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The Chinese Connection

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china-flag.gifThe Seattle Times columnist Peter Navarro blames the American business schools for not preparing business executives to deal with ethics in a corrupt and totalitarian global-business environment like China.

Moreover, he calls for much bigger discussion about how to engage economically and politically with China.

Such inadequacy has resulted to moral breakdown which was clearly demonstrated by Yahoo! when it helped the Chinese government put business journalist Shi Tao and pro-democracy blogger Wang Xiaoning behind bars for 10 years.

Navarro also cited that other American companies like Skype, Cisco, Google, and Microsoft are helping China censor the Internet.

I just want to add one important factor causing this moral breakdown – greed. With its online population surging and so many ongoing developments, the Chinese market is very profitable. Sharing little information in exchange for bigger deals is very tempting for many profit-driven companies.

Originally posted on November 19, 2007 @ 12:44 pm

No Google access in Iran

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google_logo.jpgGoogle is the latest victim of Iran’s aggressive crackdown against morally offensive content. AFP reports Google search engine, Google Mail, and other foreign sites are now blocked in this country.

Iran has been losing its battle against degradation of morality allegedly caused by the proliferation of Websites filled with “sexual and politically critical” materials.

“I can confirm these sites have been filtered,” said Hamid Shahriari, the secretary of Iran’s National Council of Information.

While I laud the effort of Iran to uphold high moral standards among their citizens, I don’t think total ban is the right approach. Maybe they should adopt the Virtual Cops strategy currently employed by fellow Asian country, China.

Originally posted on September 17, 2007 @ 7:38 am

Pearl Jam cries censorship against AT&T

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att1.jpgPearl Jam is crying censorship against AT&T after the lyrics “George Bush, leave this world alone” were silenced during the webcast of Lollapalooza.

“What happened to us this weekend was a wake up call, and it’s about something much bigger than the censorship of a rock band,” the band said in a statement posted in their web site.

AT&T is blaming a webcast editor for the incident.

Originally posted on August 9, 2007 @ 12:35 pm

Syria To Syrians: No Internet For You

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Reports are coming in that the Syrian government has shut down most (or at least large portions) of the internet after suffering months of protests from citizens.

Starting at 3:35 UTC today (6:35am local time), approximately two-thirds of all Syrian networks became unreachable from the global Internet. Over the course of roughly half an hour, the routes to 40 of 59 networks were withdrawn from the global routing table.

This image shows the current state (green: reachable, red: unreachable) of each network prefix in the Middle East this morning, visualized as a packed Hilbert-curve representation. (Renesys Blog)

Apparently the Syrian regime hasn’t learned from the (now obsolete) dictatorship of Egypt, whose former leader tried a similar stunt only to end up hastening his own demise.

Syrians still might be able to access the digital web via the phone lines (which will be extremely slow), although those lucky enough to afford satellite phones might be able to keep the world updated through various tweets.

Note: If anyone has any ideas on how those outside Syria can help feel free to let us know in the comment section below.

Originally posted on June 3, 2011 @ 1:39 pm