I can't really see Google actively assisting people in circumventing these blocks. I would expect ChinGov sees a world of difference between exploiting legal loopholes (as this move to HK seems to be) and helping people get around the government's Legal and Righteous Great Firewall.
I'm torn between expecting ChinGov to block google in short order, and the conspiracy bit in my brain thinking this is a big public showdown where Google finds a loophole and ChinGov accepts this, as a prelude to giving up the whole censorship thing. "well we don't like it, but it's legal..." Cue complaints from Baidu, and the great firewall comes crashing down.
We sell inventory control software in Australia, and have been shelling out about a thousand dollars a month for an Adwords campaign for a few years now. Our relationship with Google's service was satisfactory, as far as we were concerned.
We were stunned to have our account canceled recently, and we have no idea why it happened. Of course there's no recourse, no one at Google returns our mails, despite inviting us to respond if we felt it was done in error.
We're faced with a starkly frightening future without the sales leads we generated with our Adwords campaigns, and our Canadian office - with far more staff - is now terrified that they'll face the same ban.
It is powerfully frustrating to be dealt this blow and not have any mechanism for appeal or recourse, moreso 'cause we thought we knew Google's rules and were following them. No warning, just a permanent and bewildering end to our number one customer generating mechanism.
The best part was the email from Google a week later inviting us to read about new ways to maximize our now dead Adwords campaigns.
Of course lawyers are suing each other. The law is probably the single biggest thing in their lives, it's all they know. "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail."
Freeing your brain from the burden of memory frees it up to do things like search and crosslink. I accomplish more and faster with Google than I ever could with my memory. I don't even bookmark pages I find, 'cause I know I can find them again later.
I used to remember phone numbers, now the only ones I remember are my work and my mobile, and only 'cause people ask me for them all the time. I mean, who even uses a phone? I'm more likely to remember an IP.
I don't need to remember things, I just need to remember processes. I know how to find the information I need, and I know how to assemble that into a larger whole with the other things I find. Short term memory has become medium-term: It's there just long enough to finish something, and if I need to come back to it a year later, I'm learning it all over again. But fast!
I don't remember PHP commands. I remember where I found them last time. I don't remember phone numbers, I remember how to work my phone, and I intuit how to work someone else's if the need arises. I don't remember passwords, my browser does that for me and I remember how to reset it if the browser breaks.
It's important to remember that Australia's legal history makes 2clix' position much more tenable than you might at first glance think. Consider the case of a food reviewer who was sued by a restaurant he unfavourably reviewed:
According to cryptome.org, wikileaks may be a fraud. John Young (who runs cryptome) was a member of the wikileaks inner circle for a short while but dropped out and published all the email records of their conversations.
Talk of millions in funding, claims of millions of documents, and not a single shred of proof or evidence? I'm skeptical, and it seems I'm not alone.
In Japan fiber installations are, depending on your timing, anywhere between Y0 - Y30,000. They string the expensive, time-consuming fiber to the roof outside your house, hide a splice inside a box and run a thinner, more maneuverable cable through a wall. Once inside they give you a modem that takes fiber and outputs CAT5 (ethernet) cable. What's so expensive about running the CAT5 around a house for extra TVs, or even running it outside the house and into each wall? They have to do this with regular coax for cable TV, and with CAT5 the expensive time consuming fiber installations aren't a problem. And ethernet's plenty fast enough for any consumer use for the forseeable future.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by NFG.
I can't really see Google actively assisting people in circumventing these blocks. I would expect ChinGov sees a world of difference between exploiting legal loopholes (as this move to HK seems to be) and helping people get around the government's Legal and Righteous Great Firewall.
I'm torn between expecting ChinGov to block google in short order, and the conspiracy bit in my brain thinking this is a big public showdown where Google finds a loophole and ChinGov accepts this, as a prelude to giving up the whole censorship thing. "well we don't like it, but it's legal..." Cue complaints from Baidu, and the great firewall comes crashing down.
It's a great show, innit? =D
They got us too...
We sell inventory control software in Australia, and have been shelling out about a thousand dollars a month for an Adwords campaign for a few years now. Our relationship with Google's service was satisfactory, as far as we were concerned.
We were stunned to have our account canceled recently, and we have no idea why it happened. Of course there's no recourse, no one at Google returns our mails, despite inviting us to respond if we felt it was done in error.
We're faced with a starkly frightening future without the sales leads we generated with our Adwords campaigns, and our Canadian office - with far more staff - is now terrified that they'll face the same ban.
It is powerfully frustrating to be dealt this blow and not have any mechanism for appeal or recourse, moreso 'cause we thought we knew Google's rules and were following them. No warning, just a permanent and bewildering end to our number one customer generating mechanism.
The best part was the email from Google a week later inviting us to read about new ways to maximize our now dead Adwords campaigns.
Lawyers...
Of course lawyers are suing each other. The law is probably the single biggest thing in their lives, it's all they know. "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail."
It makes sense
Freeing your brain from the burden of memory frees it up to do things like search and crosslink. I accomplish more and faster with Google than I ever could with my memory. I don't even bookmark pages I find, 'cause I know I can find them again later.
I used to remember phone numbers, now the only ones I remember are my work and my mobile, and only 'cause people ask me for them all the time. I mean, who even uses a phone? I'm more likely to remember an IP.
I don't need to remember things, I just need to remember processes. I know how to find the information I need, and I know how to assemble that into a larger whole with the other things I find. Short term memory has become medium-term: It's there just long enough to finish something, and if I need to come back to it a year later, I'm learning it all over again. But fast!
I don't remember PHP commands. I remember where I found them last time. I don't remember phone numbers, I remember how to work my phone, and I intuit how to work someone else's if the need arises. I don't remember passwords, my browser does that for me and I remember how to reset it if the browser breaks.
It's all about the processes.
Negative reviews illegal in Australia...
It's important to remember that Australia's legal history makes 2clix' position much more tenable than you might at first glance think. Consider the case of a food reviewer who was sued by a restaurant he unfavourably reviewed:
http://my.opera.com/NFGman/blog/idiocy-in-australia
The reviewer lost.
This case seems very similar to me.
Wikileaks may be a fraud.
According to cryptome.org, wikileaks may be a fraud. John Young (who runs cryptome) was a member of the wikileaks inner circle for a short while but dropped out and published all the email records of their conversations.
Talk of millions in funding, claims of millions of documents, and not a single shred of proof or evidence? I'm skeptical, and it seems I'm not alone.
Wikileaks leak 1
Wikileaks leak 2
What about CAT5?
In Japan fiber installations are, depending on your timing, anywhere between Y0 - Y30,000. They string the expensive, time-consuming fiber to the roof outside your house, hide a splice inside a box and run a thinner, more maneuverable cable through a wall. Once inside they give you a modem that takes fiber and outputs CAT5 (ethernet) cable.
What's so expensive about running the CAT5 around a house for extra TVs, or even running it outside the house and into each wall? They have to do this with regular coax for cable TV, and with CAT5 the expensive time consuming fiber installations aren't a problem.
And ethernet's plenty fast enough for any consumer use for the forseeable future.