Next week we‘ll be presenting a couple of beautiful maps on internet censorship at the protect-the.net event in Toronto. I’ll make sure we put the maps online once the event has gone by, you can already see one here: Iran.

Announcement:

Once an unfettered forum for global communications, the Inernet is today under seige.

Upwards of forty countries now censor Internet traffic. Most of the censorship takes place in secret, without any public accountability or civilian oversight.

Protect the Net is a worldwide campaign to help restore the hope and promise that the original notion of the internet once held out as a frontier-less form of free expression, democratic communications, and access to information. It is about preserving and enlarging the global commons of information, shedding light on unlawful censorship and surveillance practices where they exist, and holding states and corporations accountable for the limitations they impose on free speech and access to information online.

Protect the Net Toronto is the first stop in the worldwide campaign. This event will be highlighted by presentations on Internet censorship, surveillance and infowar as well as the worldwide public release and demonstration of the psiphon censorship circumvention tool.

Psiphon is a human rights software project developed by the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies that allows citizens in uncensored countries to provide unfettered access to the net through their home computers to friends and family members who live behind firewalls of states that censor.

Protect the Net will educate and empower citizens worldwide about the perilous state of human rights online and what they can do to help rescue and restore those rights.

MyCreativity: Convention on International Creative Industries Research
Date: 16-18 November, 2006
Venue: PostCS 11, Post CS Building, Amsterdam www.ilove11.nl

On November 16-18, 2006 the Institute of Network Cultures and the Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster will organise MyCreativity, a Convention on International Creative Industries research. MyCreativity is a two-day conference that intends to bring the trends and tendencies around the Creative Industries into critical question. It seeks to address the local, intra-regional and trans-national variations that constitute international creative industries as an uneven field of actors, interests and conditions. The conference explores a range of key topics that, in the majority of cases, remain invisible to both academic research and policy-making in the creative industries.

Overall, the conference adopts a comparative focus in order to illuminate the variability of international creative industries. Such an approach enables new questions to be asked about the mutually constitutive tensions between the forces, practices, histories and policies that define creative production, distribution and organisation within an era of information economies and network cultures.

Also check their gallery. Sabine gave me a roll of scotch, and I had loads of fun tagging stuff!