I love the Pew Internet & American Life project research reports! Today for the first time I read one of their Comments, “Internet Ferment in China”. Apparently one of their staff members is in China and she wrote up her views on the Internet in China.
I was particularly interested to learn about Internet cafés in China – because I just read recently about a ban on new Internet cafés for 2007. Here are some facts I learned:
80 percent of rural Internet users go online at an Internet café (because a home computer is too expensive).- Internet cafés keep track of who’s doing what, including who plays games, looks at porn, and reads politically sensitive content.
- Internet cafés are considered “dens of iniquity”
I must admit that when I hear Internet cafés, I think coffee shop with WiFi. (Here’s a good list of such places in Minnesota.) For a short time in the mid-1990s there were a few Internet cafés with computers in Minnesota, CyberX in Minneapolis, Brad Theissen’s coffee shop in Mankato, Cyber Bugs in Bemidji, and Browsers N’Etc in Duluth – but they all seem to be closed now.
I wonder if public Internet kiosks in would be popular in Minnesota again, especially rural areas. I know that computers in libraries are often booked. However I wonder if even those computers would get used if the users knew that tabs would be kept on their online activities. I suspect not.
a little heads up is that everything you do on the internet is tracked by someone or in other words some firm.All your email you send is stored on servers ,which in turn destroys the thoughts of anonimity on the internet .In the news lately you hear of people having there emails brought up in court or there email actions being brought up.A small thing to remember is if you wont do it off the internet dont do it on
I think that is something that the schools should be teaching kids these days – and starting young. Google never forgets. As an online reference librarian I had someone come ask how they could get Google to remove comments they had made in a chat room years earlier. Sadly they answer was – you can’t. Google does not want to get into the habit of censoring content.
The answer in that particular case was to just start posting a lot more positive comments so push back the old comments so that they would not be as prominent – but if someone wanted to see the old remarks, it wouldn’t be hard to find them. Now I think this person had just made some youthful comments in bad taste – nothing necessarily illegal, but also nothing you’d like a prospective employer to read.
And as you point out – Google is not the only one who never forgets emails are out in the ether too – and can generally be tracked down without much work.
Thanks! Ann
i worked in digital investigation which is also known as computer forensics ,a small tidbit for people using there computers.The delete button doesnt mean it is gone also our friends at microsoft has made everything we do on a computer recoverable.So those visits to sites to see things you may think will never be found out well guess what ,they will be.Even top knotch hackers can be tracked which will be verified with searches on google.All i suggest is if you dont want things to be found out just dont make it digitally available because even pictures on your digital camera can be recovered as well as music on your mp3 player.Privacy as we once knew it will no longer ever be there.If you want some info try and type your phone number into google search and watch what happens.You may even get a map to show you the way home.
I think computer forensics would be fascinating! In the mid 1990s I worked for an ISP in Minnesota. We got a call from the FBI saying that one of our customers had sent a threatening email to the president. They had the IP address of the machine that originated the email. It took us a few minutes to figure out that the email came form a school. It took the school less than an hour to figure out which computer, which class period and then which student sent the email.
I think he got into some short term serious trouble – but it was probably a great lesson for the whole school!