Opera betrays its Chinese Users

Opera decided to lock out its Chinese users. Until today, Opera Mini was a great browser to use. Fast access to web sites, and the additional benefit for Chinese users was access to blocked sites. Since the traffic runs over Opera servers, they bypassed the Great Firewall. Until today, that is. Now, every user in China is greeted with this message (update: I replace the original screenshot with one I took):


Let me guess what has happened here. The Chinese government has put pressure on Opera to close down that free access. And like most companies, they complied.

And they betrayed not only their Chinese users, but also themselves. Yeah, yeah, Opera, making the Web better, a friend of its users. Plain bullshit, as we can see now.

And you don't even dare to admit it? No press release, no posting in a blog about that you are now blocking usage of the international version to your Chinese usage.

And the worst thing: you even pretend that this is a good thing! You dare to say that this was done for "better browsing experience". Bah, disgusting.

Opera guys, if you were up to your image, then you would first of all inform you users about what has happened. You would inform you users that their data is now accessible to the Chinese government (I'm guessing that this is now the case --- and it makes me wonder what other agencies can access Opera data). Of course you cannot tear down the firewall. My guess is if you hadn't complied than your proxies would have been blocked in China. Well, it was your choice to comply to censorship. But the worst part is that you don't even inform your users.
Update: I'm rather certain that Opera is gagged. But you know, there are sites like Wikileaks. And someone has to speak up, it has gone to far.

Thanks to xlight and mranti for pointing me at this.

Chinese Netizen Compare Chinese and US Education System using Cinderella

Again a worth reading post from chinaSMACK, this time a comparison between the Chinese and US education system: "Teaching The Cinderella Fairytale: China vs. America". The first paragraphs from both versions:

A Chinese teacher tells the story of Cinderella

Bell rings, students and teacher walk into the classroom. Guess which is which.
Teacher: Which characters did you like in the story? Disliked? Why?
Student: I like Cinderella, and the Prince. I don’t like Cinderella’s step-mother and her step-sisters. Cinderella is kind, adorable, and beautiful. Her step-mother and step-sisters were mean to her.
Teacher: If at midnight, Cinderella didn’t get into her pumpkin carriage in time, what would happen?
Student: She would turn back into a servant with dirty clothes. Aiya, that would be horrible.
Teacher: Therefore, you must be punctual, otherwise you might land yourself in trouble. Also, look around, all of you are very clean and pretty, you need to make sure to be clean or your friends will be scared of you. Girls, you need to be extra careful. When you grow up and go out on a date, if you’re not careful and your boyfriend sees you when you’re very ugly, he might be so scared that he faints. (The teacher pretends to faint, class laughs).
...

Teacher: Greetings classmates.
Students: Greeeee—tiiiinngs—teeeeeacher—(elongated vowels)

Teacher: Today’s class, we’re discussing the story of Cinderella. Did everybody study in advance?
Student: Study? Who doesn’t know the story.
Teacher: Is Cinderella a story from the Grimm Brothers or Hans Andersen? Who was the author? When was the author born? What were the major events in the author’s life?
Student: …..(In whispers) It’s all in the book, can’t you read it yourself?
Teacher: What is the theme of the story?
Student: This must be an exam question.
...

Several sites unblocked this morning UPDATE: NO MORE

This is my first post since months that I can write without using a VPN. This morning, a lot of sites are suddenly unblocked: blogspot, ow.ly, bit.ly, ... Even Facebook has become accessible even though this changes every two minutes. YouTube works in an interesting way: the Web page is shown, but I cannot watch the videos ("something wrong with the connection"). The secure connection to docs.google.com is also working again.

Let's see how long this last! For the time being, I'm happy.

Update: I received several comments on Twitter (which was accessible, but currently now longer isn't). Most people in China still cannot access these sites. My current guess is that currently CERNET (the Chinese network for universities) might unblock some sites.

The "unblock" now lasts for several hours, starting around 9:30 this morning.

Let's see whether the curtain will drop again or whether the other networks will follow. I wonder whether it has do to something with Obama's visit to China next week? To show him that nothing is blocked here...

Update 2: After one week, the magic stopped, everything is back to normal, meaning blocked.

Lobbying in German Wikipedia

Currently there is a rather big discussion going on about deleting criteria in the German Wikipedia. It seems that the administrators of the German Wikipedia are quite eager to delete articles that they deem irrelevant. My point of view is rather simple: as there are no page limits in digital media, why not have articles about Herr Müller aus der Moltkestraße 3?

Regardless, what is even more interesting is that these deleting criteria are symptoms of general problems of the German Wikipedia. A rather small, very connected group of admins "rules" Wikipedia and group dynamics seem to be pushing away members with different viewpoint. I'm not involved at all in Wikipedia, but the comments of this article in the excellent German blog "Spiegelfechter" look like they were written by someone who knows this matter. It convincingly illustrates how think-tanks and lobby groups are working within Wikipedia:

4. Thinktanks und pressure-groups haben Relevanz von WP erkannt, und entsprechend dann darin Fuß gefasst, tw. auch “ganz oben”. Sie verhalten sich einfach im Sinne von 1. und 2., machen sich so beliebt, knüpfen ihre sozialen Kontakte, und fallen dann nicht weiter auf, bzw. nur “positiv”. Kommt es in “kritischen” Artikeln dann zu inhaltlichen Diskussionen und Konflikten, wird natürlich ihrem Urteil vertraut, nicht dem der anonymen IP, die etwas anderes sagt. Als “Admin” können sie kritik mit formalen Argumenten abbügeln (”edit-war”), Autoren und Artikel sperren, löschen – es fällt nicht weiter auf. Wer hat als gut ausgebildeter Akademiker eigentlich soviel Zeit, die nötigen edits und Sozialkontakte zum Aufstieg in der WP-Hierarchie zu sammeln, ohne seinen eigentlichen Beruf zu vernachlässigen? Oder anders gefragt – wer finanziert und steht hinter manchen “Hauptamtlichen”? Solche Fragen werden aber unwirsch abgebügelt, siehe Punkt 3.

Summary: Think tanks have understood the relevance of Wikpedia and established themselves by exploiting the group dynamics. They follow the established unwritten rules, establish contacts, behave as wanted by the core group. When discussions arise in specific articles, it is they who are believed, not the anonymous IP. Once they are admins, they can silence critics, close and remove authors and articles.

I think this is highly relevant. Is it naive to believe that new tools will by themselves change the established landscape of power structures. Lobby groups are very able to adapt to these new tools. Again, we are pointed to the fact that we have to able to think critically.

Stimulating Mathematical Creativity in China

The Chinese school system with its focus on the preparation for the university entrance exams leaves too little place for stimulating creativity and autonomous problem solving. The latest Templeton Newsletter presents an initiative that tries to address these issues in the field of mathematics: the Shing-Tung Yau High School Mathematics Awards. Shing-Tung Yau is a winner of the Fields Medal, chairman of the mathematics department at Harvard, and director of the Center of Mathematical Sciences at Zhejiang University.
From the newsletter:

Modeled after the long-standing Westinghouse competition in the U.S., the Shing-Tung Yau High School Mathematics Awards have been developed with the support of a three-year, $1.2 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation. Unlike other well-known math competitions, the Yau program does not pose questions and ask students to provide pre-determined answers. It is a research-based competition. With the guidance of teachers or mentors, students are asked to come up with an original issue for investigation and then to create the mathematical tools necessary to address their topic.
In its first year, winners for which were announced last December, the competition received entries from every province in China. Yau singles out the achievement of the team from the city of Wenzhou that won the gold medal. He notes that the city is not well known for its higher education and that the students did not have a lot of resources available to them. And yet, he says, they “came up with an outstanding problem and solution in number theory.”

It is a good thing that such competitions make people more aware about the importance of creativity in education. I hope that the initiative does not stop there, though, and helps teachers and schools to learn how to stimulate creativity in class, so that more than a few students benefit. In their resource center, they have links to tools and books; I could not find out whether they go to schools directly.

Citation Criteria: Accessibility

Even the side-remarks of Steve Talbott's NETFUTURE newletter are worth reading. In the current issue, he motivates the reference section:

With a view toward the needs of the readership, I have preferred to cite review articles, where they are available and, in general, have made little effort to reflect in my citations the priority claims of the various investigators of any particular phenomenon. Public (online) accessibility of papers and ease of access to the relevant information are primary criteria for my selection ...

I like the idea of citing not who claims to be the first who made a discovery but those publications that can be accessed. I'm not convinced that crediting only a single team or person makes complete sense. Discoveries always occur in a context. So, why not use accessibility as a criteria?
By the way, you find all my publications on my homepage ;)
Note: Starting with this post, I'm trying out the comment system Disqus that aggregates comments from different social networking sites. Please leave lots of comments everywhere! H/T to Ignatia Webs.
Photo by eschipul.

Report: Why Children Need to Play in School

Steve Talbott in his excellent NETFUTURE newsletter mentioned the new Alliance for Childhood publication "Crisis in the Kindergarten - Why Children Need to Play in School". The report provides evidence for what I personally believed all along, namely that children need to play. Instead of making kindergarten a low-level first class that drills reading and mathematics, it is better for the children to create an environment that enables meaningful play.

Some quotes from the preface:

Skepticism about the value of play is compounded by the widespread assumption—promoted by hundreds of “smart baby” products—that the earlier children begin to master the basic elements of reading, such as phonics and letter recognition, the more likely they are to succeed in school. And so kindergarten education has become heavily focused on teaching literacy and other academic skills, and preschool is rapidly following suit. The common misconceptions about young children’s play fall apart when we look closely at what is really going on. We begin to be able to differentiate between superficial play and the complex make-believe play that can engage five-year-olds for an hour or more, fueled by their own original ideas and rich use of language. ...

Research shows that children who engage in complex forms of socio-dramatic play have greater language skills than nonplayers, better social skills, more empathy, more imagination, and more of the subtle capacity to know what others mean. They are less aggressive and show more self-control and higher levels of thinking. ...

Long-term research casts doubt on the assumption that starting earlier on the teaching of phonics and other discrete skills leads to better results. For example, most of the play-based kindergartens in Germany were changed into centers for cognitive achievement during a wave of educational “reform” in the 1970s. But research comparing 50 play-based classes with 50 early-learning centers found that by age ten the children who had played excelled over the others in a host of ways. They were more advanced in reading and mathematics and they were better adjusted socially and emotionally in school. They excelled in creativity and intelligence, oral expression, and “industry.” As a result of this study German kindergartens returned to being play-based again.

I never understood why some people say that playing is a waste of time for kids. If you take a closer look at what and how they play it is amazing and surely very intensive learning.

Picture: Frances Foy: Child Playing, 1934, Smithsonian American Art Museum.