Information Policy

IOC to probe apparent Internet censorship

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) will investigate apparent censorship of the Internet service provided for media covering the Beijing Olympics, press chief Kevan Gosper said on Tuesday. China, which has promised media the same freedom to report on the Games as they enjoyed at previous Olympics, loosened its regulations governing foreign media in January last year.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20080729/tot-uk-olympics-media-566e283.html

Kenyan Government publishes new communications bill

The Kenyan Government has dropped plans to bar cross-media ownership and to empower the Internal Security Minister to order invasion of broadcasting stations. These clauses that sought to muzzle the media have been taken away from the Kenya Communications (Amendment) Bill 2008. Information and Communications Minister Samuel Poghisio published the draft law yesterday. Poghisio’s predecessor Mutahi Kagwe was forced to withdraw the Bill last year amid condemnation that it contained controversial clauses aiming to gag the media. It had sought to ensure no broadcasting licensee had a “controlling interest” in another broadcasting licencee or owned or had “controlling interest” in a person licensed to produce a newspaper. Essentially it barred ownership of a newspaper and a broadcasting station at the same time. Also, while last year’s Bill stated that the Internal Security Minister could order a raid on a “rogue” station “on declaration of any public emergency or in the interest of public safety,” the new Bill has no such provision. Before issuing a broadcast license, the commission shall consider diversity and plurality of views to enhance competition.

http://www.ejc.net/media_news/kenyan_government_publishes_new_communications_bill/

Portuguese team makes first paper based transistor

Elvira Fortunato and colleagues from the Centro de Investigação de Materiais (Cenimat/I3N), at Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, made the first Field Effect Transistor (FET) with a paper «interstrate» layer. A new device which rivals in electrical performance with the actual state of the art of oxide based thin film transistors (TFTs) produced on glass or crystalline silicon substrates. These results will be published next September in IEEE Electron Device Letters. Nowadays, there is an increased interest in the use of biopolymers for low-cost electronic applications. Since cellulose is the Earth’s major biopolymer, some international teams have reported using paper as the physical support (substrate) of electronic devices. But, until now, no one had ever used paper as an interstrate component of a FET.

In a new approach, scientists from Cenimat/I3N – a research group coordinated by Elvira Fortunato and Rodrigo Martins – used a common sheet of paper as the dielectric layer on oxide FETs.

The research team fabricated the devices on both sides of the paper sheet. This way, the paper acts simultaneously as the electric insulator and as the substrate. «Is a two in one», says Elvira Fortunato.

Furthermore, electric characterization of devices showed that the hybrid FETs’ performance outpace those of amorphous silicon TFTs, and rival with the actual state of the art of oxide thin film transistors.

These results suggest promising new disposable electronics devices, like paper displays, smart labels, smart packaging, bio-applications, RFID tags, among others.

http://www.alphagalileo.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=readrelease&releaseid=531094

dotDK ready to give the Danish internet community a voice in .DK

COPENHAGEN, Denmark--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- The IT and Telecom Agency of Denmark has appointed dotDK as the association to handle the Danish internet domain registry in the future. This gives the dotDK Society the opportunity to realize its vision of enhancing the Danish top level domain for the benefit of the Danish community. dotDK will deliver a more secure, available and technologically advanced setup, but especially highlights that the entire Danish internet community in the future will have significantly more influence and a stronger voice.

The dotDK Society today announces its appointment by the IT and Telecom Agency of Denmark to handle the administration of the .dk top level domain.

"We are truly proud of the appointment and eagerly anticipate the task of migrating the system and assuming administration of the .dk registry. Our bid clearly emphasized the critical needs for Denmark which include a more secure, efficient and dependable system with enhanced input from the Danish internet community. The dotDK Society will be a Danish association with representation from the entire Danish internet community and administration located in Denmark, and we invite everyone who wishes to participate to join the dotDK Society," says Mads Thimmer, who also makes it clear that the wholesale price of 45 DKK a year will not be changed.

The Danish internet community will have a more direct influence due to the new organizational structure proposed by dotDK with a governing body made up of representatives from the entire Danish internet community including users, registrars, professionals, etc. The future also holds greater transparency in operations and public access to hearings, which will enable the Danish internet community and users to make their opinion heard and contribute with input on important processes and administrative aspects.

http://www.streetinsider.com/Press+Releases/dotDK+ready+to+give+the+Danish+internet+community+a+voice+in+.DK/3785148.html

Thailand: Nectec plan to give big boost to ict industry

Agency aims to increase the sector's GDP contribution to 20 per cent

Nectec plan to give big boost to ict industry

Nectec’s plan will encourage about 50 per cent of the population to improve its computer literacy and push people to use ICT in every part of their lives. It will also work toward developing better ICT infrastructure across the country.

The development of information and communication technology in Thailand in the next five years will help the country become "Smart Thailand" equipped with "Smart People" and a "Smart Government".

This is the goal of the country's second ICT master plan - for 2009 to 2013 - drafted by the National Electronic and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec).

The first draft of the plan is complete and Nectec intends to submit it to the National Information Technology Committee for approval on Friday.

ICT Master Plan second phase development team head Chadamas Thuvasethakul said the plan aims to achieve its "Smart Thailand" goal by 2013.

The plan is being developed to achieve three objectives. One, encourage about 50 per cent of the population above 15 years to become more ICT literate and use computers in all spheres of life.

Two, improve the country's ICT readiness so it is better positioned on the world stage.

And three, increase the contribution of the ICT industry to the country's gross domestic product (GDP) to 20 per cent, from 13.2 per cent last year.

The plan, Chadamas said, comprises six national strategies. The first strategy - the Information Literacy strategy - will focus on human-resource development.

It aims that by 2013, every year more than 15 per cent of students will graduate from the science and technology stream, while 30 per cent of those in the ICT field will acquire international certification. The plan will also encourage more than 50 local software projects to participate in international forums each year.

The second strategy, the National ICT Governance strategy, will encourage the government to use ICT to aid governance. The plan will set up a new "Policy Coordinating Body" to drive the national ICT policy and oversee the development of ICT legislation.

The third strategy is to improve the country's ICT infrastructure, with a goal of providing Internet speeds of at least 4 megabits per second (Mbps) to every district in the country and of at least 10Mbps to all educational institutes.

Fourth, the e-Governance strategy will develop an e-Government Interoperability Framework. The open-standards technology will enable all government organisations to share and exchange information, thereby creating a one-stop service centre for citizens by 2010.

The fifth strategy is to turn the ICT industry into a major income generator for the country, with special focus on the software industry.

The plan will encourage Thailand's export of niche software, increasing its contribution to about 30 per cent of the total software revenue.

It also aims to increase the software industry's worth to Bt150 billion, of which about 50 per cent would come from local software development.

The plan aims to increase ICT spending in Thailand to over 2 per cent of the GDP and increase ICT research and development budgets in both government and private sectors to more than 3 per cent of the overall value of the ICT industry.

Lastly, the plan will focus on developing ICT for sustainable competitiveness. This strategy will increase Internet penetration in businesses to up to 50 per cent while pushing for a 25-per-cent increase in use of ICT by small and medium-sized enterprises.

Chadamas said that after obtaining approval from NITC, the team would conduct six public hearings before submitting the draft to the Cabinet.

At a glance

The ICT Master Plan 2009 to 2013 intends to increase the country's ICT readiness and global competitiveness.

It aims to develop human resources and aid governance through the use of technology.

It will encourage Thailand's export of niche software, increasing its contribution to about 30 per cent of the total software revenue.

http://www.egovnews.org/?p=4102

Google: 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs

We've known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days -- when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!

How do we find all those pages? We start at a set of well-connected initial pages and follow each of their links to new pages. Then we follow the links on those new pages to even more pages and so on, until we have a huge list of links. In fact, we found even more than 1 trillion individual links, but not all of them lead to unique web pages. Many pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other. Even after removing those exact duplicates, we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.

So how many unique pages does the web really contain? We don't know; we don't have time to look at them all! :-) Strictly speaking, the number of pages out there is infinite -- for example, web calendars may have a "next day" link, and we could follow that link forever, each time finding a "new" page. We're not doing that, obviously, since there would be little benefit to you. But this example shows that the size of the web really depends on your definition of what's a useful page, and there is no exact answer.

We don't index every one of those trillion pages -- many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content similar to the calendar example that isn't very useful to searchers. But we're proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine, and our goal always has been to index all the world's data.

To keep up with this volume of information, our systems have come a long way since the first set of web data Google processed to answer queries. Back then, we did everything in batches: one workstation could compute the PageRank graph on 26 million pages in a couple of hours, and that set of pages would be used as Google's index for a fixed period of time. Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day. This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it'd be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.

As you can see, our distributed infrastructure allows applications to efficiently traverse a link graph with many trillions of connections, or quickly sort petabytes of data, just to prepare to answer the most important question: your next Google search.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html

6600 rural computer kiosks to open

JAIPUR: Close on the heels of kicking off a massive programme for 'smart cards' to about 50 lakh rural households just months ahead of polls, the state government in a major initiative towards e-governance is planning to set up computer kiosks, known as common service centres (CSC) in the rural areas in a big way.

Principal Secretary Information technology C K Mathew said about 6,600 computers kiosks would come up in the rural areas owned by women. He said out of the seven divisions in the state letter of intents (LoI) have been issued for setting up about 3,500 CSCs in four divisions on Tuesday to CMS, which would provide the infrastructure support to the programme.

He said, "The scheme envisions common service centres as the front-end delivery points for government, private and social sector services to rural citizens of the country in an integrated manner."

While the private company would provide the infrastructure and technical support in setting up of these kiosks, the allot-tees could repay the cost involved to the company in easy installments.

The objective was to develop a platform that could enable government, private and social sector organisations to align their social and commercial goals for the benefit of the rural population in the remotest corners of the state through a combination of IT-based as well as non-IT-based services. He said the CSCs, one each for six villages would have at least three computers with a printer and scanner each.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Jaipur/6600_rural_computer_kiosks_to_open/articleshow/3242823.cms

DT activates 40Gbps WDM solution from Ericsson; reiterates full year guidance

Ericsson has announced that its 40Gbps multi-haul Wavelength Division Multipexling (WDM) solution for Deutsche Telekom (DT) has been fully deployed and commercially started. The vendor said it was an important step to providing necessary bandwidth in core networks to meet the growing broadband traffic demand from customers using new multimedia services. Ericsson states that operators worldwide are planning for deployment of the 40Gbps WDM technology in order to expand capacity in their networks.

http://www.telegeography.com/cu/article.php?article_id=24220&email=text

Econet gets 2.5G, 3G approval

Zimbabwean newspaper The Herald writes that the country’s largest mobile network operator by subscribers Econet Wireless has received long-awaited approval from regulatory authorities to launch commercial 2.5G and 3G services. TeleGeography’s GlobalComms database notes that the cellco rolled out a 900MHz/1800MHz GPRS platform in the middle of 2007 but failed to announce a full commercial launch, whilst it was also ready to roll out a W-CDMA network by the end of the year. Econet’s chief business development officer Elvis Gwanzura confirmed that GPRS had been installed for a year but had been awaiting approval from regulator POTRAZ for the usage of frequencies. Gwanzura said that Econet will now launch commercial GPRS services within the next four to eight weeks, whilst 3G could be introduced in the first quarter of next year.

http://www.telegeography.com/cu/article.php?article_id=24225&email=text

Europe’s next-generation broadband

Europe powers up next-generation broadband. © Johan Ramberg - iStockphoto An enormous research effort by Europe’s leading broadband players has helped accelerate dramatically the rollout of next-generation broadband services reaching speeds in the 10s of Mbit/s in many European countries. That is just the start.

The deployment of broadband services in the 10s of megabits per second (Mbit/s) is accelerating across the continent, thanks to the research efforts of Europe’s main broadband players. Even 100Mbit/s has become economically feasible and deployments have started.

Two years ago Europe’s leading telecoms, ISP companies, and its top technology vendors and research institutes finished their work on the first phase of the MUSE project. That effort led to a new set of standard specifications for broadband technology branded as the Global System for Broadband (GSB).

“The MUSE project did not start the push for next-generation broadband technologies and services,” notes MUSE project coordinator, Peter Vetter. “Many companies and institutes were working on it already. But MUSE certainly helped to establish a consensus on what it should look like and what it consisted of, and that accelerated the deployment of a new architecture and better access technologies.”

http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults/index.cfm?section=news&tpl=article&ID=89912