Street vendor selling juzi
I still have vivid memories of Beijing clothing vendors on a street called “Yifu Alley”. After a four year legal battle the vendors from “Silk Market” in Beijing are getting busted for copyright violation from 5 big international firms: Burberry, Gucci, Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Prada. Infuriated, they threaten to beat up the law firm that is forcing them to stop selling these goods.
 Qing dynasty bronze: Rat |
 Qing dynasty bronze: Rabbit There’s something haunting about these two recently auctioned Qing dynasty bronzes, which were looted when Beijing’s Summer Palace was razed by invading French and British forces in 1860. Usually bronzes don’t do much for me, but these two are captivating. Perchance it is their colourful past, or the kerfuffle they have caused. No matter to them, these two should be returned to China whence they came. |
Single signon is the ability to authenticate once and then have access to all your computer system. In the chaotic world of the internet, with so many individual sites with different owners, one tends to login multiple times a day. OpenID is a concept from the Open Source movement to simplify this process. It is still in its infancy, and there are a few issues, the single biggest one for me is that I cannot get it to work.
This morning the sun arose just a little bit earlier. It was brighter outside than usual. The kids were just a little happier, and walk with a little more skip in their step. They are more eager to go to school and play with their friends. In fact we are all a little brighter than usual. It snowed last night.
___It’s magical that a sprinkling of 5 cm of new snow can transform our landscape, and with it the spirits of our neighborhood. New snow is pristine, covering everything with a whitewash of, well, white. It’s as if some gigantic bottle of baby powder was evenly sprinkled on everything. A landscape of white greets your senses, with only a hint of green showing from our evergreens, who have the ability to partially shed their coat of snow.
I was once at a lunch with colleagues when a remarkable revelation hit me. No, the meal at our downtown Toronto Ethiopian restaurant Queen of Sheba was not that enlightening. It was that everyone at the table was Chinese.
___Here in Toronto, that alone will not a single eyebrow raise. With five distinct “Chinatowns” here, one may view wide swaths of Toronto with nary a white or non-Chinese face. A packed Chinese mall with the rare Laowai is common, and he might be the janitor. Or lost.
Who says the Chinese cannot be creative? With all the recent talk of copyright infringements due to blatant duplication of other people’s goods, it’s refreshing to see something original, even groundbreaking for a change.
___Chinese Censorship 2.0: How companies censor bloggers is a recent publication by Rebecca MacKinnon, Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre. Her small study’s findings include:
There is much written on the internet about Overseas Chinese (huachao, or huayi), and not so much about Chinese Overseas, as in Mainland Chinese people that visit overseas. I live in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada, a part of North Eastern Toronto. My neighborhood has many Chinese people that visit from mainland China.
___Our Chinese visitors come to stay from 3 months to a couple of years. Most are retired, called here by their married kids to help raise their grandchildren. For the most part, these visitors from China are devoted to their families and add a lot of flavour to Toronto culture. They bring with them traditional Chinese values and thinking from an era of China that may be long gone, or at least buried deep in the past.
I‘ve now spent some time playing with Yahoo Pipes. Now I have a couple of great Pipes that aggregate and filter worldwide sources for news on China and Japan. As well I have also found a huge number of blogs about China. They are all aggregated on my website DonTai.com. To put all these worldwide sources, filtered by keyword, into one simple web page, for each a linked title and a small description, is great. It saves so much time. You read the title and the small description and you decide to delve in deeper or to pass. It is brilliant.
TThere is no question that contributing on the web in China is fraught with a level of personal risk not seen in the West. Here, no one really cares what you write, provided it is not racist and does not defame anyone.
___In China, blogs and blog service providers get shut down on a regular basis. No explanations or warnings are given. This is what happened with a large Chinese blog provider Bulldog.cn last month. A blog that has run for one year is considered to be long lived. Search for the most popular blogs in China and you’ll find many that are posted on local blogrolls no longer exist. Here today, gone tomorrow. You’ll find previously vibrant URLS shuttered, all content gone, no comments allowed, no explanation given. It’s all very subtle.
Overwhelming is an understatement when I describe available news on the Internet. Just get on Google’s news section and search for something. If it is anything remotely general, mountains of pages of links will topple out of your monitor and cascade onto your head like a pile of bricks. You then grit your teeth and dig your way out.