This North-South discussions/publications site is yet very much under
construction.
Latest addition:
Frederick Noronha's "bYtES For aLL" newsletters - see end of this
page !
Stories/texts tagged here and stored at this server are listed at the
download
page too - and there are some more there.
There are some good reasons to rather be modest - and more
efficient ! - in
using the Net with simple and basic means through pure text mode web
utilities; here are some reflections why.
Irritated and intrigued by ever new horror stories about email viruses
and spam - just in February last, the EU Commission published an
outcry, "Junk e-mail costs internet users 10 billion a
year worldwide" - the autor tried to quantify another daily madness,
uselessly over-bloated formatting of emailed text.
And here is the
result:
-- 57 billion EUR (nearly the same in US$),
-- worldwide, of wasted connection costs.
The calculation was done with the same and similar parameters as used in the
EU Commission's study on spam.
Ironically, the editor of this page found a strange ally, of sorts, at
the very World Bank - their Technology
Forum does indeed point to alternatives to over-expensive equipment
and use of the net. They still mention only Lynx, not even DOSlynx, BobCat, or
other text mode or DOS based net access utilities. Well, it may take a while
until high tech development news arrive at the top of higher banking circles,
but nevertheless: here is a
quote from their recommendation to access the net and the web with
cost-efficient means. The obvious remark about this is that their angle of
view seems inappropriatedly restricted to the so-called "Third World": like any
"approriate" technology - it's just that; you need not live in the Sahara to
make use of solar energy.
Just to exemplify this, fellow journalist Bill Boas sent up his experience to
rediscover appropriate high-tech: he went with a wayward XT - and a very
vintage model from the first years of the PC - up the net. Read his story
here !
To our BIG astonishment "big blue" IBM herself came out
with a "modest" web browser -- launched far away in experiental market
circuits in Japan and Brazil: read their own announcement for the IBM "WebBoy" !
It's almost revolutionary; well... at least against the background of
byte-bloat and ware-pushing on the very common IT market.
And last, but not least, there is the WEB's inventor himself, Tim Berners-Lee, now President of the World Wide Web Consortium W3C, who reminds us of the basic motivation from the beginnings - he has publicly answered to many "frequently asked questions" to him which you can find here directly: it's lots of answers indeed, and worth reading.
We strongly recommend to go to one of the following links to get and read
an extensive text by a French scientific researcher (and research
institute director at the Paris Ecole Normale Superieure), Roberto Di
Cosmo, about the WEB accessibility discussion and the whole approach to
it: "CyberSnare", at:
- for an English version -,
http://www.netaction.org/msoft/cybersnare.html
or at:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/dkiechle/cybersnare.htm,
- and for the original French version,
http://www.mmedium.com/dossiers/piege
Another solid analysis of the private monopolisation of the Internet
is a "NetAction White
Paper - From Microsoft Word to Microsoft World: How Microsoft is
Building a Global Monopoly", by Nathan Newman.
A very sober, and the more frightening, account. Recommended reading!
HOWEVER, the frightening business position of what has been dubbed "the 800lb gorilla", and the marketing hype surrounding it, should not be allowed to obfuscate the view on what people really do with their PCs. Towards this end-2001, there may be about 800 million "units" in use - and not "worldwide" but distributed rather askew, yet only a tiny little part outside the center regions of the industrialised countries. The reality of use in one of the techno-"developed" regions though, shows an astonishing variety of operational systems. Nevertheless, that bullying behaviour on, and of, "the market" has dire consequences for the development of free communication worldwide as well as inside our national societies.
A key point in the Internet's architecture is the Domain Name system. For a short period only, the uppermost instance which decides in fact about who is "allowed" to be seen on the Net has been a really "public" instance. But that has (been) changed long since - read about the privatisation of this key authority into the hands of the "private" company SAIC: that is, the military-industrial-security complex in a Freedom Forum article of 1997 by Chris Flash.
The editor of this place here has tried to formulate his own reflections
in a background paper, originally for a specialised journal:
"Privatizing the
Public Web", which you can find here.
The issue has been discussed at a congress at the university of
Frankfurt(M) in June, 1998 for which the author's contribution can be
found here - but you have to download this text
with "image" mode because it contains German language with 8-bit Umlaute
(character set Code Page 437, US- or "extended" ASCII).
For the very practical side of the matter please go on to our page with
DOS Text Mode
utilities for using the Internet - eMail, Web, the universe and
everything. Fast and most economical !
There is a little reminder for those techno-racists who think that
it's impossible to do anything - not to speak of using the Net -
without any Gigahertz gimmick. A fairly recent poll
among the rather hi-tech biased readers of the leading German computer
magazine "C'T" gave astonishing numbers of people using NOT the latest
MS-Windows mutation and NOT the latest-fastest superpower-sucking
gadgets.
Find here Frederick Noronha's "bYtES For aLL" historical, first
newsletter:
Issue No 1 * July 1999
was predominantly oriented to the Indian internet scenery.
Located at Goa in India, Frederick Noronha had compiled a rather
comprehensive list of Indian WWW addresses.
Since then it has been a quite encouraging development with and around
this monthly newsletter which by now has its own site, and there is a lively
mailing list (see there for details).
Later editions then featured a number of general "Southern" and
UN servers (August 1999), followed by overviews of current
developments in local languages, reports from conferences, a special
edition on Pakistan's Internet connections, news on rural-urban
issues. Lastest developments include news about the Indian "Simputer", a slim
and simple (and cheap) PC which is equipped with the software needed to work
in many of the - many!- Indian languages.
Frederick Noronha, Journalist in Goa/India
Home |
Tools |
Download
Area
This site is rather irregularly updated - this page last on:
20 Fef'03
Contributions welcome -