I’ve been swamped lately - book chapter editing while following the recent Wikipedia crises concerning identity hoax, deletion of articles and administrator wars.

But one tool that can still fill in the tiny minutes of free time is Twitter, a site that lets you display your mind-droppings to your friends and to the world. It’s actually a pretty simple idea. You know the “status message” you change on Skype, Google Talk or any instant messaging program, so you can say “Eating now” or “I got a new Nintendo Wii!”

Well imagine a whole site based around putting your current thoughts, gripes, links, accolades or goings-on for everyone to see. That’s Twitter. But not just that, you can link it to your cell phone and instant messaging programs. You can SMS in your current thoughts so everyone can see, or you can be notified by instant message when a friend drops a new brilliant idea.

It’s bizarre how cult-like the site has become. You can voyeuristically follow the lives of tech celebs like Joi Ito, Jimmy Wales, Steve Wozniak and pod-father Leo Laporte. It’s like each person having their own Times Square ticker. And while it wasn’t meant to be so, it’s also morphed into a mob-oriented instant messaging tool, with folks commenting on each others’ happening in a virtual commons.

An example of an exchange with Jimmy Wales as he travels the world meeting Wikipedians:

jwales Slightly waking up on night train to delhi from varanasi after astounding mud soaked jeep pushing adventures last night.

fuzheado Jimbo - You’re living the real India experience

Sometimes it can provide an insight into peoples’ lives as its happening. Perhaps too much insight. Joi Ito is now famously vegan, providing almost every lettuce leaf’s worth of detail on his Twitter feed.

bought some cow shit for the garden 10:12 PM February 27, 2007
Plowed garden and planted Broccoli, some Chinese leaf veggies and Soramame. 10:17 AM February 28, 2007
Eating fruit at my desk at Digital Garage about 24 hours ago

Steve Wozniak (loveable cofounder of Apple and Segway polo nut) has a dining philosophy a bit different than Joi:

Ice cream for dinner, fried fast food for lunch, Top Ramen for breakfast 05:35 PM February 24, 2007

Out for a walk… followed by hotdogs for dinner 04:29 PM February 25, 2007

Seeing Steve’s diet intertwined with Joi’s makes my stomach, well, twitter.

Singing up for Twitter is very simple and you can drive everything from just the Web page. And being fully Web 2.0, you can subscribe to your friends’ feeds by RSS, and there are a slew of clients out there to get your twitterlings up as fast as possible. But if it’s really Web 2.0, shouldn’t it be Twittr?

A report from the University of Colorado describe a weakness in Tor, a popular anonymity system and tool for getting around the Great Firewall. While it does take a fair amount of resources to compromise the anonymity, it is a cause for concern because it is significantly more feasable than previously thought. From their paper:

We show that an attacker can infiltrate the Tor network and can fully compromise the anonymity of a large percentage of users…

In our experiments conducted on our isolated Tor deployment consisting of 60 nodes, our attack was able to correlate over 46% of circuit-building requests through the entire network. This is a significant increase over the 0.70% analytical expectation assumed by many anonymity systems analysts… our attack performed far above expectations.

Here’s a summary and link to the Slashdot posting that brought attention to this.

Tor Open To Attack

“A group of researchers have written a paper that lays out an attack against Tor (PDF) in enough detail to cause Roger Dingledine a fair amount of heartburn. The essential avenue of attack is that Tor doesn’t verify claims of uptime or bandwidth, allowing an attacker to advertise more than it need deliver, and thus draw traffic. If the attacker controls the entry and exit node and has decent clocks, then the attacker can link these together and trace someone through the network.”

UPDATE (Feb 26 08:03:36 UTC): After just talking to the folks at the Tor project, it seems the threat is not as large as the paper has declared. Roger Dingledine and Shava Nerad of the project are incredibly sharp folks and promise to come out with an official response soon.

I was also concerned the paper was only a CS department report from the U of Colorado, and not an accepted conference or journal paper, meaning that no fellow researchers or folks in the field have endorsed their analysis. Some of the comments on Slashdot also agree that these are not brand new issues.

A new site called GreatFirewallofChina.net tries to bring attention to Internet blocking in the PRC by allowing folks to check sites for reachability within China. While there are a number of flaws to their methodology (a single test cannot give the full picture) it will be interesting to see what their results are.

Happy Chinese New Year, all.

I was watching an old PBS documentary about Communism, and was amused to see this p-r-o-paganda video (circa 1950) for an anti-spitting campaign. Here it is uploaded to YouTube:

It was an era where you had better heed the warnings of two girls in kerchiefs.

Of all the hygiene campaigns of the Mao era, this one is perhaps the one with the least amount of success.

Story from Pacific Epoch:

Shaanxi Jialong Science and Technology subsidiary ALONG MobileTechnologies announced that it will deploy over 1,000 Wi-Fi hotspots in Xi’an this year and plans to develop Xi’an into a “Wi-Fi City”, reports163.com.

The hotspots will be located in universities, train stations and airports.

UPDATE: A press release from ALONG.

technorati tags:china, wifi, xian

After a NY Times story about Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was published last week, many folks commented how small his office is, as seen in the news photo.

But what’s even more surprising for folks who believe in the stuff, is how incredibly bad the feng shui is for his office.

It’s a big no-no to have one’s back to the door. Feng shui theory says it exposes you to “poison arrows” (sha chi) making you nervous and twitchy. Even if you don’t believe in feng shui, you can imagine that having folks creep up or surprising you from behind is not a good thing.

And from Steve’s past performances (primal scream and “developers, developers“), you can see that bad feng shui has had an effect.

Beijing has come a long way in the last ten years, but it’s always lacked a decent English language bookstore. The Bookworm Cafe in Sanlitun has served this function with a lending library, but now Beijing has got a real shop.

Chaterhouse Booktrader has opened a new store in The Place, on DongDaQiao Lu in Chaoyang. (They also have two stores in Shanghai.) Go visit The Place and gawk at the large overhead video screen, but then head downstairs to the store where there are Western magazines, bestsellers and kids books you’re used to finding in Border’s or Barnes and Noble.

It’s still not a huge collection, but it’s a breakthrough for expats in Beijing who had to scrape by with the Xinhua bookstore’s selection of business books and Penguin paperbacks.