Back in March, when the government of Singapore delegated responsibility for blocking "objectionable" material on the Internet to the Singapore Broadcast Authority, Minister of Information and the Arts George Yeo promised that the SBA would rule "with a light hand". However, one article on the soc.culture newsgroup has already been censored - for daring to suggest that a few members of a prominent Singapore law firm were incompetent. The posting was removed after the law firm complained to the government, and it seems that rather than exerting some kind of nepotistic influence the government was in fact acting completely within its rights. The new SBA guidelines for Net censorship allow the blocking of any contents "which present information or events in such a way that alarms or misleads any of the public." If that's light, what's heavy?
Looks like AOL is trying to be a little Singapore of its very own. A list of terms banned from AOL (the initial use of which will get customers issued with a warning and the continued use of which can get them banned) was recently leaked to Wired. The outlawed terms include "penis", "genitalia", "semen", "vagina", "submissive", "douche" and "tit", but do not include "virgin", "tv" and "damn". "Gif" cannot be used as part of a room name, nor can "youth" or "teens".
Businessmen bitch so, don't they? These comments were recently overheard in the offices of a certain British palmtop computer manufacturer: that Apple dumped 300,000 first-generation Newtons in a landfill in California because it couldn't sell them, and that employees in Apple's London offices use Newtons as doorstops. Ouch. Talk about trashing the competition.
No previous domain name madness matches the lunacy of the Swedish couple who tried to name their son Brfxxxcccxxmnnpcccclllmmnprxxvvclmnckssqlbb11116. Is this the public half of some kind of PGP-style key encryption? Whatever the reason, the Swedish authorities weren't pleased. The couple were fined £500, despite their protestations that their son was called Albin for short.
Those hackers just don't stop. Since Kevin Mitnick broke into the computer of rival hacker Tsutsumo Shimomura two years ago, there have been three books written about the incident (and a magazine article or two - see Wired 2.08). One of the books, Takedown, was co-written by Shimomura himself, and a Web site called Takedown (takedown.com) was set up to advertise it. But Joe Hacker just couldn't resist. The site had not been up a month when an unidentified prankster sent a forged email to Network Solutions Inc - whose computers play a key role in routing enquiries and messages and keeping track of all Internet addresses - requesting that the site name be changed. And it was, too: anyone who tried to access takedown.com was rerouted to a new Web page, effectively removing Shimomura's site from the Web. The URL of the new pages? takendown.com. 3
The Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) was razed to the ground along with most of the rest of Dresden during the notorious Allied carpet-bombing raid of 1945. For five decades the church has remained little more than a pile of rubble, but now a six-year, US$177 million (£114 million) project is underway to rebuild it. At the heart of the restoration work is a trio of workstations, donated by IBM and equipped with CAD software, which the project architects and engineers have used to create a virtual prototype of the building - allowing them to reuse 30% of the original stone in the reconstructed church.
- Anna Pastor
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into London ... Segaworld opened its doors last month - onto the largest indoor entertainment complex in the world. That's 110,000 square feet of space (about eight football pitches) spread over seven floors of the Trocadero Centre at Piccadilly Circus, all of which has been packed with interactive rides and games of one sort or another. Sega is planning similar ventures in other major European cities, each of which, it promises, will be "themed and customised to suit the character and culture of its local environment". Just glad to see Sega's got that timeless symbol of England, the giant octopus, down pat.
- James Flint
At the point where Jungle collides with Techno and deejaying intersects with video mixing - there, my child, you will find Hex. Hex describes itself as a "multimedia pop group", a fluid collective with technology artist Rob Pepperell and Coldcut DJs Matt Black and Jonathan More (who have a show on Kiss FM's "Lost Generation" strand) at its hub. Their work will be amongst that featured at JAM, an art event running at the Barbican from September 12th to December 15th. Call (0171) 382 7105 or (0171) 588 9023 for details.
- Vikas Malik
Last November the Dutch Electrical Engineering Student Association (ETV) celebrated its 90th birthday, an occasion that called for something rather special. And with the help of a computer, 3.5km of cable, 400 lights, 1,500m of paper and a handy office block, ETV created something very special indeed: the world's biggest Tetris game. While making the Guinness Book of Records for the world's largest display, ETV also linked the game into the Net, so that people all over the world could telnet in and play.
- Aaron Rogers