lisasong.com

Having trouble with my two web hosts recently.

ePowHost.com: they lost my files. I don’t know whether it was a mistake, or someone hacked it or what. Searched Web and saw others had similar problem with other hosts. I wonder whether they are all resalers of the same vendor?

Anyway, ePowHost is now just playing dead: they never replied to any of my inquiries, including how to get a refund.

dot5hosting.com: the site that I host terra-bonita.com. Terribly slow and downs all the time during the summer. It is clear that they are not capable of running this business: everything was behind.

Finding a new host is not fun: I need at least 200G space, MySQL 5, DB remote access and 10 or more addon domains. It is just incredible how hard it is to find a site with all those features. A couple of candidates (awardspace.com, bluehost.com, fastdomain.com) were so close, but in the end I gave up because of others reviews, some of which painfully reminded me of what I have now.

This is my first post after upgrading to WP 2.5.1

Liked the WYSIWYG editor feature. The tags may help too.

Still have one problem: search result from Google still points to my home page but not individual blog entry. Not sure how to fix that yet.

I am caught between Search-friendly and useability.

Calendar:
1. First choice: cheap, has everything I need, looks simple too.
http://www.easyphpcalendar.com/demoTOC.php ($20)
2. 2nd choice: a little pricy, looks pretty complicated, too much a tool by itself.
http://www.extrosoft.com/ ($50)

Community:
1. http://www.xoops.org/
XooPS: pretty complicated. Seems to have most of things. Widely supported/community. Many component for download.

1.???The limitation of current Internet study: the limitation of pure quantative approach->standard survey questionaire->uniform view point->mainstream vs. marginal circle (?????: e.g. question peasant women: what TV show you like most, answer: martial arts. Urban user vs. rural user (minority) of Net Bar.
2. Guo Liang: Entertainment Super Highway
– marginality: what peaked the most is also what has been lacking:
e.g. more people use Net to connect with colleagues and friends than with family members; more people find Net useful to improve governance and politics than other nations; more people with similar political views connection through the Net.
3. ????GNC (Gross National Coolness) or ?????? ?an article in Foreign Policy/Affairs)
???????????????
4. WIP Japan:
Net penatration: 2/3 (2005), 90% youth, high broadband, mobile internet user outnumbers pc internet, more women mobile internet users than male.
Bill Dutton: why time-diary? why measure time consumption? 5 min of knowledge vs. 5 hrs of information
5. Macau: 100% PC online, 80% broadband.
6. Hong Kong: 115% mobile phone penatration rate but less than 10% mobile internet user population.
Chinese content access almost 80% (2005) from 60% several years ago. Online shopping not taking off: fluctuate b/w 12-24%
7. Vebel: France
triple play: TV, Phone and Internet, 25% individual online, <10% household.

I promised myself that if I figured this one out I will put it in blog. Took me longer than necessary: somehow Comcast did not ask for user/password authentication but verizon did–plain text unencrypted!

Configure sendmail in general:
Add to /etc/mail/sendmail.mc
————————————————-
MASQUERADE_AS(`YOURDOMAIN.COM’)dnl
FEATURE(`allmasquerade’)dnl
FEATURE(`masquerade_envelope’)dnl
————-change
define(`SMART_HOST’,`SMTP.ISP.net’)
————-check
define(`confAUTH_OPTIONS’, `A y’)dnl

Update: with RH 9 Sendmail 8.12:
need to add the following to sendmail.mc:
FEATURE(`genericstable’, `hash /etc/mail/genericstable’)dnl
GENERICS_DOMAIN_FILE(`/etc/mail/genericsdomain’)dnl
——-and change/add:
FEATURE(masquerade_envelope)dnl
FEATURE(masquerade_entire_domain)dnl

**KEY**: need to add/change genericsdomain:
localhost.localdomain ISP.net (have not tried YOURDOMAIN since I don’t need one)
localhost ISP.net

One more thing:
Edit /etc/mail/access:
AuthInfo:SMTP.ISP.net “U:USERNAME” “I:USERNAME” “P:PSWD “M:LOGIN PLAIN”

$ touch /etc/mail/masq-domains
$ touch /etc/mail/genericsdomain
$ vi /etc/mail/genericstable:
root your_reply_to@ISP.net
$ makemap -r hash genericstable.db < genericstable
$ m4 ./sendmail.mc > /etc/sendmail.cf
$ /etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail restart

A summary article by Reuters.

Yahoo was accused of providing electronic records to Chinese authorities that led to an eight-year prison term for Li Zhi for subversion in 2003 and of helping to identify Shi Tao, who was accused of leaking state secrets abroad and jailed last year for 10 years.

Another interesting article from NYT. Looks like Mr. French is ready to write a book about censorship in China.

Some quotes:
A classmate, Tang Guochao, agreed. “A bulletin board is like a family, and in a family, I want my room to be clean and well-lighted, without dirty or dangerous things in it.”

In the past, China’s efforts to control the Internet have often foundered in the face of the curiosity and inventiveness of Web surfers, who constantly find ingenious ways to find content that is banned and to discuss controversial topics.

(Here is the delima, even the free press in the West does not want to reveal publicly how to access this underground internet, how does it make any difference to a public that is closely monitored?)

Here is an example of why some contents on the Net are better restricted.

Yuk.

Interesting article in the Economist: The party, the people and the power of cyber-talk

Sina Corporation in north-western Beijing, a score of censors sit in front of their screens. They are young employees whose job is to examine thousands of blogs and comments posted by internet-users on Sina’s news items.

Sina Corporation in north-western Beijing, a score of censors sit in front of their screens. They are young employees whose job is to examine thousands of blogs and comments posted by internet-users on Sina’s news items.

But nationalism has also provided a convenient cover for experimenting with new forms of mobilisation.

Taubman: internet policy and legitamization strategy.
China Cuba case studies (Boas):
Chat room administrators hire censors, or “Big Mamas,” to screen and quickly remove offensive material from bulletin boards.
Recent crackdowns on Internet cafés have encouraged their owners to keep a close eye on web
surfers, and they have also prompted café users to patrol their own activities.
Liu Yuan, “Café Crackdown: China Enlists the Public in Its Ongoing Campaign to Censor the Internet,” Asiaweek, February 2, 2001.
Dissidents like Lin Hai and Huang Qi have been arrested and tried for their Internet use, and their fates have been well-publicized in Chinese media, undoubtedly serving as a message to others.

U.S. schools are banning MySpace.com.., the teens were told to dismantle their Myspace.com accounts or similar sites with personal profiles and blogs
(http://www.dailyrecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051024/NEWS01/510240324)

As Yi Feng has argued, the likelihood of short-term political upheaval is lower in authoritarian regimes that
are perceived to have increased living standards and promoted economic growth.

China’s censorship standard (G.E. Gorman, China-bashing in the internet censorship wars, PDF locker)

Singapore: censorship desired, popular (Dr. Peng Hwa Ang and Ms. Berlinda Nadarajan, PDF locker)

Some history of regulations (STATE CONTROL OF THE INTERNET IN CHINA, reg_hist. PDF locker)

This study has found that censorship of the Internet is commonplace in most regions of the world. In some countries, for example in China and Burma, the level of control is such that the Internet has relatively little value as a medium for organised free speech, and its used could well create additional dangers at a personal level for activists.
Also, page 54-55
(Privacy International, Censorship, PDF locker)