Ari's Planet

According to the NYT article Surveillance of Skype Messages Found in China by John Markoff (1/10/2008), reporting on the discovery by Nart Villeneuve and published on Information Warfare Monitor, China monitors Skype text chats and archives the text and personal information of users whose chats contain various trigger words, such as "Falun Gong" or "milk powder". In the past, the appropriate American response would be something like "Those terrible Chinese! They violate their citizens' rights to free speech and communication! What dastardly dictators!", with the subtext that in America, and perhaps other nations of the so-called "free world", we are better because our governments uphold more noble rights. While such statements about China remain fairly accurate, the subtext has collapsed. The NSA illegally spies on American communications. European countries have taken to archiving, for several months or years, all email communications and record end points of phone conversations.

The US government, via the copyright office, sets royalty rates for songs. That seems a bit dumb, why is the government determining rates between private parties, other than perhaps setting some fair maximum to avoid excessive restraints on trade (as in increasingly defunct usury laws)? The end result is that instead of artists (via their representatives) negotiating with broadcasters, we have artists petitioning the US government to set particular rates and broadcasters petitioning to have lower rates. Oops, did I say artists?

Ever since Google kowtowed to China and started censoring their results I've been looking for an alternative. Yahoo wasn't any better. So much for companies promising to do no evil. It didn't help Google's cause that they pester you with trillions of cookies (these can be shut off, apparently by setting other cookies, which really doesn't address the problem). From what I gather, which is not much, Cuil was started by some ex-Googlers. Since I made sure not to dig too deep, as far as I can tell Cuil hasn't gone and done anything evil yet, like blocking good stuff from folks with the misfortune of having a Chinese-looking IP address. There's also Goodsearch which will donate a bit to your charity of choice. By the way, Google should be well aware that the value of their product is in the switching cost, and since their search product has about zero switching cost, it's not very valuable. Lucky for them they have other products. Hello Cuil.

This post describes my workflow to handle digital images and how I publish them on my web site while on the road. My camera has shot about 35,000 images, nearly all of which have been taken on my trip which started in August of 2007 (it is now May 2008).

Equipment and software needed

Digital camera, flash memory, spare batteries
External USB disk, 2.5", and USB cable
Portable 2.5" disk drive that can copy cards directly
Good card reader with USB cable
USB flash stick with portable software (see below) and notes