The amazing Hubble telescope has now shown us images of galaxies from 13.2 billion years ago.  That’s because the light comes from 13.2 billion light years away, and took (by definition) that much time to get here:
“The deeper Hubble looks into space, the farther back in time it looks, because light takes billions of years [...]

Google announced today that it would cease (well, phase out) censoring the results in google.cn, the Chinese-language version of its famed search engine.  It’s a pretty stunning move, both in its fact and in its execution.  First, the announcement of “A new approach to China” may appear to have buried the lede.  The lion’s share [...]

“The first generation of Internet controls consisted largely of building firewalls at key Internet gateways; China’s famous ‘Great Firewall of China’ is one of the first national Internet filtering systems.”
That’s it.  Its presence on a poster advertising the OpenNet Initiative’s academic book Access Controlled was enough to deem it prohibited by UN security forces at [...]

There’s lots of talk, and confusion, about the “cloud” and “cloud computing.”  I’ve recently contributed to it (the discussion, at least, and possibly the confusion) with some of my worries, and in some technology and vendor circles that’s been seen as controversial. I wanted to share some thoughts about just what the cloud is – [...]

Here’s a copy of Monday’s NYT op-ed about cloud computing.  The Kindle/Orwell incident broke about ten minutes before the piece closed.  (The original new hook, somewhat oddly, was the announcement of the Google Chrome OS — not at all bad in itself, but a milestone on our progression from PC to cloud.)

David Pogue just blogged about a fascinating memory hole leak in the Kindle: customers who purchased at least one version of the classic Nineteen Eighty-Four found their copies of the book simply vanished from their readers. Amazon’s apparent explanation:
The Kindle edition books Animal Farm by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) & Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) [...]

I wrote up a few thoughts on Google’s announcement of its new Chrome operating system, designed to permit near-instant booting of a PC or other device to … a Web browser, and essentially only a Web browser.  The piece can be found here, and below:
Google and Microsoft are now officially fighting over you. They are [...]

Twitter only allows 140 characters per tweet.  The founders explain that they expected interconnection with mobile phone text messaging — SMS — from the start, and that it could be expensive to have longer tweets broken into mutiple messages when people pay per SMS.  As Dom Sagolla explains:
Messages longer than 160 characters (the common SMS [...]

One less examined piece of what’s going on in Iran this week goes beyond the use of Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms — beyond what people can do with a basic browser.  And that’s the role of the humble PC — the personal computer, whether Windows, Mac, or GNU/Linux. What makes the PC so crucial [...]

This blog isn’t that active — I haven’t quite figured out the right rhythm, and what should count as blogworthy enough to post.  The past couple days have been active, though, with the events unfolding in Iran.  I’m part of OpenNet, which tracks Internet censorship around the world, and we just released an update to [...]