Freedom of speech vs Chinese business | Bangkok Post: tech

COMPUTER Currents

Google has finally started to stand up for freedom of information on the Internet and told China it would no longer be filtering search results there.

One on side of the issue is the sovereign nation state of China and its right to control their own internal politics. On the other side are cyber attacks on Western businesses in China and the concept of freedom of access to information. While Google might be taking a stand, the other big search provide, Yahoo!, Has backed away from the issue.

The core issue is the cyber attacks on Google's severs to hack into the webmail accounts of "Chinese dissidents". These attacks appear to be coming from within China. As usual fingers are being pointed at different targets for both the source of the attacks and through what vulnerabilities they were being made. Google said that it was thinking about exiting China, while Yahoo! said it was aligned with Google as far as fighting "attempts to infiltrate company networks to obtain user information".

The question here is why Google is still using IE6. It has known vulnerabilities, is not very compatible for the latest technologies, and has a slow JavaScript engine.

The US-owned tech firm the Alibaba Group, which owns 40 percent of Yahoo! operations in China, then distanced itself from the issue, citing lack of evidence on the source of the attacks, widely believed by many to be the Chinese Government itself. The attacks exploited a zero day vulnerability in IE and hit 20 Western firms in China. You can read all about the attacks over at McAfee by looking for Operation Aurora on their website http://www.avertlabs.com.

In business terms the issue is fairly simple - stick to the high road and call out China on the issue as Google has done, or take the business driven-option to protect interests in China and ignore human rights issues, as organisations like Yahoo! have been seen to do.

Yahoo! handed over e-mails to China a few years back to "comply with local laws". For this latest attack, Google has been looking at the actions of some local employees as possibly facilitating the attacks.

Microsoft, which generally seems to follow Google in everything, through Ballmer has stated that it will not be pulling out of China and Bing is there to stay. His position is on pulling out is: "I don't understand how that helps anything. I don't understand how that helps us and I don't understand how that helps China." I guess with all the attacks Microsoft gets, this one is not unusual. That, and its strong business interests in China, and that the attacks were made through a known weakness in IE6.

There is also the issue that Google is not the top search provider in China, with the local Baidu leading there. This might also just be an excuse to pull out of a market it is not doing so well in, with only 14-30 percent share, depending on who's figures you use, behind the leader at just over 60 percent. Mind you, 14-30 percent of a market the size of China is nothing to scoff at.

There is also the issue of Microsoft sniffing at Google's heels. According to one source, Bing has moved up to 10 percent of the market, about 7 behind Yahoo! Microsoft is also readying a Chinese version of Bing. If Google pulls out, this leaved a large hole for Microsoft to fill and will increase market share there. I suspect that by the time you read this, Google will have changed its mind about moving out of China.

Industry news

Some are saying that this will be the year of the NetTab, or a touch screen tablet designed for web surfing that is larger than a Smartphone but smaller than a laptop. Industry watcher Deloitte agrees with this. The advantages include bigger screens, easier typing over the phones and being lighter and less expensive than a notebook.

These devices may make a dent in any eBook readers coming out this year as well, but 5 million of these are expected to be sold this year world wide. This sounds less than I would have expected, but then again I am not Deloitte. They also expect that 100 million eBooks titles will be sold this year.

There is a study for just about everything these days. One relevant to the IT world, particularly those playing games, is the sitting down study from Swedish scientists that are telling us it can lead to cancer, diabetes, heart disease and obesity. While the last one may sound obvious, the study says that this can happen even if you exercise between sittings. The suggestion is that you need to take regular breaks, get up and walk around. If you want to try to convince your boss about this, look up the name Dr Elin Ekblom-Bak and show him the study. The trick is to "maintain a sufficient level of exercise".

The Chinese have banned the excellent movie Avatar for "fears that it may cause unrest". Moviegoers there will be pleased to hear that Avatar will be replaced across China with "a patriotic biopic on the life of Confucius". I guess the Chinese will need to wait for the download.

Is there nothing the Wii cannot do? Doctors in Australia and Singapore are using the Wii Balance Board (BB) peripheral to assess a patient's ability to balance. They are less expensive than a force platform and good enough to do the testing.

Why is it that some organisations make updating and patching so difficult? Take the latest Shockwave patch from Adobe, for example. It fixes some security holes, good. To apply the patch they want you to manually uninstall the old version, reboot and then manually install the update.

There are two problems with this. The first is that so many other companies seem to be able to do all of this for you. You hit the update button and the installer then removes the old version, reboots for you, and drops an entry into the run-once area of the registry so that on reboot the installation process completes without your intervention.

The second problem is that making it so hard by comparison guarantees that some or many current users will not bother to go through it all and will remain at risk. Adobe, and others, get your collective installation and update acts together.

As I write this, the iSlate, or whatever it will be called, from Apple is not out yet and already the competitors are scrambling. Love 'em or hate 'em, you have to give Apple points for keeping the rest of the manufacturers on their toes.

I am a Kindle user and I love it. I read fairly quickly but I only need to take one small device when I travel now instead of a backpack full of books. Amazon has announced that they will give a 70 per cent cut of retail price to publishers who make their books Kindle-friendly. This is twice what they get already and 20 percent more than the rumoured amount that Apple will fork over. The Kindle book must however be at least 20 percent less than the printed versions. They will also need to meet a few other criteria. The other benefit is for self-publishing. The battle for the electronic book platform of the future is on.

Email: jclhein@gmail.com