Bear's Blog New Zealand (Beta)

BBC Website 'unblocked' in China

Source

From my 10+ years online experiences in China, an educated guess is that the BBC website is in "blackest" list of Great Firewall of China(GFW), along with Falun Gong, VoA and anti-CCP websites - you should never expect those sites to become accessible in China, and the fact is , I never sucessfully accessed any of those in the past ten years in China, without using any sort of 'special method'.

So this unblock is quite unusual.

Just over a week ago, Youtube and several other websites were blocked because of the tibet related photos and videos. Other recent reports also confirmed the unblock of youtube in China, but it is conditional - if you ever try to access tibet-related videos on youtube, GFW will block your access to the whole site for about 5 minutes or more.

There are quite a lot of materials related to Tibet on BBC as well. However, GFW treated BBC quite generously this time ... em... very weird.

I never opposed the presence of Internet Censorship, but its whole process must be made 100% transparent to every citizen this censorship will affect, otherwise it will be abused by the government like the case in China, tens of thousands of website are blocked without any form of notice, and only a few of them are pornographic websites, the majority of blocked websites are the ones that the government does not "like".

About ... Bebo

Even you are not a geek, you should know by now that AOL acquired this social networking website for US$850 million. The news was annunced earlier today.

I don't have any comment on this, just a trivia... In Chinese blogsphere, AOL has a "long reputation" of poor management over its subsidiaries. There is even a proverb for this: "If AOL buys it, it dies".

Famous examples of this include Netscape, ICQ, Winamp ... and much more. Most of the businesses acquired by AOL generally did poorer than before.

Just little more than 5 years ago, those softwares still had a place in my computer ... how about now? Netscape is now totally dead(BTW, its legend, and the <blink> continued in Firefox), others are still struggling ... but for how long? Won't be so long I think, just see the people around you, how many of them still prefer ICQ as their first choice of online IM?

I think the key issue is, AOL is too rich to bother whether the acquirement is benefitable. It just keeps acquiring and acquiring, before the money choke all of those business to death. I do not use social networking websites like Bebo due to my concern of information safety and privacy issues, however, my friends use them often, so I sincerely hope that Bebo won't become another victim under AOL.

New Screen!

My old screen just recently died out so I dissappeared from here for quite a time.

As a student, I need a fortune to acquire a new 22" widescreen, but after few days of use, I can be sure that the money is well worth it. It has a very high cost-benefit ratio, the screen is not too large and too expensive, like the 24" ones in school, too large and you can hardly utilise all screen area at any moment. 22" is just about right to fit two word page in one screen, and you will no longer feel annoyed by the tool boxes in Photoshop.

Highly recommanded for people who usually do a lot of word and picture processing but is on a budget. You can buy a budget brand with decent quality at the cost of around NZ$ 350 -400.

It's bit hard to find a desktop background for widescreen monitors, so I made my own one. It's a resized （1680*1050） photo showing the Great Orion Nebula. Since the original photo is from NASA Hubble Telescope, it is not copyrighted - you can use it for whatever you like.