HUA HIN, Thailand - China acknowledged this week's 20-year anniversary of the
military crackdown in Tiananmen Square by cranking up their censors and
throwing a blanket of silence over the web. The blockade of websites is
far-reaching and includes Twitter, MSN, Hotmail, YouTube and Flickr.
Information and discussion on the event have been removed from the eyes of
Chinese web surfers as the People's Republic attempts to brush it under the
digital carpet again.
As of Tuesday, people in China using Hotmail or the popular micro-blogging
website, Twitter, were faced with a server time-out error message, which is a
classic sign of censorship at a higher
level. As Twitter is limited to only 140 characters per message and is a very
fast method of communicating, it would make selectively censoring it almost
impossible. Blocking the entire site is the easy option.
Microsoft confirmed that its newly launched search engine, Bing, also fell foul
of the great firewall and was not accessible throughout China. This may be a
good sign for Microsoft as it marks some recognition of the search engine's
effectiveness, especially at searching out video clips.
More than 400 blogs were taken offline or delisted from the popular Chinese
search engine Baidu in the lead-up to the anniversary. A number of foreign blog
sites hosted by free service providers at Blogspot and Wordpress have also been
blocked.
Security companies and those offering workarounds for people living in
countries with heavy-handed Internet censorship such as China, Myanmar,
Thailand and Iran have seen a rapid increase in demand for their products.
E-mail encryption services that mask the identities of the sender and recipient
have seen an increase in use in mainland China, as have proxy servers that mask
the Internet address (IP) of blocked websites, enabling them to be viewed.
Freegate, software that specifically circumnavigates Chinese web censors, has
had a 20% increase in downloads from China this week and company executives
claim that daily traffic records to their website are consistently being
broken.
The censorship has not been limited to the Internet as reports indicate that TV
stations have also seen blackouts.
It seems that even after 20 years, the Chinese government is still adamantly
attempting to deny the tragic events of that fateful day in June 1989 and
prevent its population from knowing the truth.
Gaming
This year's Electronic Entertainment Expo, which ran from June 1 to 4 at the LA
Convention Center, created a stir among gaming aficionados. All the big names
in the digital entertainment industry were in attendance, showing off their
latest and greatest offerings.
Microsoft unveiled its new control system for the Xbox 360, dubbed Project
Natal. The hands-free control system will use facial recognition technology,
biometrics and motion sensors to enable game play.
The revolutionary system will allow users to interact with the game using their
entire body and facial expressions, as opposed to a hand-held controller. The
technology will employ a camera, depth-sensor, multi-array microphone and
custom processor running proprietary software.
The demo, featuring Steven Spielberg, showed a user interacting with a digital
child in a virtual world without the use of any external controllers. It was
almost like a scene from the 1992 sci-fi movie Lawnmower Man, which
takes place in virtual reality. Spielberg said it was "a window into what the
future holds. There is technology now that recognizes not just your thumb; it
recognizes your entire person. The technology knows who you are."
Microsoft has yet to announce a release date for Natal, though it will
definitely need to wait until there are a few games on the market that will
work with the new technology.
Natal overshadowed Sony's demonstration of a prototype games controller for the
PlayStation, while Nintendo said it was "flattered" over the attempts to
imitate its ground-breaking Wii, which in 2006 was the first console to use
motion detection. Nintendo's own offerings included Wii MotionPlus, an advanced
upgrade to the existing controller offering greater sensitivity.
Hardware
The battle for processor supremacy continued this week as combatants Intel and
AMD unleashed salvoes in the server CPU market. A six-core Opteron processor
dubbed Istanbul was released by AMD, and Intel announced plans for an
eight-core Nehalem EX chip to be launched in the first quarter of 2010.
Previous battles over performance and price resulted in both companies trying
to squeeze more cores onto a single chip to boost benchmarks.
AMD has always been playing catch-up to Intel, which has the lion's share of
the market with 89% of the global x86 architecture server chip supply - AMD has
the remaining 11%. According to researcher IDC, the server chip market is
expected to shrink 22% this year to US$4.45 billion from $5.7 billion in 2008,
so the competition is likely to heat up even more.
Intel also introduced a power-saving CPU for ultra-thin laptops this week. The
Pentium SU2700 has already been accepted by Taiwanese tech companies Acer and
Asustek, which will build laptops with the new chip. The netbook or mini-laptop
market is expected to grow this year despite the economic downturn.
Martin J Young is an Asia Times Online correspondent based in Thailand.
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Gaming
