Indonesia’s Islamic council of ulemas, MUI, has concluded their session with the issuance of the nineteen fatwas, or legal opinion concerning Islamic Law. Contrary to what the non-Muslim world thinks, a fatwa is not a sort of death sentence, although in certain circumstances and for some people they can be. Most are mere clarifications on where… Read More »
You’ve probably all heard of Skype’s new SMS service, which is very cool. If you have a Skype-Out account, you can send SMS messages to cellphones and, if you register you cellphone number with Skype, the recipients can reply to you on your mobile phone. Great idea. Only problem: It doesn’t work. Well, it does… Read More »
I wrote a couple of weeks back in the WSJ (subscription only, sorry) about the Nokia Communicator (aka The Brick) and its enduring popularity in Indonesia, where it plays important role as fashion symbol, ostentatious and yet deliverable gift to impressionable officials and, where necessary, hand combat weapon. What I found difficult to capture in… Read More »
I call it my Aung San Suu Kyi Moment, mainly because I’m a show off and like to drop names of famous people I once interviewed over the phone. It was September 1988 and I was a rookie reporter in Bangkok, one of several of us in a wire service who spent most of the… Read More »
Internet telephony folks Skype today says that it now has 100 million registered users. A press release (free registration required) says that this was achieved in “just two-and-a-half year’s time [sic], and has nearly doubled in size from September 2005 when it had 54 million registered users.” This is truly impressive. But if this is the case,… Read More »