Previous entertainment industry-led attempts to shut down The Pirate Bay torrent search engine haven't been successful, but the Swedish police are still trying to help out. Consequently, next week, the site will be blocked to anyone from inside the country who tries to visit it -- because it's being added to a list of child-pornography sites that Swedish ISPs block. A Pirate Bay admin writes on his blog that the police say that "if the content is still there next week", they'll add the site to the list -- but they won't specify what the offending content is (never mind the the site doesn't actually host and content on its own). It's highly unlikely it's actual child porn, though of course the entertainment industry has no problem equating file-sharing to child porn. But since the Pirate Bay is nothing more than a search engine, can Google expect to be blocked in Sweden soon? Yahoo? MSN? After all, chances are those sites link to at least one piece of copyrighted content.

A diverse group of creative people, all geeks in their own right but not all "techies," decided to give the people of Iraq an opportunity to speak freely to a large audience about their experiences living in the midst of a war. These geeks, who call themselves Streamtime, decided to perform a Web radio experiment: they would train Iraqis to use Dyne:bolic and other free software to create instant Internet broadcasts wherever there was a computer and Internet access. In the summer of 2004, Streamtime packed up and traveled from Amsterdam to Iraq, surviving bombings and hack attacks in their quest to bring freedom of expression to a country on a rollercoaster of victory and violence. The experiment has ended, but the mission continues.