Author Archives: paolo

Google on China: “we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn”

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We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Read more on Google blog.
Everything seems originated by cyber attacks trying to access Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
I cannot read what is the real message between the line and the real reason but this seems big news.

Interesting stuff (2009-12-18)

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  • Seppukoo = Assisting your virtual Facebook suicide
    As the Seppuku restores samurai’s honor as a warrior, in the same way, Seppukoo.com deals with the liberation of the digital body from any identity constriction in order to help people discover what happens after their virtual life and to rediscover the importance of being anyone, instead of pretending to be someone.

    Hacking and parasiting one of the most popular social networking website, Seppukoo.com deactivates one’s user facebook account, driving people into one of the most radical chic user-experience: the vir(tu)al suicide.

    Social networks of suicide! Induce your friends to commit suicide and rise up the Seppukoo Rank!

Interesting stuff (2009-12-18)

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  • Seppukoo = Assisting your virtual Facebook suicide
    As the Seppuku restores samurai’s honor as a warrior, in the same way, Seppukoo.com deals with the liberation of the digital body from any identity constriction in order to help people discover what happens after their virtual life and to rediscover the importance of being anyone, instead of pretending to be someone.

    Hacking and parasiting one of the most popular social networking website, Seppukoo.com deactivates one’s user facebook account, driving people into one of the most radical chic user-experience: the vir(tu)al suicide.

    Social networks of suicide! Induce your friends to commit suicide and rise up the Seppukoo Rank!

Interesting stuff (2009-12-08)

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  • With Lure of Cash, M.I.T. Group Builds a Balloon-Finding Team to Take Pentagon Prize – NYTimes.com
    MIT research team edged out 4,300 other teams in a Pentagon-sponsored contest to identify the location of 10 red balloons distributed around the United States. The contest featured a $40,000 prize and was organized by DARPA in an effort to develop new ways to understand how information is disseminated through social networks. The winning team (Media Laboratory Human Dynamics Group) led by a physicist, Riley Crane, took less than 9 hours to complete the challenge! The winning researchers set up a Web site asking people to join their team. They relied on visitors to the Web site to invite their friends. They said that they would dole out the prize money both to chains of individuals who referred people who had correct information on the balloons’ locations and to charities. They described their method as a “recursive incentive structure.” The researchers said they had received contributions from 4,665 participants.

  • Hide Find Bar with Ctrl+F :: Add-ons for Firefox
    On Firefox, you type "ctrl+f" and you get the find bar for searching text in the current Web page. Very handy, yeeeeh! But there is no keys combination to hide the text field when you’re done with searching, booooo! So, with this Firefox extension, you type again "ctrl+f" and the find bar disappears, yeeeeh!

Interesting stuff (2009-11-22)

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  • Idiot = unconnected
    Umberto Eco interviewed by Spiegel: "If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you’re an idiot." During a discussion about the interview on Facebook, the feminist theorist Katie King noted the interesting etymology of the word "idiot". The word comes frm the Greek idiotes, which means "unconnected, private." Cathy Davidson on her blog did a little more research and discovered that, in the middle ages, it took on the particular meaning of a layman who was unconnected to anyone else, not in a guild, not in a professional, with no relationships to others, no network (so to speak) with whom to share ideas. And I first found this via Daniele Quercia twit http://twitter.com/danielequercia/status/5932188857 At least virtually, I feel connected. By the way, Umberto Eco was born in Alessandria, just as I was ;)

Sociable nets and twitter clouds and participation

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Attending the great conference Le reti socievoli (sociable nets) at Larica group of Univ Urbino.
Behind the speakers, the beamer shows live tag clouds of twitter posts (hashtag: #retisocievoli) by visibletweets (embedded below). Good example of audience live-participating to a conference!
I’ll make my first try to livetwitter a conf. Follow me at http://twitter.com/phauly.

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