[liberationtech] The use of Social Media by political activists in sub-Saharan Africa?

[HAYES MABWEAZARA]

Hello guys,
Would anyone have any information on emerging trends in the appropriation of social media by political activist in sub-Saharan Africa? and possible comparisons with the protest movements in the Arab world?
Any information, links will be greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Hayes

Dr Hayes Mabweazara
School of Media and Performance
University College Falmouth 
Tremough Campus, Penryn 
England, TR11 9EZ 

T 0044-1326-211077 
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E hayes.mabweazara at falmouth.ac.uk 

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--- On Thu, 3/15/12, Rohan Dixit <rohandixit86 at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Rohan Dixit <rohandixit86 at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [liberationtech] Thoughts on decentralized DNS, and OpenNIC particularly?
To: "Liberation Technologies" <liberationtech at lists.stanford.edu>
Date: Thursday, March 15, 2012, 11:36 AM

Thanks for this, really helpful. My purpose in doing this is to figure out what the most practical/quickest to deployment solution is for distributed DNS records, so this is definitely useful.



I looked at both namecoin and CJDNS. Looks like namecoin has attracted most of the developers from the initial project, with CJDNS still limping along (I'm guessing based on activity here.)
Links to the code:


namecoin: https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/graphs/impact
CJDNS: https://github.com/vinced/namecoin/graphs/impact




Could you speak to the structure of namecoin a bit more? Looks like it uses the "proof-of-work" trick from bitcoin to validate DNS records (and arbitrary key-value pairs), unless my skimming was totally off. That's pretty ingenious, for those who are interested I found a great blog post that serves both as an introduction to Bitcoin and explains how it could be used to make a distributed DNS. 



http://paulbohm.com/2011/06/17/bitcoins-value-is-decentralization



It appears they're also proposing integrating with providers like OpenNIC, OpenDNS, etc. although I'm not qualified to judge how feasible that is. http://dot-bit.org/Project_Roadmap They also share computing resources with current bitcoin generators.... seems they've thought of everything.




Someone mentioned DNSSEC in a new off-shoot thread. DNSSEC within the existing DNS paradigm is only a half-measure (although I think you'll agree, an important one.)




Notes on other dDNS providers:So besides namecoin and CJDNS, there's also Dot-P2p, the dDNS system that was proposed based on the BitTorrent protocol. Some info was here: http://p2pfoundation.net/Dot-P2P but the link to http://dot-p2p.org/index.php?title=Main_Page looks dead. The first hit Googling "distributed dns" brings up another codebase that hasn't been modified seemingly since 2005 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/distributeddns/files). I checked out DIANNA as well, but didn't see a link to active code so assumed it was mostly dead. http://dianna-project.org/wiki/Main_Page





On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 4:36 PM, <liberationtech at lewman.us> wrote:



On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 02:19:47PM -0700, rohandixit86 at gmail.com wrote 14K bytes in 317 lines about:



: Curious if anyone had thoughts on OpenNIC as a provider of decentralized
: DNS. From my naive point of view, it often seems like dDNS is a good way to
: stop lazy types of censorship. But perhaps I'm missing something and the



: problem is more complicated than that?

It is not distributed. It is just a rebirth of the non-ICANN root
servers. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlterNIC for past history on



this idea.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root for more
history and current status.




--
Andrew
http://tpo.is/contact
pgp 0x6B4D6475



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