Tag Archives: internet

.xxx Domain Names Rejected

Rarely will you see the adult entertainment industry and religious groups in “relative agreement”:http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/03/26/tech-porn.html, but strong lobbying by both camps influenced “today’s decision”:http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/internet/03/30/domain.xxx.ap/index.html?eref=rss_tech by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to reject creating .xxx domains for online pornography sites. The adult entertainment industry feared that having .xxx domains would make it easier for governments censor and control content, while religious groups believed that creating such domains would greatly increase the amount of graphic sexual content on the internet. Internet politics too makes strange bedfellows.

WiFi on the river Thames

Global Reach Group has entered the wireless internet game in a big way by making the whole of the London’s river Thames a giant hotspot. It’s a free project and is available to absolutely anyone with a wireless device and £2.95/hour, £5.95/day or £9.95/month. Admitting that one can’t really make much bob providing just wireless access, the mesh network is also providing service to CCTV networks, river traffic regulators and emergency services. The network currently runs along the river and its banks all the way from the Millennium Dome at Greenwich in the east to the Houses of Parliament in the west. That’s most of downtown London covered by one provider!

“Link”:http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/mar2007/gb20070329_814918.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily to Business Week article.

NYTimes.com Now Free for College Students

The “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com has recently made its “TimesSelect web feature”:http://www.nytimes.com/products/timesselect/overview.html, which most notably provides access to the NYT’s “brilliant opinion columnists”:http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/thomaslfriedman/index.html and much of the 150+ year archive, “completely free for college students and professors”:http://www.nytimes.com/gst/ts_university_email_verify.html! All that you need to sign up is a valid university e-mail address.
“http://www.nytimes.com/gst/ts_university_email_verify.html In effect, this makes the entire contents of the New York Times free and computer-accessible. How convenient!

Kevin Kelly's other blog

I have been a long-time subscriber to “Cool Tools”:http://www.kk.org/cooltools/index.php, a blog on Kevin Kelly’s site, “kk.org”:http://www.kk.org/index.php and highly recommend it. Basically any time he or someone else finds something they think is cool or especially useful, up it goes. I’ve discovered some great things reading Cool Tools (The “‘Allen and Mike’ camping books”:http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000704.php and the “Sierra Stove”:http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000012.php being two that have led to very wise purchases) but I didn’t realize there was more greatness to be had.
On the left side of the Cool Tools page there is a navigation menu of all the other things found at kk.org and one day for some reason I was actually on the site (instead of just reading the RSS feed) and I looked at all of them. The other blog I found was “Street Use”:http://www.kk.org/streetuse/index.php and it has been on my daily read ever since. This blog explores how people adapt objects and technology to suit their particular needs. For example, “this article”:http://www.kk.org/streetuse/archives/2007/01/phone_charging_booths_in_ugand.php is about improvised phone charging booths in Uganda.
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Visualizations of Last.fm

A month or so ago I wrote an “article”:http://duenos.net/article/14/melodic-match-making-on-lastfm about “Last.fm”:http://last.fm , the self-proclaimed harbringer of the _social music revolution._ The site keeps track of what you listen to and then can export that data as simple XML feeds to put on your blog, or anything else. Well, two other websites, “Snapp Radio”:http://www.snappradio.com/ and “Last.tv”:http://lasttv.net/ have taken those data feeds about what you’re listening to and made something you can watch.
http://billiethevision.com then the pictures are more mood pieces, which I think are taken from "Flickr!":http://flickr.com This entry was posted in Original Duenos, Uncategorized and tagged , on by .

Analog peer-to-peer

A few months ago I read about a service called “BookMooch”:http://bookmooch.com/ on “BoingBoing”:http://boingboing.net that offers users a community full of people wanting to exchange their old books for free. I’ve used the site extensively and have loved it. I was finally able to get rid of those old Tom Clancy novels and ‘trade up’ to the classier writings of Henry James. My conclusion: there aren’t enough phrases like “class 2 tactical op” in Henry James. Luckily I can always trade down again with BookMooch.
The idea of a non-monetary economy in which people share their goods and/or services sounds like wackiness, I know, but I just read an “article”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/start.html?pg=4 from Wired Online about more ‘analog peer-to-peer’ sites that promise just such a cashless utopia. Each one caters to a different type of media, but here’s a short summary taken from the article:
”
“PEERFLIX”:http://peerflix.com/
MEDIA: DVD
INVENTORY: 40,000 titles
PER-TRADE FEE: $1.50
“LA LA”:http://www.lala.com/
MEDIA: CD
INVENTORY: 1.8 million titles
PER-TRADE FEE: $1.75
“PAPERBACKSWAP”:http://www.paperbackswap.com/index.php
MEDIA: Take a guess …
INVENTORY: 30,000 titles
PER-TRADE FEE: $1.59
“GAMESWAP”:http://www.gameswap.com/
MEDIA: Videogame
INVENTORY: 1,102 games
PER-TRADE FEE: $1.99 “

Brick Link, the eBay of LEGO

The LEGO-trading hotspot is “http://www.bricklink.com/”:http://www.bricklink.com/ Home (at the time of writing) to 64,918 registered members, this site hooks people up who are looking to trade, buy, sell, or discuss LEGO. Sets, parts, figurines, books, gear, catalogs, instructions, original boxes, or just unsorted lots of pieces. You name it and someone will be willing to trade it on Brick Link.
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Google's Zeitgeist

I found something new from Google. I know, big surprise there’s something new from the company that keeps on giving, but it’s absolutely worth a look. “Zeitgeist”:http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html is a site that tracks the trends in Google search terms, sponsored by the company itself. As opposed to the normal “what everyone searches” stats, (sex, boobies, etc…) this site shows the big gainers per month, week, or even year. For example, here is the page for 2006 in review: “Zeitgeist”:http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2006.html
Zeit·geist | Pronunciation: ‘tsIt-“gIst, ‘zIt | Function: noun | Etymology: German, from Zeit (time) + Geist (spirit) | Date: 1884 | Meaning: the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era.

Find out if your website is banned in China

“The Great Firewall of China”:http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/ is a website that tests to see if any given URL is banned under the censorship regime of the Chinese Communists Party. Neither this blog, nor my personal website “elliott-herder.com”:http://elliott-herder.com are banned but one of my favorite blogs “Architectures of Control”:http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/ by Dan Lockton somehow got on the Chinese black list. Or it a red list?