racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

Ah. I found it at last! Here’s a link to one of my very first personal websites, back then hosted on Geocities and Sky Internet (my old ISP … wait, it’s also my current broadband ISP!): The Alpha Centauri Webpages.

And then, of course, here’s the website of my Bulletin Board System (BBS), which I ran for a couple of years in the mid-1990’s: The Cyber County Online.

The cache is hosted by archive.org, the site that seems to have crawled the whole web and cached copies of popular (and not so) websites at regular intervals.

I remember coding the site by hand on Notepad, but I don’t remember what exact software I used for the images–it’s most likely an old version of Photoshop, though.

So there goes another part of my computer/Internet history! Don’t you dare laugh! I know the design is tacky and the copy is not so well-written. But that was the Internet of the 1990’s (and I was in high school)!

The domain wikipedia.de, which redirects to the German-language version of Wikipedia was ordered to go off-line by a German court, per the request of a family of the late hacker known as Tron. They did not wish to make his real name known to the public.

From Breitbart.com:

Visitors to the site http://www.wikipedia.de were greeted by a statement from Wikipedia Deutschland e.V. informing them they were required by law to remove the site and promising the group’s lawyers were taking “every possible step to again bring you uncomplicated access to a the free encyclopedia Wikipedia.”

…

A Berlin court ordered the site pulled on Tuesday, after the family of the German hacker known as “Tron,” whose real name is Boris F., sued the Wikimedia Foundation to prevent them from publishing the real name of their son, who was found hanged in a park in 1998.

But a quick check with the English version of Wikipedia would reveal Tron’s surname.

This is definitely not the best way to hide information from the Internet. Take down a popular website and you’re sure to have a multitude of bloggers and DIGGers talking about it for the next couple of weeks or so.

I think the best course of action would have been for the family’s representatives/lawyers to request the Wikipedia editors to take out Tron’s real name and then lock the article from further editions.

Do check out the Wikipedia entry for Tron for more information on the story.

(via DIGG)

I got an email from a reader suggesting I link up to/review Cibernaut, a free web browser based on IE. I’m up to my neck in writing stuff, though, so I thought of linking to the site for the meantime, and doing a review a bit later (though I’ve downloaded and installed it already).

Anyway, from the Cibernaut site, the creators claim the browser to be the fastest and most secure (compared to IE and Firefox). From what I see in the homepage, it seems loaded with features. Most notable are the security enhancements (if enabled, the brwoser persistently asks you to approve viewing of ads and potentially malicious code–could get annoying, but it’s great for paranoid browsers). Maybe worth a try if you’re coming from the IE side of the spectrum (Firefox junkies might not want to let go of their beloved open-source browser just yet).

The good Philippine Congressman Joseph Santiago is at it again. He blamed broadband for porn proliferation.  Now he’s worried that 3G (third-generation mobile technology) will bring about more porn, this time over the mobile networks.

The advance of broadband or high-speed Internet access, coupled with the coming of 3G mobile telecommunications technology, will surely open the floodgates to the cell phone delivery of pornography.

via Inq7.net

Dude, you must accept the fact that whenever you have access to a web-enabled computer or mobile terminal, you are sure to be able to access porn if you wanted to.

But I agree that it’s good to have a content-rating system.

The lawmaker suggested that NTC adopt a content-rating systems for audio and video materials delivered over cell phones. “Either this or mobile telephone operators themselves initiate their own content-rating systems,” he added.

But–yes, another but–even if you had content-rating systems for the content delivered by the telcos, you would need to have mobile phone support for such to work.  And I doubt that Philippine laws can influence, much less force, the mobile phone producers to implement this across their mobile offerings.  And still, if you have open WAP access with any compatible mobile, you can just go over to wap.google.com, key in some porn-related keywords, and voila, you’ve got porn!

Good intentions.  But it’s either Mr. Santiago’s staff isn’t doing proper research, or he’s just grandstanding to get the conservative citizens’ support.  Reminds me of the .XXX top-level-domain debate, wherein the “conservative” groups strongly lobbied against the creation of .XXX for porn sites, sort of like the red light district of the Internet.  John C. Dvorak puts it so well in his December 5, 2005 PC Magazine Article:

Exactly how these folks [religious and women’s groups] became enamored of resisting the .xxx domain is somewhat mysterious, and I suspect the pornographers themselves are behind it. These women have been tricked. Who benefits from the death of .xxx? The pornographers, that’s who.

…

Concerned Women for America claims that the .xxx domain will increase porn by giving the pornographers a “new platform.” What? Can someone tell me exactly how this creates a new platform? Don’t these people understand how a ghetto works? Do they know what a platform is?

At any rate, IMHO, Mr. Santiago’s proposals just won’t work.  We live in a world where pornography is a driver of technological innovation.  I’m not saying that porn is good (alright, the guys over at the Man Blog would most likely have an opposing view), but it’s a fact that where there’s access to multimedia, then porn is also easily available.

Why don’t we focus our energies on properly educating the people we intend to keep away from this stuff (our kids) instead?  Now that’s a longer-term solution!

(via Yugatech)

This must be the stupidest idea I’ve heard for quite some time.  Inq7.net reports:

[Catanduanes Representative Joseph Santiago], who was also former chief of the National Telecommunications Commission blamed the advent of “cheap, high-speed Internet access” for the proliferation of pornography and so-called “cybersex” activities.

Well, porn may have been one factor why people thought of speeding up enduser connections.  After all, porn is known to drive technological devleopment.  Why’d you think the camera was invented?  To take portraits?  (OK, I may be exaggerating here.)  In the same vein, we had arrived at our present technological level with the help of the initiators: the people who wanted a faster, better way to deliver their wares to more people.

Check out these articles:

• Porn pushing the technology envelope (MSNBC)

• Pornography Drives Technology: Why Not to Censor the Internet (Essay)

• Porno Drives Technology Development (Capitol Blue Hill)
• The Sex Market as a Driving Force in Technology Development (The Volokh Conspiracy)

As goes pornography, so goes technology. The concept may seem odd, but history has proven the adult entertainment industry to be one of the key drivers of any new technology in home entertainment. Pornography customers have been some of the first to buy home video machines, DVD players and subscribe to high-speed Internet.

- Capitol Hill Blue

Without porn, we wouldn’t have the Internet as we have it now.  We’d probably still be using text-based browsers to look up content.  Or at least, the visual interface wouldn’t be as appealing as what we have now.

But to blame broadband for porn?  I think it’s more like porn is one of the reasons we have broadband.

OK, with all these porn-related keywords splattered around this post, I think it’s safe to expect porn-related keyword hits from the big search engines soon.

(Via Yugatech)