Causes

I found something to jolt me out of my summer blogging doldrums. It is urgent, interesting, important, and blogs just happen to be an excellent platform from which to promote it. It is Amnesty International’s Irrepressible.info campaign.

If you look at my sidebar, you will notice that two new little boxes have appeared there. Down at the bottom of the “Links” section, there’s the ONE campaign, which has the worthy goal of fighting global poverty and AIDS. Not only that, but it has enough resources and supporters (yes, more than just Brad Pitt and Bono) that I would say I have seen ONE make real progress on awareness of these issues in the last few years since its creation.

Then, closer to the top, there’s the box from Amnesty. It is a little piece of HTML that displays a fragment of text that someone is trying censor (in the native language). It brings up a new fragment every time you reload the page. The more people add this code to their site, the harder it will be for governments to block their citizens from reading politically undesirable content. I think Neal Stephenson would proud. And possibly also the Founders. So join me, friends, and defend Internet freedom.

(If you don’t have a platform where you can add this code, you can also visit Irrepressible.info and sign their pledge for Internet freedom anyway.)