GoDaddy Blocked in China

GoDaddy, the largest ICANN-accredited domain registrar in the world, appears to blocked in Mainland China by the evil Net Nanny before the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games came to a close. A screen copy of the command "tracert www.godaddy.com" shows that the problem is a router inside China Telecom.

The current blocking may be related to the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. China's sport authority has banned the issuing of Internet domain names based on the country's Olympic gold medal-winning athletes to anyone but the medalists themselves,  according to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). The General Administration of Sport (GAS) provided the CNNIC with a full list of China's Olympic team prior to the Games opening on Aug. 8, and had registered all available domain names for athletes in Chinese characters and in Pinyin. Those who had already registered before the GAS order could not keep the the domain names any more, they were forced to give it to the medalist "as a gift".



The person that already had domain name hold up to now abandons a domain name of player of Olympic Games of China. If they donot want to abandon the domain, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) will force to retrieve the domain. But if the domain name is register outside China, such as in GoDaddy.com, the CNNIC can not retrieve that domain.

Now the currently largest Internet domain registrar in the world is blocking in China, the most likely explanation is, CNNIC do not want any Chinese hold a domain name of country's Olympic gold medal-winning athletes by blocking GoDaddy registrar. When the people in China can not visit GoDaddy and register domain outside China, so CNNIC can protect the domain names more easy.

GoDaddy has come under heavy criticism for suspending Chinese human rights sites without warning on August 17, 2007.

Top Ten Best PlayStation Games

The PlayStation was launched in Japan on December 3, 1994, North America on September 9, 1995. Sony enjoyed a very successful launch with titles of almost every genre, including Battle Arena Toshinden, Twisted Metal, Warhawk, Air Combat Philosoma, and Ridge Racer. Almost all of Sony's and Namco's launch titles went on to spawn numerous sequels. It is nearly impossible to pick the ten best PlayStation 2 games, as there are too many amazing games to choose from. The following is in no particular order and, for the sake of brevity at least, largely ignores multiformat games, the Top 10 Games on PlayStation.

Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy is a media franchise created by Hironobu Sakaguchi and owned by Square Enix that includes video games, motion pictures, and other merchandise.

Metal Gear Solid

Metal Gear Solid is a stealth-action video game directed by Hideo Kojima. The game was developed by Konami Computer Entertainment Japan.

Resident Evil

Resident Evil (known in Japan as Biohazard) is a survival horror video game series developed by Capcom.

Dino Crisis

Dino Crisis is a survival horror game developed and published by Capcom that was released for the Sony Playstation on July 1, 1999. It was produced and directed by Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami.

Silent Hill

Silent Hill is a survival horror video game franchise developed and published by Konami.

Tenchu

Tenchu is the title of a popular stealth game series wherein the player assumes the role of a ninja. Tenchu is known for its stealth gameplay, and the eerie settings of feudal Japan. It was one of the first ninja games to incorporate stealth, a very crucial aspect of Ninjutsu.

Tekken

Tekken is a fighting game and is the first of the series of the same name. It was developed and published by Namco.

Gran Turismo

Gran Turismo (GT) is a hugely successful and critically acclaimed series of racing video games produced for the Sony PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable and PlayStation 3 gaming systems. All of the games are said to simulate the appearance and performance of a large selection of vehicles, nearly all of which are licensed reproductions of real-world automobiles.

Parasite Eve

Parasite Eve is a survival horror role-playing game developed and published by Square (now Square Enix). The game is a sequel to the novel Parasite Eve, written by Hideaki Sena.

Winning Eleven

Winning Eleven is a soccer/football video game series made by Konami Tokyo. It is the original Japanese version of Pro Evolution Soccer. Winning Eleven's popularity has grown over the years, and is currently one of the most popular football games world-wide.

Websites Unblocked in China

It seems that the Chinese Wikipedia is unblocked in China now. The unblocking of the Chinese Wikipedia in China has probably been extended to cover the whole of China. Chinese users have direct access Chinese Wikipedia from very different corners of the country.

Not only with Chinese Wikipedia, this unblocking also looks like this was part of a broader opening up - mainlanders now have access to a lot of sites. Here's a rather representative list of sites that are now available in China, which include newspaper, magazine and NGO web sites previously hard blocked.

Western media

• Chinese Reuters


• Chinese Wikipedia


• Radio Free Asia


• Voice of America


• Wall Street Journal


• Financial Times Chinese

Hong Kong media

• Ming Pao


• Ming Pao Monthly


• Asia Times Online


• Yazhou Zhoukan


• South China Morning Post


• Apple Daily

Taiwan media

• United Daily News


• China Times


• Liberty Times

NGOs

• Human Rights Watch


• Reporters Sans Frontiers


• Amnesty International

SourceForge Unblocked in China

After a month hiatus, SourceForge, the world's largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications, is again accessible from China on the eve of Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.

Chinese authorities has never admitted to blocking access to SourceForge, the only way for people in China to reach the site was by using a proxy server based outside of the country. There has been also no official confirmation that the website has been unblocked, but China unblocked it anyway. The Chinese authorities had promised to give foreign journalists more freedom in the run-up to this summer's Olympic Games.

China censors internet content that it finds objectionable, usually political material and occasionally pornography. The SourceForge blocking may be related to the author of SourceForge's anti-China protests of Beijing Olympic Games. China programmers needs SourceForge, and SourceForge is a professional technology website without political material. Now, SourceForge has been unblocked in China, Chinese programmers should enjoy SourceForge while it's available because we may never know when it will disappear.

Disable Wordpress 2.6 Post Revisions

Post Revisions Tracking is a new features of Wordpress 2.6, Which makes it a lot easier to share writing between people. Since you can save your copy, and the other person can see what you changed. Also you can revert to previous revisions of posts you've made.

But if there is only one author of WordPress blog, Post Revisions will taking too much space as every revision is a new row in wp_post table. It creates a alot of useless database-entries.

To disable Post Revisions, Add:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

into wp-config.php, the wordpress 2.6 Post Revisions now disabled.

In my little opinion, there should be an option in general or writing settings to enable/disable the post revision feature.

Top Ten Best PS2 Games

It is nearly impossible to pick the ten best PlayStation 2 games, as there are too many amazing games to choose from. I know some of your favorite PS2 games are not on this list; some of mine are missing too, but sacrifices were made in an attempt to cull the list down to 10. The best proof for just how wide the range of quality games is for the PS2 is the impossible task of trying to create a top ten. The following is in no particular order and, for the sake of brevity at least, largely ignores multiformat games.

God of War

God of War is an action-adventure game based on Greek mythology. God of War was developed by Sony Computer Entertainment's Santa Monica division.

Dynasty Warriors

Dynasty Warriors (Shin Sangokumusou) is a series of tactical action video games developed and published by Koei.

ICO

Ico is a action-adventure video game developed by Sony Computer Entertainment and released for the PlayStation 2 video game console. Ico was designed and directed by Fumito Ueda, and published by Sony Computer Entertainment.

Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy is a media franchise created by Hironobu Sakaguchi and owned by Square Enix that includes video games, motion pictures, and other merchandise.

Metal Gear Solid

Metal Gear Solid is a stealth-action video game directed by Hideo Kojima. The game was developed by Konami Computer Entertainment Japan.

Resident Evil

Resident Evil (known in Japan as Biohazard) is a survival horror video game series developed by Capcom.

Silent Hill

Silent Hill is a survival horror video game franchise developed and published by Konami.

Tekken

Tekken is a fighting game and is the first of the series of the same name. It was developed and published by Namco.

Soul Calibur

Soulcalibur is the second game in the Soul series of fighting games developed and produced by Namco.

Burnout

Burnout, also known as Shiny Red Car (working title) is a racing game developed by Criterion Games and published by Acclaim.

Google Retiring AdSense Referrals Program

Google started introducing the AdSense Referral Program in November 2005 where publishers can get $100 bonus when they successfully referred someone into the AdSense network.

They slowly continued this program to include Google products (AdWords, AdSense, Picasa) as well as FireFox with Google Toolbar. And though western publishers get $1 for every Firefox downloads they refer, Asian publishers like in the China only get 10% of that referral fee or $0.10 (sometimes ever as low as $0.01).

Today Google has announced they will be ending their AdSense referrals program. AdSense Referrals allows you to include product referral links which cane be bought or downloaded. When a user from your site buys or downloads something via that link, you get a commission of the sale. Most popular referral links include Firefox and AdSense ad units. Today they announced that they will be officially stopping them by the end of August 2008.

An email from Google AdSense confirms that Google is terminating AdSense referrals:

We’re constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing and supporting features which drive the best monetization results for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program during the last week of August. We appreciate your patience during this transition and here are some alternative options to consider:

• Google Affiliate Network: As part of the integration of DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For further details, please visit: http://www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork/.


• AdSense for content ads: If you have less than three AdSense for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the referral ad units with standard AdSense for content ad units.

If you currently use referral ads, either to promote Google products or offerings from AdWords advertisers, AdSense Referrals code will no longer display ads beginning the last week of August. We encourage you to take the following steps before the product is retired:

• Remove the referral code from your site(s): Please take a moment to remove all referral code from your sites before the last week of August, so you can continue to effectively monetize your ad space.


• Run and save all referrals reports on your desktop: Create and save all reports related to the referrals program on your desktop, so you continue to have access to your valuable campaign information.