INTERNET & COMPUTERS
When I traveled through Eastern Europe in the wake of the 1989 revolutions, I carried a computer and a portable printer. I typed up my dispatches, printed them out, and sent them back to my employers by air mail. Even with the lag time of a week or more, my reports on conversations with activists, academics, and politicians remained fresh. Email, after all, was still rudimentary in 1990. The World Wide Web was still three years in the future. Blogs wouldn’t debut until four years after that. Change was rapid in Eastern Europe in 1990. But for both activists and observers, the printed word still carried enormous weight.
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With Google's threat to pull out of China, all eyes are on the unfolding drama to find out what the future of the internet will look like in that part of the world. Amidst accusations of cyber attacks by the company and claims of intellectual property theft, Google has threatened to abandon all operations in that county. Cyber espionage experts claim that these attacks must be state sponsored, in an attempt to catch up and pass their western rivals technologically and militarily. Backing these claims is the speed and consistency of the attacks. Which many say can only be possible with government backing.
