U.S.

From now on instead of posting links to interesting things individually as I find them I'll wait until I get half a dozen or so and then post them together in a digest like this.

Every day I spend 2 to 3 hours reading, watching and researching. During this time I see hundreds of interesting things. Here are some of the best. Enjoy!

Free!

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine, author of The Long Tail and perhaps the most far-sighted man in Silicon Valley, has a new book due out soon. Everything that goes digital eventually goes free. Find out why $0.00 is the future of business.

Microsoft tries to convince people Vista doesn't suck

Apple's Mac and PC ads are starting to bite and Windows Vista is still a colossal flop and embarrassment 18 months after its launch. In response, Microsoft has conducted an 'experiment' in which people who don't like Vista are shown a secret new version of Windows which they instantly fall in love with. Turns out it was Vista all along! The people in this video are real, but are clearly computer noobs. Watch the video and see what you think. To me it seems equivalent to responding to someone who has read a bad review of a car by showing them a sales brochure for the same car. The actual virtues of the car itself don't come into it because the person has never driven it. I'd love to see Microsoft try this experiment with someone who has actually used a computer before.

What makes people gay?

That's what John Barrowman sets out to find in this BBC documentary. Barrowman, the Scottish star of Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood, married his boyfriend last year. In the documentary, filmed in America, John challenges scientists to explain why he's gay. With the help of friends, family, psychologists and geneticists, he asks whether nature or nurture determine what we are. The Making of Me was the highest rating program on UK television when it aired this week. BBC have made it available online but only for UK viewers. Those with Bit Torrent clients will find a link to a working torrent file here.

China cleans up its air for Olympics

And this is the result! Beijing has a scale by which air pollution is measured. 100 is considered not great, 200 is bad and has been recorded many times in the last decade. Sometimes it even gets to 500. This picture, taken last week after anti-smog measures had been introduced, rates 113. No wonder the athletes are concerned.

Crazy right-wing nuts hijack public debate

Ever heard of the Overton Window? That's the name given to the idea that debate about an issue takes place within a certain range of views, focussing on mainstream beliefs with crazier fringe opinions at the edges. The idea of 'moving the Overton Window' is that by putting the crazy ideas out into the public arena more often, they become closer to the mainstream. Progressives say this is the technique that FOX news and other far right-wing voices use to hijack the political agenda. No need to back up what you're saying, just say it loud enough and often enough and people will consider your ideas normal and the other guy's ideas even crazier and more extreme. This blog looks at how this happens in Australian politics and media.

The folks at JibJab have posted a new animated video taking a light-hearted look at the US presidential campaigning. Always fun, take a look below:

It seems that in the last year of his presidency, George Bush can't win a trick. It's traditional that the Presidential Memorial Commission goes around naming things in the president's honour in his final year, but he can't even get a sewage plant named after him without major opposition.

The Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco has just recently submitted enough signatures to city election officials “hoping to place on the ballot an initiative that would rechristen the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant as the George W. Bush Sewage Plant.”

The debate seems to centre mostly around whether the naming would be appropriate because a sewage plant cleans up mess, or inappropriate because it's too useful in doing so. As one of the commission's founders Brian McConnell puts it:

"If you get to the point where people are defending the sewage plant, that’s a sign that things have not gone so well."

Listen to what McConnell says in a radio interview below:

Guy Rundle's US presidential campaign essay in Crikey today was simply so good I have to include it here in its entirety. Sadly, today I also discovered I didn't win Crikey's competition where the prize was a trip to Washington in November to have dinner with Guy and election-watch. Sigh.

You write a story in the morning on a dead news day, you go to lunch, you come back and the whole world's gone haywire. To whit: your correspondent drafted a careful pseffe... sephologi... fseffepho... electoral analysis of some swing state demographics, and had no sooner sent it off than the networks go haywire with some advance copies of the Obama family interviews given for -- seriously -- Access Hollywood channel, which will be airing tomorrow.

Click here to watch the video

Having said he wouldn't put his family front and centre during the campaign, Obama has done another brilliant/cynical switcheroo depending on your politics, and done an extended family interview lolling on the lawn in weekend casual clothes, the Obamas' two daughters talking about how the best thing about going to the White House would be that "you get to decorate your own room" and "we can get a dog!".

God, it was good. God it made me feel sorry for John McCain. The whole thing will further ram home the basic difference between Obama and McCain to millions of middle-American voters: we, the Obamas, are suburban parents just like you -- young, vigorous, beautiful, in the prime of our lives, still living it. Of particular brilliance was the exchange between Malia Ann, the Obamas' ten-year-old, chiding her father: "Daddy, you always leave..." "Oh, here we go," says Barack, smiling, Malia continues: "you always leave your bag in the hall and I trip over it."

Though Fox News may try and spin that last line as "Obama endangers daughter", I suspect that it, and the whole interview, will go down in history as Obama's Kennedy moment. And not merely a simulacrum of such -- this is really our first look at a black first family. God they look so good, so fresh and cool. [click to continue...]

While we're on the topic of free speech and the internet, here's an interesting site: Wikileaks.

The front page of Wikileaks proudly proclaims:

Have documents the world needs to see?
We protect you and get your disclosure out to the world

And so it has. In the 18 months it's been operational, the site has released some explosive material, such as never-before-seen operating manuals for the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, lists of U.S. munitions in Iraq, including stores of banned chemical weapons, and a suppressed report on the looting of the African nation of Kenya by former president Daniel Arap Moi, a leak that led to an upset in Kenya's presidential election. The Gitmo material was particularly interesting because it showed that the United States had a policy for hiding some detainees from the International Red Cross, and used dogs to intimidate prisoners.

The owner of the site doesn't know who actually runs it or how it works, on purpose. It has mirrors all around the world so when the site was briefly taken down in the US it stayed online regardless.

Ryan Singel of Wired writes:

When online troublemaker Julian Assange co-founded Wikileaks, the net's premiere document-leaking site last year, some were skeptical that the service would produce anything of interest.

Now, after 18 months of publishing government, industry and military secrets that have sparked international scandals, led to takedown threats and briefly gotten the site banned in the United States, Assange says Wikileaks is just getting started changing the world.

"In every negotiation, in every planning meeting and in every workplace dispute, a perception is slowly forming that the public interest may have a silent advocate in the room," Assange writes.
In February, the site published the Pentagon's 2005 rules of engagement for troops in Iraq, revealing that troops were authorized to pursue former officials in Saddam Hussein's government, as well as terrorists, into neighboring Iran and Syria. The document was classified "secret", meaning that in the eyes of the military, its release could be expected to cause "serious damage" to U.S. national security.

The world's governments and press have taken notice. The New York Times reported on the rules of engagement leak, and the Iranian government held a press conference to warn the United States about crossing its border. The Washington Post reported on the Guantanamo documents, forcing the Pentagon to respond.

More controversially, the site has begun posting confidential documents from the secretive and litigious Church of Scientology, and from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Julian Assange

Julian Assange (pictured) is a hacker born in Australia. He lives in east Africa now and says he does the stuff he does because he has a conscience. Still, Wikileaks doesn't only publish highly political content. It also leaked the complete script to the new Indiana Jones movie and the tax returns of at least one Hollywood actor, leading many to claim the site is simply irresponsible and undermining society. It's interesting that no-one is questioning its accuracy however. [click to continue...]

The short answer is - not really. Websites that allow user comments or participation are largely owned by private companies which reserve the right to regulate and censor content but are not obligated to. Some companies like Twitter take a completely hands-off stance, others like eBay have wide-ranging and very detailed policies about what can and can't be said or done.

Wired has done an interesting piece on the issue of free speech online, here are a few choice excerpts:

Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content that's controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.

The governmental role that companies play online is taking on greater importance as their services - from online hangouts to virtual repositories of photos and video - become more central to public discourse around the world. It's a fallout of the Internet's market-driven growth, but possible remedies, including government regulation, can be worse than the symptoms.

Dutch photographer Maarten Dors met the limits of free speech at Yahoo Inc.'s photo-sharing service, Flickr, when he posted an image of an early-adolescent boy with disheveled hair and a ragged T-shirt, staring blankly with a lit cigarette in his mouth.

Without prior notice, Yahoo deleted the photo on grounds it violated an unwritten ban on depicting children smoking. Dors eventually convinced a Yahoo manager that - far from promoting smoking - the photo had value as a statement on poverty and street life in Romania. Yet another employee deleted it again a few months later. [click to continue...]