Power and brilliance.

The internet, only good for bomb making and porn.

Or not.

This is bravery.

Alice is 15 and has terminal cancer, she has a 'bucket list' of things she'd like to do before the end. Pretty reasonable desires they are too.

Looks like she'll get them, a hundred times over.

She's only made two posts and has attracted in excess of 1300 comments. I haven't seen any trolls, and the offers are pouring in.

It is trending on Twitter at an unbelievable rate.

I lost a friend to cancer when I was about her age it had a profound effect upon me, as a 16 year old you don't expect to be reminded of your mortality. And if the last 20 years have taught me anything, it is that life is for living, needs to be taken by the scruff of the neck and have every last drop squeezed from it.

To those who think the internet can't be a power for good - one question.

How d'you like them apples?

The One That Is Blessed With Clairvoyance. . .

I blogged a little while ago about an entertaining conspiracy theory surrounding the Government's intentions for t'internet.

Well, bless my barnacles. . .

A controversial broadband tax should be law before the next election, according to Minister for Digital Britain Stephen Timms.

Now there's a surprise. Didn't see that one coming.

The 50 pence a month tax applies to everyone with a fixed line telephone.

Speaking at a debate in London, Mr Timms said the tax will be presented to parliament as part of the Finance Bill.

So, £6 per year, doesn't sound that bad does it?

I'm betting any office will have to pay for each and every phone on their premises, even if it is on a switchboard. More cost which business won't have to bear, because it will be passed on to those who use their services or buy their products.

And what will the money be used for? Making sure everyone has broadband. The next stop will be a modem licence.

Why?

So they can get us all on to Cloud. That means that ALL your files, contacts, emails and browsing history will be centrally stored, and you'll only be able to access websites which the controllers feel is appropriate for you to access.

It's coming people, and it won't just be us, this will be global.

The One That Can Tell You Why. . .

It's becoming something of an obsession, and recently I had a person from one of the opinion poll companies round bearing statements such as 'Internet access is a right' and 'The government should do more to ensure everyone has broadband'. I had to say whether I agreed strongly, disagreed strongly, well, you get the idea.

Why is the state so desperate to get us linked up to the 'net?

The race is on to get as many British people online as possible by 2012, Martha Lane Fox has told the BBC.

As the government's new Digital Champion she has been charged with getting millions online who are not yet connected to the internet.

But why? Bloggers are a continual pain in the arse for governments and their opposition. The internet has also empowered the consumer in terms of news, you don't sit down when you are told to see the news and you don't have to only hear what the editors want to tell you, that's an enormous groundshift from the consumer's relationship with papers, radio and TV.

"They've asked me to see what really clever applications of technology could help people get more employment, get more choices, take control of where they live of their own situation in a slightly more cohesive way," the co-founder of lastminute.com said.

By reading that, it would seem that the government want to fly in the face of everything they've done over the last 12 years and actually empower people. I don't buy it.

Ms Lane Fox has indicated that she wants to concentrate on the six million poorest "nonliners" first.

She will be relying on people already online to convince others to join them.

"The only way I think we can do that is if all of us as individuals sit down and think okay, how can I bring someone on this journey with me?

"Get kids training grannies, get all of us kind of plugging into our local communities to try and pull the whole country along.

We do it to help the poor.

Well, I'm sorry, but the internet, whilst being a very useful tool, is not absolutely required for everyday life. And what is this journey? Why should we all have the internet? What's in it for them? I have visions of some sort of Matrix Lite society.

I have a friend who enjoys conspiracies, and this one is a goodie, and not too far fetched. It is his belief, and with everything we've seen thus far, it is hard to argue against it, that the government is keen to introduce a national service provider akin to the Cloud system.

In a nutshell, you plug your monitor into your keyboard and your keyboard into the phone socket, absolutely everything you do on and with your computer is stored centrally. Documents you write, emails you send and recieve, websites you visit, online banking details, contacts, the lot.

Now it all makes sense. Of course with a centrally controlled system a website that the authorities don't want to be available simply isn't there. If a news site publishes a story they don't like, it simply disappears. If a blogger writes an article they find objectionable, it is taken down. The blogger would probably suffer the same fate.

The internet is a free as anything could probably ever be. The political class hate it. It must be like a maddening itch they can never reach. So great is their desire for control over every single facet of our lives that they will do anything to get control of it. So you persaude people they cannot live without the internet, you raise more taxes to put the system together (modem licence, anyone?) and then get everyone onto a system which is little more than a heavily regulated, constantly moderated intranet.

Jesus, I hate these bastards. Scary, scary shit.

The One That Says 'Ooooh, They've Done It Now'. . .

I can't work out if this government is actually barking mad or really wants to lose the next election. Such is the rate at which things designed to piss people off are trotted out, that I'm starting to think it is the latter, there must be something big and very very bad 18 months down the road, so bad that not even Labour with their sociopathic desire for power want to be a part of it.

It really is the only conclusion to draw. Can they really be so divorced from reality that they think telling people that their Facebook, Bebo and MySpace activities must be monitored will win them support? The anti-crime and anti-terror excuse is pathetic. 'Osama Bin Laden is planning a fiery death for the infidel, lol' 'Fingers Freddie is turning over the NatWest tonight! OMFG!' No, I don't think so.

In the grand scheme of things this is a tiny issue, especially when records of all our phone calls, emails and browsing history will be kept, just in case we do something wrong, even if that something wrong is perfectly legal now. However what hasn't happened thus far is any real coverage in the MSM, there's been a couple of flickers (or should that be flickr? Sorry) but nothing to really suggest that this might, you know, be a bad thing.

Well, look at the comments on the Pravda article about this story, as I write this there's only one comment which doesn't have a problem with this. We'll see how Pravda's moderation policy balances this out.

Have Labour learned nothing from the last few months? A very large number of the votes picked up by Obama in the American election were won in the blogosphere and on social networking sites. As each General Election here becomes more like a Presidential election you'd have thought that the Labour spin doctors would have realised that cyberspace is the new battleground, not against terrorism but for votes.

How many people between 18-30 turn out to vote? How many from that same age range use social networking, blogging and email as one of their primary methods of communication? The internet has always been about liberty, it empowers the media consumer and gives the individual a voice. In the case of this blog, it may only be that 20 or so people a day hear my voice, but if every one of those 20 people speak to 20 more people themselves and so forth, that is a huge number of people.

Recently the outcry amongst social networking site users about the rights to uploaded photographs caused these sites to back down. Internet users have real power, perhaps that is what really scares the government, there's no boozy paper editor with a skeleton or two in the cupboard that can be leant on or manipulated, instead there is a large collection of individuals who will say and write what they want, not what they are told.

I'll tell you this, you can piss around with recording people's itinerary when they go abroad, put chips in their bin and so on, but piss around with their Facebook and they'll mobilise in their tens of thousands; you're screwed.

Labour, you are so screwed. But please, tell me, why are you doing it on purpose?