is a good way of putting it. so now my hand”s been bitten, my custom”s going somewhere else. Bye Bye Google Bye Bye..
oh yeah and i daresay if anyone has any bright ideas re: protests outside google”s offices in London - this is where they are:
Belgrave House
76 Buckingham Palace Road
Just think -for argument”s sake - if anything happened and somehow those poor offices end up being defaced - ah well, i suppose we”d never find out would we? they won”t be able to get “justice” - why? well who”s going to bear witness to it? ….;-) see no evil, hear no evil..
Google is to launch a censored version of its search engine for China. what a bunch of bloody hypocrites.
google are cunts. yes i’ve decided. do you think we could have a version of the ‘london underground are cunts’ song for them? i reckon we might be able to rustle up some support.
not happy with their existing ‘almost monopoly’ ooh no they want more more more - and the biggest audience of them all: china. so now they decide - hey let’s join forces and be a bunch of censors why not. Gotta be in bed with the authoritarians don’t we if we want their business.. 100 million eyeballs..ooh the heart beats pitter pat. Greedy fuckers. Let’s be straight about this: they would in effect become a vehicle of censorship, a vehicle of repression.
More on this when i’ve had a chance to think straight and calm down.
In the meantime, for a bit of sardonic humour on this - take a look at The Robert Swipe Show..
e-Government strategies for central and local government 2006-7
the e-government national conference is being held at the Savoy Hotel, London on 25th January, and this precedes the evening awards ceremony.
The conference is aimed at senior officials in local and central government - and will be a briefing on the the central and local e-Government agenda & strategy for 2006-7. There’s a also a “high-value” KPMG consultancy session on how best to plan to achieve e-Government targets.
[ the big boys are in there first again. though other news from publictechnology.net is heartening in terms of small organizations and the open-source world as opposed to the usual big un-innovative IT beasts]
the second phase of the UN World Summit on Information Society convened by the International Telecommunications Union - has just concluded last weekend - in Tunisia. the ITU is a UN agency, and the first phase of the WSIS was held ages ago ( alright in 2003) in switzerland.
the point of these fancy sounding summits was to discuss the concept of information society in general, how to ensure it is inclusive; and then lay the foundation such that issues like the digital divide are addressed, and then of course, the thorny problem of internet governance ( and money..who’s gonna pay?)
( ha ha! what a simple remit)
things have moved on somewhat since 2001 when we discussed these issues in a law class i happened to be taking at the time focusing on Internet Governance : but you know what - they ain’t really moved on THAT much! ICANN is still around..and is there actually much understanding of the governance issue? well we’ll have to see - depending on what the outcomes of the latest Tunis summit. There is a lot of research to be done to find this out - given the bureaucratic nature of these ’summits’ - and who even gets to go to these summits? a bunch of politicians/national-y representative-y sort of folks, i bet. who probably don’t know anything about the internet… probably don’t know how to use it. you know how these things are - they send their most important person - who turns out to be some old bloke in a suit. Wouldn’t matter so much if they knew what they were talking about - but summits usually have idiots attending them. they like to keep the real stakeholders - people like you and me and individuals - out of the game.
at any rate: one thing is clear - the usual spotlight on the Host Country - in this case Tunisia, which i think we can safely say isn’t very friendly to cyber-dissidents. ( well dissent in general!) More on that to come as well, but it seems to be clear - as is usually the case - that the Tunisian human rights community/activists were barred from the global conference and their attempts to meet independently didn’t really succeed.
typical - let’s leave out the people we say we want to ‘include’. PAH!
0