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.

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.

Business Week has a writeup of Baidu’s Wikipedia “competitor” Baidu Baike, which is a creation of the largest search engine company in China. It says it’s been around for 19 months, and lifts content from Wikipedia’s Chinese edition without proper attribution and inclusion of the GNU Free Documentation License. Since Chinese Wikipedia is blocked in China, it’s no surprise Baidu Baike is the most popular online encyclopedia in China.

Today, Baidu Baike is the leading encyclopedia online in China, and the second-largest Net encyclopedia anywhere, after the English-language version of Wikipedia. But the company has drawn fire for its success from some critics who say it has been built on copyright violations and complicity with government censorship. Wikipedia clearly believes that Baidu has crossed an ethical line, although the American company is planning no legal action to stop what it believes is plagiarism on the part of Baidu. “We only appeal to their moral judgment about what is right,” says Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, in an e-mail interview.

When I met one of Baidu’s program managers a few months ago, I told her I’d be interested in talking to folks from Baidu Baike, just to let them know how to conform to the GFDL. It was actually fine to copy Wikipedia’s content, and also to censor stuff they don’t like, as long as they complied with the GFDL.

She got back to me saying Baidu’s folks on that side were “scared” of talking to folks involved with Wikipedia, after the strong comments by Wikimedia Foundation chairperson Florence Nibart-Devouard:

“They do not respect the licence at all,” said Florence Nibart-Devouard, chair of the Board of Trustees at the Wikimedia Foundation, during an interview at the Wikimania 2007 conference in Taipei. “That might be the biggest copyright violation we have. We have others,” she added.

It’s too bad.

It’s not hard to comply with the GFDL, but they seem to be scared of the litigation risk. The thing going for Baidu is that the Foundation cannot bring a lawsuit, since the Foundation only hosts the hardware and the site. Any lawsuit would have to come from authors who have been “harmed” by Baidu’s noncompliance. That’s not bound to happen anytime soon.

I plan to make another attempt to open up a dialogue with the folks at the company to simply explain how the GFDL works. Baidu’s a NASDAQ-listed company, so there is some “face” aspect of having it conform to the license that other prominent Wikipedia mirrors have complied with.

I’ll be in NYC this week to be on “The Changing Media Landscape” panel of the Hearst New Media lectures at Columbia University. It’s a nice homecoming to the place where I helped start the entire new media modernization of the Journalism school in 1994.
I’m glad to see more international representation than in years past, as the panel will consist of:

• Josh Cohen, business product manager, Google News (coming from the
  Googleplex)
• Hossein “Hoder” Derakhshan, an Iranian-born blogger,
  journalist, and Internet activist (coming from Toronto)
• Jonathan Dube, director of digital programming, CBC (coming from Toronto)
• Andrew Lih, author of a new book on Wikipedia and expert on Chinese media
  (coming from Beijing)
• Mindy McAdams, new media education pioneer and professor at University of
  Florida (coming from Gainesville)
• Michael Rogers, resident futurist of The New York Times (coming from
  midtown)

Hope to see some familiar faces in the crowd.