Cybersurf

Hello, good morning and welcome to Cybersurf, your weekly window, where web matters. I am your Cyberhost, Steven Lang with a program packed full of news – and, whatever you miss don’t worry I will post this script on the Cybersurf Blog.

If you tuned in last week, you’ll remember that we talked about the Internet Week in the Western Cape – one of the highlights of the week was the Civil Society Colloquium preparing for the World Summit on the Information Society also known by the acronym WSIS. The actual summit will be held in Tunis in Novermber, but most of the preparations will take place in Geneva later this month. Civil society – essentially a large grouping of NGOs and other interested parties, met in Cape Town to prepare for the Geneva meeting.

How was the Cape Town meeting? Here is Adama Samassekou - President of the first phase of WSIS.

INSERT:

This Conference has seen . . . .

. . . . process of WSIS.

Adama Samassekou, with his impression of Civil Society preparations for the World Summit on the Information Society.

(T) Back to the Convergence Bill – a very troublesome piece of legsilation that has been provoking controversy for the last three years. On Friday, government relented on one of the most problematic aspects of the Bill – that of licensing content and application providers.

Depending on whose interpretation you accepted – it could have forced anyone who had a web site to apply for a licence.

However, the deputy director-general in charge of policy at the department of Communications, Joe Mjwara, said that government will drop this requirement.

Sanity finally prevails.

Now for a complete change of perspective – to a view from space.

One of the most entertaining sites I have come across in recent months is that of Google earth – or more precisely – earth dot google dot com.

The site carries an enormous number of satellite photographs of the whole world – I did not test the whole world but it is pretty good in the places where I did test.

In the US it is almost as good as a map guide.

But for South Africa, most of the sat pictures are what they describe as “medium resolution”.

That means good enough to see parks and suburbs, but not your house.

There are one or two places that do have high resolution pictures – at Johannesburg International Airport you can count the number of engines on the passenger liners.

The site is fantastic but it does require that you download a rather large file.

An added bonus is the full set of satellite pictures of the moon - it even shows you where the Apollo landers touched down.

With that view from space – we come to the end of today’s edition of Cybersurf. You can find the full script and relevant links on the Cybersurf Blog which is at cybersurf. Blogspot.com – one more time – cybersurf.blogspot.com

Thanks, for listening and remember to keeeep on surfing