Turkey - Social (Unrest) Media

(Photo credit: vpickering)

Once again, a nation's people has taken to the streets protesting its government. This time around it's Turkey, now into the third day of protests sparked by government plans to build a shopping mall in a public park. A swift and draconian reaction by police to the original protest (a relatively small scale affair) saw tear gas canisters being fired directly at protesters, with images of badly injured people quickly making their way online.

The demonstrations quickly swelled as people took to the streets. Quite who those people were and what their motivation, we'll probably never know. Some undoubtedly were thugs, looters and anarchists bent on using the protests to their own ends. Some probably represent a disaffected opposition, beaten at the ballots recently with mutters of alleged irregularities.

But the overwhelming majority were people like you and me, angered and feeling disempowered by their government, driven to action by reports of shocking police brutality. Those reports moved fast - Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Quora among other platforms used to get the word out when 'traditional' media was slow on the uptake. Even now, 72 hours into protests that have filled the streets and squares of Istanbul and Ankara, international media coverage is surprisingly muted - although Turkish media apparently have ignored the protests altogether, which is a worry. I first started seeing the reports and images from Istanbul online on Friday - you're always waiting for 'major media' to come in and back them up, always wary of buying images that purport to show events that could be slanted or weighted by vested interest. It's the same problem an editorially minded observer faces with the footage from Syria.

And yet the images kept coming, the reports of people shut in tube stations with gas canisters lobbed in after them, young people with horrific wounds from canisters and rubber bullets fired into the crowd. Yesterday, as the damage increased and images of bloodied civilians flowed, Turkish authorities throttled the Internet, specifically Facebook and Twitter. This report from TechCrunch explains more. Apparently the police pulled back - a mixture of reduced confrontation and information flow combined to take the heat off the demonstrations.

We'll see today whether that has worked - the protests have been more focused in the afternoons so far . But the sight of a wannabe European, secular democracy shutting down the Internet to better control its people as they're bludgeoned by massive force is not one that sits comfortably. You can follow the hashtag #direngeziparki..

Blue Lasers. The UAE's Newest Toy.

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gulf News reports, bothering to give us remarkably little background, on the arrest of a Yemeni man in Sharjah for selling 'blue lasers'. The report is linked for your scanty erudition here. It was Sharjah CID wot made the nick.

Blue lasers are nasty little things. Thanks to quantum advances in laser technology, you can now buy a hand held 1.5 Watt 450nm laser 'pointer' for under Dhs 1,000. They're freely available on the web with sellers such as this one happy to mail you a device.

Most will be aware of the prevalence of red laser pointers in the UAE's cinemas - and there have been numerous reports of dolts pointing red lasers at planes. Well, blue lasers are the Chuck Norris of hand held laser devices - they can actually burn skin, pop balloons, ignite matches and cut plastic. Needless to say, merely a passing flash of one of these babies directly into an unprotected eye could cause permanent retinal damage. In fact the reflected light from a handheld blue laser can cause retinal damage.

They're every schoolboy's dream.

In a number of applications, they're useful things. They're the technology behind Blu-Ray discs - basically, blue lasers operate at a lower waveband than red or green lasers and so can be more tightly focused, allowing manufacturers to read more data in a smaller space. But that also means they can be used to produce more powerful lasers with lower power requirements - in this case actually dangerous devices with no useful application beyond burning things and hooning around. They're based, in case you were wondering, on gallium arsenide diodes.

It would appear from Sharjah CID's action that hand-held blue laser 'pointers' are being effectively banned in the UAE (although I've seen no announcement to that effect - and Gulf News certainly doesn't bother to clarify this). But I would submit that's no bad thing...