Travel Without Moving - North Korea Missile Launch Pad

Seems like it's North Korea's most active PR month given the public outbreak due to their unsuccessful launch of an intercontinental missile, so in these Travel Without Moving series I decided to feature the launch pad, originally came across it, nowhere else but at Cryptome's well sorted photo gallery of the event. Whereas the U.S is activating diplomatic ties in order to put more pressure on North Korea's tests, China and Russia among the rest of the superpowers seems to be teasing the U.S in a way only they can afford to -- let's don't forget the financial incentives for Russia to enrich Iran's uranium altogether. As far as Kim Jong Il is concerned, in between fueling growth in the infrastructure necessary to maintain a regime, he enjoys making secret meetings with ex-comrades while travelling to Moscow with his armoured train, as he's afraid of flying.

Previous series, related posts :
Travel Without Moving - Typhoon Class Submarines
Travel Without Moving - Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center
Travel Without Moving - KGB Lubyanka Headquarters
Travel Without Moving - Korean Demilitarized Zone
Travel Without Moving - Georgi Markov's KGB Assassination Spot
Travel Without Moving - Scratching the Floor

North Korea - Turn On the Lights, Please
Who Needs Nuclear Weapons Anymore?
Who's Who in Cyber Warfare?
Is a Space Warfare Arms Race Really Comming?
EMP Attacks - Electronic Domination in Reverse

How to Win the U.S Elections

Juicy barbecues, hugging babies, in between offering, and asking for the Moon days are over. E-voting is the future of technological political engineering. So, how can you win the U.S Elections?

01. Ensure one company holds a virtual monopoly in E-voting systems, thus contributing to yet another monocultural insecurity. If it naturally has some competition, insist its systems are placed in key regions, where barbecues wouldn't work.

02. Start a nation-wide PR campaign emphasizing on the benefits of E-voting. Mention it's innovative, it's going to cut costs while providing you with flexibility, the way it provides flexibity to citizens abroad, moreover, also emphasize on the increased speed of the results.

03. Make sure the rural areas where the masses of technologically unsophisticated citizens are the ones taking advantage of this immature concept. The point is that, even if there's an error, they got no chance of defining it.

04. If something "goes wrong" forward all the responsibility to the virtual monopolist, and promise pracautions against future possiblities for modifying the results -- anyway, sorry folks the elections are over, so till next time keep on speculating what actually happened.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the universe, where we should perhaps thank Jessus for coming up with more colours in live, than black and white only, I stumbled upon an Unredacted Diebold Black Box Voting Hack Reports with quite some disturbing images. Make sure the efficincy that you wish for, doesn't actually happen. A friend also tipped me on this quite longish report on the topic, and didn't forget to warn me to remove my 3D glassess before reading it either.

UPDATE : Interesting political reading related to veto power.

Clippy votes courtesy of the EFF.

BBC under the Intelligence Shadow

Nothing is impossible, the impossible just takes a little while. A relatively typical practices for the ex-USSR, namely controlling the media and profiling the journalists including the readers, seem to have been going on in London during the same period as well. According to the Sunday Telegraph, the BBC let intelligence agents vet staff :

"Confidential papers obtained by the Sunday Telegraph reveal that the British Broadcasting Corp. allowed intelligence agents to investigate the backgrounds and political affiliations of thousands of its employees, including newsreaders, reporters and continuity announcers. The files, which shed light on the BBC's hitherto secret links with the counter-espionage service known as MI5, show that at one stage it was responsible for vetting 6,300 BBC posts -- almost a third of the total work force. The procedure was phased out in the late 1980s. The files also show that the corporation maintained a list of "subversive organizations" and that evidence of certain kinds of political activity could be a bar to appointment or promotion."

If you can spell the name of the party while sleeping, and have subscribed to its periodical propaganda, only then you have the chance to unleash your career potential. I guess what they were worried about was an undercover Red reporter, taking advantage of live events and directly broadcasting a subvertive message -- remember when a guy invaded Truman's world in the "Truman show", and tried to warn the little kid he's on TV all the time? The interesting part is how even the spouses of applicants were subject to scrutiny.

There you go with the freedom of the press, I guess China must have had something in mind when blocking access to the BBC's web site.

China's Interest of Censoring Mobile Communications

Just came across to a great article at the IHT on China's interest of tightening control of cellphones :

"The new measures being contemplated for tightening control of cellphone use reportedly include mandatory user registration. Users now can easily buy cellphone cards at any convenience store, instantly obtaining a new phone number without identifying themselves. Whether through speech or short messaging, cellphones have played a major role in a wave of social unrest that has swept China in the last two years, allowing people to organize quickly and to spread news of police actions and other developments. Anonymous use of cellphones is a major loophole at a time when the state is investing heavily on monitoring communications of all kinds, and the authorities appear determined to close it"

Whereas there's been quite some media coverage on China's Internet censorship efforts, the country's under-developed income distribution model results in more people having access to plain simple cellphone communications compared to owning a PC. And even if they own a PC, or use public ones to access the Internet, information from China's provinces where the real China is, often breaks out through SMS messages -- or comes in. Venus Info Tech's Cybervision SMS Filtering System is what they've been using, and it seems it's the government's long-term partner. The article also points out on the illegality of reporting or broadcasting information on "sudden events", consider the SARS virus as one of these. Yet another in-depth article, indicates the only usefulness out of this censorship, or let's use a more friendly term, such as content monitoring/filtering, which is the detection of banking frauds and other scams -- can you censor "Bware, SMS unda ctrl" or learn to encode in such a way?

From a business perspective, the Chinese Internet population represents a hot opportunity for companies offering censorship-circumvention services -- IP cloaking and competitive intelligence among the other needs. It's interesting to note U.S government's interest in Chinese citizens having access to more information :

"Ultrareach and Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT) in North Carolina, both connected to Falun Gong, receive U.S. government funding through the International Broadcasting Bureau to help it get Voice of America and Radio Free Asia to Chinese Web surfers. Each day, DIT sends out millions of emails and text messages containing proxy links to Chinese citizens. About one million users have downloaded DIT's circumvention software, which automatically links to the firm's proxy servers, while ``hundreds of thousands'' directly access the proxy Web sites daily, said founder Bill Xia. UltraReach, claims 100,000 users use its proxies.All told, the IBB spends about $5 million a year on contracts with hacktivists and firms on censorship-busting efforts in countries such as China and Iran."

I also came across to an informative research on the topic, "The Wireless Leash : Mobile Messaging Service as a Means of Control". Recommended reading in case you want to know more on the topic from a social and political perspective, as well as go through many relevant cases.

UPDATE : China restricts Internet cafe access - "Rules on children in Internet cafes were imposed after Chinese officials warned that students were spending too much time playing online games and were getting access to violent and obscene material."

Related resources:
Censorship
China
2006 = 1984?
Anonymity or Privacy on the Internet?
World's Internet Censorship Map
China - the biggest black spot on the Internet’s map
Chinese Internet Censorship efforts and the outbreak
Securing political investments through censorship