With the rapid growth of the Internet and its audience advertisers now have a new medium at their disposal. The placement of the first banner ads in 1994 marks the birth of Internet advertising. Although the advertising industry at first hesitated to adopt the new medium, two facts brushed away their doubts:
Migrating Television Audiences: The increased use of the Internet led people to redistribute their time budget. Whereas some cut down on eating and sleeping, more than a third reduced watching television and instead uses the WWW.
Interesting Internet Demographics: While methodologies and approaches of research organizations studying the demographic composition of the Internet vary, the findings are relatively consistent: Internet users are young, well educated and earn high incomes.
Considering those findings, the Internet in the first place seems to become inevitable to be included in media planning, as part of the audience shifts from TV to the WWW, and secondly, because demographics of the Internet user population are irresistible for marketers.
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Concerning their human and financial resources commercial media and independent content provider are an extremely unequal pair. While the 1998 revenues of the world's leading media conglomerates (AOL Time Warner, Disney, Bertelsmann, Viacom and the News Corporation) amounted to US$ 91,144,000,000 provider of independent content usually act on a non-profit basis and to a considerable extent depend on donations and contributions.
Also the human resources they have at their disposal quite differ. Viacom for example employs 112,000 people. Alternative media conversely are mostly run by a small group of activists, most of them volunteers. Moreover the majority of the commercial media giants has a multitude of subsidiaries (Bertelsmann for instance has operations in 53 countries), while independent content provider in some cases do not even have proper office spaces. Asked about their offices number of square meters Frank Guerrero from RTMark comments "We have no square meters at all, because we are only on the web. I guess if you add up all of our servers and computers we would take up about one or two square meters."
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The new U.S. regulations are based on the Wassenaar Arrangement Revision of 1998, where exports without license of 56 bit
For more information see:
Seven states stay excluded from the new freedom. These are states like Libya, Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Cuba, altogether states seen as terrorist supporting. No encryption tools may be exported into those countries.
This is, what happened in the USA, whereas in Germany the issue of a cryptography-law is still on the agenda. Until now, in Germany, everyone can decide by her-/himself, whether she/he wants to encrypt electronic messages or not. Some organizations fear that this could get changed soon. Therefore an urgent action was organized in February 2000 to demonstrate the government that people want the freedom to decide on their own. One governmental argument is that only very few people actually use cryptography. Therefore the urgent action is organized as a campaign for using it more frequently.
For more information on this see:
Other European countries have more liberate laws on cryptography, like France. Austria doesn't have any restrictions at all, probably because of a governmental lack of interest more than accepting freedom.
The (former) restrictions in the bigger countries influenced and hindered developments for safer key-systems, e.g. the key-length was held down extraordinarily.
"Due to the suspicious nature of crypto users I have a feeling DES will be with us forever, we will just keep adding keys and cycles (...). There is a parallel between designing electronic commerce infrastructure today that uses weak cryptography (i.e. 40 or 56 bit keys) and, say, designing air traffic control systems in the '60s using two digit year fields. (...) Just because you can retire before it all blows up doesn't make it any less irresponsible."
(Arnold G. Reinhold)
The Chinese State Encryption Management Commission (SEMC) announced in March 2000 that only strong encryption tools will have to be registered in the future. Which sounds so nice on first sight, does not mean a lot in reality: any kind of useful encryption technique, like the
The restrictions and prohibitions for cryptography are part of the states' wish to acquire more control - in the name of the battle against criminality, probably?
Due to the emerging organized criminality the governments want to obtain more freedom of control over citizens. Organizations like the NSA appear as the leaders of such demands.
What about civil rights or Human Rights?
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Media as today's main information sources unarguably have the power to influence political agenda-setting and public opinion. They decide which topics and issues are covered and how they are reported. Still, in many cases those decisions are not primarily determined by journalistic criteria, but affected by external factors. The importance of shareholders forces media to generate more profit every quarter, which can chiefly be raised by enlarging audiences and hence attracting more advertising money. Therefore the focus of media's programming in many cases shifts towards audience alluring content like entertainment, talk-shows, music and sports.
Further pressure regarding the selection of content occurs from advertisers and marketers, who often implicitly or explicitly suggest to refrain from programming which could show them or their products and services (e.g. tobacco) in an unfavorable light. Interlocking directorships and outright ownerships can moreover be responsible for a selective coverage. Financial connections with defense, banking, insurance, gas, oil, and nuclear power, repeatedly lead (commercial) media to the withholding of information, which could offend their corporate partners. In totalitarian regimes also pressure from political elites may be a reason for the suppression or alteration of certain facts.
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Advertising as referred to in most economic books is part of the marketing mix. Therefore advertising usually is closely associated with the aim of selling products and services. Still, developments like "branding" show a tendency towards the marketing of not only products and services, but of ideas and values. While advertising activities are also pursued by political parties, politicians and governmental as well as non-governmental organizations, most of the money flowing into the advertising industry comes from corporations. Although these clients come from such diverse fields, their intentions hardly differ. Attempting to influence the public, their main goal is to sell: Products, services, ideas, values and (political) ideology.
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One of the most crucial issues in on-line advertising is the blurring of the line between editorial content and ads. Unlike on TV and in the print media, where guidelines on the labeling of advertisements, which shall enable the customer to distinguish between editorial and ads, exist, similar conventions have not yet evolved for Internet content. Labeling of online advertisement up to now has remained the rare exception, with only few sites (e.g.
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There is no society - in the past or in the present - free of censorship, the enforced restriction of speech. It is not restricted to authoritarian regimes. Democratic societies too aim at the control of the publication and distribution of information in order to prevent unwanted expressions. In every society some expressions, ideas or opinions are feared. Censored are books, magazines, films and videos, and computer games, e.g.
In defence of its monopoly of truth, the Catholic Church published a blacklist of books not allowed to be read: the Index librorum prohibitorum. As indicated by the fact that every declaration of human rights - including the United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights and the
To a high degree the Protestant Reformation was made possible by the invention of the printing press. Now those who were capable of writing and reading no longer needed to rely on the priests to know what is written in the Bible. They could compare the Bible with the sermons of the priests. This may be one of the reasons why especially in countries with a strong Protestant or otherwise anti-catholic tradition (with the exception of Germany), free speech is held in such high esteem.
There seems to be no alternative: free speech without restriction or censorship. But censorship is not the only kind of restriction of speech. Speech codes as politically correct speech are restrictions, sometimes similar to censorship; copyright, accessibility and affordability of means of communication are other ones. Because of such restrictions different to censorship, we cannot think coherently about free speech independently of issues about social justice. Many campaigns for free speech, the right of free expression are backed by the concept of free speech as unconstrained speech. That is perfectly well understood under the auspices of regimes prominently, which try to silence their critics and restrict access to their publications. But the concept of free speech should not solely focus on such constrains. Thinking of free speech as unconstrained speech, we tend to forget to take into account - to campaign against - these other restrictions. Additionally, free expression understood in that way offers no clue how to practice this freedom of expression and what free speech is good for.
In liberal democratic societies censorship is not justified by recurring to absolute truth. Its necessity is argued by referring to personal integrity. Some kind of expression might do harm to individuals, especially to children, by traumatize them or by disintegrating personal morality. Some published information, such as the names of rape victims, might infringe some people's right on privacy or some, as others say, such as pornographic images or literature, e.g., infringes some people's right on equality (how?).
For more information on the history of censorship see
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ARPAnet was the small network of individual computers connected by leased lines that marked the beginning of today's global data networks. Being an experimental network mainly serving the purpose to test the feasibility of
In 1969 ARPANET went online and links the first two computers, one of them located at the University of California, Los Angeles, the other at the Stanford Research Institute.
But ARPAnet has not become widely accepted before it was demonstrated in action to a public of computer experts at the First International Conference on Computers and Communication in Washington, D. C. in 1972.
Before it was decommissioned in 1990,
In the USA commercial users already outnumbered military and academic users in 1994.
Despite the rapid growth of the Net, most computers linked to it are still located in the United States.
Device used by the German military command to encode strategic messages before and during World War II. The Enigma code was broken by a British intelligence system known as Ultra.
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It is a system, where letters get converted into numeric characters.
The numbers were not written down and sent but signaled with torches.
for example:
A=1-1
B=1-2
C=1-3
W=5-2
for more information see:
also called "the study of code". It includes both, cryptography and cryptoanalysis
The ICPC aims at reducing the number of incidents of damages to submarine telecommunications cables by hazards.
The Committee also serves as a forum for the exchange of technical and legal information pertaining to submarine cable protection methods and programs and funds projects and programs, which are beneficial for the protection of submarine cables.
Membership is restricted to authorities (governmental administrations or commercial companies) owning or operating submarine telecommunications cables. As of May 1999, 67 members representing 38 nations were members.
http://www.iscpc.org
Vandana Shiva is the Director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in New Delhi. She has been a tireless and one of the most original campaigners for ecological diversity, eco-feminism and against "official" development policies and commercial exploitation. Book publications include Ecofeminism (1993), Monocultures of the Mind (1993) and Biopiracy : The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (1997