Billionaire Warren Buffet at his annual shareholder’s meeting this week warned about getting too sanctimonious in criticizing China. Via The Standard (HK).

Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett issued strong support for the Beijing Olympics saying any effort to boycott the games would be “a terrible mistake.”

“The United States had a similar history of human rights trouble. A black man’s vote once counted as only of a white man’s vote and women were not allowed to vote at all, but in the end those issues were resolved,” he told a crowd of 31,000 in Nebraska.

Good for Buffett, one of the few folks putting things in historical perspective, something news outlets in the States fail to do.

Vice-chairman Charlie Munger via the Wall Street Journal was even more emphatic:

[Munger] didn’t pull any punches. For critics of China, “ask yourself the question: Is China more or less imperfect as the decades have gone by?” Mr. Munger, a professed admirer of Asian cultures, said. “The answer is that China is moving in the right direction. I think it’s the worst thing to pick on something about somebody you don’t like and obsess about it.”

Not sure where Narus.com gets their info, but they seem to have the scoop on the details of the CNN DDOS attack last week.

Multiple sites of CNN (www.cnn.com, www4.cnn.com, edition.cnn.com) were the target of these attacks. NarusInsight Secure Suite (NSS) reported 2 different kinds of attacks going towards CNN - ICMP flood attacks and TCP SYN flood attacks. Interestingly the attacks had very similar signatures, e.g. an instance of a SYN flood involved the attacker distributing his packets across multiple source ports while sending exactly the same number of packets per source port). This can be expected given that the hacker group had made it easy for the novice who could download a script to launch the attack. The highest bandwidth attack seen by NSS was an 80 Mbps SYN flood attack, while the others were much less than that.

They seem to think that the DDOS attack was not successful, saying, “Fortunately, there were no large scale attacks and CNN.com was very much up and running.”

However there was widespread news of flakiness for a whole day, with China and US users finding timeouts and unreachable servers.

You have to give China’s citizens credit — when they’re unleashed (no pun intended) and able to express their dismay, they can get creative. Over at Shanghaiist, they have the latest sign to make the rounds, declaring on the taxicab: “refuse to carry frenchmen and dogs.”

Of course all good moviegoers and Bruce Lee fans will recognize this as a nod to the film “Fist of Fury” where Lee kicks down the hated sign, “No dogs and Chinese allowed.”

Roland Soong of ESWN did a good post in helping to decipher whether this sign was authentic or not. Though given the current climate, accuracy isn’t exactly first on peoples’ list of priorities.

An ominous message showed up early Sunday on the Web site of The Sports Network (TSN), one of the more popular sports news destinations in the US:

Please Note

The Sports Network website and other major news sites have been hacked by a political entity from China, and as a result are temporarily unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope to be back up and running as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Sports Network Management

Reached by phone at TSN’s main office in Pennsylvania, statistician Bob Nelson said the site was hacked “by a group out of China” early Sunday morning around 2 a.m. EST. It was after the Mets-Phillies game where the public site and the data TSN sends to clients were affected.

Staff took down the public website after it had been vandalized with the message, “Tibet was, is and always will be a part of China.” It’s not clear what “political entity” the site outage message refers to.
TSN was working to get the site back up sometime Monday.

For a snapshot of The Sports Network site in normal operation, please see the Google cache.

How did things get so bad?

This is not going to end well.

ABC News is getting roundly criticized about the way it produced the Obama-Clinton debates yesterday. It’s was so bad, there are over 12,000 comments on the ABC News site related to the debate. A sample:

I am disgusted with ABC, Stephanopoulos and Gibson. The “Debate” was nothing more than tabloid journalism. It was a disgrace. There were two hours to ask questions that would showcase the candidates’ policies and approaches to some of “THE” toughest challenges this country has ever faced and you chose to spend most of the time on nonsense. From snipers to Jeremiah Wright to lapel pins. Do you think that’s what we care about? ABC, Stephanopoulos and Gibson you owe Americans a profound apology for this wasted opportunity and their sensationalism of non issues.

This appears to be more than typical “astroturfing.” These are folks who actually took the time to write angry grafs like the above, rather than simply pressing a “vote” button.
Perhaps more to the point was this from Will Bunch from the Philly Daily News:

With your performance tonight — your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods, punctuated by inane “issue” questions that in no way resembled the real world concerns of American voters — you disgraced my profession of journalism, and, by association, me and a lot of hard-working colleagues who do still try to ferret out the truth, rather than worry about who can give us the best deal on our capital gains taxes. But it’s even worse than that. By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself. Indeed, if I were a citizen of one of those nations where America is seeking to “export democracy,” and I had watched the debate, I probably would have said, “no thank you.” Because that was no way to promote democracy.

Touche.

I’ve learned something this US election cycle.

Instead of paying phony lip service to the NRA and right-wing gun lobby like Hillary “Annie Oakley” Clinton, every American politician should have a picture on file, waiting in the wings, like this:

Of course, with several captions ready to go:

• “The wife and I have a different idea when it comes to ’shooting the breeze.’”
• “Yes honey, next time you can use the M4 Carbine and I’ll settle for the nancy H&K MP5 9mm peashooter.”
• “See? Not all journalists are left wing crunchy granola bleeding heart liberals. We shoot to kill.”
• “Live fire exercises with 5.56mm rounds? No big deal. I’ve been through Wikipedia edit wars with more casualties.”

PS: Barack, mocking Hillary Clinton probably wasn’t a very smart move for you.

Just when you thought the US was simply a bit confused about the Middle East (Sunni-Shia, Iraq-Iran and all that) Stephen Hadley, national security advisor to President Bush, flubs it regarding Tibet.

Interviewed on this ABC News This Week, he says “Nepal” instead of “Tibet” more than a “half-dozen times“. But don’t take my word for it, see the video and transcript here. (ABC News had to put “sic” in multiple times to explain the oddity).

“The way to deal with the issue of Nepal (sic) is not by some — a statement that you’re not going to the opening ceremonies and say, therefore, I checked the Nepal (sic)box.”

Instead, Hadley said the President is opting to pursue a broader diplomatic approach. “What he’s doing on Nepal (sic) is what we think the international community ought to be doing, which is approaching the Chinese privately through diplomatic channels and sending a very firm message of concern for human rights, a concern for what’s happening in Nepal (sic), urging the Chinese government to understand that it is in their interest to reach out to representatives of the Dalai Lama, and to show, while the whole world is watching China, that they are determined to treat their citizens with dignity and respect. There is an opportunity here.”

If you remember, it was Stephen Hadley who as deputy national security advisor admitted responsibility for the “16 words” about yellowcake uranium that slipped into Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address. Of course we all know now it turned out to be false. Afterwards, he submitted his resignation to the president, but Bush did not accept it and instead, he’s now top national security advisor.

I have never been a political animal and have purposely steered clear of cheerleading in that arena. But when the very core of civil liberties in my ‘homeland’ of the US are being flushed down the toilet, it’s not politics but an absolute imperative to wake people up.

This is the case with telecom immunity, the move by Bush and every single Republican senator to give blanket immunity to whatever actions the telcos took to assist the US government to tap phones or monitor conversations (with or without a warrant) since Sepember 11, 2001. What’s even more disgraceful is the “opposition” party — voted in as a check to the corporate friendly Republicans — has been splintered and cannot even fight this provision.

So let’s just take a look at the big three candidates left, all senators, on this issue. Their vote on Feb 12.

• Bill: S 2248
• Vote description: Dodd Amdt. No. 3907; To strike the provisions providing immunity from civil liability to electronic communication service providers for certain assistance provided to the Government.

• McCain: no
• Obama: yes
• Clinton: no vote

That by itself makes up my mind, unequivocally, who should be America’s Next Top Leader.

A group of Wikimedia Foundation staff and volunteers served on the jury to decide on where to hold the Wikimania conference in 2008, and selected Alexandria, Egypt. (Full disclosure: I served nominally as one of the three moderators of the process, but did not take part in the decisionmaking itself.)

I have to say it’s an exciting choice. The New Library will be the host, and will be sponsoring much of the conference for this historic homecoming to the most significant repository of human knowledge in ancient times. The public relations value and the seeding of interest in the Middle East and Africa is a great opportunity.

However, the choice has not been without controversy. David Strauss was one of the more vocal critics, alluding to Egypt’s treatment of women, LGBT and dissidents. His initial post:

I’m offended that the desire to have Wikimania hop around the globe (rotation) trumps the egregious history Egypt has with LGBT and other civil rights (local laws). While visitors to Egypt are certainly not at the same risk, I refuse to spend any money in a country that — as recently as 2004 — sentenced someone to 17 years of prison and two years of hard labor for posting a personal ad on a gay website[1]. A blogger was imprisoned in 2007 for four years for “insulting Islam and defaming the President of Egypt.”[2] Jimmy Wales even attended the Amnesty conference denouncing the censorship. No legal or cultural reforms since give me confidence that the situation has improved.

After a followup thread, there were some folks who agreed with him, but there has been no large outcry. Most folks seem excited and in support of the historic context and chance to engage a new community.

The choice of whether to boycott or engage has been a tough one. It happens with the Olympics, on trade, on technology transfer, and choosing conference venues. Given the international makeup of the Wikipedia community you’re not going to get consensus. When we chose Boston two years ago, there were folks who were upset because of the US’s foray into Iraq and the harsh requirements for visas.

Jimmy Wales has noted this, and has chosen “engagement” as his stance.

In honor of David’s concerns, I have decided to make the title of my own talk at Wikimania 2008 “Free knowledge and human rights” and I will use this opportunity to speak out against censorship and other violations of human rights around the world, including examples from Egypt.

Phoebe Ayers, who served on the jury, mentioned that the process is not perfect and that the team is willing to re-evaluate the criteria for future cycles. But this particular decision is final, and it seems on balance rather well supported.

She perhaps summed it up best.

Wikimania and Wikimedia are both global in scope, which means that while we can condemn censorship and loss of human rights everywhere we must also take into account a global range of values. Our projects focus specifically on free knowledge, and I expect that will be highlighted at the conference.