+ Every once in a while I visit the Istanbul Metroblogging site to check up on an old friend, to see where his thoughts lay. Aynadakileke Mel, for short) is a very interesting and complicated fellow. You never know for sure just how much irony has seeped into his thought of the moment. I haven’t figured the proportion of irony in this August link to a NEWSWEEK article that raves about Istanbul

Turkish Delight
After so many decades of trying to become Western, Istanbul glories in the rediscovery of a very modern identity. European or not, it is one of the coolest cities in the world.

For me having lived in Istanbul for just over a year, it’s quite exciting to see it get international recognition for someof the hippest and vibrant culture I’ve ever experienced.

from The Globe and Mail (via Kirstie: How to beat censorship, courtesy of France

A Paris-based media watchdog has released a free guide with tips for bloggers and dissidents to sneak past Internet censors in countries from China to Iran.

+ Shaw as an internet service provider has always been negative spirited. Nothing they offer is free of the squeeze. The squeeze that gets as much as possible, with the least altruism, and is geared like most corporations to get it done with little public outcry. Here’s a bit of an outcry from Techdirt.

It seems that many broadband providers have realized that they get attention for playing the “speed game.” They keep announcing faster broadband speeds, even if sometimes the announcements are a bit misleading. BroadbandReports calls Canadian cable company Shaw out for bragging about their speed increases while capping downloads at a paltry 30 gigs a month while also using traffic shaping apps to throttle BitTorrent usage. In other words: here’s your super fast cable broadband service, but you can’t actually use it for much.

+ Streetsy, all about street art…I dunno, is the name not cashing in on Banksy fame?

from polyscience.org, found at arstechnica

In the case of this study, two dominant female chimpanzees were taught two different methods of getting food out of an apparatus, poking versus lifting. Then these chimps were sent back to their respective clans, where they taught others how to get the food out of the apparatus. But a funny thing happened along the way. Some chimps from the lifting group discovered that poking was more effective than lifting. But instead of continuing to poke, they conformed to the method that the others in their group used.