Don't tell me the Internet hasn't changed the world

Yesterday my wife and youngest son went to several yard sales and came home with, among other things, a model of the Shuttle Tydirium (a space ship from Star Wars). I knew I'd be the one putting it together, and that I just had my evening planned for me.

I came home from work later in the day to find all three kids clustered around the box, excited for Dad to start work on it. So excited were they that they had removed all the pieces from their sprues. No problem, so long as the instructions were clear enough. Except there were no instructions. I tried to put a adventurous face on it, hoping we could figure out how things went together if we thought really hard.

Then I got the idea to check online. People put all sorts of odd things online these days. Sure enough, there is a gentleman who posts an amazing amount of information about his various modeling projects. I was saved.

I know it's been said many times many ways, but the Internet makes an enormous amount of information available that would have been impossible even ten years ago. And while it may not be that big of deal in the grand scheme of things, it salvaged the day for my kids and prolonged the myth that Dad can fix anything for just a little while longer.

State Department, Twitter, and the Iran Protests

I had heard nothing about this until yesterday in an interview with the president of a new internet startup.

Twitter, as most know by now, has become a critical link to the outside world for the protest movement in Iran. When the State Department found out that Twitter had a maintenance outage scheduled for the middle of the day Tehran time, they asked the company to reschedule so as not to disrupt service in Iran. Twitter agreed, and the outage occurred during the day in America instead.

However, over all, the administration gets a mixed grade for protecting internet freedom of speech abroad:

The week before supporters of Mousavi were Tweeting and coming together in the streets, China announced it would require the installation of a Web-blocking program called “Green Dam Youth Escort” on all new computers in the country. While ostensibly meant to block pornography and violent images, many technology experts pointed to its ability to block sites that are politically distasteful to the communist government. Chinese lawyers, academics, and even many in Silicon Valley were up in arms and vocal with their criticism, but Washington stayed silent. The Chinese government ultimately relaxed the requirement, but battles still loom, especially in Iran.