Hello from Genoa, Italy!
I’m here at the G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy, travelling with the White House press corps again. While it’s not unusual to be almost the only Mac user in this fairly conservative bunch, I thought you might like the “only iceBook inside the Red Zone” tag.
There are of course a handful of PowerBooks (including TiBooks!) and older iBooks to be seen among the thousands of media people here from all over the world, but as far as I have seen, there are no other iceBooks in this island of relative quiet surrounded by a raging ocean of protesters.
In trying to get hooked up to the summit LAN — which, as usual, is almost entirely Win-centric — I managed to get to know the guy who put the whole thing together. This is the first G7/G8 meeting to feature ethernet access throughout the media center, and interestingly they decided to only open port 8080 on the main server –which means that only HTTP (web page) access is available.
This is a major pain, because POP/SMTP and FTP have to be done through flaky dialup connections, but such is the price of tight security. The chief architect told me that his main concern was with the possibility of mail bombing. Most free mail sites can of course be setup to access outside POP servers, but this is less than ideal.
All the best,
David Hajime Kornhauser, Researcher/Producer
Nippon Television Washington Bureau (NTV)
National Press Building
Washington DC
