A lengthy article in The Atlantic explains just why China’s “Great Firewall” is so effective. As Boing Boing summarises, “The kicker is the social and political impact… simply by making it inconvenient to read certain sites, the Chinese government can keep politically charged issues from surfacing in the national discourse.”
Marc Andreessen on Barack Obama
Netscape founder Marc Andreessen spent 90 minutes with Barack Obama in early 2007. His report on that conversation is fascinating: “He said — and I’m going to paraphrase a little here: think about who I am — my father was Kenyan; I have close relatives in a small rural village in Kenya to this day; and I spent several years of my childhood living in Jakarta, Indonesia. Think about what it’s going to mean in many parts of the world — parts of the world that we really care about — when I show up as the President of the United States. I’ll be fundamentally changing the world’s perception of what the United States is all about.”
SHM gets broadband figures wrong
Don’t newspapers fact-check any more? In the Sydney Morning Herald, Jason Koutsoukis reckons most broadband users currently receive only 256 kilobits per second. And yet, as Richard Chirgwin points out, last year’s ABS figures were that 22% of subscribers had up to 256kbps and 45% had more than 256kbps. “Since when is around 1/3 of the broadband population equal to ‘most’ users?”
“Threads”: a film about nuclear war
A strange treat last night: I stumbled across a complete upload of the very fine 1984 docudrama Threads, which depicts the aftermath of a nuclear strike on Sheffield (and elsewhere). I’d seen it before, but it was still as powerful. Today, using The Power of Wikipedia, I discover that the scenario was based on the UK government exercise Square Leg, and that the Protect and Survive informational films it features are quite real.
Weekend reading revisited
Some things I found on the weekend which you might like. The UNIX-HATERS Handbook, which reminded me that for all the religious hype over Unix/Linux it really is just a kludge. (Hat-tip of the geekiest kind to Alastair Rankine.) A NY Times article How Dangerous Is the Internet for Children? Answer: not particularly. A fine Wired story about Titan Salvage, the smart, brave and somewhat scary guys who salvage ships. And Possums Pollytics’ wonderful response to an attack by The Australian‘s Dennis Shanahan.
Silly Internet filtering
Boing Boing has started collecting stupid decisions by Internet filters. Example: a school blocking all forums and social networking sites. Talk about overkill!