Let the words of the Big Brother spread
Chinese Media yesterday reported that China is planning to invest 45 billion yuan to raise it's "International images" through foreign broadcasting, possibly to open a "CNN" style news channel.
I always believe that to domestic market, CC's CCTV (lots of CCs, if you can guess what the first two Cs stand for:)) strongly reassembles a lot of characteristics of the telescreen. Xinwen Lianbo would be an obvious example, every night at 7, if you want to watch TV, that's pretty much the only thing available as it is simulcasted in every major Chinese TV channel.
So will this new channel become an International Edition of the telescreen? I don't know, aren't we already got CCTV 9?
I tried to watch CCTV 9 a while but it's just got too boring eventually, BBC WORLD offers a much wider perspective, more up to date news. What CCTV 9 really amused me is that, no matter what kind of news programme you are watching (like "Asia Today", "World Wide Watch", or "BizChina"); no matter what happened to the World, the headline almost always stay the same, usually involving a high ranking government official or communist party boss meet foreign visitors, or their words on various issues.
Clearly, to be a respected and trusted world new channel, you must got both global perspective and an editorial independence. Global perspective ... can be possible but I don't expect it from CCTV, but editorial independence? I guess we got another hundred year to wait.
Facism ... and Communism
Excerpts from Obama's inauguration speech:
Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions.
Most of us should have no problem with this kind expression, but let me remind you that in Asia, there's a hyper-sensitive country with fragile feelings, which its regime still insists that communism is the only way forward
China's state television, CCTV actually broadcasted Obama's inauguration live on its news channel. If my memory serves me right, this is the first time they have done such thing, and I think CCTV should be praised for that.
However, its hyper-sensitivity eventually kicked in. The live pictures were cut moments after Obama mentioned "Communism". The relative paragraph in Obama's speech is also removed in the "full text" of the speech published on most Chinese websites.
Even as a Chinese, I have great difficulty of understanding where this hyper-sensitivity comes from. When he mentions communism, he clearly means Soviet Union. Well, we all know China is more of a capitalist country anyway. If Ministry of Truth has problem on how Obama weights communism and facism as kind of the same thing ... if you can read Chinese,have a look on how Minitrue finds an "appropriate place" for the CCP.
Despite the hyper-sensitivity thing, I think Chinese media generally did well this time. Yes they removed parts from the "full text" of the Obama's speech, but most of them were forced to do so. But look at the brighter side, Obama's remark made to the public airwave tells me that Live pictures on CCTV probably are in fact, live pictures and not delayed - now that's quite rare, especially for political events.
Farewell to the President of Mass Entertainment
Just a little reminder of what we've been through ...
Courtesy of David Letterman's the Late Show. Read more
Bigger is greater?
The Royal Commission’s report on Auckland Governance will be presented to the Governor-General at end of March this year. However, I saw in the news yesterday that John seemed so eager to get that “Lord Mayor” post he jumped out to claim that title months before the final report.
Auckland region is NZ’s economic powerhouse and has about 1/3 of total New Zealand population. Any changes on how Auckland is governed should be considered in national, even international context. As a student in this area I was fully aware of the issue, and made a submission myself.
In my opinion, a super, single council is simply not viable, and I believe the Royal Commission should understand this fact too. The coverage of the authority is just too wide, if it controls 1.4 million people from Wellsford to Bombay, this council will grow enormously big, effectively become another central government of New Zealand, creating even more confusion and more red tapes to make this monstrous authority work.
Another risk of creating a big, super council is that, no matter who runs it, that Lord Mayor is likely to run the whole region the way he managed his smaller council before. Now there’s problem, most of us think all district councils in Auckland region as part of the same “Auckland”, but in real life each district has its own local identity and, sometimes culture as well. An obvious example jumped out of my mind is Waitakere City’s “EcoCity”.
Auckland will become one, super city eventually, but not now. The problem facing Auckland is not much of the red tape, it’s local councils' very short sighted, self centred vision and lack of policy consistency across the region. The region, especially metropolitan areas are becoming more connected and a lot of decisions, like the Rugby World Cup, will likely to affect several councils.
I think there’s two ways to go. First is to create a new super council but with smaller jurisdiction area. What I prefer is to include Auckland Metropolitan Area and some parts of rural land for future development and buffer. Regional Council stays but all city councils must go.
I also liked the idea of elect councillors based on electorate-like wards. If this is the case, however, I don’t think there’s a need for a Lord Mayor, or even councillors. Each City elects one Mayor as a person should be enough, and those mayors become councillors of the bigger council.
The only viable route for a region wide super council, is to maintain current local councils to be at least some kind of services branches of a super council.
No matter which way it goes, our adolescent-like urge to change is likely to stay for a while longer.
section 92A, Copyright Act
I just read the news on that new section 92A of the Copyright Act.
I'm not an expert on copyright issues, but thanks to Wikipedia, anyone who regularly contributes to it should understand a fair amount of copyright laws.
Despite of being a "teen", I'm not anti-copyright, instead, I respected copyright whenever I can. I think copyright protection is very important for our society today to progress as it encourages originality and creativity. Therefore every time I want to use external materials for blog, I make sure that I only use free materials (public domain, Creative Commons) or apply the fair use policy.
But the problem is, although I did my best and tried to respect copyright, I feel that no copyright owners, especially the big ones, respected me for being a good citizen. In fact, in my eyes copyright organisations like MPAA and RIAA are more like "copyright terrorists" now. They abuse their powers as a copyright owner, pointlessly terrorise people so they can earn just that extra bit of income.
There's a classic case on copyright terrorists in action in UK, I cannot find the exact source at the moment but I have no problem to recall the details . A copyright group accuses workers in a vehicle workshop of infringing their copyright, because workers listened to radio stations while they work, and that, in a sense, is a "public display".
Copyright terrorists worldwide also tried to demonise legitimate tools and file shares. P2P is a classic example, as a tool, it is not illegal, it is the share of copyright materials that is illegal(not under all circumstances).
Copyright terrorists won't tell you that sometimes it is legal to download copyrighted materials. In many countries, if you own a music disc, it is actually legal to download a second copy from the internet as your back up. And there's also no problem to download a TV series if it is also available to you via your local TV stations - it's no different than recording the programme from your TV, it only becomes illegal when you distribute the materials for commercial purposes.
Back to the topic then, what section 92A is about?Here's that piece of meat（just 92A, but 92a - c are all relevant, see pdf here.)
92A Internet service provider must have policy for terminating accounts of repeat infringers
“(1) An Internet service provider must adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of the account with that Internet service provider of a repeat infringer.
“(2) In subsection (1), repeat infringer means a person who repeatedly infringes the copyright in a work by using 1 or more of the Internet services of the Internet service provider to do restricted act without the consent of the copyright owner.
So how do the copyright terrorists get to know who's downloading their copyrighted material? I don't expect ISPs to monitor internet traffic because that would be too costly to any ISP. Copyright terrorists will depend on themselves to find out what you are doing.
In a P2P network you need to disclose your IP address in order to get others share what they've downloaded to you, so there should be no problem for anyone to see what your IP address is downloading or uploading. However, as I said, just being a part of a P2P network doesn't necessarily mean you are bad. So will the copyright terrorists make sure your download is illegal before they send the request to cut your Internet? Yeah right.
Not to mention that quite a lot of people's computers are infected with trojans, viruses and malwares. Sometimes these nasties download stuffs without your knowledge.
The law provides a mechanism that allows copyright terrorists to cut your internet connection without the need to prove you guilty, in fact, you have to clear yourself in order to get your internet restored - where's the principle of innocent till proven guilty?
In that sense, I regard this new section of the copyright law as a great threat to the funding principle of our justice system. Copyright terrorists will abuse this new law for sure.
As an Internet user, I think every one should start to worry about this section 92A thing and do something right now.Yes there are piracies, but most pirates are ordinary people like you and me who cannot do much harm to our society, and big film makers and Microsoft survived with them; now what we are facing is copyright terrorists trying to abuse their power as copyright owners, they use lawyers, political powers to invade our privacy, punish us without any kind of trial.
Who is the lesser of two evils? Simple.
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.
