In April 2001, Jewish movie mogul Terry Semel became the CEO of Yahoo. (He was, that same year, a co-chairman of the Israeli Film Festival). JEWISH POST, 2001]
Among such entrepreneurs is
ICQ ("I seek you") was a firm founded in Tel Aviv, Israel, "the brainchild of four Israeli computer programmers ... [Within six months] it claimed the title of world's largest online communication network." [NIESE, A., 11-15-01] Another Israeli computer company, StarBand, "is America's first consumer two-way, always-on, high-speed satellite Internet service provider." [CEO: Zur Feldman; President: David Trachtenberg]
[http://www.starband.com/whoweare/index.htm] Starband is part of the Israeli company Gilat Satellite Networks, Ltd.
Even Jewish-American Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus "is also working to link the Israeli economy to his home state. The country has the second-highest density of startups after Silicon Valley, and the hardware mogul has helped persuade state officials to offer the Israeli firms incentives to relocate in Georgia." [MOTHER JONES, 3-5-01]
Isabel Maxwell, daughter of corrupt British Jewish mogul Robert Maxwell, is "president of the Silicon Valley's hottest internet investment company" -- CommTouch ... The company was founded in 1991 by a group of technology-savvy former [Israeli] army officers led by Gideon Mantel, a bomb disposal expert ... [Ms. Maxwell] has a deep affinity for Israel ... CommTouch employs 400 staff. Its head office is in Silicon Valley. R&D sales are run from Tel Aviv." [CASSY, J., 6-22-00, p. 26]
Then there is Lawrence Perlman, co-chairman of Seagate, "the world's largest disc-drive maker." [WALL STREET JOURNAL, 3-30-2000] John Roth is the CEO of prominent computer systems giant Nortel Networks. Benjamin Rosen, long time CEO of the company that sells the most computers, Compaq Computer, is "a pioneering figure in the personal computer industry and a founding investor in both Compaq Computer and Lotus Development." The CEO, President, and Chairman of rival Packard Bell NEC, the second-largest computer maker, was Beny Alagem, until he stepped down in 2000. He too is Jewish.
From: When Victims Rule. A Critique of Jewish Pre-eminence in America
(Citation sources for the above quotes are at the end of this online book)
Googley-eyed over success,
USA Today, August 27, 2001
"Walk into Google's headquarters, and the first thing you see on
the wall is a constantly changing real-time projection of some of the
100 million daily searches taking place on its site — everything from
the song-swap service Kazaa to condoms to Martha Stewart. On the Web
Google At Google, with 1,800 queries a second, searching is what it's
all about. 'Our decision early on, and it turned out to be the right
one, is that just being the best search engine was enough,' says Sergey
Brin, 27, who co-founded Google in 1998 with fellow Stanford University
Ph.D. candidate Larry Page ... Brin [is the] son of a Jewish
refugee from the former Soviet Union who has lived in the USA since
age 6."
(a web site that critically analyzes Google)
Startup Nation. Israel has more startups than anywhere outside of Silicon
Valley.What's fueling the Internet boom? Soldiers, officers, code-breakers,
and spies,
Business 2.0, November 2000
"On the northern tip of Tel Aviv, where the old port used to be,
sits a nightclub called Dugit. One of many open-air clubs on this stretch
of beach, Dugit also rubs shoulders with auto shops, abandoned warehouses,
and a pet-supplies store. During most summer evenings, Dugit and the
other hot spots here attract some of Tel Aviv's hippest after-hours
club crawlers. But one recent sweltering night, Dugit turned into a
teeming nest of spies. They were Israeli soldiers -- 300 elite operatives
from some of the nation's most secretive high-tech intelligence and
electronic warfare units. They were on a mission so sensitive that their
superior officers had been deliberately left out of the loop -- no need
for them to know, and they wouldn't have been happy had they known.
Many had been enticed here by one of the oldest tricks in the spy handbook:
an invitation from a pretty young woman working for the other side.
Some of the operatives were armed, M-16s hanging loosely from their
shoulders. All were hunting for what has become one of the most coveted
objectives in Israeli intelligence circles today: startup funding. L'affaire
Dugit was, in fact, a recruiting party thrown by a group of Israel's
big-gun high-tech companies. The attendees were targeted because they
are among the brains behind the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF. They
belong to units that dream up the state-of-the-art intelligence and
communications technologies that give the IDF its tactical edge. These
technological innovations power Israel's far-ranging high-tech boom.
In Israel, yesterday's soldier is tomorrow's entrepreneur, and the event's
sponsors, established Israeli tech outfits that include Comverse
Technology, RoseNet, and Yazam, are trying to get
an early line on ideas to fund or geniuses to hire ... The United States
has MIT, Stanford, and a handful of other academic hothouses that nurture
the talent and research from which many high-tech powerhouses emerge.
In Israel, the military, much to its own discomfort, increasingly plays
that role. Since the creation of Israel in 1948, the military has compensated
for its lack of resources and manpower with brainpower. Particularly
in the past 20 years, the IDF has invested billions of dollars in developing
technological warfare. The result is a number of secret, semisecret,
and open-secret divisions devoted to coming up with cutting-edge technologies
designed to help Israel know what its enemies are doing -- and to kill
them when the need arises .. With the spread of the Internet, the kind
of technological wizardry once used to guide missiles, beam secure communications,
and break codes suddenly presents enormous commercial opportunities.
'By sheer luck," says Professor Shimon Schocken, dean of the school
of computer science at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, a private
Israeli university, 'Israel already had the solutions to so many of
the problems of the Internet.' Even a short list of hot tech companies
that have recently spun out of Israel's military-technological complex
is long, [including Amiram Levinberg's] Gilat Satellite Networks,
which last year made more than half of the interactive VSATs (small
satellite earth stations used in communications networks) sold in the
world. Several of the founders of Israel's best-known tech success,
the Internet security firm Check Point Software Technologies,
are former members of 8-200 who specialized in developing firewalls
between classified military computer networks. Today, the seven-year-old
company has a market cap of $23.4 billion and commands 52 percent of
the worldwide market for commercial firewall software. Gideon Hollander,
CEO of wireless software maker Jacada, is a veteran of those
units, where he worked on artificial intelligence systems. Founders
of new startups iWeb (software for delivering Web ads), CTI2
(Web telephony), AudioCodes (voice-compression technology), and
hundreds of others are former secret warriors. All this technological
ferment has catapulted Israel into the front ranks of global tech powers
-- and transformed an economy that just a decade ago was a disaster.
There are now more startups in Israel than there are anywhere outside
Silicon Valley. Israel, a country of 6 million people, ranks third in
the world in the number of Nasdaq-listed companies, behind the United
States and Canada. ... (More recently, according to Israeli and international
press reports, Israel acquired a urine sample from ailing Syrian president
Hafez Assad by clandestinely doctoring a toilet that was set aside for
his exclusive use at the funeral of Jordan's King Hussein in February
1999. The toilet's pipes were rerouted to lead to a specimen jar; Israeli
agents later analyzed the sample for clues about the Syrian leader's
health and concluded that he was living on borrowed time. Assad died
16 months later.) But it is military intelligence, more than any other
single factor, that accounts for Israel's tech prowess. In fact, the
demands made by the elite intelligence units seem as if they're meant
to be basic training for startup entrepreneurs. Soldiers work in small,
highly motivated teams, with brutal hours and little sleep. The pressure
to innovate is crushing -- national survival is at stake ... Aryeh
Finegold ... recently founded his third company, Orsus, an e-commerce
software maker. As an engineer for Intel in the United States
in the 1980s, Finegold was a principal architect of the 286 and
386 chips. One of his previous startups, Mercury Interactive,
an e-commerce monitoring software company, has a market cap of about
$11.2 billion ... Talpiot's [a special military division] role in the
current tech boom is no secret. Assaf Monsa and another Talpiot
graduate, Yair Mann, along with two other alumni of elite tech
units, three years ago founded RichFX, which has developed streaming
video technology that Monsa says uses between one-twentieth and one-hundredth
of the bandwidth gobbled up by competing systems ... Marius Nacht,
another Talpiot grad, is a co-founder of Check Point. Eli Mintz,
CEO and president of Compugen, a gene sequencing technology firm,
and Yuval Shalom, co-founder and CTO of Wiseband, a maker of
wireless phone technologies, also went through Talpiot .... [Another
military group, Mamram] comes from its founding members: 8 Ashkenazi
Jews and 200 Iraqi immigrants who were specialists in wireless communications
and had worked for Iraqi Railways. Their skills became the cornerstone
of the electronic intelligence gathering, encryption, and other activities
known to be among the unit's specialties. It's illegal for past and
present members to talk about 8-200, although it has become something
of an open secret in the tech world. The unit has also attained a mythical
status among venture capitalists for the entrepreneurial wizards who
are veterans of the unit ... About 90 percent of Israeli startups are
incorporated not in Israel but in the United States. That's in part
because the United States is such a huge market, but it's also because
the country has a less troublesome tax regime and deep ranks of managerial
and marketing expertise from which Israeli companies can draw. Some
of Israel's largest and most successful tech companies call the United
States home: Comverse, a voice messaging company with a market
cap of $14.9 billion, is based in Woodbury, N.Y.; Mercury Interactive
is based in Sunnyvale, Calif. More common these days is what's known
as the fast exit, whereby startups either sell out to a foreign multinational
entirely or split themselves in two, keeping R&D in Israel but moving
sales and marketing to the United States."
Netscape
Heeds Jews' Gripes Over Web Directory,
[Jewish] Forward, November 22, 2002
"Internet giant Netscape has acknowledged anti-Israel bias in its
massive Web cataloguing service and has taken several steps to correct
the situation, including dismissing the volunteer editor Netscape says
was responsible. Responding to a complaint by the Jewish Internet Association,
an Internet watchdog group, Netscape's Robert Keating said the company
would also eliminate a category that linked users to Jewish extremist
groups such as Kahane Chai and would add a separate list of pro-Israel
organizations under their own category ... The service, known as the
Open Directory Project, is an effort to create a comprehensive catalog
of the Internet, with millions of Web sites placed into categories and
subcategories. Hosted and administered by Netscape, the directory is
now featured by various search engines, including the popular Google.
Tens of thousands of volunteer editors choose the Web sites, Web site
descriptions and categories that will be placed in the directory, but
Netscape 'sets the editorial policies and direction' of the project,
according to the directory's own Web site. Netscape has said that the
volunteers are chosen by unpaid senior editors, who are approved by
Keating, the editor in chief of the project. Chriss said his organization
discovered problems in the directory last month, and sent a letter with
specific allegations of bias and distortions to Steve Case, chairman
of Netscape's parent company, AOL Time Warner. [Chuck Chriss,
president of the California-based Jewish Internet Agency] complained
that the directory contained a link to 'Jewish Hate Groups,' including
Kach and Kahane Chai, but did not contain a corresponding category for
Islamic extremists, nor any sites describing antisemitism among Muslims
... Shortly afterwards, Chriss received a letter from Keating saying
Netscape agreed that there was bias in the directory and that it had
decided to dismiss the volunteer editor who they said was responsible.
In addition, the company eliminated the 'Jewish Hate Group' section,
added a separate list of pro-Israel organizations under their own category
and included the Jewish Internet Association's own pro-Israel 'Palestine
Facts' Web site. Chriss told the Forward last week that he did not blame
Netscape for the initial bias, saying they had a small staff supervising
tens of thousands of volunteer editors ... Derick Mains, a Netscape
spokesman ... suggested that pro-Israel activists volunteer to be editors
on the directory and correct some of the perceived bias."
GIL
SHWED, Chairman and CEO Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.,
CIO Magazine, October 1, 2002
"You can forgive Gil Shwed for not wanting to discuss his
age, which he reluctantly confirms is 34. He was just shy of 25 when
he and two colleagues started Check Point Software. The company's
rise thrust Shwed into a spotlight most executives don't see
for decades. His appearance on Forbes' 2002 list of under-35 'billionaire
babies' has led some wags back home to call him the 'Bill Gates of Israel.'
All that attention comes thanks to Check Point FireWall-1, the
first mass-market firewall that made its debut just as the Internet
was taking off in 1993. That product and subsequent Check Point offerings
are credited with helping define the nascent markets for network security
and virtual private networks. It was during Shwed's four years
in the Israeli Defense Forces that he first had the idea for stateful
inspection—the network security standard for which he holds a patent."
Semel: The
New Yahoo on the Block, news.com, April
17, 2001
"Terry Semel has already made his mark on Hollywood. Now
he's hoping to do the same with one of the Internet's most visited Web
portals. On Tuesday, Yahoo announced that Semel will replace
outgoing Chief Executive Tim Koogle after an executive search mounted
less than two months ago. The move brings a media veteran with international
experience and a self-proclaimed specialty in marketing to the helm
of the troubled Internet bellwether. It also puts Semel back in the
hot seat about a year and half after he quit his job as co-head of Warner
Bros., presumably to pursue a quieter life running an Internet investment
firm."
Steve
Ballmer, Jewish Virtual
Library (A Division of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise)
"Steve Ballmer, 43, was appointed president and chief executive
officer of Microsoft Corp. on January 13, 2000. In his capacity
as president and CEO, Ballmer is responsible for the overall management
of Microsoft ... The Detroit-born son of a Jewish mother is now the
world's richest Jew, worth an estimated $25 billion."
Time
Magazine Honors Survivor.
Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, January 2, 1998
"Time magazine has named a Holocaust survivor its 1997 Man of the
Year. The magazine honored Andrew Grove, chairman and CEO of
Intel, which produces nearly 90 percent of the world's personal computer
microprocessors. Grove was born Andras Grof in Hungary to a dairyman
and a bookkeeper ... [Intel] is now worth $115 billion and earns $5.1
billion annually in profits, making it the seventh most profitable company
in the world." [Other Jewish moguls
in the computer world in recent years include Michael Dell, head
of Dell Computers; Steve Ballmer, president of Microsoft;
Nate Kantor, president of MCI International; Steven
Kirsch, founder of Infoseek; Mark Goldston, CEO of
NetZero; Mitchell Kapor, head of Lotus Development Corporation;
Mark Cuban, head of Broadcast.com and Audio.Net;
Lawrence Perlman, head of Seagate; John Roth, CEO
of Nortel Network; Benjamin Rosen, founder of Compaq
computers; Beny Alagem, CEO, president, and chairman of Packard
Bell NEC (Hewlett-Packard); Laurence Ellison, CEO
of Oracle Systems; Sandy Lerner, founder of Cisco Systems;
Irwin Jacobs, founder of Qualcomm Inc., Rob Glaser,
CEO and Chairman of Real Networks; Monte Zweben, President
and CEO of Blue Martini Software; Jerry Greenberg, co-founder
of Sapient; Eric Greenberg, Chairman of Scient;
Danny Lewin, founder of Akamai Technologies; and Dan
Snyder, head of Snyder Communications.] The Jewish Exponent
estimates that 10-15% of all Microsoft employees are Jewish.
-- [Mono, Brian. Spiritual Wealth: The Economy Is Doing Just Fine,
Jewish Exponent, 12-30-99, p. 9] Among the above, Lewin was killed
in the World Trade Center terrorist attacks. As CNN noted: "Lewin
was named one of the top 10 people of the Enterprise Systems Power 100,
a list of industry leaders chosen for their effect on the IT (information
technology) landscape and for their ability to influence the industry's
direction ... Born in Denver, Colorado, and raised in Jerusalem, Lewin
is an officer in the Israel Defense Forces, having served in the country's
military for more than four years." [SIEBERG, D. Akamai:
Co-Founder Dies in WTC Plane Crash, 9-11-01, CNN.com]
I'll Gladly Pay You Tuesday. How PayPal Has Already Won
the Battle of the Internet Payment Systems,
PBS, August 31, 2000
"Max [Levchin], who is 25 years old and working for
his fourth Internet startup company, is Chief Technical Officer at X.com.
And X.com, while it sure sounds to me like a great place to find dirty
pictures online, is actually a financial services site on the World
Wide Web. X.com's claim to fame is PayPal, an Internet payment system
built by ... Max Levchin. Since it was launched last Fall, PayPal
has become the payment system of choice for 3.3 million web surfers,
many of whom use it to buy and sell things on eBay and other auction
sites. When PayPal (not yet X.com) was organized in January 1999, it
wasn't a particularly auspicious time to start a micropayment system,
or any payment system for that matter ... Max, who is a very
bright, very articulate kid who immigrated nine years ago from the Ukraine
and speaks better English than I do, fits the Silicon Valley model better
than does PayPal. Max lives in an apartment with no furniture, drives
a $57,000 sports car, and has a mother back in Chicago who fears (she
doesn't know for sure) that her son is a failure because he doesn't
have a Ph.D. or even a masters degree. PayPal, on the other hand, just
shifts around dollars and cents from one person to another."
AOL's
Point Man in the Web War. How CEO Barry Schuler plans to leave Microsoft
in the dust,
Business Week,
Ray Kurzweil (well known in the "Artificial
Intelligence" field has a web
site.
Kurzweil's 1996 lecture in Israel, "Israel
in the Age of Knowledge." He sits on
two advisory boards
for an Israeli company called Jerusalem Global Ventures.
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles,
March 28, 2003
"When Susan Samueli met her future husband, Henry,
at a dance at Stephen S. Wise Temple in Los Angeles in 1979, she never
could have anticipated how different her life would be today. That was
24 years and three children ago, before Samueli became a household
name in much of Southern California, as Henry co-founded Broadcom,
the leading provider in broadband high-speed communications
technology. It was way before Broadcom went public, and the Samuelis,
with Henry serving as chief technical officer, became multimillionaires
nearly overnight ... Her family, her Judaism and her career (she ran
an alternative health-care consulting practice until 1995) all guide
her new life, just as they did her old one ... Samueli’s interest
in health care is matched by her husband’s passion for technology. 'But
we have a common interest in Judaism,' Henry said. Raised in
the Valley, Susan Samueli was always immersed in the activities
of an active Jewish community. 'It was very different where I went to
high school at Grant. During the High Holidays, the campus was empty.
Of course, everyone was ditching who wasn’t Jewish, too,' Samueli
said ... In the spring of 2001, the Samuelis bought 20 acres of land
adjacent to the already existing Tarbut V’Torah Community Day School
for $20 million. The site, overlooking the hills and valleys of much
of Orange County and directly opposite UC Irvine, will be the future
site of the Samueli Campus. The campus currently provides both elementary
and high school education. The second phase of the building project
includes a full-service Jewish Community Center with a fitness center,
pool, theater and auditorium and facilities to house the Jewish agencies
of Orange County. Groundbreaking will begin when the $20 million campaign
goal is reached. (Approximately 80 percent of phase two has been raised.)
The couple has also been instrumental in the construction of two Orange
County synagogues and recently funded a synagogue in a suburb of Tel
Aviv. They also give extensively to the Bureau of Jewish Education,
Jewish Family Services, the Jewish Federation of Orange County and Morasha
Jewish Day School."
Business 2.0, April 2003
"Pound for pound, who's the biggest, richest media mogul on the
Web? Terry Semel? Nope. Sumner Redstone? Not exactly.
Try Matt Drudge. Years after his big "scoop" -- leaking that
Newsweek was sitting on a story about the tryst between President
Clinton and Monica Lewinsky -- Drudge's website is bigger
than ever. Run on a shoestring, the Drudge Report, a plain-Jane
page of news links and occasional scoops, clears, by our back-of-the-envelope
estimate, a cool $800,000 a year. While other news sites make money,
they don't mint it Drudge-style. New York Times Digital
scored an operating profit of $8.3 million last year. But it has 237
full-time employees, meaning that each worker accounts for about $35,000
in profit. (And that doesn't take into consideration the fact that the
site's reports are actually generated by the newspaper staff, a cost
allocated to the paper side only.) By any calculus, Drudge's
site might be the most efficiently run on the Web; it makes the Times
site look bloated. Drudge's is a two-person operation (although
he never mentions his right-hand man); that means it makes $400,000
per employee. And he never has to leave the comfort of his Miami condo.
Lessons From a Web Media Powerhouse How to give a two-man shop the reach
and influence of a major news organization. 1. Offload the Work. Instead
of paying reporters to ferret out stories, Drudge gets the news
through his network of sources. 'To my knowledge Matt does virtually
no independent reporting whatsoever,' says his pal Lucianne Goldberg.
2. Aggregate, Don't Duplicate. When Drudge gets wind of breaking news,
he doesn't bother trying to report the story. Instead he just points
his readers to other news sources that already have the story, whether
it's an obscure Norwegian paper or the New York Times. 3. Zero
Bureaucracy Means Great Speed. Drudge can post breaking news in the
time it takes to type a headline into an HTML file. There's no anchor
to put in the makeup chair or layers of editors who need to vet a story
before it goes live. 4. Don't Discuss Business. Drudge never
explains how he stays on top of the news 24 hours a day. This builds
mystique and creates buzz, which translates into traffic. The result:
millions of readers and not a penny spent to advertise the website ...In
fact, Drudge does sleep. And he isn't exactly chained to his
keyboard. 'He swims on the beach every day and goes and has a burrito
for lunch,' according to friend Lucianne Goldberg, a conservative
talk-radio host ... Michael Kinsley, founding editor of Slate,
who once tried, unsuccessfully, to do business with Drudge, says
the go-it-alone persona is just a mask. 'Matt's very different
from his public image. He thinks he's this incredibly powerful, ruthless
avenger,' Kinsley says. 'But he's actually sort of an innocent,
Walter Mitty type -- except that his fantasies are more or less true.'
In fact, he's written the book on building an online media business."
[Note: Akamai Technologies was co-founded by Daniel Levin. Levin,
an officer in the Israeli military, was killed in one of the planes
involved the 9-11 attack. Another censor listed below is Yahoo! -- which
is headed by Terry Semel, also Jewish and a judge at a recent Israel
Film Festival.]
Al Jazeera
and the Net - free speech, but don't say that,
By John Lettice, The Register (UK), April
7, 2003
"Arabic satellite TV network Al Jazeera's efforts to build an English-language
web site have run into another speed bump. Akamai Technologies, whose
'Accelerated Networks can stand up to unpredictable traffic and flash
crowds for even the largest events,' fired Al Jazeera last week.
Akamai issued a statement saying it had worked 'briefly' last week with
Al Jazeera, but that it had decided 'not to continue a customer
relationship' with the channel. No reason was given for the decision,
but an Al Jazeera spokeswoman told the New York Times
that companies were coming under 'nonstop political pressure' to refuse
to do business with the channel. Al Jazeera launched an English-language
web site at the end of last month, and this immediately came under fire
on several fronts. It was hacked, DDoSed, Network Solutions was tricked
into allowing the domain to be hijacked (which inspires confidence),
and US host DataPipe gave it notice after what Al Jazeera claimed
was pressure from other customers. The English language site was up
at time of writing, but Al Jazeera clearly needs to find a robust,
long-term solution, and this is equally clearly going to be very difficult
indeed. There are many ironies to the multi-decked 'get Al Jazeera'
campaign; one attack suppressed the site with the slogan 'Let Freedom
Ring!' (only up to a point, presumably), while practically none of those
busily denying themselves the right to access it can have had time to
read it in the first place ... Al Jazeera protests, in fairly
mild terms, that it is 'increasingly appearing to be subject to a campaign
designed at limiting its access to Western audiences,' and this does
look awfully like the truth ... Essentially Al Jazeera's 'Iraqi propaganda'
activities are no greater (perhaps even rather less) than those of many
liberal media outlets. In the UK many of these have also been criticised
by the government, but they have not been the subject of major hacking
attacks, nor have hosting and services companies declined to do business
with them. We should also clarify something regarding the footage of
the prisoners and the dead servicemen; military spokesmen to the contrary,
reproducing such images is not a breach of the Geneva Convention. The
Geneva Convention is directed at governments, and does not cover news
organisations. Al Jazeera has arguably broadcast images of the Iraqi
Government breaching the Geneva Convention, but that is not the same
thing. To get this into perspective, note that one of the most striking
pictures from the Vietnam war was of a South Vietnamese officer shooting
a prisoner - do we argue that this should not have been published? If
Al Jazeera had footage of an Iraqi shooting a British prisoner, should
that be broadcast? The other way around? Are our standards today different
from those of the 60s, or do the criteria differ depending on the nationalities
of the participants and/or the audience? The answers are not straightforward,
nor should they be ... By Western standards Al Jazeera may have breached
standards of taste and decency, and may not (again by Western standards)
have sufficiently contextualised bin Laden and Iraqi exercises in propaganda.
But by Middle Eastern standards Western media could similarly be accused
of too readily parrotting propaganda in the other direction, and of
too frequently operating a system of self-censorship. There's some merit
to both points of view, the demise of Arnett being a good example of
self-censorship, but there's no good reason for casting Al Jazeera into
outer darkness - unless of course the problem is that its coverage has
been increasingly reaching a Western audience. Or an Internet audience.
Back in the irony department Yahoo!, which you may recall had
some trouble with the French government a while back over Nazi memorabilia,
is one of the companies declining to carry Al Jazeera advertising owing
to 'war-related sensitivity,' and there's probably a high correlation
between people who want Al Jazeera run off the web and people
who oppose virtually any kind of internet censorship. Al Jazeera meanwhile
has racked up millions more new TV viewers than it could possibly hope
to gain via a web site, and its service has continued to be available
in the US during the war. So why is the Internet different? To some
extent, it possibly isn't. Al Jazeera seems to have been able to run
an Arabic web site without coming under serious fire until it introduced
the English version. Similarly, it's been able to run an Arabic TV station
without Western companies trying to pull the plugs on it, and with Western
governments denouncing it on the one hand while using it in order to
get to its audience on the other. So it's possibly OK if it's over there,
in Arabic, but not if it's over here, in English (if it goes ahead with
its planned English TV service later this year, then we'll no doubt
find out). The Internet is different, however, in that despite it being,
allegedly, the New Frontier, the ultimate medium for free speech, it's
also eminently suited to the suppression of free speech. Sure, anybody
can set up a web site and say whatever they like, but only if not too
many people read what they say, and only if they're careful about what
it is they say. Say something controversial that enough people don't
like, and you'll get attacked. Say something particular pressure groups
don't like, and you'll get attacked on multiple fronts, bombarded via
email, mail and voice phone, indirectly via your neighbours, other people
in your organisation, hosts your organisation deals with, other outfits
using the same hosts who don't like the publicity."
Snail
mail attack could be launched online,
New Scientist, April 15, 2003
"An avalanche of unwanted post could be released upon an unsuspecting
victim using nothing more than an internet connection and some simple
code, a team of US researchers says. The attack, devised by Aviel
Rubin at Johns Hopkins University and Simon Byers [also Jewish?]
and David Kormann at AT&T Labs, involves automatically subscribing
a victim to hundreds of thousands of catalogue request forms that are
available online. Using search engines to instantly locate such forms
and then simple code to automatically feed a victim's name and address
into them, the researchers say such an attack would be dangerously simple
to carry out. 'We have been living in a state of bliss, spoiled by the
lack of any concerted attacks that utilise these new services, search
engines in particular,' the researchers write in a paper entitled Defending
Against an Internet-based Attack on the Physical World. The researchers
say guarding against an attack would be difficult ... Aside from the
impact on individuals, Rubin and his co-authors warn that such
an attack could even disable a local postal office."