Global Voices Online

Raisa Rasheeka has been studying the lives of the tea plantation workers in Bangladesh for a while and shares the findings in her blog.

Diligence finds many people attending a job fair in East Timor's capital Dili.

Ikeda Nobuo at OpenSpectrum Japan reports on two news stories related to copyright law in Japan: the conditional access system B-CAS has been scrapped (and with it so-called “Dubbing Ten”), and on September 18 the plan to extend copyright from 50 to 70 years was also abandoned. Ikeda observes that this may be an indication that the Web is becoming the “Fifth Estate” in Japan to compete with mass media.

Blogger id:higayasuo traces recent problems at IBM Japan to the old guard in the company not understanding modern conditions of the industry [ja], carrying over experience from an age of general-purpose computers to a modern Americanized age of rational production through outsourcing and specialization. Based on this experience, id:higayasuo explains, this older generation makes the mistake of outsourcing offshore the task of writing computer programs, while performing writing of program design documents domestically, in the end a more costly way of doing things.

In a post entitled “Google, the anti-social corporation” [ja], former Mainichi journalist and writer/blogger Hiroyuki Fujishiro [藤代裕之] at Gatonews picks up on an ongoing series of posts [ja] by blogger and security researcher Hiromitsu Takagi [高木浩光] criticizing Google's handling of the roll-out of its Street View service in Japan. Fujishiro notes that while business aspects of Google are generally viewed positively, there is a need for more discussion on various issues relating to privacy, censorship, security/trust and culture.

Hiroyuki Fujishiro [藤代裕之] at Gatonews comments on reports [ja] that Japan's two largest dailies, the Yomiuri shimbun and the Asahi shimbun, have agreed on a mutual consignment deal that, by 2012, will consolidate the printing end of the news production process. The two papers will also assist in printing the country's major business paper, the Nikkei Keizai shimbun, in cases of sudden disasters such as earthquakes. Fujishiro writes that the move, which comes less than a year after the creation of shared news portal Aratanisu, signals a sense of impending crisis in Japan's newspaper industry.

Dominica Weekly thinks that the current U.S. financial crisis “will seriously affect financial markets around the worldwide and there will almost certainly be a trickle down effect on the already weak Dominican economy and throughout the Caribbean.”

University student and blogger id:suztomo describes (with many photos) their experience in September doing an internship [ja] at Hatena in Kyoto, Japan. The blogger had two objectives with the internship: to learn how to set up a server that can withstand many users, and to learn about how web services are developed at Hatena. id:suztomo explains that each person working at Hatena has skills in a different area, and hopes in the future to have their own specialization.

Bermuda has got some unwanted attention with the Obama camp's latest campaign ad, which accuses McCain of being on the side of tax-dodging Bermuda-based US companies - Breezeblog says the whole thing “underlines the dilemma many Bermudians feel: as much as they wish to finally see a black US president, what price might that cost for the Island’s economy?”