Saturday morning is hardly the time for a wake-up call to a new development in the industry or in the state of affairs worldwide. Just sitting in my chair, lazily surfing a multitude of news sources, with the Virginia, Nagasaki and other NASA shootings vaguely there at the back of my mind. Within minutes I found a world in a sorry state of affairs that really got me thinking, "what the hell is going on?".
Example. Starting off in the UK, the Guardian headlines "Women laughed as they forced toddlers to take part in 'dog fight'", where a family pitted their 3 yr old against their 2 yr old sibling with various weapons, as light afternoon entertainment. Hmm. Or maybe a piece on Guatemala which details a harrowing account of gangland rape and other commonplace violence:
...On New Year's Day his seven-year-old daughter was killed. She had been sent out to buy a nappy for her baby brother but never arrived home - hours later her decapitated body was found in one of the deep gullies that run through the capital's slums.
Alright, shift off to some other sources I thought: The Independent's main headline drags me back into drama: "Gaza: a disturbing dispatch from a no-go area". Maybe Al-Jazeera? "Street battles rage on in Mogadishu", where UN status-quo-in-chief Ban Ki Moon muses why the Ethiopian invasion and US bombings haven't got Somalia back in its place at the bottom of the pyramid. This comes just weeks after he was nearly hit in a rocket attack by insurgents in Iraq while preaching to the press choir in Baghdad.
Unsure whether to give up at this point, I went to look for a quick update on the upcoming French presidential elections, where I found but lackluster comments about a woman being fit for President (the UK and Germany have done it, why the discussion?). But I quickly homed in on a more ominous development closer to my heart: the Le Monde website asks "Does the state want to kill the Internet in France?". This article notes an upcoming bill that requires all internet service providers and hosting companies to keep all records of all transactions made by their users, whether phone numbers, credit card information, login dates and times, IP addresses, blog entries, profiles, including any changes and edits made at any time. Moreover this data is to be submitted immediately to the relevant French authority at simple request. Just as the French web/mobile worlds are awakening, the State wants to burden the burgeoning industry with millions of Euros of Big Brother surveillance processes. For the country of liberty, equality and fraternity, this bill promises to eclipse even the Patriot Act in its sweeping scope.
Wow... So much for quiet Saturday mornings.
