Everyone needs to take a minute or so to see the Miniature Earth.

I hope the Swede’s pull this one off and that the rest of the world follows closely in their footsteps.

There’s also a Government press release.

I just came across the OpenNet Initiative.

The ONI mission is to investigate and challenge state filtration and surveillance practices.
…
Our aim is to generate a credible picture of these practices at a national, regional and corporate level, and to excavate their impact on state sovereignty, security, human rights, international law, and global governance.

The organisation has completed case studies for approx. a half dozen countries, most recently they looked at Burma. It turns out that “Burma filters certain content categories heavily, including political opposition sites, human rights pages, e-mail service providers, and pornography.”

I knew this sort of thing is happening in China as there’s been plenty said in the media (Eg. this Sydney Morning Herald article) and on blogs (Eg. Tim Bray: Microsoft and China) about Google being blocked and MSN customising their service. However I never realised that it was occurs in other countries too. For me personally, it drives home the importance of openness and the freedom of information.

I’ve never really spent a lot of time considering how different it would be living with state-controlled media. But since I hold the web in a lot higher regard than the mainstream press, I immediately feel a lot more passionate about making the web accessible to everybody.

The web has allowed us, for the most part, to circumvent geographic borders, social hierarchies and enthic differences which traditionally stiffled communication and limited the sharing of information and knowledge. I hope these positive aspects of the web can continue. I also really hope that people aren’t disadvantaged because some authority has control over what they can and can’t access on the Internet.

For anybody interested, the Malyasian Department of Environment publishes an Air Polutant Index listing.

I’m heading to Kuala Lumpur in under a fortnight and I guess I’m not really looking forward to the unhealthy breathing that’s currently on offer. Hopefully it’ll clear up a little but apparently June-October is the worst time of the year for pollution, often due to fires in Indonesia. Anyway, aside from the air quality, I’m sure everything else will be great.

And by the way, there’s also a listing for Brisbane on the Environmental Protection Agency website.

* The two listings use different scales, so direct comparisons are tricky.