According to the International Herald Tribune, “North Korea, known more for nuclear saber-rattling than its consumer products, is offering overseas shoppers the chance to buy hundreds of its goods through the Internet.  Those who keep a close eye on North Korea say the move is likely a bid to earn cash and raise awareness about what it has to offer.  The Web site – available in Korean, English, Chinese, Russian and Japanese – also sells bicycles, commemorative stamps, roller skates and uniforms for Taekwondo. It includes a shopping cart icon and says credit cards are acceptable.”  “But,” says, the IHT, “much like the North Korean economy, the site does not work very well. It has not been accessible for a week. And even when it was up, clicking some of the 14 product categories brought no response.”

In a different article, the IHT reports that “

[a]s Swedish prosecutors fixed their sights last week on The Pirate Bay, an Internet file-sharing service that is a scourge of the movie and music industries, the operators of the site responded by hoisting a defiant, digital Jolly Roger.  The Pirate Bay, on its blog, called for a ‘celebration,’ adding that it had hit some ‘magic numbers.’  The site, which lets people search for songs, films and video games, some of them legal but many of them pirated, said it now had links to more than a million such files.  Coming as four people allegedly connected with the site were charged with aiding illegal online copying, the claim highlighted why the entertainment industry was so eager to shut down the service. Not only do these self-proclaimed pirates flout any legal threats, but they are probably right about one thing, analysts say: Unauthorized copying is sharply on the rise.  ‘There are more people availing themselves of free intellectual property than at any time in history,’” [confirmed] Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne Online Media Measurement, which tracks digital traffic.”

The IHT also has an interesting article on why “China cannot sustain its model of economic growth.”

The New York Times points out that “[a]s humans, we want to believe that creativity and innovation come in flashes of pure brilliance, with great thunderclaps and echoing ahas. Innovators and other creative types, we believe, stand apart from the crowd, wielding secrets and magical talents beyond the rest of us.  Balderdash. Epiphany has little to do with either creativity or innovation. Instead, innovation is a slow process of accretion, building small insight upon interesting fact upon tried-and-true process. Just as an oyster wraps layer upon layer of nacre atop an offending piece of sand, ultimately yielding a pearl, innovation percolates within hard work over time.  ‘The most useful way to think of epiphany is as an occasional bonus of working on tough problems,’ explains Scott Berkun in his 2007 book, The Myths of Innovation.  ‘Most innovations come without epiphanies, and when powerful moments do happen, little knowledge is granted for how to find the next one. To focus on the magic moments is to miss the point. The goal isn’t the magic moment: it’s the end result of a useful innovation.’”

The San Francisco Gate writes that “[a] ‘dot-post’ Internet address in the works intends to set apart the electronic services increasingly offered by postal agencies around the world.  Backers say restricting the .post domain name to postal agencies or groups that provide postal services would instill trust in Web sites using such names. By contrast, popular suffixes such as .com and .org are assigned on a first-come, first-served basis.  The Internet’s key oversight agency, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is trying to work out contract terms for the suffix with the U.N. Universal Postal Union. Approval could come as early as this month and implementation several months later.”