Tomorrow I am off to Iceland! This is really cool even though I wish I was staying there for a longer period of time. But it’s cool enough. I fly up tomorrow, have meetings on Tuesday and fly home early on Wednesday. The meetings should be very interesting since I am there to participate in [...]

Listening to the radio this morning and heard that Karim Massimov, the Prime Minster of Kazakhstan started his private, yet official blog on 9th January and apparently has been so happy with the result that he has ordered his minsters to start personal blogs. A politician starting a blog is hardly worth mentioning and starting [...]

Internet service providers are hardly known for their efforts to protect the rights of their clients. This is hardly surprising considering they low amount of money they make per client compared to the legal costs which would be entailed in attempting to defend a client. For example: A cheap web hosting service costs less per [...]

From the cartoonist Matt Davis comes this excellent political satire on Bush’s attempt to criticize China’s human rights (BBC video here), his “…deep concerns religious freedom and human rights…” and that was even before Georgia…

Last month Time Online reported that Spain is to become the first country to extend legal rights to apes. This is the result of a long process (I blogged about this in April 2006) but I had missed the news that Spain had implemented the proposal. The Declaration on Great Apes consists of three main [...]

Since I put many of my photo’s on Flickr I was disturbed to read the following story. The more I thought about it the more I realised that it was obvious that Flickr would have the same types of rules as all the other social networking sites but it is still a reason for concern. [...]

Over at Macuser Dan Moren replies to the question “why can’t all iPhone apps be free? posed by Anita Hamilton in TIME. Moren widens the question to apply to the whole concept of free stuff but naturally focuses on free software. His point is the way in which the public at large have connected the [...]

This has been a busy week for books on Open Access. On Wednesday I blogged about the book Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide for Authors by Kylie Pappalardo. Today Open Access News wrote about two more new Open Access books: E. Canessa and M. Zennaro at the Science Dissemination Unit of [...]

Providing cameras and video cameras to different groups is not an uncommon method which allows the subjects to bring their own lives into focus without the direct mediation of the “outsider” camera/filmmaker. Naturally all uses of technology contain risks of bias and slanted views – nobody still believes that the camera never lies? Even if [...]

Coming back from a vacation always requires effort and since I was both offline and without newspapers (the latter was by choice) I am now busy catching up. One thing catches my eye – the BBC reports that a schoolteacher in Sweden confiscated a birthday cards on the grounds that those not invited were being [...]

The French have gone and done it! Times Online reports: Anyone who persists in illicit downloading of music or films will be barred from broadband access under a controversial new law that makes France a pioneer in combating internet piracy. “There is no reason that the internet should be a lawless zone,” President Sarkozy told [...]