From Beijing, access to www.google.com has been spotty the last 36 hours from my home DSL connection, and is now completely inaccessible. Hope it’s just a temporary glitch, but will try it from other connections around Beijing later. This might be related to a famous upcoming anniversary.

UPDATE (12:40pm) - Seems this is not isolated. Tests from a coffee shop with a public Internet terminal (a) and hotel with open wifi (b) show similar results in Beijing, and is confirmed by various reports from others in Shanghai and Guangdong - “www.google.com.” is inaccessible in significant parts of the PRC. Curiously, no other major search engines are affected, and “www.google.cn”, “news.google.com” and “mail.google.com” are accessible.

(a) IP: 222.128.xxx.xxx
ASN: 4814 [CHINA169-BBN (CNCGROUP IP network¡ªChina169 Beijing Broadband Network)]
Near: Beijing, Guangdong

(b) IP: 218.106.xxx.xxx
ASN: 17620 [CNCGROUP-BJ (CNCGROUP IP network of Beijing region MAN network)]
Near: Beijing, Guangdong

Caveat: Results are coming from Beijing and one particular ISP (CNC). Results may vary by locale and provider. One person pointed out that this might just be an accidental glitch in the installation of a new phase of the Great Firewall. As you can see, diagnosing the GFW is particularly tough.

UPDATE (1:00pm) - Added “www.google.cn” to list of OK sites. Tuned the wording, adding, “in significant parts of the PRC.”

UPDATE (1:50pm) - A workaround has been found for now. The problem is that “www.google.com.” resolves like this when using CNC’s name server (using the dig utility):

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.google.com. 603287 IN CNAME www.l.google.com.
www.l.google.com. 79 IN CNAME www-china.l.google.com.
www-china.l.google.com. 25 IN A 66.249.89.99

That IP address is the problem as something (GFW?) breaks the connection when the HTTP headers are being sent back to your browser. However, if you do a DNS lookup of “www.google.com.” outside of China, you’ll find other addresses. The following two worked for “Google English”:

http://216.239.37.99/
http://216.239.37.104/

Try these two, and it should work.

UPDATE (2:30pm) - For now, it appears “http://www.google.com” works again, as the 66.249.89.99 IP address seems to go through. Keep those two IP addresses above handy though.

UPDATE (2:55pm) - Though “www.google.com” is back, seems that “news.google.com” is now inaccessible with the headers problem. In advance of the fourth of this month, I’m sure there will be other ups/downs for web sites outside the PRC.

UPDATE (3:00pm) - Seems both “www.google.com” and “news.google.com” are inaccessible. The “hack” above for using the raw IPs will get you to “www.google.com” but to access Google News, you will have to hack your hosts file (Windows) or /etc/hosts file (Mac and Linux). Put an entry like this:

216.239.37.104 news.google.com

into the appropriate place in your operating system. See the following directions: for Windows and Mac. (The 216.239.37.99 address above seems to be inaccessible now).

Another accolade for Wikipedia:

Byte Level Research published the 2006 edition of The Web Globalization Report Card and, once again, Google has emerged on top. This year, Google ranks as the best of 300 web sites in 22 industries. Wikipedia finished in second place, proving that you don’t need to be a global corporation to develop a successful global Web site. HP finished in third place, down from second place in 2005. IKEA, Volvo and DHL also rank in this year’s top ten.

The Beijing area has been hit by eight sandstorms this spring (since March), and according to a story today, it’s due to several factors:

• Desertification by overgrazing (330+ million goat and sheep)
• Lower water tables due to drought and poor water management
• Tree planting slowing but not stopping desertification

As for some hard numbers, from Worldwatch.org:

According to China’s State Environmental Protection Agency, the timing of the first sandstorm moved up by a week in 2006, and the sandstorm-affected area has extended beyond 3 million square kilometers…

The poor weather conditions have cast a cloud over Beijing’s Blue Sky project, thwarting municipal efforts to improve air quality. In the period from April 1–18, the city reported only five blue-sky days.

A May 12 story had some interesting stats:

The monitoring task is enormous, with about 9,000 construction sites in the city. Samples have been taken at 280 sites in recent weeks, and 59 were found to have excessive levels of dust, Li said…

To combat the problem, 7,100 old diesel buses and 35,000 ageing taxis were taken off the city’s roads from 2000 to 2005. About 2,700 buses, which run on natural gas, were also introduced.

This year, Beijing Municipal Committee of Communication plans to take a further 8,000 taxis and 2,000 buses out of service.

The first time I experienced a sandstorm in Beijing, I thought it was just “pollution as usual” until a friend told me the cinnamon coating was not normal. People’s Daily also has something about how countries are working together on this problem.

Solve this equation:

Wiki x (Survivor + Lost) = ?

You get Tribe Wanted, a really neat experiment to help a Fiji island build a community by volunteers (well, paying volunteers).

Today in Xinhua, a brutally honest assessment of the delay to issue 3G mobile licenses in China (from Shenzhen Daily):

China has again delayed the issue of licenses for third generation, or 3G, phones until late 2006 or 2007.

Since 2002, the telecommunications industry has lost count of the number of times China has delayed the issue of 3G licenses. The industry had thought the nation’s first 3G licenses might be issued May 17, World Telecommunications Day, but nothing happened.

If you’re not familiar with the 3G landscape, this is the most important part of the article:

There are three available 3G technologies, which provide high transfer data speed and allow users to download movies and hold video conferences on cell phones. They are the U.S.-developed CDMA2000 (Code Division Multiple Access 2000), European-developed WCDMA (Wideband CDMA) and China’s TD-SCDMA (Time Division-Synchronous CDMA).

Analysts said China will issue a national TD-SCDMA license first, then issue two other licenses later to support the homegrown standard. China’s standard is not fully ready for commercial use, which forced the government to delay issuing the licenses.

TD-SCDMA is a mouthful, but it’s important to the creation of a homegrown standard, not unlike what Japan did with PDC or the US did with CDMA in their 2G expansions.

You may know the name Jimmy Wales as the founder of Wikipedia, but Larry Sanger was the person instrumental in starting the nascent online encyclopedia project. These days he’s working on a new Digital Universe project that also aims to create a sum of all human knowledge too with a more controlled model, and he’s been busy.

He recently wrote on Kuro5hin about the new project.

what I’m going to suggest next is going to be even more unpopular: that the best, future methods of collaboration online will combine the openness of projects like Wikipedia with expert oversight. I favor open meritocracies. That’s what I explain and argue for here, even if many people rake me over the coals for propounding this radical idea. 

There has been a long standing tension between the ex-chief of Wikipedia and the current community. I admit that even I have contributed to the back-and-forth. But I had the privilege of spending a day talking about the project with Larry last year when he visited Asia, and there is certianly a lot of ideas worth merit in the Digital Universe project. He points out the differences he has with Wiki-like projects:

My take on the future of collaboratively-developed content is importantly different from that which prevails on Wikipedia, Slashdot, Kuro5hin, and most of the Blogosphere that comments on this stuff–i.e., the websites and Internet projects that most closely tracks developments in online collaboration. I boldly submit that my take is not only different, it is more mature and better-developed than the prevailing view of online collaboration, according to which, as far as I can tell, collaboration is best done when anarchy prevails, anonymity is expected, and hard-won expertise is at best ignored and at worst an object of sophomoric contempt. Not only do I have these philosophical or policy disagreements, I think that focus on tools like wikis, to the exclusion of projects and their special requirements, has led to widespread indifference to whole classes of potential new kinds or systems of collaboration. At any rate, I think and hope that those who theorize about online collaboration will find something new and worth thinking about here.

The whole essay is at his site. Having multiple entities trying out different models for online collaboration and participation should be encouraged. Even though it is hot technology now, we should not be ruled by the “tyranny of wiki-fundamentalism.”

If you use Google Mail, you should ALWAYS take advantage of a great feature - accessing mail over a secure connection via https. It’s easy. Just access Gmail using the address https://mail.google.com. Not only is your password not passed over the Internet in the clear, the entire session is encrypted and untappable. This will prevent anyone from snooping on your email as it travels from Google’s server (likely in California) to where you are. Gmail is so quick, you’ll never notice the difference in speed. This is not very well publicized, but it’s an excellent feature.

Is it only for the paranoid? No. Reasons for using this feature - you’re using a Wifi hostspot where Internet traffic can be snooped; you’re using a broadband connection in a hotel where others can read your mail; you don’t want a government agency snooping on your messages; you’re in China and don’t want your incoming/outgoing mail to be filtered; you don’t want your contacts viewed by others; and it’s just a good idea.

(If you are using it in China, it can mean the difference between an outgoing email making it through, or being blocked.)

If you are not a user of Google Mail, it really is the best one around. And Yahoo, Hotmail and other free Web-based email systems don’t offer this feature. They may securely transmit your password, but the rest of your session is in the clear. If you can, make the move.

(For other security tips, see the page here called Security Tips for Journalists.)

The NYTimes has a good story about DailyKOS “blog” and how it’s spawned a real-life gathering for a YearlyKOS convention in Las Vegas. (Hat tip to Leonard Witt at PJNet).

[DailyKOS] is now less a blog than a civic phenomenon. With some 600,000 visitors a day, Daily Kos reaches more Americans — albeit like-minded Americans — than all but a handful of the largest daily newspapers. The Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly, recently profiled a 23-year-old law student who writes on Daily Kos’s front page under the pseudonym Georgia10, positing that she may well be the most-read political writer in the city, even though few people know her real name. (For the record, it’s Georgia Logothetis, and she lives with her parents.) In this way, Daily Kos and other blogs resemble a political version of those escapist online games where anyone with a modem can disappear into an alternate society, reinventing himself among neighbors and colleagues who exist only in a virtual realm. It is not so much a blog as a travel destination, a place where what you have to say can be more important — at least for a few hours each day — than who you are or what you do.

DailyKOS is one of the most interesting citizens media experiments out there, and is shortchanged by being commonly referred to as a “blog.” The majority of its content is in the “Diaries” which are contributed by anyone who has an “aged” account (to prevent spamming). There are dozens of regular contributors who get “Recommended” up by readers so these stories get promoted on the front page. There are also legions of first-time diarists who become overnight successes, by providing their own personal stories or passionate views on local politics.

The conservative side of the spectrum was so impressed with the liberal DailyKOS community, it has started a similar site using the same Scoop software, called RedState.org. It’s not nearly as popular as DailyKOS, but the spread of these sites beyond “tech portals” like Slashdot.org signal a coming of age for self-regulating user-contributed content communities.

I pointed this out at the recent WeMedia conference in the UK - news organizations need to start understanding the realm of citizen journalism beyond blogs. Interpreting individual bloggers as modern day “columnists” is obvious. But mainstream news organizations will be surprised how the role of “editing” is being done quite well by intelligent crowds of contributors, and that the never ending debate of, “Can you trust a blog?” becomes a lot more interesting.

From RAWStory, May 28:

On its 45th anniversary, Amnesty International has launched a Website to combat online censorship, with the support of The Observer, a weekly British newspaper…

At Irrepressible.info net users are asked to sign a pledge “to call on all governments and companies to ensure the Internet is a force for political freedom, not repression.” So far, at the time of this writing, the site claims that 6572 users have signed on.

The site has a section for “Take action to free Shi T*o“. As of May 29, 9:00am Beijing time, the site is accessible inside China. Care to take any bets on how long that will last?

Leo Laporte and Chris DiBona do a good indepth interview with Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia on the FLOSS Weekly, a podcast that does not shy away from talking about deep technical issues. Deserves a good listen.