The Chinese government seems to have a love-hate relationship with the net. On the one hand they’ve embraced the internet, making it widely available in universities etc, and implementing a country-wide program of high speed data links. And on the other hand, they constantly worry what their citizens get up to.

So now they’ve just had a big crackdown on net cafes, and closed 16,000. And launched a web site where people can report ‘unlawful content’. The public reason is protecting the young from naughty pictures and violence:

“However, many observers believe that the regime is just as worried about the disruptive effects of exposure to alternative sources of news and views about sensitive political subjects. “

“Australia is lagging behind the rest of the developed world as far as the spread of broadband goes, with only 13 percent penetration expected by the end of 2008, the technology research firm IDC says in a study. “

Well Telstra is trying to do something about that, with it’s new pricing plans starting at $29.95 for broadband. Except, as with everything to do with Telstra, there’s always a catch. $29.95 only gets you 256k/64k speeds – which barely qualifies as broadband, and a cap of 200 meg of data a month – which is nothing. I’d go through that in a few days. Telstra almost owns up, they describe it as ‘Light use, or exploring ADSL’.

First we had ‘flash-mobbing’, now the British have invented ‘mobile nightclub’. So if you are in London, waiting at an underground station, and see a bunch of people simultaneaously start to bop and jive, you’ll know what’s happened.

“The latest craze, devised by a pair of London artists, sees people directed to busy rail stations so they can simultaneously don personal stereo headphones and begin dancing to their own soundtrack. “

It’s official, a survey has found 3 out of 4 emails are spam.

“MessageLabs said of some 909 million e-mails scanned at its customers, 691.5 million were intercepted as spam, or 76 percent. “

“That report found the average employee receives nearly 7,500 spam messages per year, up from 3,500 in 2003. “

Gee, all the anti-spam legislation is working a treat!

Hard on the heels of the ineffective Can Spam Act in the USA, their Federal Trade Commission has introduced a new rule to require spammers to tell you they are sending you porn! As if subject lines like ‘fdh insitant hardons hgg’ and ‘ssc longlasting erectgions apb’ didn’t give the game away!

“A new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rule requires pornographic “spam” (unwanted e-mail) to carry the words “Sexually Explicit” in the subject line. It also requires sexually explicit e-mail to include a valid physical postal address for the sender, as well as a clear method of opting out of future e-mails. Internet experts generally discourage you from ever clicking on a link to opt out. “

Yeah, that’ll help.

A book for your reading list – Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold. It’s my ‘eye opener’ book for the month:

“Smart mobs emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation. The impacts of smart mob technology already appear to be both beneficial and destructive.”

Smart Mobs is a major endorsement and exploration particularly of mobile and wireless network connectivity – from high tech Janpanese teenagers to orchestraed political activists in Europe.

“The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities. Their mobile devices connect them with other information devices in the environment as well as with other people’s telephones. Dirt-cheap microprocessors embedded in everything from box tops to shoes are beginning to permeate furniture, buildings, neighborhoods, products with invisible intercommunicating smartifacts. When they connect the tangible objects and places of our daily lives with the Internet, handheld communication media mutate into wearable remote control devices for the physical world.”

A nice article and interview with Howard

Saw a newspaper ad from the ‘3’ mobile phone company this week, promoting a ‘NetConnect Card’. It’s a standard PCMCIA card to slot into your laptop, which puts you online to the net via 3’s high speed mobile network. Basically, as long as you are within the 3 coverage zones (which I think is mostly only capital cities at present), the card gives you 384k download and 64k upload speeds for around $49 a month. Now that’s not as fast as most broadbank connections, and what with the recent price drops for broadband, not the cheapest either. But it has one overriding advantage – you can be anywhere you like. So, perhaps you are a small business person, or self employed, moving around clients or locations. Absolutely perfect.

Saw a newspaper ad from the ‘3’ mobile phone company this week, promoting a ‘NetConnect Card’. It’s a standard PCMCIA card to slot into your laptop, which puts you online to the net via 3’s high speed mobile network. Basically, as long as you are within the 3 coverage zones (which I think is mostly only capital cities at present), the card gives you 384k download and 64k upload speeds for around $49 a month. Now that’s not as fast as most broadbank connections, and what with the recent price drops for broadband, not the cheapest either. But it has one overriding advantage – you can be anywhere you like. So, perhaps you are a small business person, or self employed, moving around clients or locations. Absolutely perfect.

For those of us constantly frustrated by the tiny storage space allowed by the web mail services like Hotmail, Google is coming to the rescue. Their new GMail service will provide one gigabyte of storage. Charging people for extra storage is a key revenue stream for Hotmail. IN Australia ninemsn charges $37.95 for 10 meg of email storage – that’s 1/100 of what GMail will offer for free. Not hard to see that GMail could get real popular real fast.

But there’s some concern out there after it was realised that Google was intending to run advertisements in the mail window, based on the words in the emails. Some privacy advocates are not altogether happy. And Google is now reportedly reviewing its position.

A great article from BusinessWeek Online looking at the enthusiam of political campaigns for the internet, for everything from fundraising to organising rallies.

“In three weeks in February, a Washington political consultant named John Aravosis gathered 20,000 supporters and raised more than $23,000 for a campaign against the proposed Constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage. “You have to decide how to use the Internet to drive [the] candidate [you’re targeting] crazy,” he says.”

Presidential Candidate Howard Dean set the trend, with a very successful online strategy which raised millions. And now John Kerry, another prominent candidate is aping the approach, at one stage raising $US1 million a day.