The New York Times has a clever feature article explaining why Apple (and other firms) manufacture in China for a host of reasons, of which low wages may be a relatively small part. The ability to hire a massive number of trained people nearly instantly is one factor, regardless of how well those people are treated by the contractors Apple employs. For instance, Americans typically won’t live in dormitories and work six 12-hour days in a row, which is commonplace in China and other developing nations.

Glenn Fleishman writes in an editorial at Macworld about how Apple’s “new” digital textbook plan reminds him of countless efforts to push multimedia pedagogy without evidence that it improves achievement in any measure. The iPad is remarkable, but interactive textbooks aren’t.

David Carr of the New York Times neatly explains how Wikipedia’s blackout today to protest poorly drafted anti-piracy bills under consideration in the U.S. Congress leaves a ragged hole in the Internet. He doesn’t see Wikipedia as authoritative, but as fundamental: it’s the way to start to understand and research millions of topics.

A new tool from domain name lookup service OpenDNS secures your Mac’s connection to the firm’s servers when translating a human-readable name into its IP address, as Glenn Fleishman explains at Macworld. This prevents a host of malicious activities that can occur when third parties tamper or poison the values returned for a DNS request. It’s free, and it works with OpenDNS’s free and paid offerings.

Over at Macworld, Jason Snell decodes the messages that appear in iTunes 10.5.1’s new iCloud Status column to explain each song’s status in your iCloud storage.