Friday 13/02/2009 Important Day for IT in PNG

Last Friday (13/02/09) marked an important day for IT in Papua New Guinea. The reason been is that three important IT related matters were launched on this day.

The first item was the launch of Digicel's web browsing on the Digicel mobile network. It is a great step for Internet access for Papua New Guinean's. The reason why I say this is because it now makes accessing the web something that any Digicel customer with a web capable mobile phone can do. Which before access to the Internet in Papua New Guinea was mainly done via computers. The Digital world has now had it doors flung wide open to Papua New Guinean's. Thank you Digicel.

The next item was that Telikom released its ADSL charges which were approved be the ICCC on Thursday morning (12/02/09). That was advertised to the general public on Friday. What does this mean for my Wantoks. Well now there is a new major ISP player in town, I am hoping that it will bring down the charges for access to the Internet. (I will try and find time this week to do a ISP comparison).

The last but not least event that took place last Friday was the official launching of the UNDP and BPNG - Pacific Financial Inclusion Programme (PFIP). Which is planning to give funding to projects technology projects to help reach low income households with financial services. By the sounds of things from what I can gather this project will help fund mobile banking projects, etc.

Australian Governent is planning to install ISP filtering

It is scary to think that the Australia Federal Government under Kevin Rudd is planning to install internet filtering at the ISP level. According to the Getup website:

"The Federal Government is planning to force all Australian servers to filter internet traffic and block any material the Government deems ‘inappropriate’. Under the plan, the Government can add any ‘unwanted’ site to a secret blacklist."

What Kevin Rudd's government is trying to install is the type of internet censorship that happens in China. Where a Government chooses what is appropriate to view and what is inappropriate to view. Then it is only a small step away from getting to the stage where if the Government does not like what is being said about it, the government will just filter it away. Removing an individuals right to freedom of information and people's civil liberties.

According to the nocleanfeed website:

This plan will waste tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and slow down Internet access. Despite being almost universally condemned by the public, ISPs, State Governments, Media and censorship experts

APC states that the top 5 reasons why this plan should not go a head are:

1. It will slow everything down (meaning that recent trials showed that by using Kevin Rudd's ISP filtering technology it was 30% slower to view sites etc then it was with out Rudd's technology.
2. Offensive is in the eyes of the beholder
3. It pressumes families care about this stuff
4. It makes Australia look stupid on a global scale
5. The people supporting it don't like mounting rational arguments (for example why not make the blacklist public and debate on what should be on it or not on it)

The reason why I find what Kevin Rudd and the Australian government is doing scary is because in recent times in Papua New Guinea we have seen members of the National Parliament trying to dictate to the Papua New Guinean media what it can say and can not say. A good example of this is what our PNG Finance Minister did to Post Courier at the 2009 National Budget lockup. Where reporters from Post Courier were locked out of the budget which according to Post Courier was to teach them a lesson because they had printed something that he did not like. Now if the PNG Government was to install laws like what the Australia Government is doing I fear that this technology would be used for Government propaganda in Papua New Guinea, to filter out anything from the press that the Government did not like.

Should Papua New Guinean's be scared of what is happening in Australia? I really think we should. The PNG Government may follow the Australian Government's lead and use this technology to regulate the media in Papua New Guinea.

Simple way to start programing

Microsoft has recently launched a program called Small Basic which is aimed at teaching children how to program. The software is 4.06 Mb in size so it is small enough for the typical Papua New Guinean dial up internet connection to download. Small Basic is based on .Net and inspired by the Basic programing language. Even thought Small Basics is aimed at children it can be a great way for an adult to learn how to program.

Small Basic is made up of three parts: Language, Environment, and Libraries. The Language is made up of only 14 Keywords, it comes with a simple programing environment, and its own libraries. Which you have the option to create new libraries or modify existing ones. Small Basic also allows third party libraries to be plugged in.

Requirements to run Small Basic is a Windows XP or Vista operating system and .NET 3.5 Framework.

What does this mean for the people of Papua New Guinea. Basically it gives any Person in PNG the opportunity to learn how to program with out having to attend expensive courses. It must also be noted that this is not a open source software.