Thursday, October 30, 2008

Is Blog Dead in China ?

In the past year, there is a continuing discussion in the Chinese blogosphere on whether blog culture is dying down. Moreover, recently bokee.com and blogchina.com, the two earliest BSPs founded by Fang dong-xing in China, are at business crisis. Fang is looking for investing to transform the websites into multi-media community platform.

What we see is: BSP and services related with blogs are slowly disappearing, blog has passed its golden days and walked into a dark future. The main reason is because the services around blogs cannot make a profit.

Why can't they make a profit? The content quality of blog is better than SNS, Twitter and Digg, their traffics are high. They should be able to get income from Ads. However, at present, blogger's income is too narrowed. Basically, they depends on Google AdSense. Which means their profit is affected by Google.

When Google entered the scene, it developed a huge number of blogging tools, such as google reader, feedburner, blogsearch, etc… which destroyed other BSPs dream for profit while google has a monopoly status in the market.

Blog is more open and individualized, its content quality is relative higher. SNS is more closed, especially towards search engine. It contrasts with blog's openness and affects information dissemination. A good article is very difficult to get disseminated via SNS. Now most of the SNS in China are coping the facebook, which is a dead end. The best SNS is Tencent's QQ, but you can't find any similarity between QQ and facebook. The funny thing is Tencent never claimed itself to be a SNS.

Thanks globalvoicesonline translation

GoDaddy and SourceForge Blocked in China Again

GoDaddy, the world's largest ICANN-accredited domain registrar, and SourceForge, the world's largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications, appears to blocked in Mainland China again after Beijing 2008 Olympic Games closed.

A screen copy of the command tracert shows that the problem is a router inside China Telecom.

Godaddy blocked in china


SourceForge blocked in china



Update: SourceForge unblocked on Nov 2 2008, GoDaddy unblocked on Nov 10 2008.

Friday, October 24, 2008

China Internet Censorship After Olympic Games

As Beijing 2008 Olympic Games closed, the Internet censorship in China further tightened. Undeniably, this deterioration has affected and frustrated an increasing number of netizens in China.

lot's of foreign websites have been blocked again after the Beijing Olympics drew to an end. Meanwhile, although other foreign websites remain approachable in China, some of their touchy contents are actually not accessible.

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.