August 2006

Esperanza En Accion

Submitted by Jon on Wed, 08/09/2006 - 09:29

I'm on the technology committee of the Esperanza En Accion board, and as part of this, and in fulfilling a long-standing promise to EeA's director, I'm off to Managua, Nicaragua to help out with their computer systems, networks, IT planning, and also to see Nicaragua.

Net Neutrality

Submitted by Jon on Sat, 08/05/2006 - 15:53

Dan Kaminsky is working on a software testing tool to check to see if your ISP is giving equal quality to all your traffic, or if they are favoring certain types of traffic (VOIP over web pages, or throttling all bittorrent traffic to a crawl) or preferring certain sites (AOL over Google, based on who's paid more).

Blogreement

Submitted by Jon on Sat, 08/05/2006 - 15:43

Steven Johnson has a nice quick list of topics we can move beyond when discussing blogs:

1. Mainstream, top-down, professional journalism will continue to play a vital role in covering news events, and in shaping our interpretation of those events, as it should.
...
5. Blogs -- like all modes of contemporary media -- are not historically unique; they draw upon and resemble a number of past traditions and forms, depending on their focus.

I guess this helps me narrow down my paper topics :)

IPR and ... plants?

Submitted by Jon on Sat, 08/05/2006 - 15:19

Brazil is registering list of plant names to fight pharma companies from trademarking the names when using compounds extracted from these plants.
India also has been fighting "biopiracy".

This is a reminder that intellectual property restrictions extend beyond IT and media issues, into important topics such as affordable medicines when it intersects with pharmaceuticals.