Wanna celebrate your 1000th birthday?...

...Well according to Aubrey de Grey it's just an engineering problem! TED blog has all the details and Aubrey has the beard. If you think that's bananas well I got the link from greenLAgirl while reading her piece on Chiquita's gun running antics. The irony is that many of the women who work on conventional banana plantations don't live very long because of all the pesticides they inhale. But there is an alternative: EU support for St Lucia's eco bananas, that are being marketed by supermarkets such as Sainsbury's.

Social Objects...

...is a project to "develop tools and practices that would make the consumption of locally-produced and second-hand objects socially attractive on the web." It sounds like a great idea, using the web at a grassroots level. Thanks to Hobby Princess for the link to Doors of Perception. The project uses a free product code service called Thinglink, which is an open standard and service that anybody can use. Sounds like a great way to recycle.

Egypt and blogging...

...It is just over one month since blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman, 22, was the first Egyptian blogger to stand trial for views expressed on the internet. He has been sentenced to four years in prison. He is a secular critic of religion. There is a campaign to release him that uses his blogging nameKareem Amer.

Escaping Flatland...

...with Lza's three dimensional internet workshop. Bon voyage!

Internet censorship...

..."Getting stuck with a Scandinavian version of Google is seen as a small
price to pay by those trying to hide their digital traces and
circumvent censorship on the net.

'I've a button in Firefox [the web browser] I click and my [data]
packets go off encrypted to a network of volunteers and private
computers around the world,' says Danny O'Brien, international
outreach co-ordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a
digital rights pressure group.

'I get randomly routed through one of them and when I go to Google it
might talk to me in Swedish, but this is a way of getting round these
national [blocking] filters.'" reports Chris Nuttall
in San Francisco for the Financial
Times. Tor is
one tool that can cover your tracks. Welsh may even be better than
Swedish, or how about Latin or Sanscrit? My Latin master used to send
telegrams (those were the days!) in Latin and had to explain to the
Post Office that Latin is not a code but a language. The Post Office
did not allow secret codes in telegrams at the time.

"The
goal of onion routing (OR) is to protect the privacy of the sender and
recipient of a message, while also providing protection for message
content as it traverses a network. Onion routing accomplishes this
according to the principle of Chaum's mix cascades: messages travel from
source to destination via a sequence of proxies ("onion routers"),
which re-route messages in an unpredictable path. To prevent an
adversary from eavesdropping on message content, messages are encrypted
between routers. The advantage of onion routing (and mix cascades in
general) is that it is not necessary to trust each cooperating router;
if one or more routers are compromised, anonymous communication can
still be achieved. This is because each router in an OR network accepts
messages, re-encrypts them, and transmits to another onion router. An
attacker with the ability to monitor every onion router in a network
might be able to trace the path of a message through the network, but
an attacker with more limited capabilities will have difficulty even if
he or she controls one or more onion routers on the message's path."
says the Wikipedia. There are many bloggers who could do with some of these tools in countries such as China, Egypt and Pakistan, so pass the word please.

More silliness...

...from Britain's mainstream media ("The great global warming swindle"
from Channel 4, where else?) who are trying to tell us that the sun dunnit and good old Homo sapiens had nothing to do with climate change. Svensmark, a Danish space scientist, has a pet theory for cosmic ray influence on climate change. What is it about the Danes? Old Forkbeard's been doing too much Amanita
again! Get a life, television. The old scientific
mechanistic model, took so long to wake up to climate change because it
was far too busy trying to make cosmic ray guns. Now we are moving to a
more dynamic Weltanschauung and slowly becoming
aware that our ancestors were not so stupid after all. Thanks to Gentleman
Hobbes for this piece of silliness.

All the silliness you need to know...

...and I always wanted to know more about these guys. "Since its launch two years ago, Uncyclopedia, an addictive parody of Wikipedia, has grown into one of the largest Wikia-hosted wikis. In this interview with net , co-founder and college student Jonathan Huang reveals what it’s all about...If you print it out, it’s great for wrapping fish or lining your birdcage."

Happy St David's Day...

...to all the people of Wales at home and overseas.

Ffenestr siop Quality Food, archfarchnad fawr yn Comox Ynys Vancouver, i ddathlu Gwyl Ddewi (Idris a Linda Hughes).