Google to Reveal More About Chrome OS Tonight

After a quick peek at what Google Chrome OS may look like in July, users finally will receive more details about the new operating system after the Front End Engineering Open House hosted by Google tonight.

Google Chrome OS is a natural extension of Chrome browser，which Google released around one year ago. Chrome OS is a browser-central fast-booting computer operating system mainly designed for people who living on the web. Google promised that the new operating system can start up and take users online within a few seconds. Users can then surf the web or use services and applications online without wasting time and money to install drivers.

“Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS,” Google said in its official blog. With Chrome OS, users no longer “have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates.”

According to Charlie Sorrel, Google Chrome has five major advantages. I think three of them are particularly worth mentioning here.

• Cheaper cost

Google Chrome OS will be free. Because the system is based on Linux, so users don’t have to spend money on Microsoft licensing fee.

• Faster speed

Chrome OS can be run on low-powered Atom and ARM processors. All the applications and services online do not require much power from the netbook, hence the battery will be able to last longer.

• Good Compatibility

Users don’t need to worry about the compatibility between drivers and operating systems because they don’t even need to install drivers.

Google said Chrome OS initially will target at netbooks, but will eventually be used on PCs as well . “The netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010”, said Google’s official blog.

When doing research for this blog posts, I was certainly excited to know there will be a free clean fast operating system available. However, I realised accessing applications online will need high Internet speed and lots of Internet quota. Actually, in Australia, broadband is slower but more expensive compared with the US and Japan. Users will need to pay $99 dollars for only 20GB per month according to Optus’ Internet plan. But my friend used to tell me even 30GB per month is not enough for online video viewing if you are really into Youtube. If you have to share one Internet line with your family or housemates, fast broadband will seem even further away. So unless you are really willing to invest in your online experience, using netbook with Chrome OS won’t be such a cheap option here in Australia.

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China’s Internet Censorship Nightmare

Whenever Internet censorship is mentioned, the first country many people think of probably is China. Perhaps most Chinese people would feel mortified and helpless when it comes to the Great Firewall that is filtering everything online.
Four years ago, when western people talked about the strict Internet control in China, some Chinese would just shrug, because the situation was actually not as bad as western media exaggerated. Chinese users living in China mainland could still browse most of the foreign websites. Now, in 2009, the situation has completely changed: some Chinese popular literature websites have to close up regularly to avoid trouble; many websites either close up certain sections or invent some creative ways for users to register (so that it will be difficult for the Internet police to register); service providers have to stay alert all the time—once your users post something the government doesn’t like, you are dead! But even so, most users could still endure all mentioned above. The thing that really upset a huge number of people was that Google was asked to stop linking to all foreign websites—Chinese users cannot even see a snapshot of foreign web pages. At the era of web 2.0, when knowledge is supposed to be shared by the entire humankind, the Chinese government has deprived its people of the right of seeing the rest of the world.
It’s difficult to believe such thing happens in a society where around 300 million people are using the Internet. The question everyone would want to ask is why? The Chinese government said they have justifiable reasons. Chinese Central TV and related administrations accused Google of disseminating obscene information that are harmful to the harmonisation of the Chinese society. On Sina.com (the biggest Chinese news portal), 1256 people replied to an article saying Google is “fooling Chinese people and the government”, but only 40 feedbacks can be displayed—of course all the 40 feedbacks are supporting the argument of that article. Any one who has read the article would wonder if it was the same person—an Internet police perhaps—who wrote all those feedbacks.
Ordinary Internet users in China would definitely choose to enjoy the borderless information sharing. Who wants to be constantly constrained and monitored anyway? But unfortunately, the Chinese government choose not only to block the rest of the world out, but also to silence alternative views from its own people.
After the Nation Day on 1 October, the Chinese government promoted new filtering softwares to tighten its Internet control and most anti-filtering softwares became useless. Meanwhile, the US-based IT companies continue to release updated softwares like Freegate to allow users in China to breakthrough the Great Firewall. The technological war between the filtering and the anti-filtering softwares has risen to a higher level. However, when can the Chinese government realise strict internet censorship is driving its dream of building a harmonised society further and further away?

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I wrote these articles for China Digital Times, a bilingual service covering “China’s social and political transition and its emerging role in the world.” They publish news reports as well as opinion pieces. Some of their articles are translated from other Chinese news websites. The website is run by the Berkeley China Internet Project (BCIP) out of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

China Blocked Social Networking Websites


Picture by Xianyunyehe

When the whole world is talking about the benefits brought by social networking technologies, China decides these technologies are bad and subsequently blocks the access to Facebook and Twitter from China mainland. But what’s the big deal about these social networking sites? Does it hurt that much to let Chinese people networking a bit online?
According to Huanqiu Newspaper, the Tibet-independence and Xinjiang-independence supporters who ran the riots earlier this year used Facebook to connect with each other. And Twitter managed to disseminate news about riot in Xinjiang quicker than the Chinese national news services. The Chinese government believed they would lose the control of the situation if they lost the control of information. Then immediately after the riots in Xinjiang, many popular social networking sites were either blocked or closed down.
So, several Facebook groups and tweets contributed to the fact that all netizens living in China mainland are now deprived of the right of using Facebook and Twitter? When we think about it, we can neither blame those social networking sites nor those Tibet-and-Xinjiang-independence supporters—the former simply served as communication tool, and the latter simply used the tool. The real problem here is that the Chinese government adopted an extremely negative attitude towards social networking sites. And the ordinary Chinese netizens became the victims.
In the era of Web 2.0, social networking websites rely on mass-scale online activities. It’s cleverer for a government to fully embrace new online technologies rather than to deny them. First and foremost, the Internet technologies are impossible to be killed unless a government chooses to destruct all the telephone infrastructures. Second, many incidents in the past have proved that the government can generate positive public relations through social networking sites. Take the 2008 presidential contest between Obama and Hillary as example. Both Obama and Hillary had huge number of followers on Twitter, but what made Obama a winner was he was following hundreds of thousands people while Hillary was following no one. This is certainly not the only example of the effective utilisation of social networking for political purpose. The British government has also been clever enough to ask public servants to tweet regularly. If the Chinese government was able to use the same logic, people would probably receive information about the riots from the government first, not from those Xinjiang-independence supporters.
This sort of Internet control is like a vicious cycle. The more you try to control, the more you lose. Now the Chinese netizens are dissatisfied with the tightening censorship—more and more users will start to protest if the online blockage lasts longer. Furthermore, the internet censorship in China has done huge damage to the international image of the whole Chinese nation. The Chinese Internet filtering system is dubbed the “Great Firewall”, which probably is one of the worst humiliations that the Great Wall of China has ever had in thousands of years.

Apple and Woolworths’ Trademark Dispute

I just read this hilarious story about the trademark dispute between Apple and Woolworths. The author says Apple is actively suing any one who dares to use the fruit apple in its logo—even New York City can’t be exempted. According to the article, Hans Hulsbosch, the artist who designed the new logo, said

“Based on this logic, they [Apple] would have to take action against every fruit seller.”

The feedbacks to this article are even more hilarious. A reader replied Apple should sue God because there’s apple in the Bible.
There’s actually another side of the story. According to Nilay Patel, what Apple has been doing is simply a routine that many companies do as part of the trademark reviewing process. And Apple filed its notice of opposition half a year ago, but no one cared about it until Woolworths talked to The Age.
I think it's interesting that The Age, where the story originally came from, decided to frame the whole thing like a war.

Hachiko: A Dog’s Story

I saw the film Hachiko: A Dog’s Story recently and liked it a lot. So I’d like to recommend it to everyone who browses this blog.
The film is actually based on a real story happened in Japan. A faithful dog named Hachi would accompany his owner, a college professor, to the train station everyday in the morning, and greet him outside the station at night. Unfortunately one day the professor suddenly died of heart attack when he was teaching. However, the dog continued to wait for his owner outside the train station everyday for nearly ten years.
The story of Hachi is very well-known in Japan. Even today, there’s a bronze statue outside Shibuya train station in the city centre of Tokyo as a reminder of his loyalty and devotion.

Do We Heavily Rely on News Media to Make Sense of the World?

I have been reading a book called Where Underpants Come From and feel somewhat offended by the content. The writer wrote something like people don’t queue when buying subway tickets in Shanghai. I certainly don’t believe what the book depicted because I have the first-hand experience to prove the book wrong (I’m from China). However, when I think about it, I wonder what other people would think if they read the book. If they have never been to Shanghai, will they believe the book? Well, probably yes, because at that moment, that book perhaps is the medium they reply on to make sense of the city Shanghai.
The same applies not only to books, but to all media, particularly news media—through where we look at what’s going on around the world. As McLuhan mentioned, like villagers, we use television as a window to observe what’s going on outside on the streets. In modern society, the television shows us not only things happening on the streets nearby, but also things happening on the other side of the world. Modern technology makes distance disappear greatly. However, like Miller (1971) argued senses like pain, heat and smell are cut off from the audiences. How news stories are framed can strongly influence how people interpret the whole thing. Like what happened in KOSOVO war in 1999, NATO framed the war as a “zero casualty video-game”(Bens, ED, Hauttekeete,L & Lagast, H 2002). Military actions of NATO were presented as only targeting on certain locations like power plants, communication centres, and factories. Citizen casualty was greatly erased in the news. Government and PR people made it look like a “clean war” (Bens, ED, Hauttekeete,L & Lagast, H 2002).
The news media also influence us in some more subtle ways. Like the how media label enemies as “terrorists”. In some cases, such demonizing of enemies helps not only to justify actions from “our side”, but also reduce the audiences’ sympathy to “their side”. Examples could be KOSOVO war, Iraq war, and what’s going on in Tibet recently.
There are other influential media sectors as well. One example would be advertisements. In recent years, many ads appear in media as mutated forms. In print media, ads about PDA, mobile and other gadgets sometimes do not look like ads, but look very much like feature stories, which trick readers into reading the contents. Music videos, TV series, films and video games also indicate audiences what are the must-haves nowadays. I remember watching a Hong Kong TV show in which an old guy said he was using a mobile phone his son had discarded because of its lack of certain functions. But even with that used mobile phone, he could watch TV programs and live-cam with his son. I felt a bit miserable because I have been using a GSM mobile for years. But on second thought, I wouldn’t have felt miserable without watching that show. It was the show that told me everyone else is using a high-tech mobile. But if I look at people around me, that’s certainly not the truth.