Truth Collective

From NYT:

China’s government censors have begun to block access to the Internet services Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail and Microsoft’s live.com, broadening an already extraordinary effort to shield its citizens from any hint of Thursday’s 20th anniversary of the military crackdown that ended the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement.

People in China who tried to gain access to the blocked Web sites on Tuesday instead encountered an error message saying the sites’ servers had unexpectedly dropped the Internet connection — a standard indicator that access has been blocked.

Weeks earlier, censors blocked Chinese users from viewing all videos on YouTube, and in recent days some television viewers have reported that BBC World News reports related to the Tiananmen anniversary were being selectively blacked out of broadcast programs.

The concept of censoring the internet just seems ridiculous. Notably, China has also blocked some blogging websites including blogspot and wordpress, which leads me to believe that some Chinese internet nerds (aka “netizens”) are going through some serious withdrawal right now. Thanks to my friend Wanning for the heads up about this one.

I read about Dropbox awhile ago but never tried it out until now.  Never realized it was so useful.  I don’t own a printer so anytime I need to print something out, I email it to myself and print it out at school.  This is also standard procedure whenever I need to work on something and I’m not at home.  If you have a USB flash drive you can skip email altogether; but you still have to deal with multiple versions of your files in multiple locations, which can be quite a hassle if you do this frequently or suck at keeping track of the latest version of your work.

Dropbox installs quickly, works across multiple platforms and runs seamlessly.  There are other similar services but this one looks awesome.  With options for public sharing and links to shared accounts (i.e., with your friends) this is like hassle-free zShare and Flickr and real-time data backup all at the same time.  Pretty nifty.  Right now, accounts are free and come with 2GB of space.  A must have if you are mobile, especially if you have more than one computer, and unlike a USB drive you won’t lose it accidentally.

Sign up with this link and we will both get 250MB of extra storage space… FREE.  You can thank me later.

Neat-o.

Male and Gebi, grass mud horses

“A YouTube children’s song about the beast has drawn nearly 1.4 million viewers. A grass-mud horse cartoon has logged a quarter million more views. A nature documentary on its habits attracted 180,000 more. Stores are selling grass-mud horse dolls. Chinese intellectuals are writing treatises on the grass-mud horse’s social importance. The story of the grass-mud horse’s struggle against the evil river crab has spread far and wide across the Chinese online community.

…
The grass-mud horse is an example of something that, in China’s authoritarian system, passes as subversive behavior. Conceived as an impish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has not merely made government censors look ridiculous, although it has surely done that.”

from today’s NYT article “A Dirty Pun Tweak’s China’s Online Censors”

Danwei’s commentary.

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