links for 2007-09-18

• How Wall Street is financing China's surveillance boom
  China companies developing surveillance and security systems are increasingly incorporating themselves in the US and aggressively raising funds from Western investors.
  (tags: China privacy surveillance)
• Ethan Zuckerman at IdeaFestival: The Internet is not flat
  Liveblogging by Evgeny Morozov from IdeaFestival on a talk by EthanZ on the underused potential of the Internet to foster global dialogue about important issues, including lots of examples and insights from all over the world.
  (tags: conference GlobalVoices globality EthanZuckerman IdeaFestival)
• James McLurkin at IdeaFestival: Distributed robotics and swarm behavior
  More liveblogging by Evgeny from Louisville: MIT's McLurkin talks about swarm intelligence and distributed robotics and gets a few dozen robots to move on stage and perform as an orchestra.
  (tags: IdeaFestival robotics swarmintelligence)
• A river crab wearing three watches, or language-vs-Internet-censorship in China
  Rebecca McKinnon explains on her blog how Chinese bloggers use sarcasm and phonetic detours to avert censorship. "Thus, when bloggers seem to be writing nonsensically about "river crab," they're actually talking about censorship".
  (tags: China blogging censorship)