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Archives for 2006

Xeni Jardin writes “Hacking the Himalayas” for NPR and Wired

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Xeni JardinXeni Jardin (Boing Boing et al – also see her entry in Wikipedia) has created a four-part series entitled Hacking the Himalayas that includes lots of coverage of the TibTec wireless network (sponsoring the upcoming AirJali Summit) in Dharamsala. You can find an online version of the series at the NPR web site.

The four segments are:

  • The Gaddi People of Dharamsala
  • Connecting Tibet’s Exile Community
  • A Wireless Network for ‘Little Lhasa’
  • Tradition vs. Change in ‘Lhasa Vegas’

It’s well worth catching!

Hello – you’re in the WordPress world!

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wordpressWell, after all of this time I have switched my blog from MovableType to WordPress.

The reason being that MovableType’s (paid) licenses only allow a small number of authors to participate in posting to a blog. The model they use is basically that of the “lone author” who writes a blog in first person without collaboration from others. What I have found is that the best way to keep a blog fresh, growing and fluorishing is to have several authors, each of whom posts periodically. That is prohibitively expensive using the MovableType model.

WordPress, on the other hand, is free software and open source. And thus it can be modified and improved. And the team of folks working on this software has done a marvelous job. It has everything I could want.

So it may not make a difference to you the visitor to my blog, but it makes a vast difference to me, to non-profits and NGOs and everyone who likes the “group blog” model.

Internet neutrality

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The principle of “Internet neutrality” could be stated as “All traffic on the Internet is to be routed with equal priority.” I would add “…regardless of its content, its type or how much money is being paid to route the traffic.” Proposals from the Internet backbone providers ask that they be allowed to charge more money for certain types of traffic (Voice Over IP, for instance) or on the type of provider (charge more money to Google) on the pretext that this will permit them to offer better and faster routing for these organizations.

Reading behind the lines, I think this is a boldfaced power grab. They simply want to “share” in the revenues being generated by VoIP services and by Google and to do that, the carries want to charge these guys more money for their traffic on the pretext of supplying better service for the increased price.

The reaction, of course, out here in the rest of the world, is that this would relegate those orgs that cannot pay the premium fees to “the back of the bus.” In other words, the folks paying for better routing would get essentially what they get now, and everyone else (who doesn’t have the money to pay) would get the bandwidth that’s left over. [My words.]

See this article on Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Internet Neutrality Vital for Free Expression.

Search engines’ blocking in China “improves”

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Looks like the search engines google.cn and yahoo.cn have gotten even more aggressive in terms of blocking access to “unauthorized” or “illegal” sources of information for Chinese-language searchers. Most of the recent attention on the Chinese censorship issue has been focused on Google.cn, but it turns out that Yahoo.cn may be even more in tune with the Chinese party line!

See this report from Reporters Without Borders entitled Yahoo! clear worst offender in censorship tests on search engines.