point is - sometimes they try to do someting for fun or for charity and later on it may turn out to be a big business. Usually someone else copies the initial idea with the more concrete business oriented intentions. Like Google made a better search engine than Yahoo, and added some additional features and innovative paid services to it ( Adwords, Adsense, Google Analytics for portals with millions of users is also a paid service, at least it was so couple of years ago ).

There are also business models that use both ways - they are open-source products and on the other hand they are aimed at financial benefit - either consultancy, installation services or software services related to open source products ( like selling Wordpress themes or providing Wordpress sites set up as a paid service ).

There are blogs that have been started for fun and later on they earn a lot of money with the blogs. Many experienced and well-paid programmers like to make programs as a hobby, some of these later on can turn out to be great commercial products. 37signals.com was one of such services, 37signals.com was also the first web portal that used Ruby on Rails programming language as the programming languages was invented by one of their founders.

So the non-market production and the commercial production are mixed and they can also support each other in the web services industry.

Pekka Himanen's "Challenges to the Global Information Society"

Pekka Himanen has written a paper for the Finnish parlament in 2004 , called "Challenges to the Global Information Society". He writes about the challenges of the changing world and the challenges for the developed countries as they need to compete with the rising developing nations such as China and India.

He also proposed that his paper should be used by the European Union for planning the economic policies and innovation policies. European Union is behind the United States in terms of innovation and in terms of attracting new talent from around the world.

He sees 3 main societal models in terms of innovation currently in the world:

1. The “Silicon Valley model”, i.e. the American
neo-liberalist model. Best example of this model is the United States itself.
2. The “Singapore model”, i.e. the Asian state-run model in which the governments objective is to attract big companies to the region, this is also encouraged by China and India.
3. The “Finnish model” - which is a European combination of the information society and the welfare state, which is best represented according to Himmanen in his native country Finland. The other Scandinavian countries belong to this group also.

Himmanen sees that the developed countries and European Union have the only main chance to survive and to maintain the current higher living standard by creating and maintaining an "innovative welfare state" where all groups of people have equal opportunities and the innovation and higher productivity comes from the cooperation of different groups. The cooperation of all parts of the society is something that makes this model different from the market-driven Valley model and the Singapore model. He discusses the pre-requirements for the innovation to happen - education system and education priorities, having enough rest, keeping people mentally and physically fit. I would say that the main argument that he makes in the paper is the following:

"In the information society, where learning continues throughout our lives, schools
should not only distribute information but also, and equally importantly, build self -confidence and social skills, as well as help pupils to fulfil themselves by identifying their talents and creative passions." He says that people must "learn to learn" - become able to identify problems, generate ideas and apply source criticism, and cooperate with other people.

He sees that government and private sectors both can create the conditions for fullfilling the peoples self-actualization potential by creating the environment that encourages creativity and productivity. For example - government should encourage that citizens have FREE access to as much scientific information as possible ( museums, other means ). He also proposes that the higher education should be available to all talented people in the society, regardless of their financial status.

He says that European Union in general is doing well in terms of production innovation and engineering but business innovation lags behind the United States in terms of branding for example.

I would say that the article can be concluded shortly that he describes what are the critical success factors of an innovative and productive society in general , in a welfare state.