Ed Bilodeau

This weblog had moved: http://www.coolweblog.com/bilodeau/

# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

Thursday, June 23, 2005

# Confirmed: All Typepad blogs blocked in China. The article notes that Blogger sites (hey, like mine!) are also blocked. MSN Spaces appears to provide built-in censorship features for Chinese spaces/blogs, stripping out 'bad' words.

From what I understand, the technology that makes this censorship possible has been provided to the Chinese government by US companies. If it is OK to sell them technology that kills and maims, I guess it isn't a far stretch to OK the selling of technology that allows them to control their citizens.

If the recent past is any indication, the coming years will do away with whatever remenants of techno-utopianism persist in the minds of the people who build and promote information technology as a means to a better way of life for everyone. We may see calls for a greater sense of ethics among developers, but it won't matter. Engineers (like all professionals) already have a code of ethics that they are sworn to uphold, and yet they still manage to build technology that causes both immediate and offset harm to our planet and the people living here. So will it be with software and computer technology.

Is there anything to be done? Sure, but I have a lecture on information repositories to prepare, so that post will have to wait for another time.

Ed Bilodeau

Thursday, June 23, 2005

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