..tonight, I am watching a country in the throes of a populist uprising turn off the internet as a protective measure. And I can’t help but wonder: If I were one of eighty million people living in a country in the midst of a nascent political upheaval whose access to the rest of the world was being antagonistically removed, would I start to think that maybe those simple packets that transport Facebook updates and Twitter status messages and mass emails are perhaps something more than the byproduct of business but a fundamental right of human beings to communicate with other human beings?

I have nothing more trenchant to offer than that as I get ready to go to sleep in my warm, secure bed. So I pass the buck to you: Is access to the internet a human right? And if so, to what end should we expect others to go to maintain it?

Research In Motion unveiled a concept design for a phone called the BlackBerry Empathy, which is based on a wireless “mood ring.” (No, I’m not making this up.) The ring somehow gathers your biometric data, which is sent to the phone. The phone would also detect the emotions of people near you, and would let you know if they’re angry, sad or bored; it would do the same with your social networking contacts. The idea is that everyone would know via Facebook how everyone else was feeling, based on biometric data.