OK, this spam slightly scares me …

This message slightly frightens me: Why does it worry me?  It’s not like I’m the only one whose gotten this message.  Far from it. What interest me, and forgive me for not doing the research, is that the names dropped suggest that the spammer has some idea who I am and what I’m interested in. Chen [...]

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Bing is not (only) “disease” in Chinese

There is an urban legent that the Chevy Nova had to change it’s name in Mexico because it could be interpreted as “no va”.  it’s a cute story, but it’s false. Now, apparently there is a little claim going around that Bing, the brand name of Microsoft’s search engine in fact sounds like the word [...]

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Google has left the Mainland …

… and moved into Hong Kong. I haven’t posted anything for a while, but while I still get a little trickle of views I thought I’d finally follow up on something I covered a while back.  I’ve been following the Google China news and as of yesterday, Google officially left its China offices and redirected [...]

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Google’s China problems: worth leaving over?

Yesterday Google put up a blog post (via Jason Morrison) mentioning cyber attacks originating in China that appeared to be targeting human rights activists.  Since entering China, Google has been in a precarious position of balancing the Chinese government’s insistance on censored results with their own mission to make information free and available to everyone. [...]

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China bans individuals from registering .cn domains

So, just as the Internet has had a major democratization globally, China steps in with another ham-handed attempt at restricting it.  Authorities in China have banned individuals from registering .cn domains. (via Shanghaiist): According to the latest report published by CNNIC, users who want to apply for domain names should provide written application materials to [...]

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Join the Wave!

So, I’ve been invited to Google Wave, Google’s not-so-super-secret collaborative editor and communication tool that they hope will replace email.  The system gives me eight email invites, and since I don’t want to waste them on random people I’ve decided I’ll just post about it.  Anyone who wants an invite can post a comment (Facebookers, [...]

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Chinese domain names on the way

ICANN, the international organization that maintains Internet domain names has announced that they are going to begin allowing domain names using scripts other than the Latin script to be used for top-level domains (that is, the extensions such as .com, .org, etc). Up until now, domains have been restricted mostly to the 26 letters of [...]

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Wolfram|Alpha and language info

Wolfram Alpha came out today.  For anyone who hasn’t heard of it, Wolfram Alpha is a “computational knowledge engine” created by Stephen Wolfram which draws information from various Internet sources.  Anyway, I thought I’d play around with what it does with langauge data. Searching languages is fairly straightforward.  Search English or Spanish for example, and [...]

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