Google to leave China

Undermining Freedom of Expression in China: The Role of Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google

Image by Shekhar_Sahu via Flickr

Google to leave China on April 10: state media
Posted: 19 March 2010 1211 hrs

SHANGHAI: US Internet giant Google will close its business in China next month and may announce its plans in the coming days, Chinese media reported on Friday, after rows over censorship and hacking.

The China Business News quoted an official with an unidentified Chinese advertising agency as saying Google would go through with its threatened withdrawal on April 10, but that Google had yet to confirm the pull-out.

The agency is a business partner of Google, the report said.

The report did not specify whether Google would close all or part of its operations in the country.

The newspaper quoted an unidentified Google staff member as saying the company may announce on Monday the details of its exit from China and compensation for its local staff.

Google China spokeswoman Marsha Wang declined to comment on the report, telling AFP only that there had been "no update" on the company's situation.

The report was the latest in a series of clues to emerge recently indicating Google planned to leave China, which has the world's largest population of online users, at 384 million.

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A Chinese Google user presents flowers in front of 'Google' sign outside Google China headquarters building in Beijing.

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Google has cried foul over what it said were cyberattacks aimed at its source code and the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

The Financial Times reported last week that Google was "99.9 per cent" certain to abandon google.cn, citing an unnamed source.

Chinese media said Wednesday that Google sent a notice to clients saying google.cn could close at the end of March.

The issue has sparked a simmering war of words between China and the administration of US President Barack Obama, which has called on Beijing to allow an unfettered Internet.

The dispute has exacerbated mounting tensions between the two over a range of trade and diplomatic issues.

Beijing tightly controls online content in a vast system dubbed the "Great Firewall of China", removing information it deems harmful such as pornography and violent content, but also politically sensitive material.

Google has continued to filter google.cn results to abide by Chinese censorship demands, but says it will eventually stop the screening.

Google confirmed earlier this week that it had received a letter purportedly from a group of 27 Chinese advertising agencies calling for the US company to open talks on compensation for possible business losses if it leaves China.

However, representatives of several of the firms subsequently told AFP they knew nothing of the letter and Chinese media reports have raised doubts about its authenticity.

Google's Wang told AFP the company is still "reviewing" the letter.

- AFP/yb

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.

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Pennsylvania gym killer blogged his own massacre

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I was quite taken by this news; seems like there are more and more people resorting to guns when they have problems to unload off their head and chest…

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Posted: 06 August 2009 1047 hrs

Police investigate an automobile in the parking lot outside a LA Fitness following a shooting inside the health club in Bridgeville, Pennsylvania

NEW YORK: A sexually frustrated man who killed three women in a Pennsylvania health club, then himself, blogged his preparations - with the final chilling entry announcing the "big day," police said Wednesday.

The killer, who late Tuesday burst into the LA Fitness Gym in Bridgeville, near Pittsburgh, and sprayed 36 bullets, apparently wrote the blog on a personal web page starting last November.

On the eve of the killings, he wrote: "Took off today, Monday, and tomorrow to practice my routine and make sure it is well polished... Tomorrow is the big day."

Local police superintendent Charles Moffatt said the killer, George Sodini, prepared meticulously.

After twice visiting the gym earlier in the day, Sodini entered the Latin dance class, turned off the lights and opened fire, Moffatt said in a nationally televised press conference.

Sodini carried four handguns, three of which were fired: two 9mm semi-automatics and a .45 caliber revolver he turned on himself. A total of 12 people were shot.

"He shot at least 36 times. He had clips of ammunition that held 30 rounds," Moffatt said, noting that the military-style ammunition had been legal since 2004, when a ban expired.

According to Moffatt, "there's nobody that was in that club that could have done anything to prevent Mr Sodini" from carrying out the murders.

The blog, which Moffatt said was being treated as genuine, and which was quickly pulled off the Internet, reveals a sinister, often banal mind of a man crippled by sexual frustration, anger at women and depression.

A picture of Sodini, 48, attached to the blog shows a lean, white male with slightly graying hair and wearing a smart blue shirt.

Moffatt said the blog clearly showed "the hatred in him" and that computer sleuths were looking into whether anyone saw the blog - and if so, why they didn't report it.

In the blog, Sodini wrote as far back as November 5, 2008, that he "planned to do this in the summer" but decided to see the result of the presidential election won by President Barack Obama.

In December, he again wrote that he had "planned to do this already" and sets January 6 as the new date.

"I wish life could be better for all and the crazy world can somehow run smoother. I wish I had answers. Bye," he apparently wrote less than two hours before the appointed time on that day.

But the next entry described him pulling out at the last minute: "It is 8:45 pm: I chickened out! Shit! I brought the loaded guns, everything. Hell!"

Throughout nine months of rambling entries, Sodini revealed his fixation on rejections from women and extreme sexual frustration.

"Who knows why. I am not ugly or too weird. No sex since July 1990 either (I was 29)," he wrote.

"Last time I slept all night with a girlfriend, it was 1982. Proof I am a total malfunction. Girls and women don't even give me a second look ANYWHERE. There is something BLATANTLY wrong with me."

He was angry at a brother whom he described as a bully and what he described as a distant relationship with his father. In April, he also blogged about his worries over being fired from his job, where the recession was having an impact.

Similar complaints were recorded by Sodini in a message found on him after the carnage, Moffatt said.

Ironically, the blogger wrote that going to the gym helped him relieve his psychological problems.

"My anger and rage is largely gone since I began lifting weights," he wrote in December last year.

But those positive feelings were fleeting and the blogger appeared set on preparing his destructive end.

"What is it like to be dead? I always think I am forgetting something, that's one reason I postponed," he wrote. "In this case, I cannot make a return trip!"

In the last entry, dated August 3, he showed alarm at meeting a happy neighbour, who he worried would distract him from the murders.

"I need to remain focused and absorbed COMPLETELY."

His last words on the blog: "Death lives!"

- AFP/yb

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source story here.

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US asks Twitter to stay online because of Iran vote

Posted: 17 June 2009 0727 hrs

An Iranian woman holds up a picture of the latest crackdown by Iranian police on reformist protesters in Tehran.

NEW YORK: The Obama administration took the unusual step of asking Twitter to delay a planned maintenance outage because of the social blogging site's use as a communications tool by Iranians following their disputed election, a senior official said on Tuesday.

The request highlighted the administration's Web-savvy ways and the power of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook in organizing protests over the election results in the face of a ban by Iranian authorities on other media.

But it also seemed to run counter to President Barack Obama's public efforts not to appear to be meddling in Iran's internal affairs.

Twitter delayed Monday's scheduled tune-up, which would have taken place during daylight hours in Iran, and rescheduled it for Tuesday. The site went down around 5:00 pm (2100 GMT) for what was expected to be about an hour.

A State Department official in Washington said Twitter had been asked to delay Monday's shutdown because the micro-blogging service was being used as "an important means of communications" in Iran.

The official told reporters on condition of anonymity that Twitter was all the more important because the Iranian government had shut down other websites, cell phones, and newspapers.

"One of the areas where people are able to get out the word is through Twitter," the official said. "They announced they were going to shut down their system for maintenance and we asked them not to."

The US official said he did not know who at the State Department called Twitter, but it was not Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a blog post that Twitter had delayed plans to temporarily shut down the service for "critical" maintenance, but did not mention any State Department intervention.

Another Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey, speaking at a two-day conference in New York on Tuesday about the micro-blogging service, did not mention the State Department request but said Twitter was "delaying much overdue scheduled downtime so we would not interrupt what's currently unfolding in Iran".

Dorsey described the usage of Twitter by Iranians as "amazing".

"Just think about what's occurring over there and the accessibility that we all have to see this unfold in real time," he said. "It's amazing. It's huge."

"Suddenly everything that's happening over there feels extremely close," he said. "It feels approachable. And that's really important and that is really the greatest success of what Twitter is."

"If ever there was a time that Twitter mattered it was this past weekend in Iran," added Jeff Pulver, organiser of the 140 Character Conference.

Protesters in Iran on Monday used Twitter for battle cries and to spread word about clashes with police and hardline supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Messages posted on the micro-blogging service, some with links to pictures, streamed from Iran despite reported efforts by authorities there to block news of protests over Ahmadinejad's claim of having been fairly re-elected.

Pictures of wounded or dead people that senders claim were Iranian protesters ricocheted about Twitter and wound up posted at online photo-sharing websites such as Flickr as well as on YouTube.

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters that officials at the State Department had been in contact with Twitter throughout the weekend, but did not make clear that it was about the aftermath of the Iranian elections.

When asked if such talks with Twitter could be seen as interference in Iran's affairs, he said Obama and other officials were very clear they want to stay out of Iranian politics.

"We don't want to be seen as interfering," he said.

Obama himself issued the same message on Tuesday, saying, "It is not productive, given the history of US-Iranian relations to be seen as meddling – the US president, meddling in Iranian elections."

Kelly went on to say that the new media provided a good source of information for the US government, which has had no diplomatic relations with Iran for three decades.

"We're of course monitoring the situation through a number of different media, including social media networks like Facebook and Twitter," Kelly said.

- AFP/so

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.

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Online obsession

Image via Wikipedia

A computer's many good use, being one below…

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Steven Chia, stevenchia@channelnewsasia.com

THESE days, if you are not online, you are definitely out of the game - meaning, you are pretty much out of the real world. Ironic, isn't it? You'd think the world we live in is the real one and the other, virtual. But I think the lines have blurred and the real world is somewhere in-between - one that has us living partly online, partly offline.

The Internet has become our yellow pages, our encyclopedia, our dictionary ... I could go on, but in short, it's our window to the world both literally and metaphorically.

On Tuesday, we had a chat with Scott Goodstein on the show. He is one of the staff members who helped run the online aspect of Barack Obama's presidential campaign. And we all know how Obama's presence online really gave him an edge over John McCain. It was new school versus old school, and new school won big time. The difference, Scott said, was that Obama himself was the one who wanted to get "online", so instead of just a passive presence, he turned it into an active tool to engage people.

A quick check of Obama's facebook account (he has many) showed that he's got over 6 million fans on just one of them!

For a long time, I had stayed off blogging, but now that I've got the hang of it, I actually quite enjoy the experience and recognise its usefulness. I used to think you could not control what comes out on the Internet and now I know it's true.

The difference is I now understand that most people are able to discern between what is meaningful and what is rubbish. So there isn't a need to fear the medium, since rubbish doesn't get an audience. But there is a need to embrace it and to learn how to use it to your advantage.

Singapore is slowly opening up to the idea of politics online. The Government is concerned because they know there is no way to truly control it and yet they can't prevent it. But the way I see it, for the next elections here, the contender who is media savvy will have the ultimate edge.

From TODAY, Plus – Weekend, 13/14-Jun-2009

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