Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Want China Milk, Mr. Mandelson?

British politician Peter Mandelson, who was feted in China for drinking a glass of yoghurt on television in Beijing last week, has been rushed to hospital suffering from a kidney stone.

EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson drinks a Beijing-branded yogurt at a press conference in the Chinese capital on Friday September 26, 2008. Mandelson said he was confident of Chinese dairy products despite the recent tainted milk scandal. On October 6, Peter Mandelson is to have a kidney stone removed after attending the first meeting of Gordon Brown's economic war council.

Thousands of babies across China have suffered kidney stones after drinking formula milk mixed with the industrial plastic melamine.

Also, if you want to get an idea of how the Chinese government is handling the post-scandal media since the milk powder contamination was revealed, here are instructions reportedly from the propaganda bureau on how to report the incident:

Recently, the Sanlu mild powder contamination story attracted a lot of attention on the Internet. Now we are issuing some requirements for managing online news publishing:
1. Strictly standardize news sources, only use dispatches from Xinhua, People’s Daily and other central media outlets.
2. Do not make any headlines or features on this topic. Emphasize the government’s handling of the crisis and progress, and the care given to the babies by hospitals and other care providers.
3. Forums and blogs should not recommend this topic, not put it on the top of their pages, and the atmosphere and number of threads in the forums should be monitored and controlled.
4. Firmly block and delete information and posts that criticize the Party, the government, instigate petitioning and spread rumors.
5. Mobilize online commentators to guide the opinions. The general guidance should be based on information released by the Ministry of Health, and lead online users to support the Party and the government, convey the effectiveness of the efforts by concerned agencies.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Godaddy Promo Code Expired

Today when I purchase of domain names in GoDaddy, I found that the Godaddy Promo Codes of 6.95 $ discount code have been expired, I can not continue to use the 6.95 coupons code. While I input that code, it will become $ 7.49 U.S. dollars, an increase of 0.5 U.S. dollars, I tested the four promo codes, all become 7.49 U.S. dollars. Do not know why, probably GoDaddy want the customers to spend more money to buy the domain name, the U.S. economic downturn, ah.

Saturday, September 20, 2008

MSN and Gtalk Local Password Hacking

I have to tell the true that local password of MSN & GTalk can be easily hacked. You can even find the local password directly by using a hack tool named MessenPass. This means it is high risky if you save the password of MSN or GTalk in the local PC.

MessenPass can be used to get the passwords for the current logged-on user on your local computer, and it works if you chose the remember your password in one of the above programs.

Password hashing is a way of encrypting a password before it's stored so that if local computer gets into the wrong hands, the damage is limited. Hashing is nothing new - it's been in use in Unix system password files since long before my time, and quite probably in other systems long before that.

A hash (also called a hash code, digest, or message digest) can be thought of as the digital fingerprint of a piece of data. You can easily generate a fixed length hash for any text string using a one-way mathematical process. It is next to impossible to (efficiently) recover the original text from a hash alone. It is also vastly unlikely that any different text string will give you an identical hash - a 'hash collision'. These properties make hashes ideally suited for storing your application's passwords. Why? Because although an attacker may compromise a part of your system and reveal your list of password hashes, they can't determine from the hashes alone what the real passwords are.

We've established that it's incredibly difficult to recover the original password from a hash, so how will the application know if a user has entered the correct password or not? Quite simply - by generating a hash of the user-supplied password and comparing this 'fingerprint' with the hash stored in your user profile, you'll know whether or not the passwords match.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Boycott China Product If You Really Love China

My blog entry today on a certain dairy poisoning case was deleted by request of a certain company… I feel that this very company's PR tactics are really, really neat. Isn't this supposed to be the case with best PR practises in China? That is — bind the interests of the company and the government, use the government to control your PR, and remove all posts that do not reflect well upon you. What kind of a "rhetoric advantage" this is! This way, they'll keep on drinking what you make, and suddenly vanish into graves — just like that, out of the blue.

The greatest problem in China is that we have too many people who have knowledge and independent thought, if all these people are dead, we don't have anymore problem.

There is hearsay there the enterprise spent 3 million yuans in Baidu search engine, it seems that we have underestimated its power, they only need to spend half the amount to push the government's PR machine.

Remember: if you really love China, never buy anything made in China.

Monday, September 8, 2008

Godaddy Promo Codes and Coupons List

Smart domain name buyers always use a promo code or coupon code to get the best discounts. GoDaddy.com is the most popular domain name registrar in the world, here is a list of active Godaddy promo codes with their expiry date which will surely work. Keep referring this page when you buy a domain name the next time. Visit GoDaddy.com and enter these promo codes in your shopping cart and update to see the discount.

OYH3 - $3 off / $6.95 any .COM (renewals too... just used it)

BTPS7 - 20% any order of $50 or more

BTPS255 - 25% off any order of $100 or more

OYH1 - 10% off whatever

OYH2 - $5 off a $30 purchase

BTPS50 - 50% off .co.uk domains

BTPS4 - 10% off anything

chill1 - 10% off

chill2 - $5 off $30

chill3 - $6.95 .coms

hash1 - 10% off

hash2 - $5 off $30

hash3 - $6.95 .com registration

gdd1101c - 10% off any order of $40 or more

Saturday, August 30, 2008

GoDaddy Unblocked in China

After a week hiatus, GoDaddy, the world's largest domain name host, is back online in China.

According to my early report, GoDaddy.com was blocked during the Olympics to prevent Chinese nationals from registering domain names after the names of Chinese athletes who won (Gold, Silver or Bronze) in the Olympics. The Chinese government has a policy of protecting famous names from being registered and allows only the owner the right to register it as his/her domain name.

Since GoDaddy has suspend lots of Chinese human rights sites without warning last year, Isaac Mao think GoDaddy "It deserved! No tears" -- The hidden rules in China will change all the time. Just like Godaddy's case, any cases can become your nightmare whether it's an event, a people's name, or a domain name. And the worst thing you can never recover is that you lost the support from users.  There's only one government one business can please today or tomorrow, but there are millions of users one can't be fooled.

Friday, August 22, 2008

GoDaddy Blocked in China

GoDaddy, the largest ICANN-accredited domain registrar in the world, appears to blocked in Mainland China by the evil Net Nanny before the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games came to a close. A screen copy of the command "tracert www.godaddy.com" shows that the problem is a router inside China Telecom.

The current blocking may be related to the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. China's sport authority has banned the issuing of Internet domain names based on the country's Olympic gold medal-winning athletes to anyone but the medalists themselves,  according to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). The General Administration of Sport (GAS) provided the CNNIC with a full list of China's Olympic team prior to the Games opening on Aug. 8, and had registered all available domain names for athletes in Chinese characters and in Pinyin. Those who had already registered before the GAS order could not keep the the domain names any more, they were forced to give it to the medalist "as a gift".



The person that already had domain name hold up to now abandons a domain name of player of Olympic Games of China. If they donot want to abandon the domain, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) will force to retrieve the domain. But if the domain name is register outside China, such as in GoDaddy.com, the CNNIC can not retrieve that domain.

Now the currently largest Internet domain registrar in the world is blocking in China, the most likely explanation is, CNNIC do not want any Chinese hold a domain name of country's Olympic gold medal-winning athletes by blocking GoDaddy registrar. When the people in China can not visit GoDaddy and register domain outside China, so CNNIC can protect the domain names more easy.

GoDaddy has come under heavy criticism for suspending Chinese human rights sites without warning on August 17, 2007.