It has been so hot here over the past few days, this doesn't feel like England anymore. A light, but persistent headache plus a toddler who was going berserk at times, did the rest to make me stumble, more than walk, through the day. But the headache is gone, and the heat seems to be subsiding. So, what do I have to report? My online life has clearly been dominated by Twitter.

While I've been following a lot of the links to web resources, I didn't get round to reading most of them. For a while, I also got distracted by politics. One thing was a series in the Guardian - published in May - about this year's Bilderberg conference (Matin laughs at my sudden interest in "conspiracy theories" - except they are not, Bilderberg does exist!). And then there was the fervent discussion in Germany about internet censorship. This was in many ways remarkable. It demonstrated once again how politics and political propaganda work, but also, it showed that there is a new group of young people taking on the conventional parties, and this can only be positive for the German political landscape.

The discussion was about a law proposed by the governing coalition which would introduce access blocking of certain web pages. Seemingly, this was being introduced to combat child pornography, but in more than one publication by the governing parties themselves it transpired that they were also, in the long run, interested in protecting copyrights, especially of the musical industry. The power to blacklist the sites would lie in the hands of the "Bundeskriminalamt" (federal crimnal police office).

Now, how could you be against something that is combating child pornography?? The question is, is access blocking an effective means to do this? Apparently it is pretty easy to get round the "stop sign" posted on the internet when you try to access and indexed site. And why not force the sites to be taken down altogether? A lot of people spoke out against the law, people working with the internet day by day, saying they were ineffective methods (leading to the slogan "Löschen statt sperren" (don't block, delete) and also that this was paving the way for a general censorship of the net, and the power shouldn't lie in the hands of the federal police. There was an e-petition, the most successful to date, to prevent this law. Over 130.000 people signed it. - Still, the law was passed on the 18th of June. But while this might seem a victory to main-stream politics, it has caused so much stir and made many people aware of how poor the understanding of middle-aged politicians of the internet is, that it might just give the pirates a lot of winds in their sails.

The pirate party are pretty much a single issue party, one could paraphrase the issue at heart as "freedom on the web" I would say. Is that the most pressing problem in politics at the moment? Maybe not, but it is an important issue I think, and definitely worth fighting for. In this country, we already have a technology called "cleanfeed" cleaning up the internet, and you won't even notice it, as you just get an error message "page not found" when you try to access a blocked site.

It might be working fine and serving its cause, but can we ever be sure someone won't abuse it for blocking out sites that they just don't agree with? - On a wider level, also taking in other articles/radio programmes etc. there is one thing in politics I am now convinced of. We have to resist the state gaining too much control over our private lives, private data. I understand a lot better than I used to when people say "NO to identy cards". I cannot mention Twitter and politics without writing about Iran and the protests there, following the elections of 12 June. But I have read less about it than the previous topic. There was a lot going on on Twitter, that is one thing I can say, and quite a few of the people I am following coloured their avatars green. Also, people changed their locations to Teheran. There was a massive wave of support for the protesters in Iran. Hopefully, in the end they will prevail.

It is getting very late once again. I should better stop soon, although I would have liked to write much more, about what we've done and seen in the past month. So, when is this going to become a web design blog :) Well, it was a lot about the web, at least. Good night/good morning for now.