RTFA: http://valleywag.com/360376/pakistan-bans-youtube-…

The Pakistani government caused a worldwide, two-hour-long YouTube outage on Sunday after it ordered Internet service providers to block the site. Reports suggest these two videos were responsible for the ban. The first animates the Danish cartoons which caused riots in 2005. The second is a trailer for Forbidden, a film which argues Islam is an inherently violent religion. Here’s that clip:

I have to admit that the lip syncing clip is totally funny. The other one strikes me as being fairly propagandistic, but I’m not big on censorship…

RTFA: http://system.opendns.com/2008/02/24/58/

Youtube down, not OpenDNS
Palo Alto - Online - resolved
posted on February 24, 2008 8:07 pm UTC

Youtube.com is down right now because Pakistan Telecom has decided to (accidentally probably) hijack their IP address space which means that nobody in the world can reach Youtube. This isn’t an OpenDNS issue. Just letting you all know.
This is now fixed. PCCW took far far too long to fix their broken customer (Pakistan Telecom) … Argh.

…what!? I don’t understand… I thought the .com root TLD servers were distributed around the world. I thought IP routing tables were virtually hardwired at the fiber-level to perform intelligent, disaster-circumventing routing.

RTFA: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08056/860162-294.st…

“Hey, the dudes left-handed” the research teams deputy field assistant for handedness called out.

And there was Mr. Obama, scrawling smudged notes with his wrong hand, showing all of America or at least the 3 percent glued to CNN at that moment his gauche, sinister love of the left. He was carefully writing down his opponents words, presumably to appropriate them for a very eloquent inaugural address down the road.

The big deal here is not just Mr. Obama’s orientation. Republican front-runner John McCain comes from the same, left-leaning 10 percent to 15 percent of the population. Its becoming clearer by the day — unless every right-hander in Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania votes for Mrs. Clinton — that the next president will be left-handed.

The country has not been faced with such predetermination of presidential handedness since the three-way race of 1992, when George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and H. Ross Perot all favored the same side used by Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci to create great art.

Other than the first Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton, the left-handed presidents everyone seems to agree on were James Garfield, Harry Truman and Gerald Ford.

Wow, McCain, Obama, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, & Bush Sr. are all lefties?

RTFA: http://lessig08.org/

After lots of thinking and advice, I have decided it does not make sense for the Change Congress movement for me to a run for Congress in CA12. We would have just over 30 days to introduce a district to me and to an idea. That would not be enough time to convince them to turn away from an extremely popular politician with 30 years of public service. And while anyone within the district would understand that, outside the district, the lesson would be that a “Change Congress” message has no salience or support. That would, in my view, harm the movement more than it would help.

So thank you to everyone who helped here. All the remaining funds in the campaign will be given to Change Congress (as soon as the paper work for that organization gets settled). And I would urge everyone who signed up here to signup there.

Whelp, to put it irreverantly, toss that website in the deadpool. But back in reality, Lessig ‘08 was a really fascinating event to witness, and while I would have cheered Larry along if he went for it, I also buy his reasoning for not running. So, thanks for the inspiring ideas, and I’ll be listening…