August 2006 Archives
Irrepressible Adj. 1) Impossible to repress or control.Chat rooms monitored. Blogs deleted. Websites blocked. Search engines restricted. People imprisoned for simply posting and sharing information.
The Internet is a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. Governments – with the help of some of the biggest IT companies in the world – are cracking down on freedom of expression.
Amnesty International, with the support of The Observer UK newspaper, is launching a campaign to show that online or offline the human voice and human rights are impossible to repress.
The campaign site: irrepressible.info.
Oh oh, change ahead, Doug?
Can a good soul help me find where this statue can be found, and who made it? I've been told this shot was taken in Buenos Aeres, but that it can be seen in Europe as well. I find it particularly beautiful.
P.S. my French readers are more active, as always ;-). Thanks to Coremaker, this seems to be a gargoyle, the "Gárgola del Puente del Reino en Valencia" in Spain. Here are more pics: 1, 2.
P.S. 2 And KA writes that those are four statues decorating the Del Regne bridge in Valencia. They were designed by Salvador Monleón, the engineer who built the bridge.
Om Malik reports that Boeing has decided to discontinue its Connexion by Boeing “broadband in the sky” service, and will write-off a $320 million charge [Via Loic le Meur, who notes that you can't use your laptop in a plane anymore anyway].
Working in the IT industry, I just can't help but think, each time I'm trapped in a confined zone like an airport or a plane, that I'm being milked to death by people profiting from the weird business-reality distortion field (read commercial jail) they've designed. Like asking $20/hour for an internet-on-mollasses connection. Guess what? Sometimes it's good to spend a couple of hours unplugged. Too bad for a feature that I've long been looking for, but there are psychological barriers that, as a customer, not a cow, I'm not ready to cross.
I didn't see anything about that on Randy Baseler's blog, and I'd be curious to know about Airbus plans regarding in-flight internet connection.
Wow, in addition to Windows, you can run Solaris on an Intel Mac. [Via Will's Head]
I'm reading John Battelle's book, The Search, and the recent release of search data by AOL couldn't be a better example for his metaphor of the Database of Intentions. What comes out of this giant screw-up is as fascinating as AOL mistake is big.
It's pretty obvious that with such amount of data, some of it can easily lead to personally identifiable information. As note several commenters to the aforementioned post on Google Blogoscoped, using the timestamp information will allow some sites owners to link 3 months of a user's search track to an IP, or directly a name if they have a registration record or profile there. It shows a lot about how Americans regard privacy issues. See also posts by Ars Technica, TechCrunch, Valleywag citing the NYT which took no time to identify one guy out of this so-called "anonymous" data, and John Battelle. There are probably a lot more stories already published or in the waiting, since the released data is now floating around the internet for a long time, although AOL removed it promptly after the uproar.
It also gives a lot of hints on how this gigantic amount of individual intentions can be exploited, and will be exploited no matter what, for this is a goldmine for both commercial and political interests.
About six years ago, I was pitched by one startup on tracking visitors using web beacons. During the discussion, the vendor highlighted how, via the use of cookies and datamining past logs, we could allow visitors to browse our entire site anonymously, then recollect their whole behavior since their first visit and associate it with their personal profile as soon as they registered with us. I could see the mental hard-on on the marketers face, while I was already wondering about the implications on data privacy and yet another hair-splitting-nightmare with the lawyers about the legal fineprint in the site terms of use. The truth, as always, is somewhere in between, and proper (and transparent) use of technology. But I still think about it today when someone comes to me to complain that people clear their cookies too often and that it makes our statistics "unreliable".
Some funny "web 2.0" read, mostly making fun of the recent Business Week cover story about Digg:
- Don’t believe BusinessWeek’s bubble-math
- Business Week on Digg: Smells like bubble spirit
- How Paul Scrivens, Mike Rundle, Colin Devroe, and Tyme White All Made Billions In 12 Months
Remember, each time you say "web 2.0", God kills a startup (wait 30 sec for the comic strip to show up).
