Gisha: Legal Center for Freedom of Movement , a multi-ethnic, multi-religious Israeli non-profit, has launched a game called ” Safe Passage .” [ Gisha has exceeded its bandwidth. Not sure when it will be back up. If they respond, I will let you know. Thanks to readers Plattek and Marcelo. ] The group works in Israel toward establishing freedom of movement for Palestinians. The blockade by the Israeli government of the Gaza Strip is an object lesson in what they believe is wrong with current Israeli policy. So to express the trials of impinged movement they have leveraged game dynamics to share the experience. Sponsor The recent news of ships attempting to run the blockade may give the impression that the sea is the main barrier here. But it is, according to Gisha, laws, red tape and checkpoints. In this game, specifically, the ban on commerce between Gaza and the West Bank is underscored. A user plays as a businessman, a student or a father and tries to get home. Gilad Baker, the game’s chief animator, explained the goal of the game. “We faced a challenge – how to make military documents accessible to the public. Our solution was to integrate them into the personal stories of real people in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, to help people understand the policy”. The three character types are confronted with different obstacles and required to get very creative in surmounting them. The Gazan student has to employ a flying hat to convince a military mailbox to examine her request to study at a West Bank University. The West Bank family man enters play by being catapulted from a bench beside his home in the West Bank into Gaza and has to get back. The Gazan businessman has to avoid or neutralize giant coins that threaten the ice cream factory he is trying to open in the West Bank. According to Palestine Notes , the characters were composites based on real people. “The student is based in part on the story of Berlanty Azzam, the 22-year-old Bethlehem University student from Gaza who was seized by Israeli soldiers and removed to Gaza just two months before completing her degree.” Reflecting the membership of the non-profit and the reality of the people involved in the real-world conflicts the game describes, the game can be played in Arabic, Hebrew or English. Discuss

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According to a report by SMobile Systems , entitled ” Threat Analysis of the Android Market ,” Google allows one-fifth of its Android applications to access private data that could be used for malicious purposes. Surveying 48,694 Android applications, or 68% of currently available apps, 29 were additionally found to request information from the user that have been well-documented as fitting the profile of known spyware. Sponsor Open access to the Android by developer talent and the openness of the system to manipulation are currently balanced. Here are some additional findings. “A full eight applications explicitly request a specific permission that would allow the device to brick itself, or render it absolutely unusable. 383 applications were found to have the ability to read or use the authentication credentials from another service or application. Finally, 3% of all of the Market submissions that have been analyzed could allow an application to send unknown premium SMS messages without the user’s interaction or authorization.” How can a company that relies on reliability allow so many potentially screwy apps access to its customers? That’s the price of openness. ” The Android Market offers the ability for developers to create any application they choose with the community regulating whether the application is appropriate and safe, as opposed to relying on a formal screening process….The Android Market offers flexibility that markets such as the Apple App Store do not by allowing anyone to develop and publish an application to the Market’s consumers. This presents the opportunity to easily defraud innocent consumers for financial gain.” Whether the freedom is worth the risk is currently being answered by users and by advertisers. But another question users, and Google itself might ask, is how a system like the Android Market might be kept open but made safer. Discuss

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If you’re looking to say something contentious on the Internet, then Iceland is the place to go. The Icelandic Parliament unanimously passed a proposal yesterday to make the country a “new media haven” in an initiative inspired and strongly backed by Iceland-based whistleblower website WikiLeaks . The proposal, entitled the ” Icelandic Modern Media Initiative “, “resolves to task the government with finding ways to strengthen freedoms of expression and information freedom in Iceland, as well as providing strong protections for sources and whistleblowers.” Sponsor According to the text of the initiative , Iceland hopes to become the international home of news organizations worldwide by way of providing these protections: The legislative initiative outlined here is intended to make Iceland an attractive environment for the registration and operation of international press organizations, new media start-ups, human rights groups and internet data centers. It promises to strengthen our democracy through the power of transparency and to promote the nation’s international standing and economy. It also proposes to draw attention to these changes through the creation of Iceland’s first internationally visible prize: the Icelandic Prize for Freedom of Expression. The proposal goes on to acknowledge that where a particular media is published has become irrelevant in many ways and that the creation of these laws could help create an environment that fosters quality journalism, unafraid of prosecution. “We can create a comprehensive policy and legal framework to protect the free expression needed for investigative journalism and other politically important publishing,” the initiative reads. When Al Jazeera covered the budding proposal last March, it said that “the idea behind IMMI is simple but it’s ambitious – bring together some of the most progressive media laws from many different countries to create one holistic law that will position Iceland at the forefront of the battle to protect journalists, whistleblowers and their sources from oppressive libel laws.” As both Al Jazeera, the Nieman Journalism Lab and others question, however, can laws in one country protect journalists from prosecution in other countries? The article on Nieman Journalism Lab suggests that the laws may not ensure protection from other countries laws, but “if nothing else, it would probably prevent your servers from being forcibly shut down”, were your content hosted in Iceland. For now, however, the effects of IMMI are yet unknown, as it is merely a proposal for laws that remain to be written and tested in international waters. There is also the question of whether or not Iceland has the bandwidth to support large media servers, although the IMMI clearly states that Iceland “has fast undersea cables to some of the world’s largest consumers of information”. Whatever the case, the passing of such a proposal is promising, if just in an altruistic and optimistic journalist’s point of view. Discuss

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It’s graduation season on college campuses and that means lots of young minds are eagerly awaiting the freedom of summer vacation. But for the young entrepreneurs participating in this season’s various startup incubators, the tough work is still ahead. Capital Factory , an Austin-based early-stage startup incubation program, has announced the five companies invited to attend their summer program and in doing so has disclosed a tip that helped the finalists to be selected. Sponsor While millions will flock to beaches to catch some sun and splash in the ocean, the five Capital Factory participants will be diving in head first into a sea of code hoping to improve the quality of their product through group sessions and mentorship opportunities. The five companies include three Texas natives: Hurricane Party from Austin, Smackages from Dallas and RecycleMatch from Houston. The other two participants, Simpz and Corkshare , are from Boston and Cleveland, respectively. So how does an incubator like Capital Factory go about choosing their finalist companies? According to a press release, the answer may be more about the mentors than the actual participants. “The five startups were selected from a pool of hundreds of applicants following their submission of a one-page application, five-minute video and in-person interviews with the mentors,” says Capital Factory. “With many promising entrepreneurs to choose from, the mentors focused on markets that they have experience with and the smartest teams that have already accomplished a lot with very little.” It seems that understanding who you are applying to plays a key role in being accepted into an incubator like Capital Factory. When sending applications to multiple incubators, it’s important to not just send duplicates to each program. Look at who the mentors and facilitator are see what their histories are, and there may be a particular market or interest that you can draw attention to in your application. “The mentors focused on markets that they have experience with and the smartest teams that have already accomplished a lot with very little.” – Capital Factory Capital Factory also makes a point to note that they accepted companies that had already made significant progress at the early-stages without many resources. The point of these programs is to help fund the great companies with innovative ideas that would otherwise go unfunded, so make sure your application expresses your early shoestring efforts. For 10 weeks the five finalist companies will receive guidance from twenty mentors , culminating in a Demo Day in September to show-off their products and their improvements over the summer. The participants will receive up to $20,000 in seed money in return for a 5% equity stake for Capital Factory, as well as a treasure trove of freebies. Hosting, office space, branding development (including logo design), presentation training and recruiting support are just a few of the added bonuses available for the companies. The Capital Factory Demo Day will be streamed live in September, so if you’re interested in learning about these companies and their experiences be sure to catch that later on this year. Discuss

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Insider Pages , which was acquired by CitySearch in 2007, just announced the launch of its new Doctor Finder tool. While there are already a few doctor review sites available on the Internet, most people in the U.S. still mostly base their choice of doctor on the location of the doctor’s office and the insurance the doctor accepts. To find these doctors and dentists, most patients still rely on the insurances’ online directories, which usually don’t feature any patient feedback. Sponsor 800,000 Doctors – 1.2 Million Reviews Insider Pages currently has more than 800,000 doctors in its system. To get started, Insider Pages has partnered with HealthGrades.com , which syndicates about 1.2 million patient surveys to Insider Pages. While most of the company’s competitors offer extensive databases and reviews , this cooperation with HealthGrades.com also gives Insider Pages access to the HealthGrade’s database of doctors’ records. Thanks to this, users can also check if their doctor is board certified and has a clean record. For more details about a doctor’s records (including malpractice and sanction records), Insider Pages refers its users to HealthGrades. Insider Pages also allows its users to refine their searches based on other criteria like the doctor’s gender, experience and ability to speak certain languages. As Insider Pages’ general manager Eric Peacock told us when we talked to him earlier today, rating doctors is different from rating a restaurant. While Insider Pages allows its users to write regular freeform reviews, the company also asks every reviewer 10 questions about their experience, ranging from how much time the doctor spent with the patient to how well they listened to the patient’s complaints. Privacy, of course, is a major concern when it comes to doctors. As Peacock told us, the company gives users the freedom to share as much information as they want to, but by default, these reviews are never shared on the patient’s Facebook feed. Discuss

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