GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The 3.8 billion pages in English published by Wikipedia will not be accessible Wednesday, the Wikimedia Foundation that runs the site has announced, in protest against pending US legislation that it believes will seriously damage the free Internet. “The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the US House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the US Senate—that, if passed, would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia,” the group says on a web page.
The decision was a tough one to make, given Wikipedia’s insistence on remaining neutral about information, it points out. But the largest-ever Wikipedia online discussion, involving some 1,800 “Wikipedians” or volunteer contributors to the site, agreed. Sue Gardner, the foundation’s CEO, writes that “although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not. As Wikimedia Foundation board member Kat Walsh wrote on one of our mailing lists recently,
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- We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. And we depend on a legal infrastructure that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both information and expression. For the most part, Wikimedia projects are organizing and summarizing and collecting the world’s knowledge. We’re putting it in context, and showing people how to make to sense of it.
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- But that knowledge has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or, if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to.”
Some artists would like to see tougher Swiss laws covering music downloads; others say musicians need to make it easier for fans to have some free music
BERN, SWITZERLAND – The Swiss Federal Council has ruled that the country’s laws concerning illegal downloads are adequate and additional legislation is not needed. The decision follows requests by artists’ groups for further protection. France in recent years has tightened its legislation and in some cases people who have illegally downloaded music, for example, have been banned from using the Internet.
Switzerland’s IP (intellectual property) laws allow Internet downloading for private consumption, but not for sharing. Anyone who uses popular download systems that essentially re-share is acting illegally; fines in Switzerland can run to CHF600, reports TSR (Fr).
Swiss soldiers travel on Swiss trains for free when on duty (photo: Morges station, November 2011)
BERN, SWITZERLAND – The 2012 train schedule that goes into effect 11 December will offer travellers better connections for trips abroad. Some parts of the Lake Geneva region will also see improvements. But the best news for many working travellers is that mobile connections are being improved, as is the online sales service.
The CFF rail company presented highlights of the new schedule to the press Thursday 17 November.
You’ll be able to plug in and connect better in 2012
All the new trains will have electric plugs and existing intercity trains will also get them. “All the new Duplex trains on the intercity trains will be equipped with WLAN,” says Jeannine Pilloud.
A major improvement could be the installation of equipment that amplifies signals received inside and outside the train cars, giving better access to the cell phone and Internet network.
1.8 million cell phone tickets ordered and number growing
The CFF app for ordering online tickets via cell phone is proving popular, with 1.8 million users since it was introduced in 2010, and the number is growing steadily, says the rail company.
Users of the small pocket timetables will find that some of the international ones are disappearing, in favour of online information, and that smaller stations’ stops are no longer listed, but are incorporated into regional listings. All details will be available online, however.
French-speaking Switzerland, especially commuters, to see significant improvements
A host of changes for trains in the Lake Geneva region will have a significant impact:
More double-decker trains will be used on the Geneva airport/Lucerne line, offering more seats
An additional InterRegio train will run between Neuchatel and Lausanne at 07:53 and the Neuchatel/La Chaux-de-Fonds/Le Locle line will have additional service during rush hour and a pair of trains is being added to the Neuchatel to Bienne line
Canton Vaud: the S4 line is being extended from Morges to Allaman, stopping in Saint Prex and Etoy, which will now have trains every 30 minutes instead of once an hour, Monday to Friday.
Geneva: La Plaine/Geneva, more trains will run during rush hour. Coppet–Geneva–Lancy-Pont-Rouge trains, the 30-minute schedule is being extended for weekend night and trains will run every half hour on Fridays and Saturdays until the end of the day.
New international connections, travel time cut on major links
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Governor Jerry Brown in California, USA, says his state’s coffers badly need the expected $320 million that a new tax on Internet sales will bring in, but his critics say the move will do more harm than good. The number of those critics appears to be growing in the week since Amazon announced that as a result of the new law it will stop paying what it calls “marketing affiliates”, some 25,000 of them, commission for referrals they make to click-through customers.
Links to other sites: Reuters, Telecom TV
BERN, SWITZERLAND – The Italian “Ndrangheta” organized crime group as well as Russian mafia have been increasing their operations in Switzerland, Swiss federal police said Thursday 23 June.
Human trafficking from eastern Europe is also on the rise. Police have been working more closely on a national level to reduce the amount of drug trafficking from Europe, which remains high, although several thousand kilos of cocaine and several hundred thousand francs related to drugs have been seized.
The comments are part of Fedpol’s annual report covering organized crime in Switzerland in 2010. The solution, says Fedpol, lies in coordinating work closely on the international level, particularly as the role of the Internet grows.
The mafia activity linked to Italy is mainly in border areas and in particular in Piedmont, Lombary and Bade-Wurtemberg. The Internet is being used by these groups to plan operations, often working with hackers, and Switzerland is used as a transit centre but also as a money-laundering centre.
Recent criminal activity shows that they are operating with “the greatest possible discretion”, developing ties to financial establishments in ways that make it extremely difficult to trace their operations.
A key factor in dismantling human trafficking, linked to prostitution, is witness protection and Switzerland has developed a programme that will go into effect once parliament passes a related law, which is expected to occur in coming weeks.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The US Mission in Geneva is host Thursday, from 13:00-15:00, to an interactive webcast from the UN Palais on “The Human Voice of Freedom: The Internet and Human Rights”. The session is part of the current session of the Human Rights Council.
The US Mission description for the session: “The webcast will feature human rights activists from across the world, along with highly regarded experts in the field of social media, to discuss the importance of a free Internet to the promotion of human rights and freedom of expression. This discussion will focus on the grass roots issues important to this issue. With activists from Uganda, Egypt, China, Burma, Korea, Indonesia and Tunisia, and with UN diplomats and civil society representatives from across the world in attendance, this discussion will shed a direct and unusually focused light on this timely issue.”
Guests can sign in to the free online event here.
A 48-year-old former nurse accused of seeking out and encouraging via the Internet people who were considering suicide, was sentenced in Minnesota Wednesday 4 May. William Melchert-Dinkel was convicted in March over the deaths of a 32-year-old man from England and an 18-year-old Canadian woman.
The judge yesterday ordered him to serve 320 days in prison, then in an unusual twist, to return to prison for two days every year for 10 years, on the anniversaries of the deaths of his victims. He was ordered not to have access to the Internet except for his new job as a trucker. He had been working in a nursing home.
The families of the victims expressed disappointment with the sentences: Melchert-Dinkel had faced up to 15 years in prison for assisting suicides.
The judge said that Melchert-Dinkel’s actions were not alone responsible for the deaths, but they played a role. He posed as a female nurse online and he has admitted to taking part in online suicide chats and he signed fake suicide pacts. He told the court he believed at least five of those people killed themselves.
Links to other sites: Newsninemsn, Pioneer Press
FCC vote today could have major impact on the Internet as we know it
One of the most sacred principles of the Internet, that all content is treated equally by service providers, is about to be sent down the drain by the US Federal Communications Commission, it appears. The commission is expected to vote 21 December in favour of new rules that will allow mobile service and wireless providers to charge some companies more for faster delivery, creating what many in the industry fear will be a two-speed Internet, with the big content players consolidating their positions by paying more. The FCC is the regulatory power for media and telecoms in the US. The only groups that are happy with the expected changes to FCC rules are US cable companies and telecoms, reports Wired in a scathing article about the likely outcome to the five-year net neutrality battle.
Links to other sites: Economist blog, Guardian, Huffington Post
Background, Wired, September 2009
Update 13:00 Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The web site of Switzerland’s Postfinance, the banking arm of Swiss Post, has been mostly down since Monday evening due to a hackers’ game of cops and robbers. Postfinance confirmed to GenevaLunch that is has been the target of Operation Payback as a result of closing an account opened recently by Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks.”It hasn’t been hacked. It is just too much traffic,” says a Postfinance spokesperson. “No information has been hacked, and accounts are safe,” he noted.
PostFinance has more than one million account-holders.
The site was down several times Monday night and Tuesday it has not been available. Eweek, an IT news sites, reports that pro-WikiLeaks supporters are attacking sites they perceive as hurting the whistleblowing organization, while they, in turn, are being attacked by anti-WikiLeaks hackers, who hit the organization’s site three times at the end of the first week in December. WikiLeaks responding by asking supporters to set up mirror sites, of which several hundred are now in operation.
MasterCard has also stopped accepting payments in support of WikiLeaks.
The pro-WikiLeaks hackers, calling themselves Anonymous, and their campaign Operation Payback. They have stated their ambitions in a video on YouTube, and announced their success on Twitter. They knocked PayPal out of service for a while Friday 4 December and now claim to have pulled down PostFinance.
Links to other sites: Le Temps (Fre), TSR (Fre)
Background story Monday 6 December, New York Times
Expect delays says Swisscom
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Swisscom mobile customers who use the Internet may experience “impaired service” in the next few hours, says the company. Its mobile data network was interrupted for several hours Monday, starting at 07:30 when a fault occurred on Swisscom’s GPRS network while maintenance work was being done.
About half of the customers had service again by 14:00, with the rest functioning by 17:30. The company noted that the mobile Internet service had to be restarted during the morning, causing interruptions in mobile data traffic.
On a normal day, Swisscom notes, several hundred thousand customers make use of mobile Internet services. The resumption of traffic meant that “an increase in data traffic is expected over the next few hours,” it said Monday evening, “which could lead to impaired service.
“The disturbance affected all mobile services requiring an Internet connection, from surfing the Internet to sending and receiving MMS messages and e-mails. Telephone services via the mobile network, the sending and receiving of SMS messages and connections to the fixed network (telephony, Internet, Swisscom TV) were not affected.
Geneva office contributes a little less “British perspective” to a successful mix
Susan Clark, who heads the Geneva CEMEA office for The Economist Group
Update 10 November / Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Susan Clark, who is American by passport, European resident by desire and international marketing wizard through experience, opened The Economist‘s office in Geneva in July 2009, without much noise or fanfare, British style. A year after the Swiss move she told GenevaLunch in an interview that putting down roots in Geneva has been good for the company and she’s personally been happy to move to the Lake Geneva region. Switzerland has the third largest number of continental subscribers to The Economist, after France and Germany, and a large number of advertisers are here, she confirms. Clark grew up in the eastern US and, in a comfortable dark suit, she confesses to occasional twinges of homesickness for New York City. She appears very much at home in her Geneva Old Town office, a discreetly stylish room behind an elegant old facade on Boulevard des Tranchées.
Clark and 23 Geneva employees are part of one of the media world’s rare success stories today: The Economist Group in 2009 had revenues of £313 million and a £56m profit. The Economist newspaper, as the group refers to the weekly publication, was profitable, “and we’re very proud of that”, says Clark.
This in a year characterized by the Newspaper Association of America as its worst-ever, with US newspaper revenues down 27.2 percent from 2008, previously the worst-ever year since the Depression in the 1930s. Even the grand old American lady, the New York Times, lost millions in 2009.
Clark has been the managing director of the CEMEA (continental Europe, Middle East and Africa) office since 2007; she is also the group marketing director, a title she’s had since 2008. She was previously marketing director for The Economist. She joined the group in 2005 after working for the Meridien Hotel Group.
The Geneva office head is upbeat, both about the company she works for and the future of journalism, based on what she argues is the world’s continuing desire for quality news. She is also a believer in asking readers to pay for news, which The Economist does.”People want to be well-informed. We act as a filter. Once a week we give you what we think you need to know. We talk about it as the weekly package, the thread that runs through the news.”
She is referring to the flagship publication, of course, The Economist, created in 1843 by a hat manufacturer in Scotland, James Wilson, as part of his campaign against the protectionist British Corn Laws. The affection for free trade has remained a pillar of the publication, despite the disappearance of the Corn Laws three years after Wilson’s new venture began.
Only 8-11 percent of the readers are economists, despite the title.
Debate grows over how much web site owners should tell visitors about information gleaned
What is my mouse telling web site owners?
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch.com) – The news that Google and the CIA are teaming up to predict the future based on what we’re already doing online has prompted yet another media debate over privacy and how much information is spilled by our online behaviour.
Spooks might worry the public but our use of the Internet is already providing a wealth of details many of us never consider.
A pair of students at Emory University in the US have just shown, at the SIGIR conference on information retrieval, at Unimail in Geneva in late July, how our mouse movements can tell companies whether we intend to buy or not, when we’re shopping online (Agichtein and Guo paper, pdf).
Such clues could provide valuable information for advertisers, say the authors. “The results show that our method is more effective than the current state-of-the-art techniques, both for detection of searcher goals, and for an important practical application of predicting ad clicks for a given search session.”
Advertising Age has jumped into the debate about how much web site owners should tell their customers, about the information they are able to gather, with an article arguing that sites should be more open about the information they receive about visitors.
Rupert Murdoch is going to single-handedly save the dying print news media, which online news services are strangling, by making consumers cough up hard money, starting in June. One week before the pay-day deadline, his News International company has published the new web sites of two key papers in his save-the-papers drive, The Times and The Sunday Times. The two sites have a paywall which will be activated 1 June: visitors will be able to read the home page for free, but must pay for news beyond that point. The site might be free, but visitors wanting to read beyond page 1 today must register.
For now, the new sites at first look like a step into the past, showing a traditional newsprint page rather than a news service that relies on web-friendly tools: the typeface is the classic Times Roman of newspapers, the banner at the top is classic newspaper style and the page has six columns, normal for print but unusual for web pages today.
The company owns the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), where it says it has successfully created a for-pay online product, with owner Murdoch in 2009 pointing to a high number of iPhone downloads. But the WSJ is a specialized financial news service and the two Times in London are aimed at a general public. Industry observers are giving mixed prognoses for the venture. News International says, according to CNN, that it expects to lose 90 percent of its online readers, but that the other 10 percent it retains will be “more engaged”.
Links to other sites: CNN, The Times (new site), Sunday Times
Canadian company Bombardier CHF1.86 billion train deal creates Vaud jobs, will ease passenger crunch
New CFF InterCity trains, scheduled for 2013 Geneva-Zurich
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The good news is that train travel in Switzerland is about to get better, but the bad news is that it won’t happen fast enough to suit many impatient Swiss, who travel on average 2,422 km a year by train, making them the world leaders in train use.
The CFF Swiss rail company has just bought 59 new trains with the first rollout in 2013. The purchase of 36,000 new train seats is just a start: in the next 20 years the CFF will need to replace 120,000 seats and add an additional 60,000 because of growing passenger demand and new lines.
Bombardier, a Canadian company, fought off Siemens and Stadler Rail to get a CHF1.9 billion contract with the CFF to supply 59 new double-decker trains. The contract could lead to the purchase at a later date of an additional 100 trains, for a total package worth close to CHF6b.
Passengers to see tangible benefits
For travelers, the new cars will offer a number of advantages: electric plugs and Internet for all passengers, the cars at the front and back of the train will have extra doors, to speed up passsenger movement, first and second class will be completely separated, not the case with at least one of the other offers, according to Le Temps.
The trains will carry 1,300 instead of the 1,100 currently handled by InterCity trains. The extra 200 passengers will be accommodated even with more comfortable stairs which will have a different shape to those in today’s trains, but the seats will have the same space and distance as in the IC2000 trains currently running.
A plan by the Australian government to introduce a mandatory Internet filter has come in for sharp criticism by Google and Yahoo search engine companies, among others. Google this week has refused to continue self-censorship in China, part of which has involved mandatory filters. The government had 176 replies to its invitation to respond to the proposal, including one from the Australian Computer Society, concerned about accountability and transparency on the blacklist.
Links to other sites: Irish Times, Sydney Morning Herald, Australia
Facebook has, for the first time, garnered more traffic in a week in the US than Google, as the social networking company’s strong growth of the past year continues, Hitwise, an Internet analyst reports. “The social network accounted for 7.07 per cent of all US web traffic last week, compared to Google’s 7.03 per cent, according to web analysts Hitwise,” reports News.com.au.
Link to other sites: Experian Hitwise, News.com.au
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Swiss households like their Internet access to be fixed and high-speed, with 71 percent of households having access and 89 percent of those connected using high-speed cable or telephone lines. The figures are part of the results of a survey of 1,147 homes in September 2009, carried out by the Swiss federal communications office (Ofcom). Swiss private use of the Internet is high, with 75 percent of users going on the Internet virtually daily and 20 percent at least once a week: only 11 percent use it less than an hour a week, with 30 percent going online for at least 10 hours a week.
Iceland is touting itself as the ideal place to locate data centres. It is cool year-round, has abundant power in the form of geothermal energy and likes to think that it can become the first emission-free country in the world. The first data centre outside Reykjavik will be ready in a year to lease space to internet companies that want to relocate their power-hungry servers there.
The millions of servers in the world – Google alone is estimated to have a million – produce as much CO2 as the airline industry, and between 30-40 percent of the energy is used to keep them cool. Iceland has been laying the necessary fibre optic cables to Europe and North America so that the information can flow freely and fast.
Iceland has suffered in recent months from the financial crisis: four of its biggest banks needed to be bailed out by the government, the value of the kroner collapsed and many people lost their jobs. BBC, Der Spiegel (Eng)
Icann, the body that regulates Internet domain names and country codes, took a further step towards becoming an independent body free of any governmental control 30 September by loosening ties to the US Department of Commerce (USDOC), which has governed the non-profit organization since its establishment in 1998. The body, whose name stands for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is now subject to periodic reviews of its performance by a broad group of stakeholders including the USDOC. Cnet, Reuters
To Facebook or not? That is the question in Payerne
Payerne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Several students of the Gymnase Intercantonal de la Broye (GYB), a secondary school in canton Vaud, thought when school re-opened last week that they had lost access to Facebook and Messenger while in school. Online chatting and access to social platforms is still alive and well for the 900 students at GYB, the principal says.
According to school principal Thierry Maire, the bans, reported 1 September by some Swiss media, is not quite what the school is implementing.
The Financial Times reports that Yahoo and Microsoft are “on the brink of sealing an online alliance that could create a more formidable rival to Google”, ending 18 months of uncertainty in the Internet world as Microsoft first chased, then attempted to woo Yahoo. The two reportedly are agreeing to share future online advertising revenue but Microsoft will not be paying Yahoo money up front, which was part of earlier proposals. Wall Street Journal
The French parliament is expected to pass a “Draconian” Internet piracy law today. People caught illegally downloading copyrighted material would be given three warnings before their Internet access was cut off for a year. The proposed legislation could run afoul of the Eurpean Convention of Human Rights, however, reports the Financial Times, which says it would then be tied up in a lengthy legal battle.
Vevey, Vaud, Switzerland (20 Minutes, Fre) – Two youths were given 12 and 15 months suspended sentences after being found guilty of speeding and filming it. The two, who reached speeds of 180 km/hour on the motorway and 160 km/hour on the cantonal highway, filmed then published videoclips of their speeding, on the internet in October 2006. One was also found guilty of driving under the influence of cannabis several months after being arrested for speeding.
Newspapers disappearing
Updated 14 April 07:45 Lake Geneva region, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Everyone knows banks are in desperate shape. Curiously, few people seem to realize that the newspapers bringing them this news are in equally dire straits. And it’s not just newspapers: it’s the news industry.
The Boston Globe is the latest US newspaper in the hangman’s noose, with staff told at the start of April that it is likely to lose $89 million in 2009. Its owner, the New York Times, can no longer afford to keep it alive, given the New York paper’s own $57.8 million deficit at the end of 2008. Other city newspapers in the US are lining up on the scaffold. Already hung: the Seattle Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News, two of the nation’s oldest papers, both now closed and others such as the Minneapolis Star Tribune, filing for bankrupty.
The US debate over the real impact of the Internet on print media
The closings and threatened ones are sparking a lively debate over the need for newspapers and the media in general in an Internet age, and where the news industry is headed. The problem isn’t just the Internet: US newspapers’ advertising revenue fell 16.6 percent in 2008.
Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post jumped in this week over plans announced by Associated Press (which is owned by its member newspapers) for an industry initiative to protect online news. For Huffington, the argument is about whether journalists “embrace and adapt to the radical changes brought about by the Internet or pretend that we can somehow hop into a journalistic Way Back Machine and return to a past that no longer exists and can’t be resurrected.”
It’s a debate that is beginning to reach Switzerland but here, for now the discussion appears to be more about media surviving commercially by developing non-news business while still offering journalism. This is not a new debate – think of the media owners in the US who’ve had baseball teams – but in a small country with little competition, the changing role of the media bears examination.
The numbers have been far smaller than those for television, radio and print, but the growth of online advertising has continued upward, in sharp contrast to the other ad markets – until now. New figures released by several groups in the US and the UK show that Internet advertising has either fallen or is flat, with search advertising, notably with Google, doing fine, but not banners and other ads that online companies need in order to make money. New York Times
The Munk Center for International Studies in Toronto, Canada, has uncovered a huge Internet spy network that appears to be mainly operating out of China, but one of its researchers says this doesn’t mean the Chinese government is behind it – it could well be the CIA or Russia, he noted. The Toronto Star, reporting on the highly sophisticated operation the researchers called GhostNet, writes “The malware is remarkable both for its sweep – in computer jargon, it has not been merely ‘phishing’ for random consumers’ information, but ‘whaling’ for particular important targets – and for its Big Brother-style capacities.”
Title: Lift Conference: Inspiring and connecting pioneers, Geneva
Location: Geneva
Link out: Click here
Description: Lift is a series of events built around a community of doers and thinkers who get together in Europe and Asia to explore the social consequences of new technologies.
Each conference is a chance to turn changes into opportunities by anticipating the major shifts ahead, and meeting the people who drive them.
Start Date: 25 Feb 2009
End Date: 27 Feb 2009
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – A report by Swiss authorities confirms and warns about what many already know: the Internet is not always a safe place to navigate.
An online marketplace where companies or individuals with common interests connect to buy and sell local services such as babysitting, cleaning and classes. Opened in April 2008; functions in French and English.
Researchers at the University of Toronto have uncovered a security leak in Tom-Skype in China that allowed them to download thousands of instant messages identifying users. The messages appear to have been on eight computers that are part of a Chinese government surveillance system; their existance was discovered because the servers were improperly configured, making them accessible to the outside world. The researchers are part of a group that monitors politics and Internet security issues, Citizen Lab. The article notes that this is not the first time a government has been accused of using Skye to eavesdrop on its citizens: the US was reportedly doing so in 2005 as part of its anti-terrorism programme. International Herald Tribune
