Latest Technology News

National bans is poll boon for Italian local TV, Internet

The suspension of political programming by national broadcasters ahead of regional elections Sunday and Monday has boosted audiences for Internet and local TV shows, a novelty in Italian politics.

Rai television, which groups all public channels, suspended political programming ahead of the elections, saying it did not want to be seen favouring any one party but also to avoid fines for bias.

The move caused a general outcry and a void in the public debate ahead of the elections for regional governors for 13 of Italy’s 20, a vote that will also be a test of the popularity of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

“It is incredible that in Italy there are so many political programmes, but they have to be interrupted precisely at the time when politics becomes important,” journalist Enrico Mentana said in an interview with AFP.

Rai’s controversial decision was, however, still not enough to prevent its main television news programme from being fined 100,000 euros (134,000 dollars) for “imbalance” in reporting and “weak” coverage of the smaller candidates.

The same punishment was doled out to its main competitor, Canale Cinque in Berlusconi’s Mediaset group.

“It is as if we have 10 football teams but just at the moment of the kickoff of the championship, we have only one,” said Mentana, who has created a programme on the Internet site of the Il Corriere della Sera daily.

On Thursday night a programme by Rai journalist Michele Santoro, who normally hosts the AnnoZero political talk show that Berlusconi is alleged to have tried to gag, escaped the ban by going out on local and satellite channels and the Internet.

About 200,000 people watched on the web and the show was also aired on giant screens erected in 200 Italian towns and cities, including Rome and Naples, Italian media reported.

The programme, which took aim at the 73-year-old Berlusconi, was called “Raiperunanotte” (Rai for a night) and dedicated to freedom of expression.

“Until now, the Internet was considered a separate territory, with different tribes, its own codes and systems of interaction,” said Mentana.

“But now we have brought to the web people who originally were not going there,” he said. “A new era has opened.”

It is an opinion shared by Marco Marturano, professor at the Milan school of journalism IULM, who said: “The Internet has won in this story an image and a role in information.”

He added however that “we honestly cannot say that there is a direct transfer of the public from television to the Internet.”

“The Internet public remains a public apart. But in a country where just until last year Internet communication was still far from being a means of mass communication, it is a sign of what may come,” he said.

At the same time, “an advantage has been given to the local televisions which are not under the same rules and could provide a public service that the nationals chains can no longer,” he said.

Entertainment channels were also able to contribute to the political debate.

“A programme like ours, half-way between entertainment and information, slips through the net,” Andrea Salerno, producer of “Parla con Me” on Rai Three, told AFP.

But what will be the impact of these changes on the results of the election?

Marturano said the fact that during the campaign there was “less political information will translate into more votes for the parties than for their platforms, as much on the right as on the left.”

“The vote will not consist of a choice for the best regional president but to give a signal against or for Berlusconi,” he said.

Google goes it alone in China censorship fight

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a major speech on Internet freedom two months ago, called on US technology firms not to support online censorship.

“I hope that refusal to support politically motivated censorship will become a trademark characteristic of American technology companies,” Clinton said. “It should be part of our national brand.”

Amid a host of trade disputes with China, however, Google’s decision last week to halt censorship there met with only a fairly muted response from the State Department — and virtual silence from other US technology giants.

Go Daddy, the world’s largest registrar of Web domain names, did announce that it was no longer registering names in China because of what it called “chilling” new identification requirements imposed by the Chinese authorities.

And another domain name registrar, Network Solutions, told AFP it had stopped offering the .cn domain names in December because of the “intrusive nature” of the new Chinese policies for those seeking Web addresses.

But no other US companies indicated they were prepared to follow Google’s lead and run the risk of being shut out of the world’s largest online market.

Microsoft, Yahoo!, Cisco and previously Google are among the US firms which have been accused by members of the US Congress and human rights groups of abetting the Web censorship machine dubbed the “Great Firewall of China.”

Yahoo! did not reply to a request for comment on Google’s move but chief executive Carol Bartz said last year: “It’s not our job to fix the Chinese government.

“We will respect human rights but not take on every government in the world — that’s not our mandate,” Bartz said.

Microsoft for its part last week reiterated the position the software giant expressed in January when Google revealed that it and other companies had been the target of cyberattacks originating in China.

“We appreciate that different companies may make different decisions about where and how they operate their business based on their own experiences and views,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.

“We remain committed to advancing free expression, and we currently are engaged actively in doing business in over 100 countries, even as we comply with the laws in every country in which we operate.”

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, in an interview with Britain’s Guardian newspaper, said he was “disappointed” with Microsoft and that its stance was “against freedom of speech and human rights.”

While praising Google, Representative Chris Smith, a Republican from New Jersey, said Microsoft “need to get with the program and join with the side of human rights rather than enabling tyranny.”

Google’s decision to stand up to the Chinese authorities also won plaudits from human rights groups but it was not universally lauded and Microsoft and Yahoo! also had their defenders.

Michael Arrington, founder of US technology blog TechCrunch, condemned what he called Google’s “certain level of hypocrisy” for abandoning a search market they were “failing in” while leaving behind “assets that have more promise.”

Deriding Go Daddy’s move a “publicity stunt,” Arrington said “whatever China is or isn’t, we are all very much in business with them.”

“What I can’t sit and watch is Microsoft being raked over the coals by a government that does nothing to fight the evil that they say exists in China,” he said.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are all founding members of the Global Network Initiative, which brings together Internet and telecom companies, human rights groups, academics and investors to protect freedom of expression and privacy.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a member of GNI’s board of directors, noted to AFP that Yahoo! had largely disengaged from China and said Microsoft’s continued presence there is not at odds with its participation in the initiative.

“The point is to try and be practical with the idea that engagement is the ideal situation if they can figure out a way to do it responsibly,” MacKinnon said. “We try to get beyond the alternative of in or out.

“It would be unhelpful to say that the Chinese do a lot of bad things therefore the technology sector should disengage,” she said. “Because then they should disengage from half the countries in the world.”

Confused about phone camera quality? Help’s coming

(CNET) — Let’s say you’re trying to decide whether to buy a new mobile phone and you like taking photos. The Google Nexus One’s 5-megapixel camera has 56 percent more pixels than the iPhone 3GS’s 3.2 megapixels, but it’s clear the camera isn’t 56 percent better.

Now let’s say it’s 2012 and you’re trying to decide whether to buy an Apple iPhone 4GS or a Google Nexus Three. You might be able to make a better choice this time.

That’s because the International Imaging Industry Association, a consortium involving more than 30 companies, is working on a test that will use a five-star rating and a basic accompanying chart to judge image quality.

It may seem like a simple idea, but it’s pretty important. That’s because the nature of mobile-phone photography is changing dramatically.

Once upon a time, mobile-phone cameras didn’t see much use beyond teenagers mugging for the camera and maybe sending each other the photos for viewing on another mobile phone.

But now mobile-phone cameras are getting good enough to store precious memories, too. That means viewing them on bigger screens, printing them, and saving them for more than a fleeting moment.

“As [mobile-phone photography] gets to older people, it will get more important,” said Nicholas Touchard, vice president of marketing for image quality evaluation at the French company DxO Labs, after a speech at the Image Sensor Europe conference here. Touchard represents DxO in the consortium.

He said phone buyers could start seeing the quality score as early as a year from now, but realistically two years is more likely.

The score is based on measurements of a variety of factors. First came basics such as sharpness, color uniformity, and lens distortion. Now the group is tackling image noise, white balance, sensitivity, blur, and other attributes.

Of course, reducing image quality to a single five-star rating scale can oversimplify a complicated situation. There’s a bit more, though: a chart that shows how well the camera fares with increasingly demanding tasks — mobile-phone sharing to a print mounted on the wall, for example — and showing different uses such as portraits, sports, and landscape photography.

“This is a very controversial thing. Most people will tell you that summarizing the quality of a camera to just one number is quite risky or isn’t what you would like to do as a scientist,” he said in his speech. “However, as a consumer, it’s probably a good idea.”

Mobile-phone cameras suffer poor image quality compared even to inexpensive compact cameras, much less to increasingly popular SLRs. One thing that holds them back are the tiny image sensors, which simply have a harder time recording as much information as larger ones in dedicated cameras.

Another is the correspondingly small lenses that must be built to tight manufacturing tolerances but that also must be inexpensive enough for high-volume markets with very thin profit margins.

But as the saying has gone in photography circles since the days of film, the best camera is the one you have with you, and people always bring their mobile phones.

Adding to that is another fact: as Internet connectivity increasingly is built into phones, those photos are more likely to escape the phone via e-mail, Facebook, or other means.

It’s not a coincidence that the iPhone is the most popular camera on Yahoo’s Flickr photo-sharing site. And the new smartphones are powerful enough to run software such as Photoshop for those who want to polish before sharing.

There could be more quality improvements coming, too, that separate camera quality more widely.

In 2011, start-up InVisage hopes to transform the smartphone market with much higher-quality image sensors. The company believes its QuantumFilm technology — small precisely sized elements of light-sensitive semiconductor painted onto the surface of an image sensor chip — will be as much as four times as sensitive as prevailing image sensor technology.

InVisage has another potential edge, too, said digital design manager Michael Malone in a talk at the conference. That’s because InVisage’s design isn’t as sensitive to the direction light is arriving from, in contrast to traditional sensors that work best with light arriving perpendicular to the sensor. InVisage’s approach opens up options for lens designs that permit a smaller camera package. And as everybody knows with mobile phones, thin is in.

Key to making the camera phone image quality (CPIQ) score useful will be persuading those who sell mobile phones — handset makers and carriers, chiefly — to show the number.

Touchard believes they will — at least some of them some of the time.

“They’re all waiting for who makes the first move,” Touchard said. “Progress is not really coming from the carriers. They don’t know much about this, and they don’t want to do it if the others aren’t doing it.”

Of course, plenty of companies won’t want to if their phone’s camera gets a low score. But Touchard believes that those on the other end of the quality spectrum will be instrumental in its spread. It also will appeal to newcomers or those trying to show off a competitive edge.

This is where Google and Microsoft, which joined the phone quality effort in 2009, could come into play.

“Google and Microsoft are in a battle to get into the high-end market because of Apple and Nokia,” two incumbent powers, Touchard said. Google has a particular interest in image quality: its Google Goggles program lets people submit photos as search queries, and text recognition doesn’t do well with low-quality images.

And once consumers start seeing the camera ratings, they could become sophisticated enough to recognize that there might be a reason it’s missing from some products.

‘Flying’ boat hopes to circle globe in 40 days

London, England (CNN) — The captain of a huge “flying” boat that has smashed world records for speed on water now plans to sail round the world in under 40 days.

Frenchman Alain Thebault, skipper of “Hydroptere,” a revolutionary sailing boat that looks more like a plane, says his next project is to circumnavigate the globe in half the time of the Jules Verne novel “Around the World in 80 Days.”

“My dream is to cross the world in 40 days,” Thebault told CNN. “It is a project that is very close to my heart and that I believe in.”

“Hydroptere,” currently the world’s fastest sailing boat, gets its speed from foils, or underwater “wings” that lift the boat and enable it to “fly” several meters above the water.

This innovation, which uses principles similar to those of airplanes, avoids drag and allows the 18- by 24-meter boat to achieve previously unimaginable speeds.

Inventor Thebault started working on the design for “Hydroptere” nearly 25 years ago.

“Many years ago when I said I wanted to make a boat fly people said I was crazy,” he told CNN.

Thebault is aware of the dangers of his chosen sport.

In 2008, “Hydroptere” reached extreme speeds of over 60 knots per hour (about 111 km per hour, or almost 70 mph) before dramatically crashing.

“When you sail at very high speeds, around 100 km/hour, the water becomes like a rock,” he said. “So yes, it is dangerous.Sailing at very high speeds is similar to high altitude for alpinists — up there, you have to spend the least time possible.”

Thebault and his team rebuilt “Hydroptere” and in late 2009 it became the fastest boat on the planet, traveling at over 50 knots (over 100 km/h) over 500 meters and one nautical mile.

Thebault is currently building a larger version of the boat, “Hydroptere Maxi,” to make his attempt at crossing the world in under 40 days.

At 30 by 30 meters, Thebault hopes that “Maxi” will react better in heavy seas and be able to accommodate a group of 10 sailors. He expects “Maxi” to be sea-ready in 2013.

He likened his previous records and the round-the-world attempt to the difference between a 100-meter sprint and running a marathon: “They are completely different, but we want both.”

But before all that, the maverick sailor, who admits this project is both his profession and obsession, has another goal: He will attempt to cross the Pacific in three days in 2011.

Google.cn: R.I.P or good riddance?

Beijing, China (CNN) — How do Chinese Internet users feel about Google’s decision to move most of its search functions from the mainland? That all depends on who you ask.

“You have two categories of Internet users in China,” said Isaac Mao, a prominent Chinese blogger and Internet expert.

“One strongly supports that Google is either staying here without censorship or pulling out of China to keep neutral and independent. But another layer, maybe 90 percent of Internet users in China, they don’t care whether Google leaves or not.”

Mao represents the first category: A sometimes politicized group of white collar, technologically savvy academics, bloggers and students who frequently vocalize their opposition to censorship in China on blocked Web sites. They often access blocked sites, such as Twitter, using special software to circumvent the “Great Firewall”, as China’s filtering system is called.

Among such elite circles, Google’s decision Monday to close Google.cn, the Chinese version of its search engine, and redirect users to its Hong Kong-based search engine, has little direct impact. They are already accustomed to using circumvention technology, which means an uncensored, overseas version of Google remains accessible from the mainland.

Google quits censoring search in China

For them, Google’s departure represents a symbolic mix of heroism and grief. Many of them hope that maybe the high-profile exit will make China’s Web users, who they say are aloof to government censorship, more aware of it. Then again, maybe not.

“Even if Google is a kind of wake-up call, we have no confidence that the censorship will be removed,” said Michael Anti, another prominent Chinese blogger. “We are very sad about the situation. Chinese people deserve the free Internet like others. We are not second class citizens. We deserve comprehensive and direct information like our foreign counterparts.”

Among this pro-Internet freedom group there is also a sense of frustration that Chinese netizens, as the country’s Web users are known, have been unfairly left in the dark since Google announced it might exit China on January 12.

Earlier this week a widely circulated online petition, titled “An Open Letter to the Chinese Government and Google from China Netizens,” emerged. It urges Google to provide more information on the censorship rules Beijing imposed on the company as well as considering the needs of Web users.

“They did not ask Chinese users what they want,” said Steven Lin, a Beijing-based blogger. “I think most Chinese Internet users feel they have been ignored. It is a big market and we have been helping Google get more and more users for so many years. They cannot make such a quick decision without asking how Internet users feel in China.”

Others say they are even more frustrated with Google.

According to Robert Deng, an associate professor of new media at Fudan University, many Chinese view the search giant’s decision to challenge the rule of law in China as inappropriate, even irrational behavior.

“I am disappointed by Google,” said Deng. “I agree the Internet users should have freedom of speech, but Google raised this issue in a way that is unacceptable to the government and to the Chinese people.”

“I am confused by Google’s behavior and purpose. Does it want good for the Chinese people or bad for the Chinese people? For the netizens who have been using it for three or four years, if they [Google] want it good, stay here. If they want it bad, really, you go,” said Deng.

Google-China move hurts business, academics

Comments and surveys posted on Chinese web portals indicate a broader population who do not support Google and also view the company’s actions as a move to damage the country’s reputation abroad.

Eighty percent of those who responded to a survey on the popular portal Sina.com said the Google exit would not damage China’s IT industry.

“It’s only Google’s loss,” one Web user said. “Sooner or later there will be someone stronger than Google. And Google is dead because it is now involved in politics.”

Another Chinese Internet user who declined to be identified for this article said: “Many Chinese don’t support Google. Most Chinese think business is business, and it should not be related with politics. The government will try to tell people that Google is too political and wants to try to force more human rights or democracy issues on China. In this case, most Chinese won’t like Google.”

Qin Gang, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said Tuesday Google’s moves would not impact Sino-U.S. relations.

“The Google incident is just an individual action taken by one company — I can’t see its impact on Sino-U.S. relations unless someone wants to politicize it,” he said.

(CNN) — Facebook on Friday proposed creating a way for people to add their locations to Facebook pages but released almost no details about how the feature will work.

The location-based feature, hinted at in a post on Facebook’s blog, would give the social network’s 400 million-plus members a function that has been popularized on newer “location-based” Web sites like Foursquare and Gowalla.

Those two sites feature mobile apps that are set up like games, encouraging smartphone- or laptop-wielding users to “check in” at restaurants, businesses and public locations. When a person checks in to a certain spot, his or her friends are alerted about their whereabouts.

Posting locations in addition to status messages and Web links has become a major theme of online social networking this year.

In a blog post on Friday, Michael Richter, Facebook’s deputy general counsel, provided few details about how the places feature would work but did confirm that Facebook is working on features that use people’s locations.

He writes that the addition is “more exciting” than a location feature the company had been planning.

“The last time we updated the Privacy Policy, we included language describing a location feature we might build in the future. At that point, we thought the primary use would be to ‘add a location to something you post.’ Now, we’ve got some different ideas that we think are even more exciting,” Richter wrote.

“So, we’ve removed the old language and, instead added the concept of a ‘place’ that could refer to a Page, such as one for a local restaurant. As we finalize the product, we look forward to providing more details, including new privacy controls,” the post says.

This month, The New York Times cited unnamed sources saying Facebook would unveil its location-based feature at its annual f8 conference for Facebook application developers, which begins April 21 in San Francisco, California.

Friday’s Facebook post also says that the massive social networking site will make changes “sometime soon” to the policies that govern how it works.

Such alterations typically draw raucous debate, and often backlash, from the Facebook community, but the site says it is announcing the changes for review before they go into effect so users will have time to read them and post comments.

The idea of a “place” is mentioned at least twice in the proposed policy.

“Once you register you can provide other information about yourself by connecting with, for example, your current city, hometown, family, relationships, networks, activities, interests, and places,” the policy says.

In a section about information the site collects about you from other users, the policy says: “We may collect information about you from other Facebook users, such as when a friend tags you in a photo, video, or place, provides friend details, or indicates a relationship with you.”

The addition of “place” into Facebook lingo is an important change, Marshall Kirkpatrick writes on the blog ReadWriteWeb.

“The difference between location and Place is a significant one. Substantial resources are dedicated by location-aware social networks to determine what ‘place’ your location refers to,” he writes.

“That might mean neighborhood, it might mean business name and it might mean recognizing when you are posting from home so that location can be selectively hidden if you so choose.”

On the tech blog VentureBeat, Kim-Mai Cutler writes that the “place” feature could make Facebook pages for businesses and television shows more interesting.

“This could make Fan Pages for restaurants a lot richer and maybe even competitive to Google’s Place Pages or Yelp’s listings,” she writes.

“If you could tag an update or post with a venue, you probably attach comments, mini-reviews and photos to the Fan Page.”

Pre-orders of Apple’s iPad seem to be going very well. The company updated its Web site on Saturday indicating that any new iPad orders will ship by April 12, as pointed out by AppleInsider and other blogs.

Apple is due to ship the iPad Wi-Fi model next Saturday–for those that have already placed their orders, the delivery date remains April 3. Pre-order customers had a choice of in-store pickup or delivery, an option that also appears to have been removed from the Apple Store.

The iPad Wi-Fi + 3G is still scheduled to ship in late April, according to Apple’s Web site.

 
By pushing the delivery date of new orders, it would appear that pre-orders have already accounted for all of Apple’s available stock. Though there has been a lot of speculation on how many iPads the company has ordered, nobody really knows for sure.

Some sources say Apple sold hundreds of thousands iPads since it began taking pre-orders on March 12. The source also speculates that the iPad’s first three months of sales could top those of the original iPhone’s first three months.

Apple also added a new iPad accessory, which is available for pre-order. The iPad Camera Connection Kit gives you a way to connect your camera directly to the iPad. Delivery for the $29 accessory is listed as “late April” on the Apple Store.

Delivery dates of the previously delayed iPad accessories remain unchanged.

Advanced Micro Devices is the latest to up the processing core ante with a 12-core chip. Intel is expected to follow this with a chip that contains eight cores.

Both of these chips move beyond the traditional two- and four-core processors that have been around for years. Chips integrating six or more cores are targeted at pricey, high-end server computers that need to process huge workloads in parallel. Ideally, the more cores, the faster the processing, though software has to be properly “parallelized” to take advantage of multiple cores.

Servers using these chips typically cluster together scores, if not hundreds, of processors.

The AMD Opteron 6100 series processors will come in eight- and 12-core flavors. Large server vendors such as Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Cray are all expected to announce systems with the chips.

A 12-core 2.3GHz AMD 6100 series chip will be priced at $1,386, while a 2.4GHz eight-core chip will cost $744.

Earlier this month, Intel rolled out a six-core chip. At the high end of this series is a Xeon 5680 model priced at $1,663. Intel will follow this soon with an eight-core processor.

While AMD is offering more total cores, individual Intel cores tend to outperform AMD’s.

Chinese Internet users have one less Web search option this week, but otherwise it’s business as usual as the People’s Republic of China uses technology and intimidation to keep citizens away from objectionable content.

Following several months of strategizing and negotiations, Google finally stopped censoring its search results in China and is redirecting visitors to Google.cn to a server based in Hong Kong. There they see unfiltered results and are able to visit sites about Falun Gong, Tiananmen Square, and Tibetan independence.

Andrew Lih: ‘You would be surprised how little people want to or need to access stuff that is blocked or restricted by the Great Firewall.’

(Credit: Andrew Lih)

As noble as the move might be on Google’s part, it changes very little for the approximately 400 million Internet users in China who have long lived with restrictions on their online and offline activities.

The departure of Google search from the country is “an obvious reminder of how heavy censorship is in China,” Hal Roberts, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, said in an interview this week.

Meanwhile, a mysterious mix-up on Wednesday that sent Domain Name Server (DNS) traffic destined for Google’s YouTube, Facebook and Twitter among other sites to servers behind the so-called Chinese Firewall of censorship has some speculating that it was retaliation against Google. How far will the People’s Republic go in its geopolitical squabbles over freedom of the Internet?

Google’s move out of China was a highly public stance against that country’s censorship policies and was related to attacks that the company said originated within China late last year and which targeted Google and human rights activists who use Gmail.

“Google arguably provided a more neutral, more open platform” for about one-third of the Web surfers in China than the local market leader Baidu does, Roberts said on Wednesday before the DNS problems became public. The search is considered higher-quality, so “Google certainly has an effect on them.”

But how much of an effect did Google really have?

In an interview with PBS’ NewsHour this week, China Internet and media expert Isaac Mao said that 90 percent of the people in China don’t care whether Google stays or not.

“Most people in China won’t really be affected by (Google’s) decision that much, because they already live within the Chinese language infosphere,” James Fallows, national correspondent for “The Atlantic” magazine, said in the PBS interview. “But it’s an important symbolic moment.”

The cute cat theory
Contrary to the perception in the U.S. that Chinese citizens are clamoring for subversive information, Internet users there tend to be more interested in general information and entertainment–much like Web surfers in the U.S., according to Roberts.

Citing what he called the “cute cat theory,” Roberts said Internet users in China are more interested in videos of cats flushing toilets than they are in reading political diatribes. “At the end of the day, the social uses of the Internet are bigger drivers than political and controversial news content,” he said.

“You would be surprised how little people want to or need to access stuff that is blocked or restricted by the Great Firewall,” the name for the network filtering conducted behind the scenes by the PRC, said Andrew Lih, a visiting professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism and author of “The Wikipedia Revolution.”

“It does happen, but it’s not like people are there wanting to research human rights violations and Taiwan independence, stuff most users won’t run into in the course of a normal day,” he said. “Probably 98 percent of what they’re searching for is not going to be blocked.”

This is exemplified by the fact that portals, which dominated the U.S. Internet in the 1990s, are still extremely popular in China. Portals Sina.com and Sohu.com serve as the home page for many Chinese Internet users, providing packaged content that is sure to be favorable to the government.

Chinese Web surfers “don’t have the same use characteristics you have in the U.S. where people hop onto Google and search willy-nilly,” Lih said.

People in China also aren’t as outraged about government attempts to restrict freedom of expression as Americans claim to be, experts say. As much as 85 percent of the population think the government should control the Internet, according to a 2007 survey (PDF) conducted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences that did not specifically address censorship.

While the average user in China may not mind censorship or have relied on Google search, professional workers, academics, and other “sophisticated” users in China did, according to Lih. It may not be a huge number of people, but it’s an important group, he said.

Chinese officials are wise in allowing and promoting alternatives to foreign sites they block, such as YouKu, the Chinese version of YouTube, Roberts said. However, there does not appear to be a true substitute for Twitter, a favorite site for political dissidents in Iran and elsewhere.

Unlike other Internet censoring countries like Saudi Arabia and South Korea that display messages about why a site is blocked when citizens try to access them, China’s efforts are not transparent by design. By providing no guidelines and keeping citizens guessing about policies and enforcement, the PRC has less to do as citizens and sites heavily self-censor, erring on the safe side.

“If you know all the rules you’ll put your toe right up against the line,” Lih said. “If the rules are fuzzy you are at a disadvantage. You’re not sure how far you can go.”

The Great Firewall of China
So, what is the Chinese government doing to censor the Internet?

There are a handful of Internet access “choke points” in China, where all the traffic enters and exits to the outside world. “All countries connect virtually all of their IP addresses through at most dozens of ISPs, but China’s network is the most centralized of any large country, with only four ISPs connecting more than 90 percent of its IP addresses to the rest of the Internet,” Roberts said.

Hal Roberts: ‘China’s network is the most centralized of any large country, with only four ISPs connecting more than 90 percent of its IP addresses to the rest of the Internet.’

(Credit: Kristine Roberts)

The Great Firewall is the system of gateways, routers, and servers that China uses to keep objectionable content from reaching users inside the country. Authorities mirror the stream of traffic flowing into the domestic Internet and determine what portions of a Web page the government wants to block, Lih said.

If the traffic is blocked at the domain name system level, users may get a “site not found” message; if the IP address is blocked the message may say “site unreachable;” and if the URL is blocked or a page contains sensitive content a “connection reset error” message may be displayed, according to Lih.

“China’s Great Firewall system is so sophisticated and massive, it can tailor blocking for each individual Web surfer because it monitors a person’s surfing activity to sites outside of China’s domestic Internet, right down to what’s contained inside the web page,” Lih explains on his Web site (PDF).

“In the case of someone doing a Google search, each search engine results page (SERP) being sent back to a PRC user is being analyzed for sensitive keywords, and the user’s Internet traffic to Google can be blocked within seconds. This is happening every day, constantly, regardless of whether the search engine is Google, Bing, or something else,” Lih writes.

Web surfers in China are accustomed to the variability in performance and may be uncertain why any particular site is not accessible, he said, adding that most users will just give up and move on to another site when they can’t easily get through.

Meanwhile, Internet content providers like portals need licenses to operate and must hire people to make sure the content does not run afoul of the government’s prohibitions. The sites are in charge of censoring themselves, but there are more direct forms of coercion, as well. For instance, authorities will send text messages to administrators within the content provider sites telling them what topics are banned, according to Lih.

Chinese officials reportedly were working on new guidelines that would require owners of any Web site to provide identification and a photograph in an attempt to better keep track of all sites in the country.

PRC officials are as subtle in their offline warnings to people who appear to be trying to skirt the rules as they are in their online messages. “You’ll rarely get busted outright,” Lih said. They’ll let you know slowly that they don’t approve of your behavior, such as by making it obvious they are following you. They will give you lots of little warnings before they bust down your door.”

As if monitoring the Internet traffic and restricting what content providers display weren’t enough, the Chinese authorities recently attempted to require filtering software on users’ computers. However, officials pulled back from the so-called Green Dam software initiative last year following complaints by researchers that it has serious security holes and would put computers at risk of being compromised.

“Censorship out in the cloud of the Chinese Internet was one thing, but putting a piece of software on computers that could potentially watch every keystroke…that was huge, even for people who approve of the government censoring and (ostensibly) looking out for the good of society,” Lih said.

Internet cafes are supposed to require identification and keep track of who accesses the Internet, but most don’t do that, he said. Then there are lots of open Wi-Fi hot spots that offer some degree of anonymity, he added.

Tunneling out
For those who crave unfettered access to the global Internet, there are ways to get past China’s Great Firewall. People can route their Internet traffic through proxy servers that are located outside China, but this slows things down a bit. For example, Gladder is a proxy Firefox add-on. There’s also the Tor network of private tunnels that offers total anonymity.

Many foreign companies with offices in China use virtual private network (VPN) services that create private, encrypted channels for transmitting the traffic past the Chinese monitoring system to servers outside the country. VPNs are faster but come at a financial cost that might be too steep for many citizens.

“Most of the time I lived in Beijing (from 2006 to 2009), I was blocked and had to leap over the firewall with a proxy,” Lih said.

Moving its search operations out of China is just the latest example of how Google sets itself apart from rivals Yahoo and Microsoft with regard to protecting the privacy rights of users.

Google began offering Gmail users the option of encrypting the traffic between the browser and Google’s servers with “https”–the secure version of Hyper Text Transfer Protocol–in mid-2008 and then turned that on by default for all Gmail users earlier this year.

And the company keeps customer data from things like Blogger, Gmail, and other services safe from prying PRC eyes by locating the servers outside China’s borders, Lih said.

While Microsoft representatives won’t confirm that they keep servers in China, they acknowledge that they do comply with local laws. Yahoo has proven that it does too, to dire consequences. At the PRC’s request, Yahoo provided information on several dissident users who were then arrested and sentenced to 10 years in jail.

Yahoo settled a lawsuit in 2007 filed by the arrested men’s families. That was one week after former Yahoo Chairman and co-founder Jerry Yang and Yahoo’s general counsel were called “moral pygmies” during a congressional hearing on the matter.

Since then, Yahoo has been relatively quiet on the Chinese front, letting Alibaba Group, in which it has a 40 percent stake, use the Yahoo brand for a portal site there.

For its part, China isn’t taking the Google action lying down and is trying to control how the stories around the event are reported. PRC officials have issued strict guidelines for how media there should cover Google going forward, including banning anything that is supportive of Google, requiring that they get their facts only from PRC sources and using only government approved experts.

And the PRC may retaliate by expanding its censorship of Google. It’s possible, too, that Chinese authorities could block Google.com.hk altogether if matters escalate further, Lih said.

Correction, 8:44 a.m. PDT: This story initially gave an incorrect figure for the number of Internet users in China. That group actually stands at 400 million
.

WELLESELLY, Mass.–In the burgeoning clean-energy business, there’s a clear need for technical breakthroughs and investment dollars. A less visible resource that’s also badly needed is seasoned entrepreneurs.

One of the biggest challenges facing newly formed green-tech companies–and the field overall–is a lack of people with the appropriate technical and business skills, say experts. That’s not surprising given that so many industries, such as energy storage or solar, were relatively quiet the past two decades.

 To meet that skills gap, people from IT and other fields are streaming into green tech, much the way people jumped into telecom or Internet software development in the past. In addition to technical know-how, many fledgling green outfits need people experienced in growing companies.

The latest high-profile IT executive to jump into the energy field is Gary Bloom, the former head of storage software company Veritas, who on Tuesday joined smart-grid software company eMeter as CEO. He follows former Seagate CEO Bill Watkins, who now heads up LED maker Bridgelux, and many others over the past five years.

Obviously, it’s important to get up to speed on the specific business environment, be it the power generation market or buildings, before making the transition. But people who have made the jump say that who you know in your new chosen field matters at least much as what you know.

“Fifty percent of it is the entrepreneurship, but the rest is all connections. The reason why you want a person with 15 years of experience in solar is because they know other people,” said Peter Vandermeulen, the CEO of start-up 7Solar Technologies, who spoke on a panel at here at the Babson Energy & Environment Conference on Thursday. “It just takes time to build up a whole different set of contacts.”

Vandermeulen was one of 37 executives in Massachusetts to go through two fellowships organized by the New England Clean Energy Council over the past two years. The three-month “clean-energy boot camp” gives experienced entrepreneurs a crash course in different energy technologies and introduces them to people in the field.

The fellows learn about clean energy by taking classes in technology, markets, and policy, said Nick D’Arbelloff, the president of the New England Clean Energy Council. They also have taken field trips to places like the the National Renewable Energy Laboratories in Colorado, and work on a project that could lead to a new venture.

It’s a model that’s being tried at the national level as well, which reflects how people skills are so sorely needed. In December, the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy) announced a fellows program. The competitive program, which has a limit of two years per fellowship, is part of ARPA-E’s efforts to attract the “best and brightest” researchers and entrepreneurs in clean energy, according to the agency.

Close enough
So far, the New England fellowship program, which had oversight of the DOE, has yielded a number of new ventures.

Steve Kropper, a former telecom analyst, started a company called Windpole Ventures which combines his experience in the IT industry with wind: it gathers wind speed data for wind farm operators by placing sensors on poles. He estimates that he saved two years of making a career transition by going through the fellowship.

In addition to making contacts, the technical education has helped him out. Kropper recently found himself in an investor meeting where a question about how storage will affect wind energy came up. Rather than get bogged down and sidetracked, he was able to supply a quick, informed response and move on.

Of course, there are limits to the number of people who can take fellowships. The first two New England Clean Energy Council fellowships were funded by the state of Massachusetts and foundations; program organizers are currently looking for permanent funding. People who are already in energy companies expect to hire people from different fields, panelists said on Thursday.

Michael Bayer, whose last company was in social media, is now the chief financial officer of Nexamp, which offers consulting and installation services for wind and solar projects. He is currently looking for a controller, but doesn’t expect to find somebody with many years of experience in the energy industry.

“I have to find someone who fits most of the bills and has to learn some things about this industry, as they have done before,” he said. “That’s what we have to do as an industry–create the environment where people can repurpose their skills and have a mechanism to transfer knowledge.”

It’s a very similar situation to the telecom industry in the 1980s and 1990s, where people from different fields jumped in to the fast-growing area, he added.

Not always a good fit
In many cases, venture capital companies backing young green-tech companies are mining their existing set of contacts in IT and other fields to make hires. That’s an approach that doesn’t always work out, given how different energy is from IT.

Cellulosic ethanol maker Range Fuels, which is backed by Vinod Khosla’s investment company, brought on Mitch Mandich, who previously worked at software company Edify and Apple, as CEO. In late 2008, Mandich was replaced as CEO by an oil industry veteran with more direct experience in fuels.

There are other differences between IT and energy: some energy-related ventures can require far more capital and time than an IT company, making them an awkward fit for venture capitalists’ typical investment time line. In addition, policy plays a huge role in energy markets, so entrepreneurs may find themselves lobbying politicians for the first time.

Even with those challenges, clean energy is attracting many tech entrepreneurs because many trends are leading in that direction–be it concern over the environment, energy security, or national competitiveness.

“Energy is clearly one of the sectors where huge amounts of money are being spent so the opportunities are there,” said Rick Daniels, the CEO of fuel cell membrane start-up Advent Technologies during Thursday’s panel. “And there’s a huge amount of nascent technology that hast not been able to be brought to bear until now.”