It's all About the Vision and the Courage to Execute it

Great article on China's blogging market and the never-ending censorship saga. Meet Fang Xingdong, a banned journalist who decides to beat them by playing their own game, do the math yourself. While heading China's Bokee with 14 million bloggers and more than 10,000 new ones every day, he's appointed only 10 people to monitor the blogs :

"Of course, the authorities did not allow a completely wide-open system. Censorship is still practised, even at Mr. Fang's company. Among his 80 employees are 10 people who comb through the blogs every day, deleting anything deemed to be obscene or politically unacceptable. He hopes that the Chinese blogosphere will become self-regulating. "If it's more orderly, there will be less pressure on us," he says. "I think a blog should have a basic foundation of morality and law. I compare it to a person's home."

If I were in China, I'd register on his network.

Preventing a Massive al-Qaeda Cyber Attack

From the unpragmatic department :

"Colarik proposes "a league of cyber communities." The world's 20 largest economies would sign a treaty vowing to manage their own country's cyber activities. Member states would then deny traffic to any nation that refuses to crack down on cyber terrorists."

No, he really means it, totally forgetting on how a huge percentage of terrorist related web sites are hosted in the U.S. Here's the latest example. It gets even more shortsighted :

"Al-Qaeda also publishes a monthly magazine devoted to cyber-terrorism techniques."

If installing a VMware and PGP Whole Disk Encryption is a cyber-terrorism technique, we're all cyber terrorists without the radical mode of thinking and the Quran on the bookshelf.

Eyes in London's Sky - Surveillance Poster

Alcohol's bad, drugs are bad, surveillance is good for protecting your from the insecurities we made you become paranoid of, and so are head-mounted surveillance cams equipped police officers. Sure, but consider the social implications too. London may be one of the most important business centers in Europe -- next to Frankfurt and Rotterdam -- but I'm so not looking forward to living in what's turning into a synonym for 1984.