Junjie’s China blog

Google blocked in China mainland?

From some friends I just received the message, that Google seems to be blocked within China mainland While You can still access google.CN from any place within China, the normal version google.COM seems to be blocked in several parts of China. I’ve read some China forums and it seems that Shanghai is unaffected, while in Zhuhai (Guangdong) there is no chance to access the service without an proxy.

I guess China wants to support its local search engine Baidu. Or maybe google is just bringing the evil content to China and therefore destroying the country with sex. But don’t worry, the Green dam Child escort software is coming to end all these troubles. Just install it and make You PC a willing victim. 中国加油! Keep the internet clean! We love You too much!

Posted in China in General | 2 Comments »

Green dam censoring software threatens Internet users

In China’s never ending quest to control the Internet, they spend a whooping 40 million yuan on a software called Green dam: 绿坝－花季护航. to check the content of websites and block anything that might do harm to a user. Namely pornography and violence. The software seems to be a failure already. Within days of its release severe security problems have been detected in Green dam. Here is my summary of an paper of the University of Michigan called Analysis of the Green Dam Censorware System by Scott Wolchok, Randy Yao, and J. Alex Halderman.

First: The software checks the Internet traffic and compares it with a blacklist. If the internet address is crafted in a specific way, an buffer overflow can occur and the execution stack can be manipulated. Great!

Second: The Green Dam Internet filter software uses a blacklist file. If the file is replaced by a manipulated file the creator of the manipulated file can inject code into the program, which will then be executed.

Third: The masterpassword of Green Dam can easily replaced by anyone. The file C:\Windows\System32\kwpwf.dll contains the md5 of the password (it’s not a dll really). Simply think of a new password, put the corresponding md5 into this file and You are ready to log in as You please.

Using Green Dam Internet filter software severely threatens Your Computer. You should uninstall it immediately!

绿坝－花季护航 keeps Your computer safe… not. Ah, and a special filter for all those pesky homosexuals out there (I hope they won’t censor that juicy lesbian porn)

But the list still goes on. According to the wikipedia article of Green Dam it seems like they stole parts of the software from the popular Internet filter software CyberSitter, which is a product of an US company. What is left to say? BIG FAILURE! They should have given those 40 million yuan to me, I could have used them in a much better way, instead of spending it on the Chinese censorship.

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Mircosoft’s new search engine Bing: sick or cold?

Microsoft some days ago released their new search engine Bing to the public. Apart from the question “Is Bing any good, compared to Google?” there is another one: What does Bing mean? Having a little knowledge in Chinese, this word sounds suspicious to me. And Bing does sound Chinese is some way, Mandarin Chinese to be exact. Here are my two ideas:

病 bìng - sickness

冰 bīng - ice

I’ve taken a look at one of those promotion videos of the searchengine Bing on Youtube and it becomes clear, that the correct pronunciation is indeed bìng, so sickness should be the correct translation of this Microsoft searchengine. Maybe 冰 would be cool in some way, but they obviously missed this opportunity. Feel free to have a look for Yourself:

In China however, sickness Bing is no longer Bing. At least the Chinese marketing team realized, that sickness Bing is not a good way to describe this new product. They decided to give it different name in China: 必应 bìyīng. Now what does that mean? I have no real clue what that means, but I feel it’s cheating.

Talking about the quality of Bing, it yet has to be seen if it can beat the Google searchengine. Still I get most of my traffic from Google, and little comes from Live Search / Bing. To be honest, only one visitor came from 病 so far. Here are two nice Chinese words to learn for You:

精神病 jīng shén bìng - mental disorder (medical)
神精病 shén jīng bìng - mental disorder (insult)

Posted in Various stuff | 1 Comment »

20 years past Tian An Men

This topic is all the rage these days, so I wonder what hasn’t been said about this incident. There is not much left to be honest, so I’ll keep it short. Searching for 四六 in Google Imagesearch will bring up some disturbing pictures, at least if You are outside of China. Searching for this incident (六四事件) at Baidu.com You will receive the following message:

搜索结果可能不符合相关法律法规和政策，未予显示。
Which basically means You are searching for something that is inappropriate to search for. You bastard!

Okay let’s wait for the next dictator president of China, maybe he can tell us more about the Tian An Men massacre which happened 20 years ago.

Although this massacre shut down any pro-democracy protests at that time, today the suppression of all historic works about this incident only puts the ruling Chinese Communist party in a defensive position. They bought the silence with massive economical growth. Now the growth is declining, and therefore legitimation is declining as well. Next Tian An Men coming soon? Let’s hope things turn better soon.

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Arested because of reading a not censored poem in public

At May the 23rd a group of political activist gathered in front of the main government building to read a poem. This poem is by no means illegal. It’s not censored by any state organ yet and available in any bookshop throughout the country.

The activists were standing in front of the building and wanted to start reading the poem, when a policeman rushed towards them and stopped them to ask, what they are doing. They explained and the policeman asked his superiors by radio if it is an acceptable action. Things seemed to be right and the group got the permission to read the historic poem in public.

Once they finished reading a group of policemen rushed towards the political activists and wanted to arrest them. The reason given: “The poem included opinion-content” They were dumbfounded. Is it really illegal to have an opinion here? So they told the policemen, that they got the permission before. The policemen were confused now and checked back with the headquarter to be sure. The superiors reported back, that the activists can be arrested.

It’s a common theme for dictatorships, that the police shows signs of helplessness when faced with political action. They are repressive to be sure no unwanted political message reaches the public.

Where do You think the above happened? Some of my readers may guess now, this was China, as this is a China blog. But it happened in a different country, it happened in Germany. The group are members of the legal political party Political Beauty. They read the poem To The Beauty (pdf, German). I was dumbfounded when I read that first, but it seems to be true. Read the original story here (in German, Heise). Germany and China become more and more equal. Before I had been asked: “Can You live in a country like China, where people get arrested for nothing?” Well, now I can ask the same thing back and it doesn’t make a difference after all to live here or in China.

Posted in Various stuff | 6 Comments »

Some small changes on Yolearnchinese.com

Hi guys,

Although I don’t have the time really, I did some minor tweaks on Yolearnchinese.com, as these have been annoying me for like ages. The main thing You will recognize is, that I removed most of the advertisement banners from the front page, as they didn’t bring any income, yet they took away valuable space. I’ll try textlinks now, as those don’t need any additional space. You can recognize them by the double underline. However I did keep that Chinesepod advertisement, as I feel Chinesepod is a really good website to help anyone learn Chinese. The blog looks a bit packed at the moment, so I want to experiment with some images in the sidebar and between posts. When I have time I will do some more changes to the design of this site.

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One year until World Expo 2010 Shanghai

There’s a little less than year time until the World Expo 2010, which will take place in the Chinese megacity Shanghai. The doors open at May 1 until October 31, 2010.

This is an good opportunity for You to start learning Chinese. The Chinese language will have more importance in the near term future and being able to speak this East Asian language will open a whole new world for You and a whole new market for Your business.

Long term readers of my blog already have some ideas where to start learning Chinese, but I won’t get tired to repeat myself about this important topic and I think this moment is the right moment to remind You to get started to learn Chinese. Right now is the ideal moment to apply for a summer course.

Summer is coming, soon the summer courses in China start again and You can get a good start easily. Learning Chinese in China is a great advantage as Your surroundings will give You an extra motivational boost, also hearing the language every day pumps Your skill quickly.

Step one: Choose the right school for You. Check the Chinese-Forums.com language schools in China board to find the right school or university for You.

Step two: Apply.

You may be a fan of the Chinese government, or You may hate it. But either way, China is a beautiful country with a lot of ancient temples and buildings, green parks and modern parts as well. The food is great there and so are the people and the possibilities to have a great party there. For the more economically minded, China’s GDP per capita is not that high, but there are so many Chinese people there, so it doesn’t matter. With the World Expo Shanghai 2010 China is getting it’s foot into the world wide economic elite. It’s not a mistake to be part of it and learning Chinese is the first step.

If You are looking for online resources, check out Chinese-Forums.com to find a active community directed at the Chinese learner. Sign up with Chinesepod to get podcast lessons on Your computer. The beginner lessons are for free, but the investment for an subscription account, which gives You access to the intermediate and advanced material is well worth its money. This should get You started.

Posted in China in General | No Comments »

What’s the meaning of life?

My friend Nino posed the question “What’s the meaning of life?” on his blog and he wants other people to write a blog post about it in their native language and give an English translation as well. I’ve thought about this question previously, so I can answer swiftly. Read Nino’s question and here is my answer:

Das Leben hat keine Bedeutung, aber ich finde es verdammt spannend zu sehen was morgen passiert!

Life has no meaning, but I’m so damn excited to see what happens tomorrow!

Posted in Various stuff | 2 Comments »