Ever get the feeling you are wasting your breath? Yep, after all the thousands of (mostly angry) words written about internet censorship in the UAE, by dozens of journalists, bloggers and so many others, the cack-handed  efforts at web blocking by the TRA and the duopoly still go unnoticed on the worldwide stage. China’s Green Dam and Iran’s cyber-revolution make headline news, but the fact that we can’t use flickr goes unnoticed (it’s an outrage!)

The UK newspaper the Guardian has compiled this map of global web censorship, in association with the Open Net Initiative - but there’s no data available on the UAE…

The good news is, that the paper is asking for more information on any countries that it has missed - so getting posting data to them straight away.

The internet censorship adds to a couple of other notable crowd-sourcing projects from the Guardian lately. They’ve roped in readers to comb through hundreds of pages of UK MP’s expenses and have also launched a campaign to track and identify those detained or killed in Iran’s recent election protests. Which, sadly, any one accessing from the UAE won’t be able to see all of the results from, as the Guardian is asking its volunteer community to post ideas for visualisation of the data on to flickr…

Microsoft has apparently cooked up a solution to avoid any multi-million euro fines from European regulators, with the announcement that it is dropping Internet Explorer from Windows 7 when it is released later this year.

While the move is obviously intended to placate the regulators, one of their biggest problems with Microsoft was the bundling of browser and OS, its hard to believe that Microsoft’s latest move will really make a difference to the browser market. Continue reading … ‘Windows 7 goes IE-free’

Strange news from Sweden, where a band of pirates have apparently seized a seat in the European Parliamentary elections.

The Piratpartiet - Pirate Party - is apparently Sweden’s third largest political party, according to Wikipedia - and has won electoral success with 7.1% of votes. Although the party doesn’t have official links to Swedish file sharing site The Pirate Bay, it has a broadly similar agenda, and the victory could be seen as a reaction to the jailing of the Pirate Bay founders in Sweden earlier this year.

Piratpartiet ahoy!

Continue reading … ‘Swedish pirates ahoy!’

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing was launched this week, and so far, it looks pretty good. Microsoft’s pitch is that Bing can help users make better decisions faster, and the engine certainly seems to be  speedy and clear.

The launch release says that Microsoft has focused on four key areas - making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business - so for Middle East users, without the benefit of a lot of online maps, business directories or retail sites to be linked to results, it’s not so useful, but it’s worth a look for some of the other functions.

Microsoft is certainly spending big to try and get market share from Google - with an ad campaign that seems to be saying that Bing can save the economy. Let’s face it, if you’re going to get share from Google, you better have a pretty compelling proposition to lure new users.

Aside from a small bug for IE6 users, which has now been fixed, Bing seems to be a pretty good competitor to Google, but Google aren’t slow to react to competition, and against the 70% or so market share that Google enjoys, its hard to believe that Microsoft might have a Google killer on its hands.

Of course, some users might be attracted by the well-publicized issue with video searches, that I won’t go into further except to say that I’d expect Etisalat and du to catch on in maybe a month’s time or so, and then ban the whole site completely, just like they do with other useful sites like Flickr or YouTube that might contain ‘illicit’ content but they can’t figure out how to filter…

President Barack Obama has been announcing his plans for a national co-ordinated approach to cyber security that may even include an offensive cyber warfare command within the US military.

The US govt is proposing to spend billions on cyber security, classing it as a “strategic national asset”.

Details are still scarce, and while George Bush also made big noises on cyber security, and then did nothing, at least Obama can probably spell ‘cyber’, and the signs are that he’s taking the situation seriously.

The President's plans include a White House office and a cyber tzar to deal with cyber security (Getty Images).

Continue reading … ‘A new cyber arms race’