Entries tagged 'technology'
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
The IOC’s Bad Internet Deal
International Olympic Committee officials today revealed that they cut a secret deal with Beijing’s Olympic organizers to block sites the Communist Party considers “sensitive,” despite promising open Internet access to journalists covering the Olympic Games.
“There will be limitations on website access during Games time,” IOC press chief Kevan Gosper said to Reuters, referring to Beijing’s Olympic organizers. “IOC officials negotiated with the Chinese that some sensitive sites would be blocked on the basis they were not considered Games related,” he said.
Sites on China’s blacklist include Amnesty International and others which promote spiritual group Falun Gong. While such topics are not directly sports-related, they put severe limits on visiting journalists’ efforts to accurately report about the Games’ host country.
The mainstream press, just starting to arrive en masse to Beijing, should continue to expose China’s true colors, regardless of how many gold medals they garner.
There’s something rotten in the state of China, and the IOC’s choice to tacitly support the communist regime’s authoritarian controls is a disgrace to the unifying goals of the Olympic Movement. Shame on them.
• Email This PostFriday, July 4th, 2008
Pushing Back on a Rediculous Privacy Ruling
Earlier this week, U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton ruled that Google should turn over its viewing logs to Viacom Inc. as part of Viacom’s copyright-infringement case against YouTube.
According to the Associated Press, the database includes information on when each video gets played, which can be used to determine how often a clip is viewed. Attached to each entry is each viewer’s unique login ID and the Internet Protocol, or IP, address for that viewer’s computer.
This is clearly an overreaching grab by Viacom in their effort to show that copyrighted clips are viewed more than Otters Holding Hands in order squeeze $1 billion out of Google, YouTube’s parent company.
If this ruling stands, the question is what comes next? A court forcing Google to turn over their entire database of search records to show that people search for the copyrighted term “playboy” when they’re just looking for plain-old porn?
The best reaction I’ve read so far to this ruling, however, has to be a suggestion that Google hand over the 12 terabytes of logs in paper form, just for kicks.
For the record, those logs would be equivalent to all of the printed books in the Library of Congress.
That’s a whole lot of document revew for some recent law-school grads. Have fun with that.
• Email This PostThursday, June 12th, 2008
All My Life Are Belong to Google
So for one reason or another, Google is running ran super slow right now for a period of time tonight with ping response rates at 3-4 times that of other major search engines.
The slowdown isn’t affecting all of Google’s properties — YouTube and Gmail are still running well — but is causing trouble with Reader, Search and Blogger.
During this time, I really began to realize how much I rely on Google for my daily Web life.
Despite knowing about the issue, I found myself repeatedly entering random words into Safari’s search box trying to move between sites. I couldn’t remember more than a handful of the 300+ blogs and news sites I read on a daily basis via RSS.
I felt cut off from the world, despite 99.9% of Web sites I might otherwise visit working perfectly well.
Just one more reminder that the name of the game on the Web is still search, despite all the hype over social networking, Web 2.0 and other technologies that steal our attention from time to time.
Alas, before I could even finish writing this post, Google’s webmonkeys had search up and running once again. Thanks guys!
• Email This PostTuesday, June 3rd, 2008
Blogging via Google Docs
So in fiddling about with Google Docs‘ sharing settings, I noticed a new feature that appears to let docs be published as blog entries to major blogging platforms such as WordPress, so I wanted to try it out.