mr-damon/internet

Reporters Without Borders is encouraging journalists covering the Beijing Olympics to skirt censorship with tips on how to get around firewalls, lock computer files and find safe translators.

In a guide published on the Internet Wednesday, the Paris-based organization advised reporters Wednesday to conduct phone calls and write e-mails with the knowledge that they may be monitored.

China has backed away from a promise to lift all Internet blocks on foreign media.

The new guide will likely help only journalists who have not yet left for Beijing: The press freedom group says its Web site, rsf.org [rsf.org] , remains blocked in China.

Chinese officials assured news organizations "complete freedom to report" when bidding for the games seven years ago. The International Olympic Committee received further such assurances in April. But Kevan Gosper, a senior member of the IOC, said this week that the promise will apply only to sites related to "Olympic competitions."

Hmm. And I only just started playing this game...

The latest bane of office productivity is Scrabulous, a virtual knockoff of the Scrabble board game, with over 700,000 players a day and nearly three million registered users.

Fans of the game are obsessive. They play against friends, co-workers, family members and strangers, and many have several games going at once.

Everyone seems to love the online game -- everyone, that is, except the companies that own the rights to Scrabble: Hasbro, which sells it in North America, and Mattel, which markets it everywhere else.

In January, they denounced Scrabulous as piracy and threatened legal action against its creators, two brothers in Calcutta named Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla who run a software development company. Both Hasbro and Mattel said they were hoping for a solution that would not force them to shut down the game.

Jayant Agarwalla, 21, said they did not create Scrabulous to make money, even though they now collect about $25,000 a month from online advertising. They just wanted to play Scrabble on their computers, and their favorite (unauthorized) site had started charging, he said.

Until last Friday television screens and newspapers abroad were flooded with scenes of tens of thousands of red-robed monks in the streets and of chaos and violence as the junta stamped out the biggest popular uprising there in two decades.

But then the images, text messages and posts stopped, shut down by generals who belatedly grasped the power of the Internet to jeopardize their crackdown.

"Finally they realized that this was their biggest enemy, and they took it down," said Aung Zaw, editor of an exile magazine called Irrawaddy, whose Web site has been a leading source of news over the past weeks.

His Web site has been attacked by a virus whose timing raises the possibility that the military government has a few skilled hackers in its ranks.

The efficiency of this latest, technological crackdown raises the question of whether the much-vaunted role of the Internet in undermining repression can stand up to a determined and ruthless government -- or whether a tiny, economically isolated country like Myanmar is an exception.

From the page: "Companies like Google scan their e-mail users' in-boxes to deliver ads related to those messages. Will people be as willing to let a company listen in on their phone conversations to do the same?

Pudding Media, a start-up based in San Jose, California, is introducing an Internet phone service Monday that will be supported by advertising related to what people are talking about in their calls. The Web-based phone service is similar to Skype's online service â€" consumers plug a headset and a microphone into their computers, dial any phone number and chat away. But unlike Internet phone services that charge by the length of the calls, Pudding Media offers calling without any toll charges.

The trade-off is that Pudding Media is eavesdropping on phone calls in order to display ads on the screen that are related to the conversation. Voice recognition software monitors the calls, selects ads based on what it hears and pushes the ads to the subscriber's computer screen while he or she is still talking."

Privacy advocates have grown increasingly worried that digital tools are giving governments and powerful corporations the ability to peek into peoples' lives as never before. But the real snoops are often much closer to home.

"Google and Yahoo may know everything, but they don't really care about you," said Jacalyn F. Barnett, a Manhattan-based divorce lawyer. "No one cares more about the things you do than the person that used to be married to you."