Tech Stream
Archive for June, 2009
Social web blocked in China
3 June 2009
China is blocking access to social networking and social media websites ahead of the 20th anniversary of a bloody crackdown in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Sites like Twitter, Hotmail and Flickr were blocked on Tuesday and Microsoft also reported that access was blocked to their new Bing search engine.
The story is being covered today by Radio Australia News who report that internet users filled chatrooms with protest after access to Twitter was denied on Tuesday. And Reuters reports that “Access to video-sharing site YouTube, owned by Google, has been blocked in China since March, after overseas Tibetan groups posted graphic footage of China’s crackdown on protests by Tibetans in 2008.”
The Tech Dynasty blog on CNET Asia also covered the blocks yesterday and says that “anyone in China who spends any amount of time online has weathered these blocks before” and so has recommended some good sites to overcome them. There are also unconfirmed reports on Twitter that the #gfw (great firewall of China) has been removed from the ‘trending topics’ section. We’ll have more in the Tech Stream program, on Radio Australia news and on our own Tech Stream twitter feed.
UPDATE 05/06/2009: Connect Asia covered this on Thursday morning, you can hear Steve Holland’s story from this link, and ABC News Online provided excellent coverage of the anniversary.
Sunday Profile interview with Stephen Wolfram
1 June 2009
Listen and download: MP3
The announcement last week of Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, certainly took our focus away from another, far more interesting search engine which came to life in May. It’s called Wolfram|Alpha and its ultimate goal is to:
“make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.”
Wow, that sounds easy! At the moment its very good at dealing with any queries related to numbers, but not so great on things like popular culture, history, places or people. Yet.
Monica Attard from Sunday Profile on ABC Local Radio and Radio National spoke with the man behind the venture – Stephen Wolfram.
