Posted 07/23/09 at 06:24:59 PM by Andy Salisbury

According to a recent presentation by Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain, the Internet’s delicate and vulnerable nature is held together by random acts of kindness.

As a key example, he cited when Pakistan’s government took YouTube offline in 2008. It wasn’t long before it was back, thanks to a largely unknown, unpaid and unauthorized team of volunteers. “It's like when the Bat signal goes up and Batman answers the call,” said Professor Zittrain.

The same social structure of those helping without any intention of compensation is clear on Wikipedia. “It's like dark matter in the universe. There's a lot of it, you don't see it but it has a huge impact on the physics of the place.”

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Posted 05/04/09 at 06:04:22 PM by Andy Salisbury

Sure, you could always play it safe and have your wife shack up in a hospital when she’s in the beginning stages of childbirth, or, you could whip out your iPhone and begin to search YouTube for instructional videos on how to deliver it yourself! This is one Marc Stephens did, and it worked out well for him.

According to the BBC, “Marc Stephens watched the videos as a precaution when his wife Jo started to feel some discomfort. Four hours later, his wife went into labour and started giving birth before an ambulance could arrive at their home in Redruth. ‘I Googled how to deliver a baby, watched a few videos and basically swotted up.’”

Admittedly Mr. Stephens does have some very limited prior experience, given that this is his fourth child. “For our first I spent most of the time at my wife’s head, now I’m not afraid to go down to the business end.”

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Posted 02/05/09 at 08:03:19 AM by Pulkit Chandna

UK’s Competition Commission has disapproved Project Kangaroo, a proposed Hulu-esque VOD service, which was supposed to provide video content – mostly free videos - from three of its joint owners, the BBC, ITV and Channel 4. The fear of Kangaroo’s inevitable hegemony led the Commission to veto the alliance. The Commission felt that the video-on-demand service would have resulted in the “loss of competition” between its proprietors.

The three companies expressed their disconsolation in a joint statement. “We are disappointed by the decision to prohibit this joint venture. While this is an unwelcome finding for the shareholders, the real losers from this decision are British consumers. This is a disproportionate remedy and a missed opportunity in the further development of British broadcasting,” the statement reads. Although consumers would have most certainly devoured the service, the Commission's findings appear to be reasonable.

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