Blogs

The BBC has a story on the Burmese Monks and their cyberskills:

The internet has also become a virtual space for political groups who could not openly express their shared views in public.

Ko Htike met his network of citizen journalists in an internet forum which was rapidly disbanded after initial contact had been made.

Such forums are also used as a space to alert bloggers whenever new content - stills or video - arrives.

I'll be in India for most of the rest of September...

The WaPo has an excellent story of the New Latin Left movement, which has reduced their dependence on IMF and Bank loans (and their requisite policy prescriptions and structural adjustments), with an overall reduction from $49 billion in loans from 2003 to $759 million in 2006.

Michael Bletsas stands ready to defend the OLPC

The bitfrost specification indicates that perhaps some countries may not believe that the unique green branding will protect the laptop from theft: 971 The OLPC project has received very strong requests from certain countries972 considering joining the program to provide a powerful anti-theft service that973 would act as a theft deterrent against most thieves.

Remember our discovery over at OLPCNews.com of the proto-OLPC project in Senegal? Our insightful readers dug even deeper and found some more news articles from the project. To quote the Bard, "What's past is prologue" - there are frighteningly strong parallels between this failed early-80s project and today's OLPC project. I've taken the liberty to do some not-very-creative search and replacing on the article to update it to modern circumstances. You can hover over any text that I've modified to see the original (Firefox users - check out the Long Titles Addon to see the longer pieces of text). Some paragraphs I've dropped for the sake of brevity, but please feel free to read the unadulterated original article, Seymour Papert's 'Microworld': An Educational Utopia, by Charles Euchner. All the emphases are mine, but the text is relatively unadulterated. The majority of the changes were:

• LOGO becomes Squeak
• microcomputers and Apple IIs become OLPC laptops
• French / French companies become Taiwan/Quanta
• Paris-based World Center for Microprocessors and Human Resources and Microworld become OLPC Project

Let's take the first half of the article, which parallels much of the progress to date with OLPC (emphasis mine):

Seymour Papert's One Laptop Per Child:
An Educational Utopia
Modified by Jon Camfield, original by Charles Euchner
July 18, 2007

I don't have all the bells and whistles that the guy in this movie has running, but maybe it's time to suck it up and upgrade to the newest version. Aero is Windows Vista's response to the popularity and ease of use of the Mac OSX interface, and Beryl/Compiz is the Linux answer. This video starts out with Aero, and then switches over to Beryl. I think it's pretty obvious which one is the winner, especially considering that Beryl is free, whereas running Aero requires Windows Vista, which is selling at Amazon.com for $150 for the lowest-end version of it.

The AP reports that email may now enjoy 4th amendment rights:

The Vatican urges Catholics not to donate to Amnesty International (BBC):

The Vatican also said it was suspending all financial aid to Amnesty over what it said was the group's recent change of policy on the issue.

Amnesty said it was not promoting abortion as a universal right.

But the group said that women had a right to choose, particularly in cases of rape or incest.

What does a Senegalese technology implementation project from 1982 have to do with One Laptop Per Child? Well, you might be surprised. At the same time that the French government was launching their successful (but quickly overshadowed by the Internet) Minitel project, they were also supporting a constructivist-based computer-learning project, using Apple II computers with the LOGO programming language/learning tool.

Sure, you've named a star after yourself by paying some scammers lots of moolah, but now you can get your own 128-bit number!, just like the AACS-LA! Mine is 1F CD EA 21 D7 E8 73 1F 2F 34 EB 0E 71 26 0A C5 and don't you even think about stealing it!