DOT-COM Alliance Newsletter: Regular USAID newsletter concerning telecenters and other digital divide projects.  10:20:12 AM    

Walk-By Hacking: Fun story of listening in on unprotected wifi networks in nyc.  4:37:01 AM    

World's poor to get own search engine: "Let us assume you are in Malawi," explained Prof Amarasinghe, "and the computer lab does not have access to the telephone line all the time." "If you want to find some new information about malaria, you are prompted with a message that says 'we are going to send a query through e-mail, it is OK?'. "At night, when the phone line is available, the teacher can dial out and send the queries." The request is sent to computers at MIT in Boston, which then search the internet and gather webpages. To avoid a glut of information, the software then filters the results and chooses the most relevant. These are then sent back to the computer in Malawi so that they can be stored in the machine's internet cache. "Next morning the teacher can connect, download that e-mail and when the students arrive, they can browse through those pages the way they would if they had full internet connectivity," said Prof Amarasinghe. The program keeps a record of all the information sent to avoid wasting bandwidth by re-sending the same webpages."  4:01:26 AM