Tag Archives: President

An Unlikely Blogger Expelled

Although it’s not good for Sudan, I think it’s good for blogging: CNN reports that  The government of Sudan on Sunday gave the top U.N. official in the country three days to leave, marking the latest hurdle in international efforts to bring peace to the nation torn apart by civil war. Sudan expelled Jan Pronk,… Read More »

Teaching Kids to Get into Interactive Debt

Next mealtime, expect your kids to pester you to take out a loan on a new Scion. They’ll probably have filled in the forms for you. A month ago the NYT wrote about how a kids’ virtual world website, Whyville, was cutting a deal with Toyota to promote the Scion, allowing the youngsters to buy… Read More »

How to Practice Talking to Teenagers

I can’t remember how I got there, but I ended up talking to one of those automated chat things. This one is called SmarterChild, now at least five years old, and still manages to be both obtuse and wise at the same time, while also plying his/her interlocutor with ads, most of them contextually inappropriate.… Read More »

Domain Names as a Tool for Political Control?

A case that addresses all sorts of issues, and, at the same time, none of them. Reuters.com reported a few days ago that The authorities in Kazakhstan, angered by a British comedian’s satirical portrayal of a boorish, sexist and racist Kazakh television reporter (Borat Sagdiyev ), have pulled the plug on his alter ego’s Web… Read More »

Shutting Skype Out

Who actually pays for Skype? How about the network operators, who have to put up with all the extra traffic? And what are they doing about it? A piece from VOIP Planet, Keeping Skype @Bay, points to the arrival of products specifically designed to block Skype (and other p2p traffic) from their networks: Skype is… Read More »