One Canuck's Radio Weblog

  Saturday, 1 November 2003

.< 1:40:48 AM >
US falls 14 spots in press freedom ranking

Reporters Without Borders recently released its second world press freedom ranking. With North Korea and Cuba forming the bottom two rungs and Finland, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Norway all tied in the lead, the European countries did considerably better than the rest of the world, especially the Arab world. While the US, despite no major domestic changes affecting reporters in the last year, fell to a 31st place tie with Greece, down from 17th. The ranking was compiled by asking "journalists, researchers, jurists and human rights activists to fill out a questionnaire evaluating respect for press freedom in a particular country" from September 1, 2002, to September 1, 2003. The study "does not look at human rights violations in general, just press freedom violations" and is not a ranking of the quality of the press, just its freedom. [Kuro5hin.org]

< 1:25:47 AM >

Winners of the third and final round of the Mac OS X Innovator's Contest have been announced at O'Reilly's Mac OS X Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. Sponsored by Apple Developer Connection (ADC), the contest "rewards innovative Mac OS X applications, plug-ins, user interface widgets, or other creative original software." [MacCentral]

< 1:23:22 AM >

Apple has identified an issue with external FireWire hard drives using the Oxford 922 bridge chip-set with firmware version 1.02 that can result in the loss of data. Apple is working with affected drive manufacturers to resolve this issue. [Oct 31] [Apple Hot News]