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Catalonia plots digital government in exile in bid for independence

Is this the future where tech meets politics??? Saw this article and thought you guys will like it
Photo credit: David Ramos/Getty Images

As Spain threatens to suspend the region’s autonomy, Catalan activists are making plans to take their government online.

Catalan activists are preparing to create a digital government-in-exile if Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy follows through on his threat to suspend the region’s autonomy in a bid to prevent it declaring independence.

“If the Spanish government does restrict Catalan autonomy – especially if it bans Catalan political parties – we will probably have a clandestine government,” says Simona Levi, founder of digital rights non-profit platform Xnet. “The internet would be an important part of that.”

Although details of the plan are unclear Thomas Harrington, professor of Hispanic studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, suggests “a country in the east of Europe which had itself gone through the process of declaring its independence from the former Soviet Union not all that long ago,” – believed to mean the Estonian government – might be Catalonia’s blueprint.

Estonia – already the world’s most digitally advanced society – plans eight data embassies that will each store copies of the government’s critical data to reboot in the case of physical or cyber attack. The first embassy, based in a cage in a high-security data centre in Betzdorf, Luxembourg, comes online at the start of 2018.

“When the Russians invaded the Ukraine we asked, ‘Can we survive as a nation even if we don’t own our territory?’” explains Taavi Kotka, Estonia’s former chief information officer who spearheaded the scheme. “If you can have everything online, you become location independent. We built data embassies in the way Lord Voldemort placed his soul in different vessels – if one goes down you boot up another for digital continuity.”

The Catalan government and pro-independence activists have already survived an online game of cat and mouse with the Spanish state, according to Xnet analysis. On September 13, the Spanish government used a court order to shut down the referendum.cat web page – prompting the Catalan government to open new sites and a Valencia-based user called GrenderG to publish the site’s content on Github.

Clone sites proliferated and over the following ten days the Spanish government blocked more than 140 websites, forced Google Play to remove an app with voter information and blocked the domain gateway.ipfs.io, which used the peer-to-peer Inter Planetary File System protocol to store referendum information across a wide network of servers. Guardia Civil officers raided the headquarters of the .cat registry on September 20, seizing computers and arresting the company’s CTO Pep Masoliver – who was later charged with sedition.

“The Spanish government is using an anti-phishing technical infrastructure to stop people going to those websites,” says John Graham-Cumming, CTO of web security company Cloudflare. “In Togo or Gabon or Tunisia or Syria with maybe one large telco that’s probably state owned it’s relatively easy to shut the internet down. Inside Spain, they’re redirecting those domain names to their own servers where there’s a page from the Guardia Civil saying the page is shut by court order.”

“This is not something that you normally see in a modern democracy – it’s the kind of thing you see in Turkey, Egypt, China and Iran,” says security consultant Troy Hunt.

In response, activists set up channels through encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram, guiding internet users to access the affected sites using Virtual Private Networks and proxy services. During the October 1 referendum and resulting police crackdown, polling station volunteers communicated through clandestine data networks created by routing smartphones through VPNs to operate without access to the open internet. In the streets, activists and referendum officials chanted “airplane mode”, urging voters to preserve network bandwidth for people working inside the polling stations.

“What we are seeing playing out in Catalonia is the strategic use of secrecy via technology to imagine and enact a different kind of politics,” says Dr Clare Birchall, senior lecturer in contemporary culture at Kings College London who writes on secrecy and surveillance argues this represents a new, radical form of secrecy.

“We could say that the Spanish government feels as threatened by this appropriation of secrecy and opacity as it does by the possibility of Catalan independence. From arcana imperii to covert surveillance and operations by intelligence services, secrecy has largely always been the preserve of the state. This could herald the rise of a ‘radical secrecy’ – an attempt by activist groups to establish secret networks to rival those of the state.”

Catalan premier Carles Puigdemont is expected to declare independence on Tuesday at a session of the Catalan parliament already declared illegal by Rajoy. In a Sunday interview with Spain’s El País newspaper, Mr Rajoy insisted “the government will ensure that any declaration of independence will lead to nothing.” Asked whether he was prepared to invoke the Spanish constitution’s Article 155, allowing the national parliament to run the autonomous region, Mr Rajoy added: “I don’t rule out absolutely anything that is within the law.”

 

We found this article on this link below:

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/catalan-government-independence-internet-spain

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source http://www.mojomedia.pro/catalonia-plots-digital-government-exile-bid-independence/

UK crowdfunding platform Seedrs hits £50m valuation following £6m raise

I actually have worked with seeds team before and can say they deserve every penny of this. They are an amazing platform and has a brilliant track record of helping start ups to grow.

 

Yessi Bello Perez from UK TECH NEWS reports.

 

Seedrs is now valued at £50m following a £6m crowdfunding campaign ran on its own platform.

The company, which raised £4m from Woodford Investment Management last month, received the funds from more than 2,000 of its customers.

According to Seedrs, the average individual investment amount was £3,200, with the biggest individual investment hitting £800,000. Most investors, it said, came from the UK, Germany, Portugal, France and Italy.

Jeff Kelisky, chief executive officer of Seedrs, said he was delighted with the news. “It was highly important to us that we could open up as much as possible for our existing investor base, and this sum, combined with Woodford’s investment of £4m earlier this month takes us to £10m.

“This round is yet more evidence of the market’s conviction that Seedrs is on the right path to delivering shareholder value by opening venture capital opportunities to retail investors for fast growth companies – and without Seedrs having pioneered regulated equity investment, these opportunities would have remained closed to them,” he added.

British tennis star Andy Murray backed the company: “It is with great pride that I have made this investment into Seedrs latest funding round. As an active investor into early-stage businesses through the Seedrs platform, it was important for me to take up my pre-emption rights.”

“I have made a substantial follow on investment into this round to show my support for all that Seedrs has achieved since the last raise in 2015. The team has done some great work in supporting European startups and I’m looking forward to seeing how the business will continue to grow with this additional investment,” Murray added.

Seedrs will use the funds to launch new product capabilities, to boost sales and marketing efforts and launch a series of strategic partnerships.

The company is also looking to scale its campaign executing through the use of automation, machine learning and AI.

The post UK crowdfunding platform Seedrs hits £50m valuation following £6m raise appeared first on mojo media.

source http://www.mojomedia.pro/uk-crowdfunding-platform-seedrs-hits-50m-valuation-following-6m-raise/

What Phil had to say about us :-)

This is what makes what we do worth doing.

We have been working with Phil at Pathway Cleaning for a while now. After only 3 months, we were able to rank them for the key words they were after. We even out ranked brands in their market that has historically been there for ages and has a bigger war chest.

Makes me Happy

Shan and Mojo Media team has been working with us to grow the cleaning business and he has done a fab job with advice, guidance and then the delivery of the our site. Thanks Shan for your patience and support.

Phil Egginton

Pathway Cleaning Ltd.

 

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source http://www.mojomedia.pro/phil-say-us/

Twitter Trials 280 Characters: Good, Bad or just Ugly

Well, what I really liked about twitter is that, with the constraint of limited word count one had to really be to the point without hiding behind long winded posts. However , see the post below by Jonathan Davies, editor, Digital Marketing Magazine.

 

Twitter has announced it is trialling a 280-character limit on its tweets for some users.

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was the first to trial the doubled character limit, explaining that it is “a small change, but a big move for us”. He said the social media giant was addressing a “real problem people have when trying to tweet”.

The change will be tested in all languages aside from Chinese, Japanese and Korean – three languages which convey more in a single character than their international counterparts.

In a blog post, Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen, said: “Trying to cram your thoughts into a Tweet – we’ve all been there, and it’s a pain.”

“We understand since many of you have been Tweeting for years, there may be an emotional attachment to 140 characters – we felt it, too.

“But we tried this, saw the power of what it will do, and fell in love with this new, still brief, constraint,” she said.

 

 

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source http://www.mojomedia.pro/twitter-trials-280-characters-good-bad-just-ugly/

10 SOCIAL MEDIA FACTS TO BLOW YOUR MIND.

This lovely little one was designed by Kathryn Wheeler and brought to you by MainStreetHost.  Interesting way to visualise the data I must say.

The post 10 SOCIAL MEDIA FACTS TO BLOW YOUR MIND. appeared first on mojo media.

source http://www.mojomedia.pro/10-social-media-facts-blow-mind/

Google Campus: LONDON – Planning Your Growth: Scaling Your Team

Just saw this event happening at the Google campus in London. Sound quite interesting. As one of the biggest challenge for any startup these days is to have a clear vision of how to scale and grow your business properly.  I have seen many fail at this stage by trying to grow too quickly without planning or being to naive about the need for steady growth and gets eaten up by a competition. 

I might actually go on this one.. If you want to come and network with me – Let me know, it will be fun. 

Here is the Link for the event page: 

When start-ups are founded, the talent is probably the biggest asset it has and as time goes by that won’t change: Attracting, retaining and nurturing the right talent in your scale-up is crucial for its success.

But growing a team isn’t easy – when is the right time to hire? Which roles should you hire for first? How much should you pay? How do you find the best talent? And how do you attract it to your scale-up?

If these questions are of interest to you, then you should come to our event on 28 September. The event is free, and you will hear:

– Bill Boorman, recruitment tech guru, giving a talk on the recruitment technology industry and startups and scaleups can benefit from it

– Hung Lee from Workshape, Alex van Klaveren from Kandidate and Alex Charradaudea from Linkedin, talking about considerations when growing your team, particularly with regards to new technologies which exist

 

Event location

Main Event Space

Event language

English

•  A COMMUNITY-RUN EVENT

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source http://www.mojomedia.pro/google-campus-london-planning-growth-scaling-team/