I was contacted by someone working with the YWAM Marine Reach Ship the M/V Pacific Link asking for some help. They will be travelling to remote Papua New Guinea (PNG) later this year, but want to maintain an Internet Connection while there. In remote PNG there is no infrastructure for it, so they were wanting to know what suggestions we might have ...

Here is the original e-mail:

Recently Google stopped allowing users to run Windows on their computers at Google. They stated that they were doing it as a safety measure due to the hack by the Chinese in January of some of their system's. That leads to the question, should we consider dropping Windows as well on our systems?

Recently a service called Ning decided to shut down their free service. Ning hosts social networks for people and groups. Up until recently they offered a free service and a few different premium services, ranging from $3.00 per month to $50.00 per month. People and groups who have previously been operating networks on the free service are now in a position of either shutting down their network or paying for the service.

Some of the changes that Facebook has made lately to their site has got me thinking a lot about how I use my Facebook account.If you look deeply at the changes made to the privacy settings and terms of service you will see that there is far less actual privacy on Facebook than I think many of us believe.

Recently I was talking with the guys at YWAM Harpenden about options available for digital asset management (DAM). None of the YWAM Centres that I have been at have had a system in place for this, it was pretty much always handled by the media guys just "knowing" what they had, and where it might be. Here's a fun parody video of what it's like to look for this content (I've been there and done that).

At the YWAM Centre I last worked at it was always an interesting conversation when it came to filtering the Internet. On one hand we are blocking the Internet, stopping people from free access and controlling them. On the other hand we are protecting them from all sorts of junk that is out there, and can possibly cause our brothers and sisters to stumble.

This is my fourth attempt writing this post, my computer has crashed all three other times …

I’ll be honest, when we lost all of the old YWAM IT site last year due to hosting / billing problems I became extremely discouraged and lost my motivation. This has resulted in the site you see today, one that is pretty dead and needing a lot of help. The last site started out being driven by myself, but very quickly a community developed, which is what brought life to the old site.

That community is what I would like to build here again.

Originally Posted on 26/06/2007 by Kevin Colyer

I was reading the Crit 07 report and was interested by the part about proposing an IT Symposium "a gathering of IT specialists that can come together and work on a common project – an IT project/infrastructure that will serve the mission as a whole".

Originally Posted on 18/06/2007 by Alex Costa

Hey! I've been testing some OpenSource and Free software for using with Videoconferencing equipment and I was wondering if someone here have tested, tried or successfully used any of the following software.

Xmeeting - for Mac computers

Ekiga - Formerly known as Gnome Meeting ( for Linux and has a beta for Windows)

Originally posted on 06/06/2007 by Sindre Vaernes

I think I vaguely remember when the service first started, but I did not pay much attention. Now I just read an article where Deutsche Telekom has made an investment in this company, so maybe there is something to it after all. I signed up but haven't really been able to test anything yet.

They are supposed to offer some competition with Skype, etc. Following is an excerpt from the news article I read: