Google has been under constant cyber attack from China. Operation Aurora was a large scale one and attracted wide media coverage, but hacking of individual accounts has been going on for quite a while. Many Chinese human right activists and foreign journalists stationed in China have the experience that their gmail account is secretly redirected to another account.

Even worse, Google's four year in China has also been subject to varies accusations made by Chinese state media. China's State Broadcaster, CCTV, once accused Google of "spreading unhealthy information to the country's teenagers", but Chinese netizens have soon discovered that the person ("victim") interviewed in the programme is nothing but a CCTV intern.

I'm not against censorship, but the Chinese authority has a long history of abusing this tool for communist party's own good. In an environment where there is no independent media, Internet neutrality is vital for people to access unbiased and factual information. Not in China. The dispute between Google and Chinese authority has been going on for more than two month now, but even the Chinese authority are unable to specify which Law Google has violated - What they want Google and other Chinese websites to do cannot be put under public eyes.

What Google have done today is nothing more than corrects the mistake it has made 4 years ago, but it has created a far greater impact today than if it had never entered the Chinese market. By taking this simple but definitive act of defiance, Google has told the world that money cannot buy everything, and Chinese government cannot hold its own 1.4 billion people to ransom and use it to ask  the western world to obey.

And for that, I applaud Google's courageous decision.  I also want to see other foreign internet companies in China, especially Microsoft and its search engine bing are reacting to this news. Will they also do the right thing, or continuing act like Marx has described – capitalists will do everything to maximise the profit.

One curious Chinese bloger wondered, how many days in a year are outlawed by "local laws"? He worte a script and found out that, out of 366 days, 11 of them will result the censorship notice on the search result page, these are:

* 13 January
* 31 May
* 4 June
* 13 June
* 20 June
* 25 June
* 30 June
* 5 July
* 19 September
* 13 Octorber
* 18 December

The rationale behind some of these censored dates are quite obvious, like 4 June is the date symbolises Tiananmen Square Massacre and the recent riots in China's Uyghur dominated Xinjiang Region started on 5 July.

However, even as a politically minded Chinese, I don't quite get why the rest of dates are considered "sensitive". I checked Wikipedia, there are some past events related to China, however, most of them are quite normal and can be hardly considered as sensitive events.

It is significantly improved, according to many sources. A copyright tribunal is proposed to deal with the judicial and punishment issues, and alhtough the three strikes policy is still there, the details are quite different now. I've reduced it two three steps, for details, see the excellent analysis from the Creative Freedom Foundation.

Phase 1 - First Infringement and Cease and Desist Notice Procedure

Phase 2 - Obtain Copyright Tribunal Order to get infringer's details

Phase 3 - Copyright Tribunal decision

Creation of the copyright tribunal significantly improves the fairness of the whole process, however, I am still very disappointed that termination of Internet access remained as a punishment.

Access to Internet, in my opinion, is a fundamental human right in this digital age, people who lacks the full and free Internet access will be significantly disadvantaged in the society.Internet access should be regarded as part of the freedom of communication, which is a concept in many written constitutions.

Such termination is not in the spirit of a free, democratic society - This is why we are so against Internet censorship, especially the Great Firewall. The termination is even worse than that, which the citizens' right to communicate is not just being impeded, but denied in full.

The document is open for consultation, submissions are open until 5pm Friday 7 August.

I'm living in The Chairman Mao Memorial Hall. Welcome!!!

We all know those twitterers are fake, because we know for a fact that Chairman Mao cannot tweet from the below (or above, as some may still prefer), and for those who are still breathing, they don't need a twitter account as they don't have to go through the general election process.

But in New Zealand and other countries like the States, politicians need get up to date with all the internet new techs although they are usually a bit behind. It is important nowadays for politicians to at least set up a facebook page (although the politician may never have visited "his/her page", as it was done by the employees).

Everyone wants to get their hands on youth votes, but does a facebook page really means those politicians "understand" WWW ? I always feel pity for anyone who thinks they do - the fact is that Section 92A  was passed by all major parties, except two that are, in my opinion,  sometimes genuinely connected with youth - Maori and Greens.

So no surprise on how John Key was tricked by a twitter impostor on  the April's Fool.

Australia, hurt feelings of

An Australian couple has upset Kiwis with an online expat guide which warns that Auckland is a "horrible soulless city" and its inhabitants are "hobbits" who cannot dress properly. (Via New Zealand Herald)

Well I have spent a bit of time to read that guy's blog. I'm not a serious traveller therefore I can only comment on Auckland. What that blogger blogged is indeed bit over the top,but most of the comments, although somewhat exaggerated, are also facts.

Auckland indeed lacks a bit of culture, that's how I feel at least. By "culture" I mean not just the presence of culture diversity, but ... how do I put this, a community that respect, cherish, and upholds "serious" culture (not just the culture of get drunk in a pub every Friday evening.) as one of the important life aspects.

What I was really surprised about is not the whines from this Aussie expat, but how Kiwis reacted toward those comments. I mean, it's just a blogger, like myself (possibly you as well), everyone is entitled to have, and publicly express he or she's opinion, and it is a fact of life that no matter how beautiful the Big Sister Helen or the land of Aotearoa is, it is not possible to win a 100% approval rate - that only happens in North Korea, even the Chinese parliament got more nay votes nowadays.

It's not even a news, there are more than a million blogs out there and I believe a fair amount of them is about New Zealand. Single this blogger out only means that 1) marks the new low of NZ journalism, 2) maybe the view of that blogger is not uncommon and there's a need to discuss it on a higher public forum.

So I was really surprised that many "serious" organisations, like Destination Rotorua or New Zealand beer brewery , treated the comments that seriously, even " took exception to an open letter on the site" ... oh I just see a short cut for bloggers who want to get famous. I actually quite liked the smell of Rotorua, but if I badmouth them once maybe I can generate a bit of traffic to my site as well, but I'll only do that after I put up Google Adsense:)

BTW, wonder where's the sense of humour, or it's just like the Nationalists can make fun on everyone else, but when others make fun of Nationalists, their feelings are hurt.

Most of the us who stood up and against this copyright law is not anti-copyright, I respected copyright holders' rights whenever I can. However, protection of copyright involves a mutual respect, but I feel this Section 92A, promoted by copyright holders, deeply undermines my right.

Since they treat netizens guilty of violating their rights before convicted, I also got a nice name for what they did which caused a great outrage among netizens: "copyright terrorism".

So Section 92A is dead but it doesn't mean this country does not respect copright.  New copyright protection measures will restart from scratch, I hope the new law got more common sense in it.

Parents should be prosecuted for allowing their children to play age-restricted video games, the chief censor says.

Current laws allow punishments of up to three months jail or a $10,000 fine for those caught supplying R-18 games to children. While there have been no prosecutions so far, chief censor Bill Hastings told the Dominion Post the laws should be enforced to help prevent the effects of repeat exposure to violence and sexual violence on young people. (via New Zealand Herald)

Well the first thing I started to wonder is how they are going to enforce that law. Sure that lousy TV3 programme called Target can hire under aged actors to buy restricted games, but unlike illegal selling of tobacco, distribution of games, especially compute games, does not work that way. Today's kids are pretty clever, much cleverer than what we use to. 10 years ago no parental control software can lock me away from computer, today, I recently heard a story from China,  a 14 year old kid is now spying on their parents' activities on computer.

That's a very unique case but most young people do know how to download pirated stuffs online - parents will also be responsible for this if S92A came to force last month (luckily it hasn't) as the Internet access is under the name of a parent. If this happens, I mean, is this really a fault of parents? They tried their best, education, use parental control software, lock out the computer ... but parents aren't nannies, even a nanny cannot watch with children 24/7.

There's a difference of wording, "allowing" or "supplying". Supply is a process that you handed out something that you know it is illegal, allowing can mean you simply don't know. Sure if a parent buys a clearly labelled r-18 games for their children then it is a offence, but if you simply don't know, and don't have access to information on what your children is playing?

Yes, they are copyright terrorists,  I have no doubt about that, let's  just see what they want:

RIANZ instead wants users to be required to provide sufficient evidence as to why they believe the alleged infringement didn’t occur via the internet account in question and/or why there is no copyright infringement of the file being downloaded.

Who's accusing who? Why should users prove they are innocent when they are accused by others?

RIANZ opposes having to pay for processing copyright infringement notices and indemnifying ISPs for any costs and liabilities.

So it's not all right when others download musics for free, but it's all right to have others to work for you for free?

Third, RIANZ does not want the notices sent out to users accused of infringement to include evidence that would be admissible in court.

You know this is simply amazing. This is not just guilt upon accusation, it's guilt upon accusation with absolutely with no evidence to back it up. Even the murders have a chance to see the evidence used to against them, but Internet users don't get this right.

Furthermore, RIANZ says its evidence is “highly reliable, well-tested and accepted worldwide”.

This is not the point. The point is, download activities don't mean that download is an infringement of copyright, in many cases, it's legal to download materials, like using downloaded materials as a backup of a disc I already own.

Yes they are right holders, and I do respect their copyright, but if they just want to keep abusing people like this, I'll have no sympathy for them at all.

protest against s92a, how sites looked like this morning(click for full image, coypright:cc-by Creative Freedom Foundation).

UPDATE: It worked. About 4pm today the government has announced that it will delay the implementation of s92a til end of march. If there's still no agreement at that time then the act will be suspended.

Today many New Zealand sites, mostly blogs, but also some well known NZ sites like throng and scoop, have voluntarily blacked out their sites, cut access to all content on their sites to protest the to be effective Section 92A of the copyright act.

This kind of Internet protest is quite rare in NZ, especially when you consider the fact that political blogs from across the political specturm, from Act supporter to Green supporter have all joined this protest. Those people usually disagree with each other on everything, but in this instance, they had come together. It just shows you how deeply unpopular this S92A thing is among the people who really understand the Internet.

And no, those people are not youngsters who are just protesting because they will soon unable to illegally download pirated materials.  I think it's bit sad that in some people's mind Internet is merely a place for email and news. Internet in my opinion, it is fast becoming another life necessity, part of people's basic right. It's like road, we, including criminals, all have the right to use public road, but you don't expect Ministry of Transport to police road users to see who's using the road network for illegal activities?

And National cannot get away with this. Yes it was passed under the previous government back in 2008, however, both Labour and National supported this law, and I quote from parliamentary record, Christopher Finlayson(National):

The Minister [Judith Tizard] knows, and I certainly know, that we have all had approaches from various commercial entities ...

I didn't  fake anything nor took it out of context, this is not kidding. See what our politicians have become.

Well, one week to go, try to enjoy the freedom while it lasts.

I kind of like this code. In summary:

• Four strikes out, final warning after three strikes;
• No matter how many times you infringed copyright, only one time is counted for a month;
• The strike expires 18 months after it was first issued;
• ISP serves you a "education notice" (one strike) when copyright holders made a complain.
• If you dispute,  the notice is revoked, and the copyright holder won't get your personal details ( you don't have the right to dispute after three strikes).
• If you don't dispute, that counts as one strike.
• Four strikes, and you are out.

If this is the way the ISPs will act after section 92A comes in force, then I'm pretty happy.This code of practice reminds me of another important Internet copyright Act - DMCA. They are pretty similar as the duty of identifying whether someone infringed copyright ultimately falls to the justice system, and ISP, as a neutral party, only act upon notices.

If you dispute the "education notice", the only way left for copyright holders is to sue you in court, which is quite unlikely in my opinion, unless you've downloaded too many stuffs justifying their cost and benefit analysis.

TCF definitly made a good call.

I also added an interesting widget:

I always say, as a language, Chinese does more than just a tool for conversations, it is also the carrier of Chinese traditions,  philosophy, and ideas - that's why the culture lasted thousands of years, as long as the language is still present, we all remember that you cannot spell crisis（危机） without opportunity（机） in Chinese.

a dangerous world(click for full image)

I was searching stuffs for my essay this morning, and suddenly this happened. In fact, every single result was flagged by Google as a site with "malwares". The glitches lasted for about half an hour.

Google fixed and explained what was hapened quite fast. According their blog, when they were updating the blacklist, the value " / " was accidentally checked as an identifier for sites with malwares, and of course, every URL got that slash.

http://en.akinator.com/

My friend forwarded me this site today. It's an interesting mind-reading type of game, the computer asks questions on what character you have in  mind and then tries to guess it. It's amazingly accurate, I tried like twenty times, and the character I had in mind ranged from auntie Helen Clarke to Lin Daiyu (an character in Dream of the Red Chamber)  - the computer never missed a shot and can usually done the guessing within 20 questions.

It's not a mindreading game, seriously, it works more like a decision tree in statistics. It's fun to play though.

However, I have found the list somewhat strange, first it's in the news, but you cannot find anything in Google Zeitgeist, where Google usually publish these stuffs.

The other one is, Google itself is placed sixth of the list. after "Trademe", but before "TV".

Here's my interpretation. There's a trend that, especially among the young people, when you want to visit facebook, very few people actually type facebook.com: what they do is type google.com, then search  facebook. They also tend to ignore the "I'm feeling lucky" button, which may save them 5 seconds.

I also understand some people don't even bother to type google.com, instead, they just ask "google" in the address bar. Most of modern browser will take all apparently non-URL form queries to a designated search engine.

Well, it just shows that search engines are becoming more like a doorway to the Internet, a kind of replacement of your browser's address bar.

Sure I believe most of my visitors like you know the Internet Archive bit already – it has archive pages right back to 1996. But I still enjoyed this 2001 search. You need to know the exact URL of the page you wanted before you can access it in Internet Archive, but this Google search does not, just type in the key words you wanted.

This enables you  to do a lot of stuffs ... like check what kind of promises auntie Helen has made back then, or things happening in Afghanistan before the 911. Quite interesting to see how the world was like - blog was pretty much a new concept, SNS has yet been created, and people's hope was still high on Duke Nukem Forever.

Apart from those, it's just fun to revive your good memories.

]]> http://www.arctosia.com/blog/archives/286/feed 0 http://www.arctosia.com/blog/archives/218 http://www.arctosia.com/blog/archives/218#comments Sun, 29 Jun 2008 09:30:18 +0000 Arctosia http://www.arctosia.com/blog/?p=218 Wonder how many people from North Island can get online now.

A problem within Vector's fibre network seems to be causing many people in North Island lost internet connectivity for about 7 hours+, started around 12:30pm today. As far as I understand, Country's second and third ISP Vodafone and Orcon are both affected, not so sure about Telecom.

The details are still quite sketchy, however, I suspect the outage is possibly due to our aging infrastructures failed to stand in the bad weather this week?

Seems to be OK now, at least for me.

This is a huge outage and I do expect some sort of explanation, report or compensations for this.

Google Apps is a service most of ordinary users never heard of, but yet it is so popular that some of small site owners just cannot live without it. It provides an integrated solution for small site owners, provide the Google services like Google Chat, Gmail and Google Canlendar to users of those sites, free of charge.

I'm not a very tech savvy person so the Google Apps saved me from all the hassles like manage emails. If somebody is more unsavvy than me, they can even build a whole simple site by using Google Sites.

Compare with old university 100mb storage  (1mb maximum attachment) email system, the Gmail service is just too generous, and it was free in the form of Gmail for quite a long time now. And even better, it is free.

There's only one down side:there will be usual google ads in it. Oh maybe two, another one being the administrators have little control on storages(I think all your emails are now stored on Gmail server）.

I thought people paid enough tuition fee to fund an email service that has no ads on it.  I didn't expect to see this kind of time and money save move on New Zelaand's largest universiy.

It's bit worrying that corporations are becoming more involved in the process of educating our future generation.  I wonder what kind of effect would have on the people who get their business degree in "Fisher and Paykel Appliances Auditorium".

Another worrying bit for more self is that my other bit of life online is now just fell into the hands of Google, yet again. I'm already dependent on lots of google services like Gmail, Google Reader, Calender, Apps, Docs ... they are all good but you just feel you cannot put all your stuff in the hands of one giant corporation.

It may not doing the evil today, but who knows what will happen tomorrow?

There were several beta and RC versions available. I did not try it since I'm not that kind of guinea pig type software enthusiast. However, from other people's comments, I expect the Firefox 3 to be something worth you to download, and have a try (if you never used firefox before...)

I'm a long time Netscape - Firefox user. I enjoyed Firefox with its high flexibility - you can almost add any function you can imagine to your browser by simply install a plug-in.

Another reason is just do my small bit to prevent a monopoly. Netscape has been put down by AOl, which is a sad story. However, it's legacy, and the <blink> tag, continued in Firefox.

Of all the visitors to my Chinese and this blog, roughly 25% of them are using Firefox. It's a high percentage considering that Internet Explorer had a several year monopoly over the market.

The Firefox 3 release also got something quite special ... It will attempt to become "the most downloaded software in 24 hours" in Guinness World Record. 1.3 million people worldwide have pleaded that they will become part of this "download day".

Great idea to increase Firefox's publicity.

If you don't know what "RSS" is and how to use it, this site does a much better explanation than I do. Have a read, I think you'll benefit from it.

It certainly benefited me. I subscribed tens of news sources and hundreds of blogs. It's just literally impossible to open each site and whether it has been updated.

Then the RSS come to rescure. Through an RSS reader, I can see all updates from all sites I subscribed in one place and only to read stuffs I'm interested in. If you subscribed an RSS document (we call it feed, which if you look up, you'll see a yellowish square icon at right hand end of your address bar) like mine, you don't even have to open my blog again - I output full text to my feed, so you can read them in your feed aggregator.

Most websites and blogs have that yellowish icon. If you click on it, you will get the RSS feed.

What I've found really surprising is that only 6% of world's internet users use RSS. I think the major barrier of introducing RSS to more people is that the whole thing is still bit too complex for some people (especially for those who type www.google.aol in their address bar), they don't understand how HTML works but they know how to visit a website. Well that's good enough for ordinary people, isn't it?

The same should apply to RSS. People don't have to know what RSS stands for, they don't have to know how it works, the only thing they need to know, is how to use it, in the simplest way, which requires quite an effort from major websites and communties and still has a long way to go.