ArsTechnica, one of the major tech blogs, covers the news that China refuses to guarantee open Internet during Olympics.

They said that while the government would be able to "guarantee as much [access] as possible," there's no way that China would turn off the Great Firewall entirely during the Games.

"China has always been very cautious when it comes to the Internet," Technology Minister Wan Gang said, according to Reuters. "I've not got any clear information about which sites will be shut or screened. But to protect the youth there are controls on some unhealthy web sites."

Wan's statement comes just over a month after the International Olympic Committee reminded China of its obligations as an Olympic host city to allow the press to report as freely as they have in the past—which usually includes full, unfettered access to the Internet.

And usually includes full, unfettered access to the residents of the country. Though China hasn't lived up to that commitment either. Or the one made on better human rights, since they've jailed folks for activities which should be legal by the PRC Constitution that might reflect badly upon the image of the Party and the Party's Olympic party.

But cue up the Panda player, as I'm sure there will be plenty of apologists crawling out of the woodwork saying that the PRC's failure to live up to their public international commitments is not a problem, since China is evolving... getting better... and that we all should just have patience with the folks habitually failing to live up to their own promises.

Just a few weeks ago, the State Intellectual Property Office said that it was cracking down on intellectual property infringement in anticipation of the Games. Is China now trying to give itself some wiggle room? Maybe, but it's not reasonable to expect that authorities will be able to nab every single violator. But given China's long and checkered history with IP enforcement, the IOC will likely be satisfied with visible, high-profile, and frequent crackdowns.

As Captain Renault would put it, "go round up the usual suspects". There is a charade on all sides that has to be maintained.

CNN reports on the DDOS of cnn.com.

A CNN spokesman said the Web site began to notice problems around midday Thursday and took measures to isolate the trouble by limiting the number of users who could access it from specific geographic areas.

As a result, he said, some users in those areas experienced temporary slowdowns or problems accessing the site.

According to the story at computer world australia it was supposed to be scheduled for today, the 19th, but...

While there is no apparent link between Anti-CNN and the hackers calling for the Denial of Service attack, the team at The Dark Visitor, who have been tracking Chinese hacking activity for some time, believe that it may be members of the Red Hacker Alliance that are pushing for the online attack to accompany the physical demonstrations.

According to Scott Henderson, administrator for The Dark Visitor, members of The Red Alliance have traditionally required very little in terms of direct motivation to launch politically motivated attacks against external sites. The Dark Visitor researchers have associated politically motivated attacks from this group against sites in the United States, Japan, Taiwan, and Indonesia.

Over at the Dark Visitor, the story is the DDOS was called off after becoming too public.

The Chinese hacker group that has been organizing to attack CNN has been identified as the “Revenge of the Flame.” They recently released a statement calling off the DDoS attack on CNN; however, it may have come too late to stop some of its members from going after the site.

I don't think this patriotic djinn is going back in to the bottle with a simple wave of the hand or statement by some group, be they a hacker group or Xinhua. (Though it would seem the folks at the top of the CCP are quite happy with having the Red Guards running amok as long as they adhere to Mao's the factionally-balanced CCP leadership.)

Thers over at Whiskey Fire opens both barrels on Bloggingheads.

Nobody is ever outraged, passionate, venomous -- it all reinforces the asinine and debilitating notion that political debates are some sort of polite parlor game. Or some sort of spectator sport, waiting for someone to totally lose it in a comical fashion (see Althouse, Ann).

Fuck civility, fuck Bloggingheads, fuck this taming of the shrill. Notice how no one on a Bloggingheads ever says "fuck"?

If you can't say "fuck," I'm not coming to your new media revolution.

Ah, jeebus. Am I gonna be able to say "panda licker" too? *insert visions of panda's grooming themselves, lick, lick, lick*

I guess I shouldn't point out the apparently undenied controversy over Mickey Kaus of Slate blowing goats is still out there.

At least we're not like John McCain, who called his own wife a cunt in front of reporters. We don't abuse innocents and we don't abuse our loved ones.

At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain's hair and said, "You're getting a little thin up there." McCain's face reddened, and he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt."

Apologize? Michelle Malkin would never apologize for her actions in stalkin' and harassing opposition targets. Since the Graeme Frost situation was not the first time Malkin posted the personal infomation of her targets to her blog, Sadly No at this point refers to her as Stalkin' Malkin.

While Roland Soong has been a prominent, and pretty damn irrational, critic of the foreign media's coverage of China, he's erased his role in the stalking of an American Tibetan from the internet.

UPDATE: 17 April 2008 10:45am
I was wrong that he erased his role in the stalking of an innocent American Tibetan. You just have to scroll down a bit to find his information and his justification for posting the personal information.

[Question: Should the information about Lobsang Gendun be published here? This is the same as asking whether one wants to bury one's head in the sand. Go to either Google or Baidu, type in "Lobsang Gendun" and this information will pop up anyway. The purpose of this post is not to communicate the information per se. Rather, this is an illustration of power of the human flesh search engines of China. For a similar story, see Fallout from the Free Tibet protests by John Kennedy, Global Voices Online.]

[Question: There is still a doubt about whether Lobsang Gendun is the person who grabbed Jin Jing, since the search process does not explain how he was identified in the first place. Once there was a name, the other information flows naturally (Salt Lake Tribune -> O.C. Tanner -> Salt Lake City -> Utah Tibetan Association to get telephone number -> Reverse telephone directory look-up to get address -> Google Maps/Earth -> physical reconnaissance to find a Toyota Corolla and a modified Dodge Neon parked outside the house, etc). But how did the name come up initially? The London police arrest record?]

Furthermore, Richard at the Peking Panda refers to this post by stating, "his coverage of this topic has been quite excellent. Be sure to check his detailed post on the "conspiracy theory," one of his very best." *gag* I'm glad that I'm no longer on his blogroll, if this is his attitude and that I no longer recommend my readers to bother with it.

END UPDATE

UPDATE 2: 12:20pm
The Peking Panda updates his post to point to a different section of the same page, after someone points out that I'm right about his link going to ESWN's post with the address and phone number. Do I get apology? No more than ESWN is handing out apologies or the English-language Greater China blogosphere is actively condemning ESWN for promoting stalkin' an innocent man. And even if he hadn't been the wrong guy, the stalkin' of posting the man's phone number, address, and photos of his house is bullshit.
END UPDATE2

UPDATE 3: 12:57pm
Boing Boing links approvingly to ESWN's posting of the personal information. OMG! WTF is wrong with these people? Do you guys have a moral vacuum between your fuckin' ears?
END UPDATE3

He's posted a link to an article from KSL in Salt Lake City and COPIED THE 5 PARAGRAPH ARTICLE IN FULL to his site. (can you say copyright violation?).

Of course there is no sign nor apology for Roland Soong's role in the phone harassment, as most regular readers of his know that he posted this man's phone number at his blog. Foreign media apparently has to issue apologies and corrections for their "alleged" mistakes (most of which aren't even mistakes), but Roland doesn't hold himself to that standard. Maybe ESWN just expects that he can avoid legal troubles for helping to promote stalking and harassment of an innocent man by erasing traces of his misdeeds.

As for folks who are regular promoters of Sadly No and critics of the actions of Stalkin' Malkin and the Freepers? If you're a friend of Roland, it's a wink and a nudge. Friends don't criticise friends for doing the same vile things as their arch-nemesis does. Personally we're interested in starting a pool to see when the first Philip A. Cunningham post goes up at the Peking Panda.

Did I expect the self-proclaimed top bloggers of the English-language greater-China blogosphere to mention this AP article from Monday on Chinese harassment of the foreign press there? ESWN? no. Rebecca MacKinnon? no. Hey, do pigs fly? Did the Chinese masses rise up and put an end to the now almost-universally condemned Glorious Proletarian Cultural Revolution? Remember, the top dogs have media narratives to keep alive that China is changing and Western media spreads "the China hate".

Western reporters in China have received harassing phone calls, e-mails and text messages, some with death threats, supposedly from ordinary Chinese complaining about alleged bias in coverage of recent anti-Chinese protests in Tibet.

The harassment began two weeks ago and was largely targeted at foreign television broadcasters, CNN in particular. But the campaign broadened in recent days after the mobile phone numbers and other contact information for reporters from The Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today were posted on several Web sites, including a military affairs chat site.

Of course the support that the patriotic mainland netizens have been receiving from the state-owned media is a win-win situation for the CCP. On the one hand it rallies the patriotic netizens to support the "nationalist" and "vicitimisation" media narratives long pushed by the CCP. On the other, if the netizens get out of hand and start issuing death threats, the CCP then says, "see, this is what happens when the Chinese internet is given too much freedom, like you Westerners always protest about. We need to filter the Chinese internet to protect society from the eeeeee-vil tendencies there."

Even more interesting is the whole media narrative of selectively attacking the Western media. First, you can spot the acceptance that the mainland Chinese don't believe the state-owned Chinese media is really telling the truth. So the balance is to project the "150 years of foreign victimisation" media narrative in order to drive up the negatives of the Western media to the level that they are distrusted by mainlanders as much as they distrust the CCP's mouthpieces.

This of course is nothing new. Brent Bozzell in the US is one of the pioneers of this narrative to "work the referees". He's been at this game for decades and is one of the primary architects of the notion of a "liberal media" in the United States.

One group of netizens who are infamous in the US for acting as an ultra-conservative mob to swarm objectionable articles and polls are the residents of Free Republic, who go by the name of "freepers". When the professor of online media seemed clueless in this post on anti-cnn and tibet about freeping a CNN poll, I just laughed. Proves that qualifications for professors of this stuff just have to have the right pedigree and not actually have a clue about what actually happens on the internet. Looking at the google results, this is a tactic and term that's been in widespread online use well before the 2004 US Presidential elections and was used in the 2000 US Republican Presidential primaries. p.s. CNN often pulls polls that are being obviously freeped.

The last time that we mentioned the Freepers here at Daai Tou Laam Diary was when one of their own, Chad Castagana, was held for mailing "white powder" and threats to various "liberal" media figures like Keith Olbermann. Sound familiar to what's going on in China now?

Now back to the AP article, because I have one complaint and one more observation with it.

Complaints by Chinese have largely centered on Western media outlets that either cropped or captioned photographs and footage in ways some Chinese have found misleading. Several Web sites, for example, showed photographs of Indian or Nepali police forcefully detaining Tibetan demonstrators but misidentified them as Chinese security forces.

Actually the photographs were not mis-captioned. They were just used next to stories about Chinese cracking down on Tibetans. Score one for "working the refs" and score one for the CCP's tactics of media control, especially photo journalists.

Also illuminating is the pattern of which media is being targeted for being worked over. So far, it's almost exclusively the US, British, and German press. The Indian media has been far more critical and skeptical of China, but the Indian government has been far more subservient than government officials in the US, UK and Germany. Understand the connection?

Sometimes the language that is used in politics is tortured beyond recognition. The words may sound familiar, but the meanings attached to the words seem jarring and incite cognitive dissonance.

So on behalf of my readers who come here for Chinese politics, I present ACB's Supplementary English-Chinese Dictionary Part 1. I'm hoping my readers might be able to provide some additions to this Chinese-English dictionary.

On behalf of my readers who come here for my infrequent forays back to US politics, I would suggest The Bobblespeak Translations by Culture of Truth, who provides translations/transcriptions of a few of the major Sunday political pundit shows in the US. I'm also hoping that his find live blogging/translations from Saturday's Eschacon '08 DFH Economics panel, which featured econ Ph.D Atrios and econ prof. Echidne and econ prof/NY Times columnist Paul Krugman, will be transcribed from the crack den to the Bobblespeak Translations HQ.

Krugman: the new york times covers economics well
Atrios: like how
Krugman: like which $5,000 handbag you should buy
Atrios: i read it for teh Turtleneck section
Culture of Truth | 03.29.08 - 4:07 pm

For more coverage of the Eschacon '08 conference, the crack den's Jeopardy champ liveblogged it.

Over the last two months I've learned that the Greater China English-language blogosphere often mirrors The Village. You may hold widely divergent viewpoints ranging from "CCP patriotism and all criticism of China is just spreading the China hate" all of the way to "the Chinese press and blogs are no more biased and inaccurate than their Western counterparts, so trust the Village leadership to tell you the truth is that the motherland is great and evolving to be better".

You must conform and play nice with your fellow villagers or be subject to threats of lawsuits and threats of isolation and shunning and social manipulation in order to break your disobedience to the Village leadership. No wonder "the heavyweights" in the Greater China English-language blogosphere represent viewpoints that stay strictly within the debate parameters set out inside the gates of Zhongnanhai.

One of the bravest forms of evolution under a government-supervised internet is self-censorship. What are we talking about? For example, the outbreak of asterisks in the greater China English-language blogosphere. "T*bet". Or "J****** Monastery" in attempts to ensure your blog doesn't get zapped by the Great Firewall of China and the Propaganda Ministry. At least one of the bloggers is even more explicit.

Please be forewarned that I am going to be very careful about the comments. I am going to be much more discerning about what I keep and I also am reserving the right to make changes, as necessary. I want to keep this blog online in China.

Understand? The CCP's system isn't going to change, because the CCP knows that the occupants are only too willing to mould themselves to accommodate the censorship. Evolution in action. The banality of evil.

Yesterday, Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber announced that he and his colleague had succeeded in freeing their edition of Public Choice until the end of April. The edition edited by Henry and Dan Drezner deals with Blogs, Politics and Power.

I haven't read through the whole issue yet, but there are definitely some interesting items here, like Rebecca MacKinnon's on "Flatter world and thicker walls? Blogs, censorship and civic discourse in China".

The bits that I have read seemed to have missed the Malaysian blogosphere completely, which seems kind of odd given Jeff Ooi is part of the Global Voices team. Obviously, as a January 2008 edition it preceded the events of last week at the ballot box in Malaysia.

Malaysiakini, which goes back to subscription-only today, has a wonderful column on the role of the internet in the election results entitled "Long Live the e-volution".

Because, as everyone must be aware by now, what’s made this election such a watershed is the power of the Internet.

BN thought it understood this, but the election results demonstrated that it had no idea what it was dealing with. Attempting to write-off bloggers as nothing but “nuisances”, “liars” and “unemployed women” was its first mistake, given that the bloggosphere boasted such political heavyweights as Lim Kit Siang and Anwar Ibrahim and a whole galaxy of increasingly heavy-hitters like Raja Petra Kamarudin, Rocky Attan, Jeff Ooi, Haris Ibrahim, Elizabeth Wong, Susan Loone, Bernard Khoo, K Temoc, Lulu and thousands of others as effective but too numerous to name here.

...

But the true power of the Net lies in its capacity to deliver and disseminate not mind-numbing repetition but its absolute opposite: novelty. Breaking news, instant views, raw, uncensored opinion and wild if often well-founded rumour. In other words, the Internet empowers its users with the ultimate weapon against a BN-style culture of secrecy and lies: instant and international exposure.

...

hort {sic} of banning, filtering or otherwise limiting access to the Internet as in Burma, by way of just one example, governments are helpless against its powers to expose them. They can try, as China does by jailing dissident bloggers, or as BN has attempted in past raids on Malaysiakini and more recent actions against Nat Tan, Raja Petra, Rocky Attan and Jeff Ooi, to intimidate them into silence.

And the reason why some of us focus on the arrests and banning and filtering is because it truly shows that the folks arresting, banning and filtering are the ones that are scared of different voices being heard and championed.

And the fun in Malaysia with the political blogs did not end with the election. In the forging of alliances and division of political seats in coalition state governments, the power of blogs and especially commenters became apparent. The comments of DAP stalwart Lim Kit Siang on not accepting the Sultan of Perak's decision to seat a PAS member as "State Governor" was taken to task by commenters at his personal blog following his post on the matter there. Lim Kit Siang listened and the coalition is smoothing out all of the problems in order for the e-volution to move forward.

Going through the RSS feed for the day, it seems that a Pakistani government order to ban Youtube resulted in a temporary hijack of Youtube's internet routing information. (via Wampum) But it seems there is a Hong Kong connection to the hijacking that propagated a local problem in to a global one.

Just before 18:48 UTC, Pakistan Telecom, in response to government order (thanks nsp-sec-d) to block access to YouTube (see news item) started advertising a route for 208.65.153.0/24 to its provider, PCCW (AS 3491).

Yes, you can run a routing demon and advertise any old routes you want. I can set up one and tell my local machines that the route to the White House is via my web server. You can then pass along these bogus routes to your internet neighbours and try to hijack traffic. It would be awfully insecure, if you accepted just any old route to be published by any old person, so there are checks available to make sure that bogus routes never leak out globally. Unfortunately this time someone seems to have dropped the ball on the issue of weeding out bogus routing information.

Since BGP relies on a transitive trust model, validation between customer and provider is important. In this case, PCCW (3491) did not validate Pakistan Telecom's (17557) advertisement for 208.65.153.0/24. By accepting this advertisement and readvertising to its peers and providers PCCW was propagating the wrong route. Those who saw this route from PCCW selected it since it was a more specific route.

The hijack of Youtube only lasted a couple of hours as Sys and Network Admins globally worked to restore their LOLcats and music videos. And somebody at PCCW needs to whipped mercilessly with wet noodles for taking a local censorship issue and making it global, even if not through direct action but by carelessness and shoddy workmanship.