Internet nanny drives me against the wall

For a while I thought I could live with the internet censorship, or our nanny as some call the grumpy old woman. While being irrational and wrong in itself, I would be able to find patterns I was sometimes even able to explain to outsiders.
For example, for a long time - apart from real emergencies - new IP-blocks would only get in place at the first working day of the month. This was all based on the basis principle of any bureaucracy: we take ourselves very serious, but do not like to work too hard.
By reducing the actual number of IP-blocks the Great Fire Wall (GFW) even became slight more efficient, since many newbies did not see a good reason to educated themselves on circumventing that wall.
But now the old woman has gone crazy and all my old certainties seem out of the window. First, she blocked Feedburner. What sense does it make to block the world's largest producer of RSS-feeds? Maybe nanny wanted to punish Google, who bought Feedburner recently, for not joining the non-sensical declaration on self-discipline on the internet, that was signed for the first time by Yahoo and Microsoft.
Now, today the English section of Wikipedia was closed again, and act that made really no sense to me. The problem of course when you cannot make sense out of it (unlike in my first example), the punishment does not make any sense. It only forces more angry users to get their proxies in place again.

Yahoo! lied in Shi Tao's case

Shi Tao

Rconversation points at new material found by the Dui Hua foundation that proves Yahoo! legal counsel has been lying in a congressional hearing when he said that his company did not know why the judicial authorities in Beijing wanted to go after the journalist Shi Tao.
Shi was - with the help of Yahoo! - convicted to ten years of jail for giving state secrets to foreigners.
The Dui Hua foundation has translated the original document. Rconversations links to it all.

Update: The Dui Huai foundation comes with additional prove in other cases Yahoo knew why the police was after journalists and internet users.

MySpace, MSN Spaces merge in China

The China Web2.0 review reports on a merger between slugging MySpace and MSN Live Spaces. The current MySpace CEO Luo Chuan, former CEO of MSN Live Spaces in China, will be heading the merged business.
The move comes after early reports about the lackluster start of Rupert Murdoch's MySpace in China. The first comments are carefully positive:

What we can expect from this merge? At least, the merge shows that Myspace China is almost entirely autonomous from Myspace to make its own strategy, which is a good start to compete in Chinese market.

One of the problems Yahoo and other US-based internet companies had was that they were too dependent on their US bosses and could not develop according to the requirements of the China market.

Update: The story has been denied later today by Luo Chuan. See the comment.

Yahoo blocking rumor

Different webloggers in Shanghai and Beijing report that Yahoo has been blocked. No way to get it confirmed here in Europe. Well, it is not blocked here:-)

Update: All seems well again, for the moment.

Yahoo and free speech

I'm quite sure that it is about time that Yahoo and China Yahoo (or is it still Yahoo China?) hould talk to each other again, since I'm convinced that Jack Ma, who runs their China operations might have some misgivings about Yahoo's latest moves.
In short, when Yahoo China was not yet sold to Jack it helped the Chinese authorities to jail journalist Shi Tao for ten years. Then it sold most of its China operation to Jack Ma and tried to ignore accusations that they helped in jail a Chinese journalist.
Now, obvious that is no longer possible now Shi and others are suing Yahoo in the US. This is their latest:

"Yahoo is dismayed that citizens in China have been imprisoned for expressing their political views on the Internet," the company said in the statement faxed to The Associated Press, which asked Yahoo to comment on Shi's lawsuit.

Well, we were dismayed already quite some time before Yahoo was asked to defend itself in a US court. It just does not fit. I'm again dismayed and wonder how sincere Yahoo is now.

Update: I was already wondering why Yahoo wanted to cause trouble by themselves. But their shareholders are meeting on Tuesday and that could cause drama, say some.

Shi Tao wins prize in South Africa

Shi Tao

Our internet nanny was making overtime tonight when the news broke that the Chinese journalist Shi Tao has won, the Golden Pen, a price at the conference of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) in South Africa. Shi Tao was jailed by the Chinese authorities for doing his work as a journalist with the help of Yahoo.
In this case I could see why nanny got upset, but it is the first time that I could not get any links to the issue. Also, my proxies did not work. Anyway, we have the most important news, so even a nanny in the highest alert cannot stop the news.

Update I: Got some links here now.
Update II: Got through to the original post by Rebecca MacKinnon.

Search engine conference becomes Yahoo-event

The second China conference on search engine strategies, at the end of this month in Xiamen, promises to be even less of an event than the 2006 SES in Nanjing last year. Last year China's leading search engine Baidu was not present at the stage.
Yahoo-China has now become the major sponsor, while Microsoft and Google have disappeared as a sponsor and on the current agenda I could only find a Google engineer who would be speaking. Also local players are no longer sponsoring. Of course, Baidu is certainly not present on the stage.
Even Alibaba's Jack Ma is no longer giving a key note speech like he did last year, as far as I could see on the website. Probably Mr. Ma does not feel to happy with the only unsuccessful venture he is heading. While the talk of a possible IPO of Alibaba has become stronger, Yahoo China is excluded from this exercise and probably for good reasons. The conference might still be of interest as an expert-meeting, but no longer as a media event.

Alert: Yahoo sees money in China

Jerry Yang in a cheerful mood

When Yahoo-founder Jerry Yang tells an audience in the US he sees potential for making money in China on advertisements, I cannot stop laughing. It is bad enough he helped in the past the authorities to send journalists to jail (remember, this is still the day for the press freedom), making money in China has never been his strongest point.
At least in some of the media reports he gives a clue about a smart strategy. After two years he does think it makes sense to call Jack Ma again, who took over Yang's China operation for a rather decent fee.

Google, Yahoo reject shareholders motion against censorship

Both Yahoo and Google are advising their shareholders to vote against a resolution of the New York State Pension Fund that call for an end to their corporate censorhips, reports RConversation.
Both companies do not give a reason for their negative advise and refuse to talk to the media about the issue. The annual shareholders meetings are to be held on May 10 (Google) and June (Yahoo).