“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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
We’ve just released our OpenNet Initiative 2009 study of Internet censorship in Iran, including new data from the most recent rounds of testing there. We’ll try to augment some of the findings there with data coming in over the past few days, including reports to the Herdict Web network blockage tool. If you’re finding there [...]
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