From The Atlantic: North Korea’s Digital Underground

By Sabri Ben-Achour of station WAMU

(Photo: Sabri Ben-Achour)

But it didn’t go to her bank account — she doesn’t have one, and she can’t afford one. It went to her phone. The phone is a bank account. You don’t write checks, you send text messages. This is mobile money.

Haiti isn’t known as a leader in finance or technology. But some of the country’s poorest residents are leading the way to new system of cell phone-based banking.

Kokoévi Sossouvi is in charge of economic recovery for the aid group, Mercy Corps, which is operating in Haiti. Sossouvi has been crisscrossing the countryside, from one packed town meeting to another, explaining how the cell phone banking works.

“We’re trying to give people access to financial services, so they can save money, have a safe way to store their hard earned cash, so they can make transactions,” Sossouvi said.

At a standing-room only crowd at one meeting, Sossouvi asks, “Is there anyone here who has a cell phone?”

About half the crowd yells out: “Yes.” Mobile phones are common in Haiti. About 40 percent of people have one, but only 10 percent have bank accounts. They’re considered expensive, and not worth the trouble for small amounts of money.

According to Sossouvi, using cell phones to transfer funds will make things much simpler for Haiti’s small merchants. They’ll be able to move their inventory around much faster, she said.

“You can phone your suppliers and say, send this to me on the next TapTap, here’s your money, I’ll pick it up and have my sale,” Sossouvi said. “It’s just going to make commerce simpler.”

(Photo: Sabri Ben-Achour)

“What if we collect all these electronic bonds and the bank goes out of business?” Adeline asked.

Larousse has his doubts too. He says, sometimes when you talk on the phone, you hear the lines cross. Could that happen with the money?

Sossouvi of Mercy Corps said these concerns are completely understandable and that in the training, they tell people that their money is going to be transferred safely through the phone.

“They turn around and say to us ‘it better come out of that phone!’ “Sossouvi said. “’My money better come out of that phone! I don’t know what that story is but my money better come out of that damn phone!’ And then the second time they cash out, they say ‘is there any chance I can keep some money on the phone because it’s actually kind of convenient’.”

And it’s more secure than cash, said Charles Duthard, who sat in the front row of one of the town meetings.

“When you have cash, somebody can rob you if they see what you have in your hand,” Duthard said. “But this way nobody has any idea how much you have.”

And even if someone takes your phone, they won’t have your personal identification number.

Mercy Corps is partnering with Voila, Haiti’s second largest cell phone network, and Unibank, one of the country’s largest banks to offer the mobile money service. The banks hope it can get more money circulating through the banking system.

The government could conceivably use it to make tax collection more efficient. And Mercy Corps has its own reasons for wanting to shift to mobile money. Project manager Andrew Lucas said the group hands out 20,000 emergency food vouchers a month.

“It takes a lot of time to physically hand out the vouchers, and there’s a lot of tracking for fraud, and there’s a lot of follow up, so I also saw mobile money as an easier way to cut down a lot of time and expense,” Lucas said.

Under the pilot program, Mercy Corps “deposits” about $40 a month into each person’s cellphone savings account — and they can use their phones like debit cards at a few local stores. If all goes well, mobile money is expected to go commercial soon. Charles Duthard said it reminds him of when mobile phones came to Haiti.

“Back when I was younger I had family all over the little islands, and the only way to communicate with them was to record tapes and send them the tapes and that’s how they would hear from me,” said Charles Duthard. “Now I can pick up a phone and give them a call.”

That changed his life, and he thinks mobile money might too.
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• Rebuilding Haiti
• Michael Deibert’s Haiti Blog
• Haiti’s ‘restavek’ children

Tetris, as many of you probably know, can be completely addictive. There’s just something about stacking all those shapes in nice even rows. And in recent years, we’ve been told that researchers think Tetris may be more than just an excellent time-killer. Well, now there’s a new study from Oxford University that shows Tetris may help reduce trauma. From the BBC: “Volunteers were exposed to distressing images, with some given the game to play 30 minutes later, the PLoS One journal reported. Players had fewer “flashbacks”, perhaps because it helped disrupt the laying down of memories, said the scientists. It is hoped the study could aid the development of new strategies for minimising the impact of trauma.” In this week’s WTP, We’ll hear more from Dr. Emily Holmes, one of the researchers who worked on the study.

Also in this episode, we’ll take a look at one of the latest ways the open-source mapping and texting platform, Ushahidi, is being used. In Cairo, Harassmap is using it to document cases of sexual harassment of Egyptian women.

Then, we’ll hear about about another mapping project called Facts on the Ground, a web and iPhone app that will give you the latest information on Israeli settlement activity collected by Americans for Peace Now.

And we’ll end the podcast with one of our favorite topics: the use of technology in classroom learning. This time, we travel to South Africa to hear about how cell phones are being used to help local students. Here’s the promised video:

Remember, you can follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Counterfeit drugs are a massive global problem. The UN estimates the worldwide trade in fake pharmaceuticals to be upwards of $500 billion. Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly in the developing world, die each year because they don’t get the medication they thought they were getting. But what if there were an easy, cheap way for those buying the medications to validate their authenticity? And what if that system used a tool that most people in the developing world had close to hand — a cell phone? Well, that’s where a company called Sproxil comes in. Sproxil provides a scratch-off authentication label attached to medication. At the point of sale, a customer can send a free text message via short-code to a number provided on the label. And in just seconds, they’ll receive a message back either authenticating the drug, or warning the consumer that it might be fake. We’ll have an interview with Sproxil’s 28 year-old founder, Ashifi Gogo, who is himself from Ghana in West Africa. Here are a few links for that story:

• More about Sproxil’s technology
• Other tech approaches for battling counterfeit drugs

We’ve also got a great interview about some work done by our friends at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. They got an inside look at some hacking done by the Chinese against Indian websites. We speak with Rafal Rohozinski, of the Ottawa-based SecDev Group. Rohozinski worked on the report, called Shadows in the Cloud: Investigating Cyber Espionage 2.0.

Here are some other links of interest from the ‘cast:

• The World Science discussion on geo-engineering with Scott Barrett
• North Korea’s Red Star Operating System
• Finnish post to scan snail mail, send it on…
• BBC: Tributes to ‘father of the personal computer’

Remember, you can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes, or RSS.

Join us on Facebook and be part of campaign to get 1,000 fans by the end of May!!

This week’s podcast comes to you not from The World newsroom in Boston, but the one in London. And since I’m here, let’s load up the show with some tech goodies from this side of the Big Pond. We lead with a podcast exclusive: an interview with bioinformatician David Aanensen, who works in the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College in London. He and his team have created an app for the Google Android operating system called EpiCollect. The idea is elegantly simple: many scientists are out in the field gathering information on different infectious disease organisms worldwide. Much of that data ends up in databases at Imperial College. Geography is often of significance in comparing disease organisms across the planet. So, why not devise an open source smartphone app that allows the user in the field to enter relevent information directly into the phone, where it is automatically geo-tagged by the phone’s on-board GPS? Then, when there is a strong mobile data signal, the information on phone will synch directly back to the main database back in the lab. Indeed, why not?

We’ve also got an in-depth look at the present and future of the electric car. You can read more about the latest in electric car technology here and here. And here and here.

And we end with an interesting little cross-atlantic look at how politicians are using Twitter. You can check out Jennifer Golbeck’s research here.

We happen to be on Twitter ourselves, along with Facebook and FriendFeed.

This week’s musical guest: The 5th Dimension with “Up, Up and Away in My Beautiful Balloon.”

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I’ve been doing this podcast for a long time now (four and half years, give or take an episode), and it never fails. The best, most original parts of the show are always suggested by you, the listeners. So, hats off to long-time WTP fan Gabor Kovacs, who not only sends along great story ideas from time to time, but also hosts Electrical Language, his own indie music podcast. Gabor sent me an email earlier this week, and told me to look into Embrace, a low-cost incubator made from phase change materials. The idea, as you can see, is to create a kind of sleeping bag for a low-birth-weight or premature baby. The bag is designed to hold a constant, warm temperature for four hour stretches. This can greatly improve the chances for the baby’s survival. Twenty million low-birth-weight babies are born each year, mostly in rural areas in the developing world that don’t have access to high-end incubators. Hence, the hope that the Embrace could help. We catch up with Linus Liang, one of the co-founders of the non-profit. Listen in to find out how the technology works, and how the field testing is going in India.

Our other big story this week also overlaps the boundaries of tech, science and public health. Researchers in Thailand have reported an AIDS vaccine trial which seems to show, for the first time ever, the prevention of infection. The results are modest, but it is spurring hope for a more effective vaccine to combat HIV/AIDS. I would be remiss if I didn’t include news like this in the podcast, in my humble opinion.

Then, on to worms…Scottish worms to be precise. Scientists are, wait for it, doing a worm census in Scotland. Why? Well, it turns out that those little earth engineers just might be able to tell us the effects of climate change on our environment. We speak with one of the Roy Neilson, one of the scientists involved in The Great Scottish Worm Count.

And we end with a cell phone symphony in Mumbai that was “conducted” by German soundartist Hans Koch and “performed” by, well, the audience. We couldn’t make this stuff up if we tried, could we?

Remember, we’re on Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed.

Right, “no more whining.” The message was received loud and clear from many quarters last week. Sorry about that, and let’s get on with a great show for a fantastic crew of listeners. That was evidenced by the email I received from Dr. Haidar Samiei, who wrote in to say that the people he’s heard interviewed on WTP have been an inspiration to him. He and a friend have developed a medical app for the iPhone — check it out here.

Listener Derek Bruff put me onto our lead story this week: Greg Kulowiec, who is pictured here. Greg is a high school history teacher at Plymouth South High School in Plymouth, MA. He’s also a blogger, and a big fan of using all sorts of technologies as teaching tools in his classroom. It’s part of on-going attempt to talk to tech folks who have, as one listener put it, “dirt under their finger nails.” Greg mentioned a couple of different videos he’s created about his different tech and teaching projects. Here’s a demo video of him using Poll Everywhere. And here’s the Animoto video Greg created using cell phones and Evernote.

Next, we turn to a bit darker side of cell phones. The World’s Jeb Sharp, who creates an amazing weekly history podcast called “How We Got Here,” tells us about the role that conflict minerals (including a few that make your cell phone your cell phone) are playing in the violence in Congo.

And, do you remember last week’s segment on the British engineering team that was trying to break the record for the fastest steam-powered vehicle ever? Well, they did it. We’ll have an update and reaction from the team. We’ll also have an interview with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. At a Wikipedia conference in Buenos Aires this week, there were some interesting decisions made about how pages about subjects that are still alive will be edited. Here’s a BBC link to the story.

And we end with a story about, well, artificial trees. The Brits want to use the flyswatter shaped “trees” as a way of controlling carbon emissions. You can read more about that here.

Here’s a link to the World Science Podcast, which I am also responsible for ruining this week ;)

Just remember that you can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: Yesterday Hillary Clinton was in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She traveled east to a war zone to speak out against rampant sexual violence there. But she also focused on the causes of the conflict. That includes Congo’s lucrative minerals trade. Armed groups in the east fight to control the mines and then use the proceeds to fund their operations. The World’s Jeb Sharp reports.

JEB SHARP: Congo’s mineral wealth is legendary. Its mines supply some of the most valuable metals in the world including tungsten, tin, and coltan. And the United Nations as well as advocacy groups have long documented the way the trade in minerals there fuels the conflict in the eastern part of the country. Colin Thomas-Jensen is with the advocacy group Enough.

COLIN THOMAS JENSEN: The lack of state authority coupled with abundant natural wealth in Congo allows armed groups to control mines, to control taxation routes, and to make tons of money. And in the case of eastern Congo we estimate that armed groups make anywhere from $100 to $180 million last year from taxation and trade in illegal minerals.

SHARP: And Thomas-Jensen says there’s a good chance that some of those minerals are ending up in your cell phone.

THOMAS-JENSEN: Every time your cell phone vibrates the vibration is helped and caused by a little piece of tungsten. That’s what tungsten’s used for. Tin is used for solder to hold electronic parts together. And coltan, or tantalum, is a critical element in cell phone batteries.

SHARP: So when Hillary Clinton called on the international community yesterday to start looking at steps to try to prevent the mineral wealth of the DRC ending up in the hands of those who fund the violence advocacy groups were heartened. Amy Barry is with the group Global Witness in London.

AMY BARRY: Even before she arrived, Secretary Clinton’s choice of countries was important. We were struck by the fact that a number of countries that she visited were effected in one way or another by what’s known as the resource curse. So when did she did speak about the issue of minerals, mineral wealth in the DRC, as an underlying driver of the conflict, that was something that we do see a form of progress.

SHARP: Global Witness has been documenting the problem of so-called conflict minerals for a long time. The group put out a new report on Congo just last month. According to Barry the report showed that all the armed groups in eastern Congo, including the national army, are involved in the mines. And yet the issue is rarely discussed in coverage of the conflict she says.

AMY BARRY: Often the focus of press reports or political dialogue on the conflict in the DRC is around political differences between the groups of between the countries, Rwanda and the DRC for example, or ethnic divisions. In actual fact Global Witness has been saying for a long time that the underlying economic drivers, this vast natural resources wealth, is something that really must be addressed if the conflict is going to come to an end.

SHARP: As for those steps Clinton mentioned, Barry says companies buying, trading, and processing minerals as well as end users like computer and cell phone manufacturers should find out where their minerals are coming from. She says governments can take steps to make sure that happens as well as help the government of the DRC take back control of the industry inside its own borders. And of course consumers themselves can put pressure on both governments and companies. Again, Colin Thomas-Jensen of Enough.

THOMAS-JENSEN: The best way to put pressure on any industry is through consumers and I think what we’re starting to see, and it’s early yet, what we’re starting to see in the United States is a growing number of people who are aware of the situation in eastern Congo, appalled by it and who are learning about this connection between the trade and conflict minerals and consumer electronics. The minerals that are fueling this war are components, are critical elements of cell phones, laptops, mp3 players.

SHARP: What Thomas-Jensen doesn’t want is for companies to simply pull up stakes and take their trade elsewhere as some companies have already done. The idea isn’t to boycott minerals from eastern Congo, or have a moratorium on mining there; that only hurts the Congolese. What advocates do want is for companies to make sure any minerals they do buy aren’t passing through tainted hands, much as the diamond industry learned to avoid the so-called blood diamonds from West Africa that once fueled conflict there. For The World, I’m Jeb Sharp.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp, this is the World. Cell phones are at the center of a brewing media scandal in Britain. The News of The World, a tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, has allegedly been hacking into thousands of celebrity cell phones. The claims have been made by London’s Guardian newspaper. Actress Gwyneth Paltrow, singer George Michael, even London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, are said to be on the list of victims. The scandal is generating a lot of press on both sides of the Atlantic. We wondered how this sort of hacking is done. Our technology correspondent Clark Boyd joins me here in the studio. So Clark, you wanna get into my cell phone, get my phone messages, how do you do it?

CLARK BOYD: Well, I could just, first of all, do something like steal your cell phone. [LAUGHS] That would be one of the easiest ways to do it. Of course, that’s not really what you would consider hacking. Another thing I could do is more complicated and more costly, and gets into lots of gray legal territory, and that would be to wire tap, to actually intercept your phone calls. The other thing I could do is approach the cell phone provider, the company that provides your cell phone service, and somehow strike some kind of deal with them to get your messages, or intercept those phone calls.

JEB SHARP: And which of those is it in this case?

CLARK BOYD: Well Jeb, people are calling this hacking, but it’s really a case of hacking. And I think the best way I’ve heard it described so far is, by a private investigator named Ian Withers. And he’s the former head of the world association of private investigators. Here’s a little clip.

IAN WITHERS: What we’re talking about here is people that are phoning a mobile number, and getting through to the message desk, the voicemail. And where those people have not put their own pin number in, they’re able to access on the standard default pin number, the messages that have been left. That in effect is what has been happening.

JEB SHARP: And we should point out Clark, that it’s the allegation is that people like him have been doing this.

CLARK BOYD: (OVERLAPPING) That’s right.

JEB SHARP: (OVERLAPPING) They’re private investigators.

CLARK BOYD: (OVERLAPPING) Exactly, that the news of the world has private investigators who have been calling celebrities, keeping them on the line. And then somebody else calls that cell phone number of the celebrity, goes into their voicemail, and because the celebrity or whoever hasn’t changed that pin number to get into that voicemail, they put in the default that’s give out by the provider, and they’re in there listening to celebrity cell phone messages.

JEB SHARP: So, the lesson is go change your pin code, is it that simple?

CLARK BOYD: [LAUGHS] Yes, absolutely.

JEB SHARP: So just to be clear, when I get my voicemail on my phone right now, I don’t even put in a pin. So what’s the best way to change your pin?

CLARK BOYD: Well, depends on your service provider, but I would either contact them by phone, or go up on their website and they will walk you through the steps that you need to take, to actually change that access code for your voicemail. That would be the easiest way to do it.

JEB SHARP: The World’s technology correspondent, Clark Boyd, thanks so much.

CLARK BOYD: You’re welcome Jeb.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

OK, so it’s true that mobile telecom giant Vodafone knows a thing or two about making money. The company currently operates in more than 25 countries, and has more than 250 million customers. Many of these millions are in developing countries, where things like infectious diseases and sudden natural disasters take heavy tolls. Well, the Vodafone Americas Foundation, a non-profit arm of the company, is looking for ways to help, and that’s where we start this week’s Technology Podcast (WTP 242). Vodafone just ran what it calls the Wireless Innovation Project. One hundred applicants submitted ideas that harnessed new and existing wireless technologies in pursuit of social good. The idea was to show not only great use of technology, but also a clear sense of how these products could, and would, make it to market. The three winners were recently announced at the Global Philanthropy Forum in Washington, DC. I just happened to be there, and was lucky enough to get to sit down with the three winners. Two of the projects, including the CellScope you see at right, try to capitalize on a smartphone’s imaging abilities. The CellScope works by fitting a microscope lens onto a phone’s camera, so that a field worker trying to find out if someone has tuberculosis or malaria could get lab-quality imaging of blood while out in the field. The other imaging project, the CelloPhone, dispenses with the camera lens entirely. Samples are placed directly on the cameras imaging sensors, essentially creating a hologram of the cells that are imaged. What can a cell hologram tell you? Plenty, it turns out. The third project is all about ANTs (that’s “active networked tags”). Imagine if our buildings, our bridges, our roads, even our clothes were filled with small tags that could talk to each other (and rescue teams) in the event of an emergency. Powerful ideas. I don’t know if any of this tech will save the world, but these devices might make it a little more livable for whole lot of human beings. You can see some pictures and videos of the winners here.

Also in this week’s technology podcast, we take an in-depth look at Britain’s DNA database. It’s supposed to hold DNA samples of British criminals, but it turns out that many innocent people are also in there, and that has privacy advocates up in arms.

Thanks to everyone who sent in their swine flu questions. We’ve got a segment that hopefully will answer some of them. Listen in for the great discussion between risk expert Peter Sandman and health journalist and blogger Christine Gorman. Good stuff.

And we end with another competition. Airbus is looking for interesting, even outlandish, ways to save money. So it’s asked engineering teams to submit ideas. Our favorites among the finalists: the windowless cabin, and having groups of commercial planes fly in an inverted “V” formation…like migrating birds. Yowzah!