Unblock Google Cache in China || REXX

Unblock Google Cache in China

The not so obvious point about this
(Score:5, Insightful)
by teutonic_leech (596265) on Monday October 31, @02:48PM (#13916905)
I am sure that plenty of responses are going to be along the lines of 'this is going to get disabled very soon, so why bother?'. However, I feel compelled to point out that the worst thing we all can do is to simply roll over and accept censorship of any kind. It is important that we do whatever possible to allow Internet audiences in more restricted nations to get a glimpse at the full spectrum (bad and good) of all the information that's out there. Yes, it is an armsrace and yes this workaround will probably not stand for very long.

BUT we need to send repeating signals that information should not be restricted. The reason for that is the unfortunate ability of homo sapiens sapiens to adapt to almost any environment. May this be extreme climate, sparse resources, or supressive political regimes. I bet you that a great majority of Internet surfers in China were probably upset when they first learned about those restrictions - but over time they probably accepted this as 'normal' and happily made due with the information that is presented to them. In some ways we are doing the same here in the U.S. and I make it a point to watch news shows from Europe to counter-balance the often one-sided and myopic reporting I mostly witness on most U.S. news stations/channels.

So, if this can shake up some complacency and re-instill the hunger for freedom to all information, then this is a great little work-around. We all need to get a kick in the keester to sometimes not simply seek a position of maximum comfort and non-conflict. Remember the old expression: If working towards freedom, prepare for war. I'm not quoting this expression to be taken literal here - I'm saying that it's always dangerous to accept the status quo.
Sorry for the rant - I'm getting off the soap box now...

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Google is a genius...
(Score:4, Interesting)
by clragon (923326) on Monday October 31, @07:10PM (#13919127)
wow.. having born and lived in China i know what this means for google.. profit.. you have to understand that it's not impossible for people to get books or other literature restricted by the goverment. before the internet, the CCP would put restriction on a book (a banned book in other words) and the next day there will be millions of people wanting to read that book, regardless of if it's good or not. when CCP put restrictions on the internet, there was no way around that for a normal person. another thing i have to mention is that the Chinese search engine is http://baidu.com/ [baidu.com] everyone in China uses it like us using google. google is not popular there compared to BaiDu. so with this uncensor, there will be millions of chinese flowing to google in order to read uncensored information on the internet. and since google is not a Chinese businese (unlike BaiDu) the CCP can't do anything about it. so google's influence in China will finaly increase... all i can do is applaud google's business tactics... wow... /offtopic/rant as far as the "evil communists" goes, it's not all evil. the person over threw the Qing Dynasty, and made China democracy country, Sun yat-sen, was the leader of china when he wanted to have 2 kinds of goverment parties. one is democracy and one is communism. he believed that people should have freedom but not complete freedom because that would cause alot of problems. thats how the communist party came into power, before that they were a tiny little political party that had no power. when Sun yat-sun died he gave the position of president to Shiang Kai-shek (as you can see China wasn't completly democracy back then, probably because a voting would have caused too much trouble in a already poor country and some people doesn't even know who was their leader and stuff) and Shiang kai-shek hated the Communitst. he ordered secret assasination of communist party members which furthur worsen the relationship of the 2 parties. so the communist party members basicly said "why are we waiting to be assasinated? why dont we just rebel?" so thats how they started the war and then the japanese started attacking china and the rest is history. so as you can see, the communist struggle to power was hard and when they were finaly in power, there were still lots of pro-democracy people around and letting the democracy party people having a taste of their own medicine, they started torturing the democracy party people and murdered lots of innocent people, because they came to power because the KMT gave them power, they learned the lesson of the KMT and never gave any other part in China significant power, just to establish themselves as the official goverment in the people's eyes. Shiang Kai-shek escaped to Taiwan and established his own democracy goverment there (and i should metion that he purged all of his old KMT party members form mainland) , and later died and the presidency to his son (not as democracy as he say he is :P ). if Shiang Kai-shek didn't decide to assasinate the communist party members we might actualy see an example of a democracy goverment AND a communist goverment co-exist and govern on country together. where the people have freedom, but not too much that it endangers the country's existance. /end rant
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Now let's just hope...
(Score:5, Insightful)
by whamett (917546) Alter Relationship on Monday October 31, @12:39PM (#13916844)

... that Google doesn't voluntarily identify users who do this, like Yahoo did [theepochtimes.com].

Unfortunately, many high-tech companies are all to eager to do business with a regime that has killed 80 million people [ninecommentaries.com]. Western companies' equipment, software, and expertise are what allow China's 30,000+ full-time internet censors to block this kind of breakthrough soon after they're discovered. They couldn't have built such a system without our help.
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is this information available in China?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by mah! (121197) Alter Relationship on Monday October 31, @12:19PM (#13916673)
(http://slashdot.org/~mah!/)
It's an interesting idea... but is slashdot [slashdot.org] or information the feature itself [customizegoogle.com] blocked by their Cisco-backed filter [opennetinitiative.net]?
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Great Firewall of China
(Score:5, Funny)
by The_Rippa (181699) Alter Relationship on Monday October 31, @12:28PM (#13916741)
I missed this whole thing...are they trying to keep the Mongolians out of their network?-

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http://readthisblog.net/category/computer-stuff/

Read This Blog!Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

Pages I find through SiteMeter

I use SiteMeter to track traffic to this site (I guess I could use the logs that my ISP provides, but I started using SiteMeter years ago for Defenestration Corner, where logs weren’t available, and I like the reports they provide).

Every so often, I look at the referers they report, and if something looks interesting (usually a search engine referral), I’ll click on it. Today, I found that my blog had been reached by a Google query for “kedit macros 2005″; I was curious enough to look at that page of Google results to see what else showed up. There wasn’t much, but because it was the second page of results, I decided to look at the first page.

And there was an entry with a very intriguing title: Eastern Orthodox Editors (XEDIT/KEDIT/THE, etc). It is one page on an interesting site (http://www.softpanorama.org) prepared by Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov as a service to the UN Sustainable Development Networking Programme.

Dr. Bezroukov has some definite views on editors (ones which aren’t far from mine). I am going to have to take a closer look at vim the next time I fire up my Linux box — I’ve been using it strictly at the same level of knowledge that I had for vi back in 1992 or so, and it appears that it’s far more capable than I’d given it credit for.

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May 28, 2005

Rexx - King of Languages

Howard Fosdick wrote about one of my favorite languages, Rexx, on OnLAMP earlier this week.

For many years, I did almost all my programming in Rexx, mostly on VM/CMS but occasionally on TSO or OS/2; it was a language well-suited to the environment and to the kinds of problems I had to deal with, especially when augmented with tools like WAKEUP (providing event handling) and RXSOCKET (TCP/IP socket access), as well as the invaluable CMS Pipelines. One of the best features of Rexx was its ubiquity on VM/CMS; because it used system hooks, it was available as a macro language for any program which needed one — and so it was far easier for a developer to use Rexx than to make up a unique language.

Back in 1989, Almaden’s only connection to Usenet was an AIX box, which dialed out once a day and fetched the day’s postings. I wanted real-time access to Usenet, especially misc.kids (this was long ago, before spam was invented, and so there was some actual content on Usenet), but our only connection to the ARPANet was on VM. So I wrote some Rexx code to gateway postings through VM to the AIX box (and back); it was probably about 2000 lines of Rexx and needed four virtual machines to run (CMS was single-threaded). Since the postings were traversing VM, it also seemed like a good idea to gateway them into our VM-based conferencing system — and at one time, that traffic accounted for 25% of the network traffic in IBM.

Rexx was the native macro language on OS/2, as well, and at one time, my OS/2 Gopher client had a hook to allow writing Rexx macros. Unfortunately, I never figured out any use for macros in a Gopher client, and so I never documented the hook (I think I removed it before the official release of the Gopher client). But Mike Cowlishaw took great advantage of the OS/2 support of Rexx when he wrote the OS/2 Gopher (and later Web) server, GOSERVE — of course, he was also the author of Rexx, so it was a natural decision for him!

I don’t use VM/CMS much any more (I still have an account, which I use once every 90 days to change its password); I still do have a mission-critical Rexx program which converts my paystub into QIF form so I can import it into Quicken. And my preferred text editor, Kedit, uses a 90%-subset of Rexx as its macro processor.

These days, I tend to write in Python — it has much the same “feel” as Rexx, and it makes it easy to get to SOAP, XML parsers, and the like. I tried Perl for a while, but didn’t like the style of the language. I’m playing with Ruby a bit, but haven’t really gotten down to writing anything real, and I can get by in PHP when I need to (for example, in customizing WordPress). But I still miss Rexx.

Filed under: Computer Stuff — David @ 9:01 pm