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"I krig med eliten" på Wikileaks
Sep 16th
Den danske dagsavisen Politiken (en del av JyllandsPosten/Politikens Hus) trykket på onsdag hele boken “Jæger – I krig med eliten” av den tidligere elitesoldaten Thomas Rathsack, etter at det danske forsvaret hadde forsøkt å få boken tilbakekalt. Dette har generert heftig kritikk i Danmark, til og med innad i eget avishus.
Vel, fra min side vanker det bare ros. Undertrykking av ytringsfriheten er noe av det verste som kan skje i et samfunn, selv om dette angivelig er informasjon som “går tett på” hvordan danskene opererer i Afghanistan. Som Politiken selv formulerer det i sin lederartikkel har de «valgt at bringe hele bogens tekst i dagens avis for at sikre og understrege offentlighedens ret til at følge med – også når vi er i krig, og når det ikke passer myndighederne». Dette står det stor respekt over.
For dem av oss som ikke holder oss med Politiken, kan vi gå til Wikileaks for å lese boken i sin helhet. Den er også tilgjengelig som en torrent.
En spiker i ytringsfrihetens kiste
Sep 19th
Justisminister Knut Storberget har nylig sendt et brev til norske internettleverandører der han ber dem om “frivillig” å ta i bruk Kripos’ filtreringsteknologi, som i dag benyttes til å sensurere webtjenere som antas å spre barnepornografisk materiale. Dersom leverandørene ikke stiller seg i rekke vil han tvinge dem til det ved å «innføre et lovpålegg som påbyr filtrering, særlig av overgrepsbilder mot barn.».
International phone calls on a shoestring
Feb 3rd
In less than five days, I’m going to South-East Asia to spend a month relaxing, trekking, inhaling pollution and fighting cockroaches the size of my fist in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. It’s going to be wonderful.
My problem is that it is very expensive to call to and from most of the countries in the area. The tariff for a call between a Telenor fixed-line in Norway and my prepaid mobile in Thailand is an outrageous €1.41 (NOK 11.38) per minute. The worldwide telecom tariffs are not based on distance, but destination bandwidth, de-facto monopolies, local regulations, corruption and several other complicated factors. In this case, Telenor really helps out with their typically inflated tariffs. For comparison, the Dutch telecom KPN charges “only” €1.08 (NOK 8.69) for the same call. Nevertheless, the tariffs are unacceptable, and Skype is really not an option, as it’s not as flexible and portable as a mobile phone.
Coping with vast amounts of information
Jan 9th
Google Reader
If you spend a lot of time reading on the internet, (by that, I don’t necessarily mean spending the time browsing people’s Facebook oneliners and paying your bills, but actually using it as the information source it is) then you are probably very busy right now, and I’ll get right to the point.
Use an aggregator for RSS feeds. It provides you with a clean view of a great deal of sources, from your favourite 100% online newspapers (and their brilliant political comics, like Doonesbury), to these pseudo-attempts of “established” media desperately trying to justify their dual physical/online existance. (Some do this better than others, but I’ll save that for a later rant.)
The point is that most of these are providing feeds of their news. Look for this symbol in your browser and click it to understand more. It’s worth it.
When you are on a site providing such feeds, then you can click on this icon in your browser in order to get the feed address which is usable in RSS/Atom feed aggregators. Such aggregators are probably integrated to your browser, like the well known Firefox (look at “get plugins/addons”) and even in Internet Explorer.
If you prefer to use a seperate application for this, then you can google¹ for them, or you can do what I do, use the excellent Google Reader which in my opinion just makes the internet a less noisy world to be in. It makes your up-to-date feeds available wherever you are.
For the time being, I don’t know of any better alternatives for me. If you read a lot of stuff happening on the internet (news, comics, torrents, blogs, podcasts), then perhaps you should check it out as well.
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¹) I almost can’t believe that Google seemingly have their own verb in almost all world languages now.
