Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
China declares war on "vulgar" websites
For many Chinese websites, 2009 didn't start very well. China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Centre, a semi-government agency, has published a list of websites which contain "vulgar and unhealthy information" that could be harmful to the country's youth.
The whole list can be found here(in Chinese).
The interesting thing about this list is that it covered majority of the most popular websites in China. Google was ranked number one "vulgar" site, followed by Baidu and Sina. I'm very confident that every Chinese netizen have visited at least one of such vulgar websites, myself included. So after being diagnosed as psychotic under the Chinese guideline because I need to work on my computer for too long, I'm now also officially a vulgar and unhealthy person because I have visited at least 75% of the websites listed.
Most of the Chinese netizens are very familiar with such Internet Cleansing campaign as it was repeated many times in the past decade. Despite that most of the cleansing was justified under the banner of "please think of the children"(which itself is a logical fallacy) ,it's usually the adult internet users who are most affected.
Have these campaigns worked, anyway? Well, the funny thing is, thanks to the new Xinhua Search engine, an official search engine intended to censor vulgar information, if you know the right keyword, you can find as many "vulgar" information as you can expect to find in most commercial websites. I can list you an endless list of examples of vulgar information that can be found on Chinese official news websites like the Xinhua Net: this, this, this ,or this, and the list goes on, and yet they were never criticised by anyone.
It's a common sense that it is impossible to censor out all those "unhealthy" stuffs if somebody really wants to find them, as there is a market for it.
As a regular user of the most vulgar website (Google), I cannot recall not even once that Google returns me "unhealthy" information, unless I deliberately searched for it (I admit it, haha) - not to mention Google has a optional filter that censors images and texts, which is very effective in my opinion. Therefore it is hard for me not jump to the conclusion that the accusation of search engines means that creators of the list, themselves deliberately searched "vulgar" information in order to produce the list.
So now who's unhealthy and vulgar?
In my idea, protect the future generation probably wasn't the original purpose of all those internet cleansing campaigns, and the campaigns themselves, are kind of the ridiculous - find me another country on this planet which labels the absolutely majority of its netizen population as "internet addicted" and "vulgar"?
Most of the Chinese parents, including mine, are not as tech-savvy as their children, some don't even use the internet, TV and newspaper are still their major sources of information, which are still largely controlled by the state. Strangely, they are in fact the targeted audience of such campaign.
So it's not surprising that I have met too many Chinese parents who didn't hesitate to use corporal punishment to their children just because they logged onto the Internet without parents' knowledge, because deeply in their mind, the word "internet" means "evil". Sounds shocking but luckily, as the post 80's generation are gradually becoming parents themselves, use of such corporal punishment are now less common.
However, for the older generation, although their children are now grown up and corporal punishment won't work on them any more, but bear in mind that they are now the most powerful generation in China, in 40-50s(or even older), financially stable; and as they usually have the directorial positions in organisations or their work places, this group is also potentially a powerful political force.
Now the long demonisation of the Internet is starting to make sense to me.
off topic ...
I've been blogging serious topics for too long (especially in my Chinese blog), and the atmosphere is starting to make me choke. Not that bad, but the recent topics really made me want to keep myself away from here for a bit, nobody always "on" forever.
I think its time to go off topic a bit. What I usually do in my Chinese blog is to dig up some video clips from youtube, and introduce them here. I tend to turn my attention to the ads on TV ... for no apparent reasons.
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First one is a promo from National Geographic Channel Australia. If you watch other versions of the channel, the chance is, you have never seen the following clip before as it is for the Australian version only.
This is the most beautiful, in fact, most elegant piece of art I've ever seen on all the television channels you can get in New Zealand. But sadly, as a lot of wonderful things in New Zealand, this promo is also made in Aussie.
Second one is an ad of gorilla drumming and trying to sell you ... Cadbury Chocolate.
I understand this "gorilla campaign" débuted in the United Kingdom some time in 2007, and New Zealanders saw this ad on their tellies a year later. The ad was a huge success in the UK and it was so prominent, there is even a Wikipedia article for it. In New Zealand, the ad helped the song in the ad (Phil Collins, "In the Air Tonight") re-enter the NZ singles chart and briefly reached #1.
However, I am still having difficulty of understanding how this ad is suppose to work. What's the connection between a gorilla drumming and chocolates? This ad appeared on TV many times but I still cannot recall which brand the ad is for before the brand name appears at the end.
Third one is a Kiwi classic - "we don't know how lucky we are". I doubt if there is need for me to introduce this song to New Zealand audiences.
This is a remake version as no original version is available on youtube at the moment. Sadly, again, as a lot of good things in New Zealand, they are either made in Australia, or become Australian later like John Clarke.
The last one is an example of how not to do your TV ads. It's in Chinese so I'll explain it a bit later.
If you were suspecting your computer crashed like how a video tape jams a player, you are far from alone. It's in Chinese, and there are basically three parts:
恒源祥，北京奥运会赞助商，龙龙龙！
Heng Yuan Xiang, sponsor of the Beijing Olympics, dragon dragon dragon !
First part is the brand name, second part is very self explanatory. The phrase has been repeated 12 times in the ad, and only the last part is different in every loop. Like in the example, the ad went on to read every Chinese zodiac animal three times in every 'loop". Hardly innovative, but highly annoying. When this ad first appeared on Chinese TV, most people I know got up from their couch and had a very close inspection of their TV just to make sure it is still working.
There were also people who went further and called their local TV Stations, besought the station to take off the ad. I wasn't in China at the time but I understand for the business, it was a huge campaign and the ad appeared in almost all channels.
Google Street View for New Zealand
Finally, it's New Zealand's turn. I don't know whether Google didn't say they'll do New Zealand soon or I didn't notice the news, but if I knew Google was coming, I would definitely erect a huge board, asking Google to do "no index, no follow, no cache" for my property.
Well, I checked my home, not bad, you cannot see anything apart from my fence.
If you live in centres like Auckland or Wellington, I urge you to check your home here to see whether your privacy is at any kind of risk, like this one ... you can make a complaint to google.
Actually the coverage is quite good, except some west coast roads down south and Stewart Island, rest of the New Zealand is pretty much covered.
Windows server 2008 now available free to Uni students
I can get the product key without a problem, but I didn't bother to download it ... I don't really need a server OS :(
This must be very helpful for a computer science student, but I have only found University of Auckland, and Canterbury on the able to get it list.
The only software in the DreamSpark program I've really used so far is the Visual Web Developer. Deleted soon after the installation - simply too hard for a beginner.
Outage Notice|维护通告
The maintenance took roughly 40 minutes, and I'm glad to say that, the transition was very smooth and I did not mess any thing up(at least it looks like at the moment).
You may discard this message now,thanks.
IE8 Beta 1
I have spent bit of time yesterday to make this blog more IE8 compatible. It was first time I checked this blog under IE8 Beta 1, not too bad, just some floating problem in CSS. Added two clear:both; and it looks as good as usual.
If you've encountered any bugs after the change, please tell me so I can "try" to fix them.
There's one weird problem, however as you can see in the picture.
It turns out that wordpress automatically convert some punctuations to UTF-8 compatible codes. For example, (') and (...) would become (’)[’] and (…)[…], which look like fullwidth form punctuations in CJK characters. We use them in Chinese, but that curly apostrophe looks just terribly ugly in English.
I was quite surprised that I didn't realise this problem before. That little apostrophe appeared fine in IE 6-7 and FX 2-3, I guess that's because they are not really up to that mysterious "the standard".
But if IE 8 keeps this "standard" in the final version, that little apostrophe would become a headache for wordpress based UTF-8 coded blogs. WordPress should consider at least put this somewhere in the settings that allows people to disable this converstion easily.
After consulting with Google, I understand there are two solutions. One, if you know what you are doing, get into the /wp-includes/formatting.php file, and kill the conversions that have offended you in wptexturize function.
Or there is a plug-in called Quotmarks Replacer that solves this problem. What it does is to disable(or should I say filter) the wptexturize function altogether, so all the punctions will appear as the same as the ones you actually typed.
