politics

Oct 15 2008   9:00AM GMT

What is Blog Action Day? A chance to help fight global poverty.

Posted by: Alexander Howard
open source, small business, business, Web 2.0, media, Technology, Internet, useful, cool, culture, education, learning, free, academics, volunteer, green, event, entrepeneurship, resource, Development, tool, politics, blogging, buzz, science, communications

Blog Action Day is, according to its founders, “an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day.”

In 2007, the issue was the environment. In 2008, the theme is poverty.

By coordinating the efforts of many bloggers (more than 10,000 different sites, as of this morning), the organizers hope to galvanize improvement in the lots of the world’s poor. As measured by the World Bank, substantial improvements have been made since the 1980s.

Even so, one quarter of the world continues to subsist on less than $1.25/day.

Here’s what you can do to help:

• Participate in the One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC). Just head over to laptopgiving.org.
• Tune in to BlogTalkRadio’s 12-hour Blog Action Day talkathon to discover how dozens of prominent bloggers and technologists will be helping in the effort.
• Support microlending efforts at Kiva.org. Learn more about microcredit, Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank in this Business Week article, “Can Technology Eliminate Poverty?
• Read WebTeacher’s post describing a social business to find out how this form of concerned commerce works.
• Donate to or participate in the development of the technologies described at PracticalAction.org. These include micro-hydro plants, small-scale wind generators, affordable solar lanterns and biogas plants.
• Learn more in online poverty resources listed on BlogActionDay.org.

Spread the word!

Apr 18 2008   9:16AM GMT

Video: Sir Tim Berners-Lee on Net neutrality

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Networking, video, YouTube, Internet, commentary, free, academics, IPTV, traffic, streaming, politics, controversy

You might remember this fellow — he invented the Web, after all. Sir Tim Berners-Lee offers some thoughts on the issue of Net neutrality in this video.

You can read Lee’s post on Net neutrality, which largely mirrors his statements on camera, over at his blog. You’ll note that the post and video date back to 2006, when the issue first entered a wider conversation online. These days, the U.S. presidential candidates have taken stances on it (Clinton and Obama are both for Net neutrality, McCain opposes it). Accusations of traffic shaping and the uglier-sounding “bandwidth throttling” are flying at ISPs like Comcast, sometimes justified and other times based upon mistaken conclusions.

We’ve asked you before — have you opinions changed? Private networks and corporations have good reason to restrict bandwidth to memory hogs like like IPTV. On-demand streaming of this year’s NCAA basketball tournament caused massive traffic spikes, for instance, resulted in massive traffic spikes. The security risks and bandwidth challenges presented by employee use of P2P networks like Bittorrent are an issue as well.

Once Internet use leaves the office, however, the question remains: Should ISPs be able to institute a two-tiered Internet for private citizens?

Let us know what you think in the comments or by writing in to editor@whatis.com.

Mar 10 2008   9:13AM GMT

Video: FBI can listen even when a cellphone is turned off

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Security, email, Mobile, applications, Technology, video, YouTube, Audio, tracking, traffic, tool, information, politics, hacking, communications, government

Fox News aired a report in 2006 that described how the FBI can turn on the mic on a cellphone and eavesdrop — even if the phone is turned off.

Today’s Word of the Day, government Trojan, describes efforts by various governments to covertly survail traffic of all kinds to and from suspect hard drives, including VoIP, cellphones and email.

These kinds of measures are only likely to increase as groups of all stripes turn to the Web to organize and communicate about activity the government wants to monitor. I find the “analog hacks” used here intriguing. VoIP or cellphone conversations and email messages may be encrypted during transmission but if an agency can record a target on the microphone or by using a keylogger, even quantum encryptography could be sidestepped.

Apr 12 2007   1:28PM GMT

“Google Election?”

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Google, election, politics, Google Earth, geotargeting

As former Speaker of the U.S. House of Represenatives Tip O’Neill once said, “All politics is local.” Perhaps with that in mind, the Google Earth Blog has announced that Google Earth has geared up for future U.S. elections by adding “U.S. Elections Guide” and “U.S. Congressional Districts” information layers. Once you’ve downloaded the most recent version of Google Earth, you’ll be able to select layers that will display the boundaries of voting districts, local polling places, campaign finance data, links to candidates Web sites, news and other information related to the election. The layers are not available through Google Maps, so you’ll have to have access to a PC able to run Google Earth. (Hat tip to Slashdot.org and Greg Sterling at SearchEngineWatch.com.)