Both cases demonstrated the crucial role played by the internet in this age of digital communications. The Tunisian government attempted to censor discussions and remove any material that might provoke discussions and outrage, by hacking into the accounts of journalists and reporters who were writing about the situation. In Egypt, the government ordered the shut down of all operations by the few internet service providers in the country.

While Facebook took action, albeit a week late, by forcing users to login via the secure http protocol (https), Vodafone was one of the first internet service providers in Egypt to shutdown their services. The contrast between attitudes of the two corporations could not be more stark. Facebook decided to move to protect their users while Vodafone just complied with a ridiculous request from a government that has been well known to be a collaborator of the military state of Israel and an agent of the United States in the Middle East.

On the face of the issues, one should applaud Facebook for standing up for the privacy of their users. However, it may be the case that Facebook was just trying to protect their corporate image in the eyes of their users all over the world. In the cases of the journalists who had their accounts hacked and deleted by Tunisian government agents, Facebook would not let them open accounts without using their real names. It might be OK to enforce this policy under normal circumstances, but to force these journalists to publish in Facebook under their real names would be like giving them death sentences.

The actions of Vodafone Egypt, however, was completely deplorable for letting a corrupt government control the connectivity of the country to the rest of the world. Their action in complying with the Mubarak government’s request basically left their subscribers in the dark and unable to reach the outside world effectively to expose the goings on in Egypt.

Some food for thought, I guess.

The move by Craigslists to shut down its adult services section came about after a few years of being hounded by various Attorney Generals in different states in the US. Many accusations of “enabling prostitution” have been leveled against the site, despite its taking certain measures to properly identify advertisers to make sure that there was no crime being committed through the use of the site.

The shut down of the Craigslists adult services section will mean that the advertisers will go somewhere else. There is no shortage of internet entrepreneurs out there who will be willing to take some dollars to advertise adult services. It should also be noted that the shutting down of an adult services section of a website does not in anyway bear any relationship to the exploitation of women and children, because the exploitation of women and children is not caused by Craigslists.

What it means is that essentially anyone who publishes photos online could be infringing Kodak’s patents. This situation is just untenable for a lot of the smaller site operators, but for the bigger companies such as Yahoo!, which owns Flickr.com and Google, which owns Picasa, they are more likely to challenge such a lawsuit and seek to invalidate the patent, which is one of a claimed 400 related patents that Kodak has in its portfolio.

Let us hope that all parties can see some sense in the end.

It seems ‘efficiency’ means running things down and making a profit without investing in infrastructure. This is the way of the future as privatised airports are now the norm.

If a journalist can be held as a criminal on some loose allegations made by people of dubious reputations, then the whole of newspaper business, or what we know as the press, should only be able to publish what has been vetted by the government as legal. As the case with Australia, the government has just been briefed by the Australian Federal Police that mr Assange and Wikileaks has not actually broken any laws.

The very newspapers that have been cooperating with Wikileaks in publishing the leaked documents are now getting cold feet and pretend that they have played no role in the distribution of what might actually be the truth for a change.

If you are running Exim for your MTA, it is recommended to upgrade to 4.7 immediately.

According to this article on the Guardian, the US authorities are preparing to charge Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, with espionage. This shows, once again, the complicity of the Swedish government in the whole process, from the beginning to the very end. The next time people tell me that Sweden is a neutral country I’m gonna slap them, with this story.

As far as I know, exposing government and corporate machinations that they seek to hide from the people does not constitute espionage. Let the truth be known!

It is very clear now what this “investigation” is about. It makes a mockery of real rape victims and it is nothing but an attempt at a political smear campaign and frame up that is carried out under pressure from the US authorities. The Swedish authorities still does not have the backbone to stand up for anything.

When does a fight for transparency become a criminal offence? When it rubs the US government the wrong way. It is not clear if the release of the documents by Wikileaks so far has actually broken any laws, so until it is proven illegal, people should look into the releases and read what transpired in the diplomatic circles in the recent years. So if it’s not illegal, then it might actually be legal, right?