The Internet is a good thing, unless the Internet is a bad thing. For open societies, the Internet helps to establish and expand social networks, provide a free-flow of information, and engage in new found economic opportunities. For less open societies, these benefits are seen more as a negative than a positive.
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Talks between Google and China are still on-going but it seems that the search giant is ready to pull out of the country. The censorship feud has been on-going since January, when Google issued a statement that it would not tolerate censorship of its search service in China. Both parties have stood firm since, with China’s Minister of Industry and Information Technology, Li Yizhong, saying last week that: “if you betray Chinese laws and regulations… it means that you are unfriendly, irresponsible, and you will have to pay the consequences.” Google isn’t likely to fork out for what consequences Yizhong is alluding too, however, with the search giant saying to Reuters this week: “We’ve been very clear that we are no longer going to self-censor our search results.” Sinking the censor ship Also speaking to Reuters, Mark Natkin, Managing Director of Marbridge Consulting, explained his though, noting: “Our forecast has always remained firm that once Google announced it would not accept censorship, then it was nearly impossible to imagine a scenario either where Google didn’t act on that or the government accepted their position.” Google hasn’t announced outright it is ditching China
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Last week we reported that Google’s China talks may soon be coming to a close , and CEO Eric Schmidt even hinted to reporters at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit that “something would be happening soon”. Well, if you believe the Financial Times , Google is about 99.9% sure it is going to pull the plug on China. Wired.com attempted to contact a Google spokesman for a comment, however they would neither confirm or deny the report. According to the Times, Google has drawn up a detailed plans for how it will exit the Chinese market, and is poised to execute. If Google does pull out of China, the action plan is no doubt intended to protect local employees from retaliation by authorities.
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The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde was beamed into a conference room by Skype at South by South West Interactive today to talk to interviewer Elizabeth Stark about the Pirate Bay, his views on copyright and whether the Pirate Bay can ever be fully shut down. While Sunde was often non-specific about the issues when pressed, he did drop some gems into the interview. Here are 15 of the most memorable quotes from his interview. On why he didn’t personally attend SXSWi: “If I come to the US I will get so sued that I won’t get out of the US for quite a while.” On the threatening letters received from lawyers: “You get letters from the lawyers and usually they are very used to the people who receive them just doing what they are told. Lawyers aren’t always right, but people are scared of them so we decided not to be scared
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Google CEO Eric Schmidt has hinted that the company’s negotiations with the Chinese government may be drawing to a close. The parleys began in January after the search engine giant announced it was no longer willing to censor its search results in China. Eric Schmidt told reporters at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit that “something will happen soon.” However, Google has chosen to remain mum until it concludes negotiations with the Chinese. Schmidt also revealed that the company is working alone on resolving this issue and hasn’t “coordinated with the U.S.
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ARM is looking at the future of tablet PCs, and is liking what it sees. ARM is expecting over 50 tablet PCs, a goodly number of which will be running on ARM chips, to be launched globally in 2010 , thanks in part to the interest stirred up by the introduction of Apple’s iPad. Says Roy Chen, ARM’s manager for worldwide mobile computing: “The first tablet devices will launch in the second quarter by [mobile network] carriers. You’ll see a lot more in the third quarter.” A lot of this activity, Chen says, will take place in China, and he expects there’ll be products offered by the top ten telecommunications network operators.
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British technology entrepreneur and inventor Sir James Dyson has laid out his plan for making Britain a great tech innovator – after being asked to help out the Conservative party ahead of this year’s general election. Dyson – perhaps best known for his vacuum cleaner – was asked by leader of the opposition David Cameron to come up with a way to bring Britain to the forefront of technology, and his plan deals with five ways in which the UK can fight its way back to the cutting edge. The report says: Culture: The UK’s science, engineering and manufacturing base has been neglected for decades. As result they are undervalued and misunderstood
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Instead of cracking open your PC to add extra memory, how about plugging it into a docking station that also gives you a faster processor so you can run more demanding applications? Once PCs switch over to internal optical connections based on silicon photonics instead of the copper wires that run around today’s motherboards, “we’ll have a new way to design that gets rid of the distance limit,” says Sean Koehl, a technology evangelist in Intel Labs. “You can move the memory. Take a very mobile device like a netbook and imagine a docking station that also gives it a connection to faster processing and more memory.” That could help with cooling; your notebook could get more powerful without getting hotter. Memory on your PC is going to get faster as well, he says.
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A new play about tight-ship-running Apple CEO Steve Jobs is set to be staged at California’s Berkeley Theatre early next year, penned by one of America’s leading playwrights. The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is to be staged in Berkeley in January 2011, with writer Mike Daisey having been praised by the New York Times in the past as being “the master storyteller” and “one of the finest solo performers of his generation.” Daisey will not be performing his monologue, however, with another performer still to be charged with that daunting role. Real-life Willy Wonka Berkeley Rep describes that play as Daisey diving “into the epic story of a real-life Willy Wonka whose personal obsessions profoundly affect our everyday lives—and follows the trail to China where millions toil in factories to create iPhones and iPods. “With his wry eye and eccentric intellect, Daisey delivers [an] adventure story that cuts deep with hilarious social critique,” adds the blurb on the theatre’s website.
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Microsoft has reiterated that it has no intention of pulling out of the Chinese market, despite the ongoing problems between the nation and Google. Google’s well-publicised decision to end its collaboration with China over search filters has re-opened the thorny debate about Western internet companies operating within a nation that actively censors the web, and refusal to accede to the nation’s demand could see the search giants withdraw entirely from the market. However, with Steve Ballmer already insisting that the company has no intention of following Google’s lead in refusing to follow China’s rules, the decision has been underlined by Microsoft’s Asian branch.
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