Falun Gong is a rung away from Scientology on the crazy ladder to spiritual enlightenment.
Yep, yep. Something that frustrates me when I look at US college campuses are all these Falun Gong groups. And people openly doing Falun Gong meditation. It's one thing to denounce a government for oppression (that's fine). But it's another to embrace this kooky idea as a result; I am willing to wager that if these people had found out about Falun Gong and if the Chinese government didn't try to shut it down, they wouldn't be practicing it.
The Chinese government was right about one thing: FG is crazy and cult-like. But that does not justify suppressing it, and *that* is where they went wrong.
I agree with most of what you have to say, except there are a couple of points that I would like to nitpick on.
wherein all ideas are free and public domain [...] Hobbyists and scientists alike should have full access to all material, in order to allow progress to march on unimpeded.
In the context of patents, this is true. All patents are freely accessible to anyone in the public. I assume that you do not mean that anyone can use a patent for free because you support royalties as patent compensation.
the elimination of patent-based monopolies. Instead, a set of guidelines for royalties
This is not very different from the current setup. Patent holders are not necessarily granted monopolies in our system. They are granted control over the use of their idea, which may or may not translate into monopolization. If they opt to license the technology, then this would basically be what you are proposing. So I suppose what you are trying to drive across, though you did not do so explicitly, is the idea that every patent holder should be forced to license the patent. Is that a correct reading of your argument?
If so, I think that your idea of forced licensing is good. It means that the inventor of the volume knob doesn't have to wait for the patent on the radio to expire before putting it on the market because the volume knob licensing can operate alongside the radio licensing. My only problem is the notion of the patent office deciding what that royalty/licensing should be. Should it be a fixed sum or should it be a percentage? And what percentage? It is not always clear at the time of invention what sorts of revenue a new product would bring in or even what sorts of production costs are involved. And how would one deal with abuses of this system (e.g., a rival lobbying for a lower royalty or the patent's megacorp owner lobbying for a higher royalty).
That's an urban legend that was posted some time ago either at/. or digg, and plenty of people showed that it was simply not possible. For one, even at maximum output and perfect cooking efficiency, the amount of energy emitted simply won't even come close to being enough.
Some of the people want to query about democracy, but most of them just want to know about their pop stars.
That's a good point that people often tend to keep forgetting. Most of the searches in China (as well as the rest of the world) is about everyday things. So let's look at Google's SafeSearch that filters out dirty words and pictures. That's a form of censorship. It's a form of censorship that most people don't care about (because a lot of the time, your average suburban Internet user will not be searching for porn, and for people who are searching for porn, it doesn't take long to learn that there are much better ways to find stuff than search engines). It's also a form of censorship that the user can easily turn off. In the case of google.cn, people "turn it off" by simply using google.com, which is unfortunately slower and less reliable, but that's no fault of Google's--blame the Great Firewall for that. In fact, if a user wants to use a Google Account to associate personal information with search histories or to use anything else that Google Account offers, the user is automatically redirected to google.com. And in the case of SafeSearch, I would imagine that a part of the motive would be to comply with US government rules about obscenity and stuff. So, except for the filtered material being politically controversial, just how is this different from SafeSearch?
If Google was *really* interested in making profit, then it would have launched everything in China (I'd imagine that they'd love to take a nice healthy bite out of Yahoo Mail, for example) and not just the search engine. But they didn't do this...
Okay, so it's not justification, but it sure serves as mitigation.
Actually, when coupled with the fact that google.com still exists if they really want to search for democracy (little good that will do thanks to the firewalling of the resulting sites), I think this does qualify as justification.
Calling it "BS" and calling it "not justification" doesn't cut it. You gotta back up your claim with why.
[offtopic-attempt-at-humor] - The "Plus" tab? Standard XP installs don't have that... You mean you actually installed Microsoft Plus? - *gasp* Someone on/. who's still using MSIE! [/offtopic-attempt-at-humor]
Mod the parent post up... (I was going to point out the same thing: it seems a lot of people forgot the Microsoft announcement along similiar lines when MSN Search beta came out, and it wasn't very well-received, so what, they are proposing to make MSN Search into what they had originally promised it to be in 6 months time?)
I read both links, and I have to say that it's very cryptic. I think something got lost in the translation, but here is what *I* think they were saying...
They are creating new TLDs to supplement.com and.net. The new TLDs will be composed of Chinese characters, so instead of blah.com, you'll have blah.[X][X] where [X] represents a Chinese character. If this is all that they are doing--creating new non-ASCII TLDs--then there wouldn't be much in the way of conflict with the existing.com and.net structure.
But as I said, the language is confusing at best and I'm not sure if this is what they are really intending.
I'm surprised to see this on/. since I clearly remember news of this merger making waves at the CD Freaks forums many months ago.
Anyway, so the forum is still named that? Renaming the forum was seriously discussed a long ago when Sony started using BenQ and again when Sony-NEC was announced, so I'm a bit surprised that it still hasn't changed. Wow. Hehe.;)
It's so nice to see them recognizing that public opinion is such an important battle field.
But are they really doing all that they can do win this battle? No. Take, for example, the prison torture scandal. I don't care whether or not the response to the scandal was appropriate or not; that is totally irrelevant. What is relevant is whether the world thinks the scandal is relevant. Pulling a Clinton by trying to play technicalities with the definition of torture does not help. Duking it out with McCain on the issue does not help. Forget propaganda! If you can't make the right gestures, you won't be going anywhere.
In many societies (particularly in Japan), it is considered the honorable thing for the guy on top to publicly apologize, accept responsibility, and/or resign even if something was totally the fault of some underling. Did Rummy do any of that? Nope.
Anti-virus has become more or less snake oil in respect to their effectiveness. They are slow to respond to new threats and are too easily disabled by attacks. Knowledgeable users have no need for AV because they know how to avoid infections quite easily (I'm a Windows user who has never used AV in 15 years and I have never been infected). People who are not knowledgeable will get a false sense of security and feel that they do not need to bother with learning all the ins and outs of safety.
I remember doing some maintenance on a small network once, and discovered that a number of the machines were infected. The boss was surprised. "But they all had anti-virus software!" And what a jolly amount of good that has done...
Yes, there is certainly a limited benefit to AV, as I would imagine that knowledgeable users can sometimes make a mistake. But AV software causes so many problems of their own, from the slowdowns caused by on-the-fly scanning, to the system bogdown whenever it does its scheduled full system scan, to the various slew of compatbility and stability issues that it creates (*cough* Norton *cough*).
This is political grandstanding. Aside from invoking Nazis, there was a part of the transcript excerpt that really bothered me.
Lantos asked Yahoo! about whether it has contacted the family of the jailed reporter and what it felt about that. Okay, fine. Then he asked Microsoft about the blogger, to which Microsoft clarified that it only took down the site and never provided the government with private information. Well, that's fine too, I guess, if Lantos didn't know beforehand the specifics of this incident and exactly what was different this time between "turn in" and "take down". And then he asks Google the same question. And here, that political grandstanding shines through clear and bright. Google just censors search results. It hasn't turned anyone in. It hasn't taken down any sites. Nobody could conceivably be harmed in this sensational "think of the family!" way by seeing rosy pictures of Tian'an'men. It's purely political.
If Congress was *really* interested in doing something about this, then they would recognize that the solution is not to criticize American companies, but to back them with a strong diplomatic stance up so that they would have the ability to say no to Beijing. But being tough to Beijing is hard, so let's bash these companies instead and hope that Americans will equate that to us doing something productive.
And as much as I dislike these Nazi references, maybe we should think of it this way. Remember that scene in Schindler's List when Jewish doctors kill their patients with lethal doses of some sort of liquid shortly before the Nazis come crashing in? One could argue that these doctors were immoral because they killed Jews and by killing them, they were in a way helping with the Nazi extermination. But most people would not hold that view, and instead would praise them for having mercifully killed them instead of letting them be killed by machine gun bullets when the Nazis come. The doctors could do nothing about the fact that those people were going to die, so they decided to do a little evil of their own, but in a way that mitigated a worse evil. Replace killing with censorship, doctors with American companies, and now you have a more accurate Nazi comparison.
I agree! Unfortunately, in some of the correspondences that I've had, however, there are people who are not comfortable with the lesser of two evils approach. I think that when dealing with this issue, perhaps an analogy would help:
Normally, shooting your pet would be an immoral and "evil" thing to do. What if your pet is ill and will die soon? Ideally, you would take it to a vet, but what if that was not possible? Is shooting it to put it out of its misery still immoral?
Censorship isn't Google's idea. It's the government's. Why is it Google's fault that the CCP decides that it wants censoring? What do you want Google to do? Offer an uncensored service? It already does with google.com. Offer an uncensored service that's doesn't suffer from slowdowns and outages? Well, the CCP won't let them, and they can't do anything about it unless the US gov't helps pressure the CCP (instead of trying to rack up political points in hearings). What about just doing nothing? Okay, but how is doing nothing any different than offering google.cn? There's still going to be censorship, people will have to settle for lesser search engines when they are looking up mundane everyday things, and a greater share of the market will belong to Chinese companies, which, quite frankly, I trust less than American companies (if you think that Google is being evil, think about how much evil a Chinese company on a much tighter leash from Beijing would be!)
The key issue is that you can't do anything that is absolutely not evil because as long as the CCP is in control, that is simply not realistic. Everyone rails against the censorship without providing any insight as to how Google could possibly fix that. When people finally accept that the absolute non-evil is simply not an option here, they'll realize that they need to look at the relative evils, and this is definitely the lesser of them.
1) A government for a country of that size is NOT monolithic. For example, it would be foolish to say that everyone in the US government is in favor of having troops in Iraq: there are a lot of Senators who are not happy at all. Likewise, the Chinese government has various factions. Because there is only one political party in China, political differences are expressed in the form of intra-party factionalism (whereas in the West, it is normally expressed in the form of different parties, though there are also a lot of intra-party factionalism as well). A lot of this in-fighting also happens privately, so many are not aware of it and the casual observer would think that the government was a Borg collective of identical viewpoints when it really is not.
2) This letter was written by what NPR news describes to be the "liberal wing" of the party and can be considered to be more or less a dissident voice. Such opinions are not new in China, and if you ever go there, you will notice that a lot of people will express these views (the Chinese are not stupid), except that they will express them privately, and you never hear about it in the media. I was personally very surprised that this letter of published. These folks are sufficiently power and well-connected that they are able to dissent like this.
3) I think that their target audience is the Chinese people and the rest of the government. You have to understand that the whole appeal of the Chinese Revolution is that the old government was corrupt and abusive, and there are many Chinese have not forgotten that and who are well aware of the irony that China threw out a bad government and replaced it with another bad one.
So I would not view this as some sort of public press release (that was earlier today, when they justified censorship on grounds of "pornography", which is bullshit). The earlier announcement today would be like Bush telling the UN why we need troops in Iraq. This letter would be like the Democrats grumbling about Bush putting those troops in Iraq.
Protection of the populace from pronography? So is that how they justify blocking access to Slashdot and to CNN? And yes, they do block these sites; I know from experience. Perhaps they were referring on one of the less-used definitions of the word: "Lurid or sensational material" (source: American History Dictionary).:)
...and don't forget, the owner of the site that you went to knows if (if the owner has access to server logs).
I look at my site's server logs, and I can see who came by way of search engine, what their IP and browser was, and what search term they used. Of course, that's not nearly as bad as the "whole world" knowing (which it does not; and ISPs have better things to do than to track traffic like that; it would be hideously costly to them).
The C|Net article includes a screenshot showing what incentives Yahoo! is considering offering, as well as this text:
Yahoo! is considering launching a program to reward people who make Yahoo! their primary search engine. Yahoo! Mail users will be given early access to this program. You will receive a monthly reward if you make Yahoo! your primary search engine. This means that most of the searching you do each month must be on Yahoo! Search. To ensure users receive credit for all searches conducted on Yahoo!, you may need to log in or use a search box specifically designed for this program (e.g., a Yahoo! rewards toolbar).
Some of these things could be interesting: e.g., like the airline miles. Some of them are a bit lame because they are things that Google already offers for free: e.g., like POP3/SMTP for mail. I just wonder exactly what they mean by "most" and the technical impossibility of ensuring "most" (which would be relative to rival engines) instead of "at least n number of searches".
What I want to know is how exactly one would go about simulating a "cyber attack". Or more precisely, what exactly is a "cyber attack"? Quite frankly, I have never been a fan of the whole "cyberterrorism" thing. To me, the "threat" seems abstract, ill-defined, and reeks too much of Y2K-style overreaction-through-misunderstanding. For starters, I wonder how a "cyber attack" be different from the kinds of attacks that we see day in and day out, like the literally hundreds of attempts by zombie machines to gain access to my machine each and every day (it's a fact of life)? What kind of platform would these attacks be launched from? Are we talking about some hackers trying to break into government computers or network of computers trying to flood traffic (noting that accumulating a large enough pool of such machines to do damage on a large scale--not just knocking a site or two down--without being caught is not trivial)? Furthermore, one has to wonder how they can accurately simulate such a thing when technology varies so much and can change so fast. What sort of attack will it be? Different systems, different software, different versions, etc. will react differently to attacks.
I'm not saying that this simulation is bullshit per se; I grant that there is certainly the possibility that the simulation was well-planned enough to address a wide array of realistic scenarios, but in my personal experience, a significant portion of IT-saavy people are really not that competant (not to mention many of the sorts of ill-informed comments on sees on/.), and I have to wonder if these people really knew what they were doing or if they were just holding an worthless excercise with a nice flashy headline-grabbing name.
Here is an excerpt from a C|Net article, with added emphasis.
Google will delete any copies of the files from its servers within 30 days and encrypts the data, he said. Google automatically excludes from being transferred any password-protected files and secure Web pages, and users can exclude any folders or files, he added.
What I find distressing about all the anti-Google stuff going on is that people seem to have so little faith in Google. Yet, have they really ever betrayed us? All that Google did in China was physically add new servers in China, and like every single other server in China, it has to be censored. The Chinese can still try to use Google's non-Chinese servers using a Chinese-language interface if they want the full Google; they'll just be subject to the intermittent slowdowns and outages that have *always* been associated with Google's non-Chinese servers. And I know, because I've been to China... Google simply *added* new servers that people could opt to never use if they so desired and didn't restrict anything that was in place before; so how on Earth was that bad? Especially since, unlike other services, Google openly discloses this in the search results? (More of my thoughts on Google in China are here for anyone interestd.)
Putting aside China, Google has lived up to its principles, from how frank it is about disclosing potential privacy issues (most other companies would try to cover it up) to how it handles its installers to offering a promimently-placed option to delete your account and every bit of data associated with it in the account manager (for other sites that even have account deletion, most of the time, it took endless menu-digging to find the right place!) to Google's push for open chat standards to Google's torrent of money towards open source. I, for one, believe that Google is on the side of the users. By going from nothing to superstar based almost entirely on word-of-mouth, Google demonstrated how powerful cultivating user trust can be, and Google (and its investors) would have to be idiotic to overlook that so easily. Yes, Google collects a lot of information (just like everyone else), and it takes a lot of pains to remind everyone that any reading/analysis of that information is done by machine (and every time your e-mail passed through a spam filter like SpamAssassin or the filters that are built into every other webmail provider, it's being read and analyzed by a machine, and nobody seems to throw arms up for that).
Google is probably one of the few 800-lb gorillas who is on the side of the user rights and privacy, and the EFF is idiotic for being so quick to condemn a company that I think is really an ally.
If you dislike Winamp for its complexity, then Songbird would not be your cup of tea. Running Winamp 5 (I never bothered to install modern Winamp3-style skin support), it fires up in less than a second. Songbird takes about a quarter of a minute. Changing skins on Songbird is a 10-second ordeal that involves the window disappearing for a while. Complexity? In 2006, Winamp is by far the lightest, fastest, and least complex of all the major Windows media players.
I tried Songbird for a few minutes and gave up. The interface was simply too sluggish (even slightly worse than the bloated Windows Media Player) to be comfortable (even though Firefox doesn't seem to have this problem). I'll stick with Winamp for my media player needs (fortunately, I never really got into the whole media library thing). Small footprint and instantaneous startup.
Haven't installed it yet (because it asks me to uninstall previous IE7 builds), but from the version information in the executable, this appears to be build #5296. The build in the IE7 leak story from a week ago is #5299... I remember seeing some talk about #5296 on one of the sites discussing #5299 last week, so this is a build that has been around a bit now (which is expected, of course).
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, yep. Something that frustrates me when I look at US college campuses are all these Falun Gong groups. And people openly doing Falun Gong meditation. It's one thing to denounce a government for oppression (that's fine). But it's another to embrace this kooky idea as a result; I am willing to wager that if these people had found out about Falun Gong and if the Chinese government didn't try to shut it down, they wouldn't be practicing it.
The Chinese government was right about one thing: FG is crazy and cult-like. But that does not justify suppressing it, and *that* is where they went wrong.
No, no, you got it all wrong. They're not inventions, they're inwentions! ;)
In the context of patents, this is true. All patents are freely accessible to anyone in the public. I assume that you do not mean that anyone can use a patent for free because you support royalties as patent compensation.
This is not very different from the current setup. Patent holders are not necessarily granted monopolies in our system. They are granted control over the use of their idea, which may or may not translate into monopolization. If they opt to license the technology, then this would basically be what you are proposing. So I suppose what you are trying to drive across, though you did not do so explicitly, is the idea that every patent holder should be forced to license the patent. Is that a correct reading of your argument?
If so, I think that your idea of forced licensing is good. It means that the inventor of the volume knob doesn't have to wait for the patent on the radio to expire before putting it on the market because the volume knob licensing can operate alongside the radio licensing. My only problem is the notion of the patent office deciding what that royalty/licensing should be. Should it be a fixed sum or should it be a percentage? And what percentage? It is not always clear at the time of invention what sorts of revenue a new product would bring in or even what sorts of production costs are involved. And how would one deal with abuses of this system (e.g., a rival lobbying for a lower royalty or the patent's megacorp owner lobbying for a higher royalty).
[offtopic]
:P Not every lib belongs to the LP.
> I've never come across a libertarian who hasn't
> find something government related to blame any
> failure of deregulation upon.
>
You need to meet more libertarians then.
[/offtopic]
That's an urban legend that was posted some time ago either at /. or digg, and plenty of people showed that it was simply not possible. For one, even at maximum output and perfect cooking efficiency, the amount of energy emitted simply won't even come close to being enough.
That's a good point that people often tend to keep forgetting. Most of the searches in China (as well as the rest of the world) is about everyday things. So let's look at Google's SafeSearch that filters out dirty words and pictures. That's a form of censorship. It's a form of censorship that most people don't care about (because a lot of the time, your average suburban Internet user will not be searching for porn, and for people who are searching for porn, it doesn't take long to learn that there are much better ways to find stuff than search engines). It's also a form of censorship that the user can easily turn off. In the case of google.cn, people "turn it off" by simply using google.com, which is unfortunately slower and less reliable, but that's no fault of Google's--blame the Great Firewall for that. In fact, if a user wants to use a Google Account to associate personal information with search histories or to use anything else that Google Account offers, the user is automatically redirected to google.com. And in the case of SafeSearch, I would imagine that a part of the motive would be to comply with US government rules about obscenity and stuff. So, except for the filtered material being politically controversial, just how is this different from SafeSearch?
If Google was *really* interested in making profit, then it would have launched everything in China (I'd imagine that they'd love to take a nice healthy bite out of Yahoo Mail, for example) and not just the search engine. But they didn't do this...
Okay, so it's not justification, but it sure serves as mitigation.
Actually, when coupled with the fact that google.com still exists if they really want to search for democracy (little good that will do thanks to the firewalling of the resulting sites), I think this does qualify as justification.
Calling it "BS" and calling it "not justification" doesn't cut it. You gotta back up your claim with why.
[offtopic-attempt-at-humor] /. who's still using MSIE!
- The "Plus" tab? Standard XP installs don't have that... You mean you actually installed Microsoft Plus?
- *gasp* Someone on
[/offtopic-attempt-at-humor]
Mod the parent post up... (I was going to point out the same thing: it seems a lot of people forgot the Microsoft announcement along similiar lines when MSN Search beta came out, and it wasn't very well-received, so what, they are proposing to make MSN Search into what they had originally promised it to be in 6 months time?)
I read both links, and I have to say that it's very cryptic. I think something got lost in the translation, but here is what *I* think they were saying...
.com and .net. The new TLDs will be composed of Chinese characters, so instead of blah.com, you'll have blah.[X][X] where [X] represents a Chinese character. If this is all that they are doing--creating new non-ASCII TLDs--then there wouldn't be much in the way of conflict with the existing .com and .net structure.
They are creating new TLDs to supplement
But as I said, the language is confusing at best and I'm not sure if this is what they are really intending.
My comment about /. was about the article appearing on the /. main page.
My comment about CDF was just an expression of surprise at their slowness. I hadn't visited there in months.
I'm surprised to see this on /. since I clearly remember news of this merger making waves at the CD Freaks forums many months ago.
;)
Anyway, so the forum is still named that? Renaming the forum was seriously discussed a long ago when Sony started using BenQ and again when Sony-NEC was announced, so I'm a bit surprised that it still hasn't changed. Wow. Hehe.
It's so nice to see them recognizing that public opinion is such an important battle field.
But are they really doing all that they can do win this battle? No. Take, for example, the prison torture scandal. I don't care whether or not the response to the scandal was appropriate or not; that is totally irrelevant. What is relevant is whether the world thinks the scandal is relevant. Pulling a Clinton by trying to play technicalities with the definition of torture does not help. Duking it out with McCain on the issue does not help. Forget propaganda! If you can't make the right gestures, you won't be going anywhere.
In many societies (particularly in Japan), it is considered the honorable thing for the guy on top to publicly apologize, accept responsibility, and/or resign even if something was totally the fault of some underling. Did Rummy do any of that? Nope.
Anti-virus has become more or less snake oil in respect to their effectiveness. They are slow to respond to new threats and are too easily disabled by attacks. Knowledgeable users have no need for AV because they know how to avoid infections quite easily (I'm a Windows user who has never used AV in 15 years and I have never been infected). People who are not knowledgeable will get a false sense of security and feel that they do not need to bother with learning all the ins and outs of safety.
I remember doing some maintenance on a small network once, and discovered that a number of the machines were infected. The boss was surprised. "But they all had anti-virus software!" And what a jolly amount of good that has done...
Yes, there is certainly a limited benefit to AV, as I would imagine that knowledgeable users can sometimes make a mistake. But AV software causes so many problems of their own, from the slowdowns caused by on-the-fly scanning, to the system bogdown whenever it does its scheduled full system scan, to the various slew of compatbility and stability issues that it creates (*cough* Norton *cough*).
This is political grandstanding. Aside from invoking Nazis, there was a part of the transcript excerpt that really bothered me.
Lantos asked Yahoo! about whether it has contacted the family of the jailed reporter and what it felt about that. Okay, fine. Then he asked Microsoft about the blogger, to which Microsoft clarified that it only took down the site and never provided the government with private information. Well, that's fine too, I guess, if Lantos didn't know beforehand the specifics of this incident and exactly what was different this time between "turn in" and "take down". And then he asks Google the same question. And here, that political grandstanding shines through clear and bright. Google just censors search results. It hasn't turned anyone in. It hasn't taken down any sites. Nobody could conceivably be harmed in this sensational "think of the family!" way by seeing rosy pictures of Tian'an'men. It's purely political.
If Congress was *really* interested in doing something about this, then they would recognize that the solution is not to criticize American companies, but to back them with a strong diplomatic stance up so that they would have the ability to say no to Beijing. But being tough to Beijing is hard, so let's bash these companies instead and hope that Americans will equate that to us doing something productive.
And as much as I dislike these Nazi references, maybe we should think of it this way. Remember that scene in Schindler's List when Jewish doctors kill their patients with lethal doses of some sort of liquid shortly before the Nazis come crashing in? One could argue that these doctors were immoral because they killed Jews and by killing them, they were in a way helping with the Nazi extermination. But most people would not hold that view, and instead would praise them for having mercifully killed them instead of letting them be killed by machine gun bullets when the Nazis come. The doctors could do nothing about the fact that those people were going to die, so they decided to do a little evil of their own, but in a way that mitigated a worse evil. Replace killing with censorship, doctors with American companies, and now you have a more accurate Nazi comparison.
I agree! Unfortunately, in some of the correspondences that I've had, however, there are people who are not comfortable with the lesser of two evils approach. I think that when dealing with this issue, perhaps an analogy would help:
Normally, shooting your pet would be an immoral and "evil" thing to do. What if your pet is ill and will die soon? Ideally, you would take it to a vet, but what if that was not possible? Is shooting it to put it out of its misery still immoral?
Censorship isn't Google's idea. It's the government's. Why is it Google's fault that the CCP decides that it wants censoring? What do you want Google to do? Offer an uncensored service? It already does with google.com. Offer an uncensored service that's doesn't suffer from slowdowns and outages? Well, the CCP won't let them, and they can't do anything about it unless the US gov't helps pressure the CCP (instead of trying to rack up political points in hearings). What about just doing nothing? Okay, but how is doing nothing any different than offering google.cn? There's still going to be censorship, people will have to settle for lesser search engines when they are looking up mundane everyday things, and a greater share of the market will belong to Chinese companies, which, quite frankly, I trust less than American companies (if you think that Google is being evil, think about how much evil a Chinese company on a much tighter leash from Beijing would be!)
The key issue is that you can't do anything that is absolutely not evil because as long as the CCP is in control, that is simply not realistic. Everyone rails against the censorship without providing any insight as to how Google could possibly fix that. When people finally accept that the absolute non-evil is simply not an option here, they'll realize that they need to look at the relative evils, and this is definitely the lesser of them.
First, I would strongly recommend that people listen to this clip on NPR's All Things Considered: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=5206172 because it goes into a lot more depth and offers more insight than the BBC article.
1) A government for a country of that size is NOT monolithic. For example, it would be foolish to say that everyone in the US government is in favor of having troops in Iraq: there are a lot of Senators who are not happy at all. Likewise, the Chinese government has various factions. Because there is only one political party in China, political differences are expressed in the form of intra-party factionalism (whereas in the West, it is normally expressed in the form of different parties, though there are also a lot of intra-party factionalism as well). A lot of this in-fighting also happens privately, so many are not aware of it and the casual observer would think that the government was a Borg collective of identical viewpoints when it really is not.
2) This letter was written by what NPR news describes to be the "liberal wing" of the party and can be considered to be more or less a dissident voice. Such opinions are not new in China, and if you ever go there, you will notice that a lot of people will express these views (the Chinese are not stupid), except that they will express them privately, and you never hear about it in the media. I was personally very surprised that this letter of published. These folks are sufficiently power and well-connected that they are able to dissent like this.
3) I think that their target audience is the Chinese people and the rest of the government. You have to understand that the whole appeal of the Chinese Revolution is that the old government was corrupt and abusive, and there are many Chinese have not forgotten that and who are well aware of the irony that China threw out a bad government and replaced it with another bad one.
So I would not view this as some sort of public press release (that was earlier today, when they justified censorship on grounds of "pornography", which is bullshit). The earlier announcement today would be like Bush telling the UN why we need troops in Iraq. This letter would be like the Democrats grumbling about Bush putting those troops in Iraq.
Protection of the populace from pronography? So is that how they justify blocking access to Slashdot and to CNN? And yes, they do block these sites; I know from experience. Perhaps they were referring on one of the less-used definitions of the word: "Lurid or sensational material" (source: American History Dictionary). :)
...and don't forget, the owner of the site that you went to knows if (if the owner has access to server logs).
I look at my site's server logs, and I can see who came by way of search engine, what their IP and browser was, and what search term they used. Of course, that's not nearly as bad as the "whole world" knowing (which it does not; and ISPs have better things to do than to track traffic like that; it would be hideously costly to them).
http://news.com.com/2061-10811_3-6037090.html
The C|Net article includes a screenshot showing what incentives Yahoo! is considering offering, as well as this text:
Some of these things could be interesting: e.g., like the airline miles. Some of them are a bit lame because they are things that Google already offers for free: e.g., like POP3/SMTP for mail. I just wonder exactly what they mean by "most" and the technical impossibility of ensuring "most" (which would be relative to rival engines) instead of "at least n number of searches".
(more of my thoughts on this are posted here)
What I want to know is how exactly one would go about simulating a "cyber attack". Or more precisely, what exactly is a "cyber attack"? Quite frankly, I have never been a fan of the whole "cyberterrorism" thing. To me, the "threat" seems abstract, ill-defined, and reeks too much of Y2K-style overreaction-through-misunderstanding. For starters, I wonder how a "cyber attack" be different from the kinds of attacks that we see day in and day out, like the literally hundreds of attempts by zombie machines to gain access to my machine each and every day (it's a fact of life)? What kind of platform would these attacks be launched from? Are we talking about some hackers trying to break into government computers or network of computers trying to flood traffic (noting that accumulating a large enough pool of such machines to do damage on a large scale--not just knocking a site or two down--without being caught is not trivial)? Furthermore, one has to wonder how they can accurately simulate such a thing when technology varies so much and can change so fast. What sort of attack will it be? Different systems, different software, different versions, etc. will react differently to attacks.
/.), and I have to wonder if these people really knew what they were doing or if they were just holding an worthless excercise with a nice flashy headline-grabbing name.
I'm not saying that this simulation is bullshit per se; I grant that there is certainly the possibility that the simulation was well-planned enough to address a wide array of realistic scenarios, but in my personal experience, a significant portion of IT-saavy people are really not that competant (not to mention many of the sorts of ill-informed comments on sees on
What I find distressing about all the anti-Google stuff going on is that people seem to have so little faith in Google. Yet, have they really ever betrayed us? All that Google did in China was physically add new servers in China, and like every single other server in China, it has to be censored. The Chinese can still try to use Google's non-Chinese servers using a Chinese-language interface if they want the full Google; they'll just be subject to the intermittent slowdowns and outages that have *always* been associated with Google's non-Chinese servers. And I know, because I've been to China... Google simply *added* new servers that people could opt to never use if they so desired and didn't restrict anything that was in place before; so how on Earth was that bad? Especially since, unlike other services, Google openly discloses this in the search results? (More of my thoughts on Google in China are here for anyone interestd.)
Putting aside China, Google has lived up to its principles, from how frank it is about disclosing potential privacy issues (most other companies would try to cover it up) to how it handles its installers to offering a promimently-placed option to delete your account and every bit of data associated with it in the account manager (for other sites that even have account deletion, most of the time, it took endless menu-digging to find the right place!) to Google's push for open chat standards to Google's torrent of money towards open source. I, for one, believe that Google is on the side of the users. By going from nothing to superstar based almost entirely on word-of-mouth, Google demonstrated how powerful cultivating user trust can be, and Google (and its investors) would have to be idiotic to overlook that so easily. Yes, Google collects a lot of information (just like everyone else), and it takes a lot of pains to remind everyone that any reading/analysis of that information is done by machine (and every time your e-mail passed through a spam filter like SpamAssassin or the filters that are built into every other webmail provider, it's being read and analyzed by a machine, and nobody seems to throw arms up for that).
Google is probably one of the few 800-lb gorillas who is on the side of the user rights and privacy, and the EFF is idiotic for being so quick to condemn a company that I think is really an ally.
If you dislike Winamp for its complexity, then Songbird would not be your cup of tea. Running Winamp 5 (I never bothered to install modern Winamp3-style skin support), it fires up in less than a second. Songbird takes about a quarter of a minute. Changing skins on Songbird is a 10-second ordeal that involves the window disappearing for a while. Complexity? In 2006, Winamp is by far the lightest, fastest, and least complex of all the major Windows media players.
I tried Songbird for a few minutes and gave up. The interface was simply too sluggish (even slightly worse than the bloated Windows Media Player) to be comfortable (even though Firefox doesn't seem to have this problem). I'll stick with Winamp for my media player needs (fortunately, I never really got into the whole media library thing). Small footprint and instantaneous startup.
Haven't installed it yet (because it asks me to uninstall previous IE7 builds), but from the version information in the executable, this appears to be build #5296. The build in the IE7 leak story from a week ago is #5299... I remember seeing some talk about #5296 on one of the sites discussing #5299 last week, so this is a build that has been around a bit now (which is expected, of course).