ictdchick

My friend Marian did a brief summary of what’s going on, with a couple of links and pointers to some things you can do to intervene.  In her words (with a couple of edits here and there):

There is a crisis in Eastern Congo around Goma.  The rebel army, CNDP, lead by Nkunda advanced from the north all the way to the outskirts of Goma, the provencial capital.  More than 50,000 people fled to Goma.  Behind the CNDP lines, credible reports document that the rebels have broken up IDP (internally displaced peoples camps) and burned them to the ground, further displacing 50,000 + more people.  Aid agencies haven’t been able to reach many of the displaced, until now, and hunger and starvation are very real, as there is no food. It is wet, muddy, and raining.  Many are sick. Below are a few articles that do a good job analyzing the conflict.

How we fuel Africa’s Bloodiest War
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-we-fuel-africas-bloodiest-war-978461.html

The Rape of a Nation (~10 min documentary that explains some history)
http://mediastorm.org/0022.htm

Update on UN’s role
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/31/congo-unitednations-miliband

This conflict is more than what is frequently cited as “tribal” or “ethnic,” rather it is economic.  Eastern Congo is rich in natural resources: copper, diamonds, gold, and coltan.  Coltan is used in laptop computers and cell phones — multinational companies benefit. Attached is a form letter to send to your senators calling for conflict-free coltan regulations.  Send a letter to our senators and representatives.  The form letter is “Coltan Letter.pdf”

Here are the links to the CA Senators
Senator Boxer: 
https://boxer.senate.gov/contact/email/policy.cfm
Senator Feinstein:
http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ContactUs.EmailMe

Secondly, it is women and children who suffer the most during this conflict.  Troops from both sides are raping and pillaging.  The people of Congo need security and to be able to return to their homes, their villages, their fields in order to produce food!  One million people are displaced in North Kivu, and they cannot be taken care of.  They’re dispersed, and putting huge strain on the existing towns and cities as they try to feed them.  WFP’s rations are one quarter of what is needed to survive.  MONUC (UN peacekeeping mission) doesn’t’ have the resources to provide protection.  Support is needed from the international community in order to help these organizations do what their mandate is: feed and protect. Attached is a petition drafted by HEAL Africa you can sign.  To sign, email your Name, Affiliation, Country to [editor’s note: instructions for participating in the petition are available on the HEALAfrica “Four Ways to Help” website]

Finally, to encourage the international community to do something about this humanitarian disaster, attached is a form letter (thanks to Andrew Hoeksema) to send to your senators calling for them to do something and influence the UN Security Council, rather than sit back and ignore.

“As the UN Security Council will be briefed on the situation in eastern D.R. Congo.  Please work with fellow Senators to encourage the U.S. delegation to the UN to push for further intervention on behalf of the innocents who are affected by this fighting.  Great humanitarian aid is needed for the 100s of 1000s who have been displaced in recent months.  Tell the UN Security Council to increase humanitarian aid in this emergency situation to the displaced peoples in the major city of Goma.  Also, have the UN Security Council increase the mandate of the peacekeeping troops to further intervention to stop and push back the advances of Nkunda’s rebel forces.  The UN Security Council also must work to push negotiations between presidents of D.R. Congo and Rwanda who are both involved in this crisis.”

Thank you for taking time to learn more about this catastrophe.
Thank you for praying fervently for peace and for taking  a step to end the atrocities and injustice.

Marian

As many of you know, Goma, DRC is the site of much mineral wealth - as well as much conflict, both over this wealth, and ethnic conflicts, including remnants of the Hutu/Tutsi hatred that resulted in the Rwandan genocide.

Just as diamonds are mined to finance these conflicts - coltan (used in the Sony PS2 and mobile phone chips) is another scarce resource that can be traded for weapons or other supplies.

Senate Bill 3058 endeavors to do what we’ve already done with diamonds - to enforce restrictions to make sure that we don’t end up with conflict coltan in our mobile phones. Kerry Gough from my church has drafted a letter that you can use to urge your senator to sponsor this bill.  You can download word documents for Senator Feinstein or Senator Boxer (California) here, or you can just copy the text from below and use it for your own senator.
Letter to Senator Boxer
Letter to Senator Feinstein

Honorable Diane Feinstein
331 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510

Re: Rape & Exploitation in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Dear Senator Feinstein:

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is one of the worst places in the world to be a girl or woman. Everyday women as old as 87 and babies as young as 10 months are raped by militiamen, soldiers, policemen and civilians. There are hundreds of thousands of victims—2000 RAPES were reported in June, 2008, in just one Province (North Kivu) of the DRC. There is a pervasive atmosphere of impunity that encourages rape at will.

Although the recently passed House Resolution 1227 condemns the ongoing epidemic of sexual violence in the Congo, such resolutions carry no sanctions and are ignored by the governmental powers in the DRC. Legislation with some teeth in it is necessary, such as the Conflict Coltan and Cassiterite Act of 2008 (SB 3058). Similar to the legislation banning importation of blood diamonds, SB 3058 will require that coltan be certified as conflict free before being imported. Coltan is a necessary ingredient for the manufacture of cell phones, computer games, monitors and numerous other high tech instruments. Restrictions on its import would compel not only Congolese government to take action to eliminate coltan related conflict, but also would put pressure upon the U.S. manufacturers of technological instruments to ensure that their products are conflict-free.

The Congolese live in dire life threatening and life ending conditions because DRC is entangled in 10 years of war which has contributed to the death of over 5.4 million people to date. This conflict is not just an internal African implosion but rather it is a battle for coltan, diamonds, cassiterite and gold, destined for sale in London, New York and Paris - the metals that make our technological society vibrate and ring and bling. In addition to high death rates, the war has lead to the use of child soldiers, child slavery in mines, the mass displacement of peoples, and the widespread use of rape as a weapon of war and the transmission of HIV infection by rape. Shockingly, notwithstanding the epidemic of HIV in the DRC, of the $45 billion dollars authorized by Congress to fight HIV (PEPFAR) only $15 million is allocated for the DRC.

I urge you to join as a co-sponsor of SB 3058, legislation that is essential to put meaningful sanctions behind well-meaning resolutions.

Let me know if you have any questions and I’d be happy to point you to some people that can tell you more about the bill!

Melissa

Melissa R. Ho
PhD Candidate, UC Berkeley School of Information
Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions Research Group
Information, Communications Technology, and Development
Mobile Computing for Healthcare Information Management in Africa
Telecommunications Policy and Practice in Africa

I do information technology for healthcare in Africa. Actually, I’ve also recently dabbled in solar powered lighting for a hospital in rural Nigeria, done some IT for education in Mexico, and helped out with wireless deployments in India, so I’ve been known to think about other problems as well, but my primary focus (i.e. my dissertation) is on information technology for healthcare in Africa. My motivation runs something like this: (A) I’m pretty good (compared to some, not so much compared to a lot of my colleagues in TIER) at computers and actually get pretty obsessed with them at times. (B) God has placed a special and specific compassion in my heart for the needs of Africa. Since I’m absolutely sure that (A) is not a coincidence, and because God has managed to do a lot of things in my life to make this possible, I’m using (A) to address (B).

On an academic end, my dissertation committee is Dean AnnaLee Saxenian (co-chair), Prof. John Chuang (co-chair), Prof. Eric Brewer and Prof. Jenna Burrell. My coursework and reading delves primarily into research methods, development theory, and healthcare and telecommunications policy. My work experience is in user interface and web application design, so my research also involves human-computer interaction, participatory design, and action research. By combining a theoretical approach with an experiential interaction, my work most closely approaches applied anthropology. My dissertation will be primarily ethnographic - although I am allocating six months (jan-jun 2009) to do a deployment, the remaining six months have been set aside in such a way that I will deliberately step back from my role as a technologist, both to ensure sustainability of the deployment in my absence, but also so I will have the time to observe social dynamics as they emerge around the deployment over time.

Check out http://borninseptember.org

Basically some guy decided that instead of getting birthday presents one year, he was going to ask people to donate $31/person so he could invest in wells in a bunch of villages in Africa.

The OBA project coordinator in the Mbarara office showed me this link (ostensibly to illustrate to me the power of multimedia video presentations so I could make one about the HealthyBaby project) and suddenly I felt like a card for not being more generous with my birthday.

Anyways, even though I’m not a September baby, feel free to divert any birthday attention for me towards this project instead.

Alternatively, I’ll accept future donation pledges for my up-and-coming newly founded nonprofit organization: http://tiergroup.org

Basically, we’re taking our research group, and starting an independent organization - to support the university research, and to spin out new products and services based on our various projects. =)

Powered by Qumana

Since I’m about to do this to my VMware installation of windows I thought it would be a good time to write a quick blog post on how to prevent your Windows computer from being infected by cds, dvds, and usb drives.

Of course this means that when you pop in a cd/dvd, it will no longer automatically launch some nice little installer application for you - you’ll have to go to "My Computer" and explicitly do that yourself.  But you’re better off doing things that way anyways. Trust me!

Last time I was in Uganda (November 2007) I managed to infect my usb drive, and then subsequently infect several laptops and PCs with my drive, when I tried to copy some files from a school computer. Basically some virus copied itself onto my drive, and then when I inserted it into a new computer, the computer automatically ran a special file called "autorun.inf", which launched the virus.  There were a couple of variants, including a funny one that made all of my folders hidden, and created a bunch of executable files with the same names as my folders, that had icons that looked like folders.  I mistakenly double-clicked on the "folders", and voila - another infection.  Insidious little trojan horses…  To make a long story short, I ended up spending a lot of time downloading AVG Free Anti-virus and installing it everywhere, since that was the only freely available anti-virus software that was up-to-date enough to remove these worms and viruses.. =)

Now we could have avoided all of these problems, if only execution of autorun.inf were disabled!

There’s a few sets of instructions on the web for how to do that.  Most of them just tell you how to do it for cd roms, a few give instructions that will disable it for both cdroms and usb drives:

http://www.tildemark.com/tips/disable-autorun-on-cdrom-or-usb-drives.html
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows/disable-autoplay-of-audio-cds-and-usb-drives/

The general gist of both sets of instructions is as follows:

1. Run the Group Policy Editor by typing "gpedit.msc" in the run box ("Start->Run")
2. Navigate to Local Computer Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Template-> System
3. Double-clinic "Turn Off Autoplay"
4. Select Enabled, and specify that you want to turn off autoplan for "All drives"
5. Click OK, Close the Group Policy Editor.

Do it!  Do it now!

The other thing you should do, is that anytime you are not actually copying files to your usb drive, and you are just giving files to someone else, make sure to make your usb drive read only (if possible), so if their computer is infected, they can’t infect your usb drive.

I’ve also thought about carrying around a copy of anti-virus software, but I’m feeling dis-enchanted with AVG-Free (it’s bloated, they have started running nagware for their paid services, and it’s not that straightforward to update if you don’t have a direct internet connection).  I’ve also OSX-ified myself, so have since stopped paying as much attention to Windows…. But if anyone has recommendations for good, solid, affordable anti-virus software I can give out to people in Africa, I’d be happy to check them out!

Powered by Qumana

– forwarded from my advisor –

TPRC is an annual conference on communication, information, and internet policy that convenes international and interdisciplinary practitioners and researchers from academia, industry, government, and nonprofit organizations together with policy makers. The 2008 conference will be held September 26 - September 28, 2008 at The National Center for Technology & Law, George Mason University School of Law, Arlington, VA.

TPRC is now soliciting abstracts of papers, student papers, panel proposals, and student posters for presentation at the 2008 conference. Proposals should be based on current theoretical or empirical research relevant to communication and information policy, and may be from any disciplinary perspective. TPRC seeks submissions of disciplinary, comparative, multi-disciplinary or interdisciplinary excellence.

Subject areas of particular interest include, but are not limited to the following (for more detailed descriptions see http://tprcweb.com):

• Network Competition, Policy and Management
• Next Generation and all-IP Networks: Policy, Regulatory, Architectural and Societal Issues
• Spectrum Management and Wireless Futures: Anywhere, Anytime Communications and its Implications
• Societal Issues: Universality and Affordable Access; ICTs for Development and Growth
• The Transformation and Future of Media in an Age of User- and Community-Produced Creativity
• The Transformation and Future of Intellectual Property and Digital Rights
• Privacy, Security, Identity and Trust
• Internet Governance and Institutional Strategies for Information Policy
• Other Emerging Topics

Submissions are due by May 2, 2008. Please see the guidelines for authors for additional information.

With best regards,

Johannes M. Bauer

Johannes M. Bauer
Professor, Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media
Co-Director, Quello Center for Telecommunication Management & Law
Michigan State University
409 Communication Arts and Sciences
East Lansing, Michigan 48824-1212
Fixed +1.517.432.8003, mobile +1.517.944.4154, Fax +1.517.432.8065
Web http://www.msu.edu/~bauerj and http://quello.msu.edu

NPR’s All Things Considered recently interviewed Nicholas de Torrente of Doctors Without Borders (the American branch of Medicins Sans Frontiers) about their recently published their top ten under-reported humanitarian stories of 2007:

• Displaced Fleeing War in Somalia Face Humanitarian Crisis
• Political and Economic Turmoil Sparks Health-Care Crisis in Zimbabwe
• Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis Spreads As New Drugs Go Untested
• Expanded Use of Nutrient Dense Ready-to-Use Foods Crucial for Reducing Childhood Malnutrition
• Civilians Increasingly Under Fire in Sri Lankan Conflict
• Conditions Worsen in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo
• Living Precariously in Colombia’s Conflict Zones
• Humanitarian Aid Restricted in Myanmar
• Civilians Caught Between Armed Groups in Central African Republic
• As Chechen Conflict Ebbs, Critical Humanitarian Needs Still Remain

Read the rest of this entry »

So (one of my paper reviewers recently noted that one should never start a sentence with “so”) , at the end of the banquet on the first night of ICTD2007, Kentaro (the ictd superman) introduced the two bids for the next ICTD conference. The two candidates? Buenos Aires (aka tourist and salsa heaven) and Carnegie Mellon’s campus on Qatar.

I’m honestly really divided between the two. My vote? That we pick both, choosing one to be ICTD 2010 or 2011, two conferences from now.

One of my main concerns about the content in this year’s conference, is that it seems even more biased towards Indian projects than last year’s, when we had at least one paper from China, as well as keynote speaker Prof Zhiwei Xu from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Out of the 18 papers and 20 posters:

• 22 presented results from work in India alone,
• 4 from India and other countries (”S. Asia”, India and S. Africa, India and Central America, Kenya/India/Bolivia),
• 2 from Pakistan,
• 1 from Nepal,
• 1 from Honduras,
• 5 from Africa (7, if you count the combos: Zambia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Botswana, and 3 South Africa) , and
• 3 non-specific (the meta-ICTD panel)
• 0 from China

I think several regions are under-represented. This is not to say that there is a flaw in the review process - I’m sure part of it is just that Microsoft Research India is just producing a lot of high-quality research, and another part is just that there are a lot of ICTD projects in India, so a good bulk of the submissions are about reasearch in India. Indeed it’s a lot easier to set up WiLDNet links in Tamil Nadu than in, let’s say, Ghana. I might suggest, however, that maybe some communities just didn’t get the invitation? Or that they saw that the conference was in Bangalore and thought the invitation wasn’t for them. Or they saw the program committee and At the same time I’m not sure that there’s much more we as a community can do to draw in more perspectives from projects in other countries; there’s some diversity on the program committee, they provide scholarships for participants from developing countries, and we’ve always been (as far as I can tell) an open and inviting group of people. Okay, well, I guess I for one could start writing more papers on my work in Uganda and Ghana. (Which might mean that this is a generational issue, since many of us wet our toes in India.) But I think a healthy next step could be to hold the conference in one of these under-represented areas. And, unfortunately for my decision-making process, both of these fit the bill. At the same time - given that Rahul Tongia is already firmly on the program committee, along with M Bernardine Dias (who I don’t think I’ve met yet), perhaps it makes sense to use this opportunity to engage with the universities in Argentina. But then again, this conference is still in its fledgling years, so I can also see how one would want to go with a well-known quantity and give the less-well-known quantity a year or so to become a well-known quantity. I know a certain School that does the same thing with PhD applicants…

If I were forced to choose, I would vote for Qatar (I don’t think I actually have a vote). It’s closer to Africa, where I’m likely to be at the time of the next conference. And the Argentine bid’s (I’m really sorry I forgot your name) tourist video was a little over-the-top for me; I think it was so long and so flashy that by the time it ended I forgot whatever academic reasons there were for locating the next ICTD in Buenos Aires. Besides, I’m really not all that into salsa.

I’ve been thinking about services and social entrepreneurship and all sorts of good things about making money in such a way that the public as a whole benefits.
And really, that is what entrepreneurship (”social” or otherwise) is about - finding some way that makes things better for some set of customers.  And in many cases, it is about making things free (or virtually so), sometimes by having someone else pay for the service (e.g Google with AdWords, or even Aravind Eye Hospital). It goes to say that “free” does not always mean free.  Sometimes we pay with our time/attention, our screen real estate (remember when we all got free Internet from
juno.com), or even just a counter increment on a web site.  I think freerice.com just wants to build awareness about hunger and poverty while making us learn SAT vocabulary. Well, plus whatever other ulterior motives they may have.  On top of that there’s all sorts of issues about what it means to give people something for nothing. I once went to a Taiwanese youth camp that was originally fully subsidized by the Taiwanese government, but later started imposing a nominal fee because parents thought the experience couldn’t be valuable if they didn’t have to pay for it. Likewise, some of the Mallapuram residents expressed that they didn’t want to go to the Akshaya kiosks because they were perceived as social enterprises for poor people. I think it is some of these issues that make it so difficult to work in Africa. The years of development aid have created 1) an expectation that if they wait long enough someone will come and offer what they need for free (or for a  world bank loan, which is not strictly free but often perceived as such) or 2) cynicism on the part of residents because so many offered “free” projects have quickly evaporated after considerably time and effort on their parts.  For me this manifests itself in the general trend that a lot of my work (e.g. getting things through customs) has simply failed to progress unless I was physically present. Eventually you can achieve momentum, especially if by continuing to come back you dismantle some of the cynicism by building some level of trust.  But it goes to say that our projects have a better chance of being sustainable if we acknowledge up front the investment we expect from them (time, money, etc) in return for what we are supposedly giving them for “free”.

Admittedly, I had solved two thirds of this problem this past summer.  But I think it speaks to the rapidity of mobile phone coverage expansion that solving the last third was much easier than I expected it would be.

The problem: GPRS/Internet access on my various phones on all three of the GSM carriers in Uganda, MTN, Celtel, and Uganda Telecom (UTL).  (For acronym explanations see footnoote*.) 

Before I digress, here are the configuration options:

Celtel
Access Point Name (APN): internet.ug.celtel.com (alternate: wap.ug.celtel.com)
Username/Password: none
Authentication: none
Proxy Server: 192.168.100.10, port 9401 (wap clients use port 9201)
IP Address: dynamic (server-assigned)
DNS Address: dynamic (server-assigned)
Celtel will automatically configure some phones if you send an SMS to 175 with the message “internet” (Case-sensitive)

Uganda Telecom
Access Point Name (APN): utweb 
Username/Password: none
Authentication: none
Proxy Server: none
IP Address: dynamic (server-assigned)
DNS Address: dynamic (server-assigned)

MTN^
Access Point Name (APN): yellopix.mtn.co.ug
Username/Password: none
Authentication: none
Proxy Server: none
IP Address: 10.120.0.138 
DNS Address: dynamic (server-assigned)
^to use MTN, you also need to contact them to enable Internet on your account

I managed to get the Celtel configuration from a local office here in Mbarara, mostly by poking around on my phones and switching SIM cards until they pulled out the configuration manual and handed it to me. For MTN and UTL I went to the respective offices in Kampala to get the configuration instructions.  This is the type of info I think would make sense to provide on their web sites - but generally the most information I can find is that they offer the service, with no information on pricing or how to connect them.

This trip I have three mobiles with me, the HP iPAQ hw6945 (Windows Mobile 5), my Treo 650 (Palm/GarnetOS), and the HTC s710 (Windows Mobile 6). MTN I still have only working on the HTC phone - I can get it to connect on the Treo, but can’t actually access the Internet. UTL is by far the easiest to configure - just enter utweb as the APN, and you are ready to go. Unfortunately, UTL’s coverage isn’t as consistent - while I have so far always been able to get MTN and Celtel in the rural clinics I’ve visited, UTL wasn’t reachable in the two clinics in Rubindi. Since I’m planning to use Treos for the SmartForms project I’m pretty relieved I managed to get Celtel GPRS working on mine.

The trick was (since the automatic configuration didn’t work - my phones seem to always be too new for them to have customized instructions available) was that the IP address they gave me was for a proxy server, not the phone.  And proxy server configuration is moderately painful. On the Treo you can set up the GPRS connection through the “Prefs” app; click on “Network” for the GPRS settings.  The nice thing about this one is that you can connect there and test the connection.  Also in the “Prefs” app, click on “IBM Java VM” to  set the HTTP Proxy to “192.168.100.10:9401″ (server:port). Then you also need to configure the proxy for Blazer, the web browser.  Launch “Web” and cancel the download. From the Options menu select Preferences. You’ll see three tabs - click the Advanced tab, then click the “Set Proxy” button on the bottom right of the screen. Check “Use custom proxy” and enter 192.168.100.10 for the Proxy Server, and 9401 for the Port. From there you can go back to the browser and try to load a web page. (I generally use http://m.google.com.)

On the HTC, you configure one proxy for all of the applications. Go into connections (Settings->Connections->GPRS), configure Celtel as a “WAP Area Network”, and then set up a separate http proxy (Settings->Connections->Proxy) that connects the “WAP Area Network” to “Internet”.   There are a lot of backwards things about configuring GPRS on the HTC.  At first it seems straightforward - just add a new GPRS connection.  But when you are like me, and you use the phone on lots of networks in lots of countries, then you also have to go in and set all the connections you aren’t using to connect to a non-Internet network (I use “Secure WAP Area Server”, since I don’t normally need that connection), and set the one you actually are using to “Internet”, or in the case of  Celtel, to “WAP Area Network”.

What boggles my mind is the fact that people still need a book with individual instructions on how to set up GPRS for the phones.  Even for the windows mobile phones, every phone has a different configuration - I still don’t know why MTN works on the HTC s710 wm6 phone, but not on any of the wm5 phones.  The only possible reason I can think of is that its possible to specify “None” for authentication on the s710, while wm6 requires you to specify CHAP or PAP.  I think, though, that the non-smartphones, especially the basic Nokias, work just fine.

So!  Now you know how to get Internet service on your phone in Uganda. Happy surfing!

* General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is the protocol that allows you to access the Internet through a GSM mobile phone network.  For those of you in the Bay Area, AT&T/Cingular and T-mobile are GSM networks - you can recognize a GSM network because they issue you a smartchip to put in your phone, also known as a Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card. Your phone number is tied to the SIM card than your phone, so to switch to a new phone, you just need to remove the chip from your old phone and put it in the new one. As long as the new phone is not “locked” all your calls will be routed through the new phone.

Powered by ScribeFire.