We often rant and nag and worry that companies like facebook and google or govts are building huge datamines on top of our personal data.

Mass ranting takes place usually in specially organized conferences n all or on top trending twitter hashtags. Yet – somehow – i know of very few people who use this digital data being generated by oneself to kinda – discover more about themselves and build some “indicators” about their life, how they spend it and how they want to improve it…Sometimes, putting a number on some activity or behavior may be surprising and for sure interesting (at least for nerds)…It may also help you track yourself with tangible figures that are automatically generated and take little effort.

So below is compiled a list of geekish stuff you can do to discover small things that matter about yourself – -  sorry if i am infringing on the yoga-yistan discourse - those “stuff to do” are little thing that take little to no effort and run in the “background” in your life. All you need to do is dedicate a bored afternoon to look your own data up.

Megaupload, the popular file-sharing site, was just shut down by the Feds following an order issued by a U.S District Court.

As you can read in the image below, the federal grand Jury has indicted several individual and news sites report that the US Department of Justice arrested four people and executed more than 20 search warrants in the U.S. and eight foreign countries, seizing 18 domain names and servers run in Virginia and Washington, D.C.

A small search on the internet and I found the court document – It is a 72 pages – you can view on http://mireille.it/MegaIndictment.pdf ,

Here is a print screen of who the Indicted people are

What jumps out is that all the names look so “un-american-ish”  – so here is  a little info about each of them – taken from justice.gov article on the operation [source] ( this site is probably down now due to DDOS )

• Kim Schmitz – also known as Kim dotcom – Founder of  MegaUpload – German.
• Finn Batato, 38, a citizen and resident of Germany, who is the chief marketing officer;
• Julius Bencko, 35, a citizen and resident of Slovakia, who is the graphic designer;
• Sven Echternach, 39, a citizen and resident of Germany, who is the head of business development;
• Mathias Ortmann, 40, a citizen of Germany and resident of both Germany and Hong Kong, who is the chief technical officer, co-founder and director;
• Andrus Nomm, 32, a citizen of Estonia and resident of both Turkey and Estonia, who is a software programmer and head of the development software division;
• Bram van der Kolk, aka Bramos, 29, a Dutch citizen and resident of both the Netherlands and New Zealand, who oversees programming and the underlying network structure for the Mega conspiracy websites.

Dotcom, Batato, Ortmann and van der Kolk were arrested today in Auckland, New Zealand, by New Zealand authorities.

Reactions

As the news immediately spread on twitter, very few words can better describe the reactions then this priceless picture

Yes, as you can see 6 out of 10 worldwide trending topics were about the Megaupload case. It takes no genius to tell that a shitstorm of hacking was released and obviously people around the world were seeking their own justice.

#AnonymousFTW (for the win) was leading – people were cursing at the RIAA and Universal Music – Department of Justice – and Tango Down was trending! – “Tango Down” is the military hacking word when a “website” is down.

If Tango Down is trending – trust me, this is one hell of a hacking shitstorm. The Anon chat rooms were busy to the point you could not read words as they scrolled. Here is a print screen of an anon complaining on the IRC channel.

Damn, It’s impossible to read a fucking line here… slow down guys

Here are also some anon tweets that speak of the speed of response and number of people joining in operation Megaupload

FBI, Department of Justice, Universal Music Group, RIAA and Motion Picture Association of America sites were down within minutes – and as sarcastically anons pointed, they got their forced SOPA blackout !

Making sense of it all

No Trial: websites and domain names are a multi-gazillion dollar businesses with costs and all – regardless of opinion about megaupload or similar sites offering controversial services that can be turned by users for piracy – shutting down a site is like a death sentence – I find it mind boggling that it was done without trial and legit users worldwide ,not just US citizens, were affected- they had no previous warning their data is gonna be wiped out and

Besides, how on earth does the policy of one govt get to decide? Unsatisfied with being real life global police force, does the US wants to be Internet police force too?

Timing of the bust : It’s a pretty spectacular coincidence that the Dept of Justice was able to destroy a copyright villain without any help from SOPA or PIPA just one day after the internet’s giant SOPA protest.

Quoting gizmodo :

Do you hear that, lawmakers? The law, as it stands right now was able to kill Megaupload.com, no draconian censorship powers required. The power you have now—with due process—is achieving the things you say you want to do. Your IP is protected. Online piracy was stopped, except for the dozens of Megaupload rivals like HulkShare and MediaFire. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re next.

See – we don’t need NEW draconian censorship powers !

The villains of the town – a closer look

Here is a little graph about Megaupload

Yes, companies and humans need file sharing ! in fact, Megaupload owners during previous disputes argued that most of their traffic is legal and offered to co-ordinate on the illegal part.

So seriously, is there an effort to crack down on file sharing? IPv6 is gonna be out by end of next year and will render any crackdown impossible. Why are governments engaging in such efforts ?

Crime and punishment – quoting Justice.org

“Seven individuals and two corporations have been charged in the United States with running an international organized criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for massive worldwide online piracy of numerous types of copyrighted works, through Megaupload.com and other related sites, generating more than $175 million in criminal proceeds “

“This action is among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States and directly targets the misuse of a public content” etc

Now, let’s hear out possible sentence

“charged with engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement. The individuals each face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit racketeering, five years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, 20 years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering and five years in prison on each of the substantive charges of criminal copyright infringement.

Is it me or is that a bit too strong language and too much penalty ? no death sentence yet ? (sarcasm)

Could it be that after getting used to reading wikileaks and the kind of crimes that happen that my judgement is impaired? $175 million dollars compared to the thousands of crimes against humanity, kinda seem ridiculous.

In an effort to”get things right” – here are some of my findings

EMI Ex-President

“Going to sue customers for file sharing is like trying to sell soap by throwing dirt on your customers,” Merrill said. He then deadpanned, “That’s not theft, that’s try-before-you-buy marketing and we weren’t even paying for it… so it makes sense to sue them.” [source]

What do the starving artists think of this ?

I really don’t buy that all this crackdown is to protect the starving artists – but anyway – here is what some of the TOP artists say

“I like what’s going on because I feel closer to the fans and the people who appreciate the music. It’s the democratisation of music in a way, and music is a gift. That’s what it should be, a gift.” — Shakira

“If people hear it I’m happy. I’m not going to say go and steal my album, but you know I think its great that young people who don’t have a lot of money can listen to music and be exposed to new things.” — Norah Jones

“If you love music you’re going to make it anyway. You’ll find an audience, and you may not make like millions of dollars but you’ll make enough to have a house and a family and a car.” — Nelly Furtado

Another controversial point is that a Bunch Of RIAA Label Artists Endorse MegaUpload even tho RIAA Insists It’s A ‘Rogue’ Site.
Among the stars taking part: P Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Chris Brown, The Game, Mary J Blige , Kim Kardashian, Floyd Mayweather and Jamie Foxx.

What do Americans think of this ?

According to a CBS News poll, in 2009 58%  of Americans who follow the file sharing issue, considered it acceptable in at least some circumstances; with 18 to 29 year olds this percentage reached as much as 70%.

It means that general tendency in the US, specially with the younger general – a 70% support of file sharing

The cute cat theory

a last thing you must read about is the cute cat theory - it explains it all – trust me. I’ll blog about it in details later

SOPA is a bill that was introduced in the United States House of Representatives on October 26, 2011.

If passed the bill would authorize the U.S. Department of Justice to seek court orders against websites outside U.S. jurisdiction accused of infringing on copyrights, or of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. After delivering a court order, the U.S. Attorney General could require US-directed Internet service providers, ad networks, and payment processors to suspend doing business with sites found to infringe on federal criminal intellectual property laws. The Attorney General could also bar search engines from displaying links to the sites.

The bill would require websites to police their user generated content and it provides immunity from liability to the ad and payment networks that comply with this Act or that take voluntary action to cut ties to such sites.

Here is one really nice and awesome video that puts it all into perspective with cool animation and all. This video really explains why SOPA is no good.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Who is against SOPA ? just the pirates, right ?

Actually all major tech and internet companies, tons of legislators, smart content providers like Tim O’Reilly and almost every activist is against SOPA.

To name a few companies : EFF, Google, Facebook, twitter, Wikipedia, tumblr, Yahoo!, paypal, LinkedIn, Kaspersky, foursquare, Huffingtonpost, Github, Stackexchange, Quora, , Techcrunch, eBay, AOL… and more

There is also a nice website on Members of Congress Stand on SOPA and PIPA that details each member stand, how much money they got and all the nice corrupty stuff you’d want to read about.

My favorite quotes on the topic

Mozilla

“The fact is that this legislation as written won’t stop piracy. But it would pose a serious threat to social media and user generated content sites (like YouTube) across the internet. It could also undermine some of the core technical systems underlying the internet, creating new cybersecurity risks.

“As a non-profit committed to keeping the web open and accessible to all, Mozilla wants to ensure that this legislation does not jeopardize the foundational structure of the Internet.”

O’Reilly on Google+ account

The solution to piracy must be a market solution, not a government intervention, especially not one as ill-targeted as SOPA and PIPA.

Policies designed to protect industry players who are unwilling or unable to address unmet market needs are always bad policies. They retard the growth of new business models, and prop up inefficient companies. But in the end, they don’t even help the companies they try to protect. Because those companies are trying to preserve old business models and pricing power rather than trying to reach new customers, they ultimately cede the market not to pirates but to legitimate players who have more fully embraced the new opportunity. We’ve already seen this story play out in the success of Apple and Amazon. While the existing music companies were focused on fighting file sharing, Apple went on to provide a compelling new way to buy and enjoy music, and became the largest music retailer in the world. While book publishers have been fighting the imagined threat of piracy, Amazon, not pirates, has become the biggest threat to their business by offering authors an alternative way to reach the market without recourse to their former gatekeepers.

Nothing wiser could have been said !

Why, should I, a Lebanese care ?

Being a lebanese, doesn’t stop you from being an internet user – the SOPA will affect the internet in a bad way and it involves websites outside the US, and that’s yours.

SOPA punishes people who enable or facilitate copyright infringement and that’s proxies, TOR, anonymity tools – that would be punishing the same people and banning the same tools Lebanese, arabs and activists use worldwide against censorship.

Altering and having such a deeper control over the internet in the united states will create the possibility of black hole – where content from the “outside” may not be able to penetrate internet blockade because not only the site address , but also search engine, payment and everything around it will be blocked – other countries are likely to follow the lead in legislation – and in a gloomy scenario we no longer have an “open internet”.

You should care and be pissed of, because, like it or not, the internet doesn’t exist in the clouds, it is made of companies that exist in countries and have to answer to local laws despite the fact that internet is “global”. This fact is making people worldwide care about the SOPA legislation – and even though you may feel powerless, you still should care and take online action – because all citizens in cyberspace are created equal and so their actions resonate equally :)

What can I do ? what are actions being taken ?

Websites worldwide are protesting SOPA by blacking out their sites on January 18, Wikipedia and Reddit are leading the way as well as tons of activists and bloggers who will be blacking out their sites.

The Easiest way to join the SOPA protests

WordPress plugin

Sasha Gerrand kindly created a wordpress plugin to easily implement this. Check it out on github.

Javascript ( http://sopablackout.org/ )

The following will present a blackout banner when users visit your site, which can be circumvented by clicking anywhere:

The following will blackout an element of a specific id:

<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
sopablackout_id = 'sopa';
// ]]></script>

Should you need more help in taking action and blacking out your site,specially if you are not a techy, do not hesitate to ask

For similar interesting stuff, tune in to KnoozRoom, an audio news program based in the Middle East. It aims to provide quality news by gathering stories and perspectives that are pressing, relevant, inspiring and fair.
Knooz is powered by the lesser-known ‘gold nuggets’ of the Arab world who provide personal accounts of the events that they witness, as well as creative analyses and solutions for seemingly ever-present social, economic and political problems

Jun 13, 2010

As we move into an era of a digital (r)evolution we are facing new questions and challenges that touch our very intimate human privacy and rights.

Like never before, we are able to store and process data in huge amounts and like never before our reliance on computer and digital systems is increasing exponentially. We are not only using computers to manage our money, assets and wealth but also to help us in our health challenges or in our everyday life:no business can exist without heavy reliance on information systems, each one of us is now having an online presence through a blog ( personal or professional one ), we are tweeting what we eat, how we feel, where we are or sharing pictures of what we did, who we were with.

Naturally big questions that arises : Who is gaining control over all this data? How much privacy do we have left ? What guarantees do we have over no future mis-use of our personal details ? and the funniest question is : How is the government going to protect us and who is going to protect us from our government ? because let us face it , all governments are information hungry. Intelligence/security/economy/……/health/social analysis systems all need information in order to predict trends, avoid security breaches, build studies or just for the most basis principle governments feed on : power.

While you may say having those “worries” over privacy in itself is “suspicious” or “unjustified” , Only criminals have stuff to hide, right? , or as recently google CEO has –sadly- repeated twice : “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

As right as those arguments are – their main fail point is that they accept the idea that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It’s not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.

I’ve heard the word twitter, politics, social media, arabspring so many times last week (again) – so I decided to finally yield to some temptation and do some analytics on how some politicians are using twitter by generating fact numbers.

From the tweeps,  @BarackObama seems to be doing a good job and is an international figure and such, I also wanted to take a local look on twitter and politics, but turned out that the Lebanese president twitter account is not that active and I was not sure it is verified.
So instead I did the analytics for the next person i could think of, Prime minister Najib Mikati, a friend told me he is tweeting himself and that his tweets are really good.

So here it is, a twitter analysis of “What are those politicians – now tweeps – tweeting about?“ (click full view mode arrows to actually see the thing)

There are way more details i could digg out, like make the list of tweets, the list of links, the list of images and such available for download – but I am bit too impatient with my internet connection to do this unless someone drops a comment and begs asks for them ;p

[Publishing this post was delayed due to my high levels of procrastinations and a busy life - hope it is still valuable]

If you are part of the active Lebanese online community, you must have heard of Social Media Week Beirut – It is a week full of free events and exciting stuff organized in different venues around Beirut. Of course it is all about social media and such.

I Followed the twitter stream – the discussions seemed nice and the feedback was great – I also got to attend the last day at AltCity where ontornet was presenting about its initiative.

I pretty much liked the organization and everything – the panels & discussions were nice, heated and not boring – there were different kind of people and it was a nice get together for the online community.

This is why I took the small trouble of analyzing the tweets generated from @SMWBeirut account – the team was doing a nice job covering all the panels and talks – the tweets were meaningful, so I thought I’d give it a try to see how interesting it is to data-mine the organizers of the events, not the hashtag, with the hope of finding more “relevant” content.

You can download an excel file with the data – this Excel file contains :

• The full tweets from SMWBeirut account
• Word count of all the tweets
• Top words by category ( see below )
• The graphs ( see below )
• All the links shared from fb.me, bit.ly, t.co, http
• All the tweets with a question mark – maybe you can help answer those ponderings.

The tools used to generate the reports are custom made and i believe highly accurate ( I compared the number of tweets from smwbeirut on twitter and in my database, they are identical )

So if you are interested in social media analytics for your campaign - let me know :)

Top 50 Words

Top 1 to 25	Top 26 to 50

I have repeated the following steps on how to download EBooks so many times, that it is about time i put the instructions in a blog post and just start sharing the link ;p

• OSX users
• Windows users

OSX Users:

• Download an IRC client –  colloquy will do – I am not an irc person and haven’t used irc in ages, so i don’t know what are the hottest or latest clients in there. – but truts me, colloquy will do ;p
• Connecting: After you launch the app you will be greeted with the following screen

Click on New – and input the following parameters : nickname of your choice – server protocol = “IRC” – click on the drop down button and choose irc.irchighway.net

Next is to connect to the chatroom – ebooks – all you have to do is click “join Room” on the welcome screen mentioned above.

For Windows

• Download an IRC client – mirc will do – i am not an irc person and haven’t used irc in ages, so i don’t know what are the hottest latest clients in there. – but trust me, good old mirc will do ;p
• Choose a nickname : After you launch  mirc- on the connect screen – specify a scary looking nickname  – something like l33tHax0r961 or a cute name with body parts in it, like hotS3XYL1p5. You must at least include a few numbers !

• Choose a server : The server we are looking for is IRCHighway – click on servers – scroll to find IRCHighway

• Accepting transfers: since we will “downloading” ebooks – you must make sure that your client is accepting the file transfers, to do that, go to DCC – select “Ignore” – here you can specify what to do with file transfers.
  • Disable
  • Accept only
  • Ignore only

Here you select “Accept only” and make sure to add the file extension you will use like *.pdf, *.zip *.rar

• Connecting : euh click connect – wait a few secs where you get some fancy sounds and words scrolling on your screen – this will look impressive on a black background with green fonts. You will be prompted for a channel name – enter : “ebooks“

and ta da ! you are in Ebook Heaven !!! ( trust me when i say that )

You probably have to do the above steps once – next time, you just double click on your recent connections in mirc.

The next step are Find and Download

• Searching for a book : all you have to do is type the @search command – example: @search the prophet

You will automatically receive a file with the full list of books available. Here is a sample for search on “furniture” :

!Bonaparte Fine_Woodworking_-_Guide_For_Cabinet_And_Furniture_Construction(1).pdf ::INFO:: 2.1MB
!Bonaparte Fine_Woodworking_-_Guide_For_Cabinet_And_Furniture_Construction(1).rar ::INFO:: 1.1MB
!Bonaparte Fine_Woodworking_-_Guide_For_Cabinet_And_Furniture_Construction(2).pdf ::INFO:: 1.4MB
!Bonaparte Fine_Woodworking_-_Guide_For_Cabinet_And_Furniture_Construction(2).rar ::INFO:: 739.1KB
!Bonaparte Fine_Woodworking_-_Guide_for_cabinet_and_furniture_construction.pdf ::INFO:: 3.1MB
!Bonaparte Fine_Woodworking_-_Guide_for_cabinet_and_furniture_construction.rar ::INFO:: 1.8MB
!Bonaparte 4-296Spring-2005 Furniture Making.zip ::INFO:: 493.3KB
!Bonaparte Furniture Making Projects.rar ::INFO:: 11.5MB
!Bonaparte The Art Of Woodworking – Classic American Furniture.zip ::INFO:: 27.5MB
!Bonaparte The Art Of Woodworking – Outdoor Furniture.zip ::INFO:: 27.6MB
!Bonaparte The Art Of Woodworking – Shaker Furniture.zip ::INFO:: 26.7MB
!Bookaloo Pulp – All-Story.13.09.Wolfs Furniture Mine – Ralph J. Roeder [pdf].rar ::INFO:: 73.4KB
!Bookaloo Roeder, Ralph J – Wolfs Furniture Mine [pdf].rar ::INFO:: 73.4KB
!Bookaloo Norbury – Furniture for the 21st century [pdf].rar ::INFO:: 25.2MB
!Bookaloo A H Stewart – Type Cases and Composing-Room Furniture [html].rar ::INFO:: 2.6MB
!Bookaloo H. H. Windsor – Mission Furniture (html).rar ::INFO:: 3.1MB
!Bookaloo H. H. Windsor – Mission Furniture (txt).rar ::INFO:: 39.4KB

• Donwload
  All you have to do is copy/paste into the main channel the book you want ex:
  !Bookaloo H. H. Windsor – Mission Furniture (txt).rar
  Don’t copy the :info part – just till the file name.The bot Bookaloo will go and fetch the book for you and send it for download.Easy – Simple – Unblockable :)

click on image for full view

I thought I’d share a quick/funny infographic on The Lebanese and their cars.
The eternal debate is set – Mercedes wins over BMW ! and white cars are more popular than black ones. So next time you are bored and want to play the car colors guessing game – you know what to choose :) but please can someone explain the color “3ennebeh” to me ?

as for the year distribution, here are your numbers

I guess I will be doing more statistics – compare the evolution of the market shares through the years and such and maybe I would spend some more time on this and add cute little car icons and turn it into a “nicer” infographic , calculate the average age of a lebanese car on the road then based on the car types and their consumption i can calculate a rough estimate of how much petrol we spend daily…. ( i will stop daydreaming, since probably i will do none of this due to time constraints…bas eno this was worth publishing ;p )

btw – how to make excel2007 show decimal places on the charts – i think i am entitled to the excel idiot award ;p and i am too lazy to google – errrr leave a comment to let me know