In last week’s Tech Watch, I talked about net neutrality - particularly the fear that some internet service providers might charge content providers extra to “guarantee” that their content is accessible. I didn’t mention the other boogeyman with respect to net neutrality - throttling.

Think about the children!

• My previous podcast about internet safety
• John Shehan’s talk at IT Conversations
• pdf of the Cyber Safety for Kids Act 2006

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Business 2.0 has a cute future history of Google, with four potential scenarios that could come to pass for the advertising/search giant, titled Google is the Media, Google is the Internet, Google is Dead and Google is God.

Of all the possibilities, I think “Google is the Internet” is the least likely, and “Google is God” is the most intersting, if fanciful. Though I’m not disputing the possibility of that scenario possibility for a second.

Slashdot pointed me to a Popular Mechanics article on 15 Tech concepts we all should be aware of for 2006. The highlights for me are IPTV, micro fuel cells and mobile VoIP. I wonder about AJAX, satellite video and SPIT.

AJAX, a web programming tool that makes web applications work more smoothly, is really very 2005. I have even started to hear some people say that they think its day in the sun is over.

The internet is becoming more inter(active). But at what cost?

Links I mention (thanks to commandN for some of these):

• flickr
• 37signals
• imagecrop.com
• meebo
• thinkfree
• zoho
• writely

Read about how some ISPs are blocking to whom you can send email.

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This morning I installed ipodlinux on my first generation iPod mini. I’m no hacker - I used the OS X installer available from kainjow.com. This is an unsupported version of ipodlinux, but it works really well.

The funny thing about linux on the iPod is that the thing it does really badly is play music. But that’s not why I installed it. I was hoping for the recording feature available with older iPods running linux, but no cigar. If I had read the documentation first, I would have known that recording doesn’t work on newer iPods yet.

Recently, I heard a fairly well known tech personality talk about Internet Explorer 7 and its anti-phishing feature. Microsoft has built in to its new browser an option where every website a user tried to access was sent back to MS’s server and matched against a list of known phishing sites. If it matched, the user would not be allowed to visit the site.

I have been listening to the 2005 Reith Lectures, and can only reiterate my previous recommendation. I knew that Lord Broers was an inveterate tech booster, and his first two lectures have failed to disappoint on that front. Regular readers of GH know that I am critical of those who espouse progress for its own sake and perceive the negative impacts of technological advances as merely minor side effects. Lord Broers does fall into this category, though his responses to these very criticisms are among the most thoughtful I have encountered.

When I was a kid, I remember I had this book. It was a small saddlestitched flip book of maybe 20 pages, all of which were brightly illustrated and was written in 18 point font. It was about how you (you, being a kid at the appropriate age for this type of book) should not watch too much TV. It was general TV-will-rot-your-mind propaganda, and I distinctly recall that it advocated no more than 4 hours of the tube per week. Yes, that’s right, per week.