The Internet Today

Today on the Internet I met a young man named Bryan Bishop.  I didn't meet him in the conventional sense.  I first met him on Slashdot when he posted this question, What is the first day in a University Lab Like?  Again, I didn't meet him as in, "Hi, I'm Mitchell.  Nice to meet you."  "Hi, I'm Bryan.  Nice to meet you."  I met him in an Internet sort of way.  His words gave me a bit of an introduction to him.  Intrigued, I clicked his name and wound up on his homepage.  What an interesting fellow.  It's amazing to see someone who's done so much and has so many interesting ideas.  I clicked around on some of his links and followed some threads here and there and generally spent a whole bunch of time reading somewhat random stuff of interest to a high school senior in Texas.  I found some really cool sites, my current favorite being KurzweilAI.net.  If nothing else, check out their trippy search function, The Brain.  Thanks to Bryan for being a cool guy who puts worthwhile things on the Internet.  I wouldn't know the guy if I tripped over him but I feel like I kinda know him a little bit now.

In other thrilling Internet goings-on spotlighted by Slashdot, there's an article at Yahoo! about the ongoing existence of the top level domain for the Soviet Union, Back in the USSR: Soviet internet domain name resists death.  Maybe the old American Confederacy could get its own TLD.  Or the Republic of Texas.  That'd be cool.

Support Wikileaks

A post at Slashdot tipped me off to this awesome article from The Guardian, Whistle while you work.

A secretive Swiss bank landed an apparently novel censorship blow against the internet this week. Anyone who tried to call up wikileaks.org, a global website devoted to publicising leaked documents, found themselves frustrated. The site simply wasn't there any more.

You don't think the US censors the internet? Think again. We're on lockdown every bit as much as supposedly repressive countries like China and Iran.

Since wikileaks.org doesn't work in the US at this time, The Guardian was kind enough to provide us with the IP number of the site so you can bypass the hamstrung nameservers, Wikileaks. The concept behind Wikileaks gives me shivers in a good way...

an open-source, democratic intelligence agency