Jonathan Zittrain writes in the New York Times about the web’s future: Earlier this month Google announced a new operating system called Chrome. It’s meant to transform personal computers and handheld devices into single-purpose windows to the Web. This is part of a larger trend: Chrome moves us further away from running code and storing…
Showing all posts tagged Google
Nokia should be far more careful
We reported some time ago on the complicity of Nokia in the recent Iranian crackdown. Western multinationals have become pretty good at working with authoritarian regimes (witness Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft in China.) But now a backlash: The mobile phone company Nokia is being hit by a growing economic boycott in Iran as consumers sympathetic…
News should be free and yet…
What’s a fair financial, ethical and practical share in the age of Google? The Columbia Journalism Review investigates.
Shoddy behaviour will catch up with you
This news is welcome in a nation such as China where web repression is deep: A Chinese academic has successfully sued an internet company for closing his website after he posted articles on subjects including corruption and environmental issues. Hu Xingdou, professor of economics at the Beijing Institute of Technology, said he hoped his case…
Screwing with their minds
The power of Google is something that should worry us all, despite its relevance in our daily lives. It’s therefore hard not to enjoy any attempt to challenge the company’s online dominance: On the same day it was revealed that users of YouTube, the world’s largest video-sharing site, were uploading more than 20 hours of…
Palestine, Israel and freedom of speech: striking at the heart of liberal democracies
My following piece appears in today’s edition of Crikey: Echoing the discredited and contemptible Holocaust-denier David Irving, Australian Frederick Toben, who happily accepted an invitation to the 2006 Holocaust denial conference in Tehran, was back in the news last week after being found in contempt by a Federal Court for refusing to remove material from…
Power of the people
Dawn is Pakistan’s leading English language paper. Today it publishes a review by Mustafa Qadri of my book, The Blogging Revolution: Hot on the heels of his last book, My Israel Question (a history of the Israeli occupation of Palestine from the perspective of an anti-Zionist Jewish Australian), freelance journalist Antony Loewenstein delves into the…
Don’t let Google control everything
As an author, this deeply concerns me. It’s really a human rights issue: The Justice Department has launched an investigation into whether Google is violating antitrust laws by reaching an agreement with authors and publishers to digitize millions of printed books and post the contents online. We speak to Brewster Kahle, founder of the non-profit…
Stifling the voices
My book, The Blogging Revolution, examines the Western corporates that assist the Chinese regime in its internet censorship program. According to yesterday’s New York Times, the Communists are cracking down ever-harder in the last months: It was meant to be a tongue-in-cheek alternative to the stultifying variety show beamed into hundreds of millions of living…