Top 10 Culture of Tech Stories of 2010

Every year ReadWriteWeb selects the top 10 products or developments across a range of categories. The latest installment is the top 10 stories of the culture of technology.

These are the stories that answer that question you sometimes hear from tech skeptics or those who mistake advances in computing and communications for Beanie Babies and Segways. The question is “So what?” Here’s what.

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Wikleaks

Wikileaks was not a story, but an ongoing continuum of stories. It started with release by the wiki-based whistle-blowing site in April of a video that seemed to show a U.S. helicopter gunship killing a number of Reuters journalists. We picked up the story when Wikileaks released 91,000 documents pertaining to the Afghanistan War. We followed with its release of 400,000 Iraq War documents and the recent release of classified U.S. diplomatic cables.

Wikileaks, the site and the group behind it, could not have happened until the social web did. Leaks have happened for decades but the penetration and the mass of documents only became possible recently. Websites, email, wikis, blogs, microblogs and social networks created a network of avenues for leaks to come in and to spread out again.

The stories that the overall Wikileaks story gave birth to included criticism of the group and its founder. Questions arose. Was transparency desirable for its own sake? Is the principal of transparency worth men’s lives and countries’ safety? Did it make our world more safe by requiring governments to face up or less safe by uncovering things that are not necessarily illegal or immoral but secret to maintain lives? It’s a story that is destined to keep on giving.

Online Tyranny

The level of oppression against users of social media and other online tools reached a stupendous level in 2010. As a look at our weekly feature “This Week in Online Tyranny” shows, men and women were arrested, sentenced, beaten and tortured every single week. The fear and anger those who hate dissent show to anyone who didn’t roll over doubled and redoubled as social media gained more and more users around the globe.

Low-lights include the sentencing of Canadian-Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan to almost 20 years in prison in Iran; the release, after additional torture, of the longest-serving imprisoned blogger, Kareem Amer; and the passage by the United Nations of a resolution that provides justification for blasphemy-based imprisonment and torture.

Having covered the increasing sophistication of online oppression since January of 2005, I would be lying if I claimed to see anything positive developing. Repressive governments around the world have proven much quicker to understand and accept the power of the social web than the world’s media or business leaders have. Want to know where the online world is headed? Watch the internal police services of China, Iran and Egypt. They know.

Computer Warfare on Industrial Targets

Outside of the security field, the idea of a computer virus tailored to a specific country and a specific undertaking was the stuff of paranoid thrillers. This year, the reality of country-to-country viral warfare was brought home with the unleashing of the Stuxnet virus.

As the story played out, a number of eye-widening facts came to light. The virus was made by a highest-level digital team over a prolonged period. It was aimed solely at supervisory control and data acquisition systems, used only on large industrial machinery. Further, it was aimed directly at particular frequency converter drives from specific vendors. Those vendors exist only in Finland and Iran. It was designed, in fact, to change motor speed on, among other things, uranium processing facilities in Iran.

The ubiquity of digital communication pathways mean that this is only the most dramatic event in governments targeting each other in this manner, not the last one.

When Old Communist Apparatchiks Think You’ve Gone Too Far, You’ve Gone Too Far

China is the gold standard for censorship. Pioneering what one specialist called “networked authoritarianism,” the leadership of the country knows it cannot flick a switch and shut down criticism. The Internet, especially China’s, is too big to scientifically restrict, so in a sense terror must be used. It employs a combination of technical filtering, legal restrictions on free speech and social restrictions.

• Technical: filters and search feeds on “problematic” terms.
• Legal: rules against criticizing the regime and various vague types of libel.
• Social: strong-arming and threats against both individuals, such as writers and activists, and groups, such as publications and Internet cafe owners.

A sort of social terror keeps the population in line enough for its Internet police to stomp down on real trouble-makers.

Well, now “real trouble-makers” include folks like Cheng Jianping. She added a sarcastic RT to a post on her Twitter account, was arrested and is now spending what should be her first year of married life in a forced labor camp. Perhaps it is the Orwellian singularity Chinese censorship is heading toward that has driven a large group of influential, retired old guard communist leaders to put their collective foot down.

What does it mean that such an august group publicly upbraids the wise guys of Chinese Internet policy? Maybe nothing. But maybe shame and a sense of betrayal will succeed where words, words, words have not.

A Privacy Intrusion of Mammoth Proportions

When India, the second largest country, and the largest democracy, on Earth starts up an allegedly elective, and practically mandatory, public ID program, the fiction of the Internet as liberator sinks right in.

India’s record on privacy was not great prior to this announcement. It has demanded, for instance, that Blackberry-maker RIM decrypt its user records for the government or it will be thrown out. They extended this demand to every device-maker that uses encryption. But the project to force every one of its one billion citizens to carry a card or other device linked to a central record, or risk denial of everything from housing loans to water, is one step beyond.

Regardless of whether it is a practical undertaking given the state of the country’s sorry digital infrastructure, it is a Brobdingnagian object-lesson in just how little regard a country can have for this fragile fiction of right of privacy. Maybe Zuckerberg was right and privacy is dead. But if so, as India will no doubt show us, anything we might call us dies with it.

After the jump, Google Street View, computers made of brains, the Oxford English Dictionary and more.

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