Archive for July 2006
One of those warm fuzzy feeling stories.
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More on their win over bureaucracy. And the main site.
[Via MeFi]
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Stephen Hawking asks the Internet a profound question..
No comments · Posted by Splasho in Uncategorized
In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?
I fear he may not get very intelligent responses from what I’ve seen of Yahoo Answers so far.
[Via GB]
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In fact I could have denied you access as you loaded this page. I decided to be generous.
If you wish, conduct this test:
- Try searching for anything uncontroversial on Yahoo China, just to confirm that it works.
- Then if you wish, click this link (Warning, you will lose access to Yahoo China searches. Do NOT do this if you live in China, it could be dangerous). That page forces your browser (using an Iframe) to secretly search for “Falun Gong” on Yahoo China (you can do it manually if you prefer).
- Once you’ve clicked it, you’ll be able to access Yahoo China but searching for anything will give this error message.
I don’t know how long these errors last. It appears to be based on IP address since clearing cookies has no effect.
The main issue with this isn’t the malicious ends people can put it to with iframes but the fact that Yahoo cancels any subsequent connections after a certain keyword is entered in their search engine. However much I dislike Google’s censorship at least they tell us when entries have been excluded. The other disturbing thing is that the only way Yahoo can accomplish this is to have a list of IP addresses which have been banned for these queries, not hard for Chinese authorities to get their hands on.
If a very large website popular with Chinese people implemented this then it would hopefully give so many false results that it would be impossible to punish people for these searches. It would also destroy Yahoo’s search advertising revenue and perhaps make them change their policy.
This post is based on a Google Blogoscoped post. I just wanted to demonstrate the iframe possibility. Please see the post and view its discussion.
Digg It
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An out of date film but well worth watching: SPIN. (Maybe biased to a certain extent)
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ASX video. Very worth watching
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If you haven’t seen this ‘piano’; you really should, click things like “Beethoven” on the right for demos.
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I don’t think these people people were being sarcastic
[Via kottke]
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I can’t believe this is happening!
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