India: Freedom Of Speech Shaken After Orkut Member Arrest
[photo via]
Rahul Krishnakumar Vaid from Gurgaon, Haryana (Pune, India), was arrested today for creating an Orkut community named ?I hate Sonia Gandhi? and posting derogatory content about Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and Mahatma Gandhi
He was arrested not for hating Sonia Gandhi, as this falls under the category of personal opinion which is not an offence, but for creating an online profile and then posting content with vulgar language about her. This apparently is covered by section 292 of Indian Penal Code and section 67 of the Information Technology Act.
Although India is a country of free speech, it seems that for certain “important” individuals such Sonia Gandhi, any negative talk can lead in trouble.
The complain against the forum editor was logged by Amol Bhokare, a Congress activist in December 2007.
Pune police approached Orkut (Google) and found out details of who formed this forum and circulated the vulgar messages.
Vaid will remain in custody till May 21 and if he is found guilty he is eligible for up to to five years in imprisonment and a fine up to 100,000 Rs (1 Lakh).
[via]
This Month’s Mission: Do It Like Penguings
Green Thing is a community in England that is trying to make it fun for all of us to become a bit more eco-friendly. Every month they assign people a different task that they need to accomplish.
This month’s mission? Lower the temperature of your boiler and use your own body heat to get warm 
To promote their idea they created this rather odd video (xxx)
500,000,000 Firefox Downloads Earns Rice!
The Mozilla community (ie Firefox), celebrated yesterday the 500,000,000 downloads of Firefox with a very original way. Their aim was to play at Freerice.com (a page where you play for free and give away grains of rice to people that need food) and gather 500,000,000 grains of rice.
From what I see Freerice’s daily rice grain levels fluctuate between 100,000,000-150,000,000. I am curious to find whether the Firefox community managed to reach their goal (will update this article as soon as I find out)
2008: The year of Feta cheese, Kermit the frog and potatoes
It seems that we got a lot to look forward to for 2008 according to Nature. According to the famous journal various organisations and countries have declared 2008 to be many things. Lets take a look at the headlines:
-United Nations declared 2008 to be many things such as the international year of potato (suggestion by Peru), international year of sanitation (2.6bn people are with out it), the international year of planet earth (which lasts for 3 years) and the international year of languages.
-Amphibian Ark (a zoo community) declared 2008 to be the year of the frog (to prevent the extinction of 500 species)
-International Coral Reef Initiative declared 2008 (second year running) to raise coral reef awareness and their importance
-Virgin Galactic declared 2008 the year of the spaceship (hoping to make it a reality)
-Greece declared 2008 to be all about campaigning the well known fact that Feta cheese is Greek (apparently some Danish and UK companies dont think so when it comes to money)
-Australia declared 2008 to be the year of boy scouts (why?)
-England declared 2008 the year of the gardens
-European Union declared 2008 the year of intercultural dialogue
So…you got many things to do for 2008
potatoes
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