February 2012
16 posts
drop the anchor, pull the plug
‘East Africa’s high-speed internet access has been severely disrupted after a ship dropped its anchor onto fibre-optic cables off Kenya’s coast. It could take up to 14 days to repair, cable owners The East African Marine Systems (Teams) told the BBC.
This is one of three undersea cables to have arrived in the region since 2009, delivering faster internet access.
The...
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'unlike you, we were born with a compromise' -...
‘The Economic and Social Council of the United Nations is to hold an event on the current and future status of youth employment, “Breaking new ground: Partnerships for more and better jobs for young people”.
Of the UN agencies participating in the youth conference, only one provides compensation to its interns (the ILO). Despite their best efforts, few interns actually gain employment with...
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broken feeds
‘Let’s start with those who favor the law: Viviane Reding, vice president of the European Commission, argues that everything we do — our emails, our blog comments, our e-purchases, our porn watching, the tickets we buy, the photos we share — all of it is sitting in databases controlled in the great “cloud.” That information can, and probably will, stay in those...
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hard(ly a)ware
‘The prospect of constant government surveillance of citizens through cheap drones tests the “plain sight” doctrine by which, under our Constitution, police are generally allowed to scope out whatever is in plain view, without requiring a warrant. Supercharged technologies face some limits — extra-sensitive remote microphones, or heat signature detectors of the sort that might be...
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i'm not as pretentious as i seem
‘An international alliance of publishers, including Cambridge University Press, Elsevier and Pearson Education Ltd, has served successful cease-and-desist orders on a piracy operation with an estimated turnover of £7m.
The two platforms, sharehoster service www.ifile.it and link library www.library.nu, had together created an “internet library” making more than 400,000 ...
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'every exploration is an appropriation' - r....
‘Huberman and his colleagues examined the content of news stories during a single week in August last year as measured by the news feed aggregator Feedzilla. They scored each article based on four criteria: the news source that generates and posts the article; the category of news; the subjectivity of the language; and the people and things named in the article. They then measured the...
presence maintenance
‘Geert Wilders’ anti-immigration PVV party has launched a new website where people can report complaints about central and eastern European immigrants in the Netherlands.
‘Do you have problems with people from central and eastern Europe? Have you lost your job to a Pole, Bulgarian, Romanian or other eastern European? We want to know,’ the website states.
The website is...
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say hallelujah
never send a human to do a machine's job
‘Since those lovable rapscallions at the Pirate Bay are known as much for their utopian,post-copyright whimsy as for being a bastion of piracy, then someone should give them some gold coins for their latest move, which—wait for it—wants to see people downloading physical goods.
If that sounds crazy that’s because it mostly is. It’s all a bit theoretical at the moment, but the Pirate...
mapping controversies
‘Google faces a $660,000 fine after a French court ruling that the company is abusing its dominant position in mapping by making Google Maps free.
According to The Economic Times, the French commercial court “upheld an unfair competition complaint lodged by Bottin Cartographes against Google France and its parent company Google Inc. for providing free web mapping services to some...
