Mouthing off on the state of U.S. - China relations

The United States Government is once again trying to stomp on your online freedoms. A few months ago it was online pornography now it is online poker. Even if you do not play poker this is your issue if you believe in online freedom. The train is rolling people, its up to us to put a stop to it now!

Digg, it seems, didn't 'like' my stories, so blocked my IP address from signing up or logging in.

Bush administration earns D on 2005 Presidential Human Rights Report Card.

If this poor behaviour continues we may have to ask your parents come in.

Heh. Or they could be forced to send all their money to america via digital transfer ;)

A 16-year-old boy was arrested Wednesday after postings on the popular Web site MySpace.com allegedly showed him holding handguns, authorities said.

The teen was being held at a juvenile detention center facing three misdemeanor charges of juvenile possession of a handgun, said district attorney spokeswoman Pam Russell. He is due in court Feb. 27.

Police searched the boy's home after receiving a tip from Evergreen High School on Feb. 10, the same day he was suspended, officials said

The thousands of censors who patrol the internet in China must feel a little like King Canute. One Chinese expert described their task as showing the futility of trying to hold back the sea.

“Everyone knows where the controls are and that makes it pretty easy to get around them,” said one anonymous internet specialist. He cited a Chinese proverb about a man who buried his silver for safekeeping and put up a sign reading: “No cache of silver is buried here.”

China’s Communist Party rulers are acutely aware that the internet has become an essential tool for the reform and modernisation of a country with 1.3 billion people to feed and clothe. They got a taste of China without the internet when Google’s search engine was blocked for ten days in 2002 and scholars and government officials rounded in fury on the censors, complaining that they could no longer work.

China has more than 111 million users — second only to the US, and with 20,000 new users a day that figure will reach 130 million by the end of the year.

Monitors of the internet in China have spent years honing their skills to try to block pornography and politics. A glance at Sina.com, China’s leading internet portal, provides a measure of their success. A popular section entitled “body photographs” and displaying hundreds of images of the naked female form disappeared recently. Yet, many more nudes are still to be found by a quick click on bulletin boards.

Most users do not consider it piracy to make tape copies of their own CDs. Similarly, ripping CDs to MP3s for your iPod does not set off the "I am committing a crime" sensors in most people. Well, according to RIAA, most people have it wrong.

MPs were warned on Thursday that digital rights management systems are preventing consumers from exercising their fair-use rights. Appearing at a hearing conducted by the All-Party Parliamentary Internet Group (APIG), senior representatives from the British Library said they were frustrated that DRM is stopping librarians from giving the public long-term access to content. "If an item comes into the British Library and it is protected by DRM, it makes it very hard for us to ensure long-term access to that copy," said Dr Clive Field, director of scholarships and collections at the British Library. As a copyright library, the British Library has a responsibility to keep a copy of everything published in the UK. And like all libraries, it must be able to allow members of the public to duplicate parts of the material in its care. But the Library is finding that in the modern age much of the material it collects comes in electronic form. "These days a journal, such as The Lancet, will come electronically, and with restrictions that are greater than we get with a print version," said Ben White, copyright and compliance manager at the British Library.

I believe that our American cousins say it most succinctly when they say 'Well, duh!!'