Four short links: 16 Apr 2009

China, databases, storage, and git:

  1. China’s Complicated Internet Culture (Ethan Zuckerman) — summary of Rebecca McKinnon’s talk at the Berkman Internet Center. Democracy is complex and hard to transition to, online democracy doubly so. Rebecca questions the widespread but unjustified belief that the Great Firewall of China is all that separates Chinese citizens from the empowered liberty of the West, and lays out the tangled state of affairs in China’s political Internet. Despite the rise of web video, “no one has managed to organized an opposition party on the web,” Rebecca points out. “There’s no Lech Walenza, no religious movement – Falun Gong has been squished pretty thoroughly.” (via cshirky’s delicious stream)
  2. Drop ACID and Think About DataBob Ippolito‘s talk from PyCon about the things you can do easily when you foresake the promises of ACID. More in the ongoing reinvention of databases for the needs of modern web systems. (via cesther’s Twitter stream)
  3. The PogoplugThe Pogoplug connects your external hard drive to the Internet so you can easily share and access your files from anywhere. We’re accumulating terabytes of storage at home, where it’s very useful to all the computers in the home. This offers an easy way for non-technical civilians to make these drives useful outside the home as well. There are many possibilities for Interesting Things in the massive storage we’re accumulating. (via joshua’s delicious stream)
  4. Gitorious — open source (AGPLv3) clone of github. (via edd’s delicious stream)
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