Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Foreign journalists' Yahoo email accounts hacked in China



More bad publicity for China. The article does not say that it was the Chinese government doing the hacking. But clearly something is awry here. Can anyone possibly believe that it's just a coincidence that the victims just so happened to be foreign journalists in China?

China has yet to issue a statement regarding this. Personally, it doesn't matter what the Chinese government says. Their public statements are never reliable.

Ask them about June 4th 1989.

Ask them whether or not they will grant HK universal suffrage as clearly stated in the Basic Law.

Ask them how many people do they executed annually.

Ask them about cutting greenhouse emissions.

Or even more recently, listen to what the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Ma Zhaoxu, said in response to Hilary Clinton in January 2010:

"The US has criticized China’s policies to administer the internet and insinuated that China restricts internet freedom. This runs contrary to the facts and is harmful to China-US relations. We urge the United States to respect the facts and cease using so-called internet freedom to make groundless accusations against China."

They're actually saying that they don't restrict internet freedom when it's so obvious that they do. So please, China, don't respond to this Yahoo incident. You're just going to make yourself look silly again. And frankly, you're making everyone of Chinese ethnicity look bad.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

China responds to Google pulling the plug on Google.cn


Through The Global Times and the People’s Daily, China has a couple of comments for Google. These 2 publications are produced under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party.

“With its action to shift its search service from the Chinese mainland to Hong Kong yesterday, the world’s top search engine has made a huge strategic misstep in the promising Chinese market.”
Sure, Google is definitely giving up on potential revenue.

“Google’s efforts to make this issue into a political spat have naturally met with strong opposition and criticism from the Chinese government and society.”
Did I miss something? How did Google try to make this into a political spat?

“With the company’s credibility among Chinese netizens now plummeting, Google will be greeted with less sympathy and fewer parting sentiments from Chinese internet users.”
Really? All Google did was remove their censors. The average netizen experienced nothing new. Rather than being met with Google’s censors, they’re now being met with China’s censors. The average Chinese netizen should be disappointed, instead.

The paper slammed Google for offering China’s 384 million web users access to “pornography and subversive content”, saying the Chinese web would “continue to grow in a cleaner and more peaceful environment” without Google.cn.
Really? If you asked people to say the first thing that comes to mind when you say “Google”, I bet that not one person would say “porn” or anything subversive. If you say “internet” on the other hand, you may get the occasional “porn” response.

The overseas edition of the People’s Daily, the chief newspaper of China’s ruling Communist Party accused Google on Wednesday of colluding with US spies, and said the firm’s retreat from China over censorship justified Beijing’s efforts to promote homegrown technology.
“For Chinese people, Google is not god, and even if it puts on a full-on show about politics and values, it is still not god. In fact, Google is not a virgin when it comes to values. Its co-operation and collusion with the US intelligence and security agencies is well-known.”
Seriously, this doesn’t even sound intelligent. You might as well all stay home and wrap tin foil over your heads.

Google “completely misjudged the situation, and does not grasp that Chinese people are extremely averse to external threats and pressure.”
What did Google threaten to do? They threatened to remove the censors from its search engine. Is that what the Chinese people are averse to? If so, then too bad. Welcome to the real world.

Exactly what is China afraid of when it comes to the internet? That people would find out about the June 4th incident? That people would learn about Falun Gun? That they would find porn (god forbid!)?

China really needs to pay attention to details here. Everybody here in Hong Kong has uncensored access to the internet. Have we all become anti-China. Have we all decided to join the Falun Gun? Have we all become sex-crazed lunatics?

If China wants to join the ranks of the elite countries in the world, they need to stop feeling ashamed of their history. Every country has their dark pasts. Their citizens should learn from them. So you’ve slaughtered countless innocent lives on June 4th 1989. Everybody knows about it, except your own citizens. Every Chinese outside of China knows. Yet, the existence of this event is openly denied by the Chinese government because they don’t want to be held accountable for their own actions. That’s just childish behavior. Grow up if you want to join the big boys…

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Hong Kong's air quailty reaches new low





Yesterday, the air quality in Hong Kong deteriorated to record levels. It was so bad, it made the news in the NY Times.

Why has HK not adopted any policy to limit the amount of private vehicles on the road?

There are so many ways to do this but our government chooses to do nothing. They can toll cars for entering busy zones at specific times of the day. They can raise the fuel tax for private cars. They can make obtaining a license more expensive. Any of these should make some sort of impact on the number of cars on the road. Plus they generate revenue. It's just baffling why nothing is being done.

Why are dirty diesel burning trucks and buses not replaced by newer cleaner vehicles? This accounts for 33% of all trucks and buses in HK! What's the billions of dollars in surplus being spent on?

Why is it that a majority of our electricity still comes from burning coal and oil?

The air is so bad that we can longer see the brightly lit advertisements on the other side of the harbor clearly, even at night! So what do we do? We set up more and brighter advertisements and enormous LCD screens. Obviously, something is wrong with this trend. I can't be the only one who sees this.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Milgram experiment replicated. But why?


Anyone who has taken Intro Psych or ethics would have heard of the name Stanley Milgram. Here's the Wikipedia link to his most famous experiment back in the 1960s. In short, subjects were ordered to give increasingly severe electric shocks to another person. Most of the test subjects obeyed. What was unethical about it was not that someone was continuously shocked. That person was just an actor. But it was that it revealed a hideous dark side of the subject. They now have to live the rest of their lives knowing that they are capable of essentially killing another person just because someone told them to.

Recently, this experiment was replicated on a French TV show. See here for details. This begs the question: Why?

This has already been done. The results of this experiment was already well documented. So I suppose this is being done just to mess with people?

For the past several decades, the Milgram experiment was taught to all students in the scientific field. The purpose was to make them aware of ethics and so that such experiments do not happen ever again. Everyone who took part in replicating this experiment is just being sinister.