JonCamfieldBlog

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.

Posted by Jon at 02:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

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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).

I've mostly avoided wading in on the Net Neutrality debate; not because I don't feel strongly about it, but because it seems so blatantly wrong that I feel arguing for it is like arguing for the importance of sunshine or eating every day. Further, I'm not too overly concerned about the consequences of "losing" this fight -- sure, I don't want to, but I figure a few days after ISPs start implementing annoying bandwidth restrictions, the geek type users will start implementing labyinthine methods to work around it. Can we say http over voip tunnelling, boys and girls?

Posted by Jon at 08:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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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 :)

Posted by Jon at 08:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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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.

Posted by Jon at 08:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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