An friend of mine who lives in China recently wrote to me and said “guess what.. the great firewall of China seems to be gone…” My friend advised that you can read anything you like. An example of this is the UK BBC news site, who a few months ago reported that their English site is available inside China for first time in a decade; but the point of interest is that the BBC Chinese site is also available for use within China.

A recent post on SlashDot quotes an IT professor saying: People are unwittingly trusting the information they find on Wikipedia, yet experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading After reading this, I thought it was time to write about a something I found that backs this up. An anonymous user added information about Sacha Baron Cohen (known onscreen as Ali G.) to Wikipedia on November the 14th 2006.

Telstra announced yesterday that their ADSL 2+ (what’s with the plus?) upgrade has now been completed Australia wide. What does this give the average end user access to? The Telstra PR and discussion site explains: The ADSL2+ upgrade of 907 telephone exchanges serving 2.4 million homes and businesses announced in February is now complete. This means millions of additional Australian families, businesses, non-profit organisations and government agencies across every state and territory can now enjoy the benefits of high-speed broadband

Australia is a mixed bag at Broadband. In some ways we resemble the US, and in no way do we resemble the Japan style FTTN networks (yet). But the infrastructure is starting to be there. What sucks is that sometimes to get the 30 Mbps connections you have to pay quite a bit for it (AUD$90/bundled per month for 25GB, Bigpond Cable). Yes I’m only with Bigpond cable as no ADSL service exists in my area that comes close to that speed.

Alexander Downer spent 11 years as the foreign minister of Australia. During his tenure, had he been visiting Melbourne he would have had his cars, his people and arrangements for venues visited. Now it’s a bit different. This morning I almost bumped into him on Collins Street in Melbourne. You can’t miss a public figure. The funny thing was that some man in the street was hurling abuse at him, but didn’t realise he was no longer foreign minister.

If you got the gist of the “iRack” then here is another video of great moments in Presidential Speeches. I think the video says it all. Maybe he could trump apple and introduce an iRack!