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Needles in a haystackThe problem of sifting through vast amounts of data was highlighted by the US 9/11 Commission, which concluded that the American intelligence community knew in advance that the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were in the offing, they just didn't know they knew it. The pieces were all there for anyone who knew to look for them, needles buried in a haystack of irrelevancies. The answer in both America and Britain has been to collect more haystacks: useless, indiscriminately acquired information onpeople who've done nothing to arouse suspicion. We even inveigle our citizens to become amateur curtain-twitchers and pecksniffs, demanding that they report "suspicious" activity to the authorities.

This bill doesn't legalize every part of Bush's illegal warrantless eavesdropping program but it takes a large step beyond FISA towards what Bush did. There was absolutely no reason to destroy the FISA framework, which is already an extraordinarily pro-Executive instrument that vests vast eavesdropping powers in the President, in order to empower the President to spy on large parts of our international communications with no warrants at all. This was all done by invoking the scary spectre of Terrorism -- "you must give up your privacy and constitutional rights to us if you want us to keep you safe" -- and it is Obama's willingness to embrace that rancid framework, the defining mindset of the Bush years, that is most deserving of intense criticism here.

Beyond that, this attitude that we should uncritically support Obama in everything he does and refrain from criticizing him is unhealthy in the extreme. No political leader merits uncritical devotion -- neither when they are running for office nor when they occupy it -- and there are few things more dangerous than announcing that you so deeply believe in the Core Goodness of a political leader, or that we face such extreme political crises that you trust and support whatever your Leader does, even when you don't understand it or think that it's wrong. That's precisely the warped authoritarian mindset that defined the Bush Movement and led to the insanity of the post-9/11 Era, and that uncritical reverence is no more attractive or healthy when it's shifted to a new Leader.

With large numbers of Chinese officials handling foreign affairs and nationality issues, there is no way that China could not understand what the Dalai Lama says. It is the Dalai Lama and his government in exile, who do not understand China. Just last week, before the latest demonstrations began, China accused the Dalai Lama of working to sabotage the Beijing Olympics. The reaction was exactly what China wanted: the Dalai Lama declared his firm support for China’s Olympics.

In India, the Dalai Lama's stated uncertainty about selecting his successor, combined with the fractures that lie under the surface of the exiled community, may make it likely that at his passing he will leave a resident Tibetan refugee community adrift. For all of his missteps in dealing with China, the Dalai Lama's achievement in securing the cohesion and stability of the exiled community is considerable. And he is the most universally recognisable symbol of Tibet. Given what has just transpired in Tibet, China feels that the elimination of that symbol can come none too soon.

When a small campaign becomes a permanent organization, there are often difficulties in scaling.  A small group can communicate with supporters through a Google Group, but what if you have multiple constituencies or you want to record information about your supporters that will help you communicate with them effectively? Wouldn’t you like to manage your “relationships” better? Or, be more efficient in sending out appeals and updates? Tap the right quarters when it comes to fund-raising? Know exactly who your potential supporters could be?

It also notes that CiviCRM is also used by many other large NGOs such as Amnesty International, Creative Commons and the Wikimedia Foundation for their fundraising. And there have been also cases of very large record sets being used with one company claiming to have set up CiviCRM with a set of over 3 million constituents .

Maidan was a group of tech-savvy pro-democracy activists who used the Internet as a tool to support their movement. Maidan in Ukranian means public square and Maidan’s website features the slogal “You CAN chnage the world you live in. And you can do it now. In Ukraine.”

The main activity of Maidan was election monitoring and networking with other pro-democracy organizations around Eastern Europe.

“websites cannot produce an activist organization.”

THE MCCAIN NEGATIVE WORDCLOUDWords Not in McCain’s Tech Policy | blog |social network | collaboration | hyperlink | democracy | google | wikipedia | open access | open source | standards | gnu | linux | | BitTorrent | anonymity | facebook | wiki | free speech | games | comcast | media concentration | media | lolcats |

Even if we ignore the cultural, social, and democratic aspects of the Net, even if we consider the Net to be nothing but a way to move content to “consumers” (his word), McCain still gets it wrong. There’s nothing in his policy about encouraging the free flow of ideas. Instead, when McCain thinks about ideas, he thinks about how to increase the walls around them by cracking down on “pirates” and ensuring ” fair rewards to intellectual property” (which, technically speaking, I think isn’t even English). Ideas and culture are, to John McCain, business commodities. He totally misses the dramatic and startling success of the Web in generating new value via open access to ideas and cultural products. The two candidates’ visions of the Internet could not be clearer. We can have a national LAN designed first and foremost to benefit business, and delivered to passive consumers for whom the Net is a type of cable TV. Or, we can have an Internet that is of the people, by the people, for the people. Is it going to be our Internet or theirs?

“Senator McCain’s technology plan doesn’t put Americans first—it is a rehash of tax breaks and giveaways to the big corporations and their lobbyists who advise the McCain campaign. This plan won’t do enough for hardworking Americans who are still waiting for competitive and affordable broadband service at their homes and businesses. It won’t do enough to ensure a free and open Internet that guarantees freedom of speech. It won’t do anything to ensure that we use technology to bring transparency to government and free Washington from the grip of lobbyists and special interests. Senator McCain’s plan would continue George Bush’s neglect of this critical sector and relegate America’s communications infrastructure to second-class status. That’s not acceptable,” said William Kennard, Former Chairman, Federal Communications Commission.

著名的希特勒奥运会，不用多说了。有点诡异的是，CCAV网站上将这次奥运会之所以能够在柏林举行的原因之一归结为美国奥委会委员一贯“玩弄”体育与政治分开的把戏。

奥委会又在“玩弄”体育和政治分开的把戏了。他们同时给中国大陆和台湾发去了参赛的邀请函。结果台湾抢先一步同意，使得大陆方面愤而放弃参加比赛，并且宣布只要有台湾在的奥运会，中国大陆就绝不会参与。

从此之后虽然中国体育代表团每届都有资格参加比赛，但因为政治问题，一直拒绝派团进入奥运会。

Shenyang, literally meaning “the city to the north of Shen River” and capital of the Liaoning province, is touting itself as China’s “next tourist destination.” But whether you are visiting the ancient pagodas of Old City or the official “High-tech Industrial Development Zone” the tourist brochures won’t mention the city’s male and female sex workers who mostly come from poor rural communities in search of talked-up urban opportunities. In partnership with the Ai Zhi Yuan Zhu Center for Health and Education documentary filmmaker Wei Zhang will train male and female sex workers who use the AZYZ center how to maintain a blog and upload short video documentaries to share their experiences, opinions, and troubles in order to promote more understanding of the region’s sex worker population.

How can official China possibly do such a clumsy and self-defeating job of presenting itself to the world? China, like any big, complex country, is a mixture of goods and bads. But I have rarely seen a governing and “communications” structure as consistent in hiding the good sides and highlighting the bad.

whether digital resistance poses a threat to authoritarian rule?

test whether the diffusion of information communication technology—measured by increasing numbers of Internet and mobile phone users—is a statistically significant predictor of anti-government protests after controlling for other causes of protests.

The cluster of countries with high levels of mobile phones produced a statistically significant and positive relationship between the number of mobile phone users and protest frequency. In other words, an increase in the number of mobile phones is associated with an increase in the number of protests.

The games have been billed as China's "coming out party" to the world. They are far more significant than that. These Olympics are the coming out party for a disturbingly efficient way of organizing society, one that China has perfected over the past three decades, and is finally ready to show off. It is a potent hybrid of the most powerful political tools of authoritarianism communism -- central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance -- harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism. Some call it "authoritarian capitalism," others "market Stalinism," personally I prefer "McCommunism."

By next year, the Chinese internal security market is set to be worth $33-billion. Several of the larger Chinese players in the field have recently taken their stocks public on U.S. exchanges, hoping to cash in the fact that, in volatile times, security and defense stocks are seen as the safe bets. China Information Security Technology, for instance, is now listed on the NASDAQ and China Security and Surveillance is on the NYSE. A small clique of U.S. hedge funds has been floating these ventures, investing more than $150-million in the past two years. The returns have been striking. Between October 2006 and October 2007, China Security and Surveillance's stock went up 306 percent.

Ever since the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, U.S. companies have been barred from selling police equipment and technology to China, since lawmakers feared it would be directed, once again, at peaceful demonstrators. That law has been completely disregarded in the lead up to the Olympics, when, in the name of safety for athletes and VIPs (including George W. Bush), no new toy has been denied the Chinese state.

"The heavy presence of Chinese (People's) Liberation Army officers throughout the proceedings left many wondering exactly what image the hosts were intending to project to the international community...," the newspaper said. "At a time when Tibet, Darfur and China's broader human rights record are proving delicate issues for Beijing organizers, the move to present thousands of drilled, sobersided army officers ... was surprising for its brazenness; a none too subtle projection of strength," it said. Asked about the military theme, Zhang Jigang, chief of the People's Liberation Army dance troupe, told reporters there were "excellent performers and directors" in the military. "I think this is a Chinese characteristic," he said. "All of the military arms have ... have wonderful acrobats and opera troupes. We should make use of such resources."

百度否认了。其他网站没有发表声明。不过网友们却在不断用各种方式探求真相，不断提出质疑。 　　为什么三聚氰胺事件里百度搜索结果比谷歌少？为什么新浪新闻标题的源代码里里“伊利”成了“伊<！>利”……

A United Nations agency is quietly drafting technical standards, proposed by the Chinese government, to define methods of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous.

The Chinese author of the document, Huirong Tian, did not respond to repeated interview requests. Neither did Jiayong Chen of China's state-owned ZTE Corporation, the vice chairman of the Q6/17's parent group who suggested in an April 2007 meeting that it address IP traceback.

Another technologist, Jacob Appelbaum, one of the developers of the Tor anonymity system, also was alarmed. "The technical nature of this 'feature' is such a beast that it cannot and will not see the light of day on the Internet," Appelbaum said. "If such a system was deployed, it would be heavily abused by precisely those people that it would supposedly trace. No blackhat would ever be caught by this."

wow,nice!melamine desert!! so funny to see this vedio while the production is in quality trouble now ashamed

天涯头条] 井冈山支教回来谈感受 （此帖被封）

为什么有些人还念念不忘三年前在南昌搞的那次闹事？

Sure, there's the whole oppressive communism thing and the tragic earthquake and the pollution and the overcrowding, but Chinese people may never again have to see a Sharon Stone movie. Now, to be fair, no one here watches Sharon Stone movies, either, but we still have to see ads for them.

I will never forget my first visit, in 2003, to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing. I was welcomed by Wang Luolin, the academy's vice-president, whose grandfather had translated Marx's Das Kapital into Chinese, and Huang Ping, a former Red Guard. Sitting in oversized armchairs, we sipped ceremonial tea and introduced ourselves. Wang Luolin nodded politely and smiled, then told me that his academy had 50 research centres covering 260 disciplines with 4,000 full-time researchers. As he said this, I could feel myself shrink into the seams of my vast chair: Britain's entire think tank community is numbered in the hundreds, Europe's in the low thousands; even the think-tank heaven of the US cannot have more than 10,000. But here in China, a single institution—and there are another dozen or so think tanks in Beijing alone—had 4,000 researchers. Admittedly, the people at CASS think that many of the researchers are not up to scratch, but the raw figures were enough.

China, according to the new political thinkers, will do things the other way around: using elections in the margins but making public consultations, expert meetings and surveys a central part of decision-making. This idea was described pithily by Fang Ning, a political scientist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He compared democracy in the west to a fixed-menu restaurant where customers can select the identity of their chef, but have no say in what dishes he chooses to cook for them. Chinese democracy, on the other hand, always involves the same chef—the Communist party—but the policy dishes which are served up can be chosen "à la carte."