It’ll be interesting to see how this kind of thing pans out: An Indonesian publishing company run by an expat American has launched a catalogue of Indonesian pop music on iTunes (declaration of interest: the guy, Mark Hanusz, is a friend of mine). Could this kind of thing change the way this kind of music is … Read more
I’m no great fan of big companies. They’re rarely innovative, their products are lousy, and unless you know how to get around them, they don’t like talking to customers. But some get it. Or at least, they used to. When I came out to Indonesia a second time, in 1998, I did two things. I got … Read more
I love Skype and I write about it a lot, because I think it’s a great tool, especially for people in places where phone calls cost a lot. But those places tend to be developing countries where monopolies are powerful. Just those kind of places where credit card fraud is a problem. Like, say, Indonesia. … Read more
Bruce Schneier points to a Guardian story about watches being a security threat: At Labour’s Brighton conference in the UK, security screeners are making people take their watches off and run them through the scanner. Why? No one seems to know. Bruce rightly points to the absurdity of the idea of a watch being a … Read more
[This story has since been denied by the purported source. Please see below for details] For Wikipedia there have long been two problems: How to stop vandalism and how to create a product that could be considered ‘stable’ and ‘complete’ enough to burn to CD — in short a releasable version of the encyclopedia. Maybe … Read more