· February, 2013

Stories about Technology from February, 2013

Latin America Turns to iPhone App to Take Hammerhead Sharks Off the Chopping Block

Countries across Latin America are on a mission to get hammerheads onto the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites) list for protection. They’re armed with a new iPhone app that promises to make fin identification quick and easy. Listing the sharks would help fund financially strapped programs in Latin America and restrict global trade.

28 February 2013

Monitoring Dangerous Speech in Kenya

Umati is a project that seeks to monitor and report the role of new media on an election: “Our Kenya-based project has citizens at its core and uses relevant technologies...

27 February 2013

Request Google to Look into Myanmar

Many Burmese netizens requested[my] the Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Information who met with Google's Southeast Asia Country lead for Public Policy and Government Affairs to convince the company...

23 February 2013

Journalists Under Pressure in the Gambia Turn to Blogs

The hostile media landscape in the Gambia, marred by aggressive laws and regulatory measures that have almost crippled mainstream outlets, has some journalists in the country turning to blogs to report the news. Here is a guide to some of the most active and popular blogs.

22 February 2013

China Not Blocking Hack Attack Discussion

U.S. cyber security firm Mandiant has reported that the Chinese People's Liberation Army is behind many cyber attacks against American organizations, but the usually heavy-handed Chinese government is not blocking...

21 February 2013

North Korea Breaks YouTube Rules Again

It's been less than a month since a video uploaded by the official North Korean account Uriminzokkiri was removed from YouTube on grounds of copyright infringement. Now another propaganda video...

21 February 2013

Russian Opposition, What Are You Doing? Stahp.

RuNet Echo

The Coordinating Council of the Russian Opposition has been a fascinating eDemocracy experiment, conducted in the shadow of Russia's competitive authoritarian status quo. Yet, a recent decision not to nominate candidates for any elections—local or regional—has intensified doubts about the KSO, making it a target for one of the RuNet's more vicious attack memes.

19 February 2013

Summer Course: Internet Advocacy

The Central European University in Budapest, Hungary is offering an intensive course in Internet Governance, Civil Society and Public Policy Advocacy on July 8-19, 2013 in partnership with the Annenberg...

17 February 2013

Crowd-Source Subtitles for YouTube Videos

Anyone on YouTube can now sync their account directly to the global subtitling service Amara and invite volunteers to translate videos. Subtitles are created on Amara's platform, but are synced...

15 February 2013

Kenya's Presidential Debate Ends on TV, Continues on Twitter

With only three weeks until Kenya's presidential elections, technology continues to change how the country participates in the electoral process. Kenyans submitted questions via Twitter for the first ever presidential debate on February 11, and an online election monitoring meant to keep the upcoming elections fair launched the same day.

15 February 2013