Internet freedom of speech and Irish Neutrality.

While reading this article 5 Reasons Why Online Freedom of Speech Does Not Exist I was encouraged that a person of Arabic decent wrote it. And is spot on about the real lack of freedom on the internet.

And a thought came to mind that what Irelands ‘Smart Economy’ ought to be, is to create a genuine open internet connection to the world. An Internet free of ALL censorship, blocking, filtering and snooping both into and out to the rest of the internet. Even so much as establishing free VPN connections into the country for people living in internet ‘oppressed’ world areas thus giving an open gateway into a free, and (as) open as anyone could make, Internet. It would not prevent countries from blocking export of banned information into Ireland, but Ireland would not add any blockages. And it would not prevent information from Ireland into censored countries. but it would create a cloud of truly free internet.

I think this could foster an internet ‘Switzerland’ much like Switzerland is to banking. Businesses like Google, Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Skype would find this an attractive country to expand and centralize in. It would make Ireland an Internet sanctuary for complete and open exchange of ideas and communications.

Google begins to crumble

With all the press at MWC and for that matter, everyplace else, Google is King of the internet. But it’s crumbling. Right in front of everyone, their entire infrastructure is beginning to fail. Not in the obvious way like a server outage or service unavailability. It’s the control structure.

I’ve never been a big user of Google, I only really got a Google Mail account when I started searching for a smartphone, which may have been an Android model. I had heard that this gmail account was needed to be set up in advance to load contacts and what not. But then the office IT manager thought Google Wave was a great way to keep all our remote activities documented, in other words, a tool to herd cats. Then he discovered Google Docs and gee isn’t that a great way to share document creation. Now there’s Google Buzz …. and then … and then. Google just can’t stop, and beyond that, they can’t integrate either. All these systems seem disjointed to the point I can’t even sign on and get to them, they must each be logged on to, no single sign-on. THE single most important step in services, and they can’t seem to make it work. It’s quite apparent that there is no single share point in the login process where all the services can be accessed, in a way, Google is competing against itself. And to quote verse:

‘A house divided, cannot stand’

Google is crumbling.

They have grown so fast and so broad, they have not built out the infrastructure required to support the entire breadth of their development groups. Which from empirical evidence, seems to need some method of communication, not currently visible to the outside world. To quote again;

The right hand does not know what the left hand is doing

Google is stumbling

Watching fall will not be pretty.

Internet Privacy myths

One of the enduring myths of the internet is the one involving privacy. This article on CNN titled U.S. enables Chinese hacking of Google takes umbrage at the notion that everyones email is secret and private. And while this myth might comfort many, the truth is that email was NEVER private. Every email host, every email relay was able, and in fact, completely open to reading, scanning and snooping, by man-in-the-middle processes and furthermore always has been since the beginning of the internet. And even if everyone was using https or ssh with their email clients while connected to their mail server, it did not encrypt the contents of the email. It may have minimized the likelihood of it being read in the data stream, but unless you were in the habit of encrypting your email with PGP or some other cypher your email and hence your ‘Privacy’ is negligible, hence, the privacy myth.

And while on the CNN article the discussions brought up the same old saw that governments HAD to have backdoors to snoop on email communications to prevent crime and terrorism without the concern that at no time has it proved itself in practice. Anyone wishing to sent communication, and have it stay private can do so, even in the face of a dedicated snoop. Anyone who had even browsed an encryption textbook can create a completely uncrackable code, and I mean uncrackable by anyone, by any means and present their messages in plain text in emails. Hacking them by any government is merely security theater and fundamentally has NO value.

If you seek ‘privacy’ stop sending anything through the internet unless it is encrypted by at least PGP (if not something more substantial). The only thing Google has lost in this privacy issue is the trust of their users to protect their email ‘publications’ on the internet. Now everyone will know that they have another recipient to all their emails, in other words, all the other governments, hackers, scammers and spammers in the internet.

Baidu Spider is MIA

Is it me, or my sites, that the www.baidu.com spider is no longer scanning? I have normally been scanned several times a day by that Chinese Search engine, but they all stopped yesterday? Perhaps a crackdown? Who knows, but there is a missing element now in the internet.

Another Reason to Love Nokia and Maemo

It’s not Google and it’s Deadly Power of Data I have always been leery of Power. I don’t buy Microsoft , and I’ve stopped playing into Apple fandom. The last computer I bought was a home-brew DIY Server built from parts I chose, powered by OpenSolaris So now it’s another validation of my still unshipped Nokia N900 and Maemo! Please let Amazon ship it soon 🙂

The first one to Sue, Loses!

Looks like Google has showed their true Android colors as Google has just slapped Cyanogen with a cease-and-desist letter By demonstrating that Android is really NOT Open Source it makes my decision a bit easier. Palm Pre (WebOS), or Nokia N900 (Maemo). Of the two, only Maemo is still considered Open Source, however Palm WebOS has never pretended to be Open Source either. Android always had the feel of Google Lock-in functionality with the real intention to permanently lock the Android platform into Google. And this Cease-and-Desist is the final straw. More here!

Internet to shutdown to help environment.

In this article Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches the Times On-Line quotes from an energy researcher who has no access to Google energy data to state “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.” Much like posting his article online. Perhaps he should reflect on the old adage Without Reliable Data, I’m Just another A__Ho_e with an Opinion!

Google Rebuttals: Powering a Google Search

Apple Slaps down developers again

Every day I’m more and more impressed with my Palm T/X choice as Apple extends iPhone NDA. Apple is getting genuinely proprietary about their iPhone/iPod app store. They are making a mockery of their own developer community and that won’t last, seeing as there is now the Google G1 Android phone and it’s open source development roots.

UPDATE: