Sunday, June 18, 2006

Hard Drive Reformat Survival, mKeys and Chinese Censorship

I survived my Hard Drive reformat, I manged to only reformat my System side of the Hard Drive and kept nearly all my data! It was allot quicker than I thought, although I am still downloading and installing things here and there, when I need them. Anyway at the moment I am currently working on a program called macroKeys or mKeys, which is basically a Text Replacement / Keyboard Macro. A little bit like Shortkeys, but free and will hopefully be better, but I doubt it. If you don’t have a clue what a Text Replacement / Keyboard Macro is then download and try Shortkeys, it is free for a certain amount of time, after that period is over you have to pay $19.99, so I am hoping to eliminate this fee with my free version. I will notify all of you when I release it, until then I will be working on it quite possibly for the next few weeks.


Chinese Censorship

Yahoo 'Worst Offender' for Chinese Censorship
97 per cent of results link to authorised sites only, says Reporters Without Borders.

Yahoo censors more sites than other search engines operating in China, according to press freedom organisation Reporters Without Borders. The group alleged that Yahoo China censored more results than Google China, MSN China and local search engine Baidu.

Using a list of 'subversive' keywords including 'democracy', 'human rights' and '6-4' (the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre), Reporters Without Borders measured whether the results returned linked to sites authorised or not authorised by the Chinese authorities.

A massive 97 per cent of the results returned by Yahoo China were to authorised sites, making it more restrictive than Chinese competitor Baidu. Google China returned 83 per cent authorised sites, compared with 78 per cent for MSN China.

The same search on Google.com showed only 28 per cent of authorised sites in the results.

The study also found that if users entered certain search terms into Yahoo, such as '6-4' or 'Tibet independence', they would be temporarily blocked from using the search engine for an hour. Only Baidu used the same technique.

Reporters Without Borders urged companies operating in repressive countries not to censor search results.

"We are convinced that these companies can still access the Chinese market without betraying their ethical principles. They must, however, adopt a firm and clear position in relation to the Chinese authorities," the organisation said in a statement.
[http://www.vnunet.com/2158465]

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