China accuses Google of breaking the law

The Chinese government has blocked access to Google across large swathes of the country and accused the internet giant of breaking Chinese law.

An initial nationwide ban saw screens go blank between 9pm and midnight on Wednesday.

However, Google was inaccessible in several cities and on some mobile phone networks yesterday evening, almost 24 hours after the ban expired.

China's Foreign ministry accused Google's English-language search engine of spreading vulgar content and made it plain that various "punishment measures" had been carried out by the government.

"I want to stress that Google China is a company operating within China to provide Internet search services and it should strictly abide by Chinese laws and regulations," he said.

A spokesman for Google admitted that a range of Google services, including Gmail, its email site, had been cut off. "We hope that service will be fully restored soon".

Google has been repeatedly blocked in China for upsetting the government. The first block came as long ago as 2002. However the latest action is the biggest crisis the company has faced so far and could endanger its future business on the mainland.

Although the government accused Google of spreading pornography, several commentators speculated the block may be connected to competition with the local internet search engine, Baidu.

Google was roundly criticised by CCTV, the state broadcaster, which relies on Baidu for a large slice of advertising revenue. Although Baidu leads Google in the Chinese market, it has been suffering lately, particularly since its marketing department went on strike in May.

Jeremy Goldkorn, the founder of Danwei, a website that analyses Chinese media, said that the order to ban Google had probably been vaguely communicated to local internet companies, who continued to block the website after the ban had been lifted.

"Google's stated mission is to organise all the information in the world. The Chinese government has a similar idea. The two have always had an uneasy relationship," said Mr Goldkorn.

Facebook wants you to do it live

When Facebook launched its latest redesign, it became evident that the company was putting a lot of emphasis on real-time information--inspired, undoubtedly, by the runaway success of Twitter. Now the company's rolled out two small but crucial new features that put instant updates even more front and center.

First, Facebook is aiming to use the "publisher" tool--formerly known as the status update box--as members' gateway to the Web at large. Starting Wednesday and rolling out gradually, according to a post on the company blog, a beta version of the new content-sharing box will allow members to select exactly how public or private to make each piece of content that they share. The post by Facebook engineer Ola Okelola explained that something shared on a profile can be visible by friends, friends of friends, friends and networks (school, region, or company), user-created custom friends groups--or everyone on the Web.

Facebook's probably hoping that this will spur people to share more content: if members know that sharing a video, a photo, or even a status message won't by default go out to everyone who can see their profile, they might be more likely to share things along the lines of party photos and videos of their kids.

But, wait. There's more.

In addition, a post on the Facebook developer blog Wednesday explained that developers can now take advantage of live-streaming status update boxes much like the one that CNN used during President Obama's inauguration this January. "With the Live Stream Box on your website, users log in using Facebook Connect and share updates that appear both within the Live Stream Box and on their Facebook profiles and in their friends' home page Streams," the post by Tom Whitnah explained. "Each post includes a link back to the Live Stream Box on your site so users can discover the live event and immediately join based on their friends' recommendations."

It's intended so that people watching an event simultaneously can comment in sync on Facebook. And it's also supposed to be a no-brainer to create your own, meaning that Facebook is hoping a lot of developers and site owners will jump on this bandwagon.

"The Live Stream Box is easy to install and takes just a minute to set up," the post added. "To get the Live Stream Box on your website, get a Facebook API key, upload a small file to your website, and then embed a few lines of code into your Web page."

This is a move clearly aiming in the direction of Twitter, where real-time updates and discussions around events have become so commonplace that members regularly agree on a "hashtag" to flag related posts in advance of the event. (For the inauguration, for example, it was #inaug09.) The question is whether Twitter use has already become the standard for chronicling and commenting on events in real time--will enough people be willing to use Facebook widgets rather than apps built on Twitter?

Block scripts in Firefox

The Internet is full of threats like cross-site scripting attacks and clickjacking. A lot of these attacks work by injecting scripts in web pages that you don't even know are there. You can give yourself a modicum more protection by running a Firefox plug-in calle

d NoScript.

NoScript blocks all scripts from running until you authorize them. Let me show you how it works.

Go to addons.mozilla.org and search for NoScript or get it from Download.com. Intsall it like you would any add-on. Once you have it installed, look in the bottom right corner at the little S with the cross-out symbol.

Clicking on it brings up a sub-menu that allows you to choose how to handle scripts on the page you're at. The safest way to go is not to allow any scripts. You'll never fall victim to code that doesn't run.

But some sites won't work without scripts so, the next safest thing is to Temporarily allow only the scripts you need and or trust. A lazier and slightly less safe method is to temporarily allow all on a page.

The next more convenient level, but also next less safe is to permanently allow scripts either individually or all for a page. This becomes necessary for things like your Bank's website or Google Docs where you don't want to constantly allow scripts every time you launch your browser. If you permanently allow scripts from a site, you're putting your trust in that site that it will never allow itself to be infected by a malicious script.

The worst thing you can do is globally allow all scripts. You might as well not run NoScript at that point. If you have allowed a script on a page and you change your mind about it, you can always choose forbid, to start blocking it again.

Running noScript means you're going to have to do a bit more thinking about pages you surf to. It was enlightening when I first started running NoScript which of my banks and utilities worked just fine without scripts and which became disabled. If nothing else, NoScript gives you more control over what risks you expose yourself to on the Net.