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I was driven to be fool/mad by Great Firewall

I ever putted Unipeak link on my browser's shortcuts pad to fast access some blocked web sites by China's Great Firewall. However, the site itself was blocked just before 6/4. This morning, I happened to click the link. When I found it's not accessible, I subconsciously set a proxy server to access it. Then I realized that it's also a proxy site to acess other blocked web site. Using proxy server to access proxy server, how fool I realized I am. But I'm not so fool before, who drives a smart man to fool?

It's is not enough, I have to find proxy servers almost every week to access even those academic/ religious site(like this). It seems that I was even driven to become a hungry dog to search a bone time by time.

Friendster is desperate; viral marketing failed (danah boyd)

Many-to-many, "Friendster realizes that it has lost the attention of its earliest adopters. This morning, Friendster sent a message to a select number of people that they labeled as ??SuperFriends.?? It??s a usability survey where they are asking for users?? advice on an email campaign. There are four different potential emails that they sent out as screen shots."

SkypeOut: Call globally for free?

Outed: Skype project to dial real phone numbers shouts the Register. [HeadShift]

Comdex trade show canceled for 2004
Comdex, once the preeminent trade show for the technology industry but which has lost its luster in recent years, has been canceled this year, the event's producers said Wednesday.---[CNN]

Everything is in change since the internet went broadband and ubiquitous.

Wikipedia unlocked

Wikipedia unlocked in China yesterday, after days of blocking since 6/4. Yesterday was also China's Duanwu Festival.

via [shizhao][zheng][wen xin]

Rebecca Mackinnon is talking about her experience on the change of journalism in Sashas', the place where we held bloggerCon Shanghai last time.

update: this event blogged on my Chinese blog

Dan Gillmor's new book face revealing

The book, We the Media, is expected to be published soon and have a site to extend the book's impact, as Dan revealed on his eJournal.


* Shall our wiki experiment continues this time? Let's create a site first.

Q&A With MIT��s Nicholas Negroponte

Q: Which new products or services are likely to make the biggest splash?
A: Peer-to-peer is key. I mean that in every form conceivable: cell phones without towers, sharing leftover food, bartering, etc. Furthermore, you will see micro-wireless networks, where everyday devices become routers of messages that have nothing to do with themselves.

Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.

[FurdLog][Slashdot]

Mass DNS failures in China?

I can't access many web sites smoothly today both in home and office. Are there any new attacks on China's DNS network?

f it works for cheetahs...

from Future Now, "The New Scientist reports reports that computer scientists Peter Bentley and Krzysztof Wloch have used genetic algorithms software that mimics evolution's drive for fitness to breed the best tuning configurations for racing cars.... Genetic algorithms mimic the principles of evolution to breed solutions to a problem. A population of potential solutions is tested for fitness and the best are cross-bred and mutated."

Ha, the two scientists are from UCL.

Socialbrain.org can't access?
Seems the domain, socialbrain.org, is failure from ip resolution. What's wrong with it?

dot performance art

"As an art and business project, some folks at a conference in Berlin created a dotcom company in 24 hours. Including a kick-off party, planning, nightly coding, various milestones, release, and a public IPO. I.e. they put the company for sale on ebay. There's still time to go and bid.

Well, it is in part performance art, but not altogether crazy.... " [via Ming the Mechanic]

19:00 Building
the Office

19:30 Kick-off
party

19:45
International expansion

22:00 Concepts
and planning

02:00 Nightly
coding

14:00
Milestone 1

17:00
Milestone 2

18:58 Final
release

18:59 Release
Party

19:00 Launch, IPO on eBay

Hoho, interesting. Who wants a try in China?

Many-to-Many Censorship? (Xiao Qiang)

Call it state censorship M2M model: Chinese government just launched a new website for people to report on what officials describe as illegal or unhealthy information on the internet. A China blogger called this "a crackdown that employs a public open-ended architecture" and asked "Isn��t that just inviting random, pornographic, illegal, and inappropriate comments?" ---- [Many2Many]

I do accept as same as Xiaoqiang that it's a "perfect" strategy to do censorship in theory, however, I don't think it's workable any longer. The problem is, who and how to deal with the possible reports at backend? It's a labor work, indeed. And no one can ensure if the report is a illegal or unhealthy information. Ha, just like the old Chinese proverb said, "be too smart by half; Cunning outwits itself".

Blogbridge

I'm testdriving a new RSS aggregator, blogbridge, some features are fancy to attact me. Unfortunetely, almost all new software doesn't consider international versions. So all Chinese encoding rss displays wierd in this new tool.

Wikipedia totoally blocked in China

From Shizhao, a wipipedian from Wikipedia Chinese edition, "All Wikipedia sites were blocked (in China), I proved this via router tracking. The requests to this sites can't even go through Beijing's boundary. It's time to report this to some departments".

I don't know what "departments" Wikipedian should report, and by what reason. It's not like 3/11 incident(blogbus.com, blogcn.com were all blocked by local police), Wikipedia is an open project ran by open team. Blogbus can argue to local Commujnist Party's propaganda department that it's an commerical service that will affect over 200,000 users(all blog owners). However, Wikipedia can't.



I welcomed a HSBC private bank delegate this Tuesday in Shanghai. After that, I composed a news press for my business on this event. However, I can't find any reference information about HSBC prviate bank besides their own web site. Thus I turned to Wikipedia. You know, it's not accessible from public internet. I have to find a proxy server to get that page. I know it's just a click in a open internet world, but now i have to hate the knowledge blocker, it's their own fault.

Wikipedia is also an important grassroots publishing method. It also reflects free speech in a free culture, even it's more important from the perspective of grassroots collective intelligence genre. There is no free culture at all in China. If a baby was killed, no one would be sad except their parents.

I know Shizhao and his team is sad enough, take care.

Chinese bloggers also paid attentions on Reagan's passing away

Several bloggers expressed feelings in their blogs, from Grassland's crawling.

Gaokao: The Toppest Exam

Gaokao, in Chinese, means "The Toppest Exam" or "The Biggest Exam" in Taiwan area. In asian countries, this kind of exam seems still the only method to evaluate a student's performance on learning and determines one's future fortune. The traditional factory model is still dominant in education system, especially to China. Thus Gaokao is very important to almost all familiies with kids.

6/6-8, it's the standard Gaokao day in China mainland......(leaving for a meeting)

How social techniques long lives

Corente[SocialSoftware]: "Amazing mid-last-century document explaining how to use the telephone. Some of it is technical ?? transferring calls, holding the receiver, but a lot of it is, well, tele-quette, like why the receiving party should answer first, and why the calling party should end the call. Very TCP-ish, in a social way"

For Homo Sapien, the social factors are generated from the smartness of brain( also seems to some other animal, no reference here). Just since the complexity of our brain, almost all of us meets learning disbilities(LD) with social skills. Thus training and mentoring are so important to one's life. The handbook is really great and helpful.

Something for Nothing

Suw, "The response to AKMA's question was immediate and overwhelmingly positive - soon the comments section was filled with bloggers offering to read chapters. "---[Chocolate and Vodka]

[via Tian's Langtonclose]

I should have blogged this on my Chinese blog, however, maybe I won't be able to do it in days(depends on). The power of free culture can generate many such brilliant results, thus not mere an audio book, a collaborative tranlation work, but also tons of "Disney Creation" in the future. Suw's model illustrations is cool, I think more diversified models will emerge too.

Tian gave the title, "Something for Nothing", a perfect Chinese translation. I will definitely comment it on my Chinese blog, later on.

Home PC power failure

After returning home, I found one of my Home PCs, the one running Grasshopper, can't boot up. I have to face that the PC's power supply can't work. Oh my, all the grasshopper data resides on that PC, as well the grassphopper it self. Now remote Grassland service can't update, too.

Also I can't update my Chinese blog since all the data stored locally on that machine. Hopefully, all the data is secure the machine get repaired.

??????????

Wikipedia Chinese Edition blocked in China

via CNBlog.org, "It seems that Chinese edition of Wikipedia can't be accessed reported by some wikipedians in Beijing". It's obviously that today is a very sensitive day to China's government. Thus many web sites could be blocked either permanently or temporarily.

"asdf", the most useful meaningless phrase?

A sudden meme when I'm reviewing a business web site designed by our staff, weifan. He applied many "asdf" to fullfill the content of a web page design since there were no real content yet. I used to type these "word" before in early internet age when I met some registration page. Gradually, I found the user name "asdf", "asdfasdf", or so, can't be used again since there are more and more people use this faked name.

So I googled this phrase again, today. I found a lot of asdf related interesting articles, event web site asdf.com.

I guess "asdf" could be the most popular used but ever ignored meaningless phrase in this world. :D

Little red blogs
Salon: "On the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown, blogs are booming in China. But are they making any difference?"

15 years, Tiananmen

No Comments. Find love today.

Ha, Joi on NYTime
Joichi Ito, new star found by traditional media. They are always slow to new media, blogsphere.

Unipeak blocked
A web-based web page container, Unipeak, to bypass internet censorship of China's Great Firewall, was also blocked in these two days.

It was easier to access a blocked web page with Unipeak since it tries to load the url first and re-trasnlate into it's own page display.

Fahrenheit 9/11 over Bittorrent

Cannes, France /DenounceNewswire/ -- 24 May 2004 -- In a stunning move, controversial documentary filmmaker Michael Moore announced today that his latest film, "Fahrenheit 9/11", will be released by BitTorrent, the popular peer-to-peer file-sharing network.

.....Cohen and Moore say that the film will be available through BitTorrent beginning July 3rd worldwide over the Internet. The film will be free.

----[DENOUNCE]

I'd like to send a MailtoFuture message to remind me that day, or put it in my calendar? Ha.

Interim IRAQ government formed
Good news from many bad news, IRAQ has a interim cabinet. The US-UK colitation seems trying to release themselves from this hot-blood land, step by step. However, just like falling into love, is that so easy to say "good bye"?