Freedom for Venezuela

Published on Feb 27, 2014 on Youtube
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If you need more information, or you have information that might be useful, please write to:
freevenezuela@activist.com
or go to:
http://freedomforvenezuela.wordpress....
Twitter: @freedvzla
Music credit:
Epic Battles, by Dawid Jaworski
Aftermath, by Grégoire Lourme
Mission Briefing, by Marc Teichert
Destiny, by Marc Teichert

UN says North Korea crimes 'could amount to genocide'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-26223040

UN says North Korea crimes 'could amount to genocide'

17 February 2014 Last updated at 14:01 GMT

The UN says North Korea is committing crimes against humanity including torture, mass killings and starvation that could amount to genocide.

The Independent Commission of Inquiry's chairman, Michael Kirby, said testimony gathered in the UN report "tells the stories of the prison camps... of the babies who are born stunted... of the abductions, of the public executions."

Hackathon goers create apps for getting the information out — in Cuba

http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/02/01/3906687/miamis-first-hackathon-for-cuba.html

Posted on Sunday, 02.02.14

TECHNOLOGY

Natalia Martinez, Director of Technology and Innovation of Roots of Hope, left, and Raul Moas, Executive Director of Roots of Hope, speak during the Hackathon for Cuba event on Feb. 1, 2014 in Miami. The hackathon brought together experts and programmers to devise innovative technology solutions aimed at strengthening communications and information access in Cuba. The event is organized by Roots of Hope with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. ROBERTO KOLTUN / EL NUEVO HERALD STAFF

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BY NANCY DAHLBERG

NDAHLBERG@MIAMIHERALD.COM

Problems with censorship, extremely costly service and the lowest cellphone and Internet penetration rates in the Western Hemisphere cripple communication in Cuba. Do we think there is an app for that?

At South Florida’s first Hackathon for Cuba on Saturday, there were plenty of ideas for tech solutions to help Cubans disseminate information under the harshest of conditions — and three winners.

Inspired by Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez’s call to action and fueled by caffeine and carbs, about 50 computer programmers formed teams and spent the day building solutions and then presented them to judges at The LAB Miami, a coworking campus in Wynwood. The event was produced by the nonprofit Roots of Hope, a network of college students and young professionals that help empower Cuban youth through technology and entrepreneurial support. Three $1,000 cash prizes provided by Roots of Hope, Pop.co, The LAB Miami and MIA Collective were awarded.

Two of the three winning teams based their solutions on using email to disseminate the information, which obviously seems quite primitive for this group. “You have to challenge yourself to think outside the box,” explained Raul Moas, Roots of Hope’s executive director. “We’re taking a step back in time to move forward.”

For hackathon participants Daniel Arzuaga, Felix Diaz and Salvador Pascual, using email just made sense, as 70 percent of Cubans have access to email but just 3 percent have access to the Internet.

“Our app creates the Internet without the Internet,” said Arzuaga, who moved here from Cuba 14 years ago. He explained that a person could access marketplace information, such as who is selling iPhones, or a condensed version of a Wikipedia entry, for instance. They plan to continue developing the applications.

Developers Jose Pimienta and Osniel Gonzalez also won for an email application. Called Cuba Direct, their application helps Cubans browse the web through email, allowing ways to search Google, Wikipedia or recent Twitter updates, for instance. Will they continue developing it? With a good start on the development on Saturday, “we are going to put it on a server and let our [developer] friends in Cuba play with it,” said Pimienta, who moved here from Cuba and 2009. Gonzalez arrived in 2012.

The third winner, Ronny Rodriguez, envisions a $50-$75 kit that would include a mini computer called Raspberry Pi that can store information and essentially create a web access point for sharing the information with others. “I want to share something with the Cuban people because I know how difficult it is. I was there,” said Rodriguez, who moved from Cuba about five years ago.

Nine other projects competed, including one for sending Cuban blogs from the inside to the outside world. Other ones addressed maximizing the benefits of expensive Internet cafe sessions or essentially creating the cafe at home. The overall goal of the hackathon was to bring together people who are passionate about helping Cuba with those who live and breathe technology to devise solutions and continue working on them, said Natalia Martinez, chief technology officer for Roots of Hope. A hackathon ground rule: The solutions being developed could not violate U.S. or Cuban laws.

The hackathon, sponsored by the Knight Foundation, kicked off Friday night with an opening party attended by more than 100 people. It included a few remarks from Sanchez, via video because she had to leave unexpectedly Friday morning. Sanchez said Cubans desperately need innovative apps to disseminate information. She also said she hopes to soon see the next hackathon — not in Miami but in Cuba.

Typically one- or two-day contests where programmers form teams to build apps and compete for prizes, hackathons are fairly common in South Florida now and are also becoming more specialized. In recent months, events have addressed immigration reform and education. And it’s hackathon high season in South Florida. The PayPal BattleHack is returning to The LAB Miami Feb. 22-23. One winner will be selected to compete in the global finals for a $100,000 prize. Then on March 22-23, again at The LAB, there will be a Music Hack Day to kick off the MIA Music Summit. And in May, eMerge Americas is planning a hackathon.

Roots of Hope wants to hold Hackathon for Cuba events in San Francisco and New York later in the year.

Follow Nancy Dahlberg on Twitter @ndahlberg

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/02/01/3906687/miamis-first-hackathon-for-cuba.html#storylink=cpy

ROOTS OF HOPE-- HACKATHON

Hackathon Aims to Connect Cubans to the Net

To participate check out:
http://www.rootsofhope.org/

Here is the full article

Imagine living in a country where it would take a quarter of a month's salary to access the Internet for an hour, and a heavily censored Internet at that. In this world, access to information and the ability to send information to others, among the most ubiquitous actions of the connected world, is a luxury.

When Internet cafes were finally legalized (just last year) this was the position that many Cubans found themselves in. Their country remains the least connected in the Western hemisphere in terms of both Internet and cell phone use. To put it in plain terms, even post-earthquake Haiti was more connected both to the outside world and to one another. And yet with cell phone and Internet use on the rise on the island, owed to modest government reforms, there are emerging opportunities for connectivity that have yet to be explored.

In Miami, the home of the largest Cuban population outside the island, these changes and new opportunities have not gone unnoticed. This weekend, Raices de Esperanza, a non-profit organization focused on empowering Cuban youth, launched the first ever "Hackathon for Cuba" in hopes of coming up with innovative software technologies that will help those on the island connect with the outside world, and to each other.

Programmers ranging from non-Cubans to Cuban Americans who were born in the U.S. to recent arrivals participated in the event, keeping in mind the specific context of the island. Since the island lags so far behind the connected world in telecommunications, only legacy Android apps, text messaging, and email services could prove useful for the experiment.

"Cuba is a country that needs more than anything to develop a means of freedom through technology," said Yoani Sanchez, Cuba's best-known dissident blogger, in a pre-recorded statement played for participants at the event. The idea for the hackathon came during a meeting with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Sanchez, and members of Raices de Esperanza last November. "I know that over the course of these few days that potential solutions [for connectivity] will be found."

"The more I researched about Cuba and got to know the restrictions that the island has, the more interesting it was," said participant and programmer Miguel Chateloin, a Cuban American born in the states. "We decided that we could make something that would help people like Yoani Sanchez-- bloggers, journalists, and political dissidents-- who want to communicate with the outside world and blog."

Chateloin and teammate Lazaro Gamio spent the weekend developing software that will allow users to post on a WordPress blog directly through email. The service that they call Postales (Spanish for postcards) draws inspiration from those used by major tech companies before smartphones were so widely available. "Facebook would send you an email telling you that a friend commented or did some other kind of interaction, and you could respond right on your email and connect to their server without ever having to log in," Chateloin explained. "It's the same idea."

Cuban-born duo Osniel Gonzalez and Jose Pimienta also chose to focus on email solutions to communications. "The Internet access is too limited in Cuba, but most of the people have access to email at least sometimes," said Gonzalez. "We are focusing on getting information from different news organizations into the country through email. If we compress the information and send it as attachments in the email, it can be downloaded and shared on USB."

Pimienta spoke about the censorship that is pervasive on the island, and noted that even some volumes from national hero Jose Marti's writings are mysteriously missing from the libraries on the island. "If you are even censoring your own culture and heritage, imagine how much you are going to get censored if you are trying to learn about the world in 2014," he said. The two worked on software called CubaDirect that allows users to search the unfiltered web and find news stories through a series of emails back and forth with the service, using a code to switch potentially targeted words out for other slang terms that Cubans might understand.

"We think that this can serve as a model for similar countries if we get it right," said Brett Hudson, Director of Business Development at the LAB Miami, the venue for the hackathon. He talked of the need of the community to get together and develop these technologies in a set period of time, even if many of them ultimately fall short of perfection. "Something like 90 percent of businesses fail. Is that a bad thing? This can be a beacon of hope for people to come experiment with ideas, and see what succeeds."

Though the lines often get blurry when dealing with a country like Cuba, organizers stated that they are committed to obeying the laws of both the U.S. and Cuba.

Winners of the event included CubaDirect, Rasberry PI, a $25 Internet server for local use, and Apretaste-- a service that allows users to surf Wikipedia and online marketplaces by sending an email titled 'ayuda' (help) to apretaste@gmail.com. The latter service already saw 3,000 users last month from the island, developers said.

"The hard work begins after this," said Natalia Martinez, chief innovations and technology officer at Raices de Esperanza. "It's only a one day hackathon, and after this it comes down to following up on the pitches and figuring out what needs to happen for those pitches to be finalized and implemented in a way that is high impact."

The organization has plans to expand the Miami hackathon to Silicon Valley and to New York later in the year, Martinez said. "We have always believed as an organization that technology can play a key role in what I call 'opening doors or widening cracks' that Cubans have made for themselves… This is only the first of many steps."

Al Jazeera’s coverage of the Hackathon is here.

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/2/1/hackathon-cuban-miami.htmlis here

Castro's police is now also arresting the children of the Ladies in White

Video taken in Holguín on January 3, 2014