The
Haystack application aims to use
steganography to hide
samizdat-type data within a larger stream of innocuous network traffic. Thus, civilians in Iran, for example, could more easily evade Iranian censors and provide the world with an
unfiltered report on events within the country. Haystack earned its creator
Austin Heap a great deal of positive coverage from the media during the 2009 Iranian election protests. The BBC described Heap as
"on the front lines" of the protesters' "Twitter revolution", while The Guardian called him an
Innovator of the Year. Despite the laudatory coverage, however, the media were never given a copy of the software to examine. Indeed, not much is known about the software or its inner workings. Specialists in network encryption security were not allowed to perform an independent evaluation of Haystack, despite its distribution to and use by a small number of Iranians, possibly at some risk. As interest in the project
widens and criticisms of the media coverage and software continue to
mount, Heap has currently asked users to
cease using Haystack until a security review can be performed.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Sep 13, 2010 -
31 comments
A
biased shadow of its
former self, a
waste of money dominated by
champagne socialists, a victim of
media fragmentation, a
political pawn or still the
trusted heart of the UK's (and, arguably, the world's) broadcasting world? As
scandal after
scandal threatens to undermine confidence in the BBC and the voices calling for the dissolution of the licence fee gain a more
cohesive platform, can the BBC survive, - is it
the solution or the problem, and can the British public really afford to let it die the
death of a thousand cuts?
On the day after the BBC announces it will put every UK
publically owned oil painting online and the Director General talks about the BBC's "special responsibility" to culture in the UK, what should the role of the BBC be and, perhaps more importantly, what should it cost?
posted by MuffinMan
on Jan 29, 2009 -
50 comments
News Sniffer. It's a site dedicated to monitoring news articles and discussion threads at the BBC. For censored comments from BBC news threads:
Watch Your Mouth. And now it has implementation that tracks changes in news articles, to see how things are edited:
Revisionista. Here's a
couple of
examples.
posted by gsb
on Sep 11, 2006 -
5 comments
The
BBC News website has introduced
links to other news sites' articles that relate to the stories they cover.
Google News is based around a similar premise, but as far as I know the BBC is the first major news organization to link to articles not written by themselves.
A good example of this in action is the current headline article about
today's bombings in Iraq (look in the right sidebar).
Only the top stories seem to have this feature activated, but hopefully (to me at least) it will spread through the site with time.
posted by lowlife
on Sep 30, 2004 -
9 comments
The BBC are testing out Ogg Vorbis for audio streaming.
Ogg is a completely Free and open audio codec. This is great news for Ogg Vorbis, as you don't get a much better endorsement than one of the most respected media services trialling your system.
posted by helloboys
on Dec 26, 2001 -
9 comments
BBC to North America and Australia: Drop Dead. The BBC World Service is dumping all shortwave broadcasts to the US, Canada and Australia as of July. If you want to listen you'll have to get it off the net, or hope your local public radio station uses at least a few WS programs as cheap filler material. A couple hundred US stations do this, but did we mention they tend to do it at 3 in the morning? (Scroll down past the Angola stuff in the above link.)
posted by aaron
on May 8, 2001 -
18 comments
