Blog Currents – 27-Apr-2011

Have you ever noticed that the larger the organisation is the less helpful they become?  Sitting in Adelaide, South Australia for Easter I wanted to find out what days the local supermarket would be open and closed over Easter. I went to the Web site that was full of all kinds of information about what they sold and what was on special but nothing about store hours. As usual the main page was so busy that finding something was made more difficult. In the end I gave up. The major competitor’s site was much more informative which goes to show that those who snooze, lose.

The Freedom on the Net 2001 report was interesting. Last week I mentioned how Australia and the UK landed near the top. This week I wanted to delve a little deeper and see what the other countries were up to. So at random let’s see what Thailand for example has been up to. OK, it wasn’t random.

Thailand was identified as a location where the government(s) have long blocked internet content. Legal action has been taken against users, especially if the postings criticize the monarchy in any way. The incidence of detained users and blocked sites has increased sharply in the past couple of years. Senior officials had the power to extrajudicially order blockings during the April 2010-Dec 2010 state of emergency. Thailand along with other countries like Burma, China, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam is identified as a country with substantial censorship of political issues. It was also identified as countries where websites or blogs of government opponents faced cyber attacks. Thailand also scored in the “Countries with at least partially centralised and government-controlled Internet connections,” with others like Tunisia, Zimbabwe, Iran, Jordan and others. The report explained that Thailand, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, and Venezuela have all had new laws or directives arise since 2007 that have led to an increase in censorship.  In Thailand for example,  online news outlets are legally responsible for comments
posted by readers. One editor faced criminal charges over reader comments that were critical of the monarchy. The moral here is that if you are going to be critical of a country’s government do so from a web site not hosted there. Thailand has military units assigned to countering online criticism of the monarchy, and Burma has established a blogging committee in each ministry to track authors.

The report identified 37 countries of which five were declared “at risk” because of where they might be heading in the future. They were not as bad as the big offenders like Iran, China and Bahrain but they did have a repressive environment for the media and the Internet is gaining in importance there. At this list we once again find Thailand along with Russia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and Jordan.

The Internet and Internet users in Thailand have played a significant role in challenging the political levels since 2006. This has sparked renewed efforts by the military and the government to control the free flow of information and opinion online. While Thailand has been blocking content since 2003 the last few years have seen increases in the scale and scope of these efforts. This has had an affect on thousands of websites including on independent news outlets and human rights groups.  In March of this year a Thai judge sentenced a web developer to 13 years in prison for comments he posted and for refusing to remove the remarks of others.

Yes there are worse countries that Thailand. Access to the Internet is quite easy in Thailand and if you don’t write anything too political your Web experience can be quite a good one. They don’t shape their connections for example.  There is however a lot of room for improvement.

Industry News

For years many people have selected Apple as their hardware of choice because Apple doesn’t spy on people. Microsoft does or did and others have been caught out collecting information on people but not good old Apple. Until now. The latest iPad and iPhones, in particular those with 3G access, have been recording where you are and when you sync that info is transferred to your computer.  Some clever people found this out, in the same way that the stuff Microsoft was sending was eventually found out. Apple claims that they are not using this data. Now I’m not sure about you but I’ve heard that so many times it is difficult to even keep a straight face when being told that the data someone has been collecting on you is not used. You decide but I’m guessing there are some very annoyed Apple users out there at the moment. They would be feeling that they have been betrayed by their Master and they would be right.

The latest new on this issue has a lawsuit being filed against Apple on the grounds of “irreparable injury” that has resulted from the alleged tracking. The suit was filed in Florida a couple of days ago. It has been suggested that the suit be raised to a class action suit. According to the latest from Steve Jobs the plaintiffs have been misinformed. He claims that Apple doesn’t track anyone and that the information about this issue is false. Should be easy to prove either way there are supposed to be files containing the data after all. 

Oops, Iran has been hit by another Worm. This one is called Stars and the investigators are still trying to figure out what it did. They are calling it an “espionage virus” that targeted undisclosed computer systems in the country. Actual damage has been very light as it targeted supervisory control and data acquisition, computer systems throughout the world. For the time being the Worm has only been investigated internally within Iran. It may be a regular Internet Worm or something like Stuxnet that specifically targeted Iran and its nuclear centrifuges.

Microsoft has expanded beyond their own vulnerabilities to include warning about third party items. In a recent bulletin they covered Google Chrome and Opera 11 that were patched in December last year. They do this only if the flaw is under an active attack. Microsoft has been providing information to vendors since 2008. I don’t see Adobe and Google jumping into bed with Microsoft on this one but it may help prod them to get a bug fix out a little faster.

There has been an announcement that finally Nintendo's will have the Wii 2 out by the middle of next year. No specs or other information just the announcement. All I can say is that it is way past time for a version 2.

I know there was something I was going to write about this week, concerning global warming and technology but I’ll have to finds it later. That leaves me with the upcoming Sony Android 3 tablets. They will be out in northern hemisphere autumn. They may or may not look something like the prelease pictures. There will be a 9.4 inch version and a 5.5 inch version. They will have WiFi and 3G (so what) and that is all they are saying at this point. No prices but expect them to be more expensive that the competitors, they always are.

I hope you all had a good Easter break. Those that got one.