Daily Archives: June 23, 2006

China now blocks main Google site

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I missed this BBC NEWS report (dated June 7), and only picked it up when reading Owen’s Blog…

Chinese authorities have blocked most domestic users from the main Google.com search engine, a media watchdog said.

Internet users in major Chinese cities faced difficulties accessing Google’s international site in the past week, Reporters Without Borders said.

But Google.cn, the controversial Chinese language version launched in January, has not been affected.

The site blocks politically sensitive material to comply with government censorship rules.

“It was only to be expected that Google.com would be gradually sidelined after the censored version was launched in January,” Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.

“Google has just definitively joined the club of Western companies that comply with online censorship in China,” the organisation said…

It was only a matter of time, of course. But it makes the Google boys look even more naive than I had thought.

House of the rising son

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Cory Doctorow is leaving London for a year. He’s off to LA to write a book. Walking through Cambridge yesterday I passed a lovely 17th century house in Northampton Street and thought it would make a perfect residence for the great campaigner when he returns.

US ill-prepared for Net disruption?

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From WSJ.com…

The U.S. is poorly prepared for a major disruption of the Internet, according to a study that an influential group of chief executives will publish today.

The Business Roundtable, composed of the CEOs of 160 large U.S. companies, said neither the government nor the private sector has a coordinated plan to respond to an attack, natural disaster or other disruption of the Internet. While individual government agencies and companies have their own emergency plans in place, little coordination exists between the groups, according to the study.

“It’s a matter of more clearly defining who has responsibility,” said Edward Rust Jr., CEO of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., who leads the Roundtable’s Internet-security effort.
Other companies with leaders active in the effort include FedEx Corp., International Business Machines Corp., Dow Chemical Co., Hewlett-Packard Co., CA Inc., Alcoa Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Pfizer Inc.

The study points out that a massive Web disruption could potentially paralyze banks, transportation systems, health-care providers and voice calling over the Internet.

The chief problem: There are so many public and private institutions that handle security-related tasks that their responsibilities often overlap, creating inefficiencies that can bog down an emergency response, according to the study.
Security officials at some banks and other companies have established groups to swap data about Internet threats. Companies that make the technology behind the Internet itself have an informal group of their own to discuss security issues. Meanwhile, a government body called the National Cyber Response Coordination Group is meant to manage a response to Internet emergencies.

Yet those groups’ roles are often unclear, and no system is in place to coordinate their efforts, the study says. It cited “serious problems stemming from the lack of consolidation, including the fact that these organizations are not accountable for their actions.”

Surprise, surprise: planet is hotting up

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From Environment News Service

WASHINGTON, DC, June 22, 2006 (ENS) – The Earth is hotter today than it has been in four centuries and likely warmer than it has been in the past 1,000 years, according to a review of surface temperature research released Thursday by the U.S. National Academies of Science.

The 155 page report provides additional evidence that “human activities are responsible for much of the warming,” the authors said.

The study, written by a panel of 12 climate experts, assesses the state of scientific efforts to reconstruct surface temperature records for the Earth over approximately the last 2,000 years.

Widespread reliable instrument records of global temperatures are available only for the last 150 years, leaving scientists to estimate past climatic conditions by analyzing proxy evidence from sources such as tree rings, corals, ocean and lake sediments, cave deposits, ice cores, boreholes, and glaciers.

Committee chair Gerald North said the panel’s review of instrument and proxy data affords “a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries.”

Cheese!

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An astonishing proportion of the Japanese tourists who visit Cambridge want to be photographed against the backdrop of the apple tree in front of Trinity College. Wonder if this is because of the legend about Newton and the apple? (His rooms overlook the lawn on which an apple tree stands.)

Which reminds me of one of my favourite cartoons. It shows Newton sitting under the tree, rubbing a bump on his head. He is looking meditatively at the offending fruit lying at his feet and saying: “Now comes the difficult bit — getting a research grant to write it up”.

Etherial music

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Here’s an idea to restore your faith in humanity.

Luke Jerram, a sound artist, working with international hot air balloon pilot Peter Dalby and composer Dan Jones has developed The Sky Orchestra, an ongoing research project that explores how one can perceive a sonic experience while asleep. It is an experimental artwork bringing together performance and music to create visual audio installations within the air and within the mind.

Seven hot air balloons, each with speakers attached, take off at dawn to fly across a city. Each balloon plays a different element of the musical score creating a massive audio performance that many hundreds of people experience subconsciously as the balloons fly over their homes.

Many hundreds of people experience the Sky Orchestra event live as the balloons fly over their homes at dawn. The airborne project is both a vast spectacular performance as well as an intimate, personal experience. The music is audible, both consciously and subconsciously, to all those in the balloon’s flight paths….

The residents of Stratford-upon-Avon, Will Shakespeare’s home town, were treated to this delight this morning — with the added attraction of Royal Shakespeare Company actors reading bits of the Bard’s works. One resident emailed the BBC Today programme: “If music be the food of love, I’ve got indigestion”.

easyBully loses legal action against Easypizza

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Hooray! In a rare setback for the preposterous “Sir” Stelios Loadsamoney Haji-Ioannou, the ludicrous legal action launched by his group against the tiny Easypizza company has failed.

easyGroup IP Licensing Limited, the company that holds intellectual property belonging to companies controlled by the controversial Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the founder of easyJet, has abandoned its High Court action against Easypizza Limited and its directors. Easypizza Limited currently operates in Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Haringey, Islington, and began trading in 1997 where it has developed a steady business in supplying its freshly baked pizza and Italian food and drink products to customers under the Easypizza brand. In 2004, Stelios’s company started its own similarly named easyPizza business serving re-heated frozen pizza on a delivery-only basis to certain parts of the Milton Keynes area and has since expanded in partnership with Famous Moes Pizza into Brighton, Portsmouth, Southampton and Worthing.

Easypizza Limited were represented by Memery Crystal Solicitors and easyGroup were represented by Claire Algar of Collyer Bristow Solicitors.

The case became increasingly acrimonious and bitter and a High Court trial of the matter was originally due to commence in February 2006, but easyGroup served a Notice of Discontinuance shortly beforehand. Easypizza Limited then withdrew its own Counterclaim bringing matters to an end although not before the expenditure of several hundred thousand pounds in legal costs on both sides.