I'm a news fiend. An absolute news addict...I just can't get enough of it. So the opening pages on my computer are the BBC (most accurate) Evening Standard (what's going on in London) Evening Argus (what's going on in Brighton) Sky News (the fastest news, if not the most accurate), Euronews (what's happening in the land cut off from us by the Channel), France 24 (they always have their own way of looking at things), The First Post (news and commentary in a comfy-sofa style), Al Jazeera (a different perspective again), China Daily News (the most distinctive of the lot...and why not, soon, very soon they will be the dominant superpower)and finally Russia Today (you need to know where you stand with these folk).
I wouldn't want you to think that I spend all day reading...I just scan to get the gist and see how stories are reported in different media...interestingly, it really is the Chinese News that looks at the world differently.....however just recently, Russia Today disappeared - my computer wouldn't open up the web site no matter what I did...at first I thought that may be their site was down, but it was always fine at home....most peculiar...
Last week I had reason to call up out tech guy for another problem, and he quickly identified that our ISP was blocking the site...by fiddling with DNS servers (what ever they are) I managed to restore my news of Putin's latest macho posing...and all is well with my news world again.
But it does raise the issue of why a company would block that site...or indeed any other...it shows just how easy it is to do that...and we the innocent public are none the wiser...sometimes I feel that 1984 has arrived with avengeance - after all Saudi Arabia is now stopping people using Blackberry's because they can't monitor the data, and Apple is now infamous for blocking content which it deems inappropriate...it seems that that technology is bringing more restrictions when it should really be giving us greater freedom...I hope The Boy and The Cat do not grow up in a world of government and corporate censorship. That would be bad....
By coincidence, this was on the BBC today...
...and on a more important note, The Boy returned bearing a wonderful gift - a bottle of Ferrari after shave....it was a great and much appreciated thought...
